Maulik Bhadreshkumar Bhatt,

M.A. Part – II, Sem – IV,

Roll No - 03

Paper – E-E-405-D- The African Literature,

Unit – 03 – Waiting for the Barbarians,

Department of English,

Bhavnagar University.

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

Those people were a kind of solution.”

- Cavafy (1904)

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Self – Other Binary

Magistrate / Colonel Joll

Excavation of the nearby ruin of a former civilization

Enigmatic washing and oiling “ritual” with a naked barbarian girl

Alterity is Inter-subjective for him

Self and other – inseparable – if distinct

Mikhail Bakhtin‟s view – self-other interdependence and interanimation

“I am conscious of myself only while revealing myself to another, through another, and

with the help of another… A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and

always on the boundary; looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another or with

the eyes of another… I cannot manage without another, I cannot become myself without

another; I must find myself in another by finding another in myself” (Shaffer, 134)

Mutual reflection and mutual acceptance

In order to understand – Locate outside – time, space and culture

Life is Dialogical – to dialogue/commune

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Magistrate‟s relationship with a Barbarian Girl linked with that of Third Bureau‟s.

Both trying to „trespass into the forbidden‟

Girl – Indecipherable – unreadable – obscure – opaque – blank – incomplete

“There is only blankness and desolation that that there has to be such blankness”

(Coetzee, 79)

Magistrate – A man who has lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may

lead nowhere.

Anatomizes the difficulty faced by even the most well-intentioned Self in in

understanding and valuing the other

The empire projects its own barbarism onto the other beyond the borders

References:

Cavafy, Constantine P. Waiting for the Barbarians, 1904, Print.

Coetzee, J.M., Waiting for the Barbarians, 79. 1980, Print.

Shaffer, W. Brian., Reading the Novel in English, 121-137, 2006, Print.

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