J.M. COETZEE’s Waiting for the Barbarians: Moral Residue and the Affliction of Second Thoughts

This new episode looks at J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians in relation to the question of moral residue and the affliction of second thoughts. We first touched on moral residue with respect to Agamemnon’s tragic choice in Aeschylus’s play. Here we return to moral residue but this time look at it as a persistently disruptive impediment to ethical choice-making as represented in the character of the Magistrate, the narrator and central character of the novel. For the Magistrate is faced with what appear to be diametrically opposite choices: on the one hand is to denounce the brutality of the officers of the Empire and their torture of captives captured around the frontier settlement, and second is sorting out his mixed feelings toward the barbarian girl, who has herself been tortured by the Empire’s soldiers and whom he takes into his apartment as his ward. But matters are complicated by the fact that the Magistrate is inherently defensive about the civilized lifestyle guaranteed by the Empire while at the same time feeling simultaneously attracted and repulsed by the barbarian girl. I will be arguing that this structure of contradictions essentially complicates the moral residue he experiences in taking either side, and that this is fundamentally more complicated than the choices with which Agamemnon was faced. In Agamemnon’s case the choices were simply part of a dyad: whether to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to appease the goddess Artemis and get the winds to blow the Greek ships to Troy or, contrastively, whether not to sacrifice her and remain a great father rather than a great army general). It is the structure of proliferating contradictions tied to each choice in Waiting the Barbarians that generates the affliction of second thoughts for the Magistrate, and which, as I shall show, is a fundamental aspect of all of Coetzee’s fictional protagonists.
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Suggested Reading
J. M. Coetzee, “Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky,” Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, 251-193.
Brian Stock, Augustine’s Inner Dialogue: The Philosophical Soliloquy in Late Antiquity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Bernard Williams’s “Ethical Consistency” in Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
Patricia Greenspan, Practical Guilt: Moral Dilemmas, Emotions, and Social Norms, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Lisa Tessman, Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Achille Mbembe, Necro-politics, Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Sue Kossew, “The Politics of Shame and Redemption in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” Research in African Literatures (2003): 155-152.
Teresa Dovey, The Novels of J.M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories, (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1988)

[@cephalonia71]

I loved this book!

[@micahscott9598]

I'm writing a final essay on Waiting for the Barbarians. This video really helped me see what it looks like when your thoughts are well organized. Thanks for making this.

[@CriticReadingWriting]

Hi Micah, glad the episode was useful. Good luck with your essay.

[@nomhlendlovu9332]

I truly appreciated this analysis of our inner conflicts. Please keep up the great job.

[@fannygarvey6941]

Thank you Profesor, your lectures are clear and you make it easy to understand very complicated concepts.

[@CriticReadingWriting]

Hi Fanny, glad you are finding them useful. More anon.

[@kittyhans1]

Excellent in depth explanation

[@nunyatettey640]

Profound and insightful as always. Keep up the good work Prof.

[@CriticReadingWriting]

Thanks, will do!

[@ericbeecham5921]

This is awesome Prof✌🏾

[@CriticReadingWriting]

Thanks, Eric!

[@yebouakossonouibrahimkouas7345]

Fabulous

[@gladysagyeiwaadenkyi-manie3691]

I can see sex is a strong motif in this text. thanks a lot, Prof
Quayson.

[@CriticReadingWriting]

Yes, it is indeed. And yet it does not feel like sex as we normally understand it because of the torturous way in which the Magistrate goes about prowling around the barbarian girl.