Waiting for Barbarian as an allegorical representation of Imperialism.

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Name:- Khamal Krishna R

Roll No:- 14

Course:- M.A Sem-4

Paper No:- 14 The African Literature

Assignment Topic:- Waiting for Barbarian as an allegorical representation of Imperialism.

Email id:- krishnakhamal01@gmail.com

Submitted to: Smt. S.B. Gardi Department of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji   Bhavnagar University

 Preface:

                   African Literature is  history of Slavery, oppression or suppression, violence  and humiliations of their life. This literature is not for Entertainment, not for Aesthetic delight but such literature  disturb the mind  leads to think about Humanity and so many other things. This literature is not written with  Out  of Compassion but it is written out of Disgustful life  which is experienced by writers themselves. Flood of Colonialism, Capitalism and Industrialism lead them towards salve mentality and they suffer  from agony and pain.

                        We can’t enjoy the narration of any text because writers  have no good memories to write then how can we expect that they write something romantic or anything else when their lives itself in danger or mental states are in trauma. They are suffering from Dominant power and live in fear. They  cannot explore their ‘Feelings and Emotions’ as human beings because they are not treated like as Human Beings.

•  What  is to be South African writer ?

                    A Great commanding subject haunts the South Africans imagination, Yet this subject can also turn into a kind of tyranny, close, oppressive, even destructive. It means an endless clamor or news about racial injustice, the feeling that one's life is mortgaged to a society gone rotten with hatred, an indignation that exhausts itself into depression, the fear of one's anger may overwhelm and destroy one's fiction. And except for silence or emigration , there can be no relief.

• About Writer :

                        John Maxwell Coetzee  South African writer who is a novelist, essayist, translator and recipient of the Nobel prize in Literature 2003. He focuses on power. The novel ‘Waiting for Barbarian'  was published 1980. His philosophical depth and  stylistic brilliance put him as rival of Kafka and Beckett. He was born in Cape Town ,South Africa, in 1940 educated in south Africa and United States.
John Maxwell Coetzee is a novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.  He writes many novels. It was chosen by Penguin for its series Great Books of the 20th century and won both the James Tait Black Memorial prize and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for fiction. It is first published in 1960. His first work of fiction was Dusklands written in 1974.The second one is Waiting for Barbarian in 1980. "Waiting for the Barbarians" is a novel published in 1980. “Waiting for the Barbarians” is about morality and it deals with human cruelty. The title is from a tone from the Greek post “Constantine P. Cavafy”. The story was about imaginary Empire.

  v                   About the Novel :
 

Waiting for the Barbarians" is a novel published in 1980. “Waiting for the Barbarians” is about morality and it deals with human cruelty. The title is from a tone from the Greek post “Constantine P. Cavafy”. The story was about imaginary Empire. In the novel time was unspecified. There was Barbarian tribes, who were living at the edge of the Empire.

Waiting for the Barbarians” somehow against of humanity and it, challenges humanity in many ways. As we know, Colonel Joll was a cruel fellow. He tortured people without any crime. The main character of the novel was the Magistrate. He became the victim of injustice. There was no evidence against him, if we look at the depth of the novel. The Magistrate was having peaceful personality. He was the territorial frontier of the Empire. He was a person of authority and he was quite old. He loses his power when the Empire sent an army to protect the town from the Barbarians.
At the same time, he saved one tortured barbarian girl from the street. Colonel Joll tortured her. Her tribe people left her behind. There was also a dialogue on it by the magistrate:

“However kindly she may be treated by her own people, she will never be courted and married in the normal way: she is marked for life as the property of a stranger, and no one will approach her save in the spirit of lugubrious sensual pity that she detected and rejected in me. ( Coetzee, 1982: 135)”.

Ø “Waiting for the Barbarians” as an allegorical novel

What is Allegory

An allegory is story, poem, or picture which can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically moral or political. A story that acts as extended metaphor in which persons, abstract ideas, or event represent not only themselves on the literal level,but they also stand for something else on the symbolic.

What is Imperialism:-

Imperialism it is identity of Barbarian will always be regarded as “other” by imperialist system. Imperialism is define as “an unequal human and territorial relationship, usually in the form of an empire, based on ideas of superiority and practices of dominance and involving the extension of authority and control of one state or people over another.

It was intended as an allegorical attack on apartheid South Africa. Magistrate (narrator) – a kind of all an bureaucrat against  and Colonel Joll, A young barbarian woman. In Coetzee’s words Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel about “the impact of the torture chamber on the life of a man of conscience”. Protagonist protest social unjust to Empire, but he still looks at the barbarians as a dangerous tribe. The identity of barbarians  were regarded as only “others”. Magistrate relates that, There is no woman living along the frontier who has not dreamed of a dark Barbarian hand. No man has not frightened himself with visions of the barbarians carousing into his home breaking the plates, setting fire to the curtains, raping his daughters.

It is against the image of the dark barbarian that Eurocentric cultures have constructed their fragile sense of civilization and identity. The proponents are deserted in the desert. Revisiting of the novel today provides us an urgent need for political recovery of our common humanity. The novel is a kind of debate that the natives are human or animal being.

Ø Silence in “Waiting for the Barbarians”

This novel mainly based on ‘silence’ or ‘colonialism’  or ‘Neocolonialism’.

This novel’s roots is in the poem of ‘C. P. Cavafy’ wrote the same title with poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ In which all people are ‘Waiting’ for the Barbarians’. But, after putting this kind of word writer and poet both of plays chess with readers.

Edward Said’s Concept of ‘Orientalism’ also helpful to understand the ‘Silence’ of this novel, like

Orient   ­->Native

Occident    ->Western

The narrator of Waiting for the Barbarians tells us what narrator might that his ear is ‘tuned to the pitch of human pain’. The main character in Coetzee’s allegorical novel is a magistrate in an outpost at the edge of an empire. He is aware of the dangers of passing judgment on the barbarians: while his fellow settlers blame them for lying drunk in the gutter, the magistrate finds fault with the settlers for selling them the liquor. Yet for all of his sensitivity he fails to understand the barbarian girl he adopts out of a mixture of compassion and lust. The Cultural distance is too great and at the end of the novel the magistrate concludes that his liberalism was no more helpful to the barbarians than the behavior of the soldiers who make war on then. The novel details the fall from grace of an unexceptional magistrate of the Empire, and addresses the social perversions that necessarily attend to colonial and imperial projects driven by expand sionist ambitions, pre-emptive philosophies and delirious self-righteousness. The man of conscience is the magistrate and he is the main protagonist of the novel who leads the story. The protagonist protests the unjust treatment of the so called “barbarians” although the Empire perceives them as a dangerous tribe preparing to attack the outpost and battle against the Empire. Waiting for the Barbarians can be read as an oblique parable of South Africa’s predicament and a prophecy for its future as a retrospective account of the end of empire in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, as a portrayal of the twilight of colonialism and colonial power, and as a revelation of the inadequacy and sterility of masculine consciousness. Coetzee describe the harsh reality of the ‘Empire’ and ‘Barbarians’ in this novel. Empire is imagery and self-destructive.

The first is that relations in the torture room provide a metaphor for relations between authoritarianism and its victims. The second reason for authors’ engagement with brutality is that the torture room is a site of extreme human experience accessible to no one save the participants. The challenge for an artist Coetzee asserts,

how not to play the game by the rules of the state

how to establish one’s own authority,

how to imagine for torture and death on one’s own terms.

The above dilemmas Coetzee carries on to explain are particularly urgent for fiction writers; they are less constraining for authors of auto-narrative: autobiographer’s personal experience of suffering and pain gives them the authority to retell those aspects of experiences. Dusk lands (1974) his first novel pursues the aim of diagnosing the sources of colonial violence. Even the title of the novel itself shows some sort of violence Waiting for the Barbarians here barbarians are specified as violated.

Barbarian means: people from other countries were thought to be uncivilized or violent. And here identity of the ‘barbarians’ will always be regarded as ‘others’ by imperialist society. Coetzee’s characterization is real essence with the help of characters he criticize society which he live especially character of barbarian girl, the relationship between magistrate and barbarian girl, who is central figure of theme of violence. For her part the unnamed barbarian woman her role is largely objective. All but adopted but the magistrate who makes no effort to cancel his infatuation with the oppression she has suffered, she represents the captive native upon whom the magistrate is able to project his colonial gaze. It is also to this young barbarian woman that the magistrate reveals a central theme of the novel: the terror of colonial paranoia. ‘Nothing is worse than what we can imagine’ he whispers in a moment of intimacy.

        As with all colonial cultures in Coetzee’s literary creation is above all the settlers’ fear of the indigenous other that both threatens the dominant society and justifies the violence exacted in the name of a search for that always-elusive state of security. Coetzee’s way of describing torture room, empire, barbarian girl, magistrate and his behavior with the barbarian girl, brutality, injustice all shows that how violence is represented by different ways in the novel.

               The theme of violence is prevalent throughout the book but it doesn’t’ really discuss why the capital go straight to violence to get what they need. Coetzee used this theme to describe the time in South Africa during the apartheid. They were not looking for compromise or justified trials to question the people about what they knew about the group they simply thought that if they just scare them then that would end of the problem together. It didn’t seem like an act of cruelty just an act to get what they needed out of the people. Because of novel’s treatment with violence it is different from Coetzee’s other works, violence is most important theme of the novel; here Coetzee represent both type of violence physical as well as mental. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) marks a discernable change in Coetzee’s treatment of violence in the sense that unlike in Dusk lands here Coetzee redirects his attention from the perpetrators to the victims of tortures and to the witness of atrocities who don’t suffer themselves but who are demoralized by the violence of others.

                         In the novel the descriptions of the atrocities are not made less violent and less piercing than the other works of Coetzee like in; Dusk lands. But in Waiting for the Barbarians they are viewed from the perspective of the oppressed not for the oppressors. The focus falls on the victims’ response to tortures and the result of tortures the wounded pain, suffering. Simultaneously, the perpetrators, despite their undeniable power to inflict pain are marginalized in the sense that their characterization reveals their banality. Somehow violence is reflected in many ways in the novel Coetzee shifts focus of his interest from the tortures to the consequences of their aggressiveness- the impact violence has on the oppressed and on those who are not directly subjected to brutality but who are aware of oppression of others.

Works Cited

Time, The New York. "A Stark Politicalfble of South Africa." The New York Time Book Review (l 1982).

 Coetzee, J M. Waiting For the Barbarians. London: Random House , 1997.