Name: Drashti V. Dave
Assignment sub: Theme
of Violence in J.M.Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians
Roll no: 6 Year: 2013-2015
Sem-4 M.A.part-2
Enrolment no: PG13101007
Paper no: 14- The African Literature
Submitted to: Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English
Maharaja Krisnkumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Waiting for the Barbarians clearly embraces many themes at
the heart of the South African condition, as well as universalizing the dilemma
at the heart of imperial conquest generally. Coetzee borrowed the title of his
novel from the poetry of the Alexandria-born Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy
Coetzee understands that it is against the image of the diabolical dark
barbarian that Eurocentric cultures have constructed their own fragile sense of
civilization and identity. In Coetzee’s world Waiting for the Barbarians is a
novel about “the impact of the torture chamber on the life of a man of
Conscience” (Encyclopedia.com, 2004)
About the novel: “From
horizon to horizon the earth is white with snow. It falls from a sky in which
the source of light is diffuse and everywhere present, as though the sun has
dissolved into mist, become an aura. In the dream I pass the barracks gate,
pass the bare flagpole. The square extends before
me. Blending at its edges into the luminous sky. Walls, trees, houses have
dwindled, lost their solidity, retired over the rim of the world.” -The
Magistrate’s dreamWaiting for the Barbarians is rich in symbol and meaning. Among its primary motifs is the movement of the seasons, the time of nature, set in pointed opposition to the time of human history. The novel begins in late summer, at a time of harvest and bounty, and ends at the verge of winter, and the end of civilization as known by the town’s inhabitants. Even in the beginning the oblivion that threatens is introduced in a dream motif, which anticipates the novels final pages as well as the barbarian girl. In striking contrast to the Magistrates unsparing and wry narrative, the dreams are the novels most stunning prose, recreating with authenticity the language and sublime images of a sleeping but lucid mind, and evoking both primal terror and pleasure.
In a recurring dream the Magistrate enters the town square in winter, where a kneeling girl, her face obscured, is working on a snow castle. Sitting with other children, they melt away upon the Magistrates approach. Unable to see her or even imagine her face, she is a living contrast to the stark white austerity of the empty square.
It is also in an empty square that the Magistrate first encounters the kneeling barbarian girl, the north wind bringing with it the first hint of winter. The dream motif weaves its way through the Magistrates narrative. In it the snow blankets the familiar world like a shroud, containing just the smallest hint of a latent fertility. Struggling to glimpse the face beneath the hood he encounters instead the face of an embryo or tiny whale, as white as the snow itself.
As the dream progresses he is disturbed to find the fort or square the girl is building is empty of life, only the girl, who he glimpses in a moment of clarity, relieves the dream of its desolation. In his brief glimpse of her face her eyes shine and she smiles. The dream sharpens in the next sequence and he sees her clearly, a gold thread woven through her hair, wearing a blue robe, the snow castle transformed into a clay oven. The girl is baking live-giving bread, but the dream ends before the Magistrate can accept or taste it, and his is never able to renter the dream at this point. Instead, the final winter dream is a mere collision with the girl, which echoes his collision with a woman in the night; his clarity has already begun to fade. In the novel’s final paragraph the dream and its insights have been wholly effaced by the reality of winter, it is not a dream but real children, building a snowman as they await their destiny, who have replaced the girl and the enigma she represents.
Two other dreams work also to underline the books themes. In the beginning section the Magistrate dreams of a disturbing image of a body spread on its back. Reaching to brush the black pubic hair, his hand disturbs a cluster of bees, which crawl out and fan their wings. Together an image of death, and life latent within it, it has an echo at the end of the book, in a dream occurring after the Magistrate has discovered the pit of bodies inside the towns walls. In the dream he is standing in the pit again, and his hand comes up with the corners of a jute sack, black and rotten, but this time there is no stir of life and wing, but as his hand searches further it uncovers a fork and a dead bird with empty eye sockets. This is the books final dream. “Aging and death have been persistent themes in Coetzee's work, since at least Waiting for the Barbarians, perhaps earlier. Time after time, he brings his protagonists to the brink of death, and sometimes beyond,” says Gillan Dooley in J.M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative. In Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate struggles with his own senescence while attempting to comprehend the end of the world he belongs to, doubling and intensifying this theme.
Among the novels other potent themes is an exploration of the idea of barbarism. Like the Cavafy poem, it explores the necessity of the “other” to the function and exercise of imperial power. In it a town awaits the arrival of the barbarians, and in its final lines the people are not unsettled by the barbarians arrival, but another menace:
Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.
And some people arrived from the borders,
and said that there are no longer any barbarians.
And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.
The narrator of Waiting for the
Barbarians tells us what narrator might that his ear is ‘tuned to the pitch
of human pain’. The main character in Coetzee’s allegorical novel is a
magistrate in an outpost at the edge of an empire. He is aware of the dangers
of passing judgment on the barbarians: while his fellow settlers blame them for
lying drunk in the gutter, the magistrate finds fault with the settlers for
selling them the liquor. Yet for all of his sensitivity he fails to understand
the barbarian girl he adopts out of a mixture of compassion and lust. The Cultural
distance is too great and at the end of the novel the magistrate concludes that
his liberalism was no more helpful to the barbarians than the behavior of the
soldiers who make war on then. The novel details the fall from grace of an
unexceptional magistrate of the Empire, and addresses the social perversions
that necessarily attend to colonial and imperial projects driven by expand
sionist ambitions, pre-emptive philosophies and delirious self-righteousness.
The man of conscience is the magistrate and he is the main protagonist of the
novel who leads the story. The protagonist protests the unjust treatment of the
so called “barbarians” although the Empire perceives them as a dangerous tribe
preparing to attack the outpost and battle against the Empire. Waiting for the
Barbarians can be read as an oblique parable of South Africa’s predicament and
a prophecy for its future as a retrospective account of the end of empire in
Mozambique and Zimbabwe, as a portrayal of the twilight of colonialism and
colonial power, and as a revelation of the inadequacy and sterility of
masculine consciousness. Coetzee describe the harsh reality of the ‘Empire’ and
‘Barbarians’ in this novel. Empire is imagery and self-destructive.
Waiting for the Barbarians can be read
as an oblique parable of South Africa’s predicament and a prophecy for its
future, as a retrospective account of the end of empire in Mozambique and
Zimbabwe, as a portrayal of the twilight of colonialism and colonial power, and
as a revelation of the inadequacy and sterility of masculine consciousness.
Coetzee took his title from the poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” by
Constantine P. Cavafy. Coetzee uses the poem’s notion that the barbarians “were
a kind of solution” for the Romans, as a starting point for his examination of
the Empire. The barbarian lands surround and thereby define the Empire; the
barbarians, or rather the myth of barbarians, proves that the Empire exists and
gives it a purpose. The Third Bureau, in order to justify its existence,
attempts to locate and make war on
barbarians, but inevitably, if ironically, Colonel Joll proves to be “in his heart
a barbarian,” proves to be “the enemy.” The Empire’s perverse insistence on
fighting barbarians is seen as a clear indication of its inability to accept
change, its desperate resistance to the forces of social and political
evolution. The magistrate has accepted the fact that all human beings and all
empires are transient. He is not naive about what course the future will or
should take; he offers no
solutions to the political, economic, or sociological dilemmas faced by this or
any other empire; he knows that the Empire cannot simply
open “the gates of the town to the people whose land” it has “raped.”
Theme of
Violence reflected in the novel:-
In this novel, Coetzee juxtapose his
magistrate narrator- a kind of everyman colonial bureaucrat- against two other
central characters. The first is Col Joll another official of the empire who
serves in an intelligence agency that bears the inspired name the “third
bureau”. The second character is a young barbarian woman who has been blinded
by Col.Joll’s enlightened from of intelligence gathering. As with all colonial
cultures in Coetzee’s literary creation all the settlers’ fear of the
indigenous other that both threatens the dominant society and justifies the
violence exacted in the name of a search for that always elusive state of security.
As the magistrate relates: there is no woman living along the frontier who has
not dreamed of a dark barbarian had coming from under the bed to grip her
ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with visions of the barbarians
carousing into his name breaking the plats setting fire to the curtains, raping
his daughters. Here we are showing high state of violence physical as well as
mental. Violence and complicity both are common theme in Coetzee’s work in his
many works we are shown these theme. J.M.Coetzee’s treatment of violence in his
fiction is very interesting way of looking from one angel that feature of
complicity and violence of those who are not directly involved in the actual
crimes committed by others.
In “Into the dark Chamber the writer and the South African State” (1986)
one of the essays in Doubling the point Essays and Interviews (1992)
J.M.Coetzee interrogates the problem of representing violence in literature. He
observes that many South African authors including himself, reveal “a dark
fascination” with tortures and he contends that there are two reasons for their
enthrallment.
The first is that relations in the
torture room provide a metaphor for relations between authoritarianism and its
victims. The second reason for authors’ engagement with brutality is that the
torture room is a site of extreme human experience accessible to no one save
the participants. The challenge for an artist Coetzee asserts,
how not to play the game by the rules
of the state
how to establish one’s own authority,
how to imagine for torture and death
on one’s own terms.
The above dilemmas Coetzee carries on
to explain are particularly urgent for fiction writers; they are less
constraining for authors of auto-narrative: autobiographer’s personal
experience of suffering and pain gives them the authority to retell those
aspects of experiences. Dusk lands (1974) his first novel pursues the aim of
diagnosing the sources of colonial violence. Even the title of the novel
itself shows some sort of violence Waiting for the Barbarians here barbarians
are specified as violated.
Barbarian means:
people from other countries were thought to be uncivilized or violent. And here identity of the ‘barbarians’ will always be regarded as ‘others’
by imperialist society. Coetzee’s characterization is real essence with the
help of characters he criticize society which he live especially character of
barbarian girl, the relationship between magistrate and barbarian girl, who is
central figure of theme of violence. For her part the unnamed barbarian woman
her role is largely objective. All but adopted but the magistrate who makes no
effort to cancel his infatuation with the oppression she has suffered, she
represents the captive native upon whom the magistrate is able to project his
colonial gaze. It is also to this young barbarian woman that the magistrate
reveals a central theme of the novel: the terror of colonial paranoia. ‘Nothing
is worse than what we can imagine’ he whispers in a moment of intimacy.
As with all colonial cultures in
Coetzee’s literary creation is above all the settlers’ fear of the indigenous
other that both threatens the dominant society and justifies the violence
exacted in the name of a search for that always-elusive state of security.
Coetzee’s way of describing torture room, empire, barbarian girl, magistrate
and his behavior with the barbarian girl, brutality, injustice all shows that
how violence is represented by different ways in the novel.
The theme of violence is
prevalent throughout the book but it doesn’t’ really discuss why the
capital go straight to violence to get what they need. Coetzee used this theme
to describe the time in South Africa during the apartheid. They were not
looking for compromise or justified trials to question the people about what
they knew about the group they simply thought that if they just scare them then
that would end of the problem together. It didn’t seem like an act of cruelty
just an act to get what they needed out of the people. Because of novel’s
treatment with violence it is different from Coetzee’s other works, violence is
most important theme of the novel; here Coetzee represent both type of violence
physical as well as mental. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) marks a
discernable change in Coetzee’s treatment of violence in the sense that
unlike in Dusk lands here Coetzee redirects his attention from the perpetrators
to the victims of tortures and to the witness of atrocities who don’t suffer
themselves but who are demoralized by the violence of others.
In the novel the
descriptions of the atrocities are not made less violent and less piercing than
the other works of Coetzee like in; Dusk lands. But in Waiting for the
Barbarians they are viewed from the perspective of the oppressed not for the
oppressors. The focus falls on the victims’ response to tortures and the result
of tortures the wounded pain, suffering. Simultaneously, the perpetrators,
despite their undeniable power to inflict pain are marginalized in the sense
that their characterization reveals their banality. Somehow violence is
reflected in many ways in the novel Coetzee shifts focus of his interest from
the tortures to the consequences of their aggressiveness- the impact
violence has on the oppressed and on those who are not directly subjected
to brutality but who are aware of oppression of others.
Another point of the
novel is magistrate’s relationship with the tortured girl is ambiguous and
disquieting. He is fascinated by the tortures she was subjected to and
celebrates her wounds in his evening ritual; the act of washing feet appears as
an act of hospitality. The magistrate as though wants build on emotional and
moral bond with girl, a bond that would go beyond the ritual act he thinks he
reveals his compassion and brutality for the girl and pays homage to her
victimization and suffering. In fact the magistrate throughout the starry
attempts to link tortures with religion. So this torture girl’s suffering and
other things which is presented in the novel that is also one type of violence.
Coetzee’s overt critique of
West’s treatment of violence at the same time his ambivalence about the nature
of evil and violence appears as a conscious and meaningful evasion that shows
yet another aspect of representing violence. For Coetzee writing is: “a matter of awakening the counter voices in
oneself and embarking upon such speech with them, I am some measure of writer’s
seriousness weather he does evoke/invoke those counter voices in himself” Theme
of violence is common in his work we are shown many of his work;
For example: Coetzee’s novel Age of
Iron (1990) marks another turn in his treatment of violence.
According to Fraud all
those feelings that arises trouble, anxiety, fear, horror, like as it is felt
while reading Waiting for the Barbarians, belongs to realm of uncanny.
Conclusion: S.Gallagher writes that
“Coetzee succeeds to solve the moral issue of representing violence through his
use of textual strategies that create a reality of; moral vacuum that allows
torture to exist in the contemporary world.”
Coetzee intentionally used the word violence
because it has its own importance the crucial question is about the meaning of
violence for an individual, that is how an individual person come to understand
violence on one’s own terms. The evolution of Coetzee’s treatment of violence
in his works may be described as progression from his examination of the
perpetrators and tortures to his concentration on the oppressed with their
suffering and resistance to his projection of meaningful relations based on ethical
values. We can say about Coetzee that he exposes himself in front of the
readers, betrays himself and becomes utterly vulnerable.
No comments:
Post a Comment