English Literature for Lycée: J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
Œuvre au programme de lecture de l'épreuve orale d'anglais, langue de complément LV1, en série littéraire, pour l'examen du baccalauréat général, sessions 2005 et 2006
"a story first and foremost about love and unspoken forgiveness... What is a surprise, however, is the compassion Coetzee shows his victims and villains alike" Chris Switzer
"a startling allegory of the war between opressor and opressed."
"A stark political fable of South Africa" New York Times
Waiting for the Barbarians was a set text for the Agrégation and CAPES d'anglais in 1993!
The title and situation
Coetzee took the title for his book from the eponymous poem (which alludes to decadence and change (source) by the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933).
"Waiting for the Barbarians" by C Cavafy.
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?Because the barbarians are coming today
And they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
Everyone going home so lost in thought?Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
There are no barbarians any longer.And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
Trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
Selected online resources
Review of WFTB by Chris Switzer of Turtleneck.
Review from the New York Times in 1982 (Free Registration required).
"Mr. Coetzee tells the story of an imaginary Empire, set in an unspecified place and time, yet recognizable as a 'universalized' version of South Africa . . . The result is a realistic fable, at once stark, exciting and economical."
"A good writing activity would be to have the students rewrite the story from another point of view. "
Essay - "The Triangulation of Otherness" by Martina Aronssen. The self and the other and an analysis of the three main characters: the girl, the Magistrate and Colonel Joll.
Article at Questia Online Library "The Presence of Absence: Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians" by Lance Olsen (Subscription required).
Article at The Journal of Student Writing "Turning the Screw: Sex, Torture and Fetishism as Experiential Allegory in J.M.Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians" by Johnathan Dewar:
"Most of the criticism on J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians centres on the allegorical possibilities of the novel, and while this approach is indeed useful and perhaps even the ultimate point on Coetzee's part, very little attention has been paid to the overt sexuality and eroticism of the novel outside of the metaphorical roles these issues play within the allegorical whole or wholes..."
Interpretive analysis of the magistrate's dreams.
Biography of J.M. Coetzee.
Wikipedia page on John Maxwell Coetzee.
Overview - The Republic of South Africa. Useful page from Postcolonial web.
Idea: Consider WFTB and The Tempest by William Shakespeare. Can we compare the Magistrate to Prospero and the blind girl to Caliban?