6. Vigorous light and playful musical compositions. J. M. COETZEE b. 1940 John Michael Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa. His mother was a schoolteacher; his father, a lawyer who became a sheepherder after losing his job. When Coetzee was eight, his family left the provinces, and he chronicles this and other parts of his childhood in third-person memoirs, Boyhood: Scenes from a Provincial Life (1997) and Youth: Scenes from a Provincial Life II (2002). Coetzee was educated in Cape Town and then lived in London for a few years, working as a computer programmer, before earning his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, where he wrote a dissertation on the fiction of Samuel Beckett?a major influence along with Kafka and Dostoyevsky, on Coetzee's fiction. He was appointed, first, assistant professor and, subsequently, Butler Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1984 he returned to South Africa as professor of general literature at the University of Cape Town, and since 2002 he has lived in Australia. Coetzee is the first novelist to win the prestigious Booker Prize twice, and
in 2003 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The central concern of Coetzee's fiction?the oppressive nature of colonialism? made its appearance with his first book, Dusklands (1974). This consists of two novellas, one set in the U.S. State Department during the Vietnam War, the other in southern Africa two hundred years earlier. The protagonists of these seemingly different stories?Eugene Dawn, an expert in psychological warfare, and Jacobus Coetzee, an explorer and pioneer?are engaged in similar projects, each leading to oppression and murder. Coetzee's subsequent novels include In the Heart of the Country (1977), a feminist anticolonial fable in the voice of a mad South African farmwoman; Life and Times of Michael K (1983), about a homeless man trying to survive in war-torn Africa; Foe (1986), a retelling of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of a female castaway; The Master of Petersburg (1994), a fictionalized account of Dostoyevsky's life; Disgrace (1999), about sexual harassment, rape, and race relations; and Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003), which blends essay and fiction. His many essays and works of criticism have concerned censorship, the rights of animals, South African history, and other themes.
Coetzee is at once a passionate political novelist and an intensely literary one, both qualities emerging in his most compelling indictment of colonialism, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). This novel takes its title and theme from a well-known poem by the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863?1933), which ends (in Rae Dalven's translation):
. . . night is here but the barbarians have not come.
Some people arrived from the frontiers,
And they said that there are no longer any barbarians.
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WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS / 2839
And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.
In Coetzee's novel the rulers of the unnamed empire claim it is threatened by barbarians, but the barbarian threat is, at least in part, a fantasy concocted by the empire to hold itself together. The narrator is a magistrate in charge of a frontier post, poised uneasily between the harmless inhabitants of the region and the empire's rut Mess officials, and unable to protect either the natives or himself from his brutal colleague, Colonel Joll. Imprisoned and stripped of his duties, the magistrate becomes increasingly skeptical of the empire's motives. When the imperial army arrives to subdue supposed insurgents, its vicious treatment of prisoners calls into question the relation of 'civilization' to 'barbarism' and demonstrates, in harrowing scenes of abuse and torture, the ethical dangers of one people's dominance over another. In this medley of realist particularism and allegorical parable, Coetzee leaves the landscape and time of the novel hauntingly unspecified, suggesting that colonialism's degradation and coercion, violence and moral corruption can occur anywhere, at any time.
From Waiting for the Barbarians
First there is the sound of muskets far away, as diminutive as popguns.1 Then from nearer by, from the ramparts themselves, come volleys of answering shots. There is a stampede of footsteps across the barracks yard. 'The barbarians!' someone shouts; but I think he is wrong. Above all the clamour the great bell begins to peal.
Kneeling with an ear to the crack of the door I try to make out what is going
The noise from the square mounts from a hubbub to a steady roar in which no single voice can be distinguished. The whole town must be pouring out in welcome, thousands of ecstatic souls. Volleys of musket- shots keep cracking. Then the tenor of the roar changes, rises in pitch and excitement. Faintly above it come the brassy tones of bugles.
The temptation is too great. What have I to lose? I unlock the door. In glare so blinding that I must squint and shade my eyes, I cross the yard, pass through the gate, and join the rear of the crowd. The volleys and the roar of applause continue. The old woman in black beside me takes my arm to steady herself and stands on her toes. 'Can you see?' she says. 'Yes, I can see men on horseback,' I reply; but she is not listening.
I can see a long file of horsemen who, amid flying banners, pass through the gateway and make their way to the centre of the square where they dismount. There is a cloud of dust over the whole square, but I see that they are smiling and laughing: one of them rides with his hands raised high in triumph, another waves a garland of flowers. They progress slowly, for the crowd presses around them, trying to touch them, throwing flowers, clapping their hands above their heads in joy, spinning round and round in private ecstasies. Children dive past me, scrambling through the legs of the grownups to be nearer to their heroes. Fusillade after fusillade comes from the ramparts, which are lined with cheering people.
One part of the cavalcade does not dismount. Headed by a stern-faced young corporal bearing the green and gold banner of the battalion, it passes through
1. The magistrate, narrator of the novel, listens from the prison in which the empire has incarcerated him.
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2840 / J. M. COETZEE
the press of bodies to the far end of the square and then begins a circuit of the perimeter, the crowd surging slowly in its wake. The word runs like fire from neighbour to neighbour: 'Barbarians!'
The standard-bearer's horse is led by a man who brandishes a heavy stick to clear his way. Behind him comes another trooper trailing a rope; and at the end of the rope, tied neck to neck, comes a file of men, barbarians, stark naked, holding their hands up to their faces in an odd way as though one and all are suffering from toothache. For a moment I am puzzled by the posture, by the tiptoeing eagerness with which they follow their leader, till I catch a glint of metal and at once comprehend. A simple loop of wire runs through the flesh of each
