Name:  Ankita Vadher.

Paper: The African Literature.

Sem-4,

M.A. -2

Roll No: 1,

Year: 2012-13.

Submitted To,

Dr. Dillip Barad,

Dept.of. English,

M.K. Bhavnagar University,

Bhavnagar.

General Introduction of ‘Waiting for the Barbarian’.

J.M.Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarian is the Meditative and Melancholy tale of an aging colonial magistrate’s futile struggle against the stupidity, brutality and racism of a government which he has served complacently all of his life. The unnamed magistrate is reluctant to take any action which would disrupt the pleasant and secure course of his life; he wishes to serve out his days “On this lazy frontier, waiting to retire”, spending his time engaged in “hunting and hawking and placid concupiscence”. Waiting for Barbarians is an allegory that much is plain from the generic terms used to describe places, people and events. It is a story meant to tell a different hidden story. It is as much about modern day warfare and scare tactics. The title ‘waiting for Barbarian’ is taken from a line from Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy. The narrator calls himself an old man and spends almost all of his leisure time thinking of sex with girls. The difference between reading a novel such as Waiting for Barbarians as art and as propaganda is that art emphasis the universal. It is about human experience, the individual experience or the societal experience propaganda is about a specific issue with specific view point, specific agenda, about a particular society. Waiting for Barbarians is about two main things: Complacency and Pain. It is a story pain, physical pain, and how its influence can drive and determines an entire society. Physical pain torture or threat of torture plays a large role in barbarians. Coetzee’s shows how at the same time man can be so afraid of physical pain as to trump any conviction or idea but also willing some times eagerly to dole out the some pain on others. The “Empire” in Barbarians is an established power in order to achieve some vague perhaps impossible objective. The Magistrate on Barbarians is a figure aroused from his complacency by a needling conscience that finally drives him to resistance against the very organization he embodies. The nameless character, referred to only by his title is a cog in the well- old machine of power he begins as a rather non- sympathetic character and through his transformation becomes a powerful alley for justice and doing what is right, but as usual with those who try to do what is right in a difficult situation, he comes to ruin. His physical bodies abused and destroyed he is shamed and outcast laughing stock, but what the Magistrate retains is conviction, is a sense of displacement, a sense that he doesn't belong to or in the empire and does not want to be part of its ways. He wants to live “Outside History”. He wants to be inhuman because only humans are capable of the kinds of horrors against other humans that make us call them monsters.

          Freud explains the term Unconscious as a system which “Comprises” the repressed contents which have been denied access to the Preconscious - Conscious system by Oppression of Repression.” The ancient writings are not accessible to his conscious like wise his unconscious.  All through the novel the reader traces the unconscious of Magistrate via his dreams and his relation with barbarian girl. Magistrate tries to traces the different and tortured body of the barbarian girl both in his dreams and in his washing ritual. Through her body and through her ancient script he found, he actually traces himself and his own desire, fear, and repressed feeling. For Instance: Magistrate’s attraction to the girl’s body can be the articulation of his repressed Castration anxiety while for Freud “The Body that is the source of Fetishism is the Mother’s Body, a Canny and Archaic”. Like wise the uncanny body of the mother which is the former home of the subject but at the same time somewhere alien, the girl’s disfigure body is also uncanny but attractive. The foot washing ritual of the magistrates can be considered as a fetishistic act which is the outcome of his castration anxiety. “The Fetish object is also a Mark of Mourning for the lost Object”. That’s why, the washing process like a ritual with symbolize the mourning for the girl’s lost beauty normality and subjectivity.

              One of Colonel Joll’s tortures at techniques has important representation about the victimization of woman in the society. As a tortured to humiliate the Magistrate and to break the power he has. Colonel Joll equates him with a woman by hanging him in a tree with woman clothes and showing him struggling in front of his town. Women in the society which are left behind with non subjectivity and treated as the object of pleasure and desire in a world addressing to men, and also feminist film critic say that in society “Women is deprived of a gaze, deprived of the subjectivity and repeatedly transformed in to the object of masculine with the woman by hanging him half necked in front of crowed, Magistrate is represented as a the object of colonel joll’s Scopophiliac pleasure which symbolically empower colonel’s masculinity and therefore both his subjectivity and authority. The hanging of magistrate can also be regarded as symbolic castration. When the magistrate is the represented to the crowed as a passive and silenced position while hanging on the tree, he is eliminated from the law of father and order to complete silence. Since he is belonging to the domain of the other like the female he has no subjectivity and authority and more. How Magistrate is silence by colonel joll who represents the empire, the authority and the realm of man is narrated in the following way in the novel;

          “I try to call out something word of blind fear, a shriek, but the rope is now so tight that I am strangled, speechless. I am swinging loose. The breeze lifts my smock and plays with my necked body. I am relaxed, floating, in a woman clothes.”

          The Magistrate in the novel indicates several times that he does not understand the gestures nuances of the Barbarian girl in the same way he never able to discovered her body. The rope around the magistrate signifies the pressure on the woman in the society. Through the hanging scene of the Magistrate Coetzee actually criticizes the inevitable suffering and death of Woman in the Man’s world. The ambiguous uncertainty of the danger, “Waiting” for the Danger also has different connotations. In this scene head analyses the connotation of waiting and says, “Joll needs the Barbarian to arrive for his mission and empire’s function to be validate. For the Magistrate, however the barbarians have already arrived in the form of empire’s militia: he has been waiting for empire’s Barbarity to manifest itself so that he can begin the process of disentangling himself from its ideology of power and justice”. The Magistrate does not want the natives to get too close to “Civilization” because it will destroy their own culture and human potential. He is able to see the direct Cause/ Effect relationship of the colony of the barbarians and most important the negative impact of the imposed “civilization” of the empire. The magistrate sympathy towards the natives manifests it self another way, as well as, for he eventually falls in love with captured a native girl. Though this relationship, the magistrate begins to realize that the barbarian qualities attributed to the natives were created by the empire to justify their invasion of the alien culture. In order to be barbarian, the invading empire had to name them so. It is this inside in to the relation for imperialism that ultimately leads to the Magistrate’s imprisonment.

          The Book also touches environmental aspect of our time and could also be included in a body of literature called Eco criticism. By the end of the novel, the people of town face possible starvation as their crops have been flooded, ostensibly by the Barbarians, and army is retreating to the capital in despair: though the book is a study of personal power, it is also an examination of the limits of imperial power, and the struggle against the ruthless forces of time and nature, which act in opposition Civilization and Culture.