The Visceral Allegory of Waiting for the Barbarians: A Postmodern Re-Reading of J. M. Coetzee’s Apartheid Novels

Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.

—Walter Benjamin

Allegory, then, is the doubling—indeed, the multiplication—of “texts” within and around a work of literature or art.

—David Joselit

Coetzee and Allegory

Nowadays, in the midst of a wave of protests and uprisings in the Arab world, the body re-emerges as a historical site of oppression and resistance. The killing of protesters that took or is taking place at the hands of security forces in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Syria testifies to the materiality of historical oppression. Apartheid should never be considered away from other contexts of bodily violations and loss of human rights like the Nazi death camps or the current Arab uprisings or even the Israeli-Palestinian situation. The use of sniper bullets, arrests, and torture against demonstrators in the Arab world is similar, for example, to the Sharpeville shootings in 1960 in South Africa when many protesters against the pass laws were killed and injured, with many demonstrators shot in the back as they fled the police. The same applies to the Soweto uprising of 1976 which resulted in the death of hundreds of black students protesting against apartheid and teaching in Afrikaans. Even the protesters’ goal of attaining civil liberties in South Africa under apartheid is similar to the causes of the current turmoil in many Arab states. Political rights and socioeconomic reform—as the current success of revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya shows/promises—are achieved at a price of bodily sacrifice.

Traditionally, allegory rhetorically speaks other than what it says. It becomes visible “when a progression of events or images suggests a translation of them into conceptual language” (Frye et al. 12). As Brenda Machosky reminds us, allegory is “to say one thing and mean another” and it “has always demanded that we think otherwise” (7). It is a way of writing and interpreting literature highlighting a contrast between an apparent meaning and an intended one that often gets privileged. J. A. Cuddon defines it as “a story in verse or prose with a double meaning: a primary or surface meaning; and a secondary or under-the-surface meaning” (22). Allegory, besides being a narrative in which something is spoken “otherwise,” is a narrative that displaces and ambiguates reference. As a symbolic means of representation that guises true meaning, it is not typically viewed as a visceral form of art.

By nature, allegory highlights the difficulties of articulating what is not, or cannot be, said. It hints at an “other” difficult to articulate and is implicated in the problematic of representation, which accounts for its relevance in a postmodern critique of Coetzee’s apartheid works.¹ It is not simply, Benjamin argues, “a playful illustrative technique,” but “a form of expression, just as speech is expression, and, indeed, just as writing is” (162). Traditionally, the literal meaning in allegory is overshadowed by the figurative one. Because this surface meaning is doubled by the figurative one external to the text and because allegory refers us to distant origins of meaning suggested by Benjamin’s metaphor of “ruins” (178), a good deal of allegorical interpretation becomes abstractly intellectual, trying to establish links between what is stated and what is implied. In Allegories of Reading, Paul de Man highlights levels of reading ranging between the literal and the figural and treats readings as allegorical, acting according to what we bring to texts from the world: “By reading we get, as we say, inside a text that was first something alien to us and which we now make our own by an act of understanding. But this understanding becomes at once the representation of an extra-textual meaning” (12–13). De Man further argues that “Allegories are always allegories of metaphor and, as such, they are always allegories of the impossibility of reading—a sentence in which the genitive ‘of’ has itself to be ‘read’ as a metaphor” (205). And this metaphorical dimension is only one level of allegorical interpretation we...