Power nad Privilege in Coetzee's Waiting For the Barbarians - Research Paper Example

Prof’s Power and Privilege in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians In Coetzee’s famous work, Waiting for the Barbarians, one of the most important themes is the balance of power between the individual and the government, and the government’s extraordinary willingness to use its military and cultural power to dominate and suppress the individual, and any population that opposes the will of the dominant government. Coetzee is careful to make the lessons of his work as broad and universally applicable as possible by giving general labels to groups rather than intricate descriptions of them – the dominant government is simply “the Empire” (Coetzee, 2), who is in an armed conflict with an indigenous people, “the Barbarians” (3). Even the protagonist is more of a role than a character, “the Magistrate” of “the town” (2). This provides the perfect backdrop for analysis of oppressor-oppressed relationships, as well as the individual-governmental relationship inherent in any type of governance. His essay will critically review two articles based on details of these relationships: Susan Van Zanten Gallagher’s “Torture and the Novel: J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians,’” which deals with the depictions of torture, the torturer and the tortured in literature, and Troy Urqhart’s “Truth, Reconciliation and the Restoration of the State: Coetzee’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians,’” which deals with the broader themes of the state and its relationship with the population it purports to govern. Susan Van Zanten Gallagher’s “Torture and the Novel: J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Waiting for Barbarians’” central thesis is that Coetzee walks a fine line when depicting torture, trying to give it honesty without glorification, and uses ambiguity and allegory to his advantage in this quest. Essentially, Gallagher claims that Coetzee “objects to realistic depiction of torture in fiction because he thinks that the novelist participates vicariously in the atrocities, validates the acts of torture, assists the state in terrorizing and paralyzing people by showing its oppressive methods in detail,” citing quotes by Coetzee himself to indicate this belief (Gallagher 277). She then indicates that this belief presents two important dilemmas to Coetzee: first, that he must treat a middle path between “ignoring the obscenities” perpetrated by the state and validating them by depicting them in all of their graphic detail (278), and second, that he must find a way to depict the torturer without resorting to tired and ridiculous cliches, such as the “tragically divided” torturer, the “satanic evil,” or the “faceless functionary” (279). Only when all of these goals have been accomplished can torture actually be removed from empowering the torturer and the oppressor, and rather empower the oppressed, suggests Gallagher (278). After defining the two dilemmas associated with torture that Coetzee faces when constructing the text Waiting for the Barbarians, she then moves on to an in-depth analysis of exactly how Coetzee overcomes, or attempts to overcome these dilemmas. Though this is not explicitly included in her thesis, I believe it appropriate to summarize here: Coetzee overcomes the first dilemma through the use of language and literary device, and the second by attempting to eliminate the divide between the torturer and the innocent, in order to make the torturer true, living, breathing characters (284). There are, however, several basic problems with this thesis. The most fundamental of these is the extent to which it relies on quotations from the author, Coetzee, that he made outside of his writings. Firstly, this creates a fundamental issue of authorial intent. It is a literary critic’s role to analyze what an author does, not what an author meant to do. The whole thesis essentially revolves around what Coetzee was trying to accomplish – phrases such as “Coetzee suggests” and “Coetzee describes” pepper the opening paragraphs of this essay (277), and at one point Gallagher even quotes Coetzee’s description of the central issues of the novel (278). There is no way all of this authorial intent could fail to in some way colour Gallagher’s analysis of the work. The second major issue with this heavily reliance on Coetzee’s own words is that it assumes, as a premise of the argument, that he solves his two dilemmas. It firstly supposes – without evidence – that the dilemmas Coetzee proposes are valid, without necessarily providing evidence that this is the case. Certainly, Coetzee argues that graphic depictions of torture glorify and make valid those acts, but is that actually true? Is it not possible that graphic depictions of torture make the process of torture incredibly real, and weaken rather than strengthen torturing oppressors? Furthermore, Gallagher seems to implicitly accept that Coetzee solves these dilemmas in his work, even though there is evidence to the contrary. Gallagher argues that Coetzee solves the dilemma of how to depict torturers, for instance, in part by making them “moral vacuums” (284), as demonstrated by their soulless and shaded eyes (284). But would not the “moral vacuum” also fit nicely along with the list of other cliches that one must avoid (284), along with the satanic evil and the tragically divided torturer? In what ways does that actually solve the dilemma? While Gallagher’s reliance on Coetzee’s own ideas about his writing are certainly a major weakness in the fundamental premise of her article, within those definitions and constraints her analysis is actually quite skilful and adroit. She analyzes the use of language, frustration with language and language and allegory’s connection to torture, the response, according to her, to the first dilemma of how to represent torture in literature, quite well. Firstly, she draws a connection between the sexual frustrations of the magistrate and his frustrations in his inability to write about the experience of living under the Empire’s oppression, indicating a fundamental frustration with the impotency of written words in the face of something as powerful and hateful as torture (282). Probably the best analysis within her entire work is Gallagher’s interpretation of the scene in which the Magistrate discovers glyphs left behind by the barbarians – glyphs that can be interpreted in an almost infinite variety of ways (282), which is, Gallagher contends, the final answer to the problem of representing torture – to be purposefully ambiguous as Coetzee was, and shroud the work in potent but ambiguous allegory (283). In many ways Urquhart’s article on Waiting for the Barbarians creates an argument that is fundamentally opposed to Gallagher’s. While Gallagher’s article focuses on the intentional ambiguity of the texts, and thus its wide spread and universal applicability as an analysis of torture and the torturer as sorts of platonic ideals. Urquhart’s text, on the other hand, situates Coetzee’s novel in a very specific time and place: South Africa in the 1980s, and reads it as a criticism of attempts at reconciliation and the creation of justice through acknowledging the oppression (Urquhart 2). Urquhart indicates that one of the greatest criticisms of Coetzee’s work is that it attempts to do just what Urquhart and many people take issue with: the idea that “truth” as a universal concept both exists and can be used to create reconciliation between the oppressors and the oppressed (3). Urquhart argues, however, that this is an overly simple interpretation of Coetzee’s work, and that, while he does attempt to represent attempts by a government to argue for the ‘truth=reconciliation/justice’ argument, he does so in order to critique it as an attempt by governments to retain legitimacy in the face of overwhelming evidence of moral weakness. Urquhart indicates that Coetzee’s work demonstrates “the difficulty of establishing the truth about the experience of the oppressed and, second, the manipulation of their voices to protect the interests of the state” (2). Urquhart frames his argument through the construct of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), whose goal is to alleviate the pain of apartheid by allowing victims to tell their stories, as well as letting perpetrators re-integrate into society by disclosing their involvement and receiving amnesty (3). He then quickly moves on to unpacking the criticism surrounding Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians as it relates to restorative justice through voicing of the oppressed’s grievances (4), which many critics, according to Urquhart, believe to be a beneficial aspect of the work. Urquhart, on the contrary, says that kind of social justice is inadequate and that these critics make mistakes in not accounting for the fact that the “state structures, contains, and values the voices of the oppressed” (5), essentially saying that granting the oppressed a voice does not undo the oppression, but in fact adds to it, because the state will only allow that voice to function in a way that benefits itself – in this case, by trying to distance itself from the atrocities of the past. Urquhart argues, however, that Coetzee is cognizant of the fact that being granted a voice does not lead to justice, but that the state only does this to further its own ends (6). Urquhart argues that Coetzee demonstrates the futility of the narration of oppression through the character of the Magistrate. Though ostensibly a good man, insomuch as he tries to escape the Empire and its oppression, recognizes the oppression for what it is, and do what he can to counter it, his fundamental goals are selfish. Rather than try to truly make reparations, to restore to the oppressed people what he has been complicit in taking from them, he seeks only to alleviate his guilt through penitential acts such as going on a long journey and suffering (8). This, Urquhart points out, is a selfish act in many ways: he undertakes it to alleviate his own pain and suffering from the guilt in his complicity to the oppression caused by the Empire, but does nothing to actually help the oppressed – giving voice to those peoples in the Empire’ tongue simply makes him feel better (9). Like Gallagher, Urquhart recognizes the Magistrate’s act of collecting glyphs from the ancient Empire, presumably an oppressed people, as being one of the central and most important points of the story. He argues that this section demonstrates the fundamental futility of the retelling of oppressive stories by the oppressors as an act of reparation – that they oppressor will universally co-opt this narrative. Coetzee does this by showing the magistrate himself doing this – he moves from not being able to decipher these, because they have nearly infinite possibilities, to arguing against Joll, the torturer, that he knows what they mean in order to support his own point of view (11). This, Urquhart contents, demonstrates that the state will always be in control of these oppressive retellings, and use them to their own interpretation and advantage. Urquhart’s interpretation is strong, and he makes especially good use of theory critical texts to provide alternative readings to many of the hardest to dissect parts of Coetzee’s text. Furthermore, it does an excellent job countering many of the arguments that Waiting for the Barbarians actually advocates for the idea that narration is the same thing as restorative justice, because again and again the Magistrate uses this narration for his own purposes rather than for the good of the oppressed peoples. Both Urquhart and Gallagher provide in depth and incredibly interesting articles about the nature of several parts of Waiting for the Barbarians. What is perhaps most interesting is that both of them dip occasionally into Coetzee’s intentions in creating the text, rather than simply sticking to what the text itself demonstrates. Of the two, Urquhart’s is probably the more well-refined text, offering incredibly interesting analysis that goes against much of the grain of academic though around the text while clearly demonstrating this analysis’s importance to the real world of the State and reconciliation. Gallagher, on the other hand, seems more interested in merely complementing the text for its achievements, rather than critically analyzing exactly hat those were. Works Cited Coetzee, J.M. Waiting for the Barbarians. 1980. Gallagher, Susan Van Zanten “Torture and the Novel: J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’” Contemporary Literature 29.2 (1998) 277-288. Urquhart, Troy. “Truth, Reconciliation and the Restoration of the State: Coetzee’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’” Twentieth Century Literature 51.1 (2006). 1-22. Read More