Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations of Works by J. M. Coetzee
- Chronology of Main Writings by J. M. Coetzee
- Introduction
- 1 Scenes from Provincial Life (1997–2009)
- 2 Style: Coetzee and Beckett
- 3 Dusklands (1974)
- 4 In the Heart of the Country (1977)
- 5 Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)
- 6 Life & Times of Michael K (1983)
- 7 Foe (1986)
- 8 Age of Iron (1990)
- 9 The Master of Petersburg (1994)
- 10 Disgrace (1999)
- 11 Elizabeth Costello (2003)
- 12 Slow Man (2005)
- 13 Diary of a Bad Year (2007)
- 14 Coetzee’s Criticism
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
5 - Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations of Works by J. M. Coetzee
- Chronology of Main Writings by J. M. Coetzee
- Introduction
- 1 Scenes from Provincial Life (1997–2009)
- 2 Style: Coetzee and Beckett
- 3 Dusklands (1974)
- 4 In the Heart of the Country (1977)
- 5 Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)
- 6 Life & Times of Michael K (1983)
- 7 Foe (1986)
- 8 Age of Iron (1990)
- 9 The Master of Petersburg (1994)
- 10 Disgrace (1999)
- 11 Elizabeth Costello (2003)
- 12 Slow Man (2005)
- 13 Diary of a Bad Year (2007)
- 14 Coetzee’s Criticism
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
If The Human Subject is not a rational and free agent, but located in society and therefore located by society’s values, attitudes, and ways of knowing and seeing, it follows that it is not fully in control of itself and must therefore endlessly question its intentions and actions. The problem with such self-scrutiny is clearly not that it results in a form of solipsism, but rather that the self cannot even claim to know herself and, in the absence of such certitude, is forced to doubt her motives and hence her agency. Even the idea that the rational subject is a free agent is the product of a particular cultural moment — that is, the European Enlightenment — and therefore yet more evidence of its embeddedness in society.
Understandably, the kind of skepticism attendant on the subject’s cultural implication is particularly acute and debilitating in oppressive societies where it is ethically imperative to resist tyranny actively. So, for instance, Albert Memmi argues that the leftist colonizer, who aspires to resist colonialism, is, in fact, implicated in the colonial system. The crucial point here is that colonial relations derive not from individual intention and action but preexist the arrival or birth of the individual:
The leftist colonizer is part of the oppressing group and will be forced to share its destiny, as he shared its good fortune. … Colonial relations do not stem from individual good will or actions; they exist before his arrival or birth, and whether he accepts or rejects them matters little. … No matter how he may reassure himself, “I have always been this way or that with the colonised,” he suspects, even if he is in no way guilty as an individual, that he shares a collective responsibility by the fact of membership in a national oppressor group.
Since the individual is deeply enmeshed in the oppressive society that she attempts to resist, she cannot not question the integrity of her actions.
The question of the implicated self who seeks to resist the oppressive social structures that, ironically, have structured her consciousness is omnipresent in J. M. Coetzee’s fiction of the apartheid period.
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- A Companion to the Works of J. M. Coetzee , pp. 65 - 75Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011