Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians

Waiting for the Barbarians is the third novel written by the South African-born Australian writer, critic, and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, John Maxwell Coetzee. The novel was originally published in 1980 and has since been widely read as an allegory of imperial and/or tyrannical rule. The events of the novel take place in a settlement on a frontier outpost of an Empire whose place and time period are unspecified. This Empire, nevertheless, is portrayed at a very critical moment in its history. Plagued by internal problems and losing control over its vast territories, the Empire is forced to confront its approaching demise. Hence, in an attempt to preserve its power and “prolong its era” (Coetzee 146), it labors to unite its subjects and rally them to a common cause: fighting the existential threat represented by the Barbarians who, the Empire claims, seek to annihilate civilization.

Because the novel was written and published when South Africa was still under the Apartheid rule, which lasted from 1948 to 1994, many critics have interpreted the novel as an allegory of the South African situation. Such historically-rooted allegorical interpretations demonstrate the parallels between the oppressive ‘Empire’ depicted in the novel and the South African Apartheid regime. They also show the relevance of the novel to post-Apartheid South Africa and the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which prioritized healing the state over attaining justice for the victims (Urquhart 5). In addition to these interpretations which situate the novel in its historical context, Waiting for the Barbarians has been read as an allegory of various imperial models and tyrannical regimes—there is, for example, a significant body of scholarship in which the novel is interpreted as an allegory of the War on Terror (see, for example, Robert Spencer’s fifth chapter “J.M. Coetzee and the ‘War on Terror’” in his book Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature (Macmillan, 2011)).

The reason the novel has inspired various allegorical interpretations is because of its representation of the exclusionary and exploitative logic and dynamics of imperialism and tyranny. The novel shows how imperial/despotic systems need an enemy—whether real or, as is often the case, fictional—to both define the self against and to be the self’s raison d’être. It, furthermore, illustrates how this much-needed enemy is constructed, portraying the roles discrimination, dehumanization, and indoctrination play in this process. Parallel to the novel’s thorough dissection of the making of victims, it also provides a very meticulous study of complicity and the ways complicit subjects, represented by the Magistrate (the novel’s protagonist and narrator), deal with their awareness of their complicity. Moreover, the novel’s rather mechanized—and thus dehumanizing—representation of the figure of the perpetrator is interesting as it departs from the psychopathologizing tendency, which is very common in the depiction of perpetrators in popular culture.

Waiting for the Barbarians was made into a movie, with the same name, directed by Ciro Guerra in 2019. The movie is mostly faithful to the novel; however, it presents an alternative ending to that of the novel. While there is an extensive body of scholarship on the novel, its relevance to Perpetrator and Complicity Studies is yet to be highlighted. Future study could examine the depiction of perpetrators as well as complicit subjects in both the novel and the movie. The differences in form/media and content between the novel and its film adaptation could also be studied in terms of how this impacts the representation of perpetration and complicity.

Works Cited:

Urquhart, Troy. “Truth, Reconciliation, and the Restoration of the State: Coetzee’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians.’” Twentieth-Century Literature 52, no. 1 (2006): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-2006-2003.

Author of this entry: Hagar Abdalbar.

Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians. Vintage, 2004.