J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians: Hermeneutics and Literary Theory

This paper resists a traditional allegorical approach to one of Coetzee’s major apartheid novels, Waiting for the Barbarians, by focusing more on the novel’s structural and textual import rather than its discursive representation of South African politics. Although this reading is itself ultimately allegorical, it is argued that it is anti-allegorical because it points out the limitations of allegorical representation whereby we read a clear relationship between the text and its external context. Highlighting acts of reading and interpretation, often failed, the novel poses as a challenge to literary theory. As such, it is not only an allegory against itself but also a postmodern example of the relativity of truth, the indeterminacy of meaning, and the necessary textualization of experience via the written word

Keywords:

Coetzee , South African fiction , Waiting for the Barbarians , Literary theory , Hermeneutics , Allegory , Writerly text , Polyphony , Postmodernism