The Body, the Word, and the State: J. M. Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians"

Abstract

In Presence of Absence, Lance Olsen gives a Derridean reading of J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians.' Calling upon Derrida's definition of a of presence, Olsen asserts that absence is at the center of Coetzee's language. The metaphysics of presence [is] a [misguided] that longs for the 'truth' behind every sign,... a stable 'meaning.' According to this theory, writing is antithetical to metaphysics. It creates absence.2 Olsen describes the torturer from the Third Bureau, Colonel Joll, as a misreader who deals in the of presence while he describes the old, colonial magistrate as one who believes meaning and truth float free. In his argument, Olsen defends Coetzee's novel as a postmodern fiction misunderstood by its prescriptive reviewers who seek a specific historical setting in the novel (and thus, they imply, a clearer political context).3 I too would defend this South African novel's temporally and geographically enjambed setting, as I would Olsen's thesis about the struggle between presence and absence, certainty and uncertainty. And yet I do not share Olsen's conclusions. For example, in arguing that the novel (all writing) produces gaps, absence, Olsen refers to the wood slips, a sort of ancient hieroglyphics unearthed by the magistrate whose avocation is archaeology. Though Joll assumes the magistrate knows the meaning of the wood slips, in fact the latter has no idea how to decipher them. Of this situation Olsen writes, As Derrida would have it, those wood slips form an absence which may be supplemented in an endless number of ways, cut off from responsibility, from authority, an emblem of orphaned language, nothing more than a productive mechanism [my