Bodies and Borders in J. M.

Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

Gregory O'Dea The following lecture was delivered as part of the Take Five public lecture series on international fiction at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, in May, 2004.

John Maxwell Coetzee is a South African of Boer and English descenta novelist, essayist, professor of literature and linguistics, translator, and critic. Each of his nine works of fiction, beginning with 1974's Dusklands, has been awarded at least one major literary prize. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), about which I'll be saying something before too long, won the South Africa's most prestigious literary award, the CNA Prize, as well as the Geoffery Faber Memorial Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He was the first novelist to be twice awarded the Booker Prize, the British Commonwealth's most distinguished award for fiction, for Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999) to date, the only other author so honored is the great Australian novelist, Peter Carey (a sidenote: Coetzee has recently moved to Adelaide, Australia, while Carey, the Australian, now makes his home in New York City. Such are the international

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 2

migrations of contemporary world authors). This past December, Coetzee was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize for literature in recognition of a life's work in which, to quote from Per Wastberg's Nobel presentation speech, he has consistently "given a voice to those outside the hierarchies of the mighty. With intellectual honesty and density of feeling, in a prose of icy precision, [he has] unveiled the masks of our civilization and uncovered the topography of evil." If we fall back on categories, it is perhaps to be expected that a South African novelist would be concerned with the voices of the disenfranchised, and with the masks of civilization. The critic Samuel Durant has argued, for example, that any South African writer must write drenched in the knowledge of the suffering engendered by apartheid. In general, I find such thinking too easily reductive, but it is nevertheless true that J. M. Coetzee's work is consistently concerned with systems of oppression and resistance to them, and it very often takes the figure of Empire as an historical embodiment of such systems. ** Waiting for the Barbarians was Coetzee's third work of fiction. It takes its title, and something like its premise, too, from a poem written one hundred years ago, in 1904, by the Greek writer Constantine Cavafy. The poem is called "Waiting for the Barbarians." What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 3

The barbarians are due here today. Why isn't anything happening in the senate? Why do the senators sit there without legislating? Because the barbarians are coming today. What laws can the senators make now? Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating. Why did our emperor get up so early, and why is he sitting at the city's main gate on his throne, in state, wearing the crown? Because the barbarians are coming today and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader. He has even prepared a scroll to give him, replete with titles, with imposing names. Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas? Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds? Why are they carrying elegant canes beautifully worked in silver and gold? Because the barbarians are coming today and things like that dazzle the barbarians. Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual to make their speeches, say what they have to say? Because the barbarians are coming today and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking. Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion? (How serious people's faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home so lost in thought?

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 4

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come. And some who have just returned from the border say there are no barbarians any longer. And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution. ** Cavafy's poem provides the title for J. M. Coetzee's novel, and it provides the essential premise, too: that in order for something like an empire to exist, it must have something to exist againstan opposite, an "other" against which to define itself. White, to be conceivable, relies upon the conception of black; cold must have hot; inside must be what is not outsideand civilization needs barbarism. Cavafy's poem emphasizes the ceremonial trappings and opulence of empirea legislating senate, an enthroned emperor, the dazzling show of its consuls, the contrived rhetoric of its orators. It says little about the barbarians themselves, though, except as they are perceived to stand in relation to the stuff of empire: barbarian laws, if they have any, would be different; the barbarians would be dazzled by imperial finery; they'd be bored by the contrivances of language that empire so values. What are the barbarians, then? They are not us, and so THEY provide "a kind of solution" to the persistent problem of what WE are. And when THEY are discovered not to exist, then how do we know whether WE do, either?

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 5

We might call this the problem of reflexive definition. Black needs white, day needs night, inside needs outside. And vice versa. Binary oppositions. Reflexive definition. But in the case of empire, there is this peculiar irony: Empire cannot rest. It cannot look upon the other and be satisfied with a differential reflection, because by its definition empire must expand, either by transforming the other, making it over in its own image, or by destroying the other, wiping it from the face of the earth. Either way, empire seeks to eliminate the very "otherness" upon which its own existence depends. The "other" must become the "enemy." We might call this the problem of self-consumption. ** Cavafy's poem speaks of the material matters that tend to define US against THEMthe surfaces that empire would show to the other, and that serve to create and reinforce conceptual divisions. And so tonight, as we think about J. M. Coetzee's novel, I want to consider surfaces and what might lie beneath them, as well as divisions and what might lie beyond them. I want to talk about bodies, and I want to talk about borders. For Coetzee, the two subjects are intimately connected, forming a kind of mutual metaphor.

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 6

Bodies: in Coetzee's novel, bodies are tortured, broken, and made to endure. They may be blank spaces waiting to be inscribed with meaning, or surfaces that conceal, without apparent aperturebut which may be beaten or caressed, cut into, entered, and probed in search of some elusive truth. Borders: in Coetzee's novel, borders are defended and attacked, questioned and crossed, made to stand for what is within and what is without. Borders are the great demarcation of a fatal dichotomy that has guided all of human history: the differentiation of US and THEM. Bodies and Borders. Both imply limitation, division, and separation. Your body is not mine; my territory, my space, is necessarily not yours. It seems to me that the inevitable fact of our bodily separation from one another has forced our sense of the world to follow, to reinforce the idea of separating borders. Our language, with its discrete pronouns (I, you, us, them) recognizes this thinking, and human history has certainly been guided by it. Like the citizens of empire in Cavafy's poem, we have become comfortable with such difference, even dependent upon its recognition. It has become the atmosphere in which we move. ** Now, let's look at the kind of narrative, the atmosphere that Coetzee creates in his novel. Our narrator is a nameless Magistrate who governs a nameless settlement on the outer limits, the border, of a nameless Empire. We are given no

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 7

recognizable sense of when or where the story takes place, no clear signs by which to locate the novel's events along the axes of time and space that form the grid of human history. The novel's setting is a-historical, extra-geographical, and thus resistant to the kind of reductive reading that might be brought to bear on it were the novel set, for example, in Roman Britain, or Spanish Mexico, or the Belgian Congo, or the nineteenth-century North American plains. We cannot question its historical facts or its geographical or cultural realism; the body of the novel must be taken on its own terms, as an image of all empires, everywhere in all times. In this sense it defies the borders of time and place even while it embodies the essential idea of empire. Even more curious, perhaps, is the fact that the narrative is given to us in the present tense. Unlike most narratives, which are rendered in the past tense, the Magistrate's story is not composed with the advantage of hindsight. At any given moment of his speaking, the Magistrate is exactly, precisely as unaware as we are what will happen next, and so is unable to place the events he narrates into a linear narrative context. He doesn't yet know what events are "important" or "trivial," and does not engage in the usually deliberative process of the storyteller, with its essential guiding dilemma: what to leave in, and what to leave outwhere to draw the shaping lines of the story. As the critic Anne Waldron Neumann has pointed out, the present tense implies that the Magistrate has "no conceivable occasion of

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 8

narration"why, we must ask, would he begin speaking just when he does, and not before, or after? Why does he fall silent, and cease to speak precisely when he does? Where is the conceived beginning, and where is the calculated end? And when, from what position, under what circumstances, is this utterance made? Like the a-historical, extra-geographical setting, the narrative tense of the novel seems to resist the idea of history-as-narrative, history as a linear account of "what happened" from the vantage point of victory, from a position of safety beyond the danger of the events themselves. What happens in this narrative happens NOW, and must be considered in the present. Perhaps the best way to approach some of these ideas is to trace the awakening and development of our narrator and protagonist. Let's consider the Magistrate's situation at the opening of the novel. As I've said, the frontier settlement over which he presides, "a town of 3,000 souls," sits on the border between the Empire's holdings and the Barbarian lands. He has rarely, if ever, crossed over that line into the barbarian world, and can imagine its topography only through maps that he says are "patched together from travellers' accounts over a period of ten or twenty years" (12). He understands its people only by observing what he calls "the destitute tribespeople with tiny flocks of their own along the river" (4), and the fisher-people who live closest to the settlement. But it's also true that he has not visited the capital, the center of the Empire, in decades,

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 9

not since he "was a young man" (2). Due to distance of time and space, the Magistrate seems to know as little about the goings on in the Imperial Capital as he does about the ways of the Barbarians. Indeed, those in the Capital, like Colonel Joll of the ominous Third Bureau, seem to know a great deal more about the activities of the Barbarians than does the Magistrate. The Magistrate is thus a figure on the margins of both empire and barbarism, and has led a comfortable life for many years here on the borderline. He takes care of the paperwork and recordkeeping and other minutia that make up the day-to-day business of Empire. He acts as a civil authority, judge, and tax collector. His duties leave him plenty of time for hunting and other hobbies, such as archaeology and, in recent years especially, visits to the second floor of the local inn and the rooms of prostitutes. He is very easy, this magistrate, and it is the easiness borne of a carefully cultivated ignorance. "I watch the sun rise and set, eat and am content," he says; "When I pass away I hope to merit three lines of small print in the Imperial gazette. I have not asked for more than a quiet life in quiet times" (8). But the Magistrate is also very much, in his own mind at least, a creature of an imperial past. Speaking with a young officer of the Imperial army, he unconsciously contrasts his memories of the capital with the dusty, desert oasis that has been his environment for so long:

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 10

I tell him some of the places I look back on with nostalgia: the pavilion gardens where musicians perform for the strolling crowds and one's feet rustle through fallen autumn chestnut leaves; a bridge I remember from which one sees the reflection of the moon on the water that ripples around the pediments in the shape of a flower of paradise (4950). That ease with empire begins to unravel with the arrival of Colonel Joll, officer of the Third Bureau. Joll's insistence that the Barbarians, whoever they may be, are preparing an assault on the empire's borders is one catalyst. Joll's torture of two seemingly harmless Barbarian prisoners, an old man and a young boy, is the other. This is where the bodies come in. As Colonel Joll tortures the prisoners, the Magistrate's inability or unwillingness to hear the screams coming from the granary hut gives way to his need to understand what happenedto investigate, to excavate. (Remember that archaeological excavation is one of his gentleman's hobbies.) If I had only handed over these two absurd prisoners to the Colonel If I had only gone on a hunting trip for a few dayswith no question about what the word investigations meant, what lay beneath it like a banshee beneath a stoneif I had done the wise thing, then perhaps I might now be able to return to my hunting and hawking and placid

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 11

concupiscenceBut alas, I did not ride away: for a while I stopped my ears to the noises coming from the hut by the granary where the tools are kept, then in the night I took a lantern and went to see for myself. (9) And a few days later, when Colonel Joll brings more Barbarian prisoners to the settlement for interrogation, the Magistrate chastises his impulsive disruption of his own ignorance when he says, I ought never to have taken my lantern to see what was going on in the hut by the granary. On the other hand, there was no way, once I had picked up the lantern, for me to put it down again. The knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end (21). Yet, this moment in which the Magistrate elects to shed the lantern's light into dark corners, to look rather than look away, is the beginning of his awakening and transformation. Consciously, he begins to question the empire by challenging even the imposing Colonel Joll and the Colonel's awareness of the people he tortures. Unconsciously, in his sleep, he repeatedly pushes his regular, bird-like prostitute out of bed, a sign that he is rejecting his old, comfortable life as a citizen of empire.

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 12

Part two of the novel, of course, is largely concerned with the barbarian girl whom the Magistrate takes into his bed. His lantern-lit investigation of the granary hut/torture room has shown him only the marks of torture left on the bodies of the barbarians, the signs that something has transpired. Their bodies and the marks on the walls of the room itself present texts that the Magistrate attempts to read, but cannot. What precisely has been done to the young boy, to the grandfather, to the others? As the Magistrate begins his strange ministrations to the damaged body of the Barbarian Girl, his ritual washings and caresses become another attempt at reading, another instance in which the novel presents the body as an inscribed yet inscrutable text, rather like the slips of poplar wood the Magistrate discovers in his excavations. Now, the Magistrate is keenly aware of these things. He often equates his attempts to read the marks of torturethe puncture marks on the boy's stomach and legs, the caterpillar-ish scar near the Barbarian girl's eyewith the kind of "investigations" that Colonel Joll conducts. Early on, the Magistrate says that Joll's work "is to find out the truth. That is all he does. He finds out the truth" (3). And what of Joll's methods? "Looking at him I wonder how he felt the very first time: did he, invited as an apprentice to twist the pincers or turn the screw or whatever it is they do, shudder even a little to know that at that instant he was trespassing into the forbidden?" (12). Bodies and Borders. But at this point the Magistrate knows

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 13

that, from the barbarians' perspective, there is little to distinguish him from Joll. When tending to the young boy, he thinks, "It has not escaped me that an interrogator can wear two masks, speak with two voices, one harsh, one seductive" (7). From the Barbarian Girl's perspective, he thinks, "The distance between myself and her torturers, I realize, is negligible" (27). How can this be? The magistrate is no torturer; he wields no bludgeon, he carries no hot pokers. But consider that both he and Joll interrogate. Joll wants the supposed "truth" about Barbarian war plans against the empire, while the magistrate wants the "truth" about what Joll has done to the Barbarian Girl and her father, and by extension, what the Empire has done to "the other". Joll uses instruments of pain on the body, cutting into it, probing it to get the truth out of his victims. The Magistrate moves his hands over the Barbarian Girl's body, asking her questions, also seeking truth. "It is growing more and more clear to me," he admits, "that until the marks on this girl's body are deciphered and understood I cannot let go of her" (31). But again, like the wooden slips the Magistrate has unearthed, the Barbarian Girl's body remains inscrutable, and she will not speak of what has happened to her. She is one example of a figure common in Coetzee's fiction: the figure of the voiceless or unspeaking "other." In Coetzee's novel Life & Times of Michael K, the title character's cleft palate and hair lip distort and obscure his speech. In the novel

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 14

Foe, the character called Fridayyes, from Defoe's Robinson Crusoehas had his tongue cut out. Without voice, this recurrent figure of Coetzee's is also unknowable, a cipher of indeterminate meaning and significance, except as it is indeterminate and lacking clear signification. Again, this is the unspeaking, inscrutable "other." The Barbarian Girl can speak, of course, but she remains largely silent in response to the Magistrate's questions, and even if she were willing to answer, as he says, "In the makeshift language we share there are no nuances" (40). She may be able to tell him what happened, but that telling will not necessarily give him the kind of knowledge he seeks. And so he is left with his attempts to read what he calls "the traces of a history her body bears" (64). But to read the unspeaking "other" is difficult. In comparing the Barbarian Girl with his imperial prostitute, the Magistrate speaks of their bodies, and what those bodies tell him. The prostitute opens herself eagerly, feigning desire and rapture. "'How I have missed you!' she sighs. 'What a pleasure to be back! I whisper. And what a pleasure to be lied to so flatteringly!" (42). But the Barbarian Girl doesn't even offer lies to the Magistrate; she remains a cipher: The body of the other one [the Barbarian Girl], closed, ponderousseems beyond comprehensionI have a vision of her closed eyes and closed face filming over with skin. Blank, like a fist beneath a black wig, the face grows out of her throat and out of the

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 15

blank body beneath it, without aperture, without entry. It is as if there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth, seeking entry (42). And in this moment, the Magistrate finds the greatest correlation between himself and Colonel Joll, that other seeker of entry. The Magistrate has not (yet) had intercourse with the Barbarian Girl; his attentions have been something other than sexual. He has not entered her body, as the torturer would. But this is not really a meaningful distinction. The magistrate wonders, Is this how her torturers felt hunting their secret, whatever they thought it was? For the first time I feel a dry pity for them: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other! I behave in some ways like a loverI undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside herbut I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate. (43) The point is that both the Magistrate and Joll seek to make the other speak against her will, against her ability. The methods are irrelevant if they are meant to force utterance, or reveal what the other would keep hidden. Both Joll and the Magistrate, in their ways, insist on possession of the other. Both trespass into the forbidden.

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 16

The Magistrate has been circling around this conclusion for some time before it fully reveals itself to him. He has, perhaps like many of Coetzee's readers, confused his attentions to the Barbarian Girl with sexualitya natural enough mistake, but one that obscures the nature of his relationship with the "other." He is not her lover, but her interrogator. Once he recognizes that relationship, the Magistrate seeks to destroy it by redefining himself relative to Joll and to the empire. This attempt at redefinition takes two forms, both of which involve him crossing a line: first, his verbal dissent before a young imperial army officer, and second, his journey across the border of empire to return the Barbarian Girl to her people. Neither of these acts seems entirely deliberate or conscious. To the young officer's question, "what are these barbarians dissatisfied about? What do they want from us?" the Magistrate reacts with a condemnation of Empire's oppressive and arrogant mentality, climaxing with his ironic confession: Shall I tell you what I sometimes wish? I wish that these barbarians would rise up and teach us a lesson, so that we may learn to respect them. We think of the country here as ours, part of our Empireour outpost, our settlement, our market centre. But these people, these barbarians don't think of it like that at all.they still think of us as

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 17

visitors, transients.That is what they are thinking. That they will outlast us." (51) But immediately the Magistrate second-guesses himself. After all, by what authority can he speak of what the barbarians think about anything? His utterance is in fact an act of transferrence, a projection of his own archaeological imagination, which has unearthed the remains of what he takes to be an older empire out in the desert. His projection of these ideas onto the barbarians is a momentary, figurative border crossing, a leap into the mind of the other. But in fact the mind of the other remains closed; he has only thrown himself, his own mind, out into the desert. He has, like Empire, constructed the other in his own image. The second act by which the Magistrate seeks to distance himself from Colonel Joll is a literal border crossing, as he leaves the known imperial lands for terra incognita in an attempt to return the Barbarian Girl to her people in the third section of Coetzee's novel. This may be a good time to stop and consider exactly who the barbarians are. The answer to that question is at first complex, but finally simple. The complex answer: the barbarians are variously described as both desert nomads and settled farmers, as both herdsmen and fisherpeople. They live near the imperial settlement, and they live far out in the unmapped lands beyond. They

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 18

speak languages that are known, and languages that are unknown. They are peaceful and warlike, pitiable and fearsome. Who are they? What are they? The simple answer: THEY are whatever is not US. They are all of the various things I've just described, but the use of the term "barbarian" signals a common tactic of imperial rhetoric: to conceive of the infinite diversity of heterogeneous "otherness" as one homogenous entity. Recall the young imperial officer's story of his regiment's journey to the outpost, when he says that they were followe by barbarians. The Magistrate asks how he can be sure the trackers were Barbarians; the officer replies, "Who else could they have been?" (49). Such an argument, to the imperial mind, is incontrovertible. If it is not US, it must be THEM. So, even as the Magistrate attempts to distance himself from Colonel Joll and empire by returning the Barbarian Girl to her people, to her familyeven as he rejects the absorption of the "other" into empirehe cannot escape his own imperial mind. Who, exactly, are her people? How will he find her family? He never even asks her. These questions do not occur to him. The journey across the border, so punishing to their bodies, will be enough, and the first group of THEM that they find will necessarily be the right people, simply because THEY are not US. He hands her over to God knows whom and returns to the settlement. Mission accomplished.

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 19

But of course, it's really only just begun, for if the Magistrate is to redefine himself outside of empire, he must learn what "otherness" really means. It's not a lesson to be learned among the barbarians in the desert, dancing with wolves or communing with the land from which they grownot in some fable of noble savageryfor "barbarians" don't exist as the empire conceives of them. Instead, the lesson of "otherness" can be learned only at the hands of empire and within its borders, where the conception of the "other" takes place. And it's a lesson that must be inscribed upon the body. This process begins with the Magistrate's imprisonment for "treasonously consorting with the enemy." Here in isolation, as he says, "a bestial life is turning me into a beast" (80). But as is frequently the case in Coetzee's fiction, in the words of Per Wastberg, "His protagonists paradoxically derive strength from being stripped of all external dignity." Stripped of his office and his imperial notions of dignity, imprisoned like the barbarians had been, the Magistrate becomes open to "otherness" as he had not been before. The indignities suffered by his body figuratively transport him across the border in a way that his physical journey in the previous section could not do. "My alliance with the guardians of Empire is over," he says; "I have set myself in opposition, the bond is broken, I am a free man" (78).

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 20

At one point, the Magistrate contrives to escape from his prison and actually crosses the gated threshold of the town, but then returns, welcoming his reincarceration and even his subsequent torture. Why? Why does he not light out for the territories beyond civilization, beyond the grasp of empire? Three statements the Magistrate makes in the second half or so of the novel might offer an answer to this question. The first statement is made at the moment he decides to return to imprisonment: "Why should I do my enemy's work for them? If they want to spill my blood, let them at least bear the guilt of it." (101) This is the Magistrate's initial rationale; it is a refusal to stop the process of his own transformation, his translation into "otherness." This transformation must be performed by the agents of empire, for it is they who conceive of the other. The second statement is made as Warrant Officer Mandel and his assistant begin to torture the Magistrate, apparently without any intention of interrogating him: "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." (115) This is the further rationale. Though made after his decision to return to prison is irrevocable, it is nevertheless a logical extension of the first statementthey are

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 21

torturing him, as he predicted they would, and the Magistrate takes that torture as transformativenow, as conceived "other," he learns the meaning of humanity. The third statement comes much later, and is actually not vocalized but only mouthed to Colonel Joll through the glass window of Joll's carriage as the Colonel departs from the settlement for the last time. The Magistrate calls the statement a "lesson for him [Joll] that I have long meditated": "The crime that is latent in us we must inflict on ourselves Not on others." (146) Stephen Clingman has interpreted this "lesson" to mean, "If there is to be any sacrifice at all, it should only be of ourselves." Though coming weeks after the Magistrate's decision to return to his imprisonment, to continue his translation into "otherness," the lesson has been "long meditated," and is clearly linked to the transformative process. The Magistrate's migration into "otherness" is signaled most clearly, perhaps, in his response to one of the novel's more horrific scenes, when a group of barbarians is led into the settlement for public display, and public flogging. You will remember the moment, I am sure, when I remind you that wires are run through the flesh of the barbarians' hands and cheeks, as a means of keeping them still and docile. You will remember that these wires are attached to a cord, which is in turn wrapped around a pole on the ground, and that the prisoners are made first

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 22

to bow and then to lie on the ground, so that their faces touch the pole. You will also remember that Colonel Joll literally inscribes each of their backs, each of their bodies, with the word "ENEMY" in charcoal, and then has his henchmen beat the word off of them. As with his more arcane inscription of scars and bruises onto bodies earlier in the novel, Joll's goal here is to mark "the other" with the text of Empire but here, the meaning of the text must be sickeningly clear, because this is a public and published text, not the merely private diary of torture we've been privy to earlier in the novel. What is the "other"? The other is ENEMY. And once the other is so marked by empire, what is empire to do? Beat the other clean, wipe that inscription from the body of the other with its own pain and sweat and blood until it is ENEMY no longer. Empire must conceive of the other as enemy, and it must erase the enemy. That erasure is accomplished both literally and figuratively figuratively and literally, at the same timepartly by the beatings, and, as their barbarian faces brush the pole to which they are wired, partly by making the enemy kiss the rod. The Magistrate's response to this spectacle, I say, is a clear signal of his migration to the status of what the empire would call "other"or now, in Colonel Joll's translated language, the status of "enemy." He protests, but in the obscured and inarticulate language of the "other""'No!' I hear the first word from my throat, rusty, not loud enough. Then again, 'No!' This time the word rings like a

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 23

bell from my chest. 'No! No! No!'" (106). To Colonel Joll, he can say only "'You!' Let it all be said. Let him be the one on whom the anger breaks. 'You are depraving these people!''You!''Not with that!' "Look!" 'Look!' We are the great miracle of creation! But from some blows this miraculous body cannot repair itself! How!' Words fail me. 'Look at these men! Men!'" (106107). The fractured speech, the failed line of argument, makes no impact on the imperial ear. It is as unspeaking to that ear as the fragmented text on the Barbarian Girl's body, or her monosyllabic responses to the Magistrate's questions earlier in the novel. The Magistrate undergoes further degradations, but is finally left to wander around the settlement as a harmless beggar, like one of the pitiable barbarians we glimpse here and there in the novel. And what of the threat that empire perceives? What of the missing expeditionary force that had marched forth into the barbarian lands to destroy the enemy? As the Magistrate says, No one can accept that an imperial army has been annihilated by men with bows and arrows and rusty old guns who live in tents and never wash and cannot read or write Is there any better way to pass these last days than in dreaming of a saviour with a sword who will scatter the enemy hosts and forgive us the errors that have been committed by others in our name and grant us a second chance to build our earthly paradise? (143).

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 24

When the expeditionary force finally returns to the settlement after three months in the desert, though, we discover who has been scattered, who has been the enemy, and who is forgiven. There is to be no battle pitched against barbarians gathered at the gate. There are no barbarians gathered there; rather, as one soldier tells the tale, "We froze in the mountains! We starved in the desert! Why did no one tell us it would be like that? We were not beatenthey led us out into the desert, and then vanished! They lured us on and on, we could never catch them. They picked off the stragglers, they cut our horses loose in the night, they would not stand up to us!" (147). The directional lines are important here. Mind the borders. The barbarians do not come to attack the empire; the empire has gone to attack the barbarians, and is in turn led into the unknown, scattered, its power dissipated. And this is the point at which the imperial forces abandon the settlement, leaving those who remain to erect straw men along the battlements scarecrows, ironic little figures of power that does not really exist, set up as protection against an enemy that will not come. False bodies along a false border. These figures at the novel's end blur the conceived distinction between US and THEM, give the lie to patterns of reflexive definition. But Empire, it seems, will tell its own story, create its own narrative of the world it believes itself to live in, and which it believes itself manifestly destined to remake in its own image. I'll conclude with the Magistrate's definition:

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 25

Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged line of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision, but a virulent one: I, wading in the ooze, am no less infected with it than the faithful Colonel Joll as he tracks the enemies of Empire through the boundless desert, sword unsheathed to cut down barbarian after barbarian until at last he finds and slays the one whose destiny it should be (or if not he then his son's or his grandson's) to climb the bronze gateway to the Summer Palace and topple the globe surmounted by the tiger rampant that symbolizes eternal dominion, while his comrades below cheer and fire their muskets in the air.