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

Shadi Neimneh

The Hashemite University

Professor Shadi S. Neimneh teaches undergraduate and graduate literature courses with a focus on Anglo-American and European modernism as well as different manifestations of literary theory. He has published profusely on modernist literature and South African fiction. Examples of influential publications include: "African American Satire and Harlem Renaissance Literary Politics" in American Studies Today(2013), "The Anti-Hero in Modernist Fiction: From Irony to Cultural Renewal" in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature  (2013),  "Thematics of Interracial Violence in Selected Harlem Renaissance Novels" in Papers on Language and Literature  (2014), “The Visceral Allegory of Waiting for the Barbarians: A Post-Modern Rereading of J. M. Coetzee’s Apartheid Novels" in Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora (2014),  and “Autofiction and Fictionalization: J. M. Coetzee's Novels and Boyhood" in Transnational Literature  (2015).   

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3041-5306

Abstract

This article interrogates the humanist discourse in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), negotiating the intersections between the novel’s 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 distancing 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.

Keywords:

J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, humanist discourse, ethics, public intellectualism, Edward Said