J. M. COETZEE AND COLONIAL VIOLENCE

Abstract

This essay offers an example of a form of literary criticism appropriate to an era that has demonstrated the manifest durability and even intensification of imperial ideologies and practices. The essay's premise is that one of criticism's chief aims should be to address the ways in which many literary texts succeed in fostering a critical and ultimately moral and political response to exclusionary ideologies and the violence that they engender. The topicality of J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) is due firstly to its capacity to demonstrate that torture is made possible not just by the criminality of its perpetrators and the connivance of policymakers but also, ultimately, by a pervasive ideology of dehumanization. Secondly, by virtue of its first person narrative form, Waiting for the Barbarians recounts in the voice of the colonizer a gradual process of confusion, introspection and remorse that enables the reader to experience closely rather than merely witness from a distance an exemplary process of self-questioning. Though the novel's protagonist is unable fully to reach either a successful rejection of imperial structures or an effective empathy for their victims, the specific practice of reading that the novel dramatizes and requires makes those achievements appear both available and compelling to its readers. Waiting for the Barbarians is thus further distinguished by its revival in its readers of a moral and ultimately political sensibility that is usually inhibited by the ideology of dehumanization. Through its dialogic form as much as through its main narrator's agitated reflections on the ‘war on terror’, Coetzee's most recent novel, 2007's Diary of a Bad Year, throws into very sharp relief the normative dimension of Coetzee's oeuvre by way of a new, characteristically subtle though unusually explicit advocacy of aesthetic and political engagement.