Number 22 July 2000
Turning the Screw: Sex, Torture and Fetishism as Experiential
Allegory in J.M.Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians
Jonathan Dewar
Most of the criticism on J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians centres on the allegorical possibilities of the novel, and while this approach is indeed useful and perhaps even the ultimate point on Coetzee's part, very little attention has been paid to the overt sexuality and eroticism of the novel outside of the metaphorical roles these issues play within the allegorical whole or wholes. I am not arguing against reading the novel as allegory; in fact, I think we are meant to read the social and the political (and the postcolonial) into the novel. What Coetzee does, though, is destabilize any attempts to read the novel fixedly as only those things, as a text that expounds virtue through allegory. In this way I am simply reiterating what many critics have said of Coetzee's narrative: that it controls through "precise technique" (Van Zanten Gallagher 278). Any mention of the controlling nature of the "gaps, absences, and uncertainties" is not a new idea. What has not had much attention is the notion of fetishism; that is, reading the novel as an allegory of body fetish. Consider what many critics have called the central image of the novel, the repeated scenes of ritual foot washing, rubbing, and massaging. On a very literal level these scenes are textbook examples of a foot fetish or a deformity/disfigurement fetish. Of course, that does not mean that this is necessarily what the novel is about; rather, Coetzee uses the body to destabilize any absolute certainty of the public/political or universal. This narrative control and manipulation of the reader, above all else, is why the novel seems so preoccupied with sex, because the magistrate is preoccupied with sex and Coetzee would have the reader similarly preoccupied - - at least for controlled periods of time.
Why he does this is a very good question, and one that has not been sufficiently answered. Waiting for the Barbarians resists being read as an overtly political novel because its focus on the body, primarily with regard to sex and torture, forces the readerto oscillate between what the text is doing immediately and inwardly (the intimate level of narrative and character development) and what the text as a whole is doing (possible allegorical readings); that is, the reader cannot and should not engage in arranging the allegorical puzzle pieces without first coming to terms with the experiential level of the first-person narrative. This is the one significant detail that differs from other more popular allegorical readings. Fetishism, which has seen some critical attention (and will be discussed at length), works with other body issues on both literal and figurative levels and cannot be isolated as having a solely metaphorical or ideological role.
Torture is an example of an issue that seems to immediately transcend the level of narrative to allegorical speculation, and considerable time must be spent discussing how other critics have dealt with this issue. This reading, in particular, attempts to show how Coetzee has chosen to deal with a topic as problematic as torture. It is only when we have read the novel and have stepped back to examine it as a whole in order to solve the puzzles, negotiate the ambiguities, and neatly package the novel, that we should engage in discussions of the figurative possibilities of the novel. Otherwise, we do a disservice to the novel. Coetzee certainly intended for readers to walk away from the novel at some point and wrestle with its themes (we cannot live within a novel forever, after all), but he went to great pains to carefully construct a very intimate, sensual, and visceral level, particularly with regard to the magistrate's characterization through personal narration, and that is not something he wants us to forget or quickly put aside. And the complex psychology of the magistrate requires a complex reading of his character and, ultimately, the text. This is not an argument for psychological criticism, per se, but rather an assertion that more attention should be paid to the peculiarities of the magistrate's actions, how these peculiarities resonate throughout the novel, and how readings of these peculiarities can be reconciled with socio-political allegorical readings. The blood, shit, piss, and vomit are meant to soil us on a metaphorical level, but there is also a complicity in being soiled: we are active participants even as observers. This, too, plays into the notion of fetishism. As such, the magistrate's narrative must be scrutinized through a fetishistic lens to truly begin to unpack its complexities. We should ask ourselves how Coetzee's decision to have the narrator tell his story resonates with both the immediate, experiential level of narrative and the possible allegorical levels. In particular, we should ask ourselves how this narrator's subtle and overt obsessions dictate the shape of the narrative itself. Once these questions have been considered, figurative speculation can and should begin. This exercise, however, is bound to shape the outcome of those readings. I will discuss some of the more useful critical approaches to the novel, particularly with regard to Coetzee's use of torture and language or writing.
In her preface to Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing: Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee, Rosemary Jolly says of Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" that it "has suffered from numerous readings characterized by facile allegorization; that is, attempts to redeem the events of the story by placing them within a moral sphere whose very absence is one of the crucial points - - if not the crucial point - - of Kafka's tale" (x). The same can be said of Waiting for the Barbarians, which Jolly discusses at length in the last third of her book. This phenomenon demonstrates, Jolly, says, "one of the primary difficulties that writers of literary representations of violence and critics of those representations confront: the desire to use the rhetoric of such writings to establish the author, and sometimes her or his readers, at a distance from the violations that constitute her or his subject." Jennifer Wenzel has stated that critics "who do find political significance in Coetzee's novels too often resort to simplistic allegory by mapping his plots onto the surface of South African politics" (62). Thankfully, much of the criticism centres on more ambitious allegorical readings, though most do not venture far from the political arena. Michael Valdez Moses has said that the "temptation is very strong to read [Waiting for the Barbarians] as an allegory of the self-critical South African liberal confronted with his own tacit complicity in the systematic denial of basic human rights to the majority of subjects who live under apartheid. I will not resist that temptation" (122). He further qualifies this reading by saying, "The magistrate may therefore be described as a modem liberal, in the Hegelian tradition, whose reflections upon the nature of writing, history, and above all justice, lead him into a postmodern quandary. For what Coetzee's novel suggests is that writing ... is necessarily implicated in and complicit with the worst excesses of Empire. Most distressingly, Coetzee renders writing (inscription and interpretation) as a form of torture" (l20). Moses's essay nicely encapsulates the two primary themes or concerns, torture and writing, most often highlighted by critics, including Jolly. As well, the ambiguity within Waiting for the Barbarians allows for many variations within readings of these themes or issues.
Coetzee is sometimes criticized for allowing this sort of allegorical speculation. Peter Lewis has said that "this kind of fiction as a whole, peopled as it is mainly by stereotypes, is often in danger of moving so far away from the familiar in its determination to establish universals that it defeats its own purpose" (1270). This reading completely discounts the experiential level of narrative. Irving Howe has said, "One possible loss is bite and pain, the urgency that a specified historical place and time may provide" (36). This statement may seem ironic considering the amount of critical work on the novel that focuses on pain, but Howe has a point. Allegory necessarily distances the reader from the real, if there is such a level, and even from the text because an allegory often announces its artificiality from the outset. That is why Coetzee spends so much time focusing on the "body in pain," as Barbara Eckstein has said. In fact, Eckstein, whose article "The Body, The Word, and the State: J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians," similarly focuses on the importance of language, has criticized Lance Olsen for failing to place enough emphasis on the body in his early discussions of Waiting for the Barbarians. She says Olsen's article "The Presence of Absence: Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians," while providing keen insight into the issue of the narrative's complexities, including the importance of language in the novel, "does not mention the salient, sentient fact that the novel is also about physical torture . . . . The body in pain has everything to do with the language of the novel" (176).
Many of Coetzee's critics offer readings similar to Eckstein's by suggesting that the body can be read as text, and that torture is a kind of language. Jolly reads the magistrate's relationship with the girl as a scene of "reading": "He treats her body as a text that, if he pays it enough attention - - if he 'reads' it 'properly' - - will alert him to the truth behind the scene of torture" (127). Wenzel similarly reads the relationship in these terms. She says, "the magistrate seeks to eliminate his sense of the girl's otherness and to understand the pain of her torture as he verbally and physically probes the girl in an effort to read the signs of torture written on her body" (65). Van Zanten Gallagher offers another view; she asserts that this need to read is an essential part of his character: "He can neither read the text of this world nor create a text that precisely conveys his experiences" (279), which accurately hints at the inherently flawed or limited nature of first-person narrative - - a theme Coetzee certainly explores both literally and metaphorically in the form of torture as narrative. This is where Wenzel's assertion that "Coetzee insists on holding the substantial body, the body in pain, on equal terms with the abstraction of language" (69) resonates most. This announces the thematic and figurative importance of torture within the novel.
Wenzel provides a useful reading of torture as language itself, saying "torture appears to be a kind of conversation in which physical and mental pain are used by one person to encourage another person to speak. The means of 'encouragement,' of course, represent the inequity of power in the verbal and physical exchange between tortured and torturer" (63). In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry takes this notion a step further saying, "it is in part the obsessive display of agency that permits one person's body to be translated into another person's voice, that allows real human pain to be converted into a regime's fiction of power" (18). Picking up on this idea of fiction, Jolly writes that Waiting For the Barbarians is
structured so as to (per)form a caveat both to itself and to other fictions that attempt to represent the act of torture. This caveat consists of the suggestion, made by the metanarrative of the text, that the assumptions underlying the hermeneutic of inquisition - - a hermeneutic that is taken to its extreme in torture - - may well be adopted by the fiction itself in its attempt to investigate, to interrogate, the acts of torture it describes. (123)
She goes on to say that "even if the accused offers a confession, torture is still necessary to the inquisitor as a text whereby he can provide himself with physical proof of the prisoner's guilt, which constitutes the truth he is seeking" (128).
Van Zanten Gallagher asks, "Should authors depict torture in their work, and if they do, how should they portray this incomprehensible act?" (277). Coetzee has criticized writers who choose to depict torture, saying, "If the novelist finds in squalor the occasion for his most soaring poetic eloquence, might he not be guilty of seeking out his squalid subject matter for perversely literary reasons?" (35). They and their readers become, as Jolly has said, spectators in a position of privilege; any discussion of the topic results in a critical vocabulary that further distances us from the issue, in much the same way the allegorical form distances the reader - - and the author - - from the real. Coetzee admits that "torture has exerted a dark fascination" ("Into the Dark Chamber" 13) but has criticized writers who eroticize scenes of torture and violence. Van Zanten Gallagher says that Coetzee "objects to realistic depiction of torture in fiction because he thinks that the novelist participates vicariously in the atrocities, validates the acts of torture, assists the state in terrorizing and paralyzing people by showing its oppressive methods in detail" (277). Jolly correctly makes the point that Coetzee's magistrate is guilty of both an "erotic fascination" (l32) and that "his narrative attributes to the torturer and the torture chamber . . . that 'evil grandeur' that Coetzee regards as 'false portentousness, a questionable dark lyricism' [quoted from "Into the Dark Chamber" 35]" (132). One could assume that Coetzee has chosen an allegorical form in order to avoid this fate himself, but that would be an incorrect assumption. He has deliberately crafted a narrative that tackles this twofold dilemma. Wenzel writes, "The terms for torture that Coetzee employs are deeply embedded in language, a language that tells not of beatings or shocks but instead of the difficulty of talking about the body in pain" (64). As Jolly says, Coetzee "proposes that the pitfall of 'erotic fascination' [quoted from "Into the Dark Chamber" 13] with the scene of torture into which many authors drop is a temptation posed by the very nature of the imaginative activity in which the novelist engages . . . The torture room, then, is not only a metaphor for the relationship between authority and its victims; it is also a metaphor for the act of fiction-making" (122). Coetzee's decision to put the magistrate's story in his own hands, literally, by the end of the novel, provides yet another level upon which issues of torture and writing may be examined.
The Oxford English Dictionary offers a twofold definition of torture, distinguishing between "the infliction of excruciating pain . . . from a delight in watching the agony of a victim, in hatred or revenge, or as a means of extortion" and judicial torture, which is "inflicted by a judicial or quasi-judicial authority for the purpose of forcing an accused or suspected person to confess, or an unwilling witness to give evidence or information." Colonel Joll could certainly be seen to be operating under the pretense of the latter definition, but Coetzee clearly intends for there to be an overt element of the former. And so we ask: as a spectator (at least initially), where does the magistrate stand? Certainly, by his position within the Empire, the magistrate stands within the scope of the latter definition, but his own dark fascination with torture complicates his position. At what point does he become a participant, and as exactly what type of participant would Coetzee have us see him - - complicit figure of authority or victim? It is this grey area that needs to be examined. Jolly provides a useful starting point. She writes:
[the magistrate] is ultimately unable to eradicate his fascination for the Colonel and the acts of torture he performs. It is true that he is fascinated by the 'barbarian girl' too, but only because of her connection with Joll - - the marks of torture she bears. He himself asks if it is not 'the marks on her which drew me to her.' His treatment of her - - the washing, the massaging, the tracing of her torture wounds - - indicates that he fetishizes her, rather than loving her for herself. It is no wonder he is mesmerized in the course of his attentions to her body: he is not seducing her, but rather is himself seduced by the marks on her skin. This fetishism links him once again with Colonel Joll. (129)
She goes on to say that "His fetishization of her is no less an expression of a desire to violate her, to gain access to her through her body by obliterating it, than Joll's torture of her is." Jolly's reading, as useful as it is, is guilty of elevating fetishism directly to metaphor, playing into the extra-textual realm of theory. She clearly buys into Frantz Fanon's stereotype (non-imperial as 'other'/inferior) as fetish, characterizing the barbarian girl as "sealed into crushing objecthood" (109), and, like Hayden White in "The Noble Savage: Theme as Fetish," sees the fetish as a figurative tool that has grown out of a thematic tradition. White writes, "From the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century, Europeans tended to fetishize the native peoples with whom they came into contact by viewing them simultaneously as monstrous forms of humanity and as quintessential objects of desire" (133).
This theoretical bent continues. In "The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism," Homi K. Bhabha explains that colonialist discourse is predicated upon the creation and maintenance of stereotypes of the "other." Since the native is both naturally subservient, inferior, and menacing, these stereotypes, like the fetish object, provide feelings of power and pleasure to the person in position of power, while simultaneously questioning this power by focusing on the danger inherent in the native. Bhabha argues that the stereotype should be read in terms of fetishism because the physical manifestation of the stereotype, its body, its very physical presence, is the site upon which the colonizer projects the desire for superiority. The stereotypes constructed by the colonizer are fetishized in the sense that they are seized as examples of superiority, the triumph of a superior race over an inferior one that is nonetheless always a danger to the former, despite the appearance of assimilation or cultural sameness. Simply put, the girl is a stereotype because she is undeniably portrayed as "other." But it is Coetzee who ironically "fetishizes" this stereotype - - not the magistrate; he fetishizes the girl's body. This is an important distinction.
Armed with this theoretical context, upon which criticism of fetishism within the novel has so far been built, we can begin to concentrate on reading fetishism at the narrative level. We should consider how the magistrate's words and actions work in the following context, as described by Ray B. Browne in Objects of Special Devotion: Fetishes and Fetishism in Popular Culture:
A Fetish is an item possessing some sacred, magical - -usually dark - - power. It is like an icon but different . . [Like an icon a] fetish is also an object, person, concept, theory or philosophy believed to possess extraordinary magical or supernatural power. But they are different. Fetishes are misshapen, bastard icons. To a degree beyond the icon, the fetish carries the taint of the off-color, an abnormal attachment, a 'closet' devotion, something that the person attached to the fetish should be unusually sensitive to or ashamed of. (1)
White nicely elaborates upon this definition, saying:
A fetish is any natural object believed to possess magical or spiritual power. This is the traditional ethnological meaning of the term, and from it derives the conventional figurative use of it to designate any material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence. From this figurative usage, in turn, derives the psychological sense, as indicating any object or part of the body obsessively seized upon (cathected) as an exclusive source of libidinal gratification. From these three usages we derive the three senses of the term fetishism which I use here: belief in magical fetishes, extravagant or irrational devotion, and pathological displacement of libidinal interest and satisfaction to a fetish. (122)
Coetzee quickly begins to build upon such a definition. From the outset, he conflates sex and violence, and complicates the relationships between the magistrate, Colonel Joll, and the barbarian girl, conflating - - mirror-like - - Colonel Joll and the girl as early as the first page of the novel. Coetzee opens with the image of Joll's dark glasses, which foreshadows the girl's blinding at his hand. The magistrate asks, "Is he blind? I could understand it if he wanted to hide blind eyes. But he is not blind" (1). As well, he points to the corners of his eyes to show the lack of marks (wrinkles in this case); the girl, on the other hand, has a "greyish puckering as though a caterpillar lay there with its head under her eyelid, grazing" (31). Interestingly, when we receive a description of the girl's blind eyes, she is portrayed as "white" (26) while Joll is portrayed as "dark" (1): "I wave a hand in front of her eyes. She blinks. I bring my face closer and stare into her eyes . . . The black irises are set off by milky whites as clear as a child's" (26). This is a subtle reversal of colonial stereotypes, which Coetzee peppers throughout the novel, culminating in the magistrate's realization that the notion of barbarian is flexible and can stand in for the actions of members of Empire as well. So, as early as the first page of the novel, the reader is given a hint of thematic possibilities. However, it is also at this early stage that Coetzee begins to resist a movement outward from the text to figurative possibilities. We should not begin to speculate as to the figurative meaning of these conflations so early. Not when this first conversation between the magistrate and Colonel Joll is so charged with violent eroticism. An emphasis on the body is readily apparent. Almost comically, Coetzee places a flask and a bowl of nuts between the two men. This phallic marker is meant to allude to a possible homoeroticism, but also to subtly introduce the conflation of sex and violence. A few lines after placing these objects as physical centre pieces to their conversation, the conversation itself turns to violence: "He tells me about the last great drive he rode in, when thousands of deer, pigs, bears were slain, so many that a mountain of carcasses had to be left to rot" (1). This violence with a hint of eroticism is the lens through which we should see the rest of the narrative, although this has been largely overlooked by critics, including Jolly, who see this relationship solely in terms of their complicity as "read[ers]" (127) of the girl's body.
The seed of fetishism is planted very early in the narrative. We already have an idea of the magistrate's fascination with Colonel Joll and this is reinforced when Joll begins to initiate the magistrate into the rituals of torture, albeit as an outside observer, but one who is nonetheless complicit by this act. The magistrate has, after all, offered to "help with the language" (3). It is the rituals or "set procedures" (4) of the torture that firmly establish the idea of a torture fetish for Joll and a growing dark and erotic fascination for the magistrate. A further conflation develops; the magistrate is fascinated with Joll and is, therefore, fascinated with torture. It is at this point that the magistrate's obsessions begin to develop. He says he is "aware of what might be happening, and [his] ear is even tuned to the pitch of human pain" (5), but it is ambiguous whether or not he is truly disgusted or whether this is the "dark fascination" Coetzee has spoken of ("Into the Dark Chamber" 13). The ambiguity continues and the growth of a dark obsession is realized when the magistrate contradicts himself a short time later, saying of the same event, "I did not ride away: for a while I stopped my ears to the noises coming from the hut by the granary where the tools are kept, then in the night I took a lantern and went to see for myself" (9). The obsession with the effects of torture on the body begins to take shape when the magistrate says, "Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt" (5), and on a literal level an outlet is foreshadowed, still imbued with a homoerotic fascination with Joll's body, when he quickly follows that statement with descriptions of Joll's "tapering fingernails," "mauve handkerchiefs," and, most importantly, "his slender feet."
From this subtle foreshadowing of a possible foot fetish, the magistrate continues to be fascinated with Joll and his role as torturer, which offers still more possible outlets of realization.
The magistrate says,
Looking at him I wonder how he felt the very first time: did he, invited as an apprentice to twist the pincers or turn the screw or whatever it is they do, shudder even a little to know that at that instant he was trespassing into the forbidden? I find myself wondering too whether he has a private ritual of purification, carried out behind closed doors, to enable him to return and break bread with other men. 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? (12)
This passage suggests that Joll's "first time" - - "turning the screw," so to speak - - was like a first sexual experience and it is no accident that the magistrate should use such words to describe it. The ritual of cleansing that the magistrate focuses on here should also force the reader to more closely examine images of the magistrate's own washing and massaging rituals with the girl. Is he, as so many critics have argued, attempting to read her by placing his hands on the marks left by Joll's rituals of torture? Or is he enacting a ritual of cleansing in an attempt to be like Joll or to be Joll himself? Finally, who or what is the fantasy behind the ritual, the reason for the conflation of dark and erotic fascinations? It is not a stretch of the imagination to read the magistrate's words, ambiguous and possibly untrustworthy though they may be, and his actions as having an undefined homoerotic bent. Immediately following the questioning quoted above, Coetzee has the magistrate recount yet another sexually ambiguous scene, which subsequently colours the dream the section closes with. On his way to the granary, the magistrate comes across the empty guard hut. When he calls out to the voices he hears, the young guard returns, saying "[t]he prisoner called me and I was trying to help him" (13). This deliberate reference to the gender of the prisoner and the lack of gender assigned to the guard's unseen but giggling companion is meant to allow for homoerotic allusion. The paragraph immediately following is a dream that is similarly ambiguous with regard to gender and sexual content. It is not clear whether we are to read the dream, possibly a Freudian manifestation of the magistrate's desires, as erotic, or homoerotic, or even gender specific. However, its placement following these two other scenes has built an ambiguity that Coetzee employs throughout the novel.
For a novel that allows an erotic reading, the first example of sex is quickly glossed over when the magistrate goes to see the young girl, later identified as The Star, in her room. All we are told is he slept "like a dead man" (22). The sex is assumed and is otherwise left out of the actual narrative. This further blurs our attempts to fix the magistrate's and Coetzee's intentions. Is there meant to be emphasis on the magistrate's sexuality? Some light is shed when the girl asks him of the dreams he was obviously having during the night. He does not say anything to her, but the reader is privileged to yet another reminder of the conflation of sex and violence: "The jackal rips out the hare's bowel's, but the world rolls on" (23). The magistrate seems to be implying that a sex/violence conflation is natural. With the unsatisfactory sexual encounter, for both the magistrate and the reader, the narrative moves into its second section and the introduction of the barbarian girl, and the fetish truly begins to take shape, though it is still largely undefined for the magistrate. He even tells the girl, perhaps more for his or the reader's benefit, that "This is not what you think it is" (27). And, upon a first reading, it is not what the reader expects. He "prowl[s] around her" and admits that the distance between himself and her torturers is negligible. Finally, he says "Show me your feet" (28). A physical manifestation of his growing fetish is realized. What follows is a sensual, erotic, but rather unnerving description of his washing and massaging ritual, starting with her feet and moving upward to the rest of her body. He says, "I lose myself in the rhythm of what I am doing. I lose awareness of the girl herself." Ultimately, the ritual ends in "rapture, of a kind" (29). The first stage of a body fetish is realized. However, it is not long before this stage is not enough. His fascination begins to move outward, from the foot, to disfigurement, to cleansing, to the act of torture itself: "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).
Critics are certainly not misguided in the attention they pay to words such as "deciphered" and the corresponding torture as writing or language discussed earlier; however, it is at this point that the criticism tends to move outward from the narrative to begin discussing the theoretical aspects of that reading. I argue that it is at this point that the reader should pay even more attention to the narrative itself, continuing to read the growing obsession of the magistrate as the impetus for the storytelling and not simply a theme or metaphor to be considered outside of the text. Yes, there is a considerable amount of "reading" going on, but the reader should be focused on the immediacy of the first-person, present tense narration. The sense of impending violence that has slowly developed in a reading of the magistrate's obsession with torture, Joll, and the body should be the element that is at the forefront of the readers' experience; that is, readers should be caught up in the physical, visceral, titillating voyeurism of Coetzee's/the magistrate's conflation of eroticism and violence. We should be asking, where will he take this obsession next, and not, how do I reconcile theories of anthropology, sociology, politics, and body politics? This experiential level of narrative is of utmost importance to where our narrator takes us next: his own personal experience with physical brutality.
The barbarian girl forces a separation of sex and the growing body fetish. She says, "You should not go hunting if you do not enjoy it" (41), referring literally to his attempts to tell a story about hunting. He dismisses her statement as proof that she does not understand but her following actions do not necessarily support that fact. Immediately following her statement, she gives him the answer to a question he claims not to have asked. More importantly, the girl is the one who propels the object of the fetish from her body to the act of torture itself, giving him the gruesome details of her blinding, details that he has as yet been unable to possess either through his conversations with Joll or his explorations of her body. It is after this exchange that the magistrate throws himself back into a more traditional sexual relationship. He revisits the young girl, The Star, as an act of defiance against his "bondage to the ritual of the oiling and rubbing, the drowsiness, the slump into oblivion." He acknowledges the failings of his present obsession:
All this erotic behavior of mine is indirect: I prowl about her, touching her face, caressing her body, without entering her or finding the urge to do so . . . Is this how her torturers felt hunting their secret, whatever they thought it was? For the first time I feel a dry pity for them: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other! (43)
The magistrate is clearly conflicted at this point. When he asks her "What do I have to do to move you?" (44) he sees his answer plainly: "with a shift of horror I behold the answer that has been waiting all the time offer itself to me in the image of a face masked by two black glassy insect eyes from which there comes no reciprocal gaze but only my doubled image cast back at me. " He resists what he has seen, saying, "How can I believe that a bed is anything but a bed, a woman's body anything but a site of joy? I must assert my distance from Colonel Joll! I will not suffer for his crimes!" But that is not what he truly wants. The magistrate attempts to compensate for these conflicting feelings by visiting his mistress more regularly but he suffers from bouts of impotence: "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" (45). This is a complicated metaphor that can be read many ways, but here, it is our first tangible hint that our narrator's obsessions may be compromising his story. As well, this metaphor is an example of what Coetzee is doing to the reader; he is using sex, obsession, and fetishism as red herrings to allegory, keeping us bound to the experiential level of the narrative by focusing on the magistrate's growing need to experience pain. The girl has played out her role in this growing fetish and is no longer physically necessary. The magistrate says, "While I have not ceased to see her as a body maimed, scarred, harmed, she has perhaps by now grown into and become that new deficient body" (56). What follows is the magistrate's fateful decision to return the girl to her people, thereby sealing his fate and taking the fetish to the next step.
When at last they encounter the barbarian riders they have been seeking and the girl is offered to them, the magistrate tells her to "Tell them the truth. What else is there to tell?" (71). Again there is a subtle conflation of Joll and the magistrate. Both implored her to tell the truth. And in both cases, as Rosemary Jolly states, the proof of the truth is in the physical marks on her body. As torturer, Joll needed to inflict the marks to prove he'd succeeded, and the magistrate, as storyteller complicit in the appropriation of her torture, needs only to offer those same marks as proof of her story's truth. It is at this point that a real transition occurs within the novel. As the magistrate hands over the girl, she ceases to be objectified. There is a short break in the text that resumes with images of spring, symbolic of a new beginning, which is, in some ways, the case because the magistrate's fate is sealed upon his return to the outpost. As such, this new beginning is hardly one in the sense of renewal and hope - - another metaphor and narrative red herring on the author's part.
This return opens the fourth section of the novel and sets the full realization of the magistrate's body fetish into motion. It is notable, too, that at this point the novel seems to shift to a more overtly political tone. The emphasis on sex abates and the magistrate attempts to rationalize his earlier actions within political context(s). He says, "I am aware of the source of my elation: my alliance with the guardians of Empire is over, I have set myself in opposition, the bond is broken, I am a free man" (78). Interestingly, Coetzee resists a full realization of the Joll/magistrate conflation, having the magistrate greeted by Warrant Officer Mandel. Still, the emphasis has an element of homoeroticism: "He is a good-looking man, with regular white teeth and lovely blue eyes. But vain, I think. I picture him sitting up in bed beside a girl, flexing his muscles for her, feeding on her admiration . . . He will look from behind that handsome immobile face and through those clear eyes as an actor looks from behind a mask" (77).
In fact, Coetzee resists a full realization of the earlier manifestation of the fetish as torture fetish. The first two sections of the novel seemed to be building towards a need for the magistrate to experience torture at the hands of Joll; that is, upon failing to read from the girl's body the answers to his dark and erotic questions, the magistrate would need to experience the marks himself, firsthand. And he does to a certain degree. However, it is the ambivalence with which Joll and Mandel treat him that allows for a full realization of the body fetish. This ambivalence is evident in the two Bureau officers' failure to treat him seriously. After first reading the magistrate his charges, Mandel has him unceremoniously jailed. Later, standing across from Mandel over his own desk, the "saucer of little glass balls" (82) without an accompanying phallic symbol recalls the earlier flask and bowl of nuts that opened the narrative, and is a symbolic emasculation. He is now powerless and is locked away and seemingly forgotten. There, the magistrate truly comes to know his own body. His painful incontinence is reminiscent of the emphasis placed on the excrement of the fisherfolk. As a prisoner he is reduced to a smelly, dirty caricature for whom it has "become an agony" (85) to move his bowels, enduring the stabs of pain, the tearing of tissues that accompany his "evacuations." Soon, the magistrate comes to understand that, as Michel Foucault says, "it is always the body that is at issue - - the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission" (172). In his own words, the magistrate says:
Never before has my nose been so rubbed in the quotidian. The flow of events in the outside world, the moral dimension of my plight, if that is what it is, a plight, even the prospect of defending myself in court, have lost all interest under the pressure of appetite and physical functions and the boredom of living one hour after another. I have caught a cold; my whole being is preoccupied in sniffling and sneezing; in the misery of being simply a body that feels itself sick and wants to be well. (87)
And again after being beaten for intervening in the torture and mutilation of the barbarian prisoners:
What I am made to undergo is subjection to the most rudimentary needs of my body: to drink, to relieve itself, to find the posture in which it is least sore . . . 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. (115)
His torturers, then, if that is what we are to call them, have taught him a lesson worthy of Foucault himself. The magistrate has gained a "'knowledge' of the body that is not exactly the science of its functioning, and a mastery of its forces that is more than the ability to conquer them" (Foucault 173). He has learned the "political technology of the body." He has learned that his body is "also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs . . . [T]he body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body."
The magistrate is not, as many critics have said, attempting to simply "read" from the experiences of others. It is true that his obsession with torture did begin that way, but Coetzee has resisted this reading by providing a twist to the magistrate's fetishistic quest. The magistrate never actually experiences the "torture" faced by the barbarian girl and others Joll interrogated, because he is never placed in a position of racial inferiority, never made an "other." It is true that he faces serious charges and is ultimately brutalized in the course of his imprisonment, but he always has an out. Each step of the way his fate is in his own hands. So, despite the fact that he bears, for the outside world, the marks of torture that brand him a "victim," this is a fiction. His scars result from cause and effect. He dares to intervene in the beating of the barbarian prisoners and has his face and arm broken. The final act of brutality he faces, his mock hanging and the breaking of his shoulders, has nothing to do with "judicial torture"; it is an act of depravity, one he sought on a subconscious level, at least, as part of his body fetish. This fiction is not unlike the fiction the magistrate leaves us with when, after the troops have left and life has returned to normal, he decides to write "their" story. He writes, "No one who paid a visit to this oasis failed to be struck by the charm of life here . . . This was paradise on earth" (154). This is a fiction first of all because there has been no talk of the beauty of the oasis until this point. And, perhaps most importantly, he chooses to close with a tense shift, ending with the past tense and thereby implying, because the novel has been written entirely in the present tense, that there is an impending change - - should he choose to complete the story. Or, perhaps we should consider the narrative we have as just such an object, written as it is entirely from his perspective and containing many similar ambiguities.
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