BOOK REPORT: BARBARIANS AT THE GATE? OR IN THE CATBIRD SEAT?

“…I wondered how much pain a plump comfortable old man would be able to endure in the name of his eccentric notions of how the Empire should conduct itself. But my torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. They were interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well, which very soon forgets them when its head is gripped and a pipe is pushed down its gullet and pints of salt water are poured into it till it coughs and retches and flails and voids itself…They came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity, and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal.” (Barbarians, 126)

 

I WAS reading J.M. Coetzee’s haunting and plaintive novel, Waiting for the Barbarians during the early days of the conflict in Palestine last month and the above passage struck me as a useful reminder of what is at stake here. It’s people’s humanity. Their humanity is in jeopardy of being lost or cheated or bombed out of them, or simply given away….

 

IN THE NOVEL, the “comfortable old man” is the “Magistrate”, a civilian administrator in a distant, outpost town of “the Empire” that borders “barbarian” lands inhabited by nomads and herder tribes. He has been at his job for decades and now looks forward to a quiet retirement in the capital. He is observant, thoughtful, at times introspective, learning over his years in office about the townspeople, doing his best to fulfill their need for law and order and a secure prosperity. He has friendly relations with many and is well-respected as an administrator and jurist. Along with a small military garrison embedded in the town, he keeps order, carrying out his bureaucratic functions, and dispensing justice in the district. His administration is a well-oiled machine and has been so for years. His demeanor is congenial and he works in a collaborative manner, while diligently following the guidelines and legal framework of his job as set out for him by the Empire. Life for him, and for the town, could be considered ideal, even blissful. He muses that living there on the edge of Empire has a languid, almost dream-like quality, and the years pass peacefully without major concern or incident. Life is good.

 

He also understands, or feels he does, the people who live in the dry plains and hills beyond the town walls, viewing them as timeless pastoralists, small traders, fishers, and peasants. They are barbarians, granted, but no threat to him or the Empire. They are people, like most people, who simply wish to live, to raise their children, to go about their daily lives. Most are herders who move with the seasons from highlands to low, or else fish for a living in small settlements along the nearby river. They keep to themselves except for a little trade, and the Magistrate and townspeople do likewise. Physically, they are different, being shorter and stockier, with broad, flat faces, dark eyes, and hair that is black and straight. Their native language is foreign to him but there is enough patois or lingua franca established when they come to trade in the town that the Magistrate has some understanding of their society and customs. He sees admirable qualities in them of industry and their ability to endure the arid lands and mountains they inhabit. And they do not disrupt or interfere with the serene lives of the Magistrate and his people living behind town walls in the borderlands of empire.

 

All this changes with the arrival of Colonel Joll* who brings dire warnings and new orders from the capital. Joll informs the Magistrate that the barbarians are massing an army, and outposts like his are at risk of being overrun. This stands in sharp contrast with everything the Magistrate has come to understand about the people beyond the border, and he is skeptical of the colonel’s assessment. He is also horrified with Joll’s method of interrogation after he brings back captured barbarians who seem like the simple herders and fishers he has always known. They are locked in dark cells, starved, beaten, crippled by hammers, and questioned about a suspected uprising against the Empire. 

 

And when Joll leaves to go on to other outposts, to continue his quest to find out what the barbarians are up to, an outraged Magistrate orders his garrison to provide proper food and medical care for the prisoners and to release them. He strongly disapproves of Joll’s methods and angrily commands the garrison to clean all the cells and return the place "like it was before". It is during this time he sees a barbarian woman begging in the street. She is blind and walks with crutches, and the Magistrate realizes she is one of Joll’s torture victims. It is interesting that he notices her only after she had been interrogated. He wonders why he did not notice her before, when she was brought in with the rest of the captives. During their rather strange relationship, the Magistrate broods on this blind spot and wracks his memory to recall if he had seen her earlier. Perhaps he did not 'see' her because she was a prisoner, a non-person by definition, branded with that label by Joll and the Empire they both serve. That he never asks her name, always referring to her as "the girl", reminds us that, like Joll, he is, ultimately, a functionary of the Empire, and she will always remain an 'other', a barbarian to him despite his wishes to the contrary.

Once you don the mantle of Empire, you are never free to set it aside when you like, you can only walk away.

EVENTUALLY, he takes her to his residence to become his lover. In their first intimate encounter, the Magistrate washes her tortured, broken feet. Of course, Christ's washing of the disciples' feet at the Last Supper is invoked. But instead of symbolically washing away sins, as is the meaning of Christ's actions, the Magistrate tries to 'wash away' the wounds inflicted upon her by his Empire. But no matter what he does, he cannot erase what has been done to her. It is not her 'sins' that he wishes to wash away, but his own. As a representative of the Empire he is complicit in her torture, no matter how kind and tolerant a person he may be. The marks of Empire remain on her body, visible as a permanent reminder of what his Empire has done to her. Over the months, their relationship plays itself out along waves of eroticism and repressed desire, but the girl remains, despite their intimacy, a fetishistic mystery to him. He cannot penetrate (in any fashion) her “surface”. He cannot get past her wounds--her broken feet, the scars on her back, her blindness, and in the end he is frustrated and dissatisfied, and puzzled why he ever bothered with her. [Sour grapes. Ed.] He decides it's best to take her back to her people, or at least to the first barbarian tribe he encounters, which he does after a difficult and dangerous journey.¹ And for his troubles, upon his return, he is suspected of being a collaborator by Colonel Joll, and is tortured.

 

THE INTERESTING THING is that each time Joll arrives at the outpost, he acts as a kind of catalyst, upending the Magistrate's comfortable world, causing him to question his beliefs about the Empire, about who he is, his role in the enterprise, and what he knows to be true and what is a lie. For a time after he was released from prison, he was a pariah in the town and an object of ridicule. Joll usurped his position as magistrate, and it was only after the Colonel’s harsher rule became evident that the Magistrate recovered some of his former status among the townspeople. In speaking out publicly against Joll in the town square when the colonel brandishes a hammer, presumably to bludgeon to death or cripple a group of captive barbarians, the Magistrate is beaten senseless by Warrant Officer Mandel, and the reader assumes Joll's barbarous actions were carried out afterward.

THE NOVEL ENDS with a final appearance by Joll (who had gone to fight with the army against the barbarians.) This time he and his troops pull back from the town in disorderly retreat. After the troopers are gone, the Magistrate uses his skills as an administrator to rally the remaining townspeople into a cohesive unit and to create a semblance of order once more. They prepare, as best they can, for  a forthcoming attack by the barbarians. Part of their preparations is to install dummies dressed as soldiers along the town walls to trick the approaching barbarians (if they indeed come) into believing there is a larger force guarding the town. The Magistrate adopts the role Joll once played as a defender along the Empire's border. 

 

HERE'S THE RUB: By the novel’s end, the Magistrate is as confused as ever. “I think: ‘There has been something staring me in the face and still I do not see it.’” (170) What is it he does not see? Or hasn’t learned? What has his life meant as a representative of empire in the borderlands of the Empire? Who was he, other than a magistrate? Who were the barbarians? Not the "harmless" people being tortured and murdered on his watch, surely. Why is there a war between the Empire and nomadic herders? The Magistrate seems to take two steps forward and one back: He discovers some aspect about himself or the people around him or the situation as a whole that is churned up in the wake of Joll's passage, but he seems to return to a 'default position' (as an administrator of the Empire) when the colonel leaves. 

 

Colonel Joll reminds me of a wave crashing on the sandy shore. With each surge, for a brief time, the surface of the sand is pulled back by the water to reveal a hidden layer. But then another wave comes crashing in to restore most of what the previous wave swept away. Thus, the chaos Joll creates in his world, forces the Magistrate to grapple with the nature of his relationship with those around him. He has spent decades in his position. His relations with others were fitted around his role as magistrate. Everyone had their part to play: The townspeople managed their orchards and fields, sending their harvests back to the Empire; scullery cooks, house maids and prostitutes serviced the Magistrate  sexually, his garrison kept the peace, and the barbarians were beyond the border, of little consequence.² Before Joll's arrival, these things seemed immutable to the Magistrate, as unchanging as the constellations in the night sky.

 

One Thing the Magistrate learned, and perhaps it's a truth that will remain with him, is that there is not much difference, in the end, between him and Joll. He always viewed himself as a gentlemanly administrator, kind and helpful, a fair judge, and a thoughtful, introspective man. It is Joll, he says at one point, who is the "barbarian", the "obscene torturer."³ But if Joll is the iron fist of Empire, the Magistrate, much to his chagrin, is the velvet glove sheathing it.

 

“I wanted to live outside history. I wanted to live outside the history that Empire imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects. I never wished it for the barbarians that they should have the history of Empire laid upon them. How can I believe that that is cause for shame?” (169)

  

Cheers, Jake.

 ___________________________________________

* Note that most of the novel’s characters are nameless. Joll and Mia, a scullery cook, and Warrant Officer Mandel (one of Joll’s soldiers) are the exceptions. For example, the barbarian woman, who for some months becomes his lover, the Magistrate refers to as “the girl”. The Magistrate himself is never named. His favourite prostitute in town, who he visits regularly is called “Star” (and I take it this moniker does not mean she excelled at spelling bees.😀) The town and the region, and their inhabitants are also nameless. Soldiers are equipped with “muskets”, and horses are used for transportation, so we can assume a time frame of early to mid-Nineteenth Century. Coetzee may be suggesting that his novel could be set anywhere, at any time and be peopled by anyone.

 

1. Interestingly, it is only on their journey of several days to return the barbarian girl to her people, that the Magistrate is able to make love to her. Within the strictures of Empire he could only touch. He learns later, from Mia, that he had "hurt" the girl during their time together. Mia doesn't say how specifically, but it's a fair to assume that the girl was hurt by his hesitancy to make love to her and treat her as an equal human being, not just as an object of obsession.  

 

 2.   It should be said here that the Magistrate is something of an antiquarian, conducting a small archaeological dig near the town, uncovering small wooden tablets with writing on them. He collects them as proof an earlier, literate, society existed there before them. These talismans  cause him to muse on the ephemeral nature of an empire, that all empires come and go, as will his eventually. At the novel's end he carefully wraps the tablets up and will rebury them, leaving for posterity a record of their times. Of his own time, of writing a history of his outpost, he has nothing to say. “I think: ‘When one day people come scratching around in the ruins, they will be more interested in the relics from the desert than in anything I may leave behind. And rightly so.’”(169)

 

3. Near the end, as order breaks down in the town, and after he has been released from prison, the Magistrate questions Joll's henchman, Warrant Officer Mandel, who earlier had tortured him. He politely asks the young officer how he eats afterwards, after he has "worked" with people. Did he need to wash his hands before taking his meals? Was the blood hard to scrub out, etc. The Magistrate's coy mockery irritates the Warrant Officer so much that he drags the Magistrate to the town gates and bids him leave. Standing there, yelling at the elderly official, we ask: who, then, is the real barbarian?  Perhaps, like the Magistrate who sees only the wounds of Empire imprinted on the girl's body and dares not look at the woman beneath, Warrant Officer Mandel cannot bear to look at his victim, the Magistrate, who is a constant reminder of what he has become?

 

[I RECALL reading a number of years ago "The Ecstasy of Rita Joe", by George Ryga. It is a Canadian play that depicts the life of Rita Joe, a young  indigenous woman as seen through the eyes of people who knew her. I say "knew" her, but as we come to see, none of them really did. From the remembrances of her father who thinks of her as a kind of phoenix rising from the ashes, able to overcome and soar above her misfortunes; to her lover who sees her as a kind of warrior princess; to the judge who saw her as raw material to be molded and made over, and the statements of several others, all of whom saw Rita through the lens of their own preconceived ideas of who she was. (Joll's sunglasses similarly act to filter his world.)

The final person to speak for Rita is a fellow prostitute who walked the downtown streets with her. Of Rita, she said simply that her "feet ached". Point is--no one saw Rita as a fellow human being, with the same desires and feelings, the same aches and pains, the same hopes and dreams as everybody else.

THROUGH the 'lens' of Empire, what aspects of the world and its people are filtered out and what gets through to those who choose, or are forced to wear, such devices?]    

  

 

Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians. Vintage. Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA. 1980. 2004. Print.

 

 

 

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