Destruction of Reality & the Search for a New World
The magistrate is made to question his place in the Empire because he has always thought himself as not just a servant of it, but as part of it. However, when Colonel Joll begins with his “investigations” the magistrate realizes that without having actually tortured any of the prisoners himself, he has taken part in the dark affairs of the Empire and cannot fathom the idea. After the magistrate sees Joll off to his expedition he states, “[s]o I ride back, relieved of my burden and happy to be alone again in a world I know and understand.” (Coetzee 15) After Joll has brought in the elements of pain and torture in to the world of the magistrate his world is changed, and he is taken out of his element, finding himself questioning how he should act. His duty to the Empire and his duty to mankind come into conflict in his mind because he has never previously had to make those types of choices. It is Joll who brings the undecipherable into the magistrates world, and as the phrase demonstrates, the magistrate attempts to run away in an attempt to avoid stepping into the unknown. However, at the same time it is an attempt of the magistrate to cling to his sense of being, to his identity as the magistrate of the Empire, as part of the civilized. The magistrate's statement is at once naive and insightful. For one, the magistrate assumes that with Joll's departure everything will resume as normal and that he has secured his identity, but he fails to realize that what has been heard, cannot be unheard. Yet, his naivety is revealing, as it demonstrates the fear of losing his identity that he is beginning to feel. By acknowledging the differences between Joll and himself, he has started to show his awareness of his position outside of what the Empire represents. In recognizing Joll as a burden that weighs heavily on him, the magistrate is in a sense admitting that he views his duty to the Empire as a burden as well. Further on in the text the magistrate states: “I turn my back on the Colonel's triumph...” (Coetzee 23) signaling a change, demonstrating that not only does he see Joll as something bothersome that he must carry on his conscience, but as something that he wishes to move away from. Moving away from Joll's triumph is to move away from the Empire as any
victory gathered by the servants of the Empire belong to it and its community of which the magistrate is unmistakably a part of. By physically turning away the magistrate symbolizes how he is giving up his allegiance to the Empire, where once he could claim “who am I to assert my distance from [Joll]?” (Coetzee 6) he can no longer find himself attached to the seemingly aristocratic life of an official of the Empire. At the same time the identity that had previously defined him is destroyed, and the magistrate is left to question all he has known. Upon Joll's departure back to the capital the magistrate states: “All my life I have believed in civilized behaviour; on this occasion, however, I cannot deny it, the memory leaves me sick with myself.” (Coetzee 26) Here with see that “civilized behaviour” had been the standard upon which he had measure everything in his life. Michael Valdez Moses tells us that “[t]he magistrate wishes to maintain a clear, even absolute distinction between civilization and barbarism” even if it means that the “Empire will have lost its own particular claim to civilization.” (119) What Moses does not acknowledge in his work is that the magistrate clings onto this binary of civilized versus uncivilized in order to maintain a sense of self that is recognizable. The Empire has minimized the magistrate's role in his own narrative, and has erased any sense of certainty he had previously had by claiming the flag of Civilization while simultaneously causing brutal pain and suffering. This leaves the magistrate without structure in this new phase of shame and guilt into which he enters. Noting the magistrate's distancing from the narrative of the Empire is key because it denotes a desire to rewrite the text of the Empire into something that is not scarred, ugly, and born of violence. However, it is also important to declare that the magistrate seeking new structure to his identity, is also seeking to regain the control that has been lost.
In a sense Joll did not only push the magistrate out of his narrative by bringing in torture, pain and guilt into his life, he also took control and power away from the magistrate. The magistrate loses the control of his narrative, no longer is his history written by him but by the hand of the Empire via Joll. This also explains anxiety over having Joll come into his life. Where as before Joll's arrival he had been the
ultimate figure of authority in the town, he now must answer to Joll and his commands. An example of this is when the magistrate is asked to leave by Joll during the interrogation of the boy and the old man. This action symbolizes the hand of the Empire come to take control of the narrative because it is Joll who will asks the questions and who will ultimately answer them as well. He represents the Imperial narrative that wishes to rewrite history erasing from it the narrative of the native, and although the magistrate is not, strictly speaking, a native of the land, he has become one by living in the town. The magistrate first attempts at taking back control of his story after Joll's departure is when he demands the soldiers clean up the room that had been used for interrogation. He proclaims, “I want everything cleaned up! Soap and water! I want everything as it was before!” (Coetzee 26) This set of orders symbolizes his re-taking command of the town, but also of his story. It is interesting to note that his first action is to try and do away with any traces of Joll and his work. In trying to erase the signs of torture the magistrate is trying to erase the part of his narrative that was written for him, but he fails to realize that the story that has been rewritten is not just his.
In a sense Joll did not only push the magistrate out of his narrative by bringing in torture, pain and guilt into his life, he also took control and power away from the magistrate. The magistrate loses the control of his narrative, no longer is his history written by him but by the hand of the Empire via Joll. This also explains anxiety over having Joll come into his life. Where as before Joll's arrival he had been the
ultimate figure of authority in the town, he now must answer to Joll and his commands. An example of this is when the magistrate is asked to leave by Joll during the interrogation of the boy and the old man. This action symbolizes the hand of the Empire come to take control of the narrative because it is Joll who will asks the questions and who will ultimately answer them as well. He represents the Imperial narrative that wishes to rewrite history erasing from it the narrative of the native, and although the magistrate is not, strictly speaking, a native of the land, he has become one by living in the town. The magistrate first attempts at taking back control of his story after Joll's departure is when he demands the soldiers clean up the room that had been used for interrogation. He proclaims, “I want everything cleaned up! Soap and water! I want everything as it was before!” (Coetzee 26) This set of orders symbolizes his re-taking command of the town, but also of his story. It is interesting to note that his first action is to try and do away with any traces of Joll and his work. In trying to erase the signs of torture the magistrate is trying to erase the part of his narrative that was written for him, but he fails to realize that the story that has been rewritten is not just his. The agency of the barbarians has also been taken away and they themselves have almost been destroyed and taken out of the narrative. It is interesting to note that the magistrate considers before the end of a chapter, that “[i]t would be best if this obscure chapter in the history of the world were terminated...if these ugly people were obliterated from the face of the earth and we swore to make a new start...” (Coetzee 27) At this point he also toys with the idea of marching them out to the desert to dig their own graves symbolizing the way in which he realizes that they stand before him as blemishes, mistakes in his narrative, which cannot simply be erased, but must be hidden or destroyed. The narrative of the
magistrate at this point in the novel does not present a hopeful outlook for the barbarians. If they are to be destroyed by both Empire and the colonizer-turned-native, who will write their story if they are not allowed to? Thus, we see that in order to take back his narrative the magistrate in his mind must first obliterate both the native and the Imperial stories to start anew. However, the novel does not allow for this, and instead the magistrate finds that, as Coetzee remarks in his non-fiction work, Doubling the Point, "it is not clear where one goes to run away from knowledge.” (51) That is to say, the magistrate may hide and wipe clean the blood left behind, rid himself of the barbarians, but knowledge cannot be erased, and it is this barbarian girl that represents that knowledge which cannot be ignored or erased, and which demands consideration. The barbarian girl is the foundation the magistrate needs to begin his new narrative.
magistrate tries to read these traces of the Empire on the girl and sees them as holding some sacred truth that he cannot understand. However, in acknowledging that she is a text of analytic interest he is also recognizing that she is crucial to the story. Deciphering meanings and understanding the context of her scars becomes important for the magistrate because they represent a text that is part of his story, but that is written in a language he does not yet understand. In accepting the task to decipher and understand the girl, the magistrate is recognizing that he must delve into the obscure and unclear in order to find himself. We see this element of searching, most vividly in his dreams. For example, in one of his later dreams he refers to the girl as “the only key [he has] to the labyrinth.” (Coetzee 101) Here we see that the magistrate feels lost within his own narrative, and that the girl for him seems to possess the answer for his escape from the labyrinth of confusion in which he finds himself in. When he states that he cannot let the girl go until he has understood her, he is suggesting that he cannot let her go until he has understood the darkness within the identity he had already established. The scars on the body of the girl represent the cruelty of torture, which he has attempted to ignore. In going through the ritual washing of her feet he is trying to erase of the guilt he feels for having allowed the torture to happen in the first place. Yet, he is also paradoxically, trying to settle his previous curiosities towards torture. The girl works as a mirror that allows him to come face to face with his role as both torturer and victim. Furthermore, just as the girl forced him to recognize the missing pieces of his identity, she too becomes a symbol of a loss of control.
It could be said that the barbarian girl makes the perfect object on which to build upon because she is a woman. Helene Cixous makes an interesting assertion about the role of women in men's world views, she states: “Undeniably...it's [the man’s] business to let [women] know they're getting a hard-on, so that [women will] assure them ([they] the maternal mistresses of their little pocket signifiers) that they still can, that it's still there...” (271) Cixous implies that women are key for the validation of a man's world and ego. In telling men “that they still can” women are presented as reinforcing their sexual capabilities, but also their abilities to do everything else. By telling them “that it's still there,” women are acknowledging and reassuring men of their role at the center of existence. The barbarian girl functions as this figure of “the maternal mistress” that Cixous speaks off. She has the capability to reassure him of his control over his narrative, and of his identity. The magistrate states: “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 her go.” (Coetzee 35-36) The
For the magistrate the barbarian girl represents the key to this new text that has been written by Joll, and power can be reconstituted through the rewriting of this girl's body once again but now by his hand. When the magistrate has lost his chance to read the girl, and has undergone his own experience of torture, he is able to asks himself “whether, when [he] lay head to foot with her...[he] was not in [his] heart of hearts regretting that [he] could not engrave [himself] on her as deeply” (Coetzee 155) as Joll had. This phrase reveals the way in which the magistrate had meant from the start of their relationship to win back control of his story. He needed to be reassured that he “still could” effectively take back control by taking command of what was left of her narrative. The barbarian girl is often described as appearing blank, and this is in great part due to the fact that although pieces of her remain, they are overshadowed by the scars of the narrative of torture. Similarly, the magistrate only sees the traces of the Empire on her, and wishes to wipe them away as he did in the interrogation room, to allow for his own story to flow through her. Before he can regain control of his narrative, he must feel reassured that he in fact exists as part of the story, and that Empire has not succeeded in erasing him. Nonetheless, although the girl may be presented as a potential answer to the magistrate's troubles there is much that impedes him from accurately understanding her role in the narrative.
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