Waiting for the Barbarians

South African writer J.M. Coetzee (pronounced kuut - see) wrote Waiting for the Barbarians in 1980 at the height of Apartheid. In 1983 he would write The Life and Times of Michael K which would win the Man Booker prize, and in 1999 he'd win that prize again for Disgrace. In 2003 Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Waiting tells the story of the aging Magistrate of an outpost on the edge of an unnamed civilization. Besides description of the landscape (it is an arid, inhospitable land) there is little offered to locate the reader. If you know, as I did, that Coetzee is South African, you assume that the action takes place on that continent. There's nothing wrong with making that assumption, except that it narrows the range of a novel that seems deliberately sparse on names, perhaps in order to widen its scope into a near allegory.   

Those in power at the centre of this Empire are convinced that a barbarian threat is imminent. They send an emissary, Colonel Joll, with some troops, to the Magistrate's outpost to scour the land for barbarians or those sympathetic to them, and interrogate them by any means. A logical and sympathetic man, the Magistrate doesn't see evidence of a barbarian threat. Early on he tells Joll this, which puts him under suspicion. 

When the troops return from an excursion with barbarian prisoners, Joll subjects them to brutal interrogation and torture. To help manage his own complicity in this the Magistrate takes in an adolescent barbarian girl whose feet have been broken during questioning. Though they share a bed and he bathes her intimately while she lives with him, he is reluctant, even unable, to consummate the relationship. Not until he goes on an excursion into barbarian lands to return her to her family is he able and willing to love her completely. Then, he lets her go back to her own people.

This has to mean something. An aging man of the Empire sympathizes with a young barbarian girl but cannot "enter into" her experience until outside of Empire and in her land. This all seems a bit rich. In fact, if it weren't for his horror at the politics of the Empire, we'd have to declare our hero, the Magistrate, a dirty old man who takes advantage of a situation. 

Even though his conscience seems to trouble him, he never regrets the primal, sexual nature of his relationship with this young girl, and to me this muddies the focus of the novel. When he returns to the outpost to resume his duties he finds that Joll has put an ambitious and vicious young officer in charge and the Magistrate is jailed for traitorous activities. 

The scandal of the Magistrate arises from his sympathy for the barbarians, especially his fraternization with the young girl. Although the Magistrates actions work symbolically, on a "real world" level they are problematic. Why use a cliche-ridden, and abhorrent to many, sexualized relationship as the central illustration of how civilization and barbarity must reconcile - or how what is civilized and what is barbarous are only constructs defined by Empire. Sure it all works, but it's just so unseemly and hard to defend. 

Coetzee however, explores this sort of relationship in Disgrace too. Here again the relationship causes the aging male's fall from grace. My question is simply this: though he sounds the right notes in portraying the moral ethical boundaries of sexuality, does the sexual conquest of a young female by an aging male really warrant this much attention? It may be the stuff of the aging male fantasy, but it's hard-going to suggest that this fantasy has merit on its own, much less as the focus for a parable on how relations between human groups fail. 

Further, this male-oriented point of view is already pervasive and problematic. For at least half of the readers out there, it's solidly "eyes roll back in the head and sigh" material. These readers (and you know who you are) will likely struggle with the sexual nature of the story simply because it's been told and told and told and, it's beside the point. Writers should explore large themes like the clash between civilizations, but perhaps not in a novel about an aging man who finds comfort and understanding in the body of a young female member of the underclass. 

Finally, didactic art is, at best, difficult to pull off. At worst it's a sermon disguised as a story. At best it's art with a message. There's craft in it, to be sure, but one always wonders why the writer didn't just publish an essay instead. 

Ride report

in:      -15'C wind 25 ks SW

out:   -10'C wind 25 ks WSW