Transcript Waiting for the Barbarians - University of California, Irvine

Part 2
 Spatial (capital – settlement – frontier and
beyond)
 Behavior (acting civilized)
 Appearance (physical traits and poverty)
 Young woman as interpreter.
 At the meeting, the Magistrate asks, “Blind:
what is the word for blind?” (69)
 “What a waste,” I think: “she could have
spent those long empty evenings teaching
me her tongue!” (70)
 “I bellow again and again, there is
nothing I can do to stop it, the noise
comes out of a body that knows itself
damaged perhaps beyond repair and
roars its fright.” (119)
 “He is calling his barbarian friends,”
someone observes. “That is barbarian
language you hear.” There is laughter.
(119)
 Page 70
“Speak to them,” I tell her. “Tell them
why we are here. Tell them your story.
Tell them the truth.”
“How do you ever know when a man has
told you the truth?”
“There is a certain tone,” Joll says…
“The tone of truth!...” (5)
“Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.
That is what I bear away from my
conversation with Colonel Joll...” (5)
 “The distance between myself and her
torturers, I realize, is negligible; I
shudder.” (27)
 “a jackal of Empire in sheep’s clothing”
(71)
 Reads the classics
 Catalogues his collections
 Makes maps (and collates them)
 Goes to archeological site
 Visits women
 Foot washing as a
religious rite
PAGE 28
“I lose myself in the rhythm of what I am
doing… I am not event present…my
head droops.”
 How does sexual desire connect to a
part of the Magistrate’s life that has
passed?
 Age?
 Privilege?
 An attitude of disregard?
 Manipulation of his surroundings?
Page 42
“I have just come from the bed of a
woman for whom, in the year I have
known her…the secret body of the
other.”
 “Not only that; there were unsettling
occasions when in the middle of the
sexual act I felt myself losing my way
like a storyteller losing the thread of his
story.” (44)
 “a man who does not know what to do
with the woman in his bed should not
know what to write.” (57)
 Tyranny of the metaphor: “in which
events are not themselves but stand for
other things” (39)
 Inability to understand
 “It has been growing
more and more clear
to me that until the
marks on this girl’s
body are deciphered
and understood I
cannot let go of her.”
(31)
 “I have been trying
to remember you as
you were before all
of this happened.”
(48)
 “I also found a cache of wooden slips on
which are painted characters in a script I
have not seen the like of.” (14)
 “Now, in the hope of deciphering the script,
I have set about collecting all the slips I can,
and have let the children who play here
know that if they find one it is worth a
penny.” (14-15)
 Magistrate’s difficulty - deciphering
himself, wooden slips, and the
experience of the woman.
 Reader’s difficulty - placing events and
limited access to the torture.
 Coetzee’s commitment to tell a story
that neither ignores torture nor
represents it in a realistic way.
 “For the writer the deeper problem is not to
allow himself to be impaled on the dilemma
proposed by the state, namely, either to
ignore its obscenities or else to produce
representations of them. The true challenge
is how not to play the game by the rules of
the state, how to imagine torture and death
on one’s own terms.”
 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/home/coetz
ee-chamber.html
 “I look into his clear
blue eyes, as clear as  “as my feet leave the
if there were crystal
ground I feel a
lenses slipped over
terrible tearing in
his eyeballs. He
my shoulders as
looks back at me. I
though whole sheets
have no idea what
of muscle are giving
he sees.” (115)
way.” (119)
How does the scene
at the end of the
 “For a long while I
novel offer
stare at the plea I
commentary on
have written.”
the writing of
(151)
history and
personal
experience?