Reading and writing: Narrative motifs of sexual and epistemic violence in Waiting for the Barbarians

Abstract

AbstractThis study examines J. M. Coetzee's deployment of reading and writing as dominant motifs in Waiting for the Barbarians. The narrative diffusion of the two motifs of reading and writing in the novel suggests that the colonial encounter is primarily an epistemic one. Moreover, these two motifs yield images of physical and sexual violence. Bodily torture is equated with writing and interrogation with reading. Even sexuality in the novel becomes interchangeable with textuality, and the body of the nameless native girl is transformed into a site for reading and writing violence and sex. History, which also involves writing and reading, is contested in the novel. In Waiting for the Barbarians, writing the history of the Empire and reading the history of the colonized Other are intractable, dialectic poles. The tension between the two is resolved by a third synthetic, unprejudiced form of writing outside history: Waiting for the Barbarians itself.