“Dreams of Ends”

In J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), a concupiscent Magistrate living in a far-flung colonial outpost struggles to make sense of himself and his actions amidst the cruelly rationalised violence of an unnamed Empire particularly as these pertain to a Barbarian Girl (named thus in the novel) whom he orders settlement soldiers to bring to his rooms after she is tortured and turned out by his superior, Colonel Joll. The Magistrate proceeds to subject the Barbarian Girl to bizarre erotic rituals with the apparent goal of finding her, and his own, truth—pursued through a conflation of reading, writing, and sex. It is an enduring irony of the novel that, although he attempts to assert his difference from Colonel Joll and the Empire’s regime of violence and torture, a search for truth underscores the motivations of both. As I will argue, however, the Magistrate moves, definitively if slightly, away from the self-perpetuating epistemology of Empire to an enduring experience of incoherence and uncertainty which speaks to the distinction drawn by Audre Lorde between pornography and eroticism.