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.
Slide show of the Soweto uprising
You bring up an interesting point. I found reading Waiting for the Barbarians trying, and I thought it was because the violence - mainly through torture - disturbed me. But as you point out, the torture really was described vaguely or indirectly or with purposeful gaps - in a sense leaving the reader to fill in those gaps for themselves. I wonder if the act of having to imagine that torture for myself isn't what disturbed me so much - does it include me in that complicity that seems so important a theme in the novel? Does it do more than make me bare witness, but rather puts the reader into something of the magistrate's place?
ReplyDelete- Nina Ahn
I really enjoyed your comments but I'm sorry to say that you chose a bad font for that since it is an academic study with a serious subject matter. Any way, thanks for your effort.
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