Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians to the big screen. The modern classic from double Booker Prize winner J. Coetzee — soon to be a major film starring Mark Rylance, Robert Pattinson and Johnny Depp For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire, whose servant he is.
But when the interrogation experts arrive, he is jolted into sympathy with the victims and into a quixotic act of rebellion which lands him in prison, branded as an enemy of the state. Waiting for the Barbarians is an allegory of oppressor and oppressed. Not just a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times, the Magistrate is an analogue of all men living in complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency.
A fascinating collection of writings on the influential literary critic and political campaigner. Unlock the more straightforward side of Waiting for the Barbarians with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!
This engaging summary presents an analysis of Waiting for the Barbarians by J. Coetzee, a thought-provoking novel which examines and questions the legitimacy of colonialism through the eyes of its protagonist, an unnamed Magistrate who governs a province that borders lands inhabited by a population of so-called barbarians. Coetzee is widely considered one of the most significant English-language authors currently active. He was born in South Africa but was granted Australian citizenship in , and has won a variety of highly coveted literary awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature.
However, very little is known about his personal life, as he is an extremely private individual. Find out everything you need to know about Waiting for the Barbarians in a fraction of the time! Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you on your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.
New York magazine was born in after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea. It quickly garnered popular and critical attention for the relatively young South African author.
Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! His acerbic remarks on the Presidential election take into account Steve Forbes' primary campaign, the non-candidacy of General Colin Powell, the comings and goings of Dick Morris, Senator Bob Dole's triumphant return to television as a pitchman for Air France, the building of Hillary Rodham Clinton's Potemkin village in Iowa, and the sublime vacuity of President Clinton's inaugural address.
A substantial concluding piece looks at the fate of indolent ruling classes through history. There are no reviews yet. Be the first one to write a review. Books for People with Print Disabilities. Internet Archive Books. Also you must have a place of abode. If you work here you can share the cook's room.
You do not want someone like me. I know that she cannot see. I have no idea what the gesture means. A day passes. I stare out over the square where the wind chases flurries of dust. Two little boys are playing with a hoop. They bowl it into the wind. It rolls forward, slows, teeters, rides back, falls. The boys lift their faces and run after it, the hair whipped back from their clean brows. I find the girl and stand before her.
She sits with her back against the trunk of one of the great walnut trees: it is hard to see whether she is even awake. She shakes her head. The fire is lit. I draw the curtains, light the lamp. She refuses the stool, but yields up her sticks and kneels in the centre of the carpet. The words come reluctantly. Can I really be about to excuse myself?
Her lips are clenched shut, her ears too no doubt, she wants nothing of old men and their bleating consciences. I prowl around her, talking about our vagrancy ordinances, sick at myself. Her skin begins to glow in the warmth of the closed room. She tugs at her coat, opens her throat to the fire. The distance between myself and her torturers, I realize, is negligible; I shudder. I work at the thongs and eyelets of the coat, throw it open, pull the boots off.
They are a man's boots, far too large for her. Inside them her feet are swaddled, shapeless. She begins to unwrap the dirty bandages. I leave the room, go downstairs to the kitchen, come back with a basin and a pitcher of warm water. She sits waiting on the carpet, her feet bare. They are broad, the toes stubby, the nails crusted with dirt.
She runs a finger across the outside of her ankle. The other one too. I pass my finger along the line, feeling nothing. It has healed. But perhaps when the cold comes. I help her off with the coat, seat her on the stool, pour the water into the basin, and begin to wash her feet. For a while her legs remain tense; then they relax. I wash slowly, working up a lather, gripping her firm-fleshed calves, manipulating the bones and tendons of her feet, running my fingers between her toes.
I change my position to kneel not in front of her but beside her, so that, holding a leg between elbow and side, I can caress the foot with both hands. I lose myself in the rhythm of what I am doing. I lose awareness of the girl herself. There is a space of time which is blank to me: perhaps I am not even present.
When I come to, my fingers have slackened, the foot rests in the basin, my head droops. I dry the right foot, shuffle to the other side, lift the leg of the wide drawers above her knee, and, fighting against drowsiness, begin to wash the left foot. The pressure of her leg against my side does not lessen. I go on. I am aware of the girl struggling to stand up; but now, I think, she must take care of herself. My eyes close. It becomes an intense pleasure to keep them closed, to savour the blissful giddiness.
I stretch out on the carpet. In an instant I am asleep. In the middle of the night I wake up cold and stiff. The fire is out, the girl is gone. I watch her eat. She eats like a blind person, gazing into the distance, working by touch.
She has a good appetite, the appetite of a robust young countrywoman. When I look straight there is nothing, there is--" she rubs the air in front of her like someone cleaning a window.
But I can see out of the sides of my eyes. The left eye is better than the right. How could I find my way if I didn't see? Her plate is empty. I dish up more of the bean stew she seems to like so much. She eats too fast, belches behind a cupped hand, smiles.
The room is warm, her coat hangs in a corner with the boots below it, she wears only the white smock and drawers. When she does not look at me I am a grey form moving about unpredictably on the periphery of her vision.
When she looks at me I am a blur, a voice, a smell, a centre of energy that one day falls asleep washing her feet and the next day feeds her bean stew and the next day--she does not know.
I seat her, fill the basin, roll the drawers above her knees. Now that the two feet are together in the water I can see that the left is turned further inward than the right, that when she stands she must stand on the outer edges of her feet.
Her ankles are large, puffy, shapeless, the skin scarred purple. I begin to wash her. She raises her feet for me in turn. I knead and massage the lax toes through the soft milky soap. Soon my eyes close, my head droops. It is rapture, of a kind. When I have washed her feet I begin to wash her legs.
For this she has to stand in the basin and lean on my shoulder. My hands run up and down her legs from ankle to knee, back and forth, squeezing, stroking, moulding. Her legs are short and sturdy, her calves strong.
Sometimes my fingers run behind her knees, tracing the tendons, pressing into the hollows between them. Light as feathers they stray up the backs of her thighs. I help her to the bed and dry her with a warm towel. I begin to pare and clean her toenails; but already waves of sleepiness are running over me.
I catch my head drooping, my body falling forward in a stupor. Carefully I put the scissors aside. Then, fully clothed, I lay myself down head to foot beside her. I fold her legs together in my arms, cradle my head on them, and in an instant am asleep. I wake up in the dark. The lamp is out, there is a smell of burnt wick. I get up and open the curtains. The girl lies huddled asleep, her knees drawn up to her chest.
When I touch her she groans and huddles tighter. I spread a blanket over her, and a second blanket. First comes the ritual of the washing, for which she is now naked. I wash her feet, as before, her legs, her buttocks. My soapy hand travels between her thighs, incuriously, I find.
She raises her arms while I wash her armpits. I wash her belly, her breasts. I push her hair aside and wash her neck, her throat. She is patient. I rinse and dry her. She lies on the bed and I rub her body with almond oil. I close my eyes and lose myself in the rhythm of the rubbing, while the fire, piled high, roars in the grate. I feel no desire to enter this stocky little body glistening by now in the firelight. It is a week since words have passed between us.
I feed her, shelter her, use her body, if that is what I am doing, in this foreign way. There used to be moments when she stiffened at certain intimacies; but now her body yields when I nuzzle my face into her belly or clasp her feet between my thighs.
She yields to everything. Sometimes she slips off into sleep before I am finished. She sleeps as intensely as a child. I find myself moving about unthinkingly in this nakedness, sometimes staying to bask in the fire after the girl has gone to sleep, or sitting in a chair reading. But more often in the very act of caressing her I am overcome with sleep as if poleaxed, fall into oblivion sprawled upon her body, and wake an hour or two later dizzy, confused, thirsty.
These dreamless spells are like death to me, or enchantment, blank, outside time. One evening, rubbing her scalp with oil, massaging her temples and forehead, I notice in the corner of one eye a greyish puckering as though a caterpillar lay there with its head under her eyelid, grazing.
Between thumb and forefinger I part her eyelids. The caterpillar comes to an end, decapitated, at the pink inner rim of the eyelid. There is no other mark. The eye is whole. I look into the eye.
Am I to believe that gazing back at me she sees nothing--my feet perhaps, parts of the room, a hazy circle of light, but at the centre, where I am, only a blur, a blank? I pass my hand slowly in front of her face, watching her pupils. I cannot discern any movement. She does not blink. But she smiles: "Why do you do that? Do you think I cannot see? I touch my lips to her forehead.
My tongue is slow, I sway on my feet with exhaustion. On the edge of oblivion it comes back to me that my fingers, running over her buttocks, have felt a phantom crisscross of ridges under the skin. She gives no sign that she has even heard me. I slump on the couch, drawing her down beside me, yawning. My arm folds around her, my lips are at the hollow of her ear, I struggle to speak; then blackness falls. I have relieved her of the shame of begging and installed her in the barracks kitchen as a scullery-maid.
Another of their sayings: "What is the last thing the Magistrate does when he leaves in the morning? There are no private affairs here. Gossip is the air we breathe. For part of the day she washes dishes, peels vegetables, helps to bake bread and prepare the humdrum round of porridge, soup and stew that the soldiers are fed. At first I am afraid these two will band together against her; but no, they seem quickly to make friends.
Passing the kitchen door on my way out I hear, muffled by the steamy warmth, voices, soft chatter, giggles. I am amused to detect in myself the faintest stab of jealousy. They are nice. It is to this room that she finds her way in the dark if I send her away in the night or the early morning.
No doubt her friends have prattled about these trysts of hers, and the details are all over the marketplace. The older a man the more grotesque people find his couplings, like the spasms of a dying animal.
I cannot play the part of a man of iron or a saintly widower. Sniggers, jokes, knowing looks--these are part of the price I am resigned to paying. There is more to do. She lies on her back with her hands placidly over her breasts. I lie beside her, speaking softly. This is where the break always falls. This is where my hand, caressing her belly, seems as awkward as a lobster. The erotic impulse, if that is what it has been, withers; with surprise I see myself clutched to this stolid girl, unable to remember what I ever desired in her, angry with myself for wanting and not wanting her.
She herself is oblivious of my swings of mood. Her days have begun to settle into a routine with which she seems content. In the morning after I have left she comes to sweep and dust the apartment. Then she helps in the kitchen with the midday meal. Her afternoons are mainly her own.
After the evening meal, after all the pots and pans have been scoured, the floor washed, the fire damped, she leaves her fellows and picks her way up the stairs to me. She undresses and lies down, waiting for my inexplicable attentions.
Perhaps I sit beside her stroking her body, waiting for a flush of blood that never truly comes. Perhaps I simply blow out the lamp and settle down with her. In the dark she soon forgets me and falls asleep. So I lie beside this healthy young body while it knits itself in sleep into ever sturdier health, working in silence even at the points of irremediable damage, the eyes, the feet, to be whole again. I cast my mind back, trying to recover an image of her as she was before.
I must believe that I saw her on the day she was brought in by the soldiers roped neck to neck with the other barbarian prisoners.
My eye passed over her; but I have no memory of that passage. On that day she was still unmarked; but I must believe she was unmarked as I must believe she was once a child, a little girl in pigtails running after her pet lamb in a universe where somewhere far away I strode in the pride of my life.
Strain as I will, my first image remains of the kneeling beggar-girl. I have not entered her. From the beginning my desire has not taken on that direction, that directedness. Lodging my dry old man's member in that blood-hot sheath makes me think of acid in milk, ashes in honey, chalk in bread. When I look at her naked body and my own, I find it impossible to believe that once upon a time I imagined the human form as a flower radiating out from a kernel in the loins.
These bodies of hers and mine are diffuse, gaseous, centreless, at one moment spinning about a vortex here, at another curdling, thickening elsewhere; but often also flat, blank. I know what to do with her no more than one cloud in the sky knows what to do with another. I watch her as she undresses, hoping to capture in her movements a hint of an old free state. But even the motion with which she pulls the smock up over her head and throws it aside is crabbed, defensive, trammelled, as though she were afraid of striking unseen obstacles.
Her face has the look of something that knows itself watched. From a trapper I have bought a little silver-fox cub. It is no more than a few months old, barely weaned, with teeth like a fine sawedge.
The first day she took it with her to the kitchen, but it was terrified by the fire and the noise, so now I keep it upstairs, where it cowers all day under the furniture. During the night I sometimes hear the click-click of its claws on the wooden floors as it roams about. It laps from a saucer of milk and eats scraps of cooked meat. It cannot be housetrained; the rooms have begun to smell of its droppings; but it is still too early to let it run loose in the yard.
Every few days I call in the cook's grandson to crawl behind the cabinet and under the chairs to clean up the mess. She shrugs. Sometimes I see its sharp snout peeking out from a dark corner. Otherwise it is only a noise in the night and a pervasive tang of urine as I wait for it to grow big enough to be disposed of.
Her lips close, her gaze settles rigidly on the wall, I know she is doing her best to glare at me. My heart goes out to her, but what can I do? Whether I appear to her decked in my robes of office or whether I stand naked before her or whether I tear open my breast for her, I am the same man.
I reach out five dough-fingers and stroke her hair. From each I get the same account: they hardly spoke to the prisoners, they were not permitted to enter the room where the interrogations took place, they cannot tell me what went on in there.
But from the sweeping- woman I get a descrip- tion of the room itself: "Just a little table, and stools, three stools, and a mat in the corner, otherwise quite bare No, no fire, only a brazier. I used to empty out the ashes. At my request the four soldiers who are quartered there drag their chests out on to the gallery, pile their sleeping-mats, plates and mugs on top of them, take down their strings of laundry. I close the door and stand in the empty room. The air is still and cold. Already the lake is beginning to freeze over.
The first snows have fallen. Far away I hear the bells of a pony-cart. I close my eyes and make an effort to imagine the room as it must have been two months ago during the Colonel's visit; but it is difficult to lose myself in reverie with the four young men dawdling outside, chafing their hands together, stamping their feet, murmuring, impatient for me to go, their warm breath forming puffs in the air.
I kneel down to examine the floor. It is clean, it is swept daily, it is like the floor of any room. Above the fireplace on the wall and ceiling there is soot. There is also a mark the size of my hand where soot has been rubbed into the wall. Otherwise the walls are blank. What signs can I be looking for? I open the door and motion to the men to bring their belongings back. A second time I interview the two guards who were on duty in the yard.
Tell me what you yourselves saw. The police officer would come to the hall where the prisoners were kept and he would point. We would fetch the prisoners he wanted and take them out to be questioned. Afterwards we would take them back. Sometimes two. Do you remember that prisoner? Do you know what they did to him? I helped to carry him back to the hall. Where they all slept. He was breathing strangely, very deep and fast. That was the last I saw of him. He was dead the next day.
I am listening. I want you to tell me everything you can remember. I am sure he has been advised not to talk. I saw him sitting by himself in a corner, after he had been in the first time, holding his head. He was not hungry. His daughter was with him: she tried to make him take food but he would not. She is the girl who stays with me. It is not a secret. Now go on: tell me what happened. Most of the time I was not there. When I came off duty I would go away.
They broke her feet. Did they do these things to her in front of the other man, her father? When did they do that? I knew that her feet were broken but I knew nothing about her being blind till long afterwards. There was nothing I could do, I did not want to become involved in a matter I did not understand! I dismiss them. In the night the dream comes back.
I am trudging across the snow of an endless plain towards a group of tiny figures playing around a snowcastle. As I approach the children sidle away or melt into the air.
Only one figure remains, a hooded child sitting with its back to me. I circle around the child, who continues to pat snow on the sides of the castle, till I can peer under the hood. The face I see is blank, featureless; it is the face of an embryo or a tiny whale; it is not a face at all but another part of the human body that bulges under the skin; it is white; it is the snow itself.
Between numb fingers I hold out a coin. Winter has settled in. The wind blows from the north, and will blow incessandy for the next four months. Standing at the window with my forehead against the cold glass I hear it whistle in the eaves, lifting and dropping a loose roof-tile. Flurries of dust chase across the square, dust patters against the pane. Now and again there are squalls of snow which briefly fleck the earth with white.
The siege of winter is on. The fields are empty, no one has reason to go outside the town walls except those few who make a livelihood by hunting. The twice-weekly parade of the garrison has been suspended, the soldiers have permission to quit the barracks if they wish and live in the town, for there is little for them to do but drink and sleep.
When I walk the ramparts in the early morning half the watchposts are empty and the numbed sentries on duty, swathed in furs, struggle to raise a hand in salute. They might as well be in their beds. For the duration of the winter the Empire is safe: beyond the eye's reach the barbarians too, huddled about their stoves, are gritting their teeth against the cold.
There have been no barbarian visitors this year. It used to be that groups of nomads would visit the settlement in winter to pitch their tents outside the walls and engage in barter, exchanging wool, skins, felts and leatherwork for cotton goods, tea, sugar, beans, flour. We prize barbarian leatherwork, particularly the sturdy boots they sew. In the past I have encouraged commerce but forbidden payment in money. I have also tried to keep the taverns closed to them. Above all I do not want to see a parasite settlement grow up on the fringes of the town populated with beggars and vagrants enslaved to strong drink.
It always pained me in the old days to see these people fall victim to the guile of shopkeepers, exchanging their goods for trinkets, lying drunk in the gutter, and confirming thereby the settlers' litany of prejudice: that barbarians are lazy, immoral, filthy, stupid. Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of a depen- dent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization; and upon this resolution I based the conduct of my administration.
I say this who now keep a barbarian girl for my bed! But this year a curtain has fallen all along the frontier. From our ramparts we stare out over the wastes. For all we know, keener eyes than ours stare back. Commerce is at an end. Since the news arrived from the capital that whatever might be necessary to safeguard the Empire would be done, regardless of cost, we have returned to an age of raids and armed vigilance. There is nothing to do but keep our swords bright, watch and wait.
I spend my time in my old recreations. I read the classics; I continue to catalogue my various collections; I collate what maps we have of the southern desert region; on days when the wind does not bite so keenly I take out a party of diggers to clear drift-sand from the excavations; and once or twice a week I set off by myself in the early morning to hunt antelope along the lakeshore.
A generation ago there were antelope and hares in such numbers that watchmen with dogs had to patrol the fields by night to protect the young wheat. But under pressure from the settlement, particularly from dogs running wild and hunting in packs, the antelope have retreated eastward and northward to the lower reaches of the river and the far shore.
Now the hunter must be prepared to ride at least an hour before he can begin his stalk. Sometimes, on a good morning, I am enabled to live again all the strength and swiftness of my manhood.
Like a wraith I glide from brake to brake. Shod in boots that have soaked in thirty years of grease, I wade through icy water. Over my coat I wear my huge old bearskin. Rime forms on my beard but my fingers are warm in their mittens. My eyes are sharp, my hearing is keen, I sniff the air like a hound, I feel a pure exhilaration. Today I leave my horse hobbled where the line of marshgrass ends on the bleak south-west shore and begin to push my way through the reeds.
The wind blows chill and dry straight into my eyes, the sun is suspended like an orange on an horizon streaked black and purple. From not thirty paces I see the placid circular motion of his jaw, hear the splash of his hooves.
Around his fetlocks I can make out circlets of ice-drops. I am barely attuned yet to my surroundings; still, as the ram lifts himself, folding his forelegs under his chest, I slide the gun up and sight behind his shoulder. The movement is smooth and steady, but perhaps the sun glints on the barrel, for in his descent he turns his head and sees me. His hooves touch ice with a click, his jaw stops in mid-motion, we gaze at each other. My pulse does not quicken: evidently it is not important to me that the ram die.
He chews again, a single scythe of the jaws, and stops. In the clear silence of the morning I find an obscure sentiment lurking at the edge of my consciousness. With the buck before me suspended in immobility, there seems to be time for all things, time even to turn my gaze inward and see what it is that has robbed the hunt of its savour: the sense that this has become no longer a morning's hunting but an occasion on which either the proud ram bleeds to deam on the ice or the old hunter misses his aim; that for the duration of this frozen moment the stars are locked in a configuration in which events are not themselves but stand for other things.
Behind my paltry cover I stand trying to shrug off this irritating and uncanny feeling, till the buck wheels and with a whisk of his tail and a brief splash of hooves disappears into the tall reeds. I trudge on purposelessly for an hour before I turn back. She is unsettled by talk like this, by the demand I seem to be making on her to respond.
She is making an effort to be clear; but perhaps she intends, "If you had wanted to do it you would have done it. She has a fondness for facts, I note, for pragmatic dicta; she dislikes fancy, questions, speculations; we are an ill-matched couple. Perhaps that is how barbarian children are brought up: to live by rote, by the wisdom of the fathers as handed down.
There are moments--I feel the onset of one now--when the desire I feel for her, usually so obscure, flickers into a shape I can recognize.
My hand stirs, strokes her, fits itself to the contour of her breast. She does not answer my words, but I plunge on, embracing her tightly, speaking thick and muffled into her ear: "Come, tell me why you are here. The simplicity of the moment is over; we separate and lie silent side by side.
What bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of thorns? That is not the meaning of the story, but what is the use of arguing?
I am like an incompetent schoolmaster, fishing about with my maieutic forceps when I ought to be filling her with the truth. She speaks. It was a fork, a kind of fork with only two teeth.
There were little knobs on the teeth to make them blunt. They put it in the coals till it was hot, then they touched you with it, to burn you. I saw the marks where they had burned people. I want to protest but instead listen on, chilled. They said they would burn my eyes out, but they did not. The man brought it very close to my face and made me look at it. They held my eyelids open.
But I had nothing to tell them. That was all. After that I could not see properly any more. There was a blur in the middle of everything I looked at; I could see only around the edges. It is difficult to explain. The left eye is getting better. That is where the iron touched me.
It made a little burn. It is not sore. Then she says, "I am tired of talking. I cease to comprehend what pleasure I can ever have found in her obstinate, phlegmatic body, and even discover in myself stirrings of outrage.
I become withdrawn, irritable; the girl turns her back and goes to sleep. In this moody state I pay a visit one evening to the rooms on the second floor of the inn.
As I climb the rickety outside stairway a man I do not recognize hurries down past me, ducking his head. I knock at the second door along the corridor and enter. The room is just as I remember it: the bed neatly made, the shelf above it packed with trinkets and toys, two candles burning, a glow of warmth coming from the great flue that runs along the wall, an odour of orange-blossom in the air. The girl herself is occupied in front of the mirror. She gives a start at my entry, but rises smiling to welcome me and bolts the door.
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