Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jennifer Wenzel

SOURCE: "Keys to the Labyrinth: Writing, Torture, and Coetzee's Barbarian Girl," in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring, 1996, pp. 61-71.

In the following essay, Wenzel argues that although Waiting for the Barbarians does not deal explicitly with sociopolitical issues of South Africa, the image of the tortured human body around which the novel revolves represents "a nexus of the political and the poststructural, the historic and the linguistic," which necessarily includes events in South Africa.

In a 1987 address in Cape Town, J. M. Coetzee denounced what he called

a powerful tendency … to subsume the novel under history, to read novels as what I will loosely call imaginative investigations of real historical forces and real historical circumstances; and conversely, to treat novels that do not perform this investigation of what are deemed to be real historical forces and circumstances as lacking in seriousness.