Number 25 July 2003
Contact and Representation in July's People and Waiting for the Barbarians
Tim McIntyre
The roots of European colonization are complex: some historians point to blatant economic motives, others to a more ethereal project of self-definition and an almost scientific desire to know and to dominate. Whatever the cause of colonization, its implementation has brought people from vastly different cultures into close, sometimes intimate contact. Mary Louise Pratt defines the social spaces where settlers meet natives as contact zones-places where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relationships of domination and subordination (4). While this contact does require each culture to accommodate the other into its frame of reference, the accommodation is far from equal, and the end result often seems to be a relationship based on European coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict (6). Nadine Gordimer's July's People and J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians are both novels of the contact zone. The encounter between colonizer and colonized occurs not in the heart of the empire but on its edge: a remote South African village in July's People, and the dreamscape that is the frontier of Waiting for the Barbarians. Both novels address problems of knowing and representation, of intimate contact between colonizer and colonized. Characters in each work are shaken from their comfortable, liberal roles within the empire. Removed from the culture that informed their sense of place and their personal identity, these liberal characters must struggle to redefine themselves and their relationships with the other.
Bam and Maureen Smales of July's People are forced to flee their formerly safe suburban home by a bloody battle between black revolutionaries and the white authorities. The material deprivation they experience in rural South Africa and the difficulty of adjusting to dependency on their former servant July cause them to lose their self-image as independent, gracious, liberal citizens. First Bam and Maureen lose a sense of each other as husband and wife; then, they lose their sense of personal identity. Bam changes from active and powerful to passive and defeated; this transition is shown through a withdrawal from a traditional male role into a motherly one. Maureen, after several unsuccessful attempts to create a sense of place for herself in the African village, opts for a radical rejection of her current position through her dash for the helicopter. In the novel's ambiguous ending, Maureen seems to gamble either for her old self or for death. Her body filthy and deprived of familiar comforts, she runs headlong for a helicopter that will lead back to the industrialized world or to oblivion. This fall from liberal glory is rendered through concrete representations of the landscape and Maureen's physical experience, and through the novel's third-person narrative voice, which moves in and out of characters' heads to show the extent of Bam and Maureen's failure to connect, as well as who exactly it is they fail to connect with.
Waiting for the Barbarians is less concrete, from its representational style to its impetus for action. The novel takes place in the impossible landscape of a colonial outpost in a fictionalized empire. For reasons that remain largely obscure, an administrator known only as "the magistrate" becomes obsessed with gazing into and understanding both the machinations of empire and the nature of the barbarian other. The magistrate locates the key to this understanding on the body of a barbarian girl disfigured by torture. He fetishizes the girl's body and violates it in a manner that figuratively recalls the acts of the torturer, Colonel Joll. For both of them, the girl's body is merely a means to an end, a way to produce meaning and impress oneself on another whether through violent or benevolent acts. The girl, like the landscape surrounding the outpost, remains shadowy and unknowable. In his quest to know, the magistrate brings himself out of and up against the empire. As a result, like Maureen, he learns only the limits of his own body and, through his contact with the imperial other, the degree of his complicity with a system from which he had tried to distance himself.
The problem, then, for each novel becomes showing the other with whom the main characters are in direct contact-whether the contact is daily and familial as in July's People or taboo and pseudo-sexual as in Waiting for the Barbarians. Gordimer uses realism to show Maureen's failure to know and renders both Maureen and July as complex, sympathetic characters with some degree of agency. This direct representation of the colonized other creates certain problems in that it opens the novel to criticisms of "speaking for," essentializing, or even perpetuating stereotypes. Only a perfect novel could escape all political criticism, and unsurprisingly, Gordimer's novel is not perfect. At times the novel slips into representing South Africans as animalistic or 'primitive.' Coetzee, however, shows the barbarians and the frontier as a shadowy absence and attempts to break from realist modes with allegorical and metafictional elements to make clear that his novel is discourse with no claim on any absolute truth.
Although the dominant mode of July's People is realism, Sheila Roberts notes an almost gothic sense of the uncanny in the novel's opening scene (80). There is certainly a defamiliarizing and disorienting aspect to the novel's beginning. The day starts with a familiar scenario as July brings a cup of tea to his white employers. But the scenario is initially devoid of a physical context, and this context is only gradually filled in. Maureen awakes to her new, meagre circumstances as if from a dream. Her surroundings are clear; there is no doubt about the reality of the rusted iron bed, mud and dung floor, thatch roof, dirt-strewn cobwebs, and nests for wasps or bats, but this setting make sense to Maureen only in the context of the past: of camping trips with her father or with Bam (Gordimer 2). The reality of the hut is almost too much for her to comprehend-the gentleness of the bald fowl entering the hut and the ordinariness of its presence is enough to produce in Maureen a sense of "sudden, total disbelief" (2). Only slowly does she begin "to inhabit the hut around her" (4) and recognize its reality; however, she is still unable to reconcile it with her identity as Mrs. Bamford Smales, born Maureen Hetherington of the Western Areas Gold Mines, Under 10s Silver Cup for Classical and Mime at the Johannesburg Eisteddfod (2). To her, the hut is "empty except for the iron bed, the children asleep on the vehicle seats" (4). Only the objects that could equally fit into a suburban setting have presence. The other objects-the roll of cowhide, the hoe hanging from a nail, the pile of rags and the Primus stove-"belonged to another category" and do not exist in her frame of reference (4).
Maureen's disorientation does not disappear as she rises from sleep and leaves the hut. Confronted by a situation that is agonizingly real in its impoverishment, she is stymied by its foreignness and cannot draw from a social context to confirm her identity. Maureen moves about the village as if she were sleepwalking: "Maureen was aware, among them in the hut, of not knowing where she was, in time, in the order of a day as she had always known it" (17). Her psychic disjuncture from her surroundings paralyzes her as she moves between the huts "neither working as others did nor able to do nothing as others did" (28). Maureen is unable even to read the book that she hastily snatched while fleeing. Her mind cannot occupy itself with a fiction of another place and time; it is already completely engaged in allowing her to occupy her current surroundings: "She was already not what she was. No fiction could compete with what she was finding she did not know, could not have imagined or discovered through imagination. They had nothing" (9). Maureen's experience of the village jolts her out of her sense of self and makes that which is real and concrete feel unreal and confusing.
The African village is an assault on Maureen's body. The once sophisticated Maureen finds that for the first time, she must use rags for her period (67), and she smells between her legs (9). Eventually her entire body takes on a "cold cat smell" (151). In her present state, her every want can be satisfied by a fire (58), and eating meat can create the same sense of heady exhilaration as drinking wine once did (79). In the village Maureen discovers how important privilege had been to her liberal identity. As M.A. Quayum points out, Maureen was a typical liberal, willing to change her interaction with black people-for example, by substituting the universally respectful "sir" for the term "master" (Gordimer 52)-but not willing to give up her wealth and comfort (Quayum 45). The novel makes clear that the Smaleses' attempts to slough privilege and to make contact with the black community were largely superficial, and what kept them in Africa was the fact that they could not get their money out (Gordimer 8). Jarred from her social and physical context, Maureen begins to reflect on the falseness of her position: the impossibility of a gracious, gift-bearing visit to July's village (37-38) and the disinterest in native culture behind her decision to study ballet over Fanagalo (45). Maureen finally begins to see her difference from July-that in regard to July's adulterous relationship with Ellen, the "absolute nature she and her kind were scrupulously just in granting to everybody was no more than the price of the master bedroom and the clandestine hotel tariff" (65).
Maureen's experience in the African village may have given her a better understanding of her own identity and her distance from July, but it does little to bridge the gap between the two characters. July is not interested in being understood by Maureen, and he resists her attempts to represent him. Transformed from "decently paid and contented male servant" to their "frog prince, saviour, July" (9), he now has the power to constrain Maureen's ability to represent him, and he is determined to use it. Therefore, in addition to adjusting to the poverty and foreignness of the village, Maureen must also come to terms with subtle and ambiguous shifts in her relationship with July. July now refuses Maureen the opportunity to represent their situation as she sees fit. Angered by Maureen's hypocritical lack of trust concerning the keys to the bakkie, he cuts off her speech: "The ten fingers of his hands, held up, barred what she thought, she wanted" (69). July insists on the traditionally subservient nature of their relationship, thereby further challenging Maureen's belief in her own liberal graciousness: "There in town you are trusting your boy for fifteen years.-His nostrils were stiff dark holes. The absurd 'boy' fell upon her in strokes neither appropriate nor to be dodged. Where had he picked up the weapon? . . . the word was never used in her house" (69-70). He refuses to engage her on any level other than as servant and madam and meets her only on "the lowest category of understanding" (71). In the end, Maureen moves from feeling that "he [July] and she understood each other well" (13) to the realization that
the special consideration she had shown for his dignity as a man, while he was by definition a servant, would become his humiliation itself, the one thing there was to say between them that had any meaning.
Fifteen years
your boy
you satisfy[.] (98)
Small gestures such as tending to July when he was sick and eschewing the terms master and madam did little to compensate for the differences between the two. The words themselves-fifteen years, your boy, you satisfy-fall off the page, slipping away like her ability to represent July or even herself in relation to him.
July, it seems, does not want to incorporate the Smaleses into the village. He clings to the way things were: ritualistically observing the Smaleses' custom of finishing a meal with fruit (9) and insisting that the medicine he gives his own children is not good enough for Royce-only store-bought cough medicine will do (60). He also prevents Bam from chopping his own wood (59). There is something similar in the way July rejects both Bam's and Maureen's offers to work. When Bam wants to chop his own wood, July dismisses the request as "an issue not worth mentioning" (59). When Maureen expresses her need for work, he responds by smiling "at the pretensions of a child, hindering in its helpfulness" (96). It is as if he does not even take seriously their efforts to pull their own weight and be anything but isolated in the village. When Bam makes an effort to learn more about the village by asking about its leadership structure, July appears genuinely entertained: "It seemed always to amuse July to be the mentor, as if he didn't take too seriously a white's wish to comprehend or faculty of comprehension for what he had never needed to know as a black had the necessity to understand, take on, the white people's laws and ways" (112).
There may, of course, be something more material behind July's desire to keep Maureen from gathering spinach: a need to keep his adulterous affair with Ellen a secret. But given the distance between Maureen and the village women, any fear of being betrayed seems irrelevant. Maureen and Martha share only a few words of Afrikaans, and despite a promising encounter in which the two share a laugh at Maureen's damaged, ugly legs, and work, for a time, "side by side" (92), the two never make a connection. Near the novel's end, Maureen misses an opportunity to help Martha bathe her baby and then reflects with regret and pessimism on their failure to form a bond. Regardless of language, "[s]he couldn't tell Martha what she herself felt herself to be, what had happened to her. . . . Martha had laughed at the veined white legs. At one time . . . it seemed a beginning. Something might have come of it. But not much" (146).
Maureen's experience in the contact zone is essentially a failure. She is unable to bring July or anyone else into her frame of reference. The only moments of connection between Maureen and July are decidedly negative. Their most dramatic joining, perhaps, is Maureen's reminder of July's affair. Maureen's comment hurts July deeply, causing him to shudder "in affront and temptation," the convulsion in his neck showing Maureen that "he would never forgive her the moment" (73). This moment of animosity is the closest the two come to bridging the gap between them: "they stepped across fifteen years of no-man's-land, her words shoved them and they were together, duellists" (72). The only moment of coming together, in which Maureen is able to fulfill her desire to destroy the distance between the two of them, occurs in a vitriolic confrontation. Bam descends into passivity and resignation, and Maureen makes a nihilistic sprint for the helicopter.
Both characters eventually lose their sense of self, and the first casualty of this dissolution is their relationship. Through their collapse of roles, Maureen becomes for Bam simply "Her. Not 'Maureen'. Not 'his wife'. The presence in the mud hut" (105). Their subliminal need to talk and to discuss (35) is never really fulfilled; their conversations are often no more than bitter verbal spats, with no expression of love or support, no planning for the future, and no vocabulary for talking about what was happening "back there" (89). Without a language through which to comprehend their place among what has always been the other, they lose the means to relate to and to communicate between themselves. As a result, their sex drive completely falls away. When Bam awakes to find Maureen next to him, naked from the waist down, he reacts with no more than "a 'for god's sake?' glance of enquiry" (52). Later, the baring of Maureen's breasts becomes not a sexual sight but rather "a castration of his sexuality and hers; she stood like a man stripped in a factory shower or a woman in the abulation block of an institution" (90). Of course, there are certain material factors that also constrain their sex drive. Preoccupied with survival and without the privacy and casual love-making rituals of suburbia -"a hand between her legs while she was cleaning her teeth, the butting of his penis, seeking her from behind while she bent over the bath" (89)-there is no sexual desire.
Until, that is, some of their sense of deprivation is alleviated when Bam kills some pigs for meat. Intoxicated by the consumption of meat, "conscious of the smell of grease and meat clinging to their fingers" (79-80), they make love. The consumption of the pig relieves some of their physical debasement and concomitantly returns to Bam a sense of his former self. In his new context, however, Bam reflects on the hypocrisy and adolescent nature of his past position. Stalking the pig, Bam "understood, for the first time, that he was a killer" (78), abandoning his old contention that he would no sooner shoot a buck than a man and consigning "[a]ll the old games, the titillation with killing-and-not-killing, the honour of shooting only on the wing, the pretence of hide-and-seek invented to make killing a pleasure" to "another kind of childhood he had been living in to the age of forty, back there" (77). Bam confronts and accepts the fact that he is not above killing to satisfy his desires; he returns to his position as alpha male with "a sense of relief" now that he no longer needs to obscure his desire for consumption behind liberal pretence (78). Secure in his position as "the Man," and, like his wife, temporarily relieved of some of their deprivation, the two ignore their lack of privacy and once again become lovers.
But the moment proves to be fleeting. The next morning, Bam is confronted with "a moment of hallucinatory horror when he saw the blood of the pig on his penis- then understood it was hers" (80). There may be an element of guilt at the murder of the pig prompted by a subconscious connection between the sexual penetration of his wife and the violent penetration of the pigs-both to satisfy his appetite. However, Bam's bloodied penis is essentially an image of castration, an image that fits well with the tension in the novel between Bam's attachment to an aggressive male role and the current impossibility of that role given the situation.
Bam enters the novel as a man attempting to use his intelligence, strength, and mastery of technology to carve out a place of honour for himself in the village. Almost immediately upon his arrival, Bam begins to help July mend farming equipment and to formulate a plan to build a water tank (24, 25). When Bam discovers that July has taken the bakkie without his permission, Bam reacts like a typical alpha male: "Bam got up and had the menacing aspect of maleness a man has before the superego has gained control of his body. . . . His penis was swollen under his rumpled trousers" (39). But nothing comes from Bam's attempt to be the big man; he fails to get any information about the circumstances of July's departure in the bakkie, and he comes to realize the futility of any violent action in his current situation. Yes, he has a twelve-bore shotgun, but "[i]f he took it out and killed, could that be a defence against what might come, once outside July's protections? I am a boy with a pea-shooter; he wanted to say it aloud" (41). Over the course of the novel Bam struggles with his desire to keep "the male role of initiative and reassurance" (59) while being helpless to protect or provide for his family. In the end, when the gun is stolen and Bam no longer has even a "pea shooter" with which to protect his family, he resigns himself to passivity and submission and lies defeated, face-down on the bed "as the father had never done before his sons" (145). Deprived of his last and most potent means of male authority, Bam drifts into a maternal role-not an active, loving one, but a passive, detached one. In his final scene, Bam is wordlessly giving the children food. The silence with which he performs this 'motherly' duty creates a sense of detached resignation, almost as if Bam were in mourning for his manhood. When Maureen enters, "He did not ask her where she had been; he ate with the children, using the tin spoon to which tatters of pap clung" (154). The man quietly feeding and eating with his children, failing even to acknowledge the presence of his wife, is a far cry from the masculine Bam Smales who entered the novel.
Conveniently enough, this maternal role had recently been vacated by Maureen. Deprived of her identity of gracious liberal, Maureen also renounces her role as caring mother. Her children become "her litter" (47), and as the drowning of the kittens indicates, Maureen is fully capable of ignoring the needs of a litter to suit her own ends. Eventually Maureen renounces virtually all her motherly responsibility by stating that she "no longer had to worry about her children; she fed them; they knew how to look after themselves, like the black children" (125). Maureen has experienced an "explosion of roles" (117) and, unable to make sense of her life or to fit into the village, she runs for the helicopter.
The ending of July's People is abrupt and, to some extent, difficult to grasp. Pauline Fletcher details some of the many interpretations that have been applied to it: Nicholas Visser assumes that the helicopter is from the revolutionary army and sees Maureen as running to embrace her revolutionary destiny; David Ward assumes the opposite and describes her as running toward a return to safe white society; Abdul JanMohamed sees the ending as "deliberately ambiguous" and says only that Maureen succumbs to her animal instinct for survival (Fletcher 51). Judging by the screenplay, it seems that the author's preferred scenario is Maureen running toward her revolutionary destiny. An earlier draft of the novel as well as the screenplay adaptation both identify the helicopter as belonging to the revolutionary forces, and in a 1994 interview and her correspondence with director Roland Jaffe, Gordimer makes clear her goal that the audience should see Maureen as joining the revolution (Bazin 185-86). But there is little textual evidence in the novel to support that reading, and the screenplay required substantial revisions for this scenario to be credible: scenes are added to show Maureen aiding Daniel, who in this version is clearly a revolutionary, and to show Bam as violently angry over Maureen's shift of allegiance (Bazin 184). Aside from Gina's ability to fit into the village almost seamlessly, contrasted with the "white man's anger" (Gordimer 86) that appears in Victor over the water tower (62) and the bit of rope (86), there is little evidence that Maureen would be able to make the leap into revolutionary consciousness. Unless one accepts the novel as flawed according to the author's revisionist intentions, July's People is not a story of a liberal woman becoming a revolutionary.
According to Fletcher, because Maureen does not see the markings on the helicopter, all that can be certain is "that Maureen cannot know whether she is running to safety or to death" (51). The "smell of boiled potatoes (from a vine indistinguishable to her from others)" and the promise of "a kitchen, a house just the other side of the next tree" (Gordimer 160) may indicate a desire to recover her past life, but the phrasing "indistinguishable to her" makes it clear she is aware of it as a delusion (Fletcher 51). Maureen runs "because she has to; because the truth has destroyed the possibility of any civilized relationship with July, her husband, even with herself" (52).
Fletcher's interpretation seems highly likely given that the novel's end comes on the heels of some profoundly pessimistic scenes. Not long before, Maureen reflects on her inability to make sense of her life: "She was not in possession of any part of her life . . . since that first morning she had become conscious in the hut, she had regained no established point of a continuing present from which to recognize her own sequence" (139). Shortly thereafter, Maureen reflects on her inability to connect with Martha, and Maureen's final encounter with July, where she appears to present herself sexually to him, is also quite pessimistic (146). Perhaps this posturing is a last-ditch attempt at making a connection, but the language indicates that given the state of her body and the cultural distance between them, her attempt is doomed to failure: "She lurched over and posed herself, a grotesque, against the vehicle's hood. . . . The death's harpy image she made of herself meant nothing to him, who had never been to a motor show complete with provocative girls" (153). In this context, Maureen's subsequent laughter and vulgar slapping of the mudguard seem to fit with the resignation of a woman about to sprint past her family and toward whatever fate may have in store. While this scene shows an element of castrated sexuality similar to what develops between Bam and Maureen, as Pauline Fletcher has indicated, "the arrival of the helicopter comes as the climax of the story and is felt in powerfully sexual terms" (Fletcher 52):
A high ringing is produced in her ears, her body in its rib-cage is thudded with deafening vibration, invaded by a force pumping, jigging in its monstrous orgasm-the helicopter has sprung through the hot brilliant cloud just above them all, its landing gear like spread legs, battling the air with whirling scythes. (Gordimer 158)
Both Fletcher and Nancy Bazin agree with Nicholas Visser's assertion that the imagery here echoes Yeats's "Leda and the Swan." But where Visser sees "a moment of insemination, from which new possibilities emerge" (566), and Bazin sees female infidelity indicating a shift in allegiance made possible by the descending helicopter (182), Fletcher sees a "grotesque and terrifying mechanical swan" as a possible parody of the traditional deus ex machina, or god of the machine (52). In this light, Maureen "chooses industrial civilization over the 'return to nature' that the African village has revealed as being less than idyllic" (52). It is tempting to read some such interpretation into the text, but as Fletcher maintains, "there is nothing in the text to suggest such a conscious decision on her part. Like Leda, she surrenders to whatever (death, salvation, rape?) the machine has to offer" (52).
Maureen fails to find a place and to know or be known as anything other than the woman of July's white people. Throughout the novel, communication, when it exists, is highly constrained, and in the end, Maureen learns more about her ignorance of July than she learns about the man himself. The novel's realist form shows that the real and concrete can also be foreign and unknown. When the helicopter arrives, Maureen is certain only that she is tired, filthy, and hopeless. In the absence of any meaningful identity, she runs.
Waiting for the Barbarians ends on a similarly pessimistic note. The magistrate leaves the novel "feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere" (Coetzee 152). Just past the midway point of the novel, he has already been reduced to "no more than a pile of blood, bone and meat that is unhappy" (84). Like Maureen, the magistrate is a liberal figure who is brought low and who experiences a failure to know the other. Unlike Maureen, however, the reason for the magistrate's fall from grace is not a violent situation beyond his control. His worsening physical state is not the cause of a quest for a better understanding of the other but rather an effect of it. This shift in focus, from material conditions and historic events as the impetus for action to a desire to know as the driving force, is mirrored in a stylistic shift to the postmodern and abstract. Waiting for the Barbarians moves away from concrete, realistic representations of the colonial landscape and the colonial other into representations that are shadowy, incomplete, and undercut by a sense of impossibility. Rather than detailing the fall from grace as a sort of horror story for suburban liberals, Coetzee links the violence of the military man to the benevolence of the humanist by drawing clear parallels between Colonel Joll's torture and the magistrate's pseudo-sexual act of footwashing.
Ali Behdad offers a definition of imperialism that encompasses both violent abuse and sexual submission as part of the same process of dominance. He defines imperialism as "a disturbing attempt to produce a sense of continuity between the discontinuous identities of the colonizer and the colonized" whereby through sex or violence, difference is dissolved, and the colonized other is reconciled with the colonial self (202). Behdad, like many other theorists, argues against definitions of colonialism that rely solely on a Manichean opposition between colonizer and colonized in an effort to transcend what he sees as a limiting binary distinction. However, Behdad's definition ignores the material gains that accrue to the colonizer and the production of difference necessary to legitimize domination. Behdad's definition makes the entire imperial project sound as if it were little more than the collective failure of European society to exit Lacan's mirror stage. Nevertheless, the definition does explain how the same societal norms inform the racist fetishizing and the racist violence noted by thinkers as diverse as Edward Said, Paula Gunn Allen, and Iceberg Slim. Behdad's definition seems to account perfectly for the link between Joll and the magistrate. Behdad notes that both men seek to create a sense of continuity with the barbarian girl: Joll in the military way through discipline, torture, and pain and the magistrate in the benevolent, humanist way, through pleasure, desire, and sexuality. The magistrate's own reflections make clear that these two positions are continuous; he is "the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy," and Joll is "the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow" (133).
Both Joll and the magistrate are explicitly after truth, and both seek it in the girl's body. Joll, of course, seeks this truth through torture. For Joll, "[p]ain is truth, all else is subject to doubt" (5). Joll describes his process for finding truth: "[f]irst I get lies, you see . . . then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more lies, then more pressure, then the truth" (5). Joll essentially has the power to create, through torture, any truth he wants. In her article "Keys to the Labyrinth: Writing, Torture, and Coetzee's Barbarian Girl," Jennifer Wenzel describes the conversion through torture of one human's body into another's voice. For the victim, "truth" is negated along with the integrated self and the ability even to know truth. Pain becomes the transcendental signifier, the dominant element in language; eventually the victim will say anything and ultimately stop making sense just to stop the pain. Torture, then, is an unequal conversation that produces a fiction for the powerful. No real communication can take place when the sign system collapses into pain and when meaning is a foregone conclusion (Wenzel 63). The goal of torture, in Joll's case at least, is to provide a justification for domination and further violence through an admission of guilt, and here, violence becomes similar to Western rationality. Behdad argues that violence is not antithetical to but rather a continuation of reason because the otherwise taboo act of violence is legitimized by the logic of colonialism's "civilizing mission" (Behdad 202-03). Descartes's separation of the subject/self and object/other not only creates a barrier but also establishes knowledge and its natural extension, power, as criteria for measuring worth. How well one uses knowledge to produce meaning and profit is in fact the measure of human worth to a society that values reason above all. This measure works wonderfully for European colonizers, who as a result can declare themselves superior by their own standards and therefore entitled to make meaning, reap profits, and civilize the 'savages' by any means necessary. The link between reason and knowledge accounts in large part for the barbarity that a 'civilized' society can project onto a 'primitive' one. Knowledge truly is power: the power to name and to recreate the world in one's own image. Joll's violent creation and re-creation of meaning is perhaps most explicit when he writes the word ENEMY on the backs of his prisoners and washes it off with their blood, flowing from the lashes of the cane (103-04). Joll's mastery allows him both to name and to erase the other.
While reason informs Joll's violent production of 'truth' and the dissolution of difference, benevolence informs the magistrate's quest to produce 'truth' from the barbarian girl's body. The magistrate "wanted to make reparation" and will not "deny this decent impulse, however mixed with more questionable motives" (79). His motives are questionable, however, because like Joll, he does not see the girl as a human being so much as a way to produce meaning-only in this case via the act of reading. The magistrate's act is benevolent in that it takes the girl off the streets, and it is quasi-sexual considering the intimacy of sleeping together and the tenderness and submission involved in foot washing. Yet clearly the magistrate gains no real sense of sexual satisfaction from the washing of her feet. The description of the experience indicates no sexual pleasure; the only sense of release is into oblivion, not ecstasy: "I lose myself in the rhythm of what I am doing. I lose awareness of the girl herself. There is a space of time which is blank to me: perhaps I am not even present" (28). Even when he brings the girl to orgasm, he feels nothing: "I experience no excitement during this the most collaborative act we have yet undertaken. It brings me no closer to her and seems to affect her as little" (43). Moreover, his benevolence is profoundly limited in that he has no love for the girl or for any other barbarian. To the magistrate, the barbarians are not noble savages but a potential "parasite settlement" that could invade his town (37); in fact, the magistrate seems unwilling even to extend to them the basic right to exist. Initially, at least, he flirts with the idea that the world would be a better place if all the barbarians were killed: "[i]t would be best if this obscure chapter in the history of the world were terminated at once, if these ugly people were obliterated from the face of the earth and we swore to make a new start" (24). The magistrate, then, performs his acts purely for his own obscure purposes, which are only tangentially related to empathy or desire.
To the magistrate, the girl is little more than a text to decipher. Early on he states his need to 'read' her: "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). The magistrate comes to the girl with the same desire as Joll-to produce meaning-and almost immediately, he is troubled by the similarity: "I behave in some ways like a lover-I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her-but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate" (Coetzee 42). The magistrate, humanist liberal to Joll's violent conqueror, seeks to read the marks on the girl and create his own meaning; essentially he uses the girl for the same reason but with a different method and to produce a different meaning.
George Steiner has also noted the connection between liberal and torturer. He comments on "obscene intimacy between the torturer, the victim, and the liberal witness" (qtd. in Merivale 272). The magistrate, Joll and the girl are certainly in intimate contact, and there is indeed a certain element of voyeurism in the magistrate's fascination with torture. When he observes the tortured boy, for example, the magistrate sees without being seen and conceals his presence by whispering until he chooses to reveal himself. The hushed tones with which the magistrate and the guard discuss the boy convey no sense of moral indignation; rather, they reveal an almost conspiratorial fascination with the act of torture:
'What did they do to him?' I whisper to the guard. . . .
'A knife,' he whispers back. Just a little knife, like this.' He spreads thumb and forefinger. Gripping his little knife of air he makes a curt thrust into the sleeping boy's body and turns the knife delicately, like a key, first left, then right. (Coetzee 10)
Behdad notes this passage as a description of Joll's very real penetration of the barbarian other or "erotisme des corps"-a violent and deleterious sacrificial rite, extravagantly cruel and sinister, because the dissolution is achieved by destroying the discontinuous other while the self remains whole and separate (203). Behdad sees the magistrate's pseudo-sexual relationship with the girl as an example of "erotisme des coeurs"-a desire for continuity no less sinister or violent than the "erotisme des corps" and also requiring a ritual of sacrifice in which penetration or piercing the body of the other forms a privileged moment (205). The magistrate does seek to penetrate the girl but not in a strictly sexual sense: the penetration he seeks is more metaphysical. He feels no desire to enter her "stocky little body" (Coetzee 30); it gives him no sexual satisfaction. Her body to him is "closed, ponderous . . . beyond comprehension" (41); it is "[b]lank, like a fist beneath a black wig . . . without aperture, without entry" (42). Unlike other women, with the barbarian girl "it is as if there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry" (42).
However, the magistrate cannot make a benevolent connection with the barbarian girl, nor can he produce any meaning from her. Similar to Maureen's inability to understand or represent July as a stable image, the magistrate cannot bring the girl into his frame of reference. The two are as separate yet intertwined as clouds: "diffuse, gaseous, centreless, at one moment spinning about a vortex here, at another curdling, thickening elsewhere. . . . I know what to do with her no more than one cloud in the sky knows what to do with another" (33). He finds himself unable to bring her image to his mind's eye: "I realize that if I took a pencil to sketch her face I would not know where to start" (46). He tries to remember the girl as she was before the torture, but he can conjure only "space, a blankness" (46). Troubled by her presence as absence and by the realization that he is trying "to obliterate the girl" (46) with these efforts to inscribe meaning on her, he returns her to the barbarians.
On his journey to return the girl, the magistrate is finally able to penetrate the girl sexually. Similar to Maureen, despite intimate contact, the magistrate can see his other and the difference between them only when thrust into a new contact zone in the territory of the other. The landscape outside the town is dangerous and chaotic-there is little food or water to sustain their journey, and because they travel at the end of winter and beginning of spring, the weather can be calm one moment, and then hours later a storm can tear their village apart. The entire setting of the novel, in fact, is impossibly complex and contradictory-desert sands exist with snowstorms, and lizards exist with hares. The maps of the land are paltry, and the territory itself is largely new to the magistrate and his guide. The land they travel across is as changeable and difficult to read as the girl herself. When they finally reach the barbarians, the girl unceremoniously leaves them. In this moment, the magistrate learns what the girl really was to him: "a stranger; a visitor from strange parts now on her way home after a less than happy visit" (Coetzee 71-72). Like the barbarians who tracked them on their journey, the girl was tantalizingly close but always just out of reach, and any attempt to close the distance was futile.
The trip also begins to teach the magistrate the limits of his own body. Again, like Maureen, being away from the comforts of 'civilization' takes its toll: "[a]fter long marches my bones ache, by nightfall I am so tired that I have no appetite" (59). However, it is when he returns to the town and is brought under the heel of the empire that he learns the harsh truth of the body. The magistrate's transgressive journey gives him a momentary sense of elation: "[t]here is a spring in my step as I am marched away. . . . I have set myself in opposition. . . . I am a free man" (76), but this elation only implicates him more in the tradition of liberal humanist ideals, providing a peak from which he falls. Through his experience of torture, he learns the emptiness of high-sounding words and, in the words of David Attwell, that "the body sets clear limits to what can be endured or claimed on behalf of ideals or principles" (qtd. in Wenzel 67). Once again, like Maureen, only when his body reaches its lowest point does the other become agonizingly clear. He is brutalized and stripped of his male identity by the guards who dress him in a smock and hang him from a tree; as he dangles, he sees the other in vivid detail as he imagines the old man: "I can see every hair of the horse's mane, every wrinkle of the old man's face, every rock and furrow of the hillside" (118). The girl, too, is present in this image: "black hair braided and hanging over her shoulder in barbarian fashion" (118). She is seen finally as different and separate: barbarian and unknown.
The magistrate's debasement helps him to see the barbarian girl, but the barbarian girl only reflects back on him his own complicity. Through the girl he sees the connection between himself and Joll. The magistrate reflects with shock on his desire to stir the girl: "'Does no one move you?' and with a shift of horror I behold the answer that has been waiting all the time to offer itself to me in the image of a face masked by two black glassy insect eyes from which there comes on reciprocal gaze but only my image cast back on me" (43). By the end, he can reflect on this connection with shame: "Though I cringe with shame . . . I must ask myself whether, when I lay head to foot with her, fondling and kissing those broken ankles, I was not in my heart of hearts regretting that I could not engrave myself as deeply on her [as Joll]" (132). His only redemption, if in fact there is any, is that as an old man, his "loving leaves no mark" (132). The magistrate fails to connect with and impress himself on the girl; he is as impotent in the bedroom as he is at the writing-table, unable to have sex with the barbarian girl or write any chronicle of his journey beyond one that is "devious, equivocal, and reprehensible" (151). Here Coetzee seems to be writing against the tradition Mary Louise Pratt has labeled "anti-conquest." Novels of "anti-conquest" use strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony (7). The anti-hero of these anti-conquests is usually male, European, and middle class, and whether sentimental or scientific, he maintains his innocence through passivity (78). The magistrate at times appears both sentimental in his strong and complex feelings for the girl and scientific in his archeological interest in ancient barbarian culture; however, the fact that "[t]hings happen to him and he endures and survives" (78) does not lead to much absolution, unless his absolution comes from knowledge of his complicity.
Whatever truth the magistrate has learned about himself, in the end he fails to produce any meaning from the girl. Like the poplar slips to which he arbitrarily assigns meaning during his confrontation with Joll (Coetzee 108), the girl remains foreign, complex, and indecipherable-a shadowy figure produced primarily as absence. The magistrate recognizes his failure in the final scene by acknowledging his blindness: "there has been something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it" (152). As Susan Gallagher puts it, "[w]ith his combination of sexual and authorial images, his antonymic articulations, and his failure to discover meaning in words, the magistrate seems to be wandering in the wilderness of deconstructive criticism" (qtd. in Wenzel 65). The failure to know, the metaphor of the poplar slips, and the impossibility of the landscape seem to divorce the novel from claims to represent truth or reality and force the novel to be recognized as discourse. While the Waiting for the Barbarians may be referential in a more general or multiplicitous way, as Teresa Dovey points out, the very allegorical nature of the novel undercuts traditional liberal discourse and is a radical critique of any project to gain meaning from or mastery over an other (140).
Ironically, it is this decontextualized structure of the book that has drawn some harsh political critique. Abdul JanMohamed, for one, sees the novel not as subverting liberal discourse but as willfully ignoring reality and shirking political responsibility. He states that by not making specific reference to apartheid, the novel implies that everyone is somehow equally guilty and that fascism is endemic to all societies (92). The ahistorical aspect of the novel also ignores that the production of racial difference has an economic motive: Africans were seen as neutral or benign before the slave trade; after the slave trade began, they were the epitome of evil and barbarity (80). Perhaps most significantly to JanMohamed, the novel, like the magistrate himself, never passes beyond the imaginary or mirror stage, in which the relationship with the other is based only on recognition and hostility, and there is no entrance into the symbolic order, no language, to mitigate the confrontation (92). To him, as an imaginary text the novel fetishizes a fixed opposition between colonizer and colonized, and the native is consigned merely to an image of imperialist self-alienation. JanMohamed greatly prefers the representational style of Gordimer's July's People, which he sees as a symbolic text that frees itself from the Manichean allegory (84). Maureen's act of negation at the end is not a surrender but the result of her turning away from her own culture (84). JanMohamed maintains that to try to comprehend the other requires an almost impossible negation of self in that it requires a wholesale rejection of the culture and assumptions that produce the self (84).
While July's People may be ultimately pessimistic about the possibility of a healing dialogue between master and servant, it at least shows a struggle for real communication and the native as a full human being. July, whether he is known or unknown by Maureen, has agency and is partially responsible for affecting a change in Maureen through his relentless representation of his version of their relationship. July's People also engages with the fact that in the postcolonial world, colonizer and colonized must co-exist unless one group invokes the kind of final solution that the magistrate proposes (Coetzee 24) or Maureen risks as she runs for the helicopter (Gordimer 159-60). Waiting for the Barbarians, on the other hand, tends to obscure the necessity of violence against the other to maintain colonial power. Colonel Joll's torture of the natives gives him no tactical advantage, and his violent campaign against the barbarians only hastens the demise of the outpost. In the absence of any material gains from these actions, they seem completely irrational; they must stem either from a deep subconscious desire or from an inability to recognize the magistrate's logic of peace. However, for a colonial empire, violence and torture are not simply means of self-definition or a way of "Othering"; they are effective (if abominable) means of repressing rebellion and maintaining a vastly unequal system. The title of this novel, taken from a Cavafy poem, and the magistrate's contention that the barbarians are not massing for a revolution but simply waiting for the settlers to disappear indicates that the problem of colonization will eventually solve itself and ignores what is the reality for many places: that colonizer and colonized will be stuck together indefinitely, and 'barbarians' are quite capable of active, even violent conflict. On the other hand, it is difficult to gauge to what extent the magistrate's contentions should be taken at face value, especially considering that his assertion the barbarians will outlast the empire (Coetzee 50) comes well before his fall from glory.
As his book White Writing indicates, Coetzee is highly aware of the problems of representation, and in moving the colonial encounter to the abstract he avoid problems that are almost inherent to the realist mode. To effectively show a struggle for a mitigating language between colonizer and colonized requires a representation of both sides of the divide- without showing the other, at least to some extent, any conversation is necessarily one-sided, and real communication becomes limited. Through concrete detail and a narrative voice that moves seamlessly from character to character, July's People does show both colonizer and colonized. Pauline Fletcher states that this use of physical detail resists theory by "its insistence in every detail on experience rather than theory, the reality of life as it is lived" (52-53). In her opinion, Gordimer's realism prevents the novel from being plundered for a simplistic political message (Fletcher 52). But whose reality is it? The 'reality' of the novel belongs to a privileged white writer. Gordimer, at least, is examining her own position as a white female liberal and grounding her interaction in a specific context, but perhaps inevitably, her representation of black South Africans is at times problematic. Gordimer describes July's mother's exclamations as "stylized gobbling" (20); makes an unsettling parallel between the women and animals by describing their feet as claw-like (92); and perhaps most disturbingly, she has the villagers react to the helicopter as if they were extras in an old Tarzan movie (Gordimer 158), and makes the concept of "overseas" seem almost as if it is beyond their comprehension-there is not even a word for it in their language (20). By claiming to represent reality, Gordimer opens herself up for a host of criticism that she is speaking for and perpetuating racist stereotypes. It may well be that African villagers would react to a helicopter with hysteria or that there is no word in Martha's language for overseas, but given Gordimer's distance from an African villager, it is difficult to trust completely that her representation is totally free from stereotypes.
In this light, Coetzee's technique is more subversive than Gordimer's realism because of its skepticism about meaning making in general. The novel, in a way, is ahead of its time, before Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak." However, the postmodern form is not without its dangers as well. As Bart Moore-Gilbert puts it, the more the oppressed is seen as a theoretical fiction, the more likely the oppression will be seen as fictional as well (McLeod 195). Furthermore, as Spivak suggests, while sympathetic attempts at rendering the other may result only in a more refined version of the discourse they seek to replace, giving up the ability to articulate reasonably a view and taking refuge in the theoretical purity of deconstructionism is not all that useful. From a strictly political standpoint, in terms of the routinization of cultural representation, a subtle poststructural critique of liberal discourse is probably not as good as a little strategic essentialism, or even a simple reversal of racist binaries. The problem with Coetzee's book is a problem of audience-there are probably very few people interested in or attuned to his subtle metafictional critique. Coetzee recognizes this problem and has responded to it by saying, "I may indeed by cutting myself off, at least from today's readers; nevertheless, what I am engaged in doing is more important than maintaining that contact" (qtd. in Easton 587). However, putting his own lofty theoretical goal, or even his artistic achievement, over tangible political objectives is just as dubious as doing the reverse. There is no need for Coetzee, or Gordimer for that matter, to claim superiority based on political or aesthetic style; one writer's work does not negate the other's, and there is certainly room and need enough for both their works.
The biggest difference between these two novels is probably more stylistic than political. Both works show liberal characters in intimate contact with an other who remains essentially unknown; in both works, these liberal figures learn more about their separation, their complicity, and the importance of their bodies than they learn about the other. However, while Gordimer uses realism to show some sense of what Said might call the "brute reality" of natives beyond what has been said about them (Said 5), Coetzee presents his native as a shadowy absence. Each style presents some difficulties-in Gordimer's case, the near impossibility of "getting it right," and in Coetzee's, the question of relevancy. However, Waiting for the Barbarians is more than a novel taking refuge in theoretical purity; its metafictional elements remind readers of the difficulty of making meaning and perhaps of the arrogance and naiveté behind the idea that a well written book is enough to change the state of the world. While waiting for Roland Joffe to do a film version of Waiting for the Barbarians may be an exercise in futility, the lack of a popular audience does not eliminate the novel's accomplishments. By the same token, if Gordimer sometimes creates an essential position for whites or blacks, or if occasionally she uses imagery that is less than ideal politically, those facts do not erase the strength of her work. In part, Gordimer and Coetzee might be constrained by their cultural position. If what the world really needs is to hear the subaltern speak, then these two are probably not the right people to whom to turn. Nevertheless, in a plurality of postcolonial literatures, the shortcomings of one author can be compensated for by the strengths of another.
Works Cited
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