'There-has-been-something-staring-me-in-the-face-and-still-I-do-not-see-it' - Study in J.M. Coetzee's 'Waiting for the Barbarians' and Dino Buzzati'sIl 'Deserto dei Tartari'

The challenge of Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians lies int he provocati ve combination of politically relevant texts from his own continent with Eu ropean modernist texts. In so doing the South African writer also reflects a visual space which is constituted by the autodiegetic and introverse pers pective of the narrating magistrate on the one side and the extroversion of seeing (the barbarians) on the other. In this visual zone magistrate and o thers are facing each other showing the ambivalence inherent to the logic o f the colonial system and identity formations as a result of the simultanei ty of necessity and disappearance of difference. However, the emerging conf lict of the magistrate between understanding and constant withdrawal of mea ning is here not only interpreted as a critical uncovering of the colonial strategies but also as the protagonist's desire for a nonhistorical stabili ty by means of an idyllic and uncontaminated space. In confronting Buzzati' s text about the solitude of the modern subject with the text of the likewi se ignorant magistrate Coetzee creates an allegorical scenery in which the existential but not absurd solitude of his narrator reveals itself as const ituent and part of a continuously rearticulated history.