The Mark of Empire: Writing, History, and Torture in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians

We will not follow the Germans back into their forest, nor investigate the origin of their migrations. Those forests of theirs have always passed for the abodes of free peoples . . . but we must not on this account regard such a state of barbarism as an exalted one, or fall into some such error as Rousseau’s, who represents the condition of the American savages as one in which man is in possession of true freedom. Certainly there is an immense amount of misfortune and sorrow of which the savage knows nothing; but this is a merely negative advantage, while freedom is essentially positive. It is only the blessings conferred by affirmative freedom that are regarded as such in the highest grade of consciousness.

HEGEL, The Philosophy of History

For nearly two decades, J. M. Coetzee has quietly produced a series of novels and critical essays whose philosophic depth and stylistic brilliance rival that of his two great literary masters, Kafka and Beckett. South Africa, his native country, has twice awarded him its highest literary honor, the CNA prize, and in Europe he has received Britain’s Booker Prize and France’s Prix Étranger Femina. Along with such writers as Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebee, Wole Soyinka, and Nadine Gordimer, Coetzee represents one of the most important voices in what has come to be known as postcolonial literature in English. In the context of South African politics, Coetzee occupies the precarious middle ground of the progressive liberal—a position opposed to apartheid and the conservative National Party as well as to the more radical versions of African Marxism. Criticized for his reluctance to represent contemporary South African political events of South African life directly in his fiction, charged with quietism and rarified aestheticism, Coetzee has confounded his detractors by writing allegorical tales that reflect upon the metaphysical ground and philosophical landscape in which the present historical controversies and political disputes of his country are rooted. In what is arguably his best work, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Coetzee dramatizes the moral dilemmas and political paradoxes of all imperial enterprises, steadfastly refusing to specify either the geographic or historical setting of his novel. Unmistakable analogies exist between the unnamed Empire of his novel and contemporary South Africa, and yet no simple correlations are possible. According to Coetzee, its two principal characters, whose race is never identified, “could as well be Russian and Kirghiz, or Han and Mongol, or Turk and Arab, or Arab and Berber.”¹ Coetzee’s reluctance to supply the precise historical coordinates of his story stems not merely from political discretion or postmodern literary proclivities, but more deeply from his commitment to explore disturbing questions that cannot be answered by the outcome of current political developments in South Africa. His fiction offers a meditation on the question of whether all civilizations are not necessarily founded upon some arbitrary distinction between the civilized and the barbarian, a historical distinction that seems to require an element of force and compulsion, an act of discrimination that has no moral basis. Coetzee is the bad conscience of postmodern fiction in the postcolonial world. Coetzee borrows the title of his novel from C.P. Cavafy’s poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians.”