Pfitzer 1

Sarah Anne Pfitzer

Dr. Charmion Gustke

HON 3444

4 October 2018

The Body as Resistance in J.M. Coetzee’s ​Waiting for the Barbarians

Even in torment, even under duress, the physical body exercises a degree of power– the

power to unsettle the workings of Empire, the power to deconstruct the false binaries of

language. In other words, the body is a material certainty among textual uncertainties, a truth in

indeterminacy. In his allegorical novel ​Waiting for the Barbarians, J​ .M. Coetzee explores these

claims through the plight of an unnamed barbarian girl, who, tortured and maimed beyond repair,

becomes the corrupted concubine of the outpost’s Magistrate. Though passive and deplorable on

first examination, Coetzee’s barbarian girl actually takes on a subversive role. Because her

suffering body resists lingual articulation, she dismantles the very language of Empire. In the

following essay, I will argue that this subversion is twofold: while the girl’s submissive body

eludes​ articulation through the non-language of pain, her active body ​manipulates​ articulation

through the language of sexual mimicry. Thus, resistance takes place in the material rather than

textual realm– a “loophole” of sorts that undermines assumptions of subaltern speechlessness.

Speech, after all, need not be spoken, for silence itself is a form of counter-discourse.

Before examining the novel itself, one must first acquire an understanding of the novel’s

underlying theoretical debates. It will be particularly useful, I think, to examine Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Drawing on examples from the ​Sati​ tradition,

Spivak poses the pivotal question, “to what extent [does] colonial power succeed in silencing the
 Pfitzer 2

colonized?” (Loomba 229). In Spivak’s view, brown women occupy the lowest rung on the

colonial ladder– a position that renders them incapable of speech. However, critics condemn this

view as too accommodating, too narrow: Spivak sees Empire as an unbreakable structure of

binaries, where the oppressor and the oppressed do not overstep or transcend their roles. The

Empire, then, smothers all attempts at defiance. Seen in this context, readers may initially view

Coetzee’s barbarian girl as one who cannot speak except in the service of Empire. However, it is

not the politics of speech that I am interested in discussing, but rather the politics of viscerality.

If the subaltern cannot speak, the subaltern must disrupt the Empire through alternate means.

Allow me to clarify. Hegemony– power achieved through a combination of coercion and

consent (Loomba 48)– operates on a textual level. In other words, the construction of Empire

necessarily depends upon binary oppositions: self and other (or in the case of Coetzee’s text,

colonizer and barbarian). Truth, then, is created and distributed by the Empire. It is a constructed

truth, a truth spoken into existence, a truth coerced into being. The suffering body, however, is

material rather than textual, standing in contrast to language, exposing its inherent inadequacies.

Because pain cannot be articulated, only seen, only experienced, it thereby functions as a

“non-language,” withstanding appropriation (Dalbaye 3). In fact, as scholar Ellinor Bent Dalbye

notes, because the body is wholly visceral, wholly visual, it “cannot be turned into language or

narrative” (Dalbaye 3). Though Coetzee’s Empire may attempt to coerce its own version of truth,

the body is self-evident, incontestable, and incapable of falsehood (Dalbaye 25). By resisting

inclusion in the discourse of language, the tortured body undermines hegemony by the very

nature of its silence.

 Pfitzer 3

Take, for instance, the Magistrate’s fascination with the barbarian girl. He does not desire

her sexually, ​per se​. Rather, he desires to understand her as a physical site of abuse– an artifact

with broken ankles, swollen scars, and cloudy eyes. As postcolonial scholar Rosemary Jolly

notes, “​he treats her body as a text that, if he pays it enough attention – if he ‘reads’ it ‘properly’

– will alert him to the truth behind the scene of torture.” (qtd. in Dalbaye 26). However, though

the Magistrate incessantly inquires into the nature of the barbarian girl’s wounds, the girl cannot

articulate a response (“She lies thinking for a long time. Then she says, ‘I am tired of talking’”

[Coetzee 41]). Pain then, creates a gap in language, even a gap in narrative flow (Dalbaye 45).

While the body “is a witness to its own experience” (Dalbaye 26), this experience is

inexpressible in any realm other than the physical. So, though torture may indeed oppress the

body– inscribing it with a narrative of external control, setting it apart as “other”– this oppression

resists containment via language. The tortured body, therefore, is ultimately subversive.

However, the barbarian girl is not wholly submissive. When the Magistrate elects to

return the girl to her native people, she begins to exercise a degree of personal agency outside of

the confines of the Empire. In a particularly impactful passage, she stirs the Magistrate into

intercourse: “​I [the Magistrate] feel her [the girl’s] hand groping under my clothes, her tongue

licking my ear…. With a heave I am upon her” (Coetzee 62). ​How might the reader interpret this

action, an action seemingly incongruous with that of torture and sexual submission?

Let us briefly explicate the work of Homi Bhabha to elucidate this question. Traditional

postcolonial theory often operates under the assumption that colonial authority maintains its

power by encouraging the oppressed to mimic the oppressor (Loomba 175). For example, if I am

a black man, I might attempt to marry a white woman in order to increase my status among those
 Pfitzer 4

in the hegemonic class. However, because I will never succeed in fully imitating the white man–

his physical appearance, his customs, his cultural history– I will never achieve a fullness of

humanity. That is, there will always be a gap in communication: “​the process of replication is

never complete or perfect” (Loomba 98). However, rather than focus solely on the detrimental

nature of such a relationship, Bhabha views mimicry as a performance with subversive potential–

“an invitation [to undercut] colonial hegemony” (Loomba 175).

But if language cannot subvert language, as we have determined in the previous section,

then Bhabha’s mimicry must be modified: it must be accomplished through the body, by visceral

means. Let us go back to the example of the barbarian girl and her initiation of sexual

intercourse, then, examining how her physical actions act as a counter-discourse. Though we

cannot necessarily infer that the barbarian girl has never engaged in intercourse before, her

behaviors seem to be mere reproductions of the Magistrate’s. Thus, when the barbarian girl

gropes her supposed “lover,” the reader cannot separate this instance from earlier sexual

encounters in the novel (sexual encounters that the Magistrate initiated): “My [the Magistrate’s]

hands run up and down her legs from ankle to knee, back and forth, squeezing, stroking,

moulding” (Coetzee 29). The barbarian girl’s sexual identity, then, is never wholly her own; it is

a replication, a mirror.

Structuralist thinkers might view the girl’s sexual mimicry as evidence of her

subservience– after all, as Ania Loomba notes, “the desire for the native woman for the

European man coded for the submission of the colonised people” (159); they might even skew

her incitement of intercouse as evidence of her reciprocity and free will. However, we must

make an important distinction here. If mimicry is a kind of performance, as Bhabha defines it– a
 Pfitzer 5

kind of “almost there, but not quite”– then it illustrates, through its lack of authenticity, how

hollow hegemonic codes really are. By performing in the style of the Magistrate, by “speaking

his language,” the barbarian girl subsequently weakens his authority.

Nevertheless, ​as Spivak warns, subversion is not always triumphant, for it does not

necessitate a fulfilling pre-colonial return (Loomba 231). ​Upon her homecoming in the

mountains, the girl has already been “entered”– marked and defiled by the Magistrate. In the

narrative of hegemonic control, the girl’s journey– from daughter to barbarian to mistress–

cannot be reversed. In other words, repossession is impossible for her, for the barbarian people:

the colonizer’s discourse is too far ingrained. Viewed in this light, then, the barbarian girl’s

position is ambiguous– though her bodily actions are in many ways subversive, as previously

discussed, she is nevertheless permanently maimed and adulterated. She has “fed the colonial

machine” in the most visceral manner possible (Loomba 170). This defeat, this irreversible

destruction of the girl’s body, is arguably irreconcilable with her aforementioned “victories.”

However, it is a very appreciation of ambiguity that can resist the structuralism of Empire. While

no clear or discernable answers exist, there is potential in this grey area.

If the purpose of postcolonial literature is to question the construction of a dominant

discourse, creating a counter-discourse in response, “Coetzee’s novels seem to suggest that for

this effort to be successful a different strategy must be explored” (Dalbaye 88). Language cannot

effectively resist language, because language is in itself a manmade construction and therefore

relative. Thus, “only a paradoxical presence of a trope of non-language in the narrative may

create a space that proves truly counter-discursive,” that truly exposes the truth of Empire
 Pfitzer 6

(Dalbaye 88). The body answers this call for resistance, becoming simultaneously, and

paradoxically, an inscribed narrative of imperial torture and a means of resisting inscription.

 Pfitzer 7

Works Cited

Coetzee, J.M. ​Waiting for the Barbarians​. Penguin Books, 1982.

Dalbaye, Ellinor Bent. “The Silence of the Suffering Body: Counter-discursive practices in J.M.

Coetzee’s ​Waiting for the Barbarians​ and ​Age of Ir​on​.” ​Norwegian Open Research

Archives, 2007, http://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-18512​. Accessed 30 September 2018.

Loomba, Ania. ​Colonialism/Postcolonialism​. Routledge, 2015.