Waiting for the Barbarians

Waiting for the Barbarians:

 Benefits of Ambiguity

            Dr. Susan Van Gallagher, a professor at Seattle Pacific University, specializes in African and American Literature as well as literary criticism.  Gallagher studies the interdisciplinary relationships between literature, history and government.  Literature, even non-fiction, can relate a great deal about social and political circumstances, present and past.  When the literature involves subjects surrounding “legal” torture, Gallagher insists that the writer is forced to come face to face with two moral questions.  The first question is how to find a “middle way between the obscenities performed by the state,” while at the same time “producing representations of those obscenities” (277).  The second dilemma is finding the best way to represent those being tortured.  In her essay Torture and the Novel, Gallagher uses J.M Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians to demonstrate the issues that she has brought to the forefront of her argument.  Gallagher writes that Coetzee “objects to the realistic depiction of torture,” because it does three things: validates the acts, assists in its perpetuation and paralyzes the fight against it (277). Drawing from Coetzee’s purposeful ambiguity, Gallagher demonstrates the power of her point.

            In order to assist her with her the two points of proper representation Gallagher explains how Coetzee’s text, being “full of gaps, absences and uncertainties” (278), represents a possible solution to the relationship between non-fiction literature and reality. As Coetzee points out, stereotyping the villains and the innocent only leaves room for clichéd context and disallows the reader to see beyond the given facts and into the reality of the overall purpose of the literature is. To represent history in an honest way, a delicate balance must be reached between information provided and gaps left for interpretation, thought and personal feelings.

            Using the magistrate as the narrator, Gallagher explains how Coetzee is able to represent both the views of the torturers as well as those tortured.  As a man of authority, his failure with sexual or love relationships, along with his inability to articulate his own story, thereby being a narrator full of missing pieces and unsolved questions, undermines his given authority.  The magistrate also gives the view of the tortured with the same inept articulation.  With this, Coetzee finds the middle ground, that delicate balance he needs. Whether the magistrate is searching for answers from his own captors, questioning his own sexuality and relationship with women, or questioning his own role as a torturer, he always ends up with no answers, just more questions:  “Throughout the novel when the magistrate searches for meaning, he confronts blackness” (279).  Gallagher points out that with the missing pieces throughout, the author is able to demonstrate the world of torture as not one of concrete walls, good and evils, but as the world itself, full of webs and multiple layers.  The magistrate is the torturer as well as the tortured.  His reoccurring dream that he gets deeper and deeper into never adjusts itself to make sense for him: “His inconclusive dream demonstrates that the magistrate cannot read the text of his own identity” (280).  He looks for answers everywhere, and in doing so shows the reader that there is in fact no real answer of black and white, but only greys. 

            This idea is further carried on in the fact that Coetzee refers to the authority “country” as the Empire. Using this term “suggests the multiple interpretations possible for Coetzee’s own work” (281).  The text revolves around any country and at any time. This allows the reader to parallel the givens with personal experience or knowledge and allows the gaps to be filled in with one’s own personal questions on morality in others and in the self.  Gallagher points out that “the effect of this time displacement is to reveal truths about any oppressive society, any society that employs torture as a technique” (282).

            The lack of information, or the decision to not give all the facts and answers to all the questions “does not result in moral ambiguity but rather in an assertion that everyone is guilty” (284).  Torture has levels.  It is physical, psychological and can exist in everyone.  With the ambiguity of Coetzee’s text, Gallagher is able to demonstrate how literature can best interpret history in a way that will provide more than facts – but will allow the personal questions or morality and emotion to flow. 

Gallagher, Susan, Van Zanten. "Torture and the Novel: J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the       Barbarians." Contemporary Literature 29.2 (1988): 277-85. Print.

*** Following are some historical facts that occurred around the time of the publishing of Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.  Below are two videos, which illustrate the uprising of Soweto, a large township near Johannesberg.

February 1978 - An unexploded bomb is discovered in Johannesberg. It is confirmed that the bomb was capable of destroying a 22-story building.

February 1978- The Attorney-General states that he will not prosecute any law enforcement involved in the arrest and detention of Steven Biko.

December 1978 - A bomb explodes in the Soweto Community Council offices.

January 23, 1979 - A bomb explodes near the New Canada railroad station in Soweto.

April 1979 - Explosives are discovered and defused on railroad tracks near Soweto.

November 1979 - Guerrillas open fire and hurl grenades into the charge office of Orlando Police Station in Soweto.

May 2, 1980 – Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall is banned.

South Western Township

Soweto Uprising: June 16, 1976

Antoinette Sithole speaks about the Soweto Uprising and her murdered brother.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEe-I7YHuIA

Slide show of the Soweto uprising

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb4qUsbYhfM&feature=related

Dusklands: Coetzee Elevates the Reader as Judge

       While the two narratives in J.M. Coetzee’s Dusklands take place on two different hemispheres, on two different continents and four hundred years apart, their similarities to one another are staggering to the careful observer. The narratives in Dusklands are, at the surface, critiques of colonialism and the us/them, white/other binaries.  However, this critique is not Coetzee’s focus, nor his intention.  Rather, his underlying agenda is to present and facilitate discussions and thought upon the universality of colonialism, its eternal reconfiguration and momentum and its impact both socio-politically and psychologically. Coetzee is careful to no judge the characters on either side of his binary situations, but presents them, in their totality, as a certain “other” to his reader.  The worlds about which Coetzee writes are recognizable to the reader as his own; however, a certain foreign or indescribable oddity lives within these worlds, which then allows the reader to do the judging without self-incrimination.  By creating this separation between content and reader, Coetzee allows for successful facilitation. The reader/context binary in “The Vietnam Project” and in “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,” provide the reader with the opportunity to safely judge the ethical conditions and effects of war on human population throughout history.

            Despite the fact that Eugene Dawn lives in the States as the Vietnam War goes on, he represents the white male ideal that destruction is the only answer.  Described as a somewhat nerdy man obsessed with books, a husband and father, the destructive side to him appears to be innate; it is a part of his essential male whiteness, thus making him the creator of war as opposed to war making him destructive.  Four hundred years earlier, in the South African colony, Jacobus Coetzee presents a similar dichotomy.  While he is the intruder, he cannot comprehend it.  His eventual destruction of the Namaqua village and his vicious assaults on its people, demonstrate a similar idea of inborn evil.  Both men represent the idea that through history and despite change, there is an underlying vein running through the white man.

            Coetzee places the reader in opposition to not just the white man, but to all characters within his texts.  He does this by not playing judge but allowing the reader the authority to be the moral judge.  The reader becomes the moral judge not only over Coetzee’s worlds, but also more importantly, over the white man.
District Six

           

            

Welcome to my J.M. Coetzee Blog

My name is Kelley Heinrichs and I am currently in the Interdisciplinary MA program at CSUN, focusing on literature and Pan African Studies, with a bit of history thrown in.

I received my BA in English at CSUCI where I was also introduced to J.M. Coetzee’s work.  Because of my parent’s occupation, I was carted around many places outside of the United States as a child.  Some of these places were on the African continent.  It is perhaps from this experience that my interest in Black Diaspora stems.  However, my true passion is right here at home, in African American Literature and history. I am greatly looking forward to this class on Coetzee’s literature, as his literature, only from the little I know thus far, appears to transcend all races, boundaries and time.

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As I read through J.M. Coetzee's work, I will post video links that will permit tiny glimpses into the Apartheid South Africa.  Each link will correspond to the approximate time frame that each text was composed or published. The links will be found in the blog postings and will be archived in the "Videos: Oppression in South Africa." As I learn more about Coetzee, his work and his world, I will add web links, interviews, etcetera, and welcome any additional information you would like to share with the rest of the Coetzee scholars in the world.