A Guest Post BOW: Waiting for the Barbarian

Happy Sunday, my fair readers! What a treat I have in store for you! My equal parts compassionate and brainy brother Brian has agreed to come to my rescue this week and write about the BOW: J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. As you'll see below, I had a certain, ahem, situation let's say, that kept me from finishing our BOW, but I think that incident was truly serendipitous; Brian's review offers unique insight on a classic allegory and makes strong connections to other novels as well. But enough from me! Let's get to the good stuff:

What to say about a 30 year old novel written by a Nobel Prize winning author; a novel about which much has been written, from which an opera was composed, and which contains the first words I have read penned by one of the giants of late 20th century literature? Heady questions indeed, and ones I would not be in the position of having to answer under the usual circumstances. But this week is different. This week, courtesy of a complex (but ultimately minor) domestic emergency in the house of your more familiar poster and my sister (an incident which, or so I have been told, began with a blaring smoke alarm and ended with the irreparable water-logging of said poster's copy of the book-of-the-week) here I am: your humble guest blogger. Thank you for welcoming me to your screens. The appearance promises to be brief - I have been assured that The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is nowhere near the toilet bowl….

So, impressions. To begin. I was struck almost immediately with the economy of Coetzee's prose. Now, you might ask, is economy always a good quality for prose? Not always - in fact the work of several of my favorite authors is notable for spectacularly extravagant prose. However, whereas the richness of these works (I am thinking of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow or David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest to name two) derive in no small part from their sprawling irreducibility, in the case of Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee's ability to densely pack complex relationships between image, narrative, and character development in to elegantly terse sentences was really a defining aspect of the book's quality for me. Witness:

"Against my cheek I felt the patter of sand driving from nowhere to nowhere across the wastes. The last light faded, the ramparts grew dim against the sky and dissolved into the darkness. For an hour I waited, wrapped in my cloak, with my back against the cornerpost of a house in which people once must have talked and eaten and played music. I sat watching the moon rise, opening my sense to the night, waiting for a sign that what lay around me, what lay beneath my feet, was not only sand, the dust of bones, flakes of rust, shards, ash. The sign did not come. I felt no tremor of ghostly fear. My nest in the sand was warm. Before long I caught myself nodding."

Wow. Not bad, right? This sentence here brings me to another point of interest: Erin mentioned in her first post related to this book ("Coming Soon", Sept 19th) that it possessed " some parallels to Conrad's Heart of Darkness: issues of colonialism, narrator naiveté, crises of conscience". Of course, my appreciation for Conrad's book is what got me roped into this mess / opportunity. But in reading WftB, it was its similarity to another novel from my oft-cited "back-to-school-books-that-I-didn't-appreciate-until- much-later-when-I-did-a-reread-the-books-from-high-school-I-was-pretty-sure-I-didn't-fully-grasp-thing" comment of September 11 that really struck me: Albert Camus' well-worn existential fireworks display, The Stranger. Why, you ask, dear readers? Well, while at first blush, the thematic concerns of WftB seem run closer to Conrad's in terms of an exploration of colonial morality, for me the most compelling moments in the book were of a more, well, existential nature. One of the many things I find so successful and awe-inspiring about Conrad's book is how his awareness of his own inability to achieve any real distance from his historical context is transformed from a potential liability into, arguably, the meta-theme of the novel. To add to this neat trick, Conrad clearly was able to intuit, despite these limitations, that he stood at a transitional moment: the gradual but steady dissolving of the colonial distribution of power already well under way by the time of the novel's 1902 publication - the upheaval of which would result in two world wars before the century was half over. Coetzee, on the other hand, seems to take up a strategy of distancing himself from his own personal context of colonialism and brutality - Apartheid-Era South Africa. To begin with, he sets the book in a kind of ironic Utopia - the border outpost of a fictitious "Empire" that resides in no specific time or place. Further, the characters seem to embody this desire to be outside history, outside the conditions into which they were born. To quote from the main character, the unnamed "Magistrate:"

"I think: I wanted to live outside history, I wanted to live outside the history that Empire imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects. I never wished it for the barbarians that they should have the history of Empire laid upon them. How can I believe that that is cause for shame?"

Additionally, the narrative, although it includes at least one major journey, several minor ones, and many changes, seems to me to resist the notion of fundamental progress. The above quote comes from the book's final chapter, but it seems like it could have easily come from the first. The magistrate begins the novel as a complacent, benevolent, and rather muted bureaucrat - albeit one distanced enough from the center of the Empire to retain a certain feeling of independence, of immediate responsibility for the people under his authority. Through the course of the story, he meets and lives with a barbarian woman, nursing her back to health after she is tortured by visiting agents of the Empire, attempts to find a way to express feelings for her that he knows he has but cannot understand, journeys across the plains outside his town to return the girl to her people, upon his return is deposed, imprisoned, tortured and humiliated, and, after the defeat of Empire's army by the barbarians and the subsequent evacuation of the town, is retuned to his position as magistrate essentially by default. The structure of the narrative then, for all of the radical experiences the narrator endures, is cyclical. The narrator, after his all of his travails, returns to where he began. The situation has certainly changed, and the very title of the book implies that the Empire's reign is coming to an end - but even here it seems clear that the notion of Empire will continue. The barbarians of today will be the rulers of tomorrow. Ruins outside of the town stand as a reminder that civilizations come and go. This too will pass, but this too will come again.

All of this adds up to a relatively abstract book, one that, if you will excuse the expression, doesn't seem to have the heart that Conrad's novel does. But what it does exceptionally well, (and here is the link to The Stranger), is describe the range of concrete realities interfering with our desires for abstract concepts: justice, love, even, in a way, empathy. As the narrator states of his torture:

"But my torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. They were interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well, which very soon forgets them when its head is gripped and a pipe is pushed down its gullet and pints of salt water are poured into it. ... They came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity, and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal."

I was always struck by the way in which Camus' novel of some 40 years earlier, also acknowledges the moray between the physical conditions of the body and the abstract space of the mind. Much like Coetzee's main character, Meursault is overwhelmed by fatigue and distracted by other prosaic discomforts precisely at the moments he should be having some kind of metaphysical experience - at the funeral of his mother, for instance. The distractions Meursault's body create for his mind never even approach the physical travails endured by the magistrate, and here again the thematic link becomes clear (not to mention the narrative links - the main character begins leading a life of relative comfort, commits a crime, awaits a judgement in prison…). And in a way the ultimate theme of both novels is a similar one, although less explicit in WftB - the indifference of the physical world towards the sphere of humanity, the fundamental interchangeability and contingency and events, and the fact that all of our most transcendental yearnings are rooted in this very same world.

But I have to agree with Irving Howe's 1982 New York Times Book Review of WftB in saying that I don't believe this message to be a dark or nihilistic one. Rather, I think it expands the scope of heroism and defiance to include not just the vast wheel of history, but the also the prosaic material reality of the present, the personal, the real. To stand against the ever turning wheel of history, ever leaving only to return, is to also confront our own individual history, the limits of a consciousness rooted - at least at that present moment, in the physicality of flesh. As the magistrate states during his torture, spitting in the face of the Enlightenment notion of freedom:

"What freedom has been left to me? The freedom to eat or go hungry; to keep my silence of gabble to myself or beat on the door or scream. If I was the object of an injustice, a minor injustice, when they locked me in here, I am now no more than a pile of blood, bone and meat that is unhappy."

If Conrad's novel explored a crucial historical turning point from a personal point of view, I would argue that Coetzee in his novel explores the fundamental conditions of morality - conceptual and physical, so individual, but also so crucial to any historical change - and it does so with exceptionally elegant prose that make the impact of its ruminations incredibly visceral despite Coetzee's tendency to abstraction in the book's structure. Despite all this, I still feel as if Coetzee is looking back - and perhaps this is more indicative of my historical position than anything intrinsic to the work - from a position that is decidedly post-colonial; post in the sense of coming after, but still dominated by its logic of sovereign and subjected, power distributed from a distant central location that can perhaps be escaped. I find this to be a bit of a weakness, to to date a book which takes great pains to place itself outside of time. Today, I believe, we have moved well beyond this colonial and even post-colonial moment, but power still persists, still seeks vacuums to fill. The mutations it has undergone as a result make Coetzee's relatively straight forward duality between Barbarians and Empire between which the narrator is caught seem relatively rudimentary - but the exploration of the full range of experiences it still takes to truly confront the brutality of power in its increasingly insidious configurations remains today as lucid as it is relevant.

Thanks so much for that fantastic review, Bri Guy! Readers, this is just a friendly reminder that this week's BOW is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson. Check back soon for the revealing of next week's BOW!