Something Called Justice:

J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians

By the time J.M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003, this white South African writer had won virtually ever other literary award imaginable for his searing and relentlessly troubling novels.  These are novels preoccupied with the devastating effects of apartheid on all of its citizens, white and black.  As Coetzee insists in a speech in 1987, “In a society of masters and slaves, no one is free.” Yet Coetzee’s novels are also committed explorations into the possibility of challenging corrupt regimes.  More intensely than perhaps any other writer of his generation, Coetzee interrogates the desire to resign from “the master-caste,” to separate oneself from the crimes committed by the social class or privileged group into which one is born.  Written amidst the most vicious years of the South African apartheid, Waiting for the Barbarians remains so compelling today because it asks us to reflect on the question of what exactly one is to do when atrocity occurs in one’s own backyard.

Waiting for the Barbarians is the story of the Magistrate of a lazy, far-flung outpost of an unnamed colonial empire. In the middle of yet another uneventful season, the Magistrate’s quiet existence is forever ended by the arrival of Colonel Joll and his mission to investigate rumors of a “barbarian” uprising.  Although the Magistrate finds the idea of such an uprising laughable, he initially defers to Joll’s authority, and thus becomes complicit in the interrogations the colonel performs in the town’s granary, interrogations which leave their prisoners maimed and disfigured.   The story of Waiting for the Barbarians is the story of one man’s efforts to break from the terrorizing ranks of his superiors, to make up in some way, shape, or form for the crimes committed with his passive consent. It is the great accomplishment of Coetzee’s novel that it so insistently questions the motives and effects of these efforts for “penance and reparation,” never allowing us to confuse the desire for expiation with something called “justice.” 

From his compulsive and erotically-charged bathing of the damaged feet of a tortured barbarian girl, to his efforts to return her to her people, to his own imprisonment and torture by Joll’s henchmen, the Magistrate seeks to understand and undo the damage to which he was party.  Yet, he is also inescapably aware that his most noble goals are driven, too, by his own selfish desire to ease a guilty conscience. The closest the Magistrate ever comes to heroism, in any traditional sense, is when he finally speaks out to Joll, declaring unequivocally, “You are the enemy,” the barbarian, the threat to civilization.  Yet, even in this scene, Coetzee’s novel forces us to recognize the romantic and self-serving gestures of a man who wants to go down in history as “the One Just Man.” With more honesty than most us ever achieve, the Magistrate concedes that neither his broken body nor his fine speeches can repair the barbarian girl’s feet or protect the indigenous nomads from further abuse. 

What do we do when torture occurs in our own backyard?  How do we sleep at night knowing that we give our passive consent to atrocities committed in the name of justice? What is an effective act of dissent?  Waiting for the Barbarians reverberates with these questions, and if it does not provide easy answers, it is because it recognizes how terribly complicated the problems are.  Like all great literature, this novel disturbs, and I can think of no book that speaks more forcefully to our own complex and disturbing times.

--Robin Blyn, Associate Professor, UWF Department of English