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Torture and the Novel: J. M. Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians"

One of the most horrifying realities of the twentieth century is the widespread existence of state-approved torture. Amnesty International cites allegations that torture took place in ninety-eight countries in 1984 and estimates that in the 1980s more than one-third of the world's governments are responsible for torturing prisoners. The existence of torture in the modern world raises difficult questions for writers, particularly those from South American and African countries. Should authors depict torture in their work, and if they do, how should they portray this incomprehensible act? One writer who has wrestled with these issues is J. M. Coetzee, a South African novelist, linguist, and critic. His fiction represents a working out of some tentative strategies for the novelist confronted with the question of torture. Writing in the January 12, 1986, New York Times Book Review, Coetzee admits that "torture has exerted a dark fascination" on himself and many other South African authors (13). But the writer who depicts "the dark chamber" faces two moral dilemmas, according to Coetzee. First, he or she must find a middle way between ignoring the obscenities performed by the state, on the one hand, and producing representations of those obscenities, on the other. Coetzee objects to realistic depiction of torture in fiction because he thinks that the novelist participates vicariously in the atrocities, validates the acts of torture, assists the state in terrorizing and paralyzing people by showing its oppressive methods in detail. Yet these acts must not be hidden either. Coetzee suggests, "The true challenge is how not to play the game by the rules of the state, how to establish one's own authority, how to imagine torture and death on one's own terms" (13).