Destroying Language Through Pain & Suffering Part 1: Introduction

Since I have started this blog I have become very interested in J. M. Coetzee and this has transformed into a research paper. The four posts below, and this one, are the result of my research on Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians, and it explores the concepts of pain, suffering, and the Other. The novel struck me from the first time I read it earlier in the year, and in my mind I always wanted to do something more with it. I hope my research is useful for those who are seeking to understand more about Coetzee and his work.

Destroying Language Through Pain and Suffering: An Analysis of J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the

Barbarians

 

         J. M. Coetzee in his novel Waiting for the Barbarians deals with the issue of torture and how difficult it is to represent it for both a writer, and the tortured victim. In Coetzee's novel the human body appears as a metaphor for a body of text. Michael Valdez Moses suggest that in one of Coetzee's more recent works, Elizabeth Costello, the concept of the body works as a bridging device between the reader and the novel. Something similar can be seen in Waiting for the Barbarians. There is a slight difference, however, because the magistrate utilizes the barbarian girl's scarred body as both a bridging device between his world and hers, and as the foundation for a new world. The magistrate seeks comfort in the girl because his reality is shattered and overtaken by a new world of pain and torture brought in by Colonel Joll.
The scars on the body of the girl becomes a guide to this new world, but before he can have access to it he must decipher the secret language of pain and torture. Nevertheless, the novel does not present a clear meaning to the girl's scars, they are presented as undecipherable and foreign like the slips that the magistrate finds during his amateur excavations of the barbarian ruins outside the town fortress. The barbarian girl's scars are foreign to the magistrate because she represents the Other on different levels. The barbarian girl is on one level the figure of the uncivilized Other and the magistrate cannot cross the barrier that separates the imperial and the barbaric. Instead his struggle to define his role in either world leads to his exile into a space that belongs to neither. At the same time the barbarian girl's femaleness represents another obstacle in his reading of her because he either places her on a pedestal, as a mother-like deity, or he subverts her as an object of sexual desire. Lastly, the magistrate cannot read the girl's scars because, as Elaine Scarry states in her work, The Body in Pain, “the events happening within the interior of that person's body [have]...the remote character of some deep subterranean fact...” (Scarry 6). Pain, in Scarry's terms, is so “unsharable” that the magistrate must deal with the fact that although he and the barbarian girl may be able to speak the same language, her scars do not. The magistrate is presented with a text (her scars) in a different language for which he does not possess the codex, and whose nuances and rules he cannot comprehend. The only thing that

is left for him to do is his ritual cleansing of the barbarian girl's scarred feet, worshiping their secret meaning, hoping that they will open themselves up to him in return for his devotion. By attempting to bring into words what the experience of torture is like, the true essence of the experience is lost. The magistrate cannot return to the moment of torture and be a participant of the events and so he cannot come to understand the girl's experience. In trying to distance himself from Joll, and what he represents, and his inability to take part in the experience of suffering and pain of the barbarians, the magistrate is alienated and force to begin anew. He must do so through the destruction of the oppressive language of the Empire through his own pain, and his experiences with the barbarian girl. Nevertheless, this is not made explicit, and Coetzee does not provide an answer as what this new world that the magistrate begins to build at the end of the novel could mean, or whether it is the start of a change that could solve the conflict between the colonizer and the colonized.

 Previous Parts Can Be Found Here:

Destroying Language Through Pain & Suffering Part 2 

Destroying Language Through Pain & Suffering Part 3 

Destroying Language Through Pain & Suffering Part 4 

Destroying Language Through Pain & Suffering Part 5