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SHADI NEIMNEH1 DOI: 10.15290/CR.2022.39.4.05
The Hashemite University, Jordan
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3041-5306

The Humanist Discourse
in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting
for the Barbarians

Abstract. This article interrogates the humanist discourse in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

(1980), negotiating the intersections between the novels̓ narrator, the Magistrate, and Coetzee, the public

intellectual. The ethical narrator, through the very act of witnessing and describing imperial violence, ob-

jects to the practices of torture perpetrated on captured prisoners yet feels guilty for his complicity with

the torturers. The articulation of his difficult position as a humanist serving a declining Empire forms the

essence of a humanist discourse that corresponds to the difficulties and ambivalences experienced by the

postcolonial writer/intellectual. Using the work of Edward Said on the representations of the intellectual

and Coetzee's views on ethical authorship and torture, the present article locates the humanist discourse

articulated by the Magistrate in the center of Coetzee's conception of the public intellectual. While Coetzee

undertakes the task of representing oppression without reinscribing it, his narrator struggles with distanc-

ing himself from the oppressors physically and psychologically, and thus achieving the relative autonomy

Said called for. In the process, the Magistrate moves from a position of consent to one of dissent.

Keywords: J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, humanist discourse, ethics, public intellectualism, Ed-

ward Said.

Theoretical contexts: Coetzee and public intellectualism
J. M. Coetzee's novels have been problematically received by critics, especially in South
Africa during the apartheid years, because, in the words of Benita Parry, they are "self-
reflexive novels which stage the impossibility of representation, estrange the norms of
reality, and work … to 'demythologize history'" (1998: 149). Since the mode of his novels
was not one of traditional social realism directly evoking historical realities, critics have
expressed concerns that many of his works are "only indirectly 'about' the political and

1 Address for correspondence: Department of English, Faculty of Arts, The Hashemite University, P.O.
Box 330127, Zarqa 13133 Jordan. E-mail: shadin@hu.edu.jo

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3041-5306


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social struggles of South Africa" (Martin 1986: 4), dislocating, abstracting, and allegoriz-
ing political realities into another time and place. Other critics try to justify Coetzee's
position and look for alternative sociopolitical relevance. The present article is a step in
this direction, situating Coetzee's relevance within ethical and political debates about
the function and status of the intellectual (i.e., the South African writer and critic).
Waiting for the Barbarians (1980; hereafter abbreviated as WB) engages the ethics and
politics of intellectual practice and the role/function of the intellectual at the heart of
many of Coetzee's works. According to Michel Foucault, the "author function" is ideolo-
gically important in our conception of literary works because it is "characteristic of the
mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society"
(1998: 211). South African literature written under apartheid has often been read in
terms of a specific "author function", i.e., in light of its engagement with political realit-
ies within a specific historical context.

Broadly speaking, Coetzee's novels published before the 1990s have been seen as
complex (yet often inadequate or problematic) engagements with history due to their
allegorical nature or psychological and postmodern dimensions. Coetzee has been criti-
cized in South Africa for avoiding full engagement with political history. Mainly using
the work of Edward Said on the representations of intellectuals, his 1993 Reith Lectures
in particular, the present article explores the problematic position of the South African
writer (artist or intellectual) confronted with violence, oppression, and a history of
injustice. Torn between ethical commitment and humanist values on the one hand and
attempts to publicly render them on the other hand, Coetzee was conscious of his role
as an intellectual figure as well as the dangers of exploiting the oppression he sought to
criticize. WB dramatizes the ironies, contradictions, and struggles involved in the intel-
lectual practice Coetzee has internalized in his lengthy professional career. When he
was writing WB, Coetzee had already published two novels (Dusklands in 1976 and In the
Heart of the Country in 1977) and numerous scholarly articles in reputable journals. He
was gaining international fame as a South African writer and scholar with a solid back-
ground in language theories, literary theories, world literature, and Western philosophy.
The Ph.D. in English he earned from the University of Texas at Austin in 1969 was only
one asset to an accomplished academic. Articulated in the first-person by the unnamed
Magistrate, the humanist discourse in WB manifests ethical resonances, as well as the
ambivalence of resistance and complicity. Coetzee's ethical and political concerns are
dramatized and complicated through the Magistrate, who enacts the ethical and human-
ist voice in the novel and disputably serves as Coetzee's own alter ego.

Antonio Gramsci's argument concerning the formation of intellectuals makes it clear
that intellectuals have a social and/or political function and not only a traditional profes-
sion or academic career. This social function and/or political responsibility of organic
intellectuals entails generating the ideas and hopes of their class. For Gramsci, organic



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intellectuals adopt the ideology of a particular party or class, and hence the independ-
ent, autonomous intellectual is a myth: "Every social group, coming into existence on
the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production,
creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it
homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in
the social and political fields" (1971: 5). For Gramsci, all men are intellectuals, even
though not all of them have a social function. In this expanded sense, Gramsci argues
that the organic intellectual "participates in a particular conception of the world, has a
conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of
the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought" (1971: 9). So,
intellectuals exist in varying degrees of complicity and commitment. While some intel-
lectuals side with and serve the dominant classes, others side with the less privileged
and the disenfranchised. Following this logic, the Magistrate in WB questions his role as
an imperial intellectual just as Coetzee interrogates the role and function of his standing
as a South African intellectual.

Commenting on the politicization of knowledge and the political circumstances
governing the ideological production of discourse, Edward Said asserts: "No one has
ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from
the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a
social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of a society" (1979: 10).
Here, Said not only contradicts the liberal position of true knowledge being nonpolit-
ical, i.e., objective, but also confirms the intellectual's relative involvement in the
production of knowledge in the field of the humanities and social sciences, the know-
ledge that is political in varying degrees and rooted in one's ideological standpoint, class
affiliation, and culture/society. In The World, the Text, and the Critic, Said expounds
secular criticism and argues that texts cannot be extricated from events and circum-
stances, i.e., from history and "the existential actualities of human life, politics, societ-
ies, and events" (1983: 5). Said goes on to assert that texts are "worldly, to some degree
they are events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of
the social world, human life, and, of course, the historical moments in which they are
located and interpreted" (1983: 4). Said advocates reading texts in terms of the realities
of power and resistance that produce and disseminate them, in terms of affiliations
belonging to "culture and society" (1983: 20). Hence, critics are never free from politics
or political consciousness, whether related to their personal life and background or
institutional politics and party life. It is in this study that Said presents the intellectual's
situation as a worldly one, as texts take place in life and critics exist in sociopolitical
contexts. Said uses the term "worldliness" to indicate "circumstantial reality" (1983: 34),
a specific occasion or situation. Just as texts are worldly, so is criticism. And hence, the
critic is a committed intellectual for Said, one concerned with alleviating different sorts



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of oppression: "More explicitly, the critic is responsible to a degree for articulating those
voices dominated, displaced, or silenced by the textuality of texts. Texts are a system of
forces institutionalized by the reigning culture at some human cost to its various
components" (1983: 53). Said's assertion of discursive, textual politics is an invitation for
us to explore ethics and politics in literary and cultural texts, which is what the present
article attempts in relation to Coetzee's novel WB. If we take for granted the politiciza-
tion of discourse Said advocates, what remains is to look at Coetzee's take on the intel-
lectual's relationship with power and authority.

In his 1993 Reith Lectures, later published as Representations of the Intellectual, Said
suggests that the intellectual is not only an "outsider" or "amateur" but also a "disturber
of the status quo" (1994: x), trying to speak "truth to power" (1994: xvi) on behalf of the
unprivileged or the weak. Said politicizes both discourse and the discourse writer.
Therefore, the intellectual has a vital public role and a necessary social mission to
"break down the stereotypes and reductive categories that are so limiting to human
thought and communication" (1994: xi). The intellectual has a role to universally uphold
standards of truth concerning oppression, regardless of one's background, nationality,
or political affiliation. This comment can be taken to mean that the intellectual should
not inhabit an ivory tower—he is not a predictable or conformist figure. Rather, the
intellectual is the involved figure of dissent and opposition to injustice, war, and
destruction: "There is always the personal inflection and the private sensibility, and
those give meaning to what is being said or written. Least of all should an intellectual be
there to make his/her audience feel good: the whole point is to be embarrassing,
contrary, even unpleasant" (1994: 12). Hence, Said contends that the apolitical intellec-
tual is a myth, and adopting an apolitical stance is neither the intellectual's role nor
function. Of course, this does not entail a deterioration into simple propaganda or
clichéd language. Rather, we are entitled to look into the ways and means of achieving a
political stance, which is what the present article seeks to accomplish in the case of
Coetzee's WB.

Above all, for Said, the intellectual is a universal humanist with a political mission as
"standards of truth about human misery and oppression were to be held to despite the
individual intellectual's party affiliation, national background, and primeval loyalties"
(1994: xii). In the words of Said, "Real intellectuals are never more themselves than
when, moved by metaphysical passion and disinterested principles of justice and truth,
they denounce corruption, defend the weak, defy imperfect or oppressive authority"
(1994: 6). Thus, the intellectual should seek solutions or alternatives to dilemmas,
unmask facts, and side with the marginalized or less fortunate who are not well repres-
ented by dominant power structures, juxtaposing experiences of oppression and
projecting suffering regardless of its location: "For the intellectual the task … is expli-
citly to universalize the crisis [of his/her people], to give greater human scope to what a



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particular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the suffering of
others" (1994: 44). Accordingly, the intellectual is not objective but rather controversial
and risky for mainstream politics and authorities. Intellectuals are secular figures, not
allowing authority figures or patrons to direct them. Rather, their main task for Said is
to "speak truth to power" (1994: 85), and thus they need to maintain relative independ-
ence from being co-opted by institutions or policy makers. To achieve this goal, amateur
attitudes are better than professional ones. Freedom should be sought by intellectuals,
and relative autonomy is a goal that intellectuals should seek so that they are not
absorbed by institutions, governments or organizations against the principles of
freedom, justice and truth. In this logic, the intellectual's attempted autonomy from
institutional policies is itself a worthy political stance.

Within the South African apartheid context, we can talk about relatively similar
historical and cultural concerns to those articulated by Said: injustice, dispossession,
dislocation, discrimination, and violence. The ethical and political considerations of
writing and intellectualism that Coetzee tackles are, in fact, related and can be better
understood in the light of Said's political and cultural pronouncements. For example,
Coetzee complains in "The Novel Today" that there is "a tendency, a powerful tendency,
perhaps even dominant tendency, to subsume the novel under history" (1988: 2). In
other words, the depiction of historical realities like apartheid and violence commonly
become criteria for serious or good art. Coetzee, hence, tends to favor a novel that rivals
history, even "demythologizing history" (1988: 3), by operating in terms of the novelistic
discourse rather than the historical one. This does not mean that Coetzee advocates
nonpolitical and unhistorical art; rather, he argues for a particular way of representing
historical realities in literature to not reduce literary discourse to a historical one. By
analogy, what Said tried to achieve as a cultural critic, Coetzee tried to achieve as a
writer of fiction, but not without some complication and universalism. Both intellectu-
als were concerned with the politics of representation in reaction to socio-political and
historical realities.

According to Jane Poyner, Coetzee engages "self-consciously with the ethics of writing
in his critical essays and all his works of fiction, often through the portrayal of the
conscience-stricken white writer" and thus enters "the long-running and expansive
debate about the ethics of intellectualism and the authority of the writer" (2006: 2).
Poyner contends that in his depiction of writer-protagonists in his novels, Coetzee
dramatizes a paradox in postcolonial authorship: "whilst striving symbolically to bring
the stories of the marginal and the oppressed to light, stories that heretofore have been
suppressed or silenced by oppressive regimes, writers of conscience or conscience-
stricken writers risk re-imposing the very authority they seek to challenge" (2009: 2).
Hence, the postcolonial author and critic should be careful not to reproduce hegemonic
systems of power they intend to challenge or reimpose dominant power structures. If



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postcolonial authorship is ethico-political at heart, then it should not replicate oppress-
ive structures. Accordingly, the present article explores the intersections between the
position of the postcolonial cultural critic and that of the postcolonial writer, both being
ideally humanist figures with ethical-political concerns. The conflation between the
postcolonial intellectual and the writer is manifested in the figure of the Magistrate in
Coetzee's WB, who becomes a mouthpiece for staging Coetzee's struggles with repres-
enting politics and ethics in fiction without descending into plain propaganda or repro-
ducing oppression.

Gayatri Spivak once suggested that "the subaltern could not 'speak' because, in the
absence of institutionally validated agency, there was no listening subject" (2002: 24). It
is intellectuals and the academic world that can serve as one validating institution
giving voice or lending attentive ears to the subaltern. While intellectuals and critics
have a responsibility to know and reveal society's Other, they should be aware of contra-
dictions and ambivalences in their position, i.e., what Spivak called "the possibility that
the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self's shadow"
(1988: 75). Ambivalently, the critic/intellectual can be hegemonic and oppositional. The
potential risks of having first-world intellectuals speak for the Other are serious since
this Other is heterogeneous. In the words of Spivak, "The postcolonial intellectuals learn
that their privilege is their loss. In this, they are a paradigm of the intellectuals" (1988:
82). Spivak concludes that in a colonial context, the subaltern does not have access to
history and cannot speak, and that "the subaltern as female" is even more marginalized
(1988: 82-83). Interestingly, Spivak makes it clear that the elite class of privileged intel-
lectuals shapes the image of the subaltern: "Can the subaltern speak? What must the
elite do to watch out for the continuing construction of the subaltern? The question of
'woman' seems most problematic in this context. Clearly, if you are poor, black, and
female, you get it in three ways" (1988: 90). The intellectuals as the elite class are, accord-
ingly, complicit in the construction of the subaltern as Other. Accordingly, questions of
representation become essential for the writer, whether representing the oppressed or
the sympathetic liberal humanist as the intellectual.

In this light, Said's calls for the secular, worldly critic are better understood, and so is
Coetzee's problematic position in the context of South African apartheid politics. In
both cases, questions of political relevance and commitment are at risk. In post-colonial
theory, the term "comprador" has been broadly used to include "the intelligentsia—aca-
demics, creative writers, and artists—whose independence may be compromised by a
reliance on, and identification with, colonial power" (Ashcroft et al. 2007: 47). Said's call
for the independence of the intellectual from mainstream politics finds an echo in Coet-
zee's caution to avoid the "comprador" position. For Said, as for Coetzee and Spivak, the
intellectual encounters the problem of representation and the perils of complicity. In
the words of Coetzee in "Into the Dark Chamber," WB is about "the impact of the torture



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chamber on the life of a man of conscience" (1986: para.4). Coetzee grapples with a
moral paradox: the question of how to represent torture in fiction without endorsing it
or depriving the reader, how to depict history from the position of the oppressed
without appropriating their voice, how not to transgress the limits of fiction into history
or propaganda, how not to shy away from portraying violence, and above all how this
"man of conscience" (a different label for the intellectual, author, or critic) stands in
relation to power. Through the figure of the Magistrate, the novel dramatizes the intel-
lectual's unavoidable relation to authority. In his Reith Lectures, Said poses a question
that is crucial to our understanding of WB: "How does the intellectual address authority:
as a professional supplicant or as its unrewarded, amateurish conscience?" (1994: 83).
The Magistrate moves from timidity and indirect pleading for the prisoners to speaking
his conscience and thus being the exiled figure of dissent, embodying the amateurish
position Said favors. If there is a change in the Magistrate's attitude, it is from one of
conformity, what Said calls "professional" intellectualism throughout his Reith Lectures,
to dissent, what Said calls "amateurish" intellectualism.

The ethical intellectual and humanist discourse
For Coetzee, the torture room metaphorically stages the uneven power relations
between the oppressor and the victim, and embodies the difficulties involved in the
intellectual's position. Trapped between the dilemma of ignoring the atrocities of the
state or reproducing them, the writer points to a real challenge: "how not to play the
game by the rules of the state, how to establish one's own authority; how to imagine
torture and death on one's own terms" (1986: para. 8). Playing the game by the rules of
the state entails complicity, which is the fate the Magistrate in WB resists in imagining
the torture that takes place in Joll's rooms, or in his dealings with the victims of state-
sanctioned torture. Another pitfall can be a cliched depiction of the torturer as a
demonic, evil figure or simply a tool manipulated by the state. Torture, to use the words
of Kelly Adams, "creates a crisis not only of interpretation for the Magistrate and the
reader" of the novel, but also one of "representation for Coetzee" (2015: 173). The novel's
dramatization of the Magistrate's questioning of the relationship between truth and
language (between telling and believing) and Joll's declaration that there is "a certain
tone" to truth that the interrogator knows through training and practice (Coetzee
2000: 5)2 all hint at the intellectual's predicament of representation that Coetzee the
writer and critic grapples with. While Said questions the extent to which the intellectual
involved in the public sphere should participate—"How far should an intellectual go in

2 All future references to Coetzee's novel will be to this particular edition. Page numbers are consistently
given in the text.



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getting involved?" (1994: 105)—the Magistrate, a possible mouthpiece for Coetzee, also
questions the extent to which the interrogator can exercise pain in pursuit of truth (5).
Importantly, the Magistrate questions the extent of his own involvement in imperial
politics after his "easy years" of "hunting and hawking and placid concupiscence" (9).
Initially, he turns a deaf ear to the cries of pain coming from the granary (9). However,
he goes there and sees for himself the dead corpse of the tortured prisoner (10). He talks
to the prisoner's nephew and signs the false death warrant deposited by Joll (6), which
makes him more conscious of his complicity with the torturers. He has been tempted
into the dark chamber against his conscious wish, and his questions to the guard enable
him to realize the falsity of imperial claims (6). His questions to Joll suggest his own
inner struggle with knowing and telling the truth. The basic question for the intellec-
tual, Said contends, remains one about truth: "how does one speak the truth? What
truth? For whom and where?" (1994: 88). From one perspective, WB stages the Magis-
trate's struggles with speaking this truth to the Empire he serves, as well as his gradual
transformation from a figure of consent to a figure of dissent, both being intellectual
positions Said negotiates in his lectures on the representation of the intellectual.

The pitfalls of amateur intellectualism
In his Reith Lectures, Representations of the Intellectual, Said defines intellectual
amateurism in terms of "the desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by the love
for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines
and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values
despite the restrictions of the profession" (1994: 76). Professional intellectuals lose the
full picture and can get absorbed in technical, abstract language. If the professional
intellectual seeks objectivity and thus detachment or rewards, Said contends, the
amateur intellectual favors "passionate engagement, risk, exposure, commitment to
principles, vulnerability in debating and being involved in worldly causes" (1994: 109).
For example, literature specialists can lose interest in history or politics while conform-
ing to employers' wishes and their political agendas. In brief, amateur intellectuals do
not conform to social and academic norms. On the other hand, Said defines amateurism
as "an activity that is fueled by care and affection rather than by profit and selfish,
narrow specialization" (1994: 82). Apparently, amateur intellectuals are moved by
universal values of justice and truth against the authority of power and institutional
influences.

Coetzee s̓ novel begins with the arrival of Colonel Joll from the Third Bureau of the
Civil Guard at the frontier settlement where the Magistrate has peacefully lived for
years. Claiming he has arrived under emergency powers, Joll begins his ruthless
campaign in search of possible barbarian enemies. The Magistrate, it should be stated,
is also a seeker of truth, albeit of a different kind. He is an intellectual of sorts and a



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man of principles, which fits Said's conception of the amateur intellectual. He is an
amateur writer with literary ambitions, a cartologist, a historian, a hunter, and an
archeologist reading ruins and desert signs. His life in this frontier outpost—which has
grown into an "agricultural settlement" in the desert (5)— away from the imperial capital
has sharpened his senses. He reads the wind and the migrating birds as early signs of
the arrival of spring (62). He collects and reads desert ruins in the form of wooden slips
with enigmatic script (15) as an indication of an earlier settlement near the lake. His
preoccupation with reading signs can be summarized in his exclamation: "How will I
ever know?" (16). He reads the classics in his spare time and excavates desert ruins,
trying to locate his service of the Empire in the jagged history of the rise and fall of civil-
izations. He is a reader of imperial history and a critic of imperial practices. In brief, the
Magistrate conforms to Said's conception of the intellectual as an "amateur" figure and
as an "outsider" (1994: x) to dominant ideologies of power and oppression. The Magis-
trate discovers that his previous life as a civil servant and "responsible official" (8)
administering his duties in peace has changed once he confronts imperial power in the
figure of his visitor, Colonel Joll.

For Said, intellectuals can be constrained by affiliations, parties, governments, finan-
cial considerations, and the pressures of professionalism. Such factors, Said maintains,
can "compromise judgment and restrain the critical voice", especially when trying to
please audiences or employers (1994: 68). Before he sends the barbarian girl to her
people months after she was left behind and after Joll leaves on another border mission,
the Magistrate decides to write two documents, one addressed to the provincial
governor explaining and justifying his visit to the barbarians as an attempt to prove his
goodwill. As for the second document, he is not sure what it should be: "A testament? A
memoir? A confession? A history of thirty years on the frontier? All that day I sit in a
trance at my desk staring at the empty white paper, waiting for words to come" (62).
Such writing attempts can be seen as trying to break ties with imperial centers of power
to gain the independent voice intellectuals aspire to. When words do not come, he gives
up the project and leaves. His numerous talents and hobbies, however, remain in the
amateurish sphere. In the words of Said, "insiders, experts, coteries, professionals" who
mold public opinion make the intellectual a conformist figure serving "special interests"
and "corporate thinking" (1994: xiii). So, the intellectual as an amateur figure of exile
remains an outsider to rules and guidance. While professionals, Said holds, can act as
consultants or experts trying "to provide authority with their labor while gaining great
profit" (1994: xv), the amateur intellectual seeks independence from institutional or
governmental pressures. Nevertheless, escaping the public sphere and avoiding politics
in art are difficult to achieve. When he finds Warrant Officer Mandel in his office after
the mission of sending the girl back to her people, the Magistrate ponders: "It should not
be so easy to attain salvation. And is there any principle behind my opposition?" (85). He



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takes his status as a figure of dissent to authority for granted, and he is ready to sacrifice
his freedom for his principles, yet he ethically questions his motivations for dissent.

The Magistrate links his inability to write to his inability to deal with this foreign
woman in his bed whom the Empire views as the "barbarian" girl, thus conjoining
artistic and sexual impotence, which symbolically points to the pitfalls of public intel-
lectualism and the oppressions exercised by authority. Trying to leave a written state-
ment, a history of the settlement, about the last days of the frontier town for future
generations, he also fails: "What I find myself beginning to write is not the annals of an
Imperial outpost or an account of how the people of that outpost spent their last year
composing their souls as they waited for the barbarians" (168). Instead, he writes an
idyllic plea on life on the frontier before border troubles. His amateur intellectualism,
the "locutions of a civil servant with literary ambitions" (169), are opposed to the harsh
winter approaching and the truth of expected invasion. His memorial is abortive, just
like his sexual life. While taking the girl back to her people, he thinks: "Too much or too
little: is it she I want or the traces of a history her body bears?" (70). In his ethical crisis,
he cannot tell whether his interest in her is a desire for her whole body, restored to
health after the marks of torture are erased, or a preoccupation with the tortured body
carrying the marks of imperial history. The difficulties the Magistrate encounters in his
intellectual and literary pursuits can be better understood in light of the challenges
encountered by the postcolonial writer/critic, i.e., the extent of involvement and the
ability to speak "truth to power" (Said 1994, 85). His failures and hesitations are the intel-
lectual's uneasy relationship with authority, trying to establish a distance from the
oppressor: "I must assert my distance from Colonel Joll!" the Magistrate interjects, "I
will not suffer for his crimes" (48).

The ethical humanist: complicity and resistance
The Magistrate's ethical dilemma begins early in this novel, once he has to mediate
between the tortured prisoners and his guest arriving from the capital to investigate a
possible uprising against the Empire. Years of service in a "lazy frontier" (8) during
which the Magistrate asked for a "quiet life" (8) before retirement ended with border
troubles and rumors about a possible war with the barbarians. Justifying the capture of
a sick boy and his old uncle for assumed banditry, the Magistrate says: "'No one would
have brought an old man and a sick boy along on a raiding party.' I grow conscious that I
am pleading for them" (4). However, his pleas on the prisoners' behalf never prevent the
questioning and torture that follow and which he tries to ignore. Upon their next
meeting, the Magistrate raises an ethical question to Joll. He is concerned about prison-
ers being exposed to more pressure during interrogation but already telling the truth
and having nothing more to offer, or simply being forced (through excessive pain) to lie
to please their tormentors: "And what a responsibility for the interrogator! How do you



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ever know when a man has told you the truth?" (5). While posing questions about the
ethical duty of the interrogator not to inflict excessive or needless pain on the prisoner,
the Magistrate is still aware of his difficult position of complicity with the oppressor,
serving the same imperial center: "… who am I to assert my distance from him? I eat
with him, I show him the sights, I afford him every assistance as his letter of commis-
sion requests, and more" (6). According to Ashcroft et al., the word "comprador" in post-
colonial studies describes "a relatively privileged, wealthy and educated elite" who inter-
act with and benefit from colonial practices and thus feel reluctant to "struggle for local
cultural and political independence" (48). While the Magistrate is not a native agent
collaborating and benefiting from imperial structures, he still occupies the privileged
and dominant part in his relationship with the barbarian prisoners. If the "comprador"
class is complicit with the colonizer, the Magistrate is but a colonizer/settler complicit
with another colonizer (i.e., Colonel Joll). As the novel progresses, the Magistrate will
intellectually reject this complicity with the oppressor.

Comforting the tortured boy after the death of his uncle, the Magistrate feels his
complicity with the torturers: "It has not escaped me that an interrogator can wear two
masks, speak with two voices, one harsh, one seductive" (8). He has mixed feelings of
guilt and shame as he, like the torturer, tried to leave his marks on the Barbarian girl:
"Whom will that other girl with the blind face remember: me with my silk robe and my
dim lights and my perfumes and oils and my unhappy pleasures, or that other cold man
with the mask over his eyes who gave the orders and pondered the sounds of her intim-
ate pain?" (147-48). Hence, he views this complicity with Joll as "Two sides of Imperial
rule, no more, no less" (148-49). His encounter with Joll makes the Magistrate ponder
the very existence of the torturer, i.e. how one becomes a torturer, how torturers clean
their hands afterward, and how they can break bread with others after such brutal acts:
"Does he wash his hands very carefully, perhaps, or change all his clothes; or has the
Bureau created new men who can pass without disquiet between the unclean and the
clean?" (13). The Magistrate's epistemological impasse about knowing if the prisoner is
telling the truth (i.e., to decide when to stop torture) is augmented by another level of
ontological and ethical questioning of the life and behavior of the torturer. The mental-
ity of the torturer and the conditions that create this type of people puzzle the Magis-
trate. On the one hand, the Magistrate's ejaculations serve to heighten his humanist
vision and code of ethics. On the other hand, the Magistrate's ethical vision approxim-
ates Coetzee's attempt to object to torture by pondering the torturer's lifestyle and mode
of being. Said asserts that the intellectual belongs "on the same side with the weak and
unrepresented" (1994: 22). The Magistrate finds it ethically difficult to side with Joll, and
he questions his position of complicity. His questioning of Joll's violent practices aligns
him with Said's conception of "amateur intellectuals" who refuse to be co-opted by hege-
monic power.



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As a humanist, the Magistrate believes in peace rather than war, "perhaps even peace at
any price" (15). Hence, he objects to Joll sending fishing people as prisoners to be held
until his return from the desert. To his mind, the Empire has no external "enemies".
However, his complicit stance of identification with the imperialists is manifest in his
litany of complaints about their habits: "For a few days the fisherfolk are a diversion, with
their strange gabbling, their vast appetites, their animal shamelessness, their volatile
tempers" (20). The prisoners are made the other, the "filthy" counterpart of the civilized
Empire. When the interrogation process begins, the Magistrate strains his ears not to hear
the cries of pain and sounds of violence coming from the barracks hall. It is only when
interrogation ceases that he can sleep, "away from the empire of pain" (24). The Magistrate,
the guardian of justice and civilized manners, is made to question his ethical values just as
the liberal humanist critic/novelist has to reconsider his/her relationship to oppressive
regimes and different forms of hegemonic power. Gradually, however, the Magistrate
moves from a position of avoidance or denial to one of confrontation and dissent.

As the first-person narrator, the Magistrate assumes the humanist stance expected
from "amateur" intellectuals, per Said's account. Contemplating the pain and dehumaniz-
ation the torturers imposed on the girl's father before her eyes, the Magistrate says:
"Thereafter she was no longer fully human, sister to all of us. Certain sympathies died;
certain movements of the heart became no longer possible to her" (89). When the main
force comes back with a file of twelve barbarian captives, he is shocked that a loop of
wire runs through their hands and cheeks to keep them meek. He feels disgusted at the
sight: "My heart grows sick. I know now that I should not have left my cell" (113). In fact,
the use of the word "cell" is illuminating as it disguises the Magistrate's unconscious wish
to remain in his own private state of mind rather than get involved with this public spec-
tacle of torture. He is trapped in ambivalent feelings of not wanting to hate the victim-
izers and not wanting to witness the atrocity and thus hate himself. Both experiences are
depraving to the soul, and he decides to return to his cell to save himself from the atro-
city to come: "Let it at the very least be said, if it ever comes to be said, if there is ever
anyone in some remote future interested to know the way we lived, that in this farthest
outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbar-
ian" (114). The Magistrate acts as the man of law and justice, the humanist who is
sickened by the sight of children encouraged to flog the prisoners. He wants to pass in
history as the ethical humanist who first denies being part of this depravity before he
gains the courage to speak "truth to power" in Said's terms. As an instance of a benevolent
colonizer who "refuses", to draw on the words of Albert Memmi, the Magistrate cannot
mentally escape a difficult situation: "to refuse its ideology [i.e. that of colonization's
concrete reality] while continuing to live with its actual relationships" (2003: 64). This
refusing colonizer "lives his life under the sign of a contradiction which looms at every
step, depriving him of all coherence and all tranquility" (Memmi 2003: 64). It is only with



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departing that such contradictions can be resolved, a course of action the Magistrate
does not pursue. A man of ethics and principles, the Magistrate says he felt pained to see
the settlers deceive the nomads in barter (41). In the words of Memmi, the Magistrate
becomes a colonizer who "refuses" on ethical terms: "Having discovered the economic,
political and moral scandal of colonization, he can no longer agree to become what his
fellow citizens have become; he decides to remain, vowing not to accept colonization"
(2003: 63). Hence, the Magistrate's ethical dilemma persists, due to his concurrent realiz-
ation of his complicity with the Empire and his awareness of the Empire's devious ways.

When the Magistrate returns to the imperial settlement and is questioned for "treas-
onously consorting" with the enemy, he responds to Warrant Office Mandel by denying
imperial foundations of superiority and asserting an ethic of equality: "'We are at peace
here,' I say, 'we have no enemies.' There is silence. 'Unless I make a mistake,' I say.
'Unless we are the enemy'" (85). For Said, one of the intellectual's main tasks is "to
unearth the forgotten, to make connections that were denied, to cite alternative courses
of action that could have avoided war and its attendant goal of human destruction"
(1994: 22). Despite his belief in humanist values like peace, tolerance, and justice, the
Magistrate embodies the intellectual's sense of bewilderment in the face of historical
wrongs. His failure to capture the barbarian girl's story or adequately read her body
stands for the intellectual's failure to represent oppression. Conceding that compre-
hending torture is ethically difficult, he also realizes that representing it is equally, if
not more, difficult. And when he is arrested and about to be confined, he is happy that
he is now a figure of dissent: "I am aware of the source of my elation: my alliance with
the guardians of the Empire is over, I have set myself in opposition, the bond is broken,
I am a free man" (85). He is resisting to uphold what Said calls the "eternal standards of
truth and justice" (1994: 5). When Joll wants to use a hammer to crush the feet of the
prisoners in the square, the Magistrate objects, hearing the word "No!" (116) come from
his throat and chest despite himself. He sustains injuries: a broken hand and nose and a
wound on his face. However, he insists: "'Look!' I shout. 'We are the great miracle of
creation!' But from some blows this miraculous body cannot repair itself! How--! Words
fail me. 'Look at these men!' I recommence. 'Men!'" (117; emphasis original). The Magis-
trate's humanism is founded on his opposition to torture, on pursuing the ideal of justice
despite the harsh imperial stratagems.

To reiterate, the novel demonstrates a shift in the Magistrate's position from deliber-
ate silence and avoidance in his encounter with torture early in the novel ("Of the
screaming which people afterwards claim to have heard from the granary I hear
nothing" 5) to dissent as the novel reaches its climax. What Said calls the intellectual's
"trimming, careful silence" and "turning away" which distort the intellectual's public
role (1994: xii, 100) change as the Magistrate turns into an exile speaking "the truth to
power" and becoming "controversial" (1994: xvi, 100). As a marginal figure of exile, the



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intellectual for Said stands "outside the comforts of privilege, power, being-at-home-
ness" (1994: 59). The Magistrate's problematic relationship with imperial power is mani-
fested in his repeated objections "No! No! No!" (116) to depraving the prisoners, and his
direct and public opposition to Joll can be understood in terms of the dissent he embod-
ies as a public figure. Assuming that saying "yes" entails accommodation or co-option by
power, then saying "no" signifies the refusal to conform that Said assigns to amateur
intellectuals. Exploring problems of identity and personhood in WB, Adrian Grafe has
presented the Magistrate as a "personalized" figure of "rebellion" whose guilty
conscience is revealed in the aptly used first-person narrative; hence, for Grafe the
novel dramatizes "the opposition between justice and law" (2018: 23). The Magistrate,
Grafe maintains, is "distinctly conscious of his conscience, and his 'growing conscious' is
part of the process of his becoming a person" (2018: 25). In other words, his dynamic
identity formation is contingent on his ethical pleas on behalf of the prisoners, an act
which alleviates his feelings of guilt and complicity. Instead of accepting imperial
policies or seeking the approval of authority figures, the Magistrate confronts both his
intellectual objections to torture as well as his fears of authority.

If words fail the Magistrate and he finds the body of the tortured girl enigmatic, it is
because the novel "does not recover history as a fully narratable subject, but bears
witness to it by refusing to translate the suffering produced by colonial oppression into
historical discourse" (Craps 2007: 59). Hence, the Magistrate fails to read the girl's coded
body just as he fails to articulate the pain of torture he is witnessing, and the Magis-
trate's hermeneutical crisis echoes the intellectual's task when confronting oppression
that is not told and cannot be told. Such a spectacle of cruelty, the Magistrate objects,
corrupts both sides and denies innocence to children. Joll, accordingly, mocks him for
trying to be "the One Just Man, the man who is prepared to sacrifice his freedom to his
principles" (124). Seeking exoneration before history, the Magistrate accuses Joll of
being the real enemy who committed "filthy barbarities" against the barbarians against
the principles of civilized nations (125). With his hands tied and his body hoisted on a
tree, the Magistrate still thinks in humanist terms despite the pain, hoping that the chil-
dren do not imitate the games of their elders, "or tomorrow there will be a plague of
little bodies dangling from the trees" (133). His question to a torturer like Mandel reveals
much philosophical depth about attempting to understand the zone in which the
torturer lives and how he eats after committing the atrocities of torture:

How do you find it possible to eat afterwards, after you have been … working with
people? … Do you find it easy to take food afterwards? I have imagined that one
would want to wash one's hands. But no ordinary washing would be enough, one
would require priestly intervention, a ceremonial of cleansing, don't you think?
Some kind of purging of one's soul too. (138)



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Even when the Magistrate begins to care for the tortured girl left behind, he feels that
the distance between himself and her torturers is negligible, and he shudders at this
realization (29). His ethical commitment to her burdens him, although he does not
know what exactly to do with her tortured body. It is his awareness of being complicit
with the oppressors that urges him to establish a distance from imperial ways in favor of
humanist values like toleration and acceptance: "Where civilization entailed the corrup-
tion of barbarian virtues and the creation of a dependent people, I decided, I was
opposed to civilization; and upon this resolution I based the conduct of my administra-
tion" (41). However, his attempts at an ethical distance from the Empire bring him back
to doubt and skepticism associated with complicity. His conversation with a young
officer joining the new conscripts in the settlement reveals his humanistic stance
against constructed bias: "How do you eradicate contempt, especially when that
contempt is founded on nothing more substantial than differences in table manners,
variations in the structure of the eyelid?" (55). One vital task for intellectuals, Said
contends, is an effort to "break down the stereotypes and reductive categories that are
so limiting to human thought and communication" (1994: xi). Moreover, Said adds that
intellectuals should question "patriotic nationalism, corporate thinking, and a sense of
class, racial or gender privilege" (1994: xiii). However, the Magistrate's ambivalence is
manifested when he questions his own ideals: "Do I really look forward to the triumph
of the barbarian way: intellectual torpor, slovenliness, tolerance of disease and death?"
(56). His humanistic discourse is never free from imperial prejudices and stereotypes as
he has been a functionary in the process for too long. Such contradictions in the Magis-
trate's position capture the paradoxical position of the intellectual who is complicit with
systems of oppression or simply assuming a position of privilege against the subaltern,
thus running the risk of further silencing them. While for Said intellectuals are unpre-
dictable, conforming to no rules or expectations, they remain secular figures worship-
ping no gods (1994: xiv). The spirit of opposition and dissent they hold is a "struggle on
behalf of underrepresented and disadvantaged groups" (Said 1994, xvii). Due to oppos-
ing imperial authority on behalf of the captured prisoners, the Magistrate is imprisoned
and tortured accordingly. Having struggled with overcoming a difficult position of
complicity and avoidance, the Magistrate becomes what Said calls the "unafraid and
compassionate intellectual" (1994: 101).

Conclusion
It should be noted that for some critics the Magistrate assumes a problematic position as
the liberal humanist since he "tries to maintain a moral gap from foul acts of the group,
yet he fails" (Waham & Othoman 2019: 183). However, we should not undermine his
attempts at relating to the Other or his attempts at opposing the authority of the Empire.
Coetzee, like Said in a sense, has pointed out the risks and pitfalls of the humanist as the



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intellectual, critic, or writer. The Magistrate's failures to decode the barbarian girl's
body, to construct a coherent story of her pain, or to write a history of the Empire's last
years, all point to the failures of liberal humanist discourse in the face of historical
injustice. On the other hand, we should recall that imperial agents start leaving the fron-
tier settlement at the end of the novel, allowing the Magistrate to resume some of his
duties, and the Empire seems to be losing against the elusive enemy it has constructed.
This indicates the ultimate triumph of the ideals of humanism and justice that the
Magistrate represents against the oppressive authority practiced by the Empire.
However, the intellectual as a liberal humanist has a role to play regardless of the
outcome, i.e., regardless of their ability to actually change the status quo or subvert
power structures. For Said, we should remember, the whole point is being controversial
and active to "advance human freedom and knowledge" (1994: 17). Hence, the intellec-
tual's critical sense should be augmented at any price, a necessary value often dimin-
ished when the intellectual seeks consensus-building or society's approval. On different
occasions, Said experienced his public intellectualism in terms of a personal crisis. The
life of Coetzee's Magistrate embodies those private tensions experienced by the public
intellectual as the humanist. In the figure of the Magistrate, Coetzee found a way to
negotiate ethical dilemmas and challenges faced by public intellectuals, especially
those trying to speak "truth to power."

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***
Professor Shadi S. Neimneh teaches undergraduate and graduate literature courses
with a focus on Anglo-American and European modernism as well as different manifest-
ations of literary theory. He has published profusely on modernist literature and South
African fiction. His publications include: "African American Satire and Harlem Renais-
sance Literary Politics" in American Studies Today (2013), "The Anti-Hero in Modernist
Fiction: From Irony to Cultural Renewal" in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary
Study of Literature (2013), "Thematics of Interracial Violence in Selected Harlem Renais-
sance Novels" in Papers on Language and Literature (2014), "The Visceral Allegory of
Waiting for the Barbarians: A Post-Modern Rereading of J. M. Coetzee's Apartheid
Novels" in Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora (2014), and "Autofiction and Fictionaliz-
ation: J. M. Coetzee's Novels and Boyhood" in Transnational Literature (2015).


	SHADI NEIMNEH DOI: 10.15290/CR.2022.39.4.05
	The Humanist Discourse in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians