SOURCE: Olsen, Lance. “The Presence of Absence: Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians.” In Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy, pp. 101-13. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Olsen analyzes Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians as a groundbreaking work of postmodern fantasy, one that “recharts, interrogates, challenges, and dismantles dominant cultural myths.”

There is only a blankness, and desolation that there has to be such blankness.

Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians, 73)

John M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940. He grew up in the midst of an unwieldy and corrupt system of apartheid—a system capable of destroying opposition before it has had a chance to get its message out, before it can articulate its cause. Coetzee attended school in South Africa and America, studying computer science and linguistics, then returned to teach at the University of Cape Town, lecturing on linguistics...