Chapter-by-Chapter Summary and Commentary by Sarah Lilton - Waiting for the Barbarians PDF

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Chapter-by-Chapter Summary and Commentary by Sarah Lilton “If I had done the wise thing, then now I might have been able to return to my hunting and hawking and placid concupiscence while waiting for the provocations to cease and tremors along the frontier to subside. But alas, I did not ride away, for a while I stopped my ears from the noises coming from the hut by the granary where the tools are kept, then in the night I took a lantern and went to see for myself.” - The Magistrate I The sinister and shadowy Colonel Joll and the Magistrate sit sharing a drink and a bowl of nuts as the story begins. The Colonel’s gaze is obscured by the sunglasses he wears even while indoors, a modern invention unknown in the provinces. But in contrast to the Colonel’s dark glasses, which protect his eyes from the light, the Magistrate is able to see and hear all too clearly the sounds of torture and pain soon heard from the granary at night, where the barbarian prisoners are kept. Arriving under the authority of “emergency powers,” the soldiers of the Third Bureau capture and beat two barbarian prisoners, who are being held in the granary as the Magistrate and the Colonel share a drink in the inn. The Magistrate is at once complicit in and horrified by the actions of Colonel Joll, who serves the same Empire as the Magistrate himself. The Magistrate takes a lantern into the granary at night and begins to probe the dark, seeking almost against his own will the knowledge he dreads: the marks on the bodies of the prisoners. The Third Bureau kills and tortures an old barbarian man and takes his brutalized grandson on an expedition to rout out the rest of their tribe. They send back captives to be held “incommunicado” for their return. Though the Magistrate is increasingly estranged from the Empire, he is also unable to quite sympathize with the barbarians, whose habits he describes as “frank and filthy.” And they, too, in the period of time before the interrogations begin, seem quite content and even happy to languish in captivity, eating from civilization’s refined bread and drinking sweetened tea. “So little it seems to have taken to lure them out of a state of nature.” But then an infant child rounded up with the others dies in captivity, haunting the Magistrate. Shortly after, the bugle-call announces the return of the Third Bureau. Interrogations begin and continue late into the night. The Magistrate finds himself confronted by his own true nature as well as that of the Empire he serves. His position is one of the keenest contradictions; unable to escape into either or nature or civilization, both stripped of their illusions, he is trapped between them. Taking the lantern into the granary at night becomes an allusion to his self-examination. “I know somewhat too much,” he says, “and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.” The Magistrate is after all no different from most people, who never bother to look deeply into themselves when life is easy, but are forced by difficulties to face the riddles and contradictions of existence.

The Third Bureau eventually concludes their gruesome work and returns to the capital with their report and to prepare for a further campaign, leaving the broken and battered prisoners under the Magistrate’s authority. II Mirroring the opening of the book, with the Colonel nearly constructed as an “other”, with his odd foreign ways and novel affectations, the second section similarly positions the barbarian girl left behind by the released prisoners. Begging in the square, she comes to the Magistrate’s attention, kneeling in the shadows, her features and hair setting her apart from the town and its settlers. Thus begins an ambiguous relationship in which the Magistrate installs her in his apartment and gives her employment in the kitchen. She is blinded and crippled by the torture, and the Magistrate is compelled by her brokenness to enact a strange ritual of rubbing and massaging her scarred flesh each night in an act that is not quite sexual and falling asleep in her arms. Understanding that his actions bear an eerie resemblance to the “doctors of pain,” he confesses a “dry pity” for the torturers in saying, “How natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other!” The Magistrate and the barbarian girl are both damaged, but while the girl’s body has been broken, the Magistrate’s psyche is fragmented. The Magistrate’s strange impotence is illustrated by a hunting story he recounts to the girl in which he seems to be unable to shoot at a ram that he has sighted. The girl is unable to understand his mentality. “You want to talk all the time,” she complains. “You should not go hunting if you do not enjoy it.” Frustrated with himself, he strains his mind to remember if he had ever seen the girl in the outpost as she was before she was broken. In the space she should occupy in his memory there is only a blank. Unable to comprehend or experience a healthy desire for the girl, he begins to visit a local prostitute. Finally, he decides to leave the barbarian girl alone to sleep separately from him and rein in his confused attentions to her. One of the novel’s central paradoxes in presented in this section. Speaking with a young officer that has arrived with a detachment of new conscripts, the Magistrate finds himself defending the barbarians and provocatively suggesting that they will, after all, outlast civilization. But here the Magistrate confronts a maddening riddle that he cannot solve. Does he really wish for a triumph of barbarian virtues and the dissolution of the civilization that he so values? Its art, careful records, and the order it brings? The cost of living outside of history, as the Magistrate knows, is annihilation. Unable to pay this price, he is also unable to accept the cost of civilization, which brings along its own kind of barbarism: a “moral barbarism.” Which is worse: the barbarism of primitive people or the barbarism of civilization? The Magistrate asks this question in a variety of ways, such as: “If we were to disappear, would the barbarians spend their afternoons excavating our ruins? Would they preserve our census rolls and our grain-merchants’ ledgers in glass cases, or devote themselves to deciphering the script of our love letters?”

III With the first hint of spring on the wind, the Magistrate, hardly seeming to comprehend the significance of his own actions, sets off with a few guides on a small expedition into the wilderness in order to return the girl to her people. He writes a letter to the provincial governor: “To repair the damage wrought by the forays of the Third Bureau, and to restore some of the goodwill that previously existed, I am undertaking a brief visit to the barbarians.” His guides consist of two young conscripts and a hunter and the party sets out across the treacherous terrain. The trip is wrought with peril and hardship, but the barbarian girl seems to thrive while the Magistrates feels more then ever the softness of his aging body. He and the conscripts suffer from drinking the brackish water, but the girl suffers no ill effects. Seeing her seated on her horse, he is amazed to discover she is sleeping, her face “as peaceful an infant.” Sitting around the campfire at night, he is astonished to see her bantering wittily and laughing with the young conscripts, astonished to discover her to be an attractive, intelligent woman. That night he desires her, and she him. Though he realizes that her stimulation has likely come from the attention of the young men, they consummate their relationship. Though he asks her to return to town with him, she leaves with the barbarian horsemen they encounter. “No,” she tells him. “I do not want to go back to that place.” The Magistrate, whose authority had been absolute back in the town, is swindled by the strong, confident barbarian men, who exact a fee from him in order to let him keep his horses. The Magistrate and his guides return to town and are met not with a welcoming party, as the Magistrate somewhat naively seems to expect, but with officers of the Empire who have come to arrest the Magistrate for conspiring with the enemy. The campaign against the barbarians has begun in earnest. IV An abrupt reversal has upended the Magistrates world, as he is taken captive and presented to Warrant Officer Mandel. Seated at the Magistrate’s former desk, Mandel presents the charges to the Magistrate, and delivers a scathing condemnation of the Magistrates general conduct, including is sexual dalliances with disreputable women. Kept prisoner in the same room used for the interrogations the previous year, the Magistrate is initially relieved to be at last openly opposed to the Empire, but he begins to break down under the conditions of his captivity. Eventually he is able to surreptitiously acquire a key and escape for a brief period, only to return willingly to captivity with the realization that he has nowhere to go and cannot survive in a state of nature. This poignant realization is an intensification of the paradox driving the novel’s action. The Magistrate sneaks out of his cell again when the consignment returns with the barbarian prisoners, looped together by a wire strung through their cheeks, and

attempts to disrupt their public humiliation and torture. He finds himself utterly alone in his opposition to the Third Bureau’s brutalities. The Magistrate is brought before Joll and questioned about the discovery of poplar slips from the ruins. The Magistrate takes this opportunity to conform Joll about the abuses, but the Colonel dismisses him. “You have no idea how tiresome your behavior is. Candidly, I must tell you I am not interested in this sticks. They are very likely gambling-sticks. I know that other tribes on the border gamble with sticks.” The Magistrate refuses to discuss the conversation he had with the barbarians and Joll hands him over to his torturers to learn firsthand what he could not understand before. His lofty notions of justice cannot survive in the face of such degradations, and he notes with bitterness: “They are interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well, which very soon forgets them when its head is gripped and a pipe pushed down its gullet and pints of salt water are poured into it until it coughs and retches and flails and voids itself. They did not come to force the story of what I said to the barbarians and what the barbarians said to me. So I had no chance to throw the high-sounding words I had ready in their face. They came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal.” The Magistrate is brought out of his cell periodically and humiliated and abused in the public yard. Finally, the Magistrate is treated to one last public spectacle. He is humiliated and beaten, and then painfully hung by his arms from a tree. The officers laugh while the Magistrate howls with pain, telling the onlookers, “That is barbarian language you hear.” V The barbarians, who were perhaps only a pretense for the Empire to flex its power in the beginning, have now become a tangible threat. They flood the wheat fields, conduct nighttime raids and menace the roads. The fishing people, routed out of their environment by the bush fires set by the Third Bureau to destroy cover along the river, are encamped in settlements close to town and taken to drink. The Magistrate roams the area as the beggar, trading the townspeople’s fascination with his ordeal for scraps of food. While the town’s terror grows at both the barbarian menace and the approaching lean winter, the expeditionary force that left three months before has not been heard from. In town, the soldiers become riotously drunk and raid the local stores. Still the townspeople, in mortal terror of the barbarian tribes, court their favor. At last the battered remnants of the Imperial command return, vanquished by the barbarians unorthodox methods. “We froze in the mountains! We starved in the desert!” an officer tells the Magistrate. “They lured us on and on, we could never catch them. They picked off the stragglers, they cut our horses loose in the night, they would not stand up to us!”

Hurriedly, Colonel Joll and his officers raid the town for provisions and ride out for the capital, leaving the beleaguered town to cope on its own with the prospect of starvation and the threat of a barbarian invasion. The Magistrate resumes his former position, and the town begins preparations to survive the winter. Fearing sabotage of the wells that supply the town with water, the men begin digging a new well within the towns walls in the vacant lot behind the barracks, but the diggers have discover an old makeshift grave, the bones so old as to have absorbed the color of the red clay. The bodies have been piled in “lying just any old how, on top of each other,” - an ominous sign. Winter arrives, the first snowflakes fall, and the Magistrate is still unable to puzzle out the meaning of his experiences. The Magistrate attempts to write, but is unable still to arrive at the truth. “It would be disappointing,” he muses, “to know that the poplar slips I have spent so much time on contain a message as devious, as equivocal, as reprehensible as this. Perhaps by the end of winter, when we are cold and starving, or when the barbarian is truly at the gate, perhaps then I will abandon the locutions of a civil servant with literary ambitions and begin to tell the truth.” Like in the dream motif that winds its way through the story, he is aware of, “something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it.” Is it “the image of a face masked by two glassy insect eyes from which there comes no reciprocal gaze but only my own doubled image cast back at me?” And is it, too, the girl, whom he cannot see for the imagination he has projected onto her: “Nothing is worse than what we can imagine,” the Magistrate tells her, but he has learned by now how arrogant this is. Indeed, pain can only be understood in the moment it is happening, and despite the deep impressions it can leave on both the body and the brain, its essence is elusive. Pleasure shares this quality with pain, and together they function as a powerful weapon. By the deliberate provocation of pain and pleasure does power attain its ends. But freedom is not actually possible for either the oppressor or the oppressed. As the Magistrate notes wryly about his guard, “He is robbed of his freedom too, and thinks of me as the robber.” Fear and desire push and pull; the violator and violated are thus entangled in a strange bond in which neither are entirely free....