The Humanist Discourse in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

Abstract

This article interrogates the humanist discourse in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting forthe Barbarians(1980), negotiating the intersections between the novelʼs narrator, the Magistrate, and Coetzee, the public intellectual. The ethical narrator, through the very act of witnessing and describing imperial violence, objects to the practices of torture perpetrated on captured prisoners yet feels guilty for his complicity with the torturers. The articulation of his difficult position as a humanist serving a declining Empire forms the essence of a humanist discourse that corresponds to the difficulties and ambivalences experienced by the postcolonial writer/intellectual. Using the work of Edward Said on the representations of the intellectual and Coetzee's views on ethical authorship and torture, the present article locates the humanist discourse articulated by the Magistrate in the center of Coetzee's conception of the public intellectual. While Coetzee undertakes the task of representing oppression without reinscribing it, his narrator struggles with distanc-ing himself from the oppressors physically and psychologically, and thus achieving the relative autonomy Said called for. In the process, the Magistrate moves from a position of consent to one of dissent.