Barbarian in Coetzee and Cavafy

Barbarian Encounters: Rethinking Barbarism in C. P.
Cavafy's
and J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians
Maria Boletsi
Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 44, Number 1-2, 2007, pp.

67-96 (Article)
Published by Penn State University Press

DOI: 10.1353/cls.2007.0027
For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cls/summary/v044/44.1boletsi.html
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BARBARIC ENCOUNTERS:
RETHINKING BARBARISM IN C. P. CAVAFY’S AND
J. M. COETZEE’S WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS
Maria Boletsi
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 ex-
cite 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 Gibbon1
Reflecting on the second half of the eighteenth century, Edward Gibbon

points out in chapter 38 of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire that the barbarians, as they were known in Roman times, have
disappeared. At the same time, he does not believe that the “republic of
Europe”—the domain of civilization in Enlightenment thought—should
rest assured. The barbarian threat to civilization is always there in “scarcely
visible,” “obscure people.” The more invisible and obscure they are, the more
they tantalize the civilized imagination. Their invisibility fosters the myth
around them and enhances its threatening force.
Barbarian enemies (or so the story goes) do not just wait to confront the
troops of the civilized world on the battlefield. Their threat is that of invasion
from the outside into domestic territory, which would violently disrupt a
prosperous community and force civilization to return to a primitive, barbaric
state. “Περιμένοντας τους Βαρβάρους” [“Waiting for the Barbarians”], a
poem written in 1904 by the Greek Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy,
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES , Vol. 44, No. 1–2, 2007.

Copyright © 2007 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
67
68 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES
and J. M. Coetzee’s novel with the exact same title in English (1980) both
unravel around the anticipation of such an invasion, which never actually
takes place.2
Barbarism and civilization are opposed and interdependent concepts.
In this opposition, the notion of the barbarian operates as the constitutive
outside of civilization and feeds the superiority of the civilized. In terms of
its etymology, the ancient Greek word barbarian [βάρβαρος] is supposed to
imitate the incomprehensible mumblings of the language of foreign peoples,
sounding like “bar-bar” (or, as we would say today, “bla bla”). As such, it
has a double implication: on a first level, it signifies a lack of understand-
ing on the part of the other, since the language of the other is perceived
as meaningless sounds. At the same time, it suggests an unwillingness to
understand the other’s language and thus to make the encounter with the
other a communicative occasion. Consequently, the term barbarian entails
a collective construction of the other in a way that helps define the civilized
subject itself—by specifying its negative limits. In this construction, the other
is supposedly invalidated because it can never speak back and question its
construction (its language would not be understood). The barbarian thus
appears as an abjected outside, which, according to Judith Butler, is always
inside the subject “as its own founding repudiation.”3
The conditions according to which the pair civilization/barbarism
has remained operational from its birth in ancient Greece until today have
been under constant change. Nevertheless, despite the historically variable
interrelationship between the two concepts and the changes in the semantic
space that they occupy, such categories in history appear as ahistorical enti-
ties, operating in time but not themselves historicized.4 Within the foun-
dationalist discourse of history, the oppositional pair civilization/barbarism
is naturalized, posing as the way things have always been.
The opposition becomes established in ancient Greece with the Persian
Wars. As we see in Herodotus, the criterion for the opposition between
Greeks and barbarians is not only linguistic but cultural differences as
well—Greek democracy, freedom, and logos as principles and ways of life, as
opposed to the decadent luxury, lax morality, servile manners, and despotism
of the Persians. However, the connotation of savageness that we ascribe to
the word today does not become standardized until the barbarian invasions
of Rome.5
During the Enlightenment, thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Montesquieu, and others expressed their skepticism about the merits of
civilization and invented the well-known image of the “noble savage,” who
is closer to nature and more pure than the decadent and corrupt “civilized”
BARBARIC ENCOUNTERS: RETHINKING BARBARISM IN 69
C. P. CAVAFY’S AND J. M. COETZEE’S WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS
man. Such an act of (temporarily) reversing the hierarchy so that the civilized
appear more savage than the barbarians is not exclusively found in Enlight-
enment thought. We find it already in The Iliad, in Plato’s The Republic,
and in Aristotle’s Politics, as well as in works by writers such as Montaigne
or, later, Joseph Conrad.6 Similarly, the high value set on a certain kind of
primitivism or barbarism can also be found in different moments in history,
recorded in philosophical, historical, and literary writings. From the Cyni-
cal philosophers (445–365 B.C.), who with their primitive ideals intended
to dislodge the barbarian lurking at the very heart of the city,7 to the noble
savage of the Enlightenment and to exoticism in literature and the arts, the
attraction to the barbarian other is almost omnipresent in history. Whether
these writings focus on the alluring traits of the barbarian or on the barbaric
behavior of the civilized, such attitudes and representations in most cases
still feed on the Eurocentric elements that they seem to question. They
depend on the barbarism/civilization opposition and therefore reproduce,
rather than repudiate, the hegemonic discourse of history within which this
opposition functions.
In the nineteenth century and within the context of colonialism, the
positive (though still Eurocentric) image of the “noble savage” gradually
gives its place to a negative denotation of the barbarian as violent, dangerous,
and racially and culturally inferior.8 The civilization/barbarian dichotomy is
employed at the service of the imperialist project and its “civilizing mission.”
The barbarian (the colonized subject) is not only represented as ignorant
of civilization but as threatening and destructive toward it.9 Therefore, the
barbarian has to be held under the domination of Western colonial powers,
which offer to civilize him/her. Within colonial rhetoric, the barbarians are
violent and irrational by nature, whereas imperial rule is rational and its
violence is justified under the pretext of the civilizing mission.10
While the term “barbarian” is applied to Europe’s colonized others, it
starts being used during the Industrial Revolution for marginalized others
within the European borders. The increasing gap between classes in Europe
leads to civilization being thought as “the achievement of aristocratic races.”11
The term “barbarian” is used to designate members of the underclass of
the newly urbanized European peasants, but it is also employed for other
marginal figures, such as lunatics, people of the underworld, and Roma
people.12
At the same time in the nineteenth century that the Western concep-
tion of the barbarians fed Western superiority and the belief in progress, it
also started to pose as a source of rejuvenation for the West, especially when
Europe entered the fin de siècle. As Europe found itself in a period of crisis
and cultural pessimism at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of
the twentieth centuries, Europeans started questioning rationalism, positiv-
ism, and the Enlightenment ideal of progress, which supported the colonial
project. This general uncertainty generated a desire for change. Within this
context, the idea of a kind of primitivism or barbarism that would revital-
ize Europe and offer a solution by means of a return to the origins gained
ground among many European thinkers.13 Philosophers and intellectuals
such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud redefined civilization and
barbarism from different angles and revealed civilization as a far more pre-
carious construct than it was believed to be.
In Nietzschean thought, “civilization” is associated with weakness, loss
of courage, servility, and decadence. As a solution to the decadent Western
civilization, Nietzsche envisioned a new kind of barbarism, which would be
self-conscious, liberating, and empowering.14 In The Will to Power [Der Wille
zur Macht] (1901), the new barbarian is portrayed as strong and spiritually
superior, belonging to “a species of conquering and ruling natures” who
obey their instincts and give vital energy back to European society.15 Freud’s
contribution to the questioning of the discourse on barbarism and civiliza-
tion lies in his view that barbarism is not external to Europe, but internal to
civilization and to every individual. The barbarian other is not a different
race or group of people, but an aspect of our unconscious, which civilization
tries to keep under control.16
After the two world wars and the Holocaust, the ideal of Western
civilization was debunked since the irrational and barbaric side of the West-
ern subject had taken central stage. In the years that followed, the gradual
decolonization and the emergence of the anticolonial movement led to a
reversal of the civilized/barbarian dichotomy by exposing the barbarism of
colonial practices and the bankruptcy of the European civilization.
Although the discourse on barbarism and civilization seemed to partly
recede with decolonization, after the end of the cold war and especially since
the events of 9/11 and the declaration of the “war on terror,” this discourse
has made a dynamic comeback in political rhetoric, journalism, historiogra-
phy, and popular discourse in the West. Samuel Huntington’s popular book
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996) is a
characteristic example of the reintroduction of this oppositional thinking in
terms of civilization and barbarism, or “the West” and “the rest.” Hunting-
ton divides the world into eight civilizations and detects a growing conflict
between the Western civilization and Islam, which he identifies as the main
threat to the West. Following this logic, the West, under the leadership of
the United States, has to be ready to confront these enemies.17
In the face of the persistence of the barbarian/civilization dichotomy

with all its violent ramifications in history and in its recent reinvention, the
study of literary works that thematize and, at the same time, work against
this discourse acquires an additional significance. In this article I will argue
that Cavafy’s poem and Coetzee’s novel play on this opposition and disrupt
the fixity of the relation between its two constituents. In so doing, they take
a step beyond the tradition of the discourse on barbarians as outlined above.
Before inquiring into the ways in which this is done, I will first discuss the
intertextual bonds between the two texts, starting from the title, which
Coetzee takes over from Cavafy’s poem. Moreover, I will argue that their
relationship is more than a case of one-way influence of the preceding poem
on the novel. The novel restages and recontextualizes the poem, making us
go back to it and understand its performance in a different way. The dynamic
that the two texts develop when read through each other reveals the animat-
ing force of repetition, which is inherent in every intertextual act.
In addition to their intertextual relation, the relation between history
and literature is also foregrounded in both texts. While they manifest their
opposition to the authoritative discourse of history, at the same time they
have to confront the omnipresence and penetrating force of this discourse.
The position of the speaking voice in both works will prove very relevant
to my exploration of their ambivalent affiliation with the authoritative
discourse of history and civilization. My use of the “discourse of history”
and “discourse of civilization” as more or less interchangeable terms in this
article follows the presupposition that history as we know it in the Western
world is written by exponents of the self-proclaimed “civilized world” (i.e.,
the West). I will also discuss certain narrative modes through which the texts
engage and undermine this discourse. Finally, I intend to follow the course
of a key term of this discourse in both narratives—the barbarian—in order
to show how the mechanisms that produce such categories are exposed, as
well as how these categories are challenged through their repetitive use in
both the poem and the novel.
Both Cavafy’s poem and Coetzee’s novel have received a great deal of
critical attention. Many interpretations have viewed either the poem or the
novel in an ahistorical light as allegories of the human condition, and the
barbarians as abstract symbols with universal value and dimensions. Other
critical approaches have sought a historically-rooted and contextual interpre-
tation. These latter approaches situate the work in the specific place and time
of its creation and view it as a sign of its time or a reflection on the historical
situation at the time it was written, namely the fin de siècle climate in the
case of Cavafy and the apartheid in South Africa in the case of Coetzee.18
My argument in this article, although it takes both the allegorical/universal

and the historical function of the works into consideration, will not be struc-
tured around either of these approaches. Taking literary works as events that
perform differently every time they are iterated, this article draws from the
theory of the performative (or speech acts) in its initial conception by J. L.
Austin as a theory of language and in the direction it takes within the post-
structuralist thought of Jacques Derrida and, especially, Judith Butler.19 The
theory of the performative focuses on the aspect of language that performs
the act that it designates instead of just representing, describing, or stating
a fact. By means of this theory, the two works will not be examined as given
entities with an inherent meaning, but rather as events performing in the
social and cultural present, where the critic is also situated. I therefore try to
understand their past as part of the present, with all its cultural and theoretical
anxieties.20 I subscribe here to Derek Attridge’s view that the literary work is
not an object, but an event that happens and “can have powerful effects on its
readers, and through them on the cultural and political environment.” These
effects cannot be predicted. They often take us by surprise and, therefore,
constitute “irruptions of otherness into our familiar worlds.”21
At the same time, I will explore how the concept of the barbarian per-
forms in the two works at hand. Drawing from Derrida’s and Butler’s views
on the iterability of signs and on alteration through repetition, I will focus
on the subversive potential generated by the repetitive use of concepts and
utterances related to barbarism in the works.22 In this discussion, special
attention is given to instances of the objects’ failure to perform what they
“promise”: to successfully represent the barbarian other and bring the barbar-
ians “on the stage.” This failure will be studied as a strategy of destabilizing
dominant discourses and their construction of the barbarian other, which
depends on constant and stable repetition for its consolidation.
Bringing the Texts Together: Issues of Intertextuality
Cavafy’s poem is staged in a decadent city not historically defined, but with
a resemblance to Rome. It is structured as a dialogue—a person poses a
series of questions and another one answers them. I will henceforth refer
to the person that asks the questions as “the first speaker” and to the one
that answers as “the second speaker.” The questions concern the commo-
tion and preparations that the whole city seems to be making, the reason for
which the first speaker wishes to know. The answer to all the questions is
the same, repeated again and again, with further details each time: “Because
the barbarians are coming today.” We—and the first speaker—are therefore
informed that everyone (the senators, the emperor, the consuls, the praetors,
and the orators) is preparing to receive the barbarians who are coming to
take over the city.
Τι περιμένουμε στην αγορά συναθροισμένοι;
Είναι οι βάρβαροι να φθάσουν σήμερα.
Γιατί μέσα στην Σύγκλητο μια τέτοια απραξία;

Τι κάθοντ’ οι Συγκλητικοί και δεν νομοθετούνε;
Γιατί οι βάρβαροι θα φθάσουν σήμερα.

Τι νόμους πια θα κάμουν οι Συγκλητικοί;
Οι βάρβαροι σαν έλθουν θα νομοθετήσουν.
Γιατί ο αυτοκράτωρ μας τόσο πρωί σηκώθη,

και κάθεται στης πόλεως την πιο μεγάλη πύλη
στον θρόνο επάνω, επίσημος, φορώντας την κορώνα;
Γιατί οι βάρβαροι θα φθάσουν σήμερα.

Κι ο αυτοκράτωρ περιμένει να δεχθεί
τον αρχηγό τους. Μάλιστα ετοίμασε
για να τον δώσει μια περγαμηνή. Εκεί
τον έγραψε τίτλους πολλούς κι ονόματα.
Γιατί οι δυo μας ύπατοι κ’ οι πραίτορες εβγήκαν

σήμερα με τες κόκκινες, τες κεντημένες τόγες·
γιατί βραχιόλια φόρεσαν με τόσους αμεθύστους,
και δαχτυλίδια με λαμπρά, γυαλιστερά σμαράγδια·
γιατί να πιάσουν σήμερα πολύτιμα μπαστούνια
μ’ ασήμια και μαλάματα έκτακτα σκαλιγμένα;
Γιατί οι βάρβαροι θα φθάσουν σήμερα·

και τέτοια πράγματα θαμπόνουν τους βαρβάρους.
Γιατί κ’ οι άξιοι ρήτορες δεν έρχονται σαν πάντα

να βγάλλουνε τους λόγους τους, να πούνε τα δικά τους;
Γιατί οι βάρβαροι θα φθάσουν σήμερα·

κι αυτοί βαρυούντ’ ευφράδειες και δημηγορίες.
[What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?

Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.

What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,

And why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today

and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded 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,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual

to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

And they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.]
The rather paradoxical enthusiasm of the people is succeeded by utter disap-

pointment, or—even more—despair, when the barbarians do not appear:
Γιατί ν’ αρχίσει μονομιάς αυτή η ανησυχία

κ’ η σύγχυσις. (Τα πρόσωπα τι σοβαρά που εγίναν).
Γιατί αδειάζουν γρήγορα οι δρόμοι κ’ η πλατέες,
κι όλοι γυρνούν στα σπίτια τους πολύ συλλογισμένοι;
Γιατί ενύχτωσε κ’ οι βάρβαροι δεν ήλθαν.

Και μερικοί έφθασαν απ’ τα σύνορα,
και είπανε πως βάρβαροι πια δεν υπάρχουν.
[Why this sudden bewilderment, 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 haven’t come.

And some of our men just in from the border say
There are no barbarians any longer.]
The final verses of the poem comprise a final question and a statement made
either by the first speaker or by a third, unidentified voice:
Και τώρα τι θα γένουμε χωρίς βαρβάρους.

Οι άνθρωποι αυτοί ήσαν μιά κάποια λύσις.
[Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.]
Due to its dialogic form, the poem can be easily imagined as being per-
formed on stage. In fact, there are two acts of staging in the poem, the one
embedded within the other. While the two interlocutors stage a dialogue
for the audience of the readers, at the same time an elaborate stage is being
set within the poem by an audience (the citizens) waiting for the actors (the
barbarians) to rush onto it and perform.
Just 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 “the barbarians”
who are supposed to be planning attacks against the Empire and to be caus-
ing border troubles. The absurdity of the whole enterprise starts becoming
obvious when a large group of fishing people who have nothing to do with
any barbarian attacks are captured, interrogated, tortured, and kept as pris-
oners. 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 invasion of the barbarians that the
Empire so much feared does not take place and the expeditionary force that
had been sent to confront them is dispersed in the desert and extinguishes
without ever reaching the enemies.
Coetzee borrows the title from Cavafy’s poem and acknowledges it
explicitly as the novel’s pretext in doing so. The question of why Coetzee
chose to announce Cavafy’s poem as its intertext by using the exact same title
is challenging. The iteration of the title indicates the kinship between the
two texts. The progressive form of the verb in the title of the poem points
to the lack of closure in the process of waiting. It is a process without a
definite beginning or end, as the advent of the object of waiting is eternally
deferred. The use of the same title in Coetzee evokes the practice of sequels
and raises the expectations that a sequel usually does: being left with the
(absent) barbarians of Cavafy, who “were a kind of solution,” the reader
may expect the novel to take the scenario further and propose a solution by
actually bringing the barbarians onto the stage. But the barbarians fail to
appear again. The repetition of the title thus makes the act of waiting even
more tantalizing and underlines the omnipresence and, yet, absence of the
barbarians. But, as Jacques Derrida tells us, there is also alteration in every
repetition.23 By employing the same title, Coetzee keeps the old name, but
re-embeds the poem in a postcolonial framework and, as I will show, un-
dertakes a repetition with a difference.
Caught up in Discourse: The Ambivalence of the Speaking Voice
The postcolonial status of Coetzee’s writing is regarded by many critics as

quite problematic, since it is caught up in the ambivalence that characterizes
oppositional white South African writing. While trying to interrogate the
binary divisions set up by an apartheid society, white writing is inevitably
entangled in them and thus finds itself in constant engagement with, and
opposition to, the hegemonic oppression of colonialism.24 This ambivalence
characterizes the position and identity of the protagonists in Coetzee’s novels,
as well as the position of the author himself.
In an interestingly similar way, Cavafy also occupied an ambivalent posi-
tion: originally Greek but living in Egypt, being part of the Greek community
in Alexandria, and working in the service of the British Empire, Cavafy was
caught between 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.”25
The position of the first speaker in the poem is also 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. On the other hand, his
complete ignorance as to what is happening places him outside the spectrum
of knowledge to which an insider would have access. Furthermore, even
though he belongs to the civilized and inevitably employs the discourse of
civilization, his last ironic statement, “Now what’s going to happen to us
without barbarians? / Those people were a kind of solution”—if we assume
that it comes from him—undermines this discourse by exposing civilization’s
dependence on the category of the barbarians for its self-definition. Since
the barbarians, who were “a kind of solution,” do not exist, the other part of
the opposition (civilization) is in immediate danger.
The Magistrate’s position in Coetzee’s novel is also ambivalent: he is an
insider of the Empire, but not quite. Living as he does in a convenient state
of ignorance and tranquility, he gradually moves into a position of uncertainty
and doubt. He questions the certainties and truths of colonialist discourse and
takes an oppositional stance. He realizes, however, that switching sides is not
merely a matter of choice. Despite his good intentions, he cannot avoid his
complicity with the discourse of the Empire. Just as Butler has argued in the
case of gender, the subject does not preexist, but emerges and operates only
within (and as) the matrix of social relations.26 The authoritative discourse of
the Empire, within which the Magistrate has been shaped as a subject, is not
something he can discard since it is not external to his being. Caught up in
a position where he can belong neither to the oppressors nor the oppressed,
his identity becomes a site of conflicting claims. Consequently, his narra-
tive becomes a battlefield of opposed discourses marked by the Magistrate’s
attempt to make a difference, to become—as Colonel Joll ironically calls
him—“The One Just Man” (124).
When Colonel Joll’s native prisoners are brought in, the Magistrate
sympathizes with them but watches them from a condescending distance.
He does not want them to stay long or come back: “I do not want a race of
beggars on my hands” (20). The sympathy soon gives way to impatience and
indignation at “their animal shamelessness,” “the filth, the smell, the noise”
(20–21). His voice is full of contradictions. Later he views the same features
that he himself attributed to these natives as a result of “the settlers’ litany of
prejudice: that barbarians are lazy, immoral, filthy, stupid” (41, my emphasis).
What he had previously taken as a fact, he now exposes as a biased and unfair
opinion based on the settlers’ partial knowledge.
What is more, during a conversation with a young officer, the Magistrate
imagines that the officer sees him as “a minor civilian administrator sunk,
after years in this backwater, in slothful native ways” (54), thus bearing the
same supposed barbarian qualities of the natives. It is noteworthy that the
people of the city in Cavafy’s poem show similar symptoms—the legislators
have quit making laws, the orators have quit making speeches, the consuls
and praetors are sunk in decadence, luxury, and dazzling jewelry. All of these
elements traditionally attributed to a barbarian lifestyle are much more
internal to the civilized than they tend to think.
Once doubt creeps into the Magistrate’s life, however, the certainties of
his former life as a blissfully ignorant colonizer are irrevocably shaken. There
is a beautiful scene in chapter two in which the Magistrate goes hunting.
On spotting his prey, a ram, he aims with his gun and notices that his pulse
does not quicken: “Evidently it is not important to me that the ram die”
(42). Right afterward, however, he experiences “an obscure sentiment.” He
senses that “this has become no longer a morning’s hunting but an occasion
on which either the proud ram bleeds to death on the ice or the old hunter
misses his aim; that for the duration of this frozen moment the stars are
locked in a configuration in which events are not themselves but stand for
other things” (42–43). He then lets the ram go. In this scene a revelation takes
place: the Magistrate escapes for a moment the self-centered and limited
logic of the hunter, who only sees himself killing his prey, and realizes that
there are more ways to view the self and others. He thus turns his gaze to
the victim, which now becomes a “proud ram” rather than a shooting target,
and considers the possibility of failure in the act of hunting. For a moment
he transgresses the binary colonial logic of hunters and targets. Experiencing
the freedom and terror of an ontological dislocation, he confesses, “Never
before have I had the feeling of not living my own life on my own terms”
(43). The realization that there are other ways of viewing the world opens
the way for an interrogation and revision of the fixed categories on which
the Magistrate’s life had been built.
But while he questions the Empire’s practices, he often contradicts his
own oppositional statements and actions. Even when he assumes the posi-
tion of the victim and of the enemy of the Empire by being charged with
treason, doubt does not leave him: “I walked into that cell a sane man sure
of the rightness of my cause . . . but after two months among the cockroaches
. . . I am much less sure of myself ” (104–5). Moreover, the colonizer’s in-
stincts do not abandon him. His obsessive care for a barbarian girl who was
made lame and blind by Colonel Joll and left behind by her own people
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 his fondling and kissing her wounds, he recognizes the drive to engrave
himself on her as deeply as her torturer did. This drive reflects the need of
the Empire to inscribe itself on the bodies of its subjects. Soon enough he
realizes that he and Joll are actually 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 not a coincidence, then, that the novel
begins with a description of Colonel Joll’s sunglasses in which the narrator
can see a reflection of himself.
In the barbarian girl the Magistrate sees the possibility of making con-
tact with the other. His approach, however, is incurably marked by the logic
of understanding as penetrating and deciphering, so typical of the colonial
attitude toward the colonized: “[U]ntil the marks on this girl’s body are
deciphered and understood I cannot let go of her” (33). Her body, however,
is obstinately impenetrable, closed off “without aperture, without entry”
(45). Living in the same house as they do, they actually live past each other.
Despite the Magistrate’s repeated attempts, the girl remains an unsolved
mystery, a stranger, and his attraction for her is incomprehensible. Even
the reconstruction of her form as a memory becomes an unattainable task:
“[W]here the girl should be, there is a space, a blankness” (51).
The blindness of the girl makes it impossible for him to exist in her
gaze. Instead of a reciprocal gaze, he only sees his own double image cast
back at him (47). As long as he remains trapped in the Empire’s logic
of violating its subjects in order to construct them on its own terms, the
Magistrate’s communicative attempts will not be gratified by the girl. If, as
Émile Benveniste tells us, subjectivity is produced in the here and now of an
utterance, and if the “I” cannot just dictate its truths, but needs the “you” to
sustain its authority and allow it to speak, then the girl’s refusal to validate
the Magistrate’s discourse by responding to it challenges the power of that
discourse and condemns the Magistrate to a crisis of self.27
However, despite his failure to unfold the mystery of the girl, the
Magistrate does not impose his own voice on her. Without forcing her, he
waits for the girl to talk about her experience in the torture chamber. The
fact that she never discusses it does not lead the Magistrate to make up his
own story about her—his narrative remains true to her silence. Despite his
desire to make contact with her, he does not force her into it and, in so doing,
he shows his willingness to live with difference, without fully understanding
the other and her language.
The “waiting” of the novel’s title could also then refer to the process of
waiting for the other to speak without having to use words that have been
chosen for her. Therefore, the girl’s silence—and the Magistrate’s patient
waiting for it to end—gives her agency. By refusing to let her tortured body
be translated into language, she prevents the othering that the Empire’s
categorizations would impose on her body and her story.28 Although her
refusal to speak frustrates the Magistrate, it holds within it the promise of
a voice that will be different from his, but will also be the first step toward
a reciprocal approach on equal terms. It is only in the desert where the
Magistrate takes her to return her to her people that she willingly sleeps
with him for the first and last time. The desert—a neutral, formless space
outside the borders of the town—erases with dust and wind the violence of
limits and categories. Away from the limits of imperial discourse, the girl
comes to him on her own terms.
Perhaps the closest that the Magistrate comes to her, even though she
is no longer physically with him, is when he comes to occupy her place as a
victim of torture. Through his imprisonment, torture, and humiliation, he
experiences firsthand the way in which the Empire reads and labels bodies.
From being a respected official, he is suddenly labeled as an enemy of the
state. From a torturer—although he did not engage in practices of torture
himself, he experienced his position toward the barbarian girl as similar to
that of her actual torturer—he becomes a victim of torture and therefore,
just as in the case of the girl, his voice cannot be understood anymore by
the Empire. 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, “[h]e is calling
his barbarian friends.” One of them adds, “[t]his is barbarian language you
hear” (133). The scene strongly evokes the etymology of the word barbaros
in ancient Greek, which stems from the perception of the language of others
as meaningless sounds.
The Literary Challenge to Historical Discourse
All the mysteries and signs the Magistrate is trying to decipher throughout
his narrative remain unsolved. No apocalyptic vision or climax in the end
saves him from doubt and endows his actions with purpose and meaning.
In the final scene of the novel he sees a child playing with snow, which
seems to be the child about whom he had been dreaming—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 finally be
revealed. The last lines of the novel, however, seal the failure of this expecta-
tion: “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” (170).
The novel’s resistance to closure indicates Coetzee’s reluctance to impose
his own master narrative on his text by overexplicating it.29 Cavafy’s poem
does not offer closure either. The only answer that is given is encompassed
in the ambiguous statement that views the barbarians as “a kind of solution”
(my emphasis). The lack of certainty in these words corresponds to that
of the final words in Coetzee’s novel: “a road that may lead nowhere” (my
emphasis). The final lines in Cavafy are an attempt to cling to the previous
order; an attempt, however, that is weakened by the piercing doubt encap-
sulated in the words “kind of.” “A kind of solution” translates in fact to “no
solution.” At the same time, it carries an even more tragic undertone than a
straightforward negation of the barbarians as a solution because it captures
the immense struggle of the individual, who realizes the bankruptcy of
the previous order and yet strives for self-preservation by clinging to it. “A
kind of ” is the reaffirmation of the shaky ground on which this statement
is made, and is therefore hardly convincing. In Coetzee the “road that may
lead nowhere” underscores the uncertainty of the future, when the “truths”
that sustain the Empire have been debunked—this road to the future may
lead to a dead end. However, the word “may” also opens up the possibility
of envisaging another, different “solution” beyond binary oppositions and
enemies constructed for the sake of self-definition.
The uncertainty and anxiety common to both texts bring them in op-
position to the discourse of history, which is based on certainties and in which
categories and oppositions are naturalized and objectified as ahistorical and
fixed entities.30 The authoritative discourse of history tends to see itself as
natural—not as a specific discourse born in certain historical conditions and
therefore valid only as long as these conditions pertain.31 On the other hand,
while history “provides categories that enable us to understand the social and
structural positions of people,” literature “relativizes the categories history
assigns, and exposes the processes that construct and position subjects.”32
This deconstructive task assigned to literature presupposes an intimate
engagement with historical discourse for literature to be able to interrogate its
assumptions. In his article “The Novel Today” Coetzee addresses the relation
of the novel to history: “[I]n times of intense ideological pressure like the
present . . . the novel, it seems to me, has only two options: supplementarity
or rivalry.” The novel that chooses rivalry is “a novel that 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.”33 Coetzee’s novels have often been accused of being apolitical
and of not addressing explicitly the historical situation in South Africa.34
However, the kind of novel he describes here is not ahistorical. Coetzee is
reacting against the “colonization of the novel by the discourse of history,”35
rather than pleading for a disengagement of literature from history.
Cavafy’s poetry also engages history while taking a distance from, or
subverting, historical discourse. It is noteworthy that Cavafy himself had
expressed his wish to write history: “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.”36 However, the history that he writes in his poems—or rather
the history that his poems write—strongly deviates from the objectives and
subject matter of conventional historical discourse. His historical poems usu-
ally deal with lesser known or glorified eras, times of decadence and decline.
Cavafy focuses on isolated moments in history and is fascinated by moments
“of choice, of misfortune or disgrace” and by “situations that lead, or have
led to, ruin.”37 In a large number of his poems he builds a (semi)historical
setting by choosing specific moments in history and mixing historical with
mythical and invented characters and facts. The combined use of history
and myth in his poetry is not so much a form of escapism, but often a way
for the poet to address contemporary situations and give them a timeless
dimension.38
Many of Cavafy’s critics have ventured to discover connections between

his poems and contemporary events in Egypt, where Cavafy lived, thus
offering contextual interpretations. In the case of “Waiting for the Barbar-
ians,” Stratis Tsirkas has argued that the events in the poem resonate with
recent events in Egypt at the time that the poem was written. Interestingly,
these events—if we assume that they formed one of the sources of inspira-
tion for the poem—reveal another hidden connection between the poem
and the novel as they clearly 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 Greek and other foreign communities
in the country). These people wanted to be saved from “civilization,” the
British Empire, which had been ruling Egypt since 1878. The disappearance
of the barbarians in the poem alludes to the brutal crushing of the Mahdist
rising—an Islamic revolt that was threatening the power of the British—by
the British Army. In the final battle that took place in September 2, 1898, at
Omdurman, the Mahdists, despite their brave fighting, were annihilated by
Commander Kitchener’s army. They suffered approximately twenty-seven
thousand casualties, while the English counted forty-three dead.39 The
barbarians, therefore, did not exist any longer.
Regardless of the validity of this interpretation, as well as of those con-
necting Coetzee’s novel to the South African situation, both the novel and
the poem clearly resist readings that would frame them within one specific
historical context. Indications of place and time are missing from both works.
I would argue that the absence of such indications has a special function:
it enhances the sense of the works as instances of historical and cultural
memory through performativity. The use of the present tense in both texts
gives us the sense of the unique occurrence of an act in the here and now,
which corresponds to J. L. Austin’s conception of performativity: the poem is
performed in dialogic form in the present, while the Magistrate in the novel
narrates everything in present tense as if things are happening at the moment
he utters them.40 At the same time, the lack of time/place indications in both
texts creates a literary world untied to any specific historical moment and
therefore discourages contextual interpretations that would possibly conceal
the interconnectedness of the works with other historical moments, places,
or texts. Due to the absence of such indications, the “scenario” of the works
and the issues that they raise can evoke different historical moments in the
past, the present, and, possibly, in the future without being swallowed by,
or restricted to, any of them. In this way, the iterability of the literary act is
foregrounded (the recontextualization of the poem in the novel is already
an instance of this iterability). This kind of performativity based on itera-
tion reflects Derrida’s and Butler’s version of the performative. Every time
Cavafy’s or Coetzee’s literary act is reiterated and performed within a different
historical context by new authors or readers, its felicity largely depends on
the past that it carries (the weight of historical and cultural memory). In the
same way, Coetzee’s novel carries Cavafy’s poem within it, which it restages
and implicitly informs with the experience of the South African situation.
At the same time, the two works do not claim any ahistorical universal-
ity because they constitute unique events anchored in the present of their
own literary universe. This universe does not explicitly correspond to his-
torical time, and through the refusal of the texts to be reduced to a spot in
a chronology they become even more historically active. By declaring their
iterable nature, they keep the reader alert and make him or her perceive
them as parts of a multidimensional network of historical situations, texts,
and discourses. The reader is almost forced to read with an eye on the past,
the present, and the future.
The use of the present tense in both the poem and the novel indicates
their difference from and opposition to the modes of historical discourse.
According to Benveniste, the use of the present, future, and present perfect
is incompatible with historical utterance [histoire], as it would not serve the
historian’s mission of detachment and objectivity. In historical utterances, the
speaker does not intervene in the narrative, nor does he or she have recourse
to the first person and to deictic words such as “here” and “now.”41 In Coetzee’s
novel in particular, contrary to historical (past) narratives, the present tense
conveys the sense of an action in progress, the outcome of which had yet to
be determined. The present tense of the novel and the past tense of history
are often juxtaposed in Coetzee’s narrative. For example, on pages eight and
nine, the narrator suddenly interrupts his present-tense recounting to give a
whole past-tense paragraph in which he reproduces stories about all kinds
of crimes that have supposedly been committed by the barbarians. This
paragraph is surrounded by the words “stories” and “rumour” placed at its
beginning and end, respectively: “But last year stories began to reach us” and
“the rumour went” (8–9, my emphasis). The envelopment of the paragraph
by these words suggests that the discourse of history, though articulated in
a misleadingly different way, is as much a story as the narrator’s own story.
Furthermore, the use of the first-person narrative in the novel stands
in opposition to the authoritative voice in omniscient and distant third-
person narration, which is also the mode of historical narratives.42 The
novel counterpoints the modes of historical narrative even more due to
the narrator’s uncertain position and lack of self-awareness. Immersed in
doubting, constantly shifting positions, and seeking a way out of historical
discourse but being unable to completely escape from it, the Magistrate lacks
the authoritative traits of a narrator that has control over his narrative.
But Who Are Those Barbarians After All?:

Myths, Realities, and the Barbarian Force of Repetition
The challenge to historical discourse is also located in the actual use of the
categories and concepts of that discourse in a way that destabilizes their
supposed validity and objectivity and invites a resignification. In this respect,
it is worth following the ways in which the notion of the barbarian travels
throughout the novel and the poem.
The question of the actual referent of this word is the first to arise. 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, by following
the kinds of preparations that are being made for their arrival. The consuls
and praetors are thus dressed in embroidered togas and are overloaded with
dazzling jewelry because “things like that dazzle the barbarians.” And the
orators are silent because the barbarians are “bored by rhetoric and public
speaking.” These barbarians seem to fit the non-Western profile of decadent
people, immersed in luxury and excess and opposed to the Western logos.
The absence of the actual material referent of the word “barbarian” makes
it impossible for the reader to compare this mental image to any real object.
We only receive a mediated mirror image of the barbarians, as it is reflected
on the bodies of the civilized.
In the novel, the identity of the people to which the Empire refers with
the term “barbarians” stays unclear. The barbarians against which the Empire
sends its expeditionary forces are supposed to be violent nomadic people,
planning attacks against the Empire. However, the expeditionary forces never
seem to reach these barbarians, although they constantly think that they sense
their presence. One of the leaders of the expeditionary forces is, for example,
convinced that he was trailed at a distance by barbarians: “‘Are you sure they
were barbarians?’ I [the Magistrate] ask. ‘Who else could they have been?’
He replies. His colleagues concur” (53). Colonel Joll is also convinced of
their existence: “[W]e are dealing with a well-organized enemy” (125). The
Empire’s belief in the categories it has discursively constructed is so blind
that it actually disregards the absence of any empirical evidence relating to
the existence of such an enemy. The barbarians constantly seem to leave
traces without their presence ever being manifested. Thus, when “clothing
disappears from washing-lines” and “food from larders,” the people of the
town are convinced that the barbarians did it, even though nobody actually
catches them in the act. Various speculations are made to account for the
fact that the perpetrators are never seen, such as “the barbarians have dug a
tunnel under the walls” or they only “come out at night” (134). The barbar-
ians become the scapegoats of the Empire, as the people end up accusing
them for every calamity or crime that takes place, like the flooding of the
fields (during which, again, “[n]o one saw them,” 108) or the rape of a girl
(her friends recognize the rapist as a barbarian “by his ugliness,” 134).
Through the accumulation of rumors around them, the myth of the
barbarians takes extraordinary proportions and leads to their demonization.
They become the personification of evil, ready to “fry your balls and eat
them” (164); they are the bogeyman that keeps the children at home: “Are
the children still allowed to play there, I wonder, or do their parents keep
them at home with stories of barbarians lurking in the hollows?” (110). The
narrator observes that “once in every generation, without fail, there is an
episode of hysteria about the barbarians” (9). The myth around them is thus
a long-standing one, sustained by the discourse of history, which imposes
such categories in the first place as objective and eternal. The construction
of the barbarians is exposed in the novel as an absurd and well-organized
fiction, and the status of historical discourse is shaken by the realization of
its close affinity to mythical discourse.
But the myth of the barbarians as the ultimate enemy of the Empire
needs to find real bodies on which to exercise its power. These are the prison-
ers that Colonel Joll brings with him, which, according to the narrator, are
peaceful fishing people, in no way related to any attacks. The last group of
prisoners that the Colonel captures is put on public display: “[E]veryone has
a chance to see the twelve miserable captives, to prove to his children that
the barbarians are real” (113). The desperate need of the Empire to justify its
discourse and prove that the barbarians “are real” by finding—or, better said,
naming—the enemy in material bodies, transforms the miserable prisoners
into a dangerous enemy. On their naked backs Colonel Joll writes the word
“ENEMY” with charcoal and orders their beating by the soldiers until the
word is erased by blood. The word actually has to be written on them to make
those damaged and miserable bodies plausible as enemies. “The constative
claim,” Butler argues, “is always to some degree performative.”43 Naming here
is creating the enemy. The word “enemy” thereby becomes a performative,
which manifests the Empire’s inscription of its discursive categories on the
suffering bodies of its subjects. In this scene, bodies emerge as mere effects
of discourse, as blank surfaces where the performatives of the language of
the Empire are inscribed. The actual referents of the Empire’s signifiers—the
native people—are rendered irrelevant to these processes and are turned into
foreign and hostile presences (“barbarians”) in their own land and homes.
The barbarian other does not exist as an external enemy of the Empire.
It is not situated outside the domain of the civilized subject, but within it.
Through the Empire’s practices of torture and humiliation, its atrocities
against the bodies of its prisoners, a new referent is attached to the concept
of the barbarian, which the fixed imperial discourse full of euphemisms
cannot suppress. In this case, it is the overwhelming reality (in the novel)
that leads the narrator (and the reader) to adopt the term for the Empire’s
practitioners, and not the other way around —the term creating its material
referent. Although, as the narrator remarks, the torturers of the Third Bu-
reau are probably designated as “security officers” in some pay-office in the
capital (129), the Magistrate views these people 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, which becomes barbaric in its attempt to protect “civiliza-
tion”: “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
self-destructive impulse of the Empire to give birth to its own enemies. The
Empire’s soldiers that have settled in town end up terrorizing the citizens,
looting shops, violating laws, getting drunk, and causing trouble everywhere
around them. As this behavior is constantly juxtaposed either with the pitiful
state of the barbarian prisoners or with the stories about barbarian crimes
that are never witnessed, it becomes impossible for the reader not to notice
the paradox in the Empire’s use of the word “barbarian.”
The image that the Empire has created for the barbarians proves to be
a reflection of itself. During the Magistrate’s journey through 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?” (74), the Magistrate wonders. Like a fata morgana,
the barbarians dissolve before anyone can reach them, pointing back to the
ubiquitous presence of the people of the Empire as the real barbarians. It is
exactly this specter-hunting in the desert, carried out later by the expedition-
ary forces, that will lead to the total dissemination of the troops: they freeze,
starve to death, get lost in the desert, still convinced that they are chasing
barbarians. The disintegration of the Empire comes from within, not from
the pressure of outside forces.
From the beginning of the novel, the narrator uses the term “barbarian”
repeatedly, in the exact same way that it is used within the discourse of the
Empire: to refer to the natives (the colonized subjects) and to its (invisible)
dangerous enemies. The native fishermen, the nomads, the prisoners, and
the invisible enemies are always “the barbarians” in the Magistrate’s narra-
tive. Even the native girl who lives with him is almost always referred to as
“the barbarian girl,” not simply as “the girl.” Within the Empire’s discursive
regime, naming someone by the generic term “enemy” or “barbarian” is
denying this person an actual face and a singularity. This (non-)appellation
becomes an act of distancing oneself from the other and creating the other as
a hollow vessel to be filled with the nightmares and fantasies of the civilized.
The Magistrate has no choice but to employ the categories within which he
himself has been constituted as a subject. These categories have acquired a
naturalized effect as a result of their repetitive use in history. I believe that the
obsessive repetition of the word “barbarian” by the narrator draws attention
to this practice of appropriation through repetition and points to the citation
of the word as the very mechanism of the consolidation of its power.
However, that same mechanism used by a discursive regime for the
indoctrination of its truths can also turn into a self-destructive tool, leading
to the regime’s delegitimization. As Butler claims, there is a deconstituting
possibility in the process of repetition 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.”44 As the word “barbarian” is
being repeated in the novel, the fact that 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) gradually puts the term in suspicion and leads
to its denaturalization. Even more, its incantatory repetition points to the
excess of the Empire’s discursive regime, which contaminates its truths by
overstating them. At the same time, semantic confusion is caused, as a new
referent emerges for the term when the narrator starts using it to designate
the “new barbarians” (the colonizers). This new use is contemporaneous with
the Magistrate’s indignation at the Empire’s practices, which eventually leads
to his ostracism from the system.
This turn in the Magistrate’s attitude, however, does not put an end to
his use of the term to refer to the colonized subjects as well. Until the end,
the conventional use of the word for the natives runs parallel to its subversive
use for the colonizers. This way the word becomes performative with a double
use in the narrative: while its use in relation to the natives is perceived by
the readers as, in Austin’s terms, an “infelicitous speech act” (the reader fails
to see these people as barbarians), its use for the colonizers is more likely
to secure uptake by the readers. The parallel uses of the term indicate that
more than a simple reversal of the opposition barbarian/civilized is at stake.
The narrative does not reproduce the hierarchy by means of reversing it, but
rather destabilizes the opposition by rendering it unnatural and arbitrary.
The narrator’s voice is limited by the hegemonies against which it ut-
ters itself, but manages to find its way into challenging these hegemonies
by undertaking a repetition with a difference. By exposing the processes
through which the category of the barbarians is established, Coetzee does
not make this category a starting point for discussion, but rather an object
of interrogation. The narrator cannot banish the barbarians as a category,
but makes the workings of the system that produces them visible. Through
the repetitive but confusing use of the term “barbarian,” Coetzee reveals the
contested terrain that it occupies and causes a crisis in the term that leads
to its resignification. The word is mobilized and becomes an event with a
performative force that is (historically) variable.
The exploration of the term “barbarian” in the novel can help us view
its use in Cavafy’s poem retrospectively. In the poem, the repetition of the
word “barbarians” by the second speaker emphasizes his certainty about their
coming. The phrase “because the barbarians are coming” is repeated in all five
of his answers and thus almost acquires the illocutionary force of a promise
toward 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 more everyone believes in it and thus the bigger the disap-
pointment becomes when the promise is not realized. I would argue that 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 only existed as
part of the discourse of civilization. The poem thereby stages the infelicitous
speech act of a discourse trying to play God. Its “let there be barbarians”
will not work in this case. The limitations of the authoritative discourse of
civilization are exposed, its omnipotence is contested, and the transparency
of its correspondence to the actual world becomes opaque.
The people of the city are clearly attracted to the other. Living in a
decadent world that is falling apart, they have laid their hopes for the advent
of something new on a barbarian invasion from the outside. Their eager-
ness to welcome and meet the barbarians is comparable to the Magistrate’s
attraction to the barbarian girl and his willingness 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 its failure are somewhat different. While the Magistrate refuses
to force an encounter with the girl on his own terms and to tell her story in
his own language, the people in Cavafy’s poem are not even able to imagine
an encounter with the other on terms different from their own.
As we have seen, 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
“loaded with titles, with imposing names” for their leader. Hidden in these
titles and names is the hierarchical structure of the old Empire, which the
people are trying to reproduce by passing it on to their prospective barbarian
rulers. Instead of trying to radically restructure the old in order to generate
something new, they are convinced that changing rulers is enough to bring
their world to a new beginning. However, this script of the Empire in the
hands of the emperor contains the “titles” and “names” corresponding to 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 adversaries
by writing “ENEMY” on the backs of his barbarian prisoners in the novel.
Therefore, the people in the poem leave no room for a radical transformation
of the old because they presuppose an already-known other that exists and
can be articulated in their language without yet having made its appear-
ance. Viewed in this way, the poem stages the self-destructive processes in
a solipsistic society, which does not dare to open itself to the other, the new.
Without knowing it, the citizens are themselves responsible for sabotaging
their encounter with the barbarians that they so eagerly anticipate.
The mythology of the other, as Tziovas argues, is essential for self-
affirmation, whereas its absence gives birth to utter bewilderment.45 The
barbarians are blatantly absent from the present of the poem. Their alleged
existence in the past, which is suggested in the statement “There are no
barbarians any longer” (my emphasis), does not prove solid and convincing
enough to sustain their myth. The heavy, pessimistic mood that overcomes
the city when the barbarians do not come is a sign of resignation. The Em-
pire has to come to terms with its own demise, but not in the way that it
has staged it: not as an honorable defeat from external enemies, but due to
internal conflicts and contradictions. The narcissistic, self-indulgent mood of
the decadent society in the poem is not gratified with the spectacular drama
of its fall; to borrow T. S. Eliot’s words, the Empire ends “not with a bang,
but with a whimper”—ignored and left to die away without a real ending.
Civilization is faced with its own anticlimax.46
The citizens are struck by the realization that the barbarians for whom
they wait are reflections of the barbaric qualities in themselves, which they
project onto the other. As a result, they are forced to 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.”
Finally, the compelling last lines are heard: “Now what’s going to hap-
pen to us without barbarians? / Those people were a kind of solution.” But
who speaks these two verses and from what position? It has been argued
that these final words could either be uttered by the first speaker in the dia-
logue, or by a third voice, which could be the voice of an outsider (perhaps
the poet/observer), reflecting on the situation in the poem with a deeply
ironic statement. Poggioli, for example, seems to be entertaining this latter
possibility when he argues that the poet “looks at decadence not as an actor
but as a spectator doubly removed, and hence able to afford both a sardonic
and an urbane wit.”47
However, without dismissing the idea of the third voice, I would argue
that these lines could be spoken by the first speaker, whose voice is now
altered, since the “dreadful realization of the depletion of images of Other-
ness.”48 It is thus not the voice of a third-person observer who witnesses the
dialogue from an epistemological distance and is able to draw conclusions;
nor is it the voice of Hegelian dialectics, seeking to transcend contradic-
tions and shape them into a new unified, homogeneous whole where the
difference between self and other is eradicated. As the agony and struggle
for self-preservation in the phrase “a kind of ” suggests, this voice belongs to
the same discourse that invented and has been waiting for the barbarians.
But at the same time, it is changed by self-reflection, which always requires
a distancing from oneself, a viewing of oneself as other. This changed voice
realizes that the civilized themselves carry the barbaric qualities they ascribe
to the other. This realization gives it its ironic undertone. However, this
voice is unable to answer the question of what should come in the place
of the constitutive outside for which the barbarians stood now that their
construction has collapsed.
The difference of this last voice also lies in the fact that it is not only
addressed to the citizens in the poem’s city. It seems to turn to the audience
of the poem’s staged performance, the readers. In so doing, it perpetuates the
search for another “solution”—beyond barbarians—in the present, and the
present of every reading. The final voice is dragging the reader in, implicating
him/her in the search for a solution in ever new contexts.
The failure of encountering the other in the poem does not necessarily
support a pessimistic view of civilization. Cavafy himself did not see the
poem’s message as necessarily pessimistic: “Besides, the poem does not work
against my optimistic view [about the future]. It could be taken as an episode
in the course towards the Good.”49 The failure of the poem’s performative
(the promise of encounter) indicates the bankruptcy of existing modes of
thought and, as such, it can be seen as an act of criticism. The poem whis-
pers in our ear that if we want those barbarians to come—if we want an
actual encounter with the other—we must refashion the norms whereby we
understand ourselves as well as others.50
Concluding
The Empire in Coetzee’s novel is also falling apart for the same reasons as
the city in the poem: not by an external enemy, but under the pressure of its
internal tensions. In what seems to be a Freudian move, both works expose
the “barbarian” as an inherent part of the civilized subject, but nevertheless
constructed as an external other in order to delimit the borders of civiliza-
tion and support its supremacy. But they also go beyond Freud’s “barbar-
ian within,” as well as beyond the tradition of the barbarian/civilization
dichotomy: neither in the poem nor in the novel is the opposition between
civilization and barbarism just reversed by simply demonstrating that the
civilized are in fact the barbarians, whereas the barbarians are the innocent
victims of Western barbarism. Both works rise above this reversal because
they radically question the terms of the dichotomy and expose them as
hollow, inadequate, and, at the same time, violent and absurd. Furthermore,
they deal with the “existential significance of the Absolute Other’s absence”51
while struggling with the difficulty of escaping the categories that have
shaped our identity.
Confronted with the impossibility of discarding these categories, both
works nevertheless succeed in mobilizing them. The notion of the barbarian,
in its historically fixed relation to civilization, is led to a “productive crisis.”52
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 what we think we see, is it the barbarians
themselves or our own reflection? The barbarian as a concept is omnipres-
ent and yet elusive.
In achieving to destabilize the discourse on barbarism and civilization,

both the poem and the novel stand before a bigger challenge: that of recon-
structing after having deconstructed. In Cavafy, this challenge is encapsulated
in the question “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?” In
the poem, the question of an alternative to civilization’s collapsed constitutive
outside is left unanswered. Despite the difference of the speaker’s voice in the
final verses, I still hear it as a voice standing before a void, not plunging into
it. In Coetzee, on the other hand, I would argue that the narrator descends
into that void and dares to let a negotiation take place between the old (the
Empire and its discourse) and a new kind of discourse. The narrator, with
his constant misreading and misappropriating of the foundational concepts
of the Empire, develops a discourse that carries signs of a transition between
the old and the new, sameness and otherness. His discourse moves toward
a new space of negotiation at the significatory boundaries of the Empire, a
space that can accommodate differential and contradictory readings of signs
without imposing an artificial unity.
The narrator cannot completely escape the limitations of the Empire’s
authoritative discourse. However, he manages to experiment with the cat-
egories of this discourse and turn them from ideological tools in the service
of the Empire into instruments of subversion and linguistic contamination.
In doing so, he momentarily turns into a “barbarian” himself, and not in
the sense that the Empire wants him to be, but in a sense that could be
extracted from the second meaning of the word “barbarism”: “an offensive
word or action, especially a mistake in the use of language” (according to
The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English). In failing to write history,
the Magistrate becomes a barbarian because he “contaminates” and misuses
the fixed terms of historical discourse.
The insertion of “barbarisms” in a sedimented discourse—those small,
improper alterations that become the errant stitches that change the pattern
of civilization—creates a different space for this discourse. In this new space,
created here within literature, barbarism is resignified to denote the dynamic,
destabilizing invasion of a new and foreign force into something familiar.
This new barbarism is not the barbarism that thinkers such as Nietzsche
envisioned as the solution to the decadence of Western civilization—a force
of destruction and regeneration that wipes out the previous order in order
to install a new one. It rather uses and repeats the old in order to restructure
it. The process of repetition is after all inherent in the word “barbarian”
itself, understood from its etymological perspective, as barbarism describes
a relation of “iterative disturbance (ba-ba), that interrupts the linear passage
of language.”53
Cavafy’s and Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians present the reader with
unresolved questions, linguistic bewilderment, obsessive iterations, infelici-
tous performatives, and the desire for an alternative way of thinking and
speaking—a desire perhaps explored in Coetzee more than in Cavafy. In so
doing, they extend an open and challenging invitation for their performance
in the reader’s present. Indeed, one reading them today cannot bypass their
striking pertinence to the contemporary world in which strict oppositional
thinking in terms of “us” and “them,” “civilization” and “barbarism” is staging
a comeback in political rhetoric and everyday discourse. Both works explore
the effects of oppositional thinking, as well as a prospect that constitutes
one of the desiderata of our global community: that of a society that would
not need to wait in vain for the barbarians, but would be more open to an
encounter with others.
Leiden University
Notes
1. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury,
7 vols. (London: Methuen, 1909), 4:177.
2. I am using the translation of the poem by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard in C. P.
Cavafy, Collected Poems, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (New Jersey: Princeton
UP, 1975). For my references to page numbers in Coetzee’s novel, I am using the following
edition: J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980; London: Vintage, 2000).
3. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge,
1993), 3.
4. Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17.4 (1991): 778.
5. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, London: Co-
lumbia UP, 1991), 51.
6. Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination,
1492–1945 (New York: Oxford UP, 2001), 6.
7. François Hertog, Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece, trans. Janet
Lloyd (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2001), 98.
8. This view is also supported by Dimitris Tziovas in “Cavafy’s Barbarians and Their West-
ern Genealogy,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 10 (1986): 169. The terms “savage” and
“barbarian” are not always used interchangeably during and after the Enlightenment. Their
semantic difference often lies in that the savage is closer to nature and redeemable, whereas
barbarians are dangerous and irredeemable; see Mark B. Salter, Barbarians and Civilization in
International Relations (Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press, 2002), 22.
9. Salter 35.
10. Salter, 36.
11. Tziovas, 179.
12. Salter, 6.
13. Matthew Arnold and J. Burckhardt are two exponents of this line of thinking. See Tzi-
ovas 170–71. A bit later, in Oswald Spengler’s famous historical epic, The Decline of the West
[Der Untergang des Abendlandes] (1918–22), the barbarian receives a positive signification as
well, seen as the remedy for the restraints of civilization [“Zivilisation”], which represents the
spirit of decay. See also Salter, 71.
14. Nietzschean ideas on barbarism in Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist der Musik [The
Birth of Tragedy] (1872), as presented in Tziovas, 174.
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann
and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 478–79.
16. Freud’s ideas in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur [Civilization and Its Discontents] and
Zeitgemässes über Krieg und Tod [Thoughts for the Times of War and Death] presented in Salter,
74–75.
17. Huntington, 209–18.
18. Among such contextual approaches of the poem are those by Stratis Tsirkas, O politikos
Kavafis [The Political Cavafy], (Athens: Kedros, 1971), 48–54, and Dimitris Tziovas, “Cavafy’s
Barbarians and Their Western Genealogy,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 10 (1986):
161–78. An approach that focuses on the universality of the poem is, for example, that of
Peter Bien, Constantine Cavafy (New York and London: Columbia UP, 1964), 35–37. On
the relation of Coetzee’s fiction to the context of its writing and to the South African situa-
tion, see, for example, Sue Kossew, A Post-Colonial Reading of J. M. Coetzee and André Brink
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 1–31; David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics
of Writing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1993); Susan VanZanten Gallagher,
A Story of South Africa: J. M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991).
19. The theory of speech acts was coined by J. L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words
(1962; Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975) as a reaction to the solid assumption of philosophy
that the function of language was to “describe some state of affairs, or to state some fact, which
it must do either truly or falsely” (Austin, 1). The terms “performative” and “speech act” in
Austin’s theory are more or less interchangeable.
20. See also Mieke Bal, introduction to The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdis-
ciplinary Interpretation, ed. Mieke Bal (Stanford: Stanford U P, 1999), 1.
21. Derek Attridge, preface to J .M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (Chicago and London:
The U of Chicago P, 2004), xii.
22. The idea of the subversive potential in the repetition of a concept or utterance is exten-
sively developed in Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York:
Routledge, 1997).
23. In Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan
Bass (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982), 307–30.
24. Kossew, 2, 7.
25. My translation. Martin McKinsey, “Anazitondas toys Varvarous” [Looking for the bar-
barians], in I Poiisi toy Kramatos: Modernismos kai Diapolitismikotita sto Ergo toy Kavafi [The
poetry of alloy: modernism and interculturalism in the work of Cavafy], ed. Michalis Pieris
(Heraklion: Crete UP, 2000), 42.
26. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 7. Butler concentrates on the matrix of gender relations.
27. Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris, Gallimard: 1966), 225–36.
28. Jennifer Wenzel, “Keys to the Labyrinth: Writing, Torture, and Coetzee’s Barbarian
Girl,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 15, no. 1 (1996): 66.
29. Kossew, A Post-Colonial Reading of J. M. Coetzee and André Brink, 24.
30. Scott, 778.
31. Teresa Dovey, “J. M. Coetzee: Writing in the Middle Voice,” in Critical Essays on J. M.
Coetzee, ed. Sue Kossew (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), 23.
32. Spivak as presented in Scott, 791.
33. J. M. C.oetzee, “The Novel Today,” Upstream 6 (1988): 3
34. Kossew, A Post-Colonial Reading of J. M. Coetzee and André Brink, 10.
35. Coetzee, “The Novel Today,” 3.
36. My translation. Cavafy quoted in D. N. Maronitis, “Yperopsia kai Methi. O Poiitis kai i
Istoria” [Arrogance and intoxication. The poet and history], in I Poiisi toy Kramatos, ed. Pieris,
226.
37. Stephen Spender, “Cavafy: The Historic and the Erotic,” in The Mind and Art of C. P.
Cavafy, ed. Denise Harvey (Athens: Denise Harvey and Co., 1983), 90.
38. Alexandra Samouil, “K. P. Kavafis—A. Gide; Mia Synandisi” [C. P. Cavafy—A. Gide; an
encounter], in I Poiisi toy Kramatos, ed. Pieris, 152. According to C. M. Bowra, Cavafy found in
history a way to relate to the present, as well as the symbols and myths he needed to give shape
to his ideas and thoughts; see Bowra, “Constantine Cavafy and the Greek Past,” in The Crea-
tive Experiment (London, Melbourne and Toronto: Macmillan, 1967), 32–33. George Seferis
sees the staging of historical scenes in Cavafy as an objective correlative through which the poet
can express his sensibility; see Seferis, “K. P. Kavafis, T. S. Eliot: paralliloi” [C. P. Cavafy, T. S.
Eliot: parallels], in Eisagogi stin Poiisi toy Kavafi: Epilogi Kritikon Keimenon [Introduction to
the poetry of Cavafy: selection of critical essays], ed. Michalis Pieris (1946; Heraklion: Crete
UP 1999), 141–78. For Tsirkas, historical poems in Cavafy usually involve three “keys”: (1) the
real event—an event serving as an inspiration source from the poet’s immediate context and
time; (2) the historical event—the event from history explicitly thematized in the poem; and
(3) the psychic event—the poem’s relation to the poet’s personal experiences and psyche; see
Tsirkas, O Kavafis kai i Epochi toy [Cavafy and his time] (Athens: Kedros, 1958), 315–20. For
other discussions of Cavafy and history, see also Giannis Dallas, Kavafis kai Istoria [Cavafy
and history] (Athens: Ermis, 1974); Edmund Keeley, Cavafy’s Alexandria: Study of a Myth
in Progress (London: Hogarth Press, 1977); Marguerite Yourcenar, Présentation critique de
Constantin Cavafy 1863–1933 (Paris: Gallimard, 1978); Michalis Pieris, “Kavafis kai istoria”
[Cavafy and history], in Eisagogi stin Poiisi toy Kavafi: Epilogi Kritikon Keimenon [Introduction
to the poetry of Cavafy: selection of critical essays], 397–408; and Maronitis.
39. For this interpretation of “Waiting for the Barbarians,” see Tsirkas, O Politikos Kavafis
[The Political Cavafy], 48–54.
40. Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002),
176.
41. Benveniste, 238–39.
42. Bal, 192.
43. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 11. Further citations in text.
44. Ibid., 10.
45. Tziovas, 177.
46. Renato Poggioli, “Qualis Artifex Pereo! Or Barbarism and Decadence,” Harvard Library
Bulletin 13.2 (1959): 149.
47. Poggioli, 148.
48. Marios Constantinou, “The Cavafian Poetics of Diasporic Constitutionalism: Toward a
Neo-Hellenistic Decentering of the Cyp(riot)ic Experience,” in Cyprus and Its People: Nation,
Identity, and Experience in an Unimaginable Community, 1955–1997, ed. V. Calotychos (Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1998), 193.
49. Ta Nea, April 23, 1983 (my translation).
50. On the conditions for the encounter of the self with the other and the effects of this
encounter, see Derek Attridge, “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other,” in
Deconstruction: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, 4 vols., ed. Jonathan Culler
(Routledge: London and New York, 2003), 4:330–31.
51. Constantinou, 193 (my emphasis).
52. Butler’s formulation, Bodies That Matter, 10.
53. Brett Neilson, “Barbarism/Modernity: Notes on Barbarism,” Textual Practice 13, no. 1
(1999): 83.

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Barbarian Encounters: Rethinking Barbarism in C. P.

Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 44, Number 1-2, 2007, pp.

Published by Penn State University Press

For additional information about this article

The reign of independent barbarism is now contracted to

Reflecting on the second half of the eighteenth century, Edward Gibbon

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES , Vol. 44, No. 1–2, 2007.

In the face of the persistence of the barbarian/civilization dichotomy

My argument in this article, although it takes both the allegorical/universal

Bringing the Texts Together: Issues of Intertextuality

Τι περιμένουμε στην αγορά συναθροισμένοι;

Είναι οι βάρβαροι να φθάσουν σήμερα.

Γιατί μέσα στην Σύγκλητο μια τέτοια απραξία;

Γιατί οι βάρβαροι θα φθάσουν σήμερα.

Γιατί ο αυτοκράτωρ μας τόσο πρωί σηκώθη,

Γιατί οι βάρβαροι θα φθάσουν σήμερα.

Γιατί οι δυo μας ύπατοι κ’ οι πραίτορες εβγήκαν

Γιατί οι βάρβαροι θα φθάσουν σήμερα·

Γιατί κ’ οι άξιοι ρήτορες δεν έρχονται σαν πάντα

Γιατί οι βάρβαροι θα φθάσουν σήμερα·

[What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?

Because the barbarians are coming today.

Why did our emperor get up so early,

Because the barbarians are coming today

Because the barbarians are coming today

Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual

Because the barbarians are coming today

The rather paradoxical enthusiasm of the people is succeeded by utter disap-

Γιατί ν’ αρχίσει μονομιάς αυτή η ανησυχία

Γιατί ενύχτωσε κ’ οι βάρβαροι δεν ήλθαν.

[Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.

Και τώρα τι θα γένουμε χωρίς βαρβάρους.

[Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Caught up in Discourse: The Ambivalence of the Speaking Voice

The postcolonial status of Coetzee’s writing is regarded by many critics as

The Literary Challenge to Historical Discourse

Many of Cavafy’s critics have ventured to discover connections between

But Who Are Those Barbarians After All?:

In achieving to destabilize the discourse on barbarism and civilization,

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