Maxwell Coetzee
About Author:- J. M. Coetzee
Born: 9 Feb 1940 (age 79)
Capetown, South Africa
Occupation: Novelist, essayist, literary critic, linguistic, translator, professor
Language: English, Afrikaans, Dutch
Notable Awards: 1983- Booker Prize, 1985- Prix Femina, 1995- The Irish Times (International Fiction Prize), 2003- Nobel Prize in Literature
Major Works: Dusklands (1974), In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life and Times of Michael K. (1983), A Land Apart: A South African Reader (1986), Foe (1987), The Lives of Animals (1999).
About Novel:- Waiting for the Barbarians
Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel by the South African-born writer J. M. Coetzee.
First published in 1980, it was chosen by Penguin for its series Great Books of the 20th Century.
Won both the 'James Tait Black Memorial Prize' and 'Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize' for fiction.
Language: English
Genre: Novel
Publisher: Secker & Warburg
Publication Date: 27 Oct 1980
Coetzee took the title from the poem "Waiting for the Barbarians" by the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy.
Coetzee's novel has been deeply influenced by Italian writer Dino Buzzati's novel The Tartar Steppe.
Characters:-
The Magistrate: The magistrate is the first-person narrator and flawed protagonist of the novel. He wants to live in peace in his outpost, serving his Empire without questioning the purpose or effects of its colonial project. The magistrate goes on a journey of self-discovery in the novel.
Colonel Joll: an officer of the third Bureau, acting under emergency powers on the frontier. Colonel Joll is the novel's antagonist. Indeed, with his black sunglasses and black carriage, he plays the role of a classical villain.
Barbarian Girl: The Barbarian girl is one of Joll's torture victims, who gets left behind after her father is killed in Joll's torture chamber. Her legs were broken at the ankle and they have never set. She is crippled and must walk with two sticks. Her eyes were burned with molten rods. She is mostly blind though she can see out of her peripheries.
The Warrant Officer Mandel: Mandel is Colonel Joll's henchman. He's a blue-eyed, blonde, muscular, attractive man who does much of Joll's dirty work. He openly takes pleasure in inflicting pain. He is the sadistic officer who personally tortures the magistrate.
Minor character:-
Old Man
Boy
The fishing people
A prostitute
Two conscripts & a guide
Mai
Mai's young son
Summary:-
Coetzee's third novel, "set in a marginal settlement of state referred to simply as the Third Empire," made it "evident that the politics of colonization would constitute a recurrent theme in his fiction". "Though the setting of Waiting for the Barbarians is unidentified, the novel can, like the earlier works, be read as a political fable of South Africa. A sympathetic but unsuccessful liberal humanist, the narrator magistrate governs a marginal settlement at the end of the empire. A well-meaning man, he is nevertheless implicated in 'the system' and is no match for the neo-fascist torturer, Colonel Joll, who persecutes the few pathetic 'barbarians' (actually from a local fishing tribe) the Empire has succeeded in capturing. The barbarians are almost invisible, being mainly a product of that nameless fear that haunts all-conquering empires. The Empire is threatened from within, not from without, but it projects its paranoia onto the unknown 'other'. In the novel, a magistrate attempting to protect the peaceful nomadic people of his district is imprisoned and tortured by the army that arrives at the frontier town to destroy the "barbarians" on behalf of the Empire. The horror of what he has seen and experienced affects the magistrate in inalterable ways, bringing changes in his personality that he cannot understand. The barbarians remain unknown, and neither Joll's brutalities nor the magistrate's weak attempts at love and compensation can bring them closer".
Themes:
Central Theme:-
Subaltern
Marginal Themes:-
Inhumanity and Torture
Colonialism
Independence
Imperialism
Sexuality and Anxiety
Comparison with other texts:-
- African literature is very closed to postcolonial literature and both are parallel to sharp or deep bondage with each other.
- Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe
- Aime Cesaire's A Tempest
Learning Outcome:-
After freedom, are we really free from anything?
About Author:- J. M. Coetzee
Born: 9 Feb 1940 (age 79)
Capetown, South Africa
Occupation: Novelist, essayist, literary critic, linguistic, translator, professor
Language: English, Afrikaans, Dutch
Notable Awards: 1983- Booker Prize, 1985- Prix Femina, 1995- The Irish Times (International Fiction Prize), 2003- Nobel Prize in Literature
Major Works: Dusklands (1974), In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life and Times of Michael K. (1983), A Land Apart: A South African Reader (1986), Foe (1987), The Lives of Animals (1999).
About Novel:- Waiting for the Barbarians
Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel by the South African-born writer J. M. Coetzee.
First published in 1980, it was chosen by Penguin for its series Great Books of the 20th Century.
Won both the 'James Tait Black Memorial Prize' and 'Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize' for fiction.
Language: English
Genre: Novel
Publisher: Secker & Warburg
Publication Date: 27 Oct 1980
Coetzee took the title from the poem "Waiting for the Barbarians" by the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy.
Coetzee's novel has been deeply influenced by Italian writer Dino Buzzati's novel The Tartar Steppe.
Characters:-
The Magistrate: The magistrate is the first-person narrator and flawed protagonist of the novel. He wants to live in peace in his outpost, serving his Empire without questioning the purpose or effects of its colonial project. The magistrate goes on a journey of self-discovery in the novel.
Colonel Joll: an officer of the third Bureau, acting under emergency powers on the frontier. Colonel Joll is the novel's antagonist. Indeed, with his black sunglasses and black carriage, he plays the role of a classical villain.
Barbarian Girl: The Barbarian girl is one of Joll's torture victims, who gets left behind after her father is killed in Joll's torture chamber. Her legs were broken at the ankle and they have never set. She is crippled and must walk with two sticks. Her eyes were burned with molten rods. She is mostly blind though she can see out of her peripheries.
The Warrant Officer Mandel: Mandel is Colonel Joll's henchman. He's a blue-eyed, blonde, muscular, attractive man who does much of Joll's dirty work. He openly takes pleasure in inflicting pain. He is the sadistic officer who personally tortures the magistrate.
Minor character:-
Old Man
Boy
The fishing people
A prostitute
Two conscripts & a guide
Mai
Mai's young son
Summary:-
Coetzee's third novel, "set in a marginal settlement of state referred to simply as the Third Empire," made it "evident that the politics of colonization would constitute a recurrent theme in his fiction". "Though the setting of Waiting for the Barbarians is unidentified, the novel can, like the earlier works, be read as a political fable of South Africa. A sympathetic but unsuccessful liberal humanist, the narrator magistrate governs a marginal settlement at the end of the empire. A well-meaning man, he is nevertheless implicated in 'the system' and is no match for the neo-fascist torturer, Colonel Joll, who persecutes the few pathetic 'barbarians' (actually from a local fishing tribe) the Empire has succeeded in capturing. The barbarians are almost invisible, being mainly a product of that nameless fear that haunts all-conquering empires. The Empire is threatened from within, not from without, but it projects its paranoia onto the unknown 'other'. In the novel, a magistrate attempting to protect the peaceful nomadic people of his district is imprisoned and tortured by the army that arrives at the frontier town to destroy the "barbarians" on behalf of the Empire. The horror of what he has seen and experienced affects the magistrate in inalterable ways, bringing changes in his personality that he cannot understand. The barbarians remain unknown, and neither Joll's brutalities nor the magistrate's weak attempts at love and compensation can bring them closer".
Themes:
Central Theme:-
Subaltern
Marginal Themes:-
Inhumanity and Torture
Colonialism
Independence
Imperialism
Sexuality and Anxiety
Comparison with other texts:-
- African literature is very closed to postcolonial literature and both are parallel to sharp or deep bondage with each other.
- Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe
- Aime Cesaire's A Tempest
Learning Outcome:-
After freedom, are we really free from anything?
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