Writing Revolution: The Manuscript Revisions of J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

In May 1971, J. M. Coetzee returned to South Africa from the United States where he had been unable to secure permanent residence. He had already begun writing fiction, although his first novel, Dusklands, appeared only in 1974. During the subsequent decade, he turned his attention repeatedly to South Africa's immediate future, which until the late 1980s seemed inevitably catastrophic. He began three novels in which he tried to imagine Cape Town undergoing a revolution. The first, The Burning of the Books, was abandoned after a year. The third was Life & Times of Michael K. The second was Waiting for the Barbarians, which began with whites using Robben Island as an embarkation station, fleeing in UN-chartered ships. The story was to focus on a sexual relationship in which the male character was an explorer of the vitalities thrown up by the last days of the republic.' The project stalled until Coetzee shifted the milieu to a purely fictional empire for which he used the geography of western Asia to provide verisimilitude. During the early months of composition, however, Stephen Biko was murdered in detention. Media coverage of the public inquest gave Coetzee his theme: the effects of totalitarianism and torture on the life of a man of liberal conscience. Reading the manuscripts of Waiting for the Barbarians, the essay traces the simultaneous processes of distancing and homecoming that produced one of Coetzee's most powerful fictions.