Encounter With The Other—A Levinasian Reading Of J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting For The Barbarians

A prominent figure in the contemporary literary arena, J. M. Coetzee is one of the most important voices of South Africa. Many well-known awards were attributed to him for his great contribution to the world’s literature, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Booker Prize, etc. Almost all of his novels are tinted with an allegorical colouring, while Waiting for the Barbarians is considered the most allegorical one with ambiguous spatial and temporal settings and unnamed protagonist. Some critics are dissatisfied with Coetzee’s adoption of allegory, believing that he should be actively responding to South Africa’s political reality instead of passively eschewing it. Most studies on this novel are from the perspectives of postcolonialism and postmodernism, focusing on its interrelationship with South Africa’s politics. In order to defend for Coetzee, this paper tentatively tries a Levinasian reading of Waiting for the Barbarians, intending to elaborate on the Self’s ethical relation with the Other in this novel, with the help of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the Other.Out of paranoiac superiority over and irrational fear of the natives, the Empire in the novel represses them atrociously to preserve and consolidate its own regime. Its autonomy runs to an extreme of totalitarianism, inflicting tremendous torment on the Other. Concomitantly, the protagonist in the tale undergoes a long and painful process of ethical awakening—he discovers the natives’irreducible otherness and the Empire’s true nature of barbarousness; he recognizes his infinite ethical responsibility to the Other and determines to shoulder it. Having shaken off the Empire’s autonomy, the protagonist abides by the heteronomy of the Other, truly transcending his Self to embrace the Other. He bravely fights for the natives against the Empire, at the cost of his comfort and pleasure, with his own safety in jeopardy and freedom in difficulty.Coetzee employs allegorical form in Waiting for the Barbarians not to escape history and politics, but to tactically respond to the reality of South Africa and the whole world in general. Via a tentative Levinasian reading of the novel, this thesis tries to unfold the moral message that Coetzee delivers:only when the Self shows unconditional respect and shoulders ethical responsibility to the Other in their encounter, justice and peace in the world would be possible. With sensitive compassion and profound meditation on innocent people in suffering caused by some other people, Coetzee implicitly and earnestly indicates an ethical redemption for human beings—to heal the war-saturated world with respect and responsibility.