The Obstacles of Otherness: Experience vs Ignorance
Yet, the concept of experience, and more specifically the experience of pain, is something that also presents complications for the magistrate in his search for meaning in the story of the barbarian girl. Elaine Scarry in her text, The Body in Pain, suggests that the pain of someone else is something unknowable, “one might almost appear to be speaking about two wholly distinct order of events.” (4) The magistrate experiences something similar in the text. As mentioned previously he is alienated from being a participant in the process of torture, and therefore does not have experiences on which to draw on when he first approaches the girl. The magistrate constantly asks her to tell him about what her torturers did, but it is not just facts that he is after. The magistrate seeks much more than that, what he is truly trying to do is find her deepest and most secret feelings, something Scarry tells us is unattainable. Scarry explains that while we may at some level understand our body in pain, “the moment it is lifted out of the ironclad privacy of the body into speech, it immediately falls back in,” and “[n]nothing sustains its image in the world.” (60) Even if the girl could do more than just indicate where she was injured and burned, it would impossible to truly recreate a picture of what happened to her because the pain of torture is incommunicable, and indescribable. Before the magistrate undergoes his own experience of torture he begs the girl to “[not] make a mystery of [torture], pain is only pain,” but the pain of torture is not just pain. (Coetzee 36) What the magistrate fails to see is that language in the act of torture has been transformed into a tool of torture as well, and to remember the moment of torture and to try and articulate the moment into words is to feel, and relive that pain once again. Scarry states, that in torture “the words of [the torturer] have become a weapon,” a concept that appears clearly in the novel. (46) We see this in the way that the magistrate's questioning of the girl results in much the same dynamic that probably held true when she was being tortured by Joll, and the magistrate himself acknowledges this. When the magistrate hears himself utter, “What do I have to do to
move you?” he comes to realize that he has been keeping this girl as a prisoner in his home, whom he has been trying to interrogate about the nature of torture and pain. He then states: “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 glassy insect eyes from which there comes no reciprocal gaze but only my doubled image cast back at me.” (Coetzee 50) What this implies is that because the magistrate has been utilizing language much in the same as Joll the girl is not able to respond positively to his inquiries. The girl is made to relive the process of torture over and over during her time with the magistrate. The fact that the barbarian girl only provides the facts about what was done, and not the deeper result of the scars, is because pain caused by torture does not lend itself to accurate translation, but also because she is never given an chance to do so in a setting that lies outside of the confines of torture. Therefore, the magistrate is in this way blocked from access to the girl's experience, and yet if the girl could translate her pain for him, the opportunity is never allowed to flourish as he maintains her bound within the discourse of torture.
Furthermore, although the magistrate undergoes his own experience of torture, as Scarry tells his experiences cannot be equated to what happened to her. This however, does not mean the magistrate is left without any way to connect with the barbarians and their story. Jennifer Wenzel argues that “the object around which [the magistrate's] frustrations with language revolve is a broken human body, tortured into silence under an imperial regime.”(66) Wenzel draws upon Elaine Scarry's text to support her analysis, but she ignores the fact that although Scarry suggest that pain “actively destroys” language, she also acknowledges that a new type of language is accessed, which are “the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.” (4) It is crucial to an understanding of the text to realize that it is these very same sounds and cries which may constitute a new way of communication outside of any previously accepted discourse in the text. 
and recognizable means of starting anew, that is to say it is outside of discourse itself. For Moses the problem is that one cannot asks for justice in this pre-human language, but to speak the word justice is to return to a structure that lends itself to ambiguity. In other words, this would be remain within the discourse of the Empire, which Moses himself notes is representative of “the arbitrariness of the law” and of “all human definitions of justice.” (122) Yet, it is not until the magistrate is completely beaten down, and he has lots “his last vestiges of authority” that through this “pre-human” language that the magistrate is able to finally make a connection with the barbarian girl in spite of the fact that she is no longer there, and he can understand the untranslatable nature of torture through this language. Therefore, it can be argued that the novel wishes to instill in us a mistrusts for language, and invites a destruction of already established structures of language and discourse so as to access a new means of storytelling and communication that are outside of the structures of Empire and barbarian, and without distinctions.
Coetzee's text as shown previously tries to show a rewriting of a story of both Empire and barbarian that is different and more inclusive in the sense that it takes into consideration the pain of the barbarian girl, the atrocities of the Empire, and the guilt of the complicit magistrate. Although, the magistrate encounters many obstacles in trying to bridge these worlds, it is ultimately through the destruction of the language and discourse of the Empire that the magistrate is able to come close to this. Nevertheless, it must be stated that although the magistrate can come close to understanding the pain of the barbarians, he cannot understand what it is to be a barbarian, only what it might be like to be a barbarian within the discourse of the Empire. In this sense, we see that the novel tells that the Other is as unimaginable as the pain that is caused by torture, and that it is only through exile that we may come to an understanding of it. It is for this reason that as the novel closes the magistrate tells that he “[has] lived through an eventful year, yet understand no more of it than a babe in arms.” (Coetzee 179) We too are left with a vague sense of confusion, but not without having been marked by the powerful statements of the novel. It may not possess all the answers but it presents us with all the right questions.
Works Cited
Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin Books, 1980. Print.
Coetzee, J. M. “Remembering Texas.” Doubling the Point. Ed. David Atwell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. 50-3.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Print.
Eckstein, Barbara J. The Language of Fiction in a World of Pain: Reading Politics as Paradox. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990.
Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” French Feminism Reader. Ed. Kelly Oliver. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000. 257-75. Print.
Gallagher, Susan Van Zanten. “Torture and the Novel: J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians” Contemporary Literature 29.2 (1988 Summer), 277-85. Web. 15 Nov. 2011.
Wenzel, Jennifer. "Keys to the Labyrinth: Writing, Torture, and Coetzee's Barbarian Girl".Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature15.1 (1996 Spring), 61-71. Web. 15 Nov. 2011.
Moses, Michael Valdez. “The Mark of Empire: Writing, History, and Torture in Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians” The Kenyon Review 15.1 (1993 Winter), 115 -27. Web. 15 Nov. 2011.
Moses, Michael Valdez. "'King of the Amphibians': Elizabeth Costello and Coetzee's Metamorphoric Fictions". Journal of Literary Studies/Tydskrif vir Literatuurwetenskap 25.4 (2009 Dec.), 25-38. Web. 20 Oct. 2011.
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