88 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
feel genuine sympathy for the figure he sees standing “in the shade
of the barracks wall [... ] muffled in a coat too large for her, a fur
cap open before her on the ground [... containing] no more than a
few pennies” (p. 27). At this point it is worthwhile pausing to con-
sider the ethical significance of this sympathy. If we were to offer
a generous interpretation of the Magistrate’s empathic motives, we
could view it in the light of Levinas’s ethical work and conclude that
it signifies a desire to identify with—and understand—the absolute
Other.^29 However, as mentioned in the previous chapter, we should
also be wary of the sociopolitical implications that attend the perfor-
mance of empathy.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, Lauren Berlant considers
compassion and sympathy to signify an indulgence in—and rein-
forcement of—unequal power relations, which can distract from the
material imbalances in society that create suffering in the first place.
This is a thesis that offers a valuable insight into the problematic
nature of the Magistrate’s sympathy.^30 It is also one that strikes a
chord with Robert Pippin’s reading of Coetzee’s novels. For Pippin,
the image of unequal power perverting social relations (and there-
fore any attendant “sympathy”) recurs throughout Coetzee’s work.
He argues that the “exercise of power in situations without reciproc-
ity, situations of gross inequality [... generates] a kind of illness or
suffering” in Coetzee’s socially privileged characters because “such
an exercise of unequal power is in some way difficult to sustain psy-
chologically, difficult at least with the smallest dawning of some self-
consciousness.”^31 The Magistrate’s sympathetic impulse toward the
“barbarian girl” is then destined to be corrupted because “in the
world they inhabit, even gestures of pity and benevolence are insep-
arable from the relevant positions both occupy and so are insepara-
bly implicated in the relations of power firmly established in that
world.”^32 The process by which these impulses become corrupted
plays itself out in typically opaque fashion; but a close discourse
analysis of the key scenes yields significant insights. The transition
that occurs in the character is incremental and is revealed through
subtle changes in tone and modality, which develop from the sincere
to the sexually predatory.