84 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
is established, with the latter taking on the function of an unor-
thodox nurse and housemaid. However, this does not come about
through the employer-employee exchange she had envisaged. Rather,
a relationship of care and relative tolerance is established through a
lengthy and occasionally hostile process of personal disclosure and
the experience of living in close proximity to each other.
Although Waiting for the Barbarians is, in keeping with all of
Coetzee’s novels, a singular work of art that resists straightforward
assimilation into established theoretical constructs, it nonetheless
shares some of the thematic patterns alluded to above. Indeed, per-
haps more than any other of the writer’s works, the text presents a
sophisticated and striking illustration of certain sociopolitical con-
ditions that obstruct cosmopolitan conciliation. The Magistrate,
whose voice is narrated in the first person, undergoes an ethical jour-
ney that is vaguely reminiscent of those in Coetzee’s other works.
Coming from a privileged family in a distinctly hierarchical and
imperialist society, the Magistrate enjoys a leisurely existence as a
“responsible official in the service of the Empire, serving out [... his
days on the] lazy frontier, waiting to retire.”^21 H o w e v e r , t h e i n t e r -
nally focalized narrator makes the reader aware from the outset
that the protagonist considers himself much more of a liberal and
a cosmopolitan than do the other agents of imperial authority that
inhabit the story.
These cosmopolitan inclinations are expressed in a variety of
ways, each exhibiting the familiar conciliatory priorities that can be
observed in some of Coetzee’s other protagonists. Perhaps the most
conspicuous of these is manifested in the Magistrate’s active interest
in the different cultures and languages that exist in the region. He
spends years excavating the environs of the town, forming a tentative
understanding of the history of its peoples and their peculiar rela-
tionship to the land, and takes pains trying to decipher the osten-
sibly extinct language used by an unknown band of settlers whose
ancient existence in the region was perhaps ended by the avenging
“barbarians”(p. 16). The Magistrate’s administration of the town
also ref lects his cosmopolitan conciliatory ideals in that he attempts
to turn “ his” town into something of a persona l cosmopolitan utopia
in which disparate peoples come to trade and exchange knowledge,