86 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
the Magistrate is placed on a path on which a violent confrontation
with the Empire appears inevitable.
Before progressing further with the analysis of the Magistrate’s
inner transformation, it is necessary to expand upon how the term
“disciplinary power” is applied in the discussion. For Foucault, “dis-
cipline is the technology deployed to make individuals behave, to
be efficient and productive workers”; but, importantly, such power
relies heavily on corporeal control and the threat of physical vio-
lence.^22 Indeed, although he is careful not to neglect the economic
manifestations of power, Foucault nonetheless insists that power is
“above all a relation of force [... that] represses nature, the instincts,
a class, individuals.”^23 It is this ultimate reliance on repressive force
that prompts Foucault to declare that “nothing is more material,
more physical, corporeal than the exercise of power.”^24 Disciplinary
power is therefore a materially based nexus of influence and con-
trol that pervades all social relations and is visible between “every
point of a social body, between a man and a woman, between the
members of a family, between a master and his pupil, between every
one who knows and every one who does not.”^25 Perhaps the most
striking passage in the novel that illustrates the extent to which
Coetzee depicts social structures in the Foucauldian manner elu-
cidated above comes when the Magistrate describes the mentality
of an austere imperial officer. Pondering over the violent mental-
ity behind the “lilac-blue uniform that the Bureau has created for
itself,” he posits that the officer must have “been told that one can
reach the top only by climbing a pyramid of bodies” (p. 92). This
image has the dual function of evoking two forms of physical vio-
lence. The most immediate and unsettling of these is the evocation
of the memories of Holocaust survivors, who, when charged with
clearing out the gas chambers, would encounter piles of bodies that
would rise to a small pinnacle on which the strongest victims were
to be found (the Zyclon-B gas being heavier than air). Writing of
Anne Frank’s experiences at Belsen concentration camp, Carol Ann
Lee tells us that when the “doors of the chamber were opened by
the sonderkommando [... , the] pyramid of bodies” could be seen.^26
It is this stark image that provides the basis for the preferred inter-
pretation of the passage, with Barbara J. Eckstein offering perhaps