One thing I find curious about J.M. Coetzee is that there are, seemingly, no pictures of him as a young man. Even in the earliest photos his beard blooms white about his face. He is always an old man writing about the desires of old men, and that is why I read him.
Many things about the novel, in terms of its imperialist discourse, were predictable. Before even opening the book one can sense the ambiguities inherent in the designation "barbarian" (inevitably those using the word come to manifest its most brutal significations, as if the word were cursed with some strange incantatory property). The reader knows that the main character will be confronted with the violent foundations of empire and find himself unable to reconcile his ethical self with his practical self. What is atypical is that his moment of resistance, when it comes, is so pathetic: "You seem to want to make a name for yourself as the One Just Man," mocks the diabolical enforcer of the empire's grim will, "the man who is prepared to sacrifice his freedom for his principles" (131). "History will bear me out!" cries the main character in his own defense. "Nonsense," says the torturer. "There will be no history, the affair is too trivial" (131). There is nothing noble about the violence and humiliation the main character then endures, his former friends and neighbors are not galvanized into action against the unjust on his behalf, and his eventual release is as purposeless and mundane as the torture he experiences.
But the character of the old man's desire...that is where the meat of the work is for me. It isn't simply that old men have desires (for me the idea that age has a neutering effect is archaic and yet exerts a kind of moral pressure that is sometimes difficult to suppress), it's that the desires have such complex expressions, that they are mingled with the sense that they are inappropriate, distasteful and unrequited, and yet they are also frank and unrepentant: "The older a man the more grotesque people find his couplings, like the spasms of a dying animal [...] Sniggers, jokes, knowing looks--these are part of the price I am resigned to paying" (37). There is always a feeling, in the articulations of these desires, of compulsion. He cannot help himself (just as the professor in Disgrace: A Novel
), even though he is acutely aware of the strained emotional state of his partner.As the magistrate of some remote colonial outpost the main character is disturbed to find himself host to the kind of sociopath attracted to the workings of empire's savage underbelly: Colonel Joll. Joll and his soldiers spend their days arresting nomadic natives under dubious pretexts and dragging them into makeshift interrogation rooms in order to extract absurd confessions and uncover fantastic machinations against the empire. First two, then an entire tribe of nomads are brought and held within the borders of the magistrate's town while he does his best to remain entirely aloof from the proceedings: "The Empire does not require that its servants love each other," he tells himself as he provides the Colonel with all he requires, "merely that they perform their duty"(6). I suppose one can't help but evoke Orwell...
After the ordeal is over, the colonel departed, the prisoners, both living and dead, dispersed, the magistrate finds himself confronting his impotence upon no other field than the body of one of the victims: a woman, largely blinded and disabled by her interrogators whose father they killed before her. His unorthodox desires for her are mingled with his sense that he is exploiting her and is therefore not so different from the men who brutalized her: "I behave in many ways like a lover--I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her--but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate" (49).
Here there is the invocation of those strange cartographic properties of a woman's body, a dark continent overrun by eager colonialists crazed by the prospect of penetration, a site across which bellicose matters are transacted, a place to which the male might come to procure his joy, assert his puissance, etc. Yet is it not also a country he might inhabit to gain awareness of himself? Might he not see upon her very desirability his own aversiveness? Is it not somehow heroic, this subjecting of oneself to one's most pathetic incarnations and yet for all that reasserting the heart's endurance? "That is no country for old men," writes Yeats."An aged man is but a paltry thing,/ A tattered coat upon a stick, unless/Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing/ for every tatter in its mortal dress" ("Sailing to Byzantium").
ps
Compare to Roth's The Dying Animal
for an alternate explication of aged masculine need.
