Coetzee: Brilliant Language, Odd Subject Matter

This is possibly one of the strangest pieces of writing that I have ever read, and I don't simply mean strange in the sense that Waiting for the Barbarians discusses some...odd...subject matter. Scrutinizing Coetzee's work yields the presence of some very unique stylistic approaches. The most manifest of these approaches is his use of the present tense to tell the reader the tale of the Magistrate--we, as the readers, become a part of the Magistrate. We become lost in his thoughts; we indulge in his senses. Coetzee's deliberate employment of the present tense not only lures the reader into each scene but also gives the novel a sense of immortality, of endlessness.

Furthermore, I must concede that I am fascinated with--and slightly baffled by--Coetzee's simple yet complex, contradictory yet perfectly lucid stream of consciousness. Namely, I speak of his interactions with the barbarian girl. Perhaps the most compelling and puzzling of his thoughts concerning her is this:

"The girl lies in my bed, but there is no reason that it should be called a bed. 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, it would be no less intimate."

It is in these contradictions that I become oddly enticed to read further.

I feel I must comment on another of these contradictions--one that I believe may be one of the most thought-provoking I have read thus far in Waiting for the Barbarians:

"Desire seemed to bring with it a pathos of distance and separation which it was futile to deny."

After having noted such captivating phrasing and careful positioning of themes and motifs, I have come to notice a trend of Coetzee's: he seems to juxtapose contrary ideas and subject matter--such as the concept of desire and its infallible resulting in separation. He also intermingles the contradicting threads describing the blindness of the barbarian girl with the graphic, visually-stimulating language used to describe the Magistrate's physical relations with the girl.

Overall, my first impression of Waiting for the Barbarian was a skeptical one. Yet as I continued reading, I found myself genuinely intrigued by the mystique surrounding the Magistrate's intentions, the barbarian girl's desires, and where their relationship would go. Also, I must admit that of all the works we have read thus far in the year, Coetzee's use of language and stylistic structure has been by far the most compelling.

Marianna Torgovnick’s “Primitivism and the American Woman” lifts the mysterious veils concealing The Heart of Darkness and exposes perspectives that the novella cannot, or will not, say.

The “horror, the horror”—what has Kurtz actually done in Africa?

“Kurtz has allowed himself to be worshiped by his African followers.” Kurtz has becomes consumed by the fantasy of his ultimate superiority—unhinged from reality, drowning in a fantasy that is even more savage than his perspective of African primitivism.

He commits miscegenation (mates with a black woman, breaking a British code). The African woman is raised above the other Africans by wearing jewelry and leggings. She is beautiful, but she is not the Intended in that she is not “high of mind.” -- substitute/inversion for Kurtz’s ideal Intended woman. “She is presented as all body and inchoate emotion.”


Shrunken Heads
See passage at the top of page 398, which describes the collection of shrunken heads.

Shrunken Heads/Cannibalism in primitivism: absorption of a slain enemy’s courage and power, communal goals, provision of souls for boys at initiation, sense of renewal--all spiritual values that are primitive, yet not savage.

Western fantasy of savagery Westerners views of primitivism and head-hunting elicit a sense of savagery and animalistic, barbaric behavior—heartlessness, brute force.

Kurtz: completely disregards the communal, spiritual power of collecting heads. “In collecting heads, he acted out a Western fantasy of savagery, with emotions different from those typically found among primitive peoples.” (pg.399)


Erosion of Conventional European Values

“Africans became Kurtz’s grade fantasy theater for playing out his culture’s notions of masculinity and power through the controlled borrowed rituals attributed to certain groups within Africa, perverted to Western ends.” (pg.400)
Kurtz experiences a corrosion of European values, as asserted by the article. I disagree in some senses, however. Rather, he seems to be drowning in these European values, these Western presumptions of the African world. The only erosion of European values that I attribute to Kurtz is his unusual relationship with the African woman.

Marlow’s return to Brussels (pg.70)“I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams.”
Bitter, resentful, oppressed, jaded. He realizes, however, that he cannot express this bitterness, that he would be regarded as mad. Therefore, just one page later, he refers to those same, hurrying Europeans as “commonplace individuals going about their business.”

Closure?

Inside the inverted reality of Faulkner's literary design, the Sound and the Fury examines the steady decline of the Compson family, a metaphorical parallel to the diminishment of the Southern Aristocratic era. The self-centeredness of Mother, Father, and Jason wither any hope for a strong familial bond in the future; the embarassment that the Compsons find in Benji damages any hope to maintain the facade of a flawless Southern family; the sexual promiscuity of Caddy sullies the Compson name beyond repair; the suicide of Quentin, the first born son, casts an permanent shadow upon outsiders' perceptions of the once noble family. The Compsons have reached a dead end. With three physically or mentally sterile sons and one banished daughter, the Compson family has nowhere to go but to fade away into the absolute silence of a defeated family lineage.

And such is the final impression of the Sound and the Fury. Quentin's escape compounds with Mother's melodrama, which compounds to Jason's bitterness and fury--loudness, anger, red, pain, distrust, synicism, sadness, change?, the end. These components conjoin and are symbolized by Benji unprecedentedly loud and mournful bellering. And then--silence.

This silence, the silence that ensues the end of Benji's hollering, provides closure to Faulkner's the Sound and the Fury because it demonstrates the impending fate of the Compson family--silence; the end. This silence suggests that the family is doomed to be defeated by time, by change, and by their rejection of both time and change.