“This Is How I Look”: Surveillance and Unexpected Guidance in the Panoptic Empire of Waiting for the Barbarians

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this article, I utilise Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon prison design and Michel Foucault's derived notion of panopticism to examine the depiction of surveillance, power, and resistance in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1982). Both Colonel Joll and the Magistrate, I argue, employ techniques of panoptic surveillance to dominate and control the “barbarian” girl, the former by physically torturing her and thereby inscribing his imperial gaze on her body, and the latter by subjecting her to a psychological process of analysis and interpretation. Left blind after her interrogations and trapped under perpetual surveillance, the girl comes to embody, in some ways, the docile Foucauldian inmate. She is not without agency, however. In the final section of the article, I show how she resists the Magistrate's imperialist vision and, in so doing, effects a profound ethical transformation in him. Ultimately, I contend that the girl acts as the Magistrate's unexpected guide by directing him towards an alternative and ethically “blind” way of seeing.