Social and Moral Deformation in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians

The policies of racial segregation under apartheid provide the visible manifestation of the strict regulation of inter-human relations by the state. Race relations in the apartheid regime designate a destructive way of human relationality based on systematic domination and exploitation of weaker individuals and disenfranchised groups. Drawing mainly upon Erich Fromm’s thought, this study attempts to interpret and analyze the import and associations of Coetzean notions of social deformation, pathological attachments, and stuntedness of individuals within South African regime of power and control. It also aims to demonstrate how Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians is the fictionalized re-expression of his concerns about inter-human relationships, and how this political allegory explores the pathology of love and human relationality in the apartheid era. The novel, this paper holds, thus becomes Coetzee’s critical report on South African human condition under apartheid through exploring the particular dimensions of power struggles in intersubjective relationships, and the antagonism, violence, and unfreedom that the state-sanctioned forms of relationality produce

Keywords:

apartheid , J. M. Coetzee , pathological attachment , domination , relationality