'What is that noise?' I ask when the guard brings my food.  They are tearing down the houses built
    against the south wall of the barracks, he tells me : they are going to extend the barracks and build
    proper cells.  'Ah yes,' I say : 'time for the black flower of civilization to bloom.'
        -J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

Even more so than the Soviet Union, it is hard to recall the South Africa of the 1970's, the virulently racist regime which so provoked intellectuals and activists of the Left.  Twenty years ago, no one could fail to understand that this rather elliptical short novel was intended as an allegory for the situation in South Africa.  But reading it today it seems, at least to me, to have lost much of it's power.

The narrator of the story is a minor Magistrate whose position on the periphery of the Empire has allowed him to avoid having to come to grips with his own distaste for the regime he serves:

    I did not mean to get embroiled in this.  I am a country magistrate, a responsible official in the
    service of the Empire, serving out my days on this lazy frontier, waiting to retire.  I collect the
    tithes and taxes, administer the communal lands, see that the garrison is provided for, supervise the
    junior officers who are the only officers we have here, keep an eye on trade, preside over the
    law-court twice a week.  For the rest I watch the sun rise and set, eat and sleep and am content.
    When I pass away I hope to merit three lines of small print in the Imperial gazette.  I have not
    asked for more than a quit life in quiet times.

But his self-deluded idyll is shattered by the arrival of Colonel Joll from the Third Bureau, "the most important division of the Civil Guard nowadays."  Colonel Joll has come to the frontier to ruthlessly gather intelligence from among the aboriginal peoples.  He begins with an old man and a young boy currently being held in jail by the Magistrate, who is confronted at first hand the effects of Joll's interrogation techniques and horrified by the senselessness of torturing these two prisoners.  The Magistrate seeks to understand how Joll can resort to such methods:

    'What if your prisoner is telling the truth,' I ask, 'yet finds he is not believed?  Is that not a terrible
    position?  Imagine : to be prepared to yield, to yield, to have nothing more to yield, to be broken,
    yet to be pressed to yield more!  And what a responsibility for the interrogator!  How do you ever
    know when a man has told you the truth?"

    'There is a certain tone,' Joll says.  'A certain tone enters the voice of a man who is telling the
    truth.  Training and experience teach us to recognize that tone.'

    'The tone of truth!  Can you pick up the tone of truth in everyday speech?  Can you hear whether I
    am telling the truth?'

    This is the most intimate moment we have yet had, which he brushes off with a little wave of the
    hand.  'No, you misunderstand me.  I am speaking only of a special situation now, I am speaking of
    a situation in which I am probing for the truth, in which I have to exert pressure to find it.  First I
    get lies, you see--this is what happens--first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure,
    then the break, then more pressure, then the truth.  That is how you get the truth.'

And so the Magistrate's dilemma is established, he simply wishes to serve out his allotted time in this backwater of Empire, but circumstances force him to consider the utter brutality of that Empire and it's repression of the barbarians, whom he knows to be essentially peaceful.

In symbolic penance for his complicity in the Empire's increasingly heavy handed treatment of the local natives, the Magistrate takes in a young barbarian woman.  Each night he massages her wounded feet and bathes her, in a ritual that grows ever more fraught with sexual tension.  Eventually, with war now imminent, he rides out into the arid wastes of the frontier to return her to her people.

This action suffices to make him suspect in the eyes of the men of the Third Bureau, but in addition, he undertakes a series of protests against their treatment of barbarian prisoners and ends up a prisoner himself.  Eventually they enact a sort of faux crucifixion, in which he is strung from a tree, suspended by a rope through his arms and wearing a salt-bag hood.  But they do not allow him to die, and in the aftermath of this incident, he asks Joll's successor Mandel:

    'Have you a minute to spare?' I say.  We stand in the gateway, with the guard in the background
    pretending not to hear.  I say : 'I am not a young man any more, and whatever future I had in this
    place is in ruins.'  I gesture around the square, at the dust that scuds before the hot late summer
    wind, bringer of blights and plagues.  'Also I have already died one death, on that tree, only you
    decided to save me.  So there is something I would like to know before I go.  If it is not too late.,
    with the barbarians at the gate.'  I feel the tiniest smile of mockery brush my lips, I cannot help it.
    I glance up at the empty sky.  'Forgive me if the question seems impudent, but I would like to ask :
    How do you find it possible to eat afterwards, after you have been...working with people?  That is a
    question I have always asked myself about executioners and other such people.  Wait!  Listen to me
    a moment longer, I am sincere, it has cost me a great deal to come out with this, since I am terrified
    of you, I need not tell you that, I am sure you are aware of it.  Do you find it easy to take food
    afterwards?  I have imagined that one would want to wash one's hands.  But no ordinary washing
    would be enough, one would require priestly intervention, a ceremonial of cleansing, don't you
    think?  Some kind of purging of one's soul too--that is how I have imagined it.  Otherwise how
    would it be possible to return to everyday life--to sit down at table, for instance, and break bread
    with one's family or one's comrades.'

    He turns away, but with a slow claw-like hand I manage to catch his arm..  'No listen!'  I say.  'Do
    not misunderstand me, I am not blaming you or accusing you, I am long past that.  Remember, I
    too have devoted a life to the law, I know its processes, I know that the workings of justice are
    often obscure.  I am only trying to understand.  I am trying to understand the zone in which you
    live.  I am trying to imagine how you breathe and eat and live from day to day.  But I cannot!  That
    is what troubles me!  If I were he, I say to myself, my hands would feel so dirty that it would choke
    me--'

    He wrenches himself free and hits me so hard in the chest that I gasp and stumble backwards.  'You
    bastard!' he shouts.  'You f****** old lunatic! Get out!  Go and die somewhere!'

    'When are you going to put me on trial?'  I shout at his retreating back.  He pays no heed.

But the Magistrate never is put on trial and when the Empire's expeditionary force disappears reprisals against captured barbarians begin.  The Magistrate, now free to wander the town, witnesses some of these actions:

    I stand in the road waiting for the quivering of rage in me to subside.  I think of a young peasant
    who was once brought before me in the days when I had jurisdiction over the garrison.  He had
    been committed to the army for three years by a magistrate in a far-off town for stealing chickens.
    After a month here he tried to desert.  He was caught and brought before me.  He wanted to see his
    mother and his sisters again, he said.  'We cannot do just as we wish,' I lectured him.  'We are all
    subject to the law, which is greater than any of us.  The magistrate who sent you here, I myself,
    you--we are all subject to the law.'  He looked at me with dull eyes, waiting to hear the punishment,
    his two stolid escorts behind him, his hands manacled behind his back.  'You feel that is is unjust, I
    know, that you should be punished for having the feelings of a good son.  You think you know
    what is just and what is not.  I understand.  We all think we know."  I had no doubt, myself, then,
    that at each moment each one of us, man, woman, child, perhaps even the poor old horse turning the
    mill-wheel, knew what was just : all creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory
    of justice.  'But we live in a world of laws,' I said to my poor prisoner, 'a world of the second-best.
    There is nothing we can do about that.  We are fallen creatures.  All we can do is to uphold the
    laws, all of us, without allowing the memory of justice to fade.'  After lecturing him I sentenced
    him.  He accepted the sentence without murmur and his escort marched him away.  I remember the
    uneasy shame I felt on days like that.  I would leave the courtroom and return to my apartment and
    sit in the rockingchair in the dark all evening, without appetite, until it was time to go to bed.
    'When some men suffer unjustly,' I said to myself, 'it is the fate of those who witness their suffering
    to suffer the shame of it.'  But the specious consolation of this thought could not comfort me.  I
    toyed more than once with the idea of resigning my post, retiring from public life, buying a small
    market garden.  But then, I thought, someone else will be appointed to bear the shame of office,
    and nothing will have changed.  So I continued in my duties until one day events overtook me.

Ultimately, with the Expeditionary Force lost, the men of the Third Bureau withdraw from town too and the Magistrate takes charge once more.  As the book ends, the town sits, a quiet backwater once again, waiting for the barbarians to come.

The imagery, archetypes and situations which Coetzee uses to form his allegory are fairly obvious : the Empire stands for Afrikaner-ruled South Africa; the barbarians are the blacks of South Africa; the Magistrate, as evidenced by the ritual ablutions he performs, his time in the desert and his near crucifixion, is a Christ figure; and the Empire's officials, as evident in the final passage above, are as much prisoners of the repressive system of laws as are the barbarians.  But it strikes me, reading the book twenty years after it was first published, how much the story depends on the reader to insert, South Africa, Apartheid, Afrikaners, blacks, etc. into the structure of the allegory in order for it to work.  Taken purely on it's own terms, the book is somehow too detached from the subjects under discussion to have too powerful an effect on us.  In some ways it just inhuman.  Other than the Magistrate, none of the characters seem more than caricatures.  The Empire is so distant and the barbarians so mysterious that we have no basis on which to judge the rival cultures.  Of course, we all find torture and repression repellent, but even such horrific methods may be a lesser evil than the system which the oppressed would impose were they to triumph over the oppressor.

The final impact of the novel then is paradoxical.  Where allegory typically universalizes a story, here it particularizes the tale.  It succeeds as an extended meditation on the moral obligations of an individual, especially an official,  who is uncomfortable about his nation's legal system and opposes the techniques used by his government.  It evens succeeds in convincing us that the Empire is making a mistake in torturing these victims.  But overall the story is so divorced from reality and has so few characters who resemble our fellow human beings that it has very little general applicability to the broader world outside the covers of the book.

Perhaps the best comparison is to George Orwell's magnificent short story, Shooting an Elephant.  Orwell takes one entirely specific, seemingly insignificant incident and convinces us that a system, Colonialism, which would require that he shoot an elephant merely in order to perpetuate the system itself, is perforce illegitimate.  He brilliantly extracts a universal message out of particular circumstances.  It's hardly fair to judge another author against such an exacting standard as George Orwell, but Coetzee's novel does conspicuously fail to achieve this kind of universality.

(Reviewed:27-Aug-00)

Grade: (B-) Orrin C. Judd

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