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.

Destroying Language Through Pain & Suffering Part 5

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.