SujaySood,sujaysood@gmail.

com 1

That we should obey laws, whether good or bad is a new fangled notion...It is contrary to our selfhood if we obey laws repugnant to our conscience. Such teaching is opposed to religion and means slavery. The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi

We Are the Miracle: Waiting for the Barbarians

NOTE OF INTRODUCTION This analysis argues that Coetzees powerful meditation on the nature of ethics in Waiting for the Barbarians forefronts ethics as an extra-rational truth. Critics have either expressed dissatisfaction with regard to its ambiguous nature and lack of historical specificity (Atwell, Dovey, Gallagher), or approached it as a narrative that is modernist in nature and thus responsible. In terms of ethics figured as responsibility, Coetzees oeuvre in general has been filtered through Derridean and Levinasian ethics (Attridge, Marais). Employing a framework I created for literary analysis during my dissertation, and which I entitled dharmic-Ethics, I argue that the ethical vision in Barbarians surpasses the critical gaze that is filtered through the Western binary of Self/Other. To counter this, I show that the ethical trajectory of Barbarians can best be understood by employing tools of semiotic criticism which are then subsumed into a larger theoretical framework inspired by philosophical tenets to be found in the Bhagvada Gita and Samkhya in Indian philosophy. Similar to other ancient schools of Indian thought, Samkhya has no conception of an ontological Otherits vision always supports a self/Self universalism. The conception of ethics in such a system is radically different from the dominant Western one that, I would argue, essentializes Self and Other, as also essentializing the encounter between (human) Self and Other as the founding moment for ethics. I have treated my conception of Dharmic-Ethics at length in my dissertation; more recently, I had an article entitled An Introduction to Dharmic-Ethics published by Rodopi Press, which provides a succinct introduction.1 The theoretical framework I employ for analysis provides an interpretation of the ethical import of Coetzees Barbarians. Written in two parts, this analysis first engages with representative criticism, then in the second part provides an alternative and truly postcolonial method of evaluating the ethical dimension of the narrative.
1

SocietyinaPostColonialWorld.Eds.GeoffreyV.Davis&PeterH.Mardsen.Rodopi: Amsterdam/NewYork,NY2004,XVI

SeeAnIntroductiontoDharmicEthics,inTowardsaTransculturalFuture:Literatureand

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WE ARE THE MIRACLEPART I

THE DILEMMA OF TORTURE
Waiting for the Barbarians stands out in Coetzee's uvre as the narrative most directly concerned with the nature of ethical responsibility and its intimate contact with the extradiscursive "unteachable" core of human being. The evocation of the agency of ethics as primary sociality is figured through the many mysterious gestures depicted in Coetzee's lyrical and allegorical novel. This figuration importantly exceeds the bounds of discourse-fixated criticism that is commonplace as appraisal of Coetzee's authorial intentionality; exemplary, in this regard, are the following statements: In Waiting for the Barbarians one finds a point at which history, in failing to transform the terms of discourse, becomes objectified as the myth of history, or History; with teleology thus undermined, the discursive nature of history is thrown into relief," (Atwell 14) And, In Waiting for the Barbarians, allegory is thematised [sic] as a means of articulating the liberal humanist crisis of interpretation, while at the same time allegory is employed as a structural device in order to imply the inevitable imbrication of the novel's own discourse with the discourses it deconstructs. (Dovey, CPC 141)

Both Atwell and Dovey are sensitive to the permutations of a post-structural analysis, and are right in finding in Barbarians some of the major elements that inform postmodern and post-colonial critiques, such as "History," "humanist crisis of interpretation," and self-reflexive strategy. But first and foremost, Waiting for the Barbarians hinges upon torture and the ethical crisis produced by it. Coetzee's
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response in Barbarians to the issue of state oppression and to torture, in particular, very consciously avoids historical specificity. Certain South-African critics have
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viewed the allegorical approach as insufficiently political and thus escapist, blaming Susan Gallagher, in "The Novelist and Torture," has addressed the South African background which relates to the deployment of torture in Coetzee's novel. Specifically, the Soweto uprising of June 1976 led to a sixteen-month period of social unrest and unconscionable Police brutality. The volatile state of affairs reached a dangerous point with the death of Stephen Biko, the charismatic leader of the Black People's Convention, under mysterious circumstances after spending a month in detention with the Security Police (112-118). These events were among the inexorable consequences of the apartheid policies sanctioned by the National Party that gained control of South African policy-making in 1948. Though rumors of state-sponsored torture existed aplenty since then, the events culminating in Biko's death had important repercussions, not least at the global level: "the issue of South Africa filled public discourse of all kinds--from government reports to protest poems, from United Nations declarations to novels" (112).
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The only reference to historical time is the mention of crude-fashioned sunglasses and guns, locating the narrative anywhere after the twelfth-century.
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Coetzee for his avoidance of addressing the material and historical determinants of Imperialism, the economic processes of capitalism, the contemporaneous political struggle in South-Africa, and for his seeming lack of an ideological purposefulness. This leads to dissatisfied claims such as, "Coetzee's fictional language can say next to nothing outside the modality of its own racial-historical dialectic" (Vaughan), and, Barbarians shows the lack of a moral courage "as it ultimately challenges nothing," providing no more than "the sonorous malediction of an idealistic humanism finding itself in alien territory" (in Penner 23-29). Such responses to Coetzee's aesthetic effort fail to appreciate the significance of an ethical inquiry into the justification of all action, be it the zone of politics, capitalism, historicism, Imperialism. Indeed, as I will discuss below, the paucity of historical markers does not diminish Coetzees soulsearching investigation into the constitution of ethics. To the contrary, Coetzees narrative reveals the nature of ethics to be at the very core of the unknowable element of lifecall it mystery or secret or othernessand highlights a discovery that is also a truth: that ethics is extra-rational and extra-human, a quality that I propose to address through the framework of dharmic-ethics.
It is the act of torture in Barbarians that launches the crucial self-investigation of the Magistrate, and his inquiry exposes the limits of binary dialectic, undoing the Self/Other dichotomy as well as the recourse to epistemological certitude. Coetzee, in acknowledging that Barbarians is a novel "about the impact of the torture chamber on the life of a man of conscience," proposes two reasons for the fact that torture exerts a "dark fascination" for (South African) writers. First, torture provides "a metaphor, bare and extreme, for relations between authoritarianism and its victims" (DP 363). The Third Bureau of Empire victimizes the Barbarian Girl as well as the Magistrate. Colonel Joll wields a power sanction that is unopposable in like-terms. The resistance to Joll, then, takes place in the form of a Gandhian ahimsa or non-violence and satyagraha or truth-force which is evinced not only by the Magistrate but is also reflected in the attitude of the girl towards Joll and the experience of torture. And, in an interesting triangulation, this Gandhian resistance is also seen in the aftermath of the Barbarian Girls life in her relationship with the Magistrate who is unable not to echo the role of inquisitor. Coetzee's second reason for the writer's dark fascination relates to the torture room and its experience, which provide that which is inaccessible to language, through the pain and destruction of the victim's self-dignity. The writer, as real-life Coetzee and fictive Magistrate, faces the challenge and the need to represent and understand torture as it affects both its participants, the torturer and the tortured. In the narrative, we see the Magistrate pondering whether he occupies the detestable slot of torturer in his relationship with the Barbarian Girl. Later, he even occupies the slot of tortured when he becomes an

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outspoken adversary of Jolls Empire. Yet, he experiences repeated failure when he tries to write his own history, and to document pain. For Coetzee the author, the fact of torture produces two moral dilemmas. The first arises from the effort to resist the urge of making the "vile mysteries" of the "dark, forbidden chamber" of torture the occasion of fantasy (DP 364). Since torture is conducted by the State in secrecy, it is an obscenity enveloped in mystery and thus "creates the preconditions for the novel to set about its work of representation" (364). The second dilemma concerns the person of the torturer--"how is the writer to represent the torturer?" The problem here concerns avoiding the trivialization of the experience of torture through the use of the various clichs that abound in describing the torturer as evil incarnate. Coetzee sees these dilemmas as being proposed by the state itself, namely to ignore its obscenities or else to produce representations of it, so that "the true challenge" becomes "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" (364). Thus, Barbarians presents a Magistrate who finds himself approaching Joll the torturers (in)humanity time and again as the distance between himself and his torturers keeps collapsing. More importantly, Coetzee meets this challenge in Barbarians by mobilizing an criture feminin or feminine writing that exposes the limits of rational discourse and hearkens to revive the extra-discursive ethics of the caress in the Magistrate/Barbarian Girl relationship. Coetzee's admission of being faced with such dilemmas is extremely significant not only as it describes the context of the Magistrate's actions in Barbarians, but also because it signals paradox and contradiction as the conceptual base for the ethical inquiry undertaken by Coetzee as author, and by the Magistrate as failed author in the story. The result is a text that obfuscates the transparency of language, highlighting otherness in the text itself, as well as presenting the text as Other. In Ethical Modernism, Derek Attridge has likened this aspect to the strategy of high modernism, suggesting that Coetzee uses a variety of formal devices that disrupt the realistic surface of the writing, reminding the reader forcibly of the conventionality of the fictional text and inhibiting any straightforward drawing of moral or political conclusions (655). Such disruption can be, and does become in Coetzees hand, a powerful expression and exploration of ethics. Inthisrespect,BarbaraEckstein'sconclusionthattheMagistrate'sexperienceteaches himthatknowledgefromlanguageislesscertainthanknowledgefrompain approachestheethicalmessageofthenovel.Ecksteinmakesthesalutaryclaimthat "Coetzeeindictscolonialbarbarity,indeed,allinterpretationof"barbarians"by barbarousauthorityanditsideologyofotherness"(Eckstein88).4TheMagistratein

Ecksteins Foucauldian reading of the novel is heavily influenced by Elaine Scarry's invaluable study on torture, The Body in Pain. Scarry claims that the goal of torture, especially in its state-sanctioned form, is nowhere the extraction of truth but the destruction of the selfhood of the tortured subject whose expression of pain, an indisputable yet incommunicable quality, validates the metaphysics of presence on
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BarbariansrealizesthatwhatmakeshimdifferentfromthebarbarousJollisthefact thathecannotreconcilehisparticipationinthe(un)ethicsofJoll'sregimeoftorture and,inwhatisclearlyaGandhianturntowardsselfsacrifice,iswillingtopaywith hislifeforhisrefusaltoparticipate. BARBARIANS AS OTHER Employing a strategy that is reminiscent of Edward Saids exposition on Orientalism, all knowledge of the Barbarians, the eponymous Other in Coetzees narrative, is a projection of the Imperial Selfs desire. The "civilization" of the nomadic barbarians is never quite present nor is it represented by the Magistrate--neither its language nor its culture. Coetzees narrative is sly, however, by quickly inviting the reader to process Barbarians through a Self/Other dialectic; as the narrative unfolds, this dialectic proves insufficient as one realizes that virtually nothing is known about the purported Barbarians. They are nomadic, and remain absent even as the Empires military expedition is defeated as it attempts to confront them. Eckstein misreads or reads into the novel that which is absent when she asserts that Joll "destroy[s] the world, the civilization, of his prisoners. Pain and his voice make them barbarians, people who live only on the level of sentience" (80). Though the barbarians do fill the role of the Other in the Empire's economy of self-definition, the Magistrate's account provides no information that would validate any reciprocity in the relationship; both barbarian ontology and epistemology remain an absolute mystery, and this fact is in keeping with the motif of "blankness" which pervades the Magistrate's account. The closest information we get as to Barbarian mentality or intention comes through when the Magistrate addresses the new officer's question, "what are these barbarians dissatisfied about? what do they want from us?" (50). The Magistrate answers that the barbarians consider the Empire a transient and misinformed nuisance trying to impose its will on a desert land fated to remain wild: "they still think of us as visitors, transients...At this very moment they are saying to themselves, "Be patient, one of these days their crops will start withering from the salt, they will not be able to feed themselves, they will have to go." That is what they are thinking. That they will outlast us" (51). Keeping in mind that the above evaluation is purely conjecture by the Magistrate (not a direct statement by the barbarians), it still shows on the one hand that the Empire is regarded as an enterprise that is doomed by the very territory it needs to domesticate as proof of its colonial conquest (that is as validation of its presence as empire), and on the other hand, that the barbarians have not in any significant manner been colonized, perhaps as a necessary corollary of their uninterrupted nomadic life. Ironically, Eckstein's misrepresentation of the effect of the Joll experience on the barbarian's existence
which the totalitarian regime depends.

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that Joll destroys the barbarian's civilizationtoo easily imposes imperial ontology onto the barbarians, whereas Coetzees narrative itself provides no such corroboration. The Empire exists mono-logistically in the territory it has annexed, and it can be said that the imperial Self in Coetzees narrative hallucinates its knowledge of the Barbarian Other. The theme of sight and blindness also serves to undermine the Self/Other dialectic, for the vision of all characters is identically limited. This is reflected in the moments when the Magistrate stares into the Barbarian Girl's eyes, only to find in them his own gaze: "I take her face between my hands and stare into the dead centres of her eyes, from which twin reflections of myself stare solemnly back" (41, my emphasis). In a later moment, after he has yet again searched her blank face for an answer to his inchoate obsession with her, he makes the horrific realization that "the answer that has been waiting all the time offer[s] itself to me in the image of a face masked by two black glassy insect eyes from which there comes no reciprocal gaze but only my doubled image cast back at me" (44, my emphasis). In the economy of this reflection, the Magistrate doubles as the inquisitor as Joll, he doubles too as the girl as tortured victim staring back at herself in the lens of the torturer, and, importantly, the girl too doubles as the inscrutable torturer as Joll; the girl's blinded eyes are a version of Joll's darkglasses reflective eyes, and so she too mirrors the inquisitor. All three share the same problematic of vision, and the one doubling that remains absent, that of Joll doubling as the victim, is figured near the end, when Joll makes a pit-stop at the garrison before fleeing back to the Center. This time, it is Joll's eyes that are naked and his mien vulnerable, and he remains enclosed in the relative safety of his carriage; the relationship here is properly inverted--it is he who tries to read the Magistrate: "he looks out at me, his eyes searching my face. The dark lenses are gone" (146). The Torturer/tortured dialectic, then, is dismantled by this strategic and visionary doubling that defies static binarism. This destruction is an essential aspect of the ethical force of Coetzee's narrative and the Magistrate's self-revision that refuses the Imperial mistake and peril of Othering: the gaze thrust upon the Other reflects only the gazing Self. It is not surprising, then, that when viewed from a Self/Other dialectic, Coetzees ethical vision in Barbarians stymies critics: their logic-based tools are unable to penetrate both paradox and contradiction generated by an aesthetic exposition of the very fabric of ethics that consistently collapses the Self/Other polarity. Huggan and Watson, who rightly condemn the skeptical critics for being entrenched in a binarism of politics/aesthetics which approaches " the crudeness and reductiveness of racial thinking" (CPC 3), are themselves confronted with the horizon line, as it were, of their critical apparatus beyond which lies the space elsewhere and the margin of freedom generated by Coetzees fiction. Indeed, when confronted with the dissolution of binary oppositions in Barbarians, they end up evoking that perplexing "third" space in binary structures, the space in the margins as they seek an explanation for the fact that Coetzee's fiction remains, in the final analysis, mysterious as it refuses to provide answers after having dissolved either/or categories "into an--often elaborate--play of paradox and

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contradiction" (7). But what is paradox if not the moment of the unmasking of all logocentric binarism? In this sense, paradox can be seen as the explosion of the Self's Other, a collapse both objectivity and objecthood. Coetzees narrative, then, presents us with the becoming subject of ethics (both in terms of subjectivity and subjecthood). GallaghernotesthatCoetzeecombinestheallegoricalformwithatext emphasizinggapsanduncertaintiestoshow,through"thepersonaofaweakand wonderingmanwhocontinuallyfindsthatwordsfailhim"(121),thefailureof authority,ofpenandpenis,andoflanguage.TheresultoftheMagistrate'sethical selfexplorationisnotafailurebutabreakdownordestructionoftheSelf/Other dialecticthatservesasthestructuralfoundationofEmpireandvalidatesitsvarious conquests.Thisdialecticisrecastinthebinarismsofempire/colony,master/slave, man/woman.blindness/sight,law/barbarism,expediency/ethics(Penner),but WatsonmisreadsthefailureofthedialecticthatCoetzeeorchestratesinBarbarians: "somuchofCoetzee'sworkcanbeviewedasafaileddialectic,aworldinwhich thereisnosynthesis,inwhichtheverypossibilityofasynthesisseemstohavebeen permanentlyexcluded"(382).AsIhavebeenarguinghere,thefailureofdialectic representsnotthefailureofapossibilityofsynthesis,buttakesusbeyondthescope ofdialecticalsynthesisitself.Indeed,theforceofCoetzee'sethicalvisioncanbe understoodonlyifwearewillingtoaccepttheinadequacyoftheImperialdialectic whichOtherstheothers,andinsteadperform,asdoestheMagistrate,arevaluation ofourethicaldeterminantsinthelightofaself/Selfethicaluniversalism.Sucha revaluation,Iwillarguebelow,isdharmicethicalinnatureandisrealizedbythe MagistratewhenheintercedesinthecruelestmomentofEmpireattheriskofhis life,withtheacceptanceofselfsacrificeforhisethicalbeliefs.

BARBARIAN CYCLES

At the base of the barbarian world-view that is proffered by the Magistrate lies the only indicator suggesting that the barbarian ontology, whatever else it may be, is a function of cyclical and seasonal time; their nomadic lives and migrations from the flat lands to the mountains and beyond and back are dictated by the change in seasons and the interdependence of livestock and vegetation. Clearly, the cyclical barbarian time represents a feminine alternative to the masculine cosmology of Empire, the latter arguably being

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psychopathic in its severance from and need to impose its will on Nature. The Magistrate condemns the linear and teleological time of Empire and its virulent History: What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the season but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era" (133). The novel's time is carefully set-up to undo the totalizing and linear time of Imperial history. The narrative is framed within one seasonal cycle; Joll's advent upon the scene is concomitant with winter, the Magistrate's expedition to return the girl to the barbarians takes place at the cusp of spring and the first sighting of the barbarian horsemen occurs on the first spring day--"warmer air, clearer skies, a gentle wind" (68), the period of the Magistrates incarceration and torture coincides with the most uncomfortable part of a scorching summer, Joll's final exodus marks an attempt to outride the onset of winter, and the novel ends with the onset of a new winter which finds the Magistrate free but confused about life in general. The attention paid by the Magistrate to the cyclical time of natural events lends a mythological aspect to his story, and supports his anti-imperial desire: "I wanted to live outside history. I wanted to live outside the history that Empire imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects. I never wished it for the barbarians that they should have the history of Empire laid on them" (154). Considering the eventual failure of Joll's enterprise to subdue the barbarians and the barbarians' triumph in retaining their nomadic invisibility, it can be said that the novel celebrates the victory of cyclical time. The Magistrate's tale is an allegory that centralizes the function of storytelling as a self-conscious and non-authoritative discourse and, as Susan Gallagher suggests, the "ability to tell stories, stories that contain unheard voices and work on an emotional and evocative level, provides one way to battle the monophonic and autocratic discourses of history" (48). Linear history is subordinated to the cyclical time of eternal recurrence, as is evident in the Magistrate's surmise, among the ancient ruins, that history is repetitive and not teleological: Perhaps ten feet below the floor lie the ruins of another fort, razed by the barbarians, peopled with the bones of folk who thought they would find safety behind the high walls. Perhaps when I stand on the floor of the courthouse, if that is what it is, I stand over the head of a Magistrate like myself, another gray-haired servant of Empire who fell in the arena of his authority, face to face with the last Barbarian? How will I ever know? (1516) The deconstruction of historical certitude is most strongly expressed in the mobilization of various semiotic systems that expose the arbitrariness of all signification. Most important amongst these are the slips of poplar wood that the Magistrate has discovered amongst the ruins. The Magistrate has recognized what seem to be four hundred characters of an unknown script, which he has unsuccessfully tried for years to decode. In fact, he is not even sure if the characters represent elements in a "syllabary," they might even be a pictorial representation

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"whose outline would leap at me if I struck on the right arrangement: a map of the land of the barbarians in older times, or a representation of a lost pantheon" (16). In a later moment, the current Imperial enterprise of mapping is shown to be inaccurate as the Magistrate's expedition finds out that what appears to be a lake-bed is not so: "we have not left the lake behind, we now realize: it stretches beneath us here, sometimes under a cover many feet deep, sometimes a mere parchment of brittle salt" (60).5 The poplar slips figure in the semiotic climax of the novel, a scene in which Colonel Joll questions the Magistrate, who is at this stage an accused traitor and barbarian conspirator, regarding their meaning. The Magistrate's interpretations are purposefully ironic and mock the epistemological certitude of Joll's Empire. Joll draws the "reasonable inference" that the slips contain "messages" passed between the Magistrate and barbarian parties. Despite the Magistrates initial reaction, "I do not even know whether to read from right to left or from left to right...I have no idea what they stand for" (110), he plays along and "reads" out a message which conforms with Joll's expectations, a message from a barbarian father who sends his love to his daughter. He then picks out another slip and reads a similar message, and then another in which he deliberately exposes the fictive status of his reading, by citing one of the earliest "accidents" of Joll's torture investigation: "We went to fetch your brother yesterday. They showed us into a room where he lay on a table sewn up in a sheet" (111). Subsequently, he works his way through other slips, making each sign the site of multivalent messages; his manipulation of the signs, then, signals his disaffection with the rule of Empire by evoking the atrocities against ethical standards committed by Joll and by, quite literally, flipping on its head the exercise of ascertaining the truth through the process of sign systems: It is the barbarian character war, but it has other senses too. It can stand for vengeance, and, if you turn it upside down like this, it can be made to read justice. There is no knowing which sense is intended" (112).
THE

TRUTH? There are, of course, other moments that expose the insufficiency of sign-systems, thereby

undoing the dominance of any one particular semiotic regime. What is most importantly highlighted is the innately misleading desire to "read" certifiable and unequivocal meaning or truth into signs. In competition with the semiotic regime of Empire, with its ledger of History and its Self/Other polarity, exist other domains and sites of signification, all of which prove equally inefficacious in imparting certainty of any kind. The Magistrate regrets not having

Here,thetwodimensionalmapprovesincommensuratewiththethreedimensionalreality ofthelandinspacetime.ItisreminiscentofJorgeLuisBorges'sstory,"TheMapofEmpire," abouttheperfectmapwhichliterallycoverstheentireterritorytobemapped,andthus existsonaperfect1:1scalewiththatwhichitrepresents.Evensuchamap,inthecontextof thelayeredinvisibilityofCoetzee'slandscape,wouldprovetobeinaccurateandincomplete.

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learnt the barbarian language when he has to rely on the girl's interpretation of the barbarian chief's speech at the moment of her return; having naively asked her to tell them the "truth," he catches part of their conversation but "cannot make out a word" (71). In his ritual washing of the girl, he inspects and re-inspects the scars on her body, the marks of Empire's torture, with the hope of deciphering some truth "with his blind fingertips" about the event but remains unable to do so (45). He returns to the torture room after the first series of torture and examines it thoroughly for signs of any kind and finding only "a mark the size of [his] hand where soot has been rubbed into the wall" (35). Later, when he is imprisoned as a torturevictim in the very same room, he hopes that his gaze, if intent enough, will reveal "the imprint of all the pain and degradation," and that his hearing, if attuned finely enough, will detect "that infinitely faint level at which the cries of all who suffered here must still beat from wall to wall" (79-80). Later still, in the same room, he notices three specks on the wall and wonders for the thousandth time, "why are they in a row? Who put them there? Do they stand for anything?" (84). What becomes clear from these various expositions of the arbitrariness of semiotic systems is their inadequacy to signify the "truth." The truth that is sought by the Magistrate is one that will recuperate ethics from the inhuman abyss of a torture sanctioned by the Imperial regime of Self and Otherness. Early in the narrative, the Magistrate shows his aversion to torture and his interest in the notion of truth. In his systematic torture of the prisoners, Joll tries to extract the "truth." The Magistrate finds out that Joll's truth depends not on the extraction of information per se but on the hammering out of the right "tone." The first torture sequence involves an elderly man and his grandson, who are not barbarians but belong to the fisherfolk who do not even share the same barbarian language. Joll ignores the Magistrate's plea that the couple's ignorance, with regard to the purported barbarian revolt against Empire, is a foregone conclusion, and instead assures him that he will sound out the "tone of truth:" "I am probing for the truth, in which I have to exert pressure to find it. First I get lies, you see this is what happensfirst lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth. That is how you get the truth" (5). In a realization that echoes Elaine Scarry's discussion (see above), the Magistrate realizes that "Pain is truth. All else is subject to doubt" (5). Penner does a disservice to the barbarians when he suggests that "these actions reveal Joll's barbarian character" (77), for there is no evidence in the novel to suggest that the barbarians in any way employ a Jollian philosophy of truth, nor does the accepted definition of "barbarian" convey any sense of State-sanctioned torture; Joll is the devil-child of the State as Empire and his crimes against the ethical sanctity of human relationships is in no way "barbarian." What may safely be asserted with regard to Joll's actions is that he "is ethically blind, as is the empire he represents" (77). Dick Penner has likened the Magistrate's incessant self-questioning and hyperconscious awareness of his own contexts to what "Prince Myshkin of The Idiot calls..."double-thought,"

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literally, "a doubling back of thought." This double-thought is complemented by an overriding will to the truth without which the Magistrate would remain paralyzed and unable to intervene at the risk of his life against the cruelty of the Empire. Crucial in the Magistrate's search for the truth is the realization that the "truth" that would reconcile his life and his ethics with the inhuman aspects represented by Joll's regime of torture is most likely beyond rationalization and language. In a moment, which invokes the domain of truth and livedexperience as that which exceeds language, the Magistrate experiences the dissipation of linguistic meaning: "or perhaps whatever can be articulated is falsely put." I think. My lips move silently, composing and recomposing the words. "Or perhaps it is the case that only that which has not been articulated has to be lived through." I stare at this last proposition without detecting any answering movement in myself toward assent or dissent. The words grow more and more opaque before me; soon they have lost all meaning. (64-65) David Atwell refers to Kermode's peripeteia to suggest that what stares the Magistrate in the face--"There has been something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it" (155)--is "history itself, history as something brute, impenetrable, and ultimately unrepresentable, something that will not be possessed by his efforts to produce a historical discourse" (76-77).6 I would argue that it is not simply history here but discourse itself that has been exposed as incommensurable with lived-experience, especially where ethical truth is concerned. What has been staring the Magistrate in the face is the intuitive "truth" of the ethical sociality of the Self, a truth he sees clearly at the ethical climax of the novel.

WE ARE THE MIRACLE PART II

ANTERIORTOSINGULARITY

Waiting for the Barbarians lends itself especially well to analyses that take the Self/Other binary as the operative ontological foundation for ethics. Exemplary, in this regard, are approaches inspired by Emmanuel Levinass philosophy on ethics (Marais, Attridge). Here, the subjects negotiation with autrui, Levinass term for the personal alterity of the human Other, takes place in a face-to-face encounter (Totality 202). The face of autrui bears the trace of the Il y a, Levinass conception of an absolute Being, Being in general detached from beings which dominate it (Existence 18). This trace bestows on autrui an exteriority that resists the subjects attempt to absorb autrui into the economy of the Same, a term Levinas employs for the apparent totality formed by the subjects intentional acts of consciousness and the intentional objects that are constituted by these acts (Marais 166). In other words, Levinass Same is just an intentional construct of the self, which has nothing to
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ironyinrhetoric,"wherenaiveexpectationsofclosurearedisconfirmed,leadingtomore complex,ifunresolved,versionsofthe"truth"(18).

SeeFrankKermodeinTheSenseofanEnding.Peripeteiais"theequivalentinnarrative,of

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do with the nature of autrui; the Same is totalizing, in the sense of totalitarian. However, the encounter with autrui resists integration into the subjects Same, because of the trace of absolute alterity (il y a) borne on the face of autrui (see Meaning 90-100). Faced with such resistance, the subject is surprised and the intention to integrate autrui into the Same gives way to attention. Thus is the subject called to responsibility, and, inspired by the others otherness, the subject responds with the saying Here I am (Marais 167). The phrase Here I am is, of course, of foundational relevance for Judeo-Christian ethics.7 While the call to responsibility is an act through which the subject gives the Other authority, Levinas also conceives of it as a sacrificial gesture: the response Here I am implies a giving or sacrifice of self to the Other (Marais 167).8 The Levinasian scheme as described above is embedded in the Judeo-Christian tradition as the only possibility of negotiating or conceiving Ethics. This scheme takes as ontological necessity the categories of Self, Other, and Absolute Other. And while this scheme can be applied to interpret the ethical dynamics of Coetzees narrative, I feel that the narrative problematizes the Self/Other binary, a binary endemic to Judeo-Christian philosophy. Take, for example, the fact that the Barbarians, apart from the Magistrates relationship with the Barbarian Girl, are never properly encountered. The Magistrates self-sacrificial action in the narrative, his Here I am as it were, is addressed to Joll. It is a moment of literal selfsacrifice in which the Magistrate risks his life in order to oppose the inhuman, anti-ethical torture about to take place, on Jolls command, upon the barbarian captives. This is the ethical crux of the novel, and it is crucial that the Magistrates Here I am is an explosive Look! (107). This is a command, albeit given in desperation, that inverts the Levinasian scheme, since forcing the Other to look altogether defeats the purpose of being called to responsibility. The Magistrates very next words compound this inversion: We are the miracle of creation (107). In the ethical crisis at hand, the Magistrate invokes self-identity premised in plurality, not singularity, thereby belying the singular, specific, and personal nature of autrui. The Magistrates next assertion is Look at these men!" I recommence. "Men!" (107). There is no individuated comparison in his remonstrative plea: no them versus us, and, I would argue,
7

IntheBible:"GoddidtemptAbraham,andsaiduntohim,Abraham:andhesaid,behold, hereIam.AndhesaidTakenowthyson,thineonlysonIsaac,whomthoulovest,andget theeintothelandofMoriah;andofferhimthereforaburntofferingupononeofthe mountainswhichIwilltelltheeof"(KJV22:12).

8

Throughouthiscareer,Levinashasmaintainedreverenceforthetranscendental possibilitiescontainedintheethicalstructuresandcharactersoftheBible,asalsoforthe imperativenecessityofnotforgettingtheprimacyoftheBiblicaltexttoallsubsequentand thereforesecondaryphilosophies,goingsofarastosaythat"allphilosophicalthinkingrests onprephilosophicalexperiences,andtheBiblicaltexthasalwaysbeenformethese foundationalexperiences.(Toutepensephilosphiquereposesurdesexpriencesprphilosophiques etquelalecturedelaBibleaappartenuchezmoicesexpriencesfondatrices)"(EthiqueetInfini14, mytranslation).

WeAretheMiraclebySujaySood13

no Other versus self. Since this is clearly a moment of ethical self-vindication, why is the Magistrate able to intuit an ethical affirmation for the miracle of creation?
ZONE/ZONE-KNOWER

Is ethics possible without a Self/Other ontology possible? Certainly not, if we remain firmly within a Judeo-Christian orientation. However, I propose to take up Derek Attridges suggestion on how we are to proceed with a literary work as event: We come to it in the unfolding process of reading or rereading and [this] process always occurs in a richly determined context, including the context of the readers situation and personal history (660). Let me assert, then, that my situation and personal history is influenced by ontological precepts of Hindu thought and complemented by an exposure to post-structuralist philosophy, and that the analysis that follows below is richly determined by it. Attridge summarizes the conventional understanding of the Other as Indicat[ing] an already existing entity that the self encounters: most obviously another human being...In colonial and postcolonial studies, the other tends to stand for the colonized culture or people as viewed by the dominant power. Whatever its precise complexion, the other in these accounts is primarily an impingement from outside that challenges assumptions, habits, and values and that demands a response. (Innovation 23) TheBarbariansbecomelessandlessandexternalimpingementasCoetzees narrativeprogresses.Intheethicalcruxofthestory,thecaptivesarenevergiventhe opportunitytopresentthemselvesethically,inthesenseofLevinassHereIam (afterthemomentoftheMagistratesintervention,thecaptivesdropoutofthetext). The power of this narrative, however, is dependent not only on its discursive strategies but in its homage to dharmic-ethical knowledge, that is, a knowledge which combines the knowledge of the ksetra or zone with the knowledge of the Ksetrajna or knower of the zone.9 Thesedesignationsarederivedfromauniverseconceivedasanextensionof theSelf/self,asbeingthesumofPrakriti+Purushottama,Nature+Conscience,or indeed,thezonalprocessesintheksetra+witnessorksetrajnaofthezone.TheZone orksetracomprisesof"thegreatelements,theconsciousnessof"I,"theintelligence andtheunmanifest,thesenses,tenandone,andthefiveZonesofactionofthe senses,Desire,aversion,pain,theorganicwhole,consciousness,steadfastness,This

MyunderstandingoftheseintertwinedconceptsfoundintheBhagvadaGitaksetramor zoneandksetrajnaorknowerofzoneisinfluencedbySriAurobindosexplication:"the Gitaexplainstheksetram,Zone,bysayingthatitisthisbodywhichiscalledthezoneofthe spirit,andinthisbodythereissomeonewhotakescognizanceofthezone,Ksetrajna,the knowerofNature"(EG398).Inthissense,trueknowledgeisknowledgeofboththezoneand theknowerofthezone,theksetramandtheksetrajna.

9

WeAretheMiraclebySujaySood14

brieflyisdescribedastheZonewithitsmodifications"(XIII:56;WBG53435).1In suchaksetra,theksetrajnamuststrivetoattaintrueknowledge,whichis"constancy inknowledgeoftheSupreme[Self],observingthegoaloftheknowledgeoftruth" (XIII:11;WBG539).10Mostimportantly,socialityisaninherentaspectofallbeing: "Anybeingwhatever,standingstillormoving,Inasmuchasitisborn,Arisesfrom theunionoftheZoneandtheZoneknower"(XIII:26;WBG554).Acrucialdifference thatarisesherewithregardtoJudeoChristianethicsisthatethicsasinherent socialityisinvestedintheentirezoneitisnotanexclusivelyhumanprerogative. GUNAS (QUALITIES) OF PRAKRITI (NATURE) ThenarrativeismobilizedinthefirstpersonoftheMagistrate,whoisanacute observeroftheksetrambutalsoofthenatureofhisethicalresponsibilityasa Ksetrajna.OuraccesstotheksetramorzoneisthroughtheMagistrate'sbeing. WhatisthePrakritiorNaturethattraversestheMagistrate'sbeing?Toanswer thisquestion,weneedtoconsidertheGunasorqualitiesthatinformhisprakriticor naturalconstitution.AurobindotellsusthatthethreequalitativemodesofNature areinextricablyintertwinedinallcosmicexistence;"Ontheirpsychologicalsidethe threequalitiesmaybedefined,TamasasNature'spowerofnescience,Rajasasher powerofactiveseekingignoranceenlightenedbydesireandimpulsion,Sattwaas herpowerofpossessingandharmonizingknowledge"(EG413).Attheonsetofthe story,theMagistratehasapreponderanceofTamaswithaquickeningsattwic inclination.Throughthecourseofhisactions,hedevelopsandsubsequentlyfollows asattwicpathinwhichheisabletoeffectuateanethicallyviableresponsetothe eventsoftorture.TheendofthenovelleavestheMagistratebackwherehebegan, withatamasicanxiousnesstowardstheuncertainfuture. LetusconsiderbelowsomeoftheindicesoftheMagistrate'sprakritic constitution.TheMagistrate'sproclivityistowardsmaintainingthestatusquo;he
10

which,oneattainsimmortality;itisthebeginlesssupremeBrahmanwhichissaidtobe neitherexistentnornonexistent"(XIII:12;WBG540).

KrishnatellsArjuna:"Thatwhichistheobjectofknowledge,Ishalldeclare,knowing

WeAretheMiraclebySujaySood15

haslivedforthirtyyearsintheremoteoutpostofempire,hasbecomeaslaveto habit,anddoesn'twelcometheideaofanychangeordisruptiontohisroutine,least ofalltheencumbranceofColonelJoll'svisit.Hisinitialreactiontothefactof unjustifiedtortureiscouchedinignoranceandescapism:heregretsthefactthathis "easyyears,"whenhecould"sleepwithatranquilheartknowingthatwithanudge hereandanudgetheretheworldwouldstaysteadyonitscourse,"arecomingtoan end;hewondersifheshouldnotdothe"wisething"byescapingtohis"huntingand hawkingandplacidconcupiscencewhilewaitingfortheprovocationstocease"(9). HemoreorlesshopesthatJollisanightmarethatwillsoongoaway,andthat everythingwillreturntowhatitoncewas.Thistamasicdesire,ofwishingfora returntoapaststateofaffairs,isperhapsthemostsignificanttraitofthe Magistrate'sPrakriticbeing,anddictatesthecourseofhisrelationshipwiththe BarbarianGirl,whoappearsonthesceneimmediatelyafterhisresolution"torestore theprisonerstotheirformerlivesassoonaspossibleasfaraspossible"(25).Heis unabletocomprehendthathisparticipationinthewebofeventsisaforegone conclusion;inanironicmoment,aguardhequestionsregardingthetreatmentthe BarbarianGirlreceivedatthehandsofhertorturersechoeshiswishfuldenialof complicity:"TherewasnothingIcoulddo,Ididnotwanttobecomeinvolvedina matterIdidnotunderstand!"(37).TheMagistratefeels"relieved"atJoll'stemporary absencefromthefort;thatJollhasgoneoutonthehuntformoreprisonersseems nottoimpingeontheMagistrate'stamasicconsciencehavingseenoffJoll,herides back"relievedofmyburdenandhappytobealoneagaininaworldIknowand understand...Ibelieveinpeace,perhapsevenpeaceatanyprice"(14). The price he pays for his tamasic indulgence is announced by the return of Joll and his fresh batch of river peoplewho arent even barbarians, technically speakingas prisoners. At this point, the Magistrate demonstrates a streak of rajashe gets angered at Joll's callous brutality, and finds himself aroused to indignant action: "I write an angry letter to the Third Bureau, unsleeping guardian of the Empire, denouncing the incompetence of one of its agents" (20), and wonders if he can sneak out the prisoners without drawing attention to himself. Of course, in keeping with the dictates of his dominant Tamas, he "wisely" tears up the letter and subdues the urge for action--"But I do nothing" (20). His tamasic streak persists to dominate

WeAretheMiraclebySujaySood16

his desires even as he returns from his expedition to reunite the Barbarian Girl with her people; when the fort becomes visible in the horizon, he yearns for "the familiar routine of [his] duties, the approaching summer, the long dreamy siestas, conversations with friends...with boys bringing tea...and the eligible girls in twos and threes promenading before us on the square in their finery" (75). In the first movement of the book that culminates with his reception as traitor to the Empire, we are shown a Magistrate who refuses to acknowledge the fact that the "familiar world" has been transformed and needs for him to adapt if he is to find ethical justification for his life. There has, of course, been a sattwic inkling asserting itself throughout the course of the Magistrate's actions in the ksetram, signaled by the fact that he can neither escape in placid concupiscence nor ignore the goings-on initiated by Joll. Faced with Joll's interrogation, his sattwic nature struggles against his habitual Tamas as he finds his equilibrium disturbed. He finds himself unable to simply ignore the cries of pain and escape on a hunting trip. Instead, he is compelled to action which he knows is an interference on Joll's work; however, in "trespassing...on what has become holy or unholy ground, if there is any difference, preserve of the mysteries of the State" (6), he shows a desire to attain knowledge of what is happening in an effort to regain his peace of mind, his fading equanimity. Once he takes up the lantern and goes to investigate first-hand the scene and victims of torture, a sattwic rise against his tamasic turpitude is initiated; in Aurobindos words, "the principle of understanding, knowledge and of according assimilation, measure and equilibrium [i.e., sattwa]" takes up its struggle against "the forces of inertia and nescience [i.e., tamas]" (EG 414). MOTHERING THE GIRL The Magistrates ambiguous relationship with the Barbarian Girl is prompted by his search for a knowledge that will provide an ethical justification for his life and, as noted earlier, by his misconstrued desire to restore things--and in this case her body--to their condition before the torture experience. It is clear that torture represents a crime against humanity and the Magistrate seeks to recreate an ethical and or social bond that has been severed by Joll's efforts. The ethical crisis in his life manifests itself even at the level of the hunt; whereas he once could hunt with rajasic satisfaction, feeling "enabled to live again all the strength and swiftness of [his] manhood [feeling] a pure exhilaration" (39), he now has the sense that the hunt "has become no longer a morning's hunting but an occasion on which either the proud ram bleeds to death on the ice or the old hunter misses his aim" (39-40). The hunt as ritual has lost all its meaning as rite or "formal procedure or act in a religious or other solemn observance" (OED). It is not surprising, therefore, that he initiates a new ritual for himself, one that entails the ministration of caress on the Barbarian Girl. The Magistrate's relationship with the girl marks the site where discourse proves insufficient for meaning and for generating the "truth;" additionally, the relationship shows

WeAretheMiraclebySujaySood17

the efforts the Magistrate makes to reinvest his actions with an ethical imperative. Though most critics have taken the relationship to circulate around the ambiguous sexual desires of the Magistrate, I think that the ritual of "purification" carried out by the Magistrate concords not with a lover-beloved bond, however perverse, but with a mother-child or caregiver-child bond. This revaluation explains the inchoate desire of the Magistrate's actions, which in the final analysis are not the yearnings of a libidinal sexual drive but the restoration of sociality as primary ethics through the extra-discursive and erotic gestures of the caress. The Magistrate's experience with the girl is both erotic and sensual, and yet it is marked by the repeated failure of both discourse and sexual desire. The entire episode is an enactment of the regeneration of the originary caregiver-child social bond that has been mutilated by Joll's regime of torture, and this originary social bonding is achieved properly in the domain of kinesthetics (touch, smell, sound).11 In this respect, I take issue with Dovey's judgment that "the Magistrate's ritual of washing the girl's feet implies the fetishising of the suffering victim in liberal humanist novelistic discourse" (CPC 144); indeed, one of my primary arguments is that the novel takes us beyond the Western ramifications of such discourse by performing a self/Self ethical revision which celebrates the truth of the eternal mystery. The Barbarian Girl, who has been deformed in her encounter with Joll, is found begging on the streets by the Magistrate. He offers and nearly coerces her to serve as a concubine and domestic in his house. As soon as she is installed in his room, he makes the sattwic realization that "the distance between myself and her torturer, I realize, is negligible; I shudder" (28), as a consequence of which he never allows himself to hate the emissaries of the Third Bureau as satanic and inhuman Others and tries to understand the defective constitution of their ethical being. He, then, is also searching after the "truth," though of a different kind, and it would seem that he first attempts to do so by looking for it in the scars of her experience. He has her unwrap the bandages on her feet, and examines her ankles: ""Does it hurt?" I say. I pass my finger along the line, feeling nothing. "Not anymore. It has healed,"" (28) the girl replies. Her response shows importantly that she is not suffering at the moment. Here, Dovey again misreads the Magistrate-girl relationship when she asserts that the Magistrate represents the liberal writer who attempts to give meaning to the suffering of the victim: "in bearing
11

feministcontributiontothephilosophicaldiscussionoforiginaryethics.Ido,however,feel thatshelimitstheimpactofherargumentbyremaininguncriticaloftheSelf/Other dichotomy.Forinstance,sheproposesthat"theinfantisneitheridentifiedwiththeOtherin ananonymousorcollectiveexistencenoralienatedfromtheOtherintheabstract constructionsofaprivatesubjectivitybutisalwaysorientedtowardtheOtherthrough kinesthetics..."(16).Iclaim,however,thattheSelf/Othermodeldoesnotaccountforthe urgetowardssociality,thatisalwaysalreadythere.Thedharmicethicsoftheself/Self accountsforbothmaternalethicsandsocialethics.

MydiscussionofthemotherchildbondisinfluencedbyCynthiaWillett'simportant

WeAretheMiraclebySujaySood18

witness to the other's suffering, and ultimately claiming an equivalent suffering for him/herself, the writer casts him/herself in the role of the seer, truth-teller, blameless one, and perhaps even tragic hero or scapegoat" (CPC 144). To the contrary, the Magistrate feels equally victimized by the experience of the Third Bureau, and as victims what both of them suffer is no longer physical pain, as the girl makes explicit, but outrage and incomprehensibility with regard to Joll's torture and its contradiction to ethical being. The Magistrate's ritual of washing her is an action that is rhythmic, caressive, and fills his being with "an intense pleasure," and, "a blissful giddiness," and, a "rapture, of a kind" (2829). What begins as a foot wash soon turns into the caress and washing of her entire body, and the Magistrate's description of the ritual suggests nothing other than a caregiver-child bond, an intense and rejuvenating eroticism that is in no way linked with a libidinal sex drive: First comes the ritual of washing, for which she is now naked. I wash her feet, as before, her legs, her buttocks. My soapy hand travels between her thighs, incuriously, I find. She raises her arms while I was her armpits. I wash her belly, her breasts. I push her hair aside and wash her neck, her throat. She is patient. I rinse and dry her. She lies on the bed and I rub her body with almond oil. I close my eyes and lose myself in the rhythm of the rubbing...I feel no desire to enter this stocky little body glistening by now in the firelight. It is a week since words have passed between us. (30). The Magistrate and the girl participate in a pre-discursive ritual of rhythmic caresses. Try as he will, the Magistrate cannot find a conscious reason for his actions and for the intense pleasure he derives from it. This is because he as caregiver and the girl as infant participate at the most fundamental level of communication, that of the erotic maternal caress. The ritual demonstrates Cynthia Willett's assertion that, "our most fundamental level of communication is, like artistic expression, beyond intentionality, causal explanation, or any literalistic verbal account. We express much more than we could ever say" (91). The ritual rejuvenates for the Magistrate the ethical bond severed by Joll's torture, and inasmuch as his caresses succeed in getting a response from the girl, in terms of accommodation and adjustment to his touch (what Willett calls "dance") we can say that she, too, is replenished. Finally, the Magistrate's maternal action in its unique specificity demonstrates his sattwictamasic qualities. The sattwic component manifests itself in the fact that he seeks knowledge from his actions and that he enjoys his act of pursuit of his knowledge. It is most significant in this respect that he foregoes verbal discourse in his search and becomes intent on the information provided primarily by tactile exploration. This search polarizes his other search one which desperately seeks to subsume truth as a function of semiotic signification (discussed below). The tactile searchfigured as maternal ethics of the Selfexists in counterpoint to the semiotic searchfigured as Imperial ethics of the Self/Other. The experience with the girl shows us a Magistrate who is undecided about which system beckons his actions, not least because the truth of the tactile pursuit remains a "blank" to him and is visible only in its silence throughout the text--it is that which figures as the mystery that the Magistrate is yet unable to comprehend. Finally, the Magistrate is still in the grip of Tamas as

WeAretheMiraclebySujaySood19

an equally complementary effect and desired goal of his ritual, his oblivious sleep being the prime example: "often in the very act of caressing her I am overcome with sleep as if poleaxed, fall into oblivion sprawled upon her body" (31). The Barbarian Girl's behavior as described by the Magistrate points to a sattwic-rajasic character. She seems reconciled to her experience in life, and performs her duties to the best of her abilities; the Magistrate can't help being surprised by seeing her vibrant, talkative and happy in the company of other domestics as she helps with work in the kitchen. She expresses a rajasic maxim when confronted by the Magistrate's failure in the hunt: "If you want to do something, you do it...if you had wanted to do it, you would have done it," and even chastises the Magistrate for his tireless and empty flow of words--""You want to talk all the time," she complains" (40). Penner remarks correctly that the Barbarian Girl is not subservient, and "stoical" in her reaction to life around her--giving "no sign of rejoicing" when informed that she will be taken back to her people; Furthermore, Penner concludes, in her physical blindness, she retains her manner of seeing: she is direct, uncomplaining, independent even in servitude, productive, stoical, convivial, and above all, accepting of things as they are-torturers and lovers, pain and pleasure--without judgment. As Jane Kramer aptly observes, " She yields to everything without yielding herself. (79) The Barbarian Girl's Prakritic constitution, it can be argued, exemplifies the state of being that has managed to reconcile itself to an existence above the lower Prakriti, nature with the bondage of its Gunas (comprising of tamas, rajas and sattva). The following description by Aurobindo of a person having achieved the state of trigunatita or madbhava in action resonates tellingly with the nature of the Barbarian Girl: The sign [of such a person] is that inwardly [s]he regards happiness and suffering alike...[she] initiates no action, but leaves all works to be done by the Gunas of Nature. Sattwa, Rajas or Tamas may rise or cease in [her] outer mentality and [her] physical movements with their results of enlightenment, or impulsion to works or of inaction...but [she] does not rejoice when this comes or that ceases, nor on the other hand does she abhor or shrink from the operation or the cessation of these things. (Aurobindo 419). The Magistrate's encounter with her is also crucial to his movement towards attaining a similar state; already, in her presence, he gets the intimation of the eternal mystery of life or uttammam rahaysam, the highest secret, the all important secret which can only be intuited but never be known: "I feel a dry pity for them [the torturers]: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other" (43). Without this sattwic knowledge, the Magistrate would not be able to perform his all-important act of self-sacrifice later in the story. Itissurprisingthatnoneofthecriticshaveaddressedtheempoweringaspectsof therelationshipbetweentheMagistrateandtheBarbarianGirl.Attentionhas mostlybeenpaidtotheMagistrate'sdesiretoreadthescarsonherbody,buther

WeAretheMiraclebySujaySood20

bodyisalsothesiteoferosasistheirrelationship.Theactofwashing,anointing, massaging,andcaressingthegirl'sbodyisdescribedbytheMagistrateasablissful experience;asIhavearguedabove,thissignalstherejuvenationofprimarysociality throughthetactileregistersofthematernalcaress.Itisfromthiscelebrationof "mamaese"thatCoetzee'snovelultimatelydrawsitsstrength.SusanGallagher makesacrucialpointwhenshesuggeststhat"theMagistrate'snarrativevoiceagain is"feminine"initsfocusonthelanguageofthebodyanditsinclusionofuncertainty andblankness"(124).WaitingfortheBarbariansdramatizesthecrueltyandethical failureofaworldgovernedbytherationalistdiscoursesandactionsofEmpire,and againstitevokesandcelebratestheallimportantexperienceofthatwhichlies beyondthekenofrationalandepistemologicalcertitude,thatis,ethicsasprimary socialityoftheSelf.Inotherwords,Coetzeesnoveldemonstrateshowmamaese recuperatesthefailureofpapaese.Theconcernofthemomentthen,becomesthe reinvestmentofethical"truth"tothedomainofthemamaese.ThoughCoetzee's novelcritiquesthetechnologiesofmasculineselfdefinitionthroughapoetic narrativethatisamappingofblanks,his"mamaese"isvisionarymamaeseinthe sensethatwhatheeffectsheresurpassestheSelf/Otherrhetoricwhichremains centraltofeministformulationssuchasWillett's.

ETHICALTRUTH
The Magistrate finds himself liberated when he becomes a prisoner of the Empire. His reaction is one of elationhis "false friendship with the Bureau," his "alliance with the guardians of the Empire is over" (78-79). His incarceration provokes a satyagrahic reflection about the ethical nature of his duties. He realizes that in continuing to disburse his office with the knowledge of Joll's torture means that his participation condones the Law of Empire as represented by the Third Bureau. He cannot morally remain an accomplice to such a system: "from the oppression of such freedom who would not welcome the liberation of confinement?" (78). His opposition to the Empire echoes Mahatma Gandhi's sentiment that, "we are sunk so low that we fancy that it is our duty and our religion to do what the law lays down. If man will only realize that it is unmanly to obey laws that are unjust, no man's tyranny will enslave him" (247). Indeed, the Magistrate adopts the way of passive-resistance as his means of opposition. The latter half of the novel shows his pointed refusal to blame

WeAretheMiraclebySujaySood21

Joll's regime--"whatever it was that had happened...I was to blame for it" (95), his reconciliation with death and his quest for an ethical knowledge as Ksetrajna or knower of the zone--"I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am," (94). To this end, the statement he makes at the moment of his (ultimately faked) lynching is a soul-searching request for his "torturer" Mandel to address the issue of ethical sociality as eros: "I [would] appreciate a few words from you. So that I can come to understand why you devote yourself to this work, and can hear what you feel towards me, whom you have hurt a great deal and now seem to be proposing to kill" (118), and later, his question is more pointed, "How do you find it possible to eat afterwards, after you have been...working with people?" (126). Joll is supervising a public beating of the barbarian prisoners with whom he has just returned from his expedition. The Magistrate watches the horrific show with a sense of defeat and wonders time and again whether it would not have been better for him not to witness this cruel act, whether he should do best to return to his cell. But when Joll brandishes a hammer as a sign of the torture to ensue, the Magistrate renounces his role as mute spectator and unwilling participant, and intercedes with the cry, "Look!" I shout. We are the great miracle of creation! But from some blows this miraculous body cannot repair itself! How--! Words fail me. "Look at these men!" I recommence. "Men!" (107, emphases mine). This is a decisive action performed by the usually vacillating Magistrate, and it shows him at his Sattwic best, having at least for the moment, shed his tamasic stupor. The Magistrate undergoes torture on his own person as a consequence of his interference, but he interferes regardless of the consequences he knows await his action. Without this moment of ahimsa or non-violent protest and satyagraha or the use of truth-force on the part of the Magistrate, the novel would remain mired in the pessimism of the failure of a moral universe. To the contrary, the narrative climaxes with a moment of self-sacrifice and thus carries a powerful and hopeful ethical message. It is a message, however, that hearkens to an intuitive truth that is beyond rationalization. The Magistrate intuits this revelation of the love of the all life in a plural Selfidentification, and in doing so foregoes reasoning and rationalization. The failure of rationality that the Magistrate encounters here reinforces the dharmic-ethical emphasis of his exclamations. He invokes the miracle of creation, and "the miraculous body," as "a marvelous event occurring within human experience, which cannot have been brought about by human power or the operation of any natural agency, and must therefore be ascribed to the special intervention of the Deity or of some supernatural being" (OED). The fact that at this point he is all but unable to articulate, to put into words, the ethical implications of such a miracle shows that dharmic-ethics lie beyond the realm of words, and in the realm of intuitive knowledge. His use of the first person plural nominative pronoun "We" groups him with the barbarians and also with Joll. This self-address destroys the Self/Other dialectic and in

WeAretheMiraclebySujaySood22

doing so invalidates all ethical action that is premised on the ethical standards in which ethics derives in response to the judging and/or responsive gaze of the Other. Arguably, if the Empire in Barbarians relies on the dialectic of the Self and Other, then its justification as Imperial enterprise echoes historical Imperial colonization. The Magistrate's horror at the brutal Othering of his fellow humansthe barbarianscannot be explained simply in terms of a traditional liberal humanism, for such a conditioning still relies on the Western post-Enlightenment suppositions of the superiority of rationality and its coherent subject or individual marching down the road of civilizational progress. Dovey is partially correct in suggesting that the Magistrate's story addresses two major areas of failure in liberal humanist discourse: "first of all its failure to interpret and offer resistance to the militarized totalitarian phase of colonization and, secondly, its failure to interpret and articulate the history of the colonized" (CPC 141). The Magistrate's actions in the ksetram or zone demonstrate both an interpretation and a resistance against Joll's totalitarianism but not in terms of a binaristic opposition; that is, the power distribution informing the dialectic or binary of colonizer/colonized, torturer/tortured, civilized/barbarian is not reversed in a meaningless flip-flop. His actions reflect a refusal of all such dialecticism that essentializes the difference of Self from Other, and tries to comprehend the events through what is ultimately a dharmic-ethical framework, in which neither the girl, nor Joll, nor the barbarian, nor the Magistrate himself occupy the slot of the Other, but are different aspects of a Prakriti or Nature that always ethically bonded in a self/Self universalism. The Magistrate in this narrative acts as a purusha or Witness of existence and being, and ultimately succeeds in finding an ethical principle that can be brutalized but never severed. His quest is pursued in the extra-rational domain of ethical sociality. Coetzee's narrative, then, allegorical and selfreflexive as it may be, broaches a profound ethical truth against, at the very least, twentiethcentury forms of Othering humanity and its criminal consequences.

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LIST OF WORKS CITED

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