A repressed desire named revolution: Social anomalies and anxieties in Coetzee’s Waiting for The Barbarians

Abstract

The present paper attempts to investigate J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) in terms of Fredric Jameson’s concept of the political unconscious. Jameson’s intellectual hermeneutics lies in uncovering the way in which the contradictions, antinomies, sociopolitical and cultural anxieties are to be unfolded within his three semantic horizons of interpretation. This study argues that the narrative, through the political unconscious analysis, reveals the repressed desires encoded in the unconscious of the text. To unravel the underlying contradictions and antinomies beneath the surface of the text, the narrative demands interpretations in order to pierce into the latent meaning of the novel. Coetzee’s novel depicts the cultural and sociopolitical anxieties by which the south Afrikaners’ collective consciousness is determined and shaped. Furthermore, the notion of utopianism has stood in opposition to the dominant ideology so that it could depict antithetical forces. The unimaginable notion of utopia functions as a revolutionary energy to solve the sociopolitical contradictions and antinomies. The very notion of utopia also expresses its antisocial agency of the real world until it ultimately finds its expression in the ideology of the form.

Keywords

• jameson
• coetzee
• the political unconscious
• utopia
• ideologeme(s)
• modes of production
• history