Marked Bodies: The Problem of Interpretation in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians

Marked bodies pervade J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. The novel presents the bodies of the barbarians as paper or parchment, and from the abused body of a young boy to the crippled feet of a barbarian girl, each body contains a story written upon it in the markings of abuse. It seems deeply ironic, then, that the people responsible for writing these stories onto the bodies of the barbarians are completely unable to read the stories, no matter how hard they try.

No character is more interested in these marks than the Magistrate of the colony. Over and over he attempts to interpret the “marks” the barbarian girl’s “torturers have left upon her,” but to no avail; he simply cannot read them. The novel’s refusal to render the barbarian girl’s body intelligible seems to suggest that the girl’s story is not for the Magistrate to know. While the novel must present the bodies as parchment, and the bodies are unable to avoid being marked by abuse, Waiting for the Barbarians seems to ultimately critique the idea that the colonizer has the ability to know the colonized, and refuses to allow the Magistrate to find his own redemption through interpreting the girl’s body.

The Magistrate’s obsession with the barbarian girl seems to be a self-serving endeavor. He laments: “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.” The novel suggests that only once the girl’s story is read, and then washed away, does the Magistrate believe he can be redeemed from the “history” that Empire has “laid upon” the barbarians. Washing the girl’s body each night, the Magistrate attempts to both interpret the markings and wash them away. He conveys that his “pleasure in her is spoiled until these marks on her are erased and she is restored to herself; or is it the case . . . that it is the marks on her which drew me to her but which, to my disappointment, I find do not go deep enough? . . . Is it she I want or the traces of history her body bears?” Do the markings really not go deep enough? Or does the Magistrate not have the ability to interpret the marks? 

While the Magistrate claims to care for the girl, the fact that it is his “pleasure” that is spoiled, until he erases the marks and restores the girl to “herself,” suggests that his actions are purely self-serving. He desires the “history her body bears” because it is only by interpreting that history that he can hope to “live outside” of the history of Empire.  The novel’s refusal to allow the Magistrate access to the girl’s history, then, conveys a critique of the belief that the colonizer could ever truly know or understand the plight of the colonized. It is a critique of the assumption that the barbarians, the “other,” are merely an extension of the Empire and would therefore be intelligible. It is a critique, ultimately, of the notion that the Magistrate could ever be able to share the girl’s history and, in that shared history, find redemption from the history that the Empire has “imposed on its subjects.”

--Kristen Randall