5
Barbarism in Repetition
LITERATURE’S WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS
The reign of independent barbarism is now contracted to a narrow span; and the remnant of Calmucks or Uzbecks, whose forces may be almost numbered, cannot seriously excite the apprehensions of the great republic of Europe. Yet this apparent security should not tempt us to forget that new enemies and unknown dangers may possibly arise from some obscure people, scarcely visible in the map of the world.
—Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Reflecting on the second half of the eighteenth century, English historian Edward Gibbon points out that the barbarians, as they were known in Roman times, have disappeared. Nevertheless, he does not believe that the “great republic of Europe”—seen as the domain of civilization—should rest assured. The barbarian threat to civilization is always there in “scarcely visible,” “obscure people” (1912, 177). Their invisibility continues to tantalize the civilized imagination and to foster their myth.
Barbarian enemies—so the legends tell us—do not confront the troops of the civilized world on the battlefield. Barbarians are not supposed to have a fixed location, as they hardly ever lead a sedentary lifestyle. They are believed to be somewhere “out there”: nomads, roaming vast deserts and steppes; warriors, passing through untrodden mountains; people free from constraints and moral inhibitions, acting on their desires, instincts, and passions—wild, violent, untamable; with monstrous features and strange, inhuman customs; dangerous, dreadful, captivating. Their threat is that of an invasion from the outside into domestic territory, which would violently disrupt a prosperous society and bring about civilization’s regression to a primitive, barbaric state. The arrival of barbarians at the gates of civilization is often cast in apocalyptic scenarios engaging civilized humanity as a whole (White 1972, 20). “Waiting for the Barbarians” (Περιμένοντας τους βαρβάρους, 1904), a poem by the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, and the novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) by South African author J. M. Coetzee, both unravel around the anticipation of such an invasion, which never takes place.
The barbarian operations that take center stage in this chapter are enabled by the demonstrative repetition of foundational categories of civilization. I have probed the implications of Benjamin’s use of another name for barbarism (Barbarentum), which slightly modifies the common German term (Barbarei) in order to redirect its violence toward a new project. Here, I show how Cavafy’s poem and Coetzee’s novel stick to the conventional categories—“barbarian,” “barbarism”—and try to revise them by repeating them into new meanings and effects.
The key concept in this comparative reading of Cavafy’s poem and Coetzee’s novel is repetition. First, repetition takes the form of intertextuality and allegorization. The second concern is how the words barbarism and barbarian can be repeated into new senses in the space of literature and redeployed in ways that create confusion in their established uses.
The concept of repetition here is also linked with two other concepts: “history” and “allegory.” Cavafy’s and Coetzee’s works reiterate history’s categories in order to perform another kind of history in literature.1 Many critics have tried to capture the works’ relation to history by allegorizing them. Some critics view either the poem or the novel as a universal allegory of the human condition. Others undertake a historically rooted and contextual interpretation. Although I briefly discuss universalist and historicist allegorizations of both works, I propose another mode of reading, which I call “barbarian allegory.” Through the concept of barbarian allegory I envision an alternative approach to history, actualized in the space of literature.
Finally, drawing from Jacques Derrida’s and Judith Butler’s views on performativity and on the possibility for alteration through repetition, I probe the workings of the repetitive use of the term “barbarian” in Cavafy’s and Coetzee’s texts. Through this repetition, the poem and the novel try to shape ground for a new relationality between self and other, beyond the oppositional thinking of “civilized versus barbarian.”
The title of this chapter can be read in two ways: it refers to the repetition of the name “barbarian” in literature and to a potential reconceptualization of history and historical categories through literature; and it denotes the constructive barbarism that potentially lies in the operation of repetition itself. In the latter sense, “barbarian operations” can take effect through the repetition of normative and familiar categories in slightly different or subversive ways. Repetition is, after all, inherent in the term “barbarian,” which is etymologically grounded in the perception of the other’s language as a series of repetitive sounds (“bar bar”).
In probing the issue of repetition, I take my cue from the theory of the performative (or speech act theory), which is employed here in its initial conception by J. L. Austin (1962), and particularly in the direction it takes in the poststructuralist thought of Jacques Derrida as a general theory of iterability and in Judith Butler’s theory of gender and subject constitution.2 Austin’s theory of the performative focuses on the aspect of language that performs the act it designates instead of just representing, describing, or stating a fact. This describes the performative, as opposed to the constative, aspect of an utterance.3 Although literary theorists extensively use his theory, Austin’s account explicitly excludes literature from consideration. Literature for him is language used “not seriously” and “in ways parasitic upon its normal use.” For Austin, performative utterances can be studied only when issued in “ordinary circumstances” and in “serious” uses (1980, 22).
In his version of the performative, laid out in “Signature, Event, Context” (1972) and Limited Inc (1988), Derrida takes up Austin’s views but underscores the iterability and citationality of any mark as the condition of possibility for any performative utterance.4 Contrary to Austin, Derrida deconstructs the opposition between “citational utterances” and “singular” or “original” utterances (1982, 326). The citation of an utterance is the condition for the singular to take place. For Derrida, this general iterability is a law of language: for a sign to be a sign, it has to be able to be repeated and cited, even in what Austin calls “non-serious” circumstances, like literature (Culler 2000, 509). As a result, literature, which Austin considers non-serious, parasitic language because it is a form of citation of “normal” language, becomes an exemplary case for Derrida’s theory of the general iterability of signs. “Iterability” does not just signify identical repetition—“repeatability of the same”—but “alter-ability of this same idealized in the singularity of the event, for instance, in this or that speech act” (Derrida 1988, 119). In this sense, iterability makes sure that concepts, utterances, or marks in general are never “safe” from contamination and change (119). The repetition of a concept makes its alteration possible.
Butler extends this view beyond language to address the constitution of subjects through the citation and repetition of norms. According to Butler, we become subjects through repeated acts, which reflect social conventions, norms, and habits. The citation of norms is thus constitutive of subjects. As she argues in Bodies That Matter (1993) and in Excitable Speech (1997a), the repetition of certain utterances in the social world enhances dominant discourses and their central categories. However, this also means that dominant discourses depend on the repetition of utterances and are thus not self-sufficient. If norms are fortified only insofar as they are reiterated, then the repetition of normative categories could lead to the destabilization of authoritative discourses by producing a citation that challenges the force of the norm (1993, 14–15). The possibility of resistance and change lies in the limited space between the norm and the way it is carried out, which is not always according to expectation. As I argue, in Cavafy’s and Coetzee’s works, the destabilization of the category of the barbarian comes about through its stubborn citation, which aspires to produce difference in repetition.
Because the force of normative categories is grounded in their repetitive use in different places and moments in time, they have a strong historical dimension. However, their historical force remains tied to their repetitive uses in each present. As Jonathan Culler notes in his discussion of Butler’s views, “You can’t control the terms that you choose to name yourselves. But the historical character of the performative process creates the possibility of a political struggle” (2000, 515). Here, I show how such a struggle can take place within literature.
Repeating the Title
Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians” is staged in a decadent city, not historically defined, but with allusions to Rome.5 Diana Haas and George Savidis suggest that Cavafy’s main historiographical source for this poem was Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which Cavafy was reading at the time.6 The poem is structured as a dialogue—a person (designated here as “the first speaker”) poses a series of questions and another person (“the second speaker”) answers them. The questions concern the commotion and preparations the city is making, the reason for which the first speaker wishes to know. The answer to all his questions is the same, repeated again and again, with slight variations and additions: “Because the barbarians are coming today.” The reader and the first speaker are therefore informed that everyone is preparing to receive the barbarians, who are coming to take over the city:
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 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.
(1904; translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard [1992, 18–19])
Due to its dialogic form the poem is easily imagined as a stage performance. In fact, there are two levels of staging in the poem embedded within each other. While the speakers stage a dialogue in front of the readers’ audience, an elaborate stage is being set within the poem by the citizens, the emperor, the senators, consuls, praetors, and orators, anticipating the real actors (the barbarians) to rush onto the city’s stage.
Like the poem, Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians is situated in an undefined town and period. The Magistrate, who narrates the story, is peacefully doing his job in a small town at the edge of the “Empire.” The advent of Colonel Joll, a functionary of the “Third Bureau,” disrupts the tranquility of his life and brings him face-to-face with the brutal reality of the Empire. Colonel Joll arrives to collect information about “barbarians” supposedly planning attacks against the Empire and causing border troubles. The absurdity of Joll’s enterprise becomes obvious when he captures, interrogates, tortures, and imprisons a large group of native fishing people who have nothing to do with any barbarian attacks. From then on, the Magistrate refuses to cooperate with the Empire and its practitioners. He eventually ends up in prison and is tortured after being wrongly accused of treason. He is released again when the people of the Third Bureau leave the town. The barbarian invasion the Empire so much feared does not take place, and the Empire’s expeditionary force sent to confront the barbarians is dispersed in the desert and disappears without ever reaching the enemy.
Coetzee borrows the title of Cavafy’s poem and thereby acknowledges it as the novel’s pre-text. Both works can be placed within a broader intertextual network that engages the theme of waiting for the arrival of the other. This topos has been staged in a series of literary works, from Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe (Il deserto dei Tartari, 1938) to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot, 1952) and Julien Gracq’s The Opposing Shore (Le rivage des Syrtes, 1951).7
To these works one can add several poems that converse with Cavafy’s barbarians. Extending over more than ten countries, these poems either respond directly to Cavafy’s poem and the questions it poses or borrow its dialogic structure and appropriate it for contemporary situations.8 Examples in the latter category are American poet James Merrill’s “After Cavafy,” where the role of the barbarians is filled by the Japanese; Richard O’Connell’s “Waiting for the Terrorists,” which takes over the dialogic structure of Cavafy’s poem to address the events following the attacks on September 11, 2001;9 Serbian poet Jovan Christić’s “Varvari”; and Alistair Te Ariki Campbell’s “Waiting for the Pakeha,” a poem from New Zealand, in which the natives are waiting for the European settlers.10
Coetzee’s novel is perhaps the best-known restaging of Cavafy’s poem in literature. What is the function of the demonstrative announcement of the poem as the novel’s main intertext by the adoption of the same title? In the poem’s title, the progressive form of the verb points out the lack of closure in the process of waiting. It is a process without end, as the advent of the object of waiting does not take place in the poem and is eternally deferred. In the novel, the barbarians also fail to arrive. In both cases, the title fails to fulfill its implicit promise: to produce the barbarians as presences. In breaking this promise, the title becomes an anaphora, which, according to Shoshana Felman’s definition, is an “act of beginning ceaselessly renewed through the repetition of promises not carried out, not kept” (2003, 24). It is because the title does not keep its promise that this promise can be renewed.11 The anaphora of Cavafy’s title keeps reproducing its promise in an array of texts and cultural objects that bear the same title, some of which will also be discussed further.
Iterability, Derrida argues, suggests that the full presence of a text—as an absolute correspondence between the text and its meaning—is never attained (1988, 129). The intention of a text never reaches its telos, because the text keeps referring to something else that slips away. An intention, like a promise, ceases to exist as soon as it is realized. The topos of “waiting for the barbarians” exemplifies this law of iterability as the promise of full presence deferred by means of repeating itself. The barbarians’ arrival is never actualized, and its promise can therefore be renewed through its repetition in other forms and contexts.
The iteration of the title of Cavafy’s poem in Coetzee’s novel results in a new event. This event stands as a challenge to the poem, testing the Cavafian theme in different spatial and temporal coordinates. Therefore, Coetzee’s repetition of Cavafy’s title invites us both to explore the echoes of the poem in the novel and to reread the poem through the experience of the novel.
The Ambivalence of the Speaking Voice
Although Cavafy and Coetzee are situated in very different contexts, their position is marked by a certain ambivalence, which infiltrates the speaking voice in both the poem and the novel. Coetzee’s writing is caught up in the ambivalence that characterizes oppositional white South African writing. While trying to interrogate the binary divisions of apartheid society, white writing is inevitably caught up in them. As a result, it is simultaneously implicated in, and opposed to, the hegemonic oppression of colonialism (Kossew 1996, 2, 7). This ambivalence haunts the position of most protagonists in Coetzee’s novels, as well as Coetzee’s own position as an author.
In a different but somewhat parallel way, Cavafy also occupied an ambivalent position. Originally Greek but living in Egypt, being part of the Greek community in Alexandria and having to work in the service of the British Empire in order to earn a living, Cavafy was caught amid conflicting worlds. Due to his complex position, he remained a marginal figure all his life—a marginality enhanced by his homosexuality. A Greek, a European, and a Levantine at the same time, he was, as Martin McKinsey has called him, “a civilized barbarian” (2000, 42).
Ambivalence and oscillation between belonging and not-belonging mark the speaking voices in the poem and the novel. The position of the first speaker in the poem is quite obscure. The use of the first-person plural in his questions about the city situates him as a member of the community—a citizen of the city. However, his complete ignorance about what is happening places him outside the spectrum of knowledge to which an insider would normally have access.12
The first speaker’s storm of questions can be attributed to sincere ignorance with regard to the reasons for the commotion. Nevertheless, one can also read in these questions an inquisitive spirit that refuses to passively wait for the barbarians and uncritically assist in the preparations, but interrogates the official course of action, seeks the underlying reasons for the city’s frenzy, and questions the rationale of the enterprise of waiting to receive the barbarians. The speaker’s questions can be read as a critique of the city’s strange resignation and inertia. In this case, with a question such as “Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?,” the speaker implies that the senate should be more active in times like these.
If the role of the first speaker is to question, the role of the second is to validate the Empire’s voice by repeating its official statements in a mechanical way and spreading its propaganda. He is the Empire’s parrot. Both the arrival of the barbarians and the city’s attitude to their arrival are taken for granted in his replies, which do not betray any signs of doubt.
The repetitive structure of the dialogue, built up as a succession of “why-because” questions and answers, accelerates the rhythmical dynamics of the poem by creating staccato. The iambic meter in the Greek text enhances this rhythmical structure.13 However, while the structure of the dialogue conveys a sense of anxiety (the heat of the preparations), it simultaneously has a reassuring function, since it turns the poem into a perfectly rational composition: to every question, the voice of civilization (the second speaker) has a clear answer, repeated no less than four times: “Because the barbarians are coming today.” The almost hypnotic effect of this repetition leaves no room for doubting the logic of the answer: the barbarians are coming, and they are the remedy to the predicament of a decaying civilization. The repetition of the reply illustrates the mechanism by which the discourse of civilization sustains itself: it cultivates the illusion of rationality and normalizes its truths by overstating them through repetition.
Nevertheless, the poem’s perfectly rational and symmetrical structure collapses in the end. The nonarrival of the barbarians deprives civilization of the only answer it seemed to have and disempowers the second speaker. In light of this nonarrival, suddenly the mechanical repetition of his answer sounds like the stuttering utterances of a barbarian, whose language is perceived as a continuous repetition of the same meaningless sound: “bar bar.” His speech loses its ground and status.
Like the first speaker in the poem, the Magistrate in Coetzee’s novel is an insider of the Empire, but not quite. Living as he does in a convenient state of ignorance and tranquility, he gradually enters a state of uncertainty and doubt. He ceases to believe in the truths of colonialist discourse and takes an oppositional stance. He realizes, however, that switching sides is not merely a matter of free will, because he cannot avoid his complicity with the discourse of the Empire. As Butler argues, subjects are constituted through social norms and discursive practices (1993, 7). For Butler, there is no voluntarist, intentional subject who “exists quite apart from the regulatory norms which he/she opposes” (15). “The paradox of subjectivation,” Butler’s argument continues, is “precisely that the subject who would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms” (15). This captures the Magistrate’s predicament. The authoritative discourse of the Empire, within which the Magistrate has been shaped as a subject, is not something he can discard at will, as it is not external to his subjectivity. Caught up in a position where he can neither belong to the oppressors nor to the oppressed, his narrative becomes a battlefield of conflicting discourses.
When Colonel Joll’s native prisoners are brought in, the Magistrate sympathizes with them but at the same time watches them from a condescending distance. He does not want them to stay long or return: “I do not want a race of beggars on my hands” (Coetzee 2000, 20). His sympathy soon gives way to impatience and indignation at “their animal shamelessness,” “the filth, the smell, the noise” (20–21). His voice is replete with contradictions and immersed in the discursive violence of the Empire, even when he wishes to counter it. Later in the novel he views the same features he himself had attributed to these natives as a result of “the settlers’ litany of prejudice: that barbarians are lazy, immoral, filthy, stupid” (41, emphasis added). What he had previously taken as a fact he now regards as a biased and unfair opinion, based on the colonizers’ partial judgment.
Once doubt creeps into the Magistrate’s life, however, the certainties of his former life as a blissfully ignorant colonizer are irrevocably shaken. Nevertheless, even when he questions the Empire’s practices, he often contradicts his own critical statements and doubts his actions. After delivering a sermon against the Empire’s injustice toward “the barbarians” (the natives), he cannot help asking himself: “And do I really after all believe what I have been saying? Do I really look forward to the triumph of the barbarian way: intellectual torpor, slovenliness, tolerance of disease and death?” (56).
The Magistrate is not freed from the colonizer’s instincts. He takes obsessive care of a barbarian girl tortured and made lame and blind by Colonel Joll, and then left behind by her own people. His care, however, does not fundamentally differ from the practices of her torturer: “I behave in some ways like a lover—I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her—but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her” (46). In fondling and kissing her wounds, he recognizes the drive to engrave himself on her as deeply as her torturers did. Soon enough he realizes that he and Joll are different sides of the same coin: “For I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent, pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow. Two sides of Imperial rule, no more, no less” (148–49). It is no coincidence that the novel begins with a description of Colonel Joll’s sunglasses, in which the narrator sees a reflection of himself.
In the barbarian girl the Magistrate sees the possibility of making contact with the other. Nevertheless, his approach is not free of the logic of understanding as penetrating and deciphering, typical of the colonial attitude toward the colonized: “Until the marks on this girl’s body are deciphered and understood I cannot let go of her” (33). Her body, however, is impenetrable, “without aperture, without entry” (45). Despite the Magistrate’s attempts, the girl remains an unsolved mystery, a stranger.
The girl’s blindness makes it impossible for him to exist in her gaze. His gaze cannot be reciprocated, because in her eyes he sees only his own image cast back at him (47). According to Émile Benveniste, subjectivity is produced in the here and now of an utterance. As a result, the “I” cannot just dictate its truths but needs the “you” to sustain its authority and allow it to speak (1966, 225–36). Therefore, the girl’s refusal to validate the Magistrate’s speech with a response leads the Magistrate to a self-crisis. As Gayatri Spivak argues in her commentary on the novel, “The meaning of his [the Magistrate’s] own acts is not clear when he tries to imagine her perspective” (2003, 22). As he continues “to swoop and circle around the irreducible figure of the girl,” the meaning he is after, according to Spivak, is “the meaning of the Magistrate as subject, as perceived by the barbarian as other.”14 The girl refuses to yield any determinable meaning through which the Magistrate could articulate his own subjectivity through the other’s perspective. Struck by the inability of his language to translate the girl, he starts doubting the signifying capacity of his own language and considers that “perhaps whatever can be articulated is falsely put” (Coetzee 2000, 70). Nevertheless, her untranslatability holds the promise of another language, different from the Empire’s fixed set of meanings.
Although the girl is generally cooperative, she speaks only in order to give brief answers on practical matters or to communicate factual information. In response to the Magistrate’s inquiries about her torture, she gives him only a strictly factual account of what happened (44). She never gives away emotions; she offers no indication of her desires, wishes, or feelings toward the Magistrate and her torturers; she asks no questions; and she never embellishes her utterances with anything other than facts. The Magistrate perceives her attitude and speech as uncommunicative. There is something ironic in the way the rational speech of a barbarian—devoid of emotions, interpretations, and biased opinions—clashes with the confused, stuttering, self-canceling speech of the Magistrate—the speech of the civilized. Their communicational gap is experienced as such by both sides. She has as little understanding of him as he does of her. “You want to talk all the time,” she complains when the Magistrate tells her about his hunting experience; “you should not go hunting if you do not enjoy it” (43–44). Disillusioned by their miscommunication, the Magistrate shakes his head: “That is not the meaning of the story, but what’s the use of arguing?” (44). In their interaction, the distinction between civilized and barbarian is transfigured into a difference between two foreign subjectivities, two barbarians, neither of whom makes sense to the other.
The girl causes the Magistrate’s narrative to stutter and stumble. He fails to make any confident statement about her, as her subjectivity remains inaccessible—“what I call submission may be nothing but indifference” (60). The girl interrupts the flow of his speech and leads it to dead ends and unresolved question marks. His language turns into the stuttering speech of the barbarian.
However, despite his failure to unfold the mystery of the girl, the Magistrate does not end up imposing his own voice on her in the same way that the Empire constructs its others on its own terms. As Spivak argues, the Magistrate “tries to grasp the barbarian in an embrace that is both singular and responsible” (2003, 21–22). He waits for the girl to talk about her experience in the torture chamber and doesn’t make up his own story about her. Despite his willingness to make contact with her, he does not force her into it. He thereby shows his willingness to live with the other, without having access to her subjectivity.
The “waiting” of the novel’s title could also refer to the process of waiting for the other to speak without using words that others have chosen for her. Therefore, the girl’s silence grants her a form of agency. By refusing to let her tortured body be translated into language, she prevents the violence that the Empire’s categorizations would impose on her story (Wenzel 1996, 66). Only in the desert, where the Magistrate takes her to return her to her people, she willingly sleeps with him for the first and last time.15 The desert—a neutral, formless space outside the Empire’s borders—erases with dust and wind the violence of imperial categories. Away from the borders of imperial discourse, the girl comes to him on her own terms.
Perhaps the closest the Magistrate comes to her, even though she is no longer physically with him, is when he becomes a victim of torture himself. When his status suddenly changes from that of a respected official to that of an enemy of the state, the Magistrate is imprisoned, tortured, and humiliated. As soon as he enters this new state of being—from a colonizer to a tortured victim—the Empire cannot understand his voice anymore. For the Empire and its practitioners, everyone who produces meaning alien to their language is reduced to a barbarian. Listening to his howls of pain, the Magistrate’s torturers scornfully remark: “He is calling his barbarian friends.” One of them adds: “This is barbarian language you hear” (Coetzee 2000, 133). The scene evokes the etymology of the “barbarian,” based on the perception of the other’s language as nonsensical sounds.
The Magistrate does not embody the position of the barbarian in the same way the natives or the barbarian girl do—the Empire’s designated others. His barbarization partly answers to his own desire to redeem himself and achieve what he was not able to achieve in his relationship with the girl. Unable to domesticate her otherness from his position as “civilized,” he may be trying to achieve that by becoming the Empire’s other. The status of the barbarian is usually violently imposed on others, but at times it can be willingly assumed or claimed.16 The tagging of the natives as “barbarians” takes place independently of the natives’ wills. They become silent objects on which the discursive violence of civilization is exerted. They are the real site of otherness in the novel—an otherness exemplified in the barbarian girl. The Magistrate’s barbarian status is partly imposed externally and partly self-assumed. It is the result of a dislocation that, according to Rebecca Saunders, “allows him to conceive of himself as other and to become foreign to the identity mapped out for him by historical circumstances” (2001, 223). His attempt to make himself the Empire’s enemy, I contend, may reflect his wish to put himself on equal footing with the girl but also to cleanse himself, as it were, from the guilt of her torturers, which is also his own. His (self-)barbarization is both a brave act of opposition and a selfish act of personal redemption.
His barbarian status should thus be distinguished from the barbarian labeling of those others, upon which a discourse foreign to them is inflicted. The Magistrate is an exponent of the self-proclaimed civilized world and wishes to become barbarian in order to oppose the Empire’s practices and fend off his complicity with these practices. The girl and her people—proclaimed barbarians by the Empire—are fishing people and nomads who (possibly) just wish to be fishing people and nomads.
Both the novel and the poem end with a sense of disillusionment and uncertainty, without any revelation that restores meaning and presence. The Magistrate tries to make sense of several signs throughout his narrative. However, all the signs that seem pregnant with meaning remain undeciphered—just as the girl does. No apocalyptic vision endows his actions with meaning. In the final scene of the novel he sees a child playing with snow, who appears to be the child he has often been dreaming of—one of the signs he so eagerly wanted to decode. For a moment, the expectation is raised in him (and in the reader) that at least the meaning of this sign will be disclosed. The last lines of the novel, however, seal the failure of this expectation: “This is not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere” (Coetzee 2000, 170).
Cavafy’s poem does not offer closure either. The only answer is encompassed in the ambiguous statement that views the barbarians as “a kind of solution” (emphasis added). The lack of certainty in these words corresponds to the final words in Coetzee’s novel: “a road that may lead nowhere” (emphasis added). The final lines in Cavafy are an attempt to cling to the previous order—an attempt, however, severely weakened by the doubt contained in the words “kind of.” “A kind of solution” translates in fact to “no solution.” “A kind of” reaffirms the shaky ground on which this statement is made, and it is hardly convincing. In Coetzee, the “road that may lead nowhere” signals the terrifying openness of the future, when the “truths” that sustain the Empire are debunked. This road may lead to an impasse. However, the word “may” leaves open the possibility of envisaging a different path, a “solution” beyond binary oppositions and enemies constructed for the sake of self-definition.
What Figures between Literature and History
The uncertainty and resistance to closure that the poem and the novel share contrast them with what we could call “history,” which is the discursive field wherein the opposition between barbarism and civilization takes center stage. The distinction between fiction and history has been adequately contested by postmodern literary theorists and by historians such as Hayden White, as well as by Michel Foucault’s influential work, which has projected history as one discourse among others.17 Nevertheless, many historians are still, as Derrida remarks, “naïvely concerned to ‘objectify’ the content of a science” (1992, 55). I see “history” here as a strictly regulated discourse, which, according to Felman, prefers clear-cut choices and binary distinctions (2003, 100). While history prefers sharp distinctions and clear-cut categories, literature, in Spivak’s view, “relativizes the categories history assigns, and exposes the processes that construct and position subjects” (Spivak, presented in Scott 1991, 791).
Coetzee addresses the relation of the novel to history in his essay “The Novel Today”: “In times of intense ideological pressure like the present . . . the novel, it seems to me, has only two options: supplementarity or rivalry” (1988, 3). The novel that chooses rivalry “evolves its own paradigms and myths, in the process . . . perhaps going so far as to show up the mythic status of history . . . a novel that is prepared to work itself out outside the terms of class conflict, race conflict, gender conflict or any of the other oppositions out of which history and the historical disciplines erect themselves” (3). The kind of novel Coetzee describes here is not ahistorical. As David Atwell remarks, “To decline the politics of historical discourses does not necessarily involve ahistoricism” (1990, 588). Coetzee reacts against the “colonization of the novel by the discourse of history” rather than pleads for a disengagement of literature from history (1988, 3).
The real challenge, in my view, is not to show that history is just fiction or to collapse the distinction between history and literature altogether but to articulate the difference of these discourses without posing an absolute dichotomy between them. This would encourage new readings (or even modes of writing) of history within literature. This is a challenge that Cavafy’s poem and, especially, Coetzee’s novel undertake.
The Magistrate in Coetzee’s novel aspires to be a historian. After his experience of torture, he has a burning desire to write the history of the events he witnessed in a way that will expose the Empire’s crimes and unveil the truth. However, he acknowledges his inability to write a history that would account both for his aversion to and complicity with the Empire (Wenzel 1996, 9). This history would inevitably be written in the discourse that the Empire developed to spread its own truth. Trying to find a way out of this predicament, the Magistrate starts his “historical account” in the mode of a fairy tale: “No one who paid a visit to this oasis . . . failed to be struck by the charm of life here” (Coetzee 2000, 168–69). His account is imbued with romantic nostalgia for a past way of life and the desire to escape from historical time. He wishes to return to a world before history, because he realizes that “Empire has created the time of history” (146). This colonization of history by the Empire makes it impossible for him to write a history that would do justice to the Empire’s victims. He says, “I think: I wanted to live outside history. I wanted to live outside the history that the Empire imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects. I never wished it for the barbarians that they should have the history of Empire laid upon them. How can I believe that that is cause for shame?” (169).
For a moment, his flight to a prehistorical world seems the easy way out of his entrapment in the imperial matrix. However, his overall position in the novel contradicts his momentary desire for a flight from history. From the beginning he states his intention to stay within history and put up his fight: “I struggle on with the old story, hoping that before it is finished it will reveal to me why it was that I thought it worth the trouble” (26).
Cavafy’s poetry is immersed in history. Remarkably, Cavafy had expressed his historiographical impulse: “I am a historical poet; I could never write a novel or a play, but I feel 125 voices in me telling me that I could write history” (Lechonitis 1977, 19–20).18 This history writing takes place within his poems. His poetry flirts with historiographical conventions and employs techniques intended to enhance the historicity of what is enacted in the poems.19 At the same time, the kind of history his poetry performs decenters hegemonic historical accounts in order to illuminate alternative perspectives, marginalized and forgotten characters or events, and obscure or peripheral eras and places.20
“Waiting for the Barbarians” is usually counted among Cavafy’s “historical poems,” even though it lacks explicit spatial and temporal markers. Many interpretations use it as a key alluding to specific historical events. Some critics have tried to establish connections between the poem and contemporary events in Greece or Egypt, where Cavafy lived. Stratis Tsirkas, for example, has argued that the events in the poem reflect recent events in Egypt at the time the poem was written.21 These events—if we assume they formed a source of inspiration for the poem—reveal another connection between the poem and the novel, as they place the poem in the context of colonialism. According to this interpretation, the people waiting for the barbarians are the people of Egypt, including the foreign communities in the country. These people wanted to be saved from “civilization”—the British Empire, which had ruled Egypt since 1878. The disappearance of the barbarians in the poem alludes to the British army’s brutal crushing of the Mahdist uprising in 1898—an Islamic revolt that threatened British power.22 Thus, the barbarians in the poem refer to the Mahdists, who no longer existed after their defeat.
Cavafy’s poem has thus attracted historicist approaches, which read it in the context of colonized Egypt, connect it to political and military events in Greece, or place it in the fin de siècle climate in Europe at the time of its writing.23 However, even more common is the poem’s treatment as a universalist allegory. Edmund Keeley argues that in “Waiting for the Barbarians” the poet does not have “a specific historical event in mind” and leaves the historical context purposefully vague, because he intends to “offer an insight into the larger pattern of history that raises particular places and events to the level of metaphor or myth” (1976, 30). Viewed as symbols within a historical pattern, Cavafy’s barbarians are easily applicable to historical situations before or after the poem’s publication.
The poem’s citation in various genres, ranging from newspapers, exhibition catalogues, and philosophical or theoretical texts to Internet blogs, illustrates its multiple allegorical functions and applications.24 In newspaper articles and opinion pieces, Cavafy’s poem is employed as an allegorical vessel for illuminating global problems and contemporary issues in politics and international relations. It is worth looking at some of these allegorical applications and their thematic diversity.
In “West Needs to Rethink Attitudes to Islamic Civilizations” (Irish Times, May 11, 2002), Patrick Comerford reflects on the suspicion and prejudice with which Muslim populations within or outside Europe and the United States are treated after September 11. He ends his piece with a brief discussion of Cavafy’s poem, which helps him reach his conclusion: “An imagined external enemy provides excuses for not wrestling with real social and political problems. On the other hand, real dialogue with the Islamic world is the only way of removing prejudice and fears of an imaginary threat.”
In “After America; Is the West Being Overtaken by the Rest?” (New Yorker, April 21, 2008), Ian Buruma uses Cavafy’s poem to probe the thesis that “America’s time of global dominance is finished, and that new powers, such as China, India, and Russia, are poised to take over.” In this context, he writes: “All great empires set too much store by predictions of their imminent demise. Perhaps, as the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy suggested in his poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians,’ empires need the sense of peril to give them a reason to go on. Why spend so much money and effort if not to keep the barbarians at bay?”
An opinion piece by H. D. S. Greenway, “No More Waiting for ‘Barbarians’” (Boston Globe, June 2, 2009), applies the poem’s message to the people of Iran after Barack Obama’s election as president:
And so it is with Iranians today. For generations America, the “Great Satan,” has been at the gates, overthrowing Mohammed Mossadegh in the ’50s, serving the Shah through the ’70s, shooting down a civilian airliner and backing Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, President Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” and on and on go the grievances, convincing Iranians that their ancient civilization risks destruction at the hands of the United States. But now President Obama is saying there need not be barbarians any longer. And Iranians are asking what’s going to happen to them without barbarians? . . . For Iranians, the constant of American hostility has been “a kind of solution.”
Such uses testify to the poem’s appeal in the present. Nevertheless, understanding the work as part of the present does not just mean turning it into an allegorical formula that helps us build an external argument about real-life situations. It involves reading it through contemporary concerns, while being attentive to its singularity and its resistance to reductive allegorical uses.
Just like Cavafy’s poem, Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians has been read both as a universal narrative of human suffering and moral choice, and as an indictment of the violence and barbarity of the apartheid regime (Attridge 2004, 42). Historicist readings have been particularly prioritized in South African writing, especially during the apartheid years, when every “responsible and principled South African writer” was expected to make the country’s historical situation his or her “primary concern” (33).
Although these two kinds of readings—universalizing and historicist—may seem incompatible, Derek Attridge argues that they both treat the texts as allegories. Attridge defines allegorization as “a process whereby characters and the events that befall them are taken to represent either wider (in some cases . . . universal) or more specific meanings” (39). The first kind of allegorical reading (universalizing) seeks to extract general statements or truths about the human condition, while the second historicist allegorical reading approaches texts as keys to an external historical situation (33). The main fault Attridge finds with allegorical readings is that they often bypass the details and particularities of the text, as they turn it into a vehicle that should lead to a more significant meaning (60).25 The formal elements of the text seem to be in the service of an external meaning or message. Once this meaning is extracted, formal elements, narrative techniques, and other details lose their relevance, as a gift’s wrapping becomes useless after the gift has been opened.
In a discussion of Attridge’s views, Ernst van Alphen locates the problem with allegorical readings in the fact that they often use only limited and selective aspects of the text—those that are useful for its transformation into an allegory. Contingent or seemingly superfluous textual elements or details that do not fit the economy of the allegorical reading are bypassed (2008, 27). Another problem I would add is that an allegorical reading that views a literary work as either ahistorical or as a key to a historical situation outside the text presupposes a clear-cut opposition between literature and history. If literature and history are viewed as completely distinct domains, the only way for a literary work to be historically relevant is by becoming a marker of a historical reality external to it. This overlooks the possibility that literature can offer another mode of history writing, different from that of academic history, without explicitly referring to an external historical context.
In reaction to reductive allegorical readings, Attridge proposes a literal mode of reading that focuses on the singularity of the text and on the reading experience. A literal reading draws attention to what the text does rather than what it means, and thus does not rush into saying what a text is “about” (2004, 36–37, 39). It is sensitive to the reading experience and to the impact of textual elements and narrative techniques on the reader.26 It can be described as a performing of the text that “responds simultaneously to what is said, the way in which it is said, and the inventiveness and singularity (if there is any) of the saying” (60).
Following Attridge’s notion of literal reading, Cavafy’s and Coetzee’s texts constitute unique events anchored in the present of their literary universe. The lack of time/place indications does not prevent these works from evoking moments in history and in the present, thereby improving our understanding of the present and of external situations. However, they refuse to be reduced to a spot in a chronology. In so doing, the poem and the novel become even more historically active. Their iterability is what immerses them in history. A text’s iterability, Derrida claims, is “the condition of historicity,” because it roots a text to a context and simultaneously “opens this non-saturable context onto a recontextualization” (1992, 63).
But can the singularity and iterability of the literary event be captured only by a “literal reading,” as Attridge suggests? Attridge, van Alphen argues, is perhaps a bit too quick to dismiss allegorical readings altogether. According to van Alphen, reading for the meaning of a text, which allegorical readings do in Attridge’s definition, is something we always end up doing in one way or another when we interpret a text (2008, 29). Thus, the crucial question is how we read for meaning: Do we read to confirm what we already know or to open ourselves to unknown meanings and sensations that works may trigger? Attridge’s proposed “literal reading” and “reading for meaning (allegorical reading),” van Alphen concludes, can be seen as complementary: they substantiate each other in “an interplay” between the “affective, experiential dimension of reading” and “the allegorical dimension of meaning.” In this interplay, the production of meaning is the result—not the “cause, end, or goal of reading” (30). As long as allegorical readings do not rush into the production of familiar or predetermined meanings, they can be a productive part of a careful interpretive process that makes space for the “not yet known,” triggered by the affective operations of the text (30).
In Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, the untranslatable symbols and signs, as well as the irreducible otherness of the girl, are elements that exceed the allegorizations we are tempted to produce. In such ways, Attridge argues, the novel simultaneously invites and sabotages its allegorization, thereby delivering a critique on the allegorizing impulse itself (2004, 45). But there might be more at stake here than an implicit commentary on allegory. Instead of dismissing allegorical readings as reductive per definition, I argue that the works invite a new kind of allegorical reading, which suggests another approach to history in literature.
Barbarian Allegory
Words and signs in the Magistrate’s narrative often seem to refer to something else. Their promise of meaning invites us to view them as parts of an allegory that promises to translate signs into something different than what they are. Neither the novel nor the poem gratifies the expectations its allegorical structure cultivates.
In a definition that stays close to its etymology, allegory means to “speak other than one seems to speak” (Saunders 2001, 223). Allegorical readings usually assume that the “other” to which the allegory refers is knowable and can be discovered through interpretation. The allegory the novel sets up is different: its allegorical structures point to something unknowable and, in that sense, barbarian. This “barbarian allegory” does not promise a decodable meaning but induces an experience that can still affect our language with its foreignness and produce multiple interpretive possibilities, none of which are final or verifiable. This allegory invites us to read for meaning without presupposing that the meaning of a text is ever determinable. It thus perpetuates interpretation, while alerting the reader to the “barbarian” aspects of a literary text: those elements that escape our understanding without being meaningless. A barbarian allegory does not abolish reference; referring to something other is part of the definition of allegory. Thus, it does not freeze the signifying transaction, but it problematizes the correspondence of a sign with its referent.
Barbarian allegory describes both a mode of reading and aspects or elements in literary texts that invite and enable such a reading. It is thus a potential in some texts (not all literary texts can function as barbarian allegories) that the reader can activate. The performance of barbarian allegory requires both certain aspects of a literary text and a particular mode of reading. Coetzee’s novel can be read as a barbarian allegory because its untranslatable signs bear the promise of a language, the meaning of which cannot be fully determined.
The girl in the novel, for instance, functions as a site of barbarian allegory. Because the Magistrate is unable to “read” her, she maintains her irreducible singularity against the generalizable features of the Empire. Despite her unintelligibility, she has an impact on the Magistrate’s language and subjectivity. He may not be able to determine the meaning of her language and acts, but through her barbarian allegory the meaning of his own acts changes as he tries to imagine it through her perspective. As Spivak notes, in speculating about the possible meanings that his subjectivity assumes in the eyes of the barbarian girl, there is “an indefinite structure of possibilities” (2003, 23).
The concept of barbarian allegory is particularly developed in the following scene in the novel, wherein a barbarian language assumes an allegorical function. The scene describes the interrogation of the Magistrate by Colonel Joll. The latter is conducting an investigation concerning supposed barbarian threats to the Empire. Colonel Joll is convinced that the Magistrate has been communicating with the barbarian enemy. He therefore asks him questions in order to clarify the exact meaning of certain wooden slips with barbarian characters, which were found at the Magistrate’s house. The Magistrate had excavated those slips at the site of an ancient barbarian civilization. Colonel Joll is not aware of that and assumes that the slips are recent and contain secret messages between the Magistrate and the barbarian enemies: “A reasonable inference is that the wooden slips contain messages passed between yourself and other parties, we do not know when. It remains for you to explain what the messages say and the other parties were” (Coetzee 2000, 121).
At first, the Magistrate is at a loss when he is assigned the task of translation: “I look at the lines of characters written by a stranger long since dead. I do not even know whether to read from right to left or from left to right. . . . Does each stand for a single thing, a circle for the sun, a triangle for a woman, a wave for a lake; or does a circle merely stand for ‘circle,’ a triangle for ‘triangle,’ a wave for ‘wave’?” (121). The Magistrate has no idea what the characters mean. Nevertheless, he offers Colonel Joll a speculative reading. He first pretends to read the texts on three of the slips as parts of an epistolary exchange: a letter from a father to his daughter, written at times of peace, and two letters informing someone about the brutal death of his brother in the hands of officers. The last two letters allude to the practices of torture exercised by the Empire’s practitioners against the barbarian natives. After “reading” those letters, he moves on to another slip:
“Now let us see what the next one says. See, there is only a single character. It is the barbarian character war, but it has other senses too. It can stand for vengeance, and, if you turn it upside down like this, it can be made to read justice. There is no knowing which sense is intended. This is part of barbarian cunning.”
“It is the same with the rest of these slips.” I plunge my good hand into the chest and stir. “They form an allegory. They can be read in many orders. Further, each single slip can be read in many ways. Together they can be read as a domestic journal, or they can be read as a plan of war, or they can be turned on their sides and read as a history of the last years of the Empire—the old Empire I mean. There is no agreement among scholars on how to interpret these relics of the ancient barbarians. . . .”
“Thank you. I have finished translating.” (122–23)27
In this scene, two views on translation are implied, each with different objectives and epistemological consequences. Colonel Joll wishes to have the barbarian signs translated to confirm his suspicion that the signs are secret messages from the enemy. This will legitimize his presence in town and his violent practices. Although he does not speak the barbarian language and therefore needs a translator—the Magistrate—Joll has in fact already decided on the meaning of this translation and will accept the Magistrate’s translation only if it confirms his own prefabricated version of it: the messages as threatening for the Empire. Joll’s intended translation follows the Empire’s tendency to impose its own code on others, turning it into a universal, all-explanatory machine. Following this logic, the Empire translates based on the law of sameness: its translations appropriate every barbarian sign to the imperial code and regulate meaning by delimiting the context in which it can take place (Saunders 2001, 228).28 In fact, Colonel Joll’s intended translation is a pseudo-translation because there is no transference of meaning from one code to another. There is only one code at play, that of the Empire.
In a different way, the Magistrate’s translation is also a failure. It is a misreading—and, to be sure, an intentional one. In fact, one could argue that it does not qualify as a translation at all, since the source language remains unintelligible. However, instead of facing the unintelligibility of the barbarian language as an insurmountable impediment, the Magistrate plunges into an impossible translation, which takes nonknowledge as its starting point. His “translation” does not just reproduce a version of the self (the Empire’s language) but imbues the Empire’s discourse with traces of alterity, which I identify as “barbarisms.”
Contrary to the way Colonel Joll imagines translation—as an act that should yield a univocal reading—the Magistrate’s translation constitutes an allegorical reading that converts the Empire’s naturalized categories (war, vengeance, justice) into barbarian allegories, by “reading” them through the foreignness of the barbarian slips. In this way, the language of the Empire and the barbarian language of the slips, to borrow Felman’s words, “meet even as they fail to meet” (2003, 63). The Magistrate’s reading, Saunders argues, subjects the Empire’s terms to multiple interpretive possibilities, while making their determination impossible (2001, 226). The Empire’s most popular terms become barbarian allegories, as they are disembedded from their familiar context and read through the signs of a barbarian language.
In their “Treatise on Nomadology,” Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between “royal” and “nomad” science. While the former domesticates foreign knowledge, the latter cuts the contents of royal science loose (1987, 405). Bringing this distinction to bear on the novel, we could say that the Empire (as “royal science”) appropriates barbarian knowledge, while the Magistrate’s “barbarian cunning” (representing “nomad science”) unsettles the Empire’s epistemological certainties. His translation refuses to gratify the Empire’s need for stable contexts and definitions and imbues terms like “justice,” on which civilization depends for justifying its practices, with an ambiguous, controversial meaning. Whereas Joll needs a stable signification for the barbarian signs, the Magistrate does not extract constants from variables but sets variables “in a state of continuous variation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 407).
“Justice,” one of civilization’s favorite categories, is made to coexist with “vengeance” and “war” under the umbrella of the same sign. As a result, its meaning shifts through its proximity to these two concepts. The force of these three terms in imperial discourse is premised on their difference, which allows them to be clearly distinguished from one another. The Magistrate purposefully bypasses that difference in order to underscore their similarity and intertwinement. The virtuous connotations of “justice” are contaminated by the violent connotations of “war” and “vengeance.” The Magistrate’s translation suggests that “justice” and “vengeance” are indistinguishable from each other in the Empire’s practices: justice is often an excuse for vengeance, or vengeance is masked as justice to justify violence. The hierarchical interrelation of these three terms is unsettled, the values they carry become suspect, and their absolute difference fades out, as they all become readings of the same allegorical sign.
The Magistrate counters the Empire’s hegemonic knowledge with his epistemological barbarism—his “barbarian cunning”: a practice of inserting ambiguous elements that the Empire tries to obliterate from its discourse. Notably, these elements are no other than the Empire’s key categories. However, their unorthodox use reveals the contradictions within the Empire’s own discourse. The terms and ideological tools of imperial language turn into instruments of subversion. The Empire cannot domesticate the Magistrate’s translation, which is the reason that Colonel Joll dismisses it.
Although his translation does not really decipher the barbarian slips, it manages to convey something of the other’s language, albeit only the realization that the Empire’s linguistic code is just as unstable and stuttering as the mumblings we hear in a barbarian language. His encounter with the barbarian language of the slips generates a temporary suspension of understanding that reveals the limits of the Empire’s discourse. The Magistrate ends his part in this scene with the words “I have finished translating.” However, his translation does not really “finish,” since it does not offer semiotic closure. His allegorical reading seeks to perpetuate interpretation by bringing in ambiguity and polysemy in the fixed relation between the Empire’s signs and their meanings.
The Magistrate’s reading in this scene could also serve as a model for a different approach to history. The past could be seen as a barbarian allegory: an untranslatable language—just like the barbarian script on the slips—referring to something gone and impossible to grasp as a presence. It is reminiscent of Cavafy’s barbarians, who, in the poet’s words, are not there “any longer.” History, then, can be seen as an attempt to read the barbarian allegory of the past and assign meanings to it by casting it into coherent stories and familiar narratives. Discourses of history generally treat the past as something (at least partly) known and legible. But, as the novel suggests, we could also write history differently by reading the past in the way the Magistrate reads the barbarian slips: as something unknown and irretrievable, which nonetheless, through its foreignness, can affect our language in the present.
By acknowledging the untranslatability of the past, we invite it to haunt our present, because we can never appropriate it and leave it behind as a “finished translation.” The barbarianness of the past does not prevent it from being meaningful to us. Due to its allegorical character, it is not a hermetic structure but refers to things and situations other than itself even though its referents are not fully determinable. It therefore has a continuous bearing on our present, as its signifying capacity is inexhaustible.
The conception of history that I draw from the Magistrate’s allegorical reading yields different meanings in every present without ever being present. This conception is also suggested in the poem. There, the barbarians’ absence challenges their status in the discourse of history. If literature is performative in that it creates the reality to which it refers, then history supposedly refers to an existing reality in the past. However, the poem questions this opposition between literature and history by showing that a fundamental category of history—the barbarian—has no actual referent in “reality.”
By turning history’s founding terms (“barbarians,” “war,” “vengeance,” “justice”) into ambiguous signs, the works read history as “speaking other than it seems to speak”—an “other” that never crystallizes. Thus, both the poem and the novel open up a space within literature for performing history otherwise. The capacity of literature to interrogate other discourses (including itself) can be correlated with its freedom to say everything—a freedom that the strictly regulated discourse of history lacks. Derrida describes literature as an “institution of fiction which gives in principle the power to say everything, to break free of the rules, to displace them, and thereby to institute, to invent and even to suspect the traditional difference between nature and institution, nature and conventional law, nature and history” (1992, 37).29
For Derrida, this freedom can work both ways: it can be “a very powerful political weapon, but one which might immediately let itself be neutralized as fiction. This revolutionary power can become very conservative” (1992, 38). The fact that literature is explicitly fictional and citational language use—which is the reason that Austin, John Searle, and other philosophers degrade it as “non-serious” language—may suggest that literary discourse can have no impact on “real” situations or “serious” discourses.30 However, precisely due to its common perception as non-serious, fictional, and citational—in contrast with the supposed seriousness and truth effect of historical discourse—literature is allowed to say everything and can use this freedom to challenge “serious” discourses. Therefore, literature’s assumed non-seriousness, to which it partly owes its institutional freedom, is paradoxically what makes it a powerful political tool, able to intervene in “serious” discourses.
As we see in the novel, literature interrogates historical categories by “citing” them otherwise. Whereas reductive allegorical readings either superimpose a specific version of the historical upon the literary or strip a text of its historical relevance altogether, Coetzee’s novel and Cavafy’s poem perform history through literature’s institutional freedom. In so doing, they undercut the hierarchy between the two discourses—history as “serious” language with a bearing on “reality” versus literature as “non-serious” language that only “cites” real situations—without canceling the differences between the two discursive realms. As a result, they enable a critical performance of history through its “discursive other.”
Who Are Those Barbarians after All? Barbarians in Repetition
One of the most prominent ways in which the poem and the novel challenge the discourse of history is by using history’s key terms in ways that erode their stability and enable their resignification. I explore this operation by specifically following the term “barbarian” in the novel and the poem.
The first question that arises concerns the term’s referent. In the poem, since we never see any barbarians, we can only reconstruct the image that the people of the city have created about them. The consuls and praetors are dressed in embroidered togas and are overloaded with dazzling jewelry, because “things like that dazzle the barbarians.” The orators are silent, because the barbarians are “bored by rhetoric and public speaking.” The image of the city-in-preparation fits the Orientalist stereotype of decadent people immersed in luxury and excess. The citizens believe either that this is what the barbarians are like or that these are the kinds of things the barbarians like. In other words, either the barbarians are constructed according to an Orientalist representational regime or they are imagined to be crude primitive warriors—reminiscent of the Teutonic nations that invaded Rome—who are likely to be impressed by the Empire’s luxury and grandeur. The reader cannot test this mental image on real subjects. We receive only a mediated mirror image of the barbarians through the civilized.
In the novel, the identity of the people the Empire names “barbarians” remains unclear. The barbarians against whom the expeditionary forces are sent are supposed to be violent nomadic people who are planning attacks against the Empire. However, the expeditionary forces never reach these barbarians, although they think they sense the barbarians’ constant presence. One of the leaders of these forces is convinced that barbarians trailed him at a distance. “Are you sure they were barbarians? I [the Magistrate] ask. Who else could they have been? He replies. His colleagues concur” (Coetzee 2000, 53). The barbarians seem to leave traces without their presence ever being witnessed. Thus, when “clothing disappears from washing-lines” and “food from larders,” the people in town are convinced that the barbarians did it, even though nobody catches them in the act. Various theories are devised to account for the fact that the perpetrators are never seen, for example, that “the barbarians have dug a tunnel under the walls” or that they only “come out at night” (134). The barbarians become the Empire’s scapegoats. The people end up accusing them for every calamity and crime, such as the flooding of the fields (during which, again, “no one saw them,” 108) or the rape of a girl (during which her friends recognize the rapist as a barbarian “by his ugliness,” 134).
The accumulation of rumors around them leads to their demonization. They become the personification of evil, ready to “fry your balls and eat them” (164). “Once in every generation, without fail,” the narrator observes, “there is an episode of hysteria about the barbarians” (9). But the myth of the barbarians as the ultimate enemy of the Empire needs to find real bodies on which the Empire can exercise its power. These are the prisoners Colonel Joll brings with him, who, according to the narrator, are peaceful fishing people, in no way related to any attacks. The last group of prisoners the Colonel captures is put on public display. As the Magistrate ironically remarks, “Everyone has a chance to see the twelve miserable captives, to prove to his children that the barbarians are real” (113). The Empire’s need to legitimize its discourse and prove that the barbarians “are real” by finding—that is, naming—the enemy in material bodies, transforms the miserable prisoners into a dangerous enemy. On their naked backs Colonel Joll writes “ENEMY” with charcoal and orders the soldiers to beat them until the word is erased by blood. The word has to be written on them to make those damaged bodies plausible as enemies, to transform a “literal body into a figurative enemy” (Saunders 2001, 230). “The constative claim,” Butler tells us, “is always to some degree performative” (1993, 11). Here, naming creates the enemy. The category “enemy” is literally inscribed by the Empire on the bodies of its subjects. This scene literalizes the symbolic violence of language, thereby underscoring its inextricability from physical violence.
Colonel Joll’s act reflects the Empire’s need to sustain what Paul de Man calls “the myth of semantic correspondence between sign and referent” by literally attaching the sign to the referent (1979, 6). The actual intentions and deeds of the natives are irrelevant in this process. Only after imposing its clear-cut distinctions does the Empire read its others—that is, read itself in its others. In the same way, the Empire’s officials elicit “the truth” from their victims of torture: they project their own truth onto their bodies.31
The barbarian other does not exist as an external enemy. Through the Empire’s atrocities toward its prisoners a new referent is attached to the barbarian in the novel. The overwhelming reality (in the novel) leads the narrator to adopt the term for the Empire’s practitioners. Although, as the narrator remarks, in the Empire’s euphemistic vocabulary the torturers of the Third Bureau are probably designated as “security officers” (Coetzee 2000, 129), the Magistrate views them as the “new barbarians” (85) who have come to install terror in town. He realizes that the people of the Empire are enemies to themselves and that Colonel Joll is the product of an irrational society that becomes barbaric in its attempt to protect civilization: “Those pitiable prisoners you brought in—are they the enemy I must fear? . . . You are the enemy, Colonel! . . . You are the enemy, you have made the war, and you have given them all the martyrs they need” (125).
In the Magistrate’s words, a new kind of inside barbarian is designated, exposing the impulse of the Empire to generate its own excess in a suicidal fashion. The Empire’s soldiers, who have settled in town, end up terrorizing the citizens, looting shops, violating laws, getting drunk, and causing trouble. Their behavior is constantly contrasted either with the pitiful state of the barbarian prisoners or with the stories about barbarian crimes that are never witnessed. Consequently, it becomes impossible for the reader to overlook the paradox in the Empire’s use of the name “barbarian.”
The image the Empire has created for the barbarians is a distorted reflection of itself. During the Magistrate’s journey in the desert to return the girl to her people, he and his companions keep seeing specters of the barbarians in the distance, which they never reach. If they move or stop, the specters move and stop with them. “Are they reflections of us, is this a trick of the light?” the Magistrate wonders (74). Like a mirage, the barbarians dissolve before anyone can reach them, pointing back to the ubiquitous presence of the people of the Empire as the real barbarians. This specter hunting in the desert is later also carried out by the Empire’s troops, leading to their total dissemination: they freeze, starve, and get lost in the desert, still convinced that they are chasing barbarians. The disintegration of the Empire comes from within.
From the beginning of his narrative, the Magistrate repeats the term “barbarian” in exactly the same way it is used within the Empire’s language: to refer to the natives (the colonized subjects) and to the Empire’s (invisible) dangerous enemies. The native fishermen, the nomads, the prisoners, the invisible enemies are all called “barbarians” in the Magistrate’s narrative. Even the native girl that lives with him is referred to as “the barbarian girl,” not simply as “the girl.” The Magistrate has no choice but to employ the categories within which he has been constituted as a subject. These categories have been naturalized through their repetitive use in history. I contend that the narrator’s obsessive repetition of the word “barbarian” draws attention to this practice of naturalization through repetition. As Butler argues, the repetition of the norm—here, the citation of the name “barbarian”—is the main mechanism through which its power is secured (1993, 15).
However, that same mechanism used by a discursive regime for the indoctrination of its truths can also lead to the regime’s delegitimization. There is a deconstituting possibility in the process of repetition, Butler claims, because through it “gaps and fissures are opened up as the constitutive instabilities in such constructions, as that which escapes or exceeds the norm, as that which cannot be wholly defined or fixed by the repetitive labor of that norm” (10). Although the word “barbarian” is repeated in the novel, the material referent of the term either never appears or does not live up to its supposed barbaric nature: the barbarian enemies are not found in the desert, and the native prisoners never display any barbaric behavior. This puts the term under suspicion. At the same time, when the narrator starts using it for the “new barbarians” (the colonizers), confusion is produced. This new use is concomitant with the Magistrate’s indignation at the Empire’s practices, which leads to his imprisonment.
The Magistrate’s turn against the Empire, however, does not put an end to his use of the term “barbarian” for the colonized subjects. Until the end of his narrative, the conventional use of the word for the natives runs parallel to its critical use for the colonizers. Thus, the word becomes a performative operating in a twofold way: while the reader perceives its use for the natives as an infelicitous speech act (the reader fails to see these people as barbarians), its use for the colonizers is more likely to convince the reader and secure uptake.32 The parallel uses of the term indicate that more than a simple reversal of the barbarian/civilized opposition is at stake. The narrative destabilizes the hierarchy by rendering it unnatural and arbitrary.
One could argue that we are dealing with two different definitions of the term “barbarian.” In the first case, the narrator uses it as a (supposedly) neutral, descriptive term to refer to the native others and distinguish them from the civilization of which he is part. In the second case, he uses it to impose moral judgment on the Empire’s practitioners. However, through the narrator’s simultaneous use of both senses, the novel problematizes precisely the intertwinement of these two senses of the word, which is so commonplace in Western discourses. This intertwinement results in the automatic attribution of barbarian behavior (the second sense) to subjects that simply happen not to be part of the “civilization” of the self. Therefore, the term’s operations in the Magistrate’s discourse point to the inconsistencies in the language by which Western history signifies the barbarian.
The narrator’s voice is limited by the hegemonies against which it utters itself but manages to challenge these hegemonies through a repetition with a difference. The repetitive and somewhat confusing use of “barbarian” in the novel reveals the contested terrain the term occupies. All in all, the uses of “barbarian” in the novel have three different functions. They perform (1) the history of the term’s use for naming civilization’s inferior others, (2) the history of the reversals of the term’s referent, to describe the barbaric behavior of the civilized, and (3) the open temporality of the term, since its subversive iteration in the novel creates a space for resignification.
The operations of the barbarian in the novel invite us to revisit its function in Cavafy’s poem. In the poem, the repetition of the word “barbarians” by the second speaker conveys certainty about their coming. The phrase “because the barbarians are coming” is repeated in all his answers (albeit in a slight variation in his first answer) and thus almost sounds like a promise to his interlocutor, the people of the city, and the readers themselves, who are also anticipating the spectacle. The more emphatically the promise is repeated, the greater the disappointment becomes when the promise is not realized. The failure of this speech act stages the failure of the discourse of civilization to bring to life what it has constructed as its outside. The barbarians remain a signifier without a material referent because they have always existed only as part of the discourse of civilization. The poem stages the infelicitous speech act of a discourse trying to play God. Its “let there be barbarians” does not work. The omnipotence of the discourse of civilization is contested, and the transparency of its correspondence to the world becomes opaque.
The people of the city live in a decadent world that is falling apart. To these people, the anticipation of an encounter with the other, even in the form of an invasion, becomes the driving force behind their actions. In the Western imagination, the barbarian has sparked anxiety and fear, as well as fascination and longing.33 A mixture of both emotional states overtakes the people in the poem, although desire is the prevailing emotion. The poem inflates the Western topos of the desire for the other to such an extent that it takes the form of a self-destructive wish.
The eagerness of the citizens to welcome the barbarians is comparable to the Magistrate’s attraction to the barbarian girl and his desire to make contact with her. Both the Magistrate and the people in Cavafy’s city fail to make real contact with the barbarians. But the way they imagine this encounter and the reasons for their failure are different. While the Magistrate refuses to construct the girl on his own terms and tell her story in his own language, the people in Cavafy’s poem are unable to imagine an encounter with the other in terms other than their own.
The people in the poem assume to know what the barbarians are like, what their habits are, how they will behave, and how they will rule the city once they arrive. The emperor has even prepared a scroll to give to their leader, “replete with titles, with imposing names.” Hidden in these titles and names is the hierarchical structure of the old Empire, which the people intend to pass on to their prospective barbarian rulers. They are convinced that changing rulers is enough to bring their world to a new beginning. However, the script of the Empire in the hands of the emperor contains the “titles” and “names” that safeguard the categories and oppositions that brought their society to an impasse in the first place. As such, they resemble Colonel Joll’s act of creating his barbarians by writing “ENEMY” on the backs of his prisoners. Therefore, the citizens leave no room for the arrival of something truly new, because they presuppose an already known other that can be articulated in their language before it has even made its appearance. In this way, the poem sketches a solipsistic society that does not open itself to newness and alterity. Without knowing it, the citizens themselves are responsible for sabotaging their encounter with the barbarians they so eagerly anticipate.
The mythology of the other, Dimitris Tziovas argues in his essay on the poem, is essential for self-affirmation, whereas its absence gives birth to utter bewilderment (1986, 177). The pessimistic mood that overcomes the city when the barbarians do not come is a sign of resignation. The Empire has to come to terms with its own demise, but not in the way it has staged it: not as an honorable defeat from external enemies but as a result of internal contradictions. The society in the poem, to borrow T.S. Eliot’s famous line from “The Hollow Men,” ends “not with a bang but a whimper.” As a result, the citizens redirect their gaze from the outside to the inside. The introspection that follows—and the depressive mood it generates—can be read in everybody’s faces (“How serious people’s faces have become”), as everyone is “going home lost in thought.”
Eventually, the compelling final lines are heard:
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
Who speaks these verses and from which position? The identity and status of the voice in these lines has been an object of debate among critics. The lines could be uttered either by the first or second speaker in the dialogue or by a third unidentified voice, which could be that of the poet-observer, reflecting on the situation in the poem with a deeply ironic statement.34 Based on the structure of the dialogue, we can infer that these lines are uttered by the first speaker, as a reaction to the previous statement by the second speaker, wherein he announces that the barbarians will not come. However, a metrical analysis of the Greek text suggests that these two verses follow the metrical pattern of the second speaker’s speech: they comprise thirteen syllables each, as opposed to the decapentasyllabic verse (fifteen syllables) that the first speaker uses in his questions. This brings the final lines closer to the second speaker’s sound in the poem.35
I contend that these lines are spoken by the first speaker, whose voice is no longer the same. His voice appears altered after the “dreadful realization of the depletion of images of Otherness” (Constantinou 1998, 193). The final voice does not belong to a third-person-observer who witnesses the dialogue from a distance. The agony and struggle for self-preservation implicit in the phrase “a kind of” suggests that this voice belongs to the same discourse that invented the barbarians. But this voice is also changed by self-reflection, which requires a distancing from oneself, a viewing of oneself as other. To this latter dimension it owes its ironic undertone.
The final voice addresses the poem’s audience: the readers. Through this implicit apostrophe, the speaker transfers and perpetuates the search for another “solution” in the present of every reading, implicating the reader in this search. Searching for an answer to the question “And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?” may lead to a rethinking of the self and a reflection on the conditions that made the encounter with the barbarians impossible. The non-realization of this encounter does not necessarily support a pessimistic view upon civilization. Cavafy himself read his poem with optimism: “Besides, the poem does not work against my optimistic view [about the future]. It can be taken as an episode in the course towards the Good. Society reaches a level of luxury, civilization, and consternation, where, desperate from being in a position wherein it cannot rectify things through a compromise with its usual mode of living, it decides to bring radical change—to sacrifice, to change, to go back, to simplify.”36 Cavafy reads his poem as a warning that society needs “radical change.” Whether the “solution” lies in going back to a simpler mode of life, as Cavafy seems to suggest in his comment, or in another mode of being, one thing is certain: the failure of the poem’s promise indicates the bankruptcy of existing modes of thought, and as such it can be seen as an act of criticism, initiating a search for another solution.
Cavafy’s poem and Coetzee’s novel, by disrupting the discourse of “barbarism versus civilization” through a subversive reiteration of its categories, both stand before an even greater challenge: that of constructing a new discursive space after having deconstructed the old. In Cavafy’s poem, this challenge is implied in the question, “And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?” In the poem, the possibility of another “kind of solution,” of a new space wherein the relation between self and other is refashioned, is posed as a challenge, which is left unresolved. Despite the difference in the speaker’s voice in the final verses, I still hear it as a voice standing before a void, not yet plunging into it. In Coetzee, however, I contend that the narrator descends into that void and lets a negotiation take place between the old and a new kind of discourse. The narrator’s language, misreading the foundational concepts of the Empire, carries signs of a transition between the old and the new, sameness and otherness. Nevertheless, this transition is not fully accomplished in the novel, which in the end leaves us on a road “that may lead nowhere.”
The narrator cannot escape the limitations of his discourse. However, his barbarism consists in misusing the terms of the Empire’s discourse and experimenting with the inconsistencies that come about when these terms are reiterated. In the space of literature, barbarism emerges as an operation that causes shifts in a familiar code by repeating the signs of this code in slightly altered signifying constellations.
A Promise on Shaky Ground
The Empire in Coetzee’s novel is falling apart for the same reasons as the city in the poem: not by an external enemy but under the pressure of internal conflicts. Both the poem and the novel expose the barbarian as part of the civilized subject, but nonetheless constructed as an external other that supports the identity of civilization. These works do not just reverse the opposition between civilization and barbarism in order to demonstrate that the civilized are the real barbarians, whereas those tagged as “barbarians” are the innocent victims of Western barbarism disguised as civilization. As Coetzee’s novel particularly suggests, it is not enough to recognize the barbarism within civilization and point the finger to the perpetrators of barbaric acts from a supposedly safe distance. Recognizing barbaric behavior is commendable, but it does not resolve the predicament of our implication in these discursive categories that have co-shaped our subjectivity. As the Magistrate’s position indicates, our entanglement in the discourses of civilization, Empire, or history marks our complicity with the perpetrators, even if we are not the ones using the instruments of torture. This predicament is too complex to be resolved by siding with the “good guys” or against the “bad guys.” Thus, instead of just shuffling the referents of these categories, Coetzee’s novel reiterates the term “barbarian” in ways that confound its conventional field of operation.
Faced with the impossibility of discarding the category of the “barbarian,” the poem and the novel nevertheless succeed in mobilizing it. Searching for the barbarians, we do not know where to look; our gaze is unfixed. Should we try to discern them beyond the borders of the city or in the vastness of the desert, or should we look around us, in our homes, our cities, within ourselves? And is what we think we see the barbarians or a distorted reflection of ourselves? The barbarian is omnipresent yet elusive.
In both the poem and the novel, the barbarian oscillates between history and literature, challenging the institutional boundaries of these discourses. The barbarians of history are shown to be mythical constructions with no real referents, while new barbarians—the people of the Empire in the novel or the people of the city in the poem—are designated in literature. One of history’s favorite dichotomies, barbarians versus civilized, faces a “barbarian invasion” from literature, which imbues the solid terms of this dichotomy with ambiguity.
Cavafy’s poem and Coetzee’s novel present the reader with unresolved questions, linguistic bewilderment, obsessive reiterations, infelicitous performatives, and the prospect of an alternative way of speaking and relating to others—a prospect perhaps explored in Coetzee more than in Cavafy. The promise they make—the arrival of the barbarians—is a promise they cannot keep. However, in failing their promise, they succeed in envisioning another kind of history within literature. This history is able to survive the repeated broken promise of the presence of meaning by refashioning its binary structures and “truths” as barbarian allegories: configurations of inherited signs, which may be meaningful for, and relate to, our present, but whose meaning is never fully settled. In this performative approach to history, the past is a living part of the present.
These works do not have any clear-cut solution to the predicament of civilization. They do, however, project the hope—the promise even—of another “kind of solution” that could guide us to “a road that may lead” somewhere. Some may find the terms in which this promise is made too weak or vague to be convincing. But attempts to repeat dominant categories into new senses cannot have a secure outcome. On this shaky ground of unpredictability, between the “may” and the “kind of” new solution that could put us on a road to somewhere or “nowhere,” a limited but cogent notion of agency is enabled. Cavafy’s poem and Coetzee’s novel explore the effects of oppositional thinking, as well as a prospect that constitutes one of the desiderata of our globalized world: that societies would not need to wait in vain for barbarians but would be more open to encounters with others on terms other than the ones they have internalized.