Prepared
by: Richa Pandya
M.A. English Semester – 4
Roll no- 26
Enrolment No: – 206910842019003
Batch: 2018- 20
Submitted to: S. B. Gardi Department of English,
MKBU
Paper no- 13 The New Literature
Topic: The Magistrate’s Identity in a Colonial
Context
Introduction
Waiting for the Barbarians, Nobel laureate John Maxwell Coetzee’s 1980
novel, centers around racial strife and power struggles in a fictional colonial
village. Though the colonial Empire and the land’s native population are never
identified, it is generally understood that the novel was written to reflect
the political situation of South Africa. In Waiting for the Barbarians,
Coetzee explores both the violence and terror inherent in a colonial system
from the perspective of a deeply conflicted representative of that system.
About the Novel
The
main protagonist of the novel is a nameless civil servant, who serves as magistrate to
a frontier settlement owned by a nameless empire. The Empire, a vague
colonialist regime, sets itself in opposition to the “barbarians,” mysterious
nomadic peoples who live in the wild lands bordering the Empire. The magistrate
is looking forward to a quiet retirement, and hopes to live out his last years
of service without anything too eventful happening—he spends his free time looking
for ruins in the desert and trying to interpret pieces of pottery he finds. His
life falls into disarray, however, when a Colonel Joll arrives
at his fort. There’s been fear recently brewing in the Empire’s capital that
the “barbarians” are plotting a full-scale offensive, and Joll has been sent to
investigate whether this is true. But his methods of investigation are brutal,
and they deeply disturb the magistrate. Joll employs vicious torture tactics,
which seem to force his victims into fabricating information that confirms his
hypothesis, just in order to cease the pain. One such victim, a young barbarian girl,
whose father died at the hands of Joll and his interrogation assistants, ends
up playing a central role in the magistrate’s life. After her release, he sees
her begging on the streets of the fort; her ability to walk and to see have
been greatly hindered by Joll’s torture techniques.
The magistrate takes the girl in, hiring her as a cook and
maid, but their relationship quickly moves from professional to sexual—from
being motivated by the good will of the magistrate to more questionable
intentions. Over time, the magistrate grows frustrated with the barbarian girl,
finding her personality enigmatic and impenetrable. He begins to have anxiety
over the meaning of his own sexuality. Eventually, he decides to take the girl
back to her people. The magistrate then assembles a team of two other soldiers,
several horses, and a stock of supplies, and heads out on a grueling journey
into dangerous wintry storms in the desert. Eventually, Mandel and most of the
soldiers return to the capital, and many of the fort’s inhabitants follow. The
magistrate regains his former position, and stability among the settlement
returns. The novel ends as the magistrate tries to write the history of
the settlement, but he finds himself unable to.
Character of Magistrate
The magistrate transforms from an old man living a peaceful
life to an outspoken opponent of the Empire that employs him. His transition
highlights how individual members of a majority population passively benefit
from the violent colonization or oppression of minority populations. They
benefit even if they haven't partaken in the oppression themselves. The
magistrate's character indicates how there are no innocent parties in
government oppression. At the beginning of the novel, the magistrate works for
the Empire, enforcing laws without question. When Colonel Joll arrives and
begins torturing prisoners, the magistrate feels uncomfortable with the
injustice but allows it for the sake of hospitality to Joll. The magistrate
houses one of Joll's torture victims, a nomad girl, whom he massages although
he gets no sexual pleasure out of the act. He eventually decides to return the
girl to her family. When he arrives back at town, the Empire has issued a
warrant for the magistrate's arrest, alleging his collusion with the enemy. The
magistrate is imprisoned, beaten, and tortured before the army eventually
abandons the town. The magistrate resumes his former position but as a changed
man. The magistrate therefore has the makings of an outcast within him from the
start of the novel, and his willingness to vocalize his dissent to the various
executors of the Empire’s military will ultimately solidifies him in that role.
The magistrate’s inner character is also shaped by a complicated relationship
with his sexuality. His attraction to the barbarian
girl baffles and frustrates him, as it
makes him realize just how little control he has over his own sexual desire.
The opacity of her personality infuriates him; he feels unable to get past her
cold surface and have a deeper connection with her. The magistrate wants
to uncover the untold history of her past—to understand and envision her before
she was marked by the trauma of Joll’s torture tactics—but he ultimately fails
in excavating her psyche as deeply as he wishes.
Magistrate
as a post-modern identity
Character
of Magistrate as a post-modern identity
living in a colonial context. The Magistrate establishes his identity in the
novel as an intermediary figure between two opposing polemics: the colonizer
and the colonized. Though he works for the colonizers and carries out their
colonial duties in the unnamed colony, the Magistrate inconsistently appears
sympathetic with the natives whom the colonizers usually describe as barbarian.
The Magistrate spends around thirty years in the colony, so that he himself
achieves a sort of identification with the colonized. He becomes aware of the
injustice of colonization and rejects it at the end as he narrates the events
that led him to such conclusion. Thus, the main argument of this paper is that
the character of the Magistrate suffers a mixture of post-modern
characteristics of alienation, lack of cultural belonging, insecurity, double
consciousness, and fragmented power relations that are brought about as a
result of his awareness of the evil of colonization. Sunglass of the magistrate is one of the
symbol of the novel. It show the post – modern identity. His sunglass show the strong identification with them to a point
that he “opposed to civilization” of the colonizer. The Magistrate’s presence
in the novel as a trapped figure becomes ironic. He is the one who is supposed
to regulate the business of the Empire in that place, but, ironically, he can
manage nothing in Colonel Joll’s presence. The Magistrate’s double awareness of
fragmented positionality adds more to the conflict of his identity. He lives in
a real conflict concerning the way he deals with Colonel Joll, the military
violent version of colonialism. This conflict leads to constructing the
Magistrate’s double consciousness that grows to dominate a large portion of his
identity. W. E. Du Bois (1969) uses the term of double consciousness to
describe the African American identity that may also suffer division and
inconsistency since such identity’s belonging is divided. The Magistrate
himself is struggling whether it is appropriate for him to take sides with the
colonized or to stay loyal to the tyranny of the colonizer. He is torn between
these two poles that generate his crisis of conscience. The way he asks the boy
in prison to tell the truth has two layers. On the surface, you feel that he is
just like a compassionate father who is taking care of his children, but the
truth of the matter seems to be the opposite. He is an advocate of diplomacy
and leniency with prisoners in order to know the truth. He himself expresses
such awareness as he says: “it has not escaped me that an interrogator can wear
two masks, speak with two voices, one harsh, one seductive. The Magistrate
himself establishes his existence in the colony as a colonizer when he says in
chapter five of the novel: “I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times
are easy, he [Joll] the truth that Empire tells when harsh wind blow. Such
power presence and absence correspond to the Magistrate’s conflict of identity
in terms of loyalty to either side. When Colonel Joll is away chasing the
native invaders of the Empire, as he claims, the Magistrate stays at the frontier
managing business for the Empire. He feels he has more power to speak and,
sometimes, to take action than when the Colonel is there. He gets mad when the
Colonel sends him fishermen to be held and publicly describes him as
“ridiculous”. Actually, this scene in which he is bathing her reminds us of a
warm mother bathing her child in the tub. The child will be delighted while his
mother is caressing his body. He will feel secure. This time it is the
Magistrate who feels secure and is taken away into the realm of the unconscious
as he is doing that. In this context, he says: “I lose myself in the rhythm of
what I am doing. I lose awareness of the girl herself. There is a space of time
which is blank to me: perhaps I am not even present”. As a result of the
security he feels with the barbarian girl, he immediately falls asleep with no
nightmares this time. Though he takes care of her body, but he doesn’t abuse or
misuse her. Rather, he feels “no desire to enter this stocky little body
glistening by now in the firelight”.
Conclusion:
We
see the character of the Magistrate as post-modern identity. The main part is
the his dream sequence. In his dream sequence he saw the many things. At the
end of the novel and in its last chapter, the whole place turns into a mess as
the colonizer loses control and the soldiers themselves turn into thieves. The
Magistrate refuses to leave the place and decides to tell the truth.
Works Cited
Al-Badarneh, Abdullah F. "Waiting for the
Barbarians: The Magistrate’s Identity in a Colonial Context." International
Journal of Humanities and Social Science 3 (2013): 6. 8 3 2020. <https://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2115/44947/1/JGSL6-4.pdf>.
Course Hero. 5 11 2018. 8 3 2020.
<https://www.coursehero.com/lit/Waiting-for-the-Barbarians/character-analysis/>.
Iffland, William. LitCharts. 31 3 2017. 8 3
2020. <https://www.litcharts.com/lit/waiting-for-the-barbarians/summary>.
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