Where to begin? Ab initio or in media res? A case could be made for either. A peaceful prologue acclimates the reader to the plot’s ecosystem in its undisturbed state. Once briefed on the characters/setting, the reader will be prepared for things to go pear-shaped; the reader can focus on the action and not struggle to remember who is who, or wonder why any of it matters.

On the other hand, a writer has maybe five pages to give the reader a reason to continue being one. If you have some drama that inspired this whole plot, why not lead with it? If we adopt the tenets of the engineer, why not ditch the set-up and streamline your opening?

I would call Waiting for the Barbarians’s intro in media res, with a few qualifications. Usually when we think of in media res, we think of gun fights or murder mysteries that begin with a corpse. These are truly in the middle of things: a good portion of essential plot has been leapfrogged so that we can launch into the text with some velocity. WFTB is “in the middle of things” in the sense that it begins about five minutes after the disturbance starts. The first line describes the sunglasses of the antagonist, Colonel Joll.

All we have missed, really, is the protagonist (The Magistrate) opening the door and asking Joll to have a seat. But there are other ways to open this story up. Coetzee could have begun with the day before Joll’s arrival, establishing the typical routine of this frontier fort. Characters could be introduced, plotlines could be initiated.

Or further back: Coetzee could begin with The Magistrate’s first day on the job, or his birth. But these ab initios would not fit this story. The Magistrate is not inherently interesting. (He would receive a first name if he were.) He becomes interesting when faced with the moral dilemma Colonel Joll poses. So we begin the story at the moment The Magistrate becomes interesting.

Maybe this is an ab initio beginning after all: I think I fell into a semantic bog. What exactly is a beginning? What is the beginning of this plot? Hopefully you see the point: you can start well before the action, at the onset of the action, or knee-deep in the action. Coetzee chose the middle course. That should probably be our default: the first option should be chosen when character takes priority; the third when plot does.

The story so far: the Magistrate has taken in a barbarian girl as penance for his grudging collaboration with the torturer Colonel Joll. He performs this penance each night through a sexually charged ritual of ablution. He washes her damaged feet, rubs and oils her. But they’ve never actually had sex. After cohabiting for awhile, the barbarian girl tries to initiate with the much older Magistrate.

She slips open my gown and begins to fondle me. After a while I push her hand away.

“You visit other girls,” she whispers. “You think I do not know?”

I make a peremptory gesture for her to be quiet.

“Do you also treat them like this?” she whispers, and starts to sob.

Though my heart goes out to her, there is nothing I can do. Yet what humiliation for her! She cannot even leave the apartment without tottering and fumbling while she dresses. She is as much a prisoner now as ever before. I pat her hand and sink deeper into gloom.

This is the last night we sleep in the same bed. I move a cot into the parlour and sleep there. Physical intimacy between us ends. “For the time being,” I say. “Until the end of winter. It is better so.” She accepts this excuse without a word. When I come home in the evenings she brings me my tea and kneels by the tray to serve me. Then she returns to the kitchen. An hour later she taps her way up the stairs behind the girl with the dinner-tray. We eat together. After the meal I retire to my study or go out for the evening, resuming my neglected social round: chess in the homes of friends, cards with the officers at the inn. I also pay one or two visits upstairs at the inn, but with guilty feelings that spoil the pleasure. Always, when I return, the girl is asleep, and I must tiptoe like an erring husband.

First, that peremptory gesture. What motion do you picture, exactly? A flat hand, chopping at the air? A flicking backhand, like you’re dusting off your jacket? Something else? I like that the gesture is non-specific. It’s easy to overdirect your readers, like a director might an actor. Give them some room for their imaginations to work; it saves you words, too.

Second, look at that final paragraph. We’ve seen Coetzee use short, flat, affectless sentences before. There it was to communicate disappointment, here awkwardness. The phrasings become more formal, too: “Physical intimacy between us ends.”

In one of my workshops another student presented a great story about an ice fishing trip taken by two men. Something goes wrong with their truck, and as they are snowbound in the cramped cab, we learn that one of the men has cuckolded the other, and the cuckold knows it. The cuckold smashes their bottle of booze against the dash in a rage. My note to the writer was that the tone of the sentences never rose to match the character’s fury. The sentences remained smooth and even. Both the author and our eminent teacher shot me down on that note, because the story was in third person and neither saw any reason that the narrator had to mirror the anger of the character. Which I understood, but didn’t agree with. As a reader, I want to be immersed in the physical and emotive reality of the moment, whether the narrator is first or third person. Naturally there are advantages to playing against the expected mood of a moment, but when the text is trying to describe peak experiences, how can the reader get there if the sentences won’t lead them?

In this example, the reader discovers the Magistrate’s mood by his blatant attempts to deceive us. He tries to point us away from his discomfort by adopting a neutral tone, but we walk in exactly the opposite direction and arrive at his true mental state. This is the sullen introvert’s dinner party dilemma: I feel awful and tetchy right now, but how can I disguise it? Pretending that I’m in a good mood would read as inauthentic and I don’t want to try it anyway. On the other hand, dropping out of the conversation is a dead giveaway too, if you have any track record of volubility. So you attempt some doomed middle way, smiling politely when someone makes a joke, saying, “No, no, I’m fine,” when an attentive person asks if you’re not.

We’re given away in those interactions by tells that are difficult to control but easy to spot. The skin around the eyes do not crinkle up, the customary warm note of fine is missing. Writers do not have to manage these physical signals, but still struggle to fake their feelings.

My middle-schoolers were particularly bad at disguising their boredom when writing essays about the fairness of school uniforms or the value of the Pledge of Allegiance. When I invited them to write about something they liked, they became funnier, more intelligent, and their sentences began to pop and sizzle. Vocabulary improved, sentence structure took on greater variety. It occurred to me that a lot of writing advice is actually personality advice. In asking for active verbs, I was asking them to be personally energetic. Do not talk around the point because I want you to be forthright as people. Cut out the I thinks because I want you to be confident.

The best writers in the class were my students who were both smart and sunny. I had a number of kids (whom I really enjoyed, because I was/am the same way) who were very bright but moody and insecure. These kids were tentative with their prose, just as they were in class, while the sunnier kids could bring the full weight of their intelligence to bear on any topic I assigned them, because golly, isn’t life fun and isn’t everything interesting?

I had other students who wrote well even on subjects they found uninteresting, only because they took their academics very seriously. They had learned how to try hard on something they didn’t care about in service of something they did care about – a good skill, to be sure, and one every writer would be lucky to be able to call upon when struggling with daily quota.

But if the right attitude cannot be summoned, a writer might be able to fake it: every mood has its syntax. Angry people talk a certain way, depressed people another. The lovesick have their own sticky phrases. The grammars of all these must be mastered to represent such characters correctly, particularly in dialogue or first-person narration.

All of which sounds like the preamble to a case study in the creation of tone in prose, but I have no real findings yet. So far I can say that an awkward tone can be created with flat, formal sentences.

Solitary confinement is taking its toll on the Magistrate.

Under the monotonous regimen of soup and porridge and tea, it has become an agony for me to move my bowels. I hesitate for days feeling stiff and bloated before I can bring myself to squat over the pail and endure the stabs of pain, the tearing of tissues that accompany these evacuations.

No one beats me, no one starves me, no one spits on me. How can I regard myself as a victim of persecution when my sufferings are so petty? Yet they are all the more degrading for their pettiness. I re- member smiling when the door first closed behind me and the key turned in the lock. It seemed no great infliction to move from the solitariness of everyday existence to the solitude of a cell when I could bring with me a world of thoughts and memories. But now I begin to comprehend how rudimentary freedom is. What freedom has been left to me? The freedom to eat or go hungry; to keep my silence or gabble to myself or beat on the door or scream. If I was the object of an injustice, a minor injustice, when they locked me in here, I am now no more than a pile of blood, bone and meat that is unhappy.

The writing here isn’t so interesting as the sentiment. It echoes a key moment in Catch-22.

Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.

Man is meat that believes itself to be more than that. A chunk of flak can destroy the meat; a week locked in the darkness can destroy the meat’s illusion of personhood.

I admire Coetzee’s sensitivity to our fragility, and to how contingent our well-being is on simple things:

I walked into that cell a sane man sure of the rightness of my cause, however incompetent I continue to find myself to describe what that cause may be; but after two months among the cockroaches with nothing to see but four walls and an enigmatic soot-mark, nothing to smell but the stench of my own body, no one to talk to but a ghost in a dream whose lips seem to be sealed, I am much less sure of myself. The craving to touch and be touched by another human body sometimes comes over me with such force that I groan; how I looked forward to the single brief contact which was all I could have with the boy, morning and evening! To lie in a woman’s arms in a proper bed, to have good food to eat, to walk in the sun – how much more important these seem than the right to decide without advice from the police who should be my friends and who my enemies! […] And what is the point of suffering at the hands of the men in blue if I am not iron-hard in my certainty? No matter if I told my interrogators the truth, recounted every word I uttered on my visit to the barbarians, no matter even if they were tempted to believe me, they would press on with their grim business, for it is an article of faith with them that the last truth is told only in the last extremity. I am running away from pain and death. I have no plan of escape. Hiding away in the reeds I would starve within a week, or be smoked out. I am simply seeking ease, if the truth be told, fleeing to the only soft bed and friendly arms I have left to me.

While writing you’ll frequently bump into the limits of text. Describing a gesture, or choosing the right onomatopoeia for cloth falling to the floor, you’ll wish for a camera and a foley artist. But the distance between text and direct sensation can also be an advantage. It allows you to tune through different levels of generality. In this scene, Coetzee eases us into a conversation at dinner. Notice how the dialogue shifts from gist to transcript.

A detachment of new conscripts has arrived to take the places of men who have completed their three-year spell on the frontier and are ready to leave for their homes. The detachment is led by a young officer who is to join the staff here.

I invite him, with two of his colleagues, to dine with me at the inn. The evening goes well: the food is good, the drink plentiful, my guest has stories to tell about his journey, undertaken in a hard season in a region wholly foreign to him. He lost three men on the way, he says: one left his tent in the night to answer a call of nature and never returned; two more deserted almost within sight of the oasis, slipping away to hide in the reeds. Troublemakers, he calls them, whom he was not sorry to be rid of. Still, do I not think their desertion was foolish? Very foolish, I reply; has he any idea why they deserted? No, he says: they were fairly treated, everyone was fairly treated; but then of course conscripts… He shrugs. They would have done better to desert earlier, I suggest. The country around here is inhospitable. They are dead men if they have not found shelter by now.

Think about how a movie would accomplish this. We’d see a wide shot of the conscripts marching in. The Magistrate goes to greet the young officer, welcoming him to town, perhaps inviting him to dinner while he’s still ahorse. Cut to the inn, pan across a table puddled with wine, hear some uproarious laughter that fades down. The young officer begins his story, and of course we’ll have to hear every line, because you can’t fast foward.

These medium-specific advantages should be kept in mind; if you watch as many movies as I do, you may try to solve a problem from within a movie paradigm, while prose has a better solution right there waiting for you.

Waiting for Barbarians is about the crisis of conscience suffered by a civil servant of an empire that employs torturers. Certain themes are magnetized by this scenario: justice, the Other, time. How does Coetzee realize those themes in his text?

I’ve written about this at length before, but the short version is this: we think best through examples. The thought experiment is the philosopher’s favorite bloodhound, using intuition to snuffle towards the truth. (Metaphors are another way to make the abstract concrete.)

Waiting for the Barbarians, as an allegory, can be considered a comprehensive thought experiment. The protagonist will ruminate on certain issues, but the text’s general impulse is to do its thinking through the objective correlative, meaning that all abstractions find their physical form.

So when the Magistrate feels guilt for his complicity with Colonel Joll’s torturing of the natives, he doesn’t sit in his apartment thinking about the ethics of torture. Instead the plot lets him do penance by washing the feet of a blind, lame native girl. Everything about the situation is loaded with meaning. The girl is the Other. Washing of the feet evokes Jesus, humility. Even the girl’s blindness is significant. She has some vision, but only at the periphery.

I look into the eye. Am I to believe that gazing back at me she sees nothing–my feet perhaps, parts of the room, a hazy circle of light, but at the centre, where I am, only a blur, a blank?

This can cut a few ways, but Coetzee mentions how much this relaxes the Magistrate, not to be seen by her. Due to her blindness he is willing to expose his old man’s body that he hates so much. This is consistent with his previously stated desire to live a quiet life in a backwater, invisible to his Empire.

And then we have to contrast the girl’s blindness to Colonel Joll’s sunglasses, the very first image of the novel. If the eyes are the instruments of shame, what does it mean for a man to shield his?

It’s the kind of question that could easily support a four page essay in a college lit course. Most readers recoil from the thought of unpacking these questions so explicitly, but that’s the beauty of the objective correlative. They don’t. Their moral and intellectual intuitions can size these matters up, even subconsciously, while the reader reads on. When these background processes are running, the scene suddenly has juice.

Now if a reader recoils from the thought of exegesis, why would they want the author to make them sit through a lecture on themes? But I see it all the time, these timeouts in which the author steps to the front of the stage while the cast is frozen in tableau behind them. I understand why writers do this. It can be hard to trust the reader enough to infer your themes. Or, to be more precise, to trust yourself that you’ve made it easy for the reader to infer your themes. But it’s doable. If the scenarios are designed carefully, steeped in themes, the reader cannot help but catch your meaning. And if they are not the sort of reader to worry about themes, that’s fine – that stuff can pass over their heads like the dirty jokes in kids’ cartoons.

An author named Mark Sarvas once received a negative review from Troy Patterson that I remember as though it had been aimed at me. The book was Harry, Revised. The hatchet stuck in its spine looked like this:

Or, to gape at the novel from another angle, it is as if Harry were a voodoo doll and his creator eager to wear out a gross of stickpins. The author jabs the hero’s side with “a stab of irritation,” “an unexpectedly sharp stab of pain,” “an involuntary stab of jealousy” and a “stab of guilt as it blossoms into anger.” Harry’s soul is battered by a “wave of anger,” “waves of despair,” “a sweaty wave of guilt, remorse and shame,” a “wave of queasy self-loathing” and, climactically, “a tsunami of loss.” His heart pounds, races, thumps and, somehow still beating despite this plaque of cliché, pounds again. In the interest of fairness, we should consider such lines in context: Harry’s body also plays host to joy — a “wave of euphoria,” just for instance. Aroused, the man experiences “a dancing St. Elmo’s fire of the groin.”

Harry does not seem to have been reread, never mind revised.

Oof. I haven’t read the book, but I suspect this is slightly unfair – peccadilloes magnify when you present them in succession, Daily Show style. But this wonderfully nasty paragraph highlights a problem: how do we describe what it feels like to have an emotion? We can talk about their manifestations – grins, grimaces, tears, laughter – but what do those things feel like as they work their way through our emotive plumbing? Metaphors must be relied on, and I don’t blame Sarvas for going liquid so frequently. And I don’t know how else you can describe a heart’s beating. (Though a Scottish band, Frightened Rabbit, has a good line: “her heart beats like a breezeblock thrown down the stairs.”)

Perhaps the critic’s point is that one should not describe these things. That is a safe play, but is it possible? Describing emotion, much like describing physicality, seems a little silly to me.

Coetzee disagrees:

“Have you had anything to eat?” I ask the boy. He shakes his head. I feel my heart grow heavy. I never wished to be drawn into this. Where it will end I do not know.

Or:

A simple loop of wire runs through the flesh of each man’s hands and through holes pierced in his cheeks. “It makes them meek as lambs,” I remember being told by a soldier who had once seen the trick: “they think of nothing but how to keep very still.” My heart grows sick.

As far as I remember, I’ve written one story in the first person. It’s called “Cold Hands, Warm Fire”. It’s about frontiersmen menaced by the uncanny fauna of a new continent. Wolves which are perhaps not wolves carry off a child; one night they lure the bereaved mother into the woods by howling at her with the voice of her dead son. Keith, the father, begins a one-man campaign of extermination against these monsters, venturing alone into the woods and returning sometimes with their pelts. The narrator accompanies Keith on a hunt, and gets captured and rotisseried by some humanoid monsters.

I recapped the plot because I have unwittingly plagiarized myself for the new novel this study is directed at. In The God Hunters, white men arrive on the shores of a place much like Central America, and their efforts at colonization are disrupted by the forest’s uncanny fauna: cats that may not be cats, monkeys who create creepy little sculptures, etc. The natives believe these are gods, and one of the protagonists, Chac, believes himself cursed by them. In response, he begins hunting them, just like Keith. What fascinates me about this is that I’d completely forgotten about “Cold Hands, Warm Fire”. It’s five-and-a-half pages long, written four years ago. But clearly it spent enough time composting to fertilize some new ideas. I find that exciting – “manuscripts don’t burn.” Some day, even your failures may inform some new work.

And “Cold Hands, Warm Fire” was not my most successful story. Given the point of view, my teacher told me that the ending didn’t make sense. If the protagonist is roasted alive by these arboreal monsters, how is this document coming to us? How could the “I” describe any of this if he’s dead?

I didn’t care for that critique, since I understand first-person stories as being transmitted through a kind of psychic CB and transcribed by the writer. If we are to understand first-person narration as having some plausible paper trail, and that we writers are simply literary historians who unearthed a previously extant text, that raises some strange questions for me: what is the narrator’s rationale for writing this? Are all first-person narrators the kind of person who would sit down and commit a few dozen or hundred hours to writing a text? Or relate these details to some transcriber? The suspension of disbelief now extends to the text’s production and publication history, rather than confining itself to the text’s events.

Waiting for the Barbarians doesn’t have these difficulties. It is a first-person narrative, but the narrator is alive at the end and would certainly be capable of and interested in writing a book. Since I always write in third person, I’m going to pay attention to the advantages offered by first person. Let’s take a look at the book’s opening:

I HAVE NEVER SEEN anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire. Is he blind? I could understand it if he wanted to hide blind eyes. But he is not blind. The discs are dark, they look opaque from the outside, but he can see through them. He tells me they are a new invention. “They protect one’s eyes against the glare of the sun,” he says. “You would find them useful out here in the desert. They save one from squinting all the time. One has fewer headaches. Look.” He touches the corners of his eyes lightly. “No wrinkles.” He replaces the glasses. It is true. He has the skin of a younger man. “At home everyone wears them.”

We sit in the best room of the inn with a flask between us and a bowl of nuts. We do not discuss the reason for his being here. He is here under the emergency powers, that is enough. Instead we talk about hunting. He tells me about the last great drive he rode in, when thousands of deer, pigs, bears were slain, so many that a mountain of carcases had to be left to rot (“Which was a pity”). I tell him about the great flocks of geese and ducks that descend on the lake every year in their migrations and about native ways of trapping them. I suggest that I take him out fishing by night in a native boat. “That is an experience not to be missed,” I say; “the fishermen carry flaming torches and beat drums over the water to drive the fish towards the nets they have laid.” He nods.

He tells me about a visit he paid elsewhere on the frontier where people eat certain snakes as a delicacy, and about a huge antelope he shot.

If you cast a few sentences of this into third person, you can immediately see one huge advantage of first person: pronoun simplicity. In third person, a scene between two men or two women can become confusing unless you are vigilant about antecedents.

Rhetorical questions read better in first person, since there is genuine uncertainty for the narrator. A third-person omniscient narrator asking “is he blind?” comes off as coy.

Also, indirect speech feels quite natural in this context. Notice how selective Coetzee is in quoting the characters. In this opening we hear their voices only when there is some interesting implicature at work. For instance, it’s unlikely that the kind of man who participates in a massive drive resulting in a mountain of rotting carcases would actually be sincere when he calls this “a pity”.

Otherwise, Coetzee simply reports their dialogue to us. (Look again at how many X tells Y there are in the paragraphs.) Reported dialogue enables very efficient compression with little cost to meaning: a character’s preferred topics can tell us just as their speech patterns.

---

In another post I talked about how, in his novel Disgrace, Coetzee manages a first-person effect within third-person narration:

To be simplistic about it, I think close psychic distance is achieved once the narration starts talking about meaning, once actions are interpreted; in short, when subjectivity enters the prose.

WFTB is the inverse: a first-person novel which sometimes sounds third-person. When does it feel the most like a first-person narrative? When you get the impression of being spoken to by an individual. You get that impression very strongly in these sentences, I think:

He hears me out, even (I have the feeling) leads me on a little. I am sure this conversation is noted down afterwards, with the comment that I am “unsound”.

Looking at him I wonder how he felt the very first time: did he, invited as an apprentice to twist the pincers or turn the screw or whatever it is they do, shudder even a little to know that at that instant he was trespassing into the forbidden?

But what creates that effect? I believe it’s the uncertainty. The human position on absolute facts is modest: we appreciate the many things we do not know and therefore hedge with “I thinks” and “maybes.” The declarative sentence belongs to the third-person omniscient narrator and television pundits.

(Remember that declarations of certainty pertain only to speakers capable of being incorrect. For instance:

No doubt her friends have prattled about these trysts of hers…

An omniscient narrator would not write something like this.)

It’s unusual to hear the opinions of an omniscient narrator – why bother with opinions when you have access to the truth? They diminish authority, which of course that sort of narrator wants, and draw attention to the narrator as a character, something that should not be invited lightly. That sort of narrator is mostly employed for their superb sensitivity towards things that we never describe as first-person narrators in our own stories. Things like the color of the sky, the texture of tree bark, sunlight on closed eyelids: sensory details, in short. Listen to the stories we tell each other. It’s all action and feeling. You probably know a lot about the personalities of your friend’s coworkers, but nothing about their appearance. Unless of course their appearance proves something about their personality, as it does here:

I try to subdue my irritation at his cryptic silences, at the paltry theatrical mystery of dark shields hiding healthy eyes. He walks with his hands clasped before him like a woman.

These feel like first-person observations, but in a different way than our previous examples. There’s no uncertainty here. But there is value judgement, interpretation. Paltry, hands clasped “like a woman.” These assessments are not intrinsic to the man being described. Reality ascribes nothing to itself. It simply is, and we decide what it means. A simple arrangement that fiction complicates. How can you assemble a reality from the irreal (language)? Third person must make the attempt, and create a reality which is legible to a reader but has not been obviously predigested. First-person narration, subjective as it is, doesn’t have to solve the problem. It just needs to create an entertaining bubble world.

The Magistrate has delivered the girl to the barbarians. He returns to town and finds a man from the Third Bureau sitting at his desk, pawing through his files. The Magistrate is screwed. They march him off to jail, the very same cell that served as Joll’s torture chamber. This is a 2.5 page scene I’m going to analyze it a few different ways, so read it through clean and then come back.

Unmarked version.

A while ago I came up with a list of skills a storyteller has to have. The last item was this:

A writer must know what to communicate, what is relevant and what is understood. This affects diction, syntax, but also the selection of details and the ordering of material.

Ordering a narrative is usually pretty straightforward. Start at the beginning, go to the end. But the Magistrate’s time in the prison cell is not experienced like that. There is no chain of events to carry the reader through. Instead we have a stew of minor incidents and introspection. I was interested in how Coetzee doled these out, particularly the introspection, which is another type of storytelling that does not obey your basic A to B trajectory.

To impose some order on the imprisonment, Coetzee makes liberal use of time tags. You can see those in bold here.

Of course the paragraphs also help to order the sequence. We begin in the particular instant and diffuse into the habitual. So the first paragraph is about the Magistrate sleeping and dreaming, and the first food delivery.

1. Sleeping night and day
2. Cell specifications
3. Exercise in the yard
4. The cockroaches (hints of a mental breakdown)
5. Magistrate communes with ghosts of the tortured
6. Effect of solitary confinement
7. Back to the seance
8. Thoughts of the blind girl and her father
9. Imagining the father’s death
10. Considering the father’s identity, failings
11. Considering himself as father to the girl, his failings, the moral hazard of knowing these things
12. Questioning his identity (through metaphor of albatross/crow)

In almost every case Coetzee uses the real as segues and triggers. It’s sort of like an informercial, where the shill duly asks the very question to prompt the demonstration of the appliance’s next feature. “I’m glad you asked, Donna!”

When we need to consider the mental duress the Magistrate is under, Coetzee releases a swarm of cockroaches into his room. Let’s not forget that the room was once a torture chamber, allowing for a very natural consideration of Joll’s atrocities and the Magistrate’s negligence of them. How to summon up the girl? With this great sentence: “Somewhere, always, a child is being beaten.” Pair that with the ghosts of the torture victims and of course one would think of the girl.

All of this is an example of we associate ideas. There’s a Wikipedia page about this, if you’re interested in a primer. In the future I’ll write up my own study.

Associating ideas is well and good, but what about those ideas that are being associated? How do we make them tangible? When writing, we face the eternal problem of finding a verb for every sentence. In every goddamn sentence, over and over, we must find things for these nouns to do. Even when you’re talking about ideas and imaginings, and the only real action is an old man lying in a prison cell.

Metaphors are one solution. By having the Magistrate imagine himself as a buzzard circling around the girl, Coetzee gets us back on the firm ground of physical actors performing in space. To evoke the torture victims, there is the flight of fancy about the “imprint of all the pain and degradation” that has seeped into the walls, and the remnants of the screams that still echo. It’s a bit whimsical, but what better way to talk about absent persons?

---

Unannotated Version

With my bedroll and the old bear-fur under my arm I enter my cell. The soot-marks are still on the wall where the brazier used to stand. The door closes and darkness falls.

I sleep all day and all night, barely disturbed by the chop-chop of picks behind the wall at my head or the faraway rumble of barrows and shouts of labourers. In my dreams I am again in the desert, plodding through endless space towards an obscure goal. I sigh and wet my lips.

“What is that noise?” I ask when the guard brings my food. They are tearing down the houses built against the south wall of the barracks, he tells me: they are going to extend the barracks and build proper cells.

“Ah yes,” I say: “time for the black flower of civilization to bloom.”

He does not understand.

There is no window, only a hole high on the wall. But after a day or two my eyes have adjusted to the gloom. I have to shield myself against the light when, morning and evening, the door is flung open and I am fed.

The best hour is early morning, when I wake and lie listening to the first birdsong outside, watching the square of the smoke-hole for the instant at which darkness gives way to the first dove-grey light.

I am fed the same rations as the common soldiers. Every second day the barracks gate is locked for an hour and I am let out to wash and exercise. There are always faces pressed against the bars of the gate gaping at the spectacle of the fall of the once mighty. Many I recognize; but no one greets me.

At night when everything is still the cockroaches come out to explore. I hear, or perhaps imagine, the horny clicking of their wings, the scurry of their feet across the paved floor. They are lured by the smell of the bucket in the corner, the morsels of food on the floor; no doubt too by this mountain of flesh giving off its multifarious odours of life and decay. One night I am awoken by the feather-light tread of one crossing my throat. Thereafter I often jerk awake during the night, twitching, brushing myself off, feeling the phantom probings of their antennae at my lips, my eyes. From such beginnings grow obsessions: I am warned.

I stare all day at the empty walls, unable to believe that the imprint of all the pain and degradation they have enclosed will not materialize under an intent enough gaze; or shut my eyes, trying to attune my hearing to that infinitely faint level at which the cries of all who suffered here must still beat from wall to wall. I pray for the day when these walls will be levelled and the unquiet echoes can finally take wing; though it is hard to ignore the sound of brick being laid on brick so nearby.

I look forward with craving to exercise times, when I can feel the wind on my face and the earth under my soles, see other faces and hear human speech. After two days of solitude my lips feel slack and useless, my own speech seems strange to me. Truly, man was not made to live alone! I build my day unreasonably around the hours when I am fed. I guzzle my food like a dog. A bestial life is turning me into a beast.

Nevertheless it is only on the empty days when I am cast wholly upon myself that I can turn seriously to the evocation of the ghosts trapped between these walls of men and women who after a visit here no longer felt that they wanted to eat and could not walk unaided.

Somewhere, always, a child is being beaten. I think of one who despite her age was still a child; who was brought in here and hurt before her father’s eyes; who watched him being humiliated before her, and saw that he knew what she saw.

Or perhaps by that time she could not see, and had to know by other means: the tone his voice took on when he pleaded with them to stop, for instance.

Always I find in myself this moment of shrinking from the details of what went on in here.

After that she had no father. Her father had annihilated himself, he was a dead man. It must have been at this point, when she closed herself off to him, that he threw himself upon his interrogators, if there is any truth in their story, and clawed at them like a wild animal until he was clubbed down.

I close my eyes for hours on end, sitting in the middle of the floor in the faint light of day, and try to evoke the image of that man so ill-remembered. All I see is a figure named /father /that could be the figure of any father who knows a child is being beaten whom he cannot protect. To someone he loves he cannot fulfil his duty. For this he knows he is never forgiven. This knowledge of fathers, this knowledge of condemnation, is more than he can bear. No wonder he wanted to die.

I gave the girl my protection, offering in my equivocal way to be her father. But I came too late, after she had ceased to believe in fathers.

I wanted to do what was right, I wanted to make reparation: I will not deny this decent impulse, however mixed with more questionable motives: there must always be a place for penance and reparation. Nevertheless, I should never have allowed the gates of the town to be opened to people who assert that there are higher considerations than those of decency.

They exposed her father to her naked and made him gibber with pain; they hurt her and he could not stop them (on a day I spent occupied with the ledgers in my office). Thereafter she was /no /longer fully human, sister to all of us. Certain sympathies died, certain movements of the heart became no longer possible to her. I too, if I live long enough in this cell with its ghosts not only of the father and the daughter but of the man who even by lamplight did not remove the black discs from his eyes and the subordinate whose work it was to keep the brazier fed, will be touched with the contagion and turned into a creature that believes in nothing.

So I continue to swoop and circle around the irreducible figure of the girl, casting one net of meaning after another over her. She leans on her two sticks looking dimly upward. What does she see? The pro- tecting wings of a guardian albatross or the black shape of a coward crow afraid to strike while its prey yet breathes?

---

Time tags

With my bedroll and the old bear-fur under my arm I enter my cell. The soot-marks are still on the wall where the brazier used to stand. The door closes and darkness falls.

I sleep all day and all night, barely disturbed by the chop-chop of picks behind the wall at my head or the faraway rumble of barrows and shouts of labourers. In my dreams I am again in the desert, plodding through endless space towards an obscure goal. I sigh and wet my lips.

“What is that noise?” I ask when the guard brings my food. They are tearing down the houses built against the south wall of the barracks, he tells me: they are going to extend the barracks and build proper cells.

“Ah yes,” I say: “time for the black flower of civilization to bloom.”

He does not understand.

There is no window, only a hole high on the wall. But after a day or two my eyes have adjusted to the gloom. I have to shield myself against the light when, morning and evening, the door is flung open and I am fed.

The best hour is early morning, when I wake and lie listening to the first birdsong outside, watching the square of the smoke-hole for the instant at which darkness gives way to the first dove-grey light.

I am fed the same rations as the common soldiers. Every second day the barracks gate is locked for an hour and I am let out to wash and exercise. There are always faces pressed against the bars of the gate gaping at the spectacle of the fall of the once mighty. Many I recognize; but no one greets me.

At night when everything is still the cockroaches come out to explore. I hear, or perhaps imagine, the horny clicking of their wings, the scurry of their feet across the paved floor. They are lured by the smell of the bucket in the corner, the morsels of food on the floor; no doubt too by this mountain of flesh giving off its multifarious odours of life and decay. One night I am awoken by the feather-light tread of one crossing my throat. Thereafter I often jerk awake during the night, twitching, brushing myself off, feeling the phantom probings of their antennae at my lips, my eyes. From such beginnings grow obsessions: I am warned.

I stare all day at the empty walls, unable to believe that the imprint of all the pain and degradation they have enclosed will not materialize under an intent enough gaze; or shut my eyes, trying to attune my hearing to that infinitely faint level at which the cries of all who suffered here must still beat from wall to wall. I pray for the day when these walls will be levelled and the unquiet echoes can finally take wing; though it is hard to ignore the sound of brick being laid on brick so nearby.

I look forward with craving to exercise times, when I can feel the wind on my face and the earth under my soles, see other faces and hear human speech. After two days of solitude my lips feel slack and useless, my own speech seems strange to me. Truly, man was not made to live alone! I build my day unreasonably around the hours when I am fed. I guzzle my food like a dog. A bestial life is turning me into a beast.

Nevertheless it is only on the empty days when I am cast wholly upon myself that I can turn seriously to the evocation of the ghosts trapped between these walls of men and women who after a visit here no longer felt that they wanted to eat and could not walk unaided.

Somewhere, always, a child is being beaten. I think of one who despite her age was still a child; who was brought in here and hurt before her father’s eyes; who watched him being humiliated before her, and saw that he knew what she saw.

Or perhaps by that time she could not see, and had to know by other means: the tone his voice took on when he pleaded with them to stop, for instance.

Always I find in myself this moment of shrinking from the details of what went on in here.

After that she had no father. Her father had annihilated himself, he was a dead man. It must have been at this point, when she closed herself off to him, that he threw himself upon his interrogators, if there is any truth in their story, and clawed at them like a wild animal until he was clubbed down.

I close my eyes for hours on end, sitting in the middle of the floor in the faint light of day, and try to evoke the image of that man so ill-remembered. All I see is a figure named father that could be the figure of any father who knows a child is being beaten whom he cannot protect. To someone he loves he cannot fulfil his duty. For this he knows he is never forgiven. This knowledge of fathers, this knowledge of condemnation, is more than he can bear. No wonder he wanted to die.

I gave the girl my protection, offering in my equivocal way to be her father. But I came too late, after she had ceased to believe in fathers.

I wanted to do what was right, I wanted to make reparation: I will not deny this decent impulse, however mixed with more questionable motives: there must always be a place for penance and reparation. Nevertheless, I should never have allowed the gates of the town to be opened to people who assert that there are higher considerations than those of decency.

They exposed her father to her naked and made him gibber with pain; they hurt her and he could not stop them (on a day I spent occupied with the ledgers in my office). Thereafter she was /no /longer fully human, sister to all of us. Certain sympathies died, certain movements of the heart became no longer possible to her. I too, if I live long enough in this cell with its ghosts not only of the father and the daughter but of the man who even by lamplight did not remove the black discs from his eyes and the subordinate whose work it was to keep the brazier fed, will be touched with the contagion and turned into a creature that believes in nothing.

So I continue to swoop and circle around the irreducible figure of the girl, casting one net of meaning after another over her. She leans on her two sticks looking dimly upward. What does she see? The protecting wings of a guardian albatross or the black shape of a coward crow afraid to strike while its prey yet breathes?

The Magistrate (protagonist) and Colonel Joll (antagonist) start coming into focus when they visit the prisoners. An old man and a boy are accused of participating in a stock-raid. They kneel in the corner. The Magistrate levels the power imbalance by squatting to talk to them. He speaks in the patois of the frontier and makes no threats, though he does remind the old man of the gravity of the allegation.

“Father, do you see this gentleman? This gentleman is visiting us from the capital. He visits all the forts along the frontier. His work is to find out the truth. That is all he does. He finds out the truth. If you do not speak to me you will have to speak to him. Do you understand?”

He addresses the man with the honorific, ‘father’. He refers to Joll, the colonel, as a gentleman (he is in fact a torturer). He talks to the old man like he is reassuring a skittish child at the doctor’s.

At one point he glances back to Joll.

But Joll does not smile back. [Note: Coetzee never mentions the first smile, and lets the ‘back’ imply it.] Before prisoners, it appears, one maintains a certain front.

Such a revealing sentence, that last one. Discarding the parenthetical “it appears,” we have one of those social prescriptions: “One must not put one’s elbows upon the table, dear.” That haughty tone is achieved just through the “one” and the verb choice “maintains”. If the Magistrate discovers this fact, as implied by “it appears”, it’s obvious he has no expertise with prisoners.

Combined with his body language and manner of speech, we’re already getting an idea of our protagonist. Joll remains enigmatic, and The Magistrate quickly becomes annoyed:

I try to subdue my irritation at his cryptic silences, at the paltry theatrical mystery of dark shields hiding healthy eyes. He walks with his hands clasped before him like a woman.

That irritation seeps into the description immediately: “paltry”, “like a woman.”

But Joll breaks his cryptic silence to announce that he will question the two prisoners. He requests the use of a guard for translation. The Magistrate asks why not himself. Joll replies: “You would find it tedious. We have set procedures we go through.”

Then whitespace. Then:

Of the screaming which people afterwards claim to have heard from the granary, I hear nothing.

Joll’s cruelty contrasts with his foppishness:

Colonel Joll, whom with his tapering fingernails, his mauve handkerchiefs, his slender feet in soft shoes I keep imagining back in the capital he is so obviously impatient for, murmuring to his friends in theatre corridors between the acts.

I tend not to describe characters beyond age, gender, maybe size. But this is unnatural, isn’t it? Everybody looks like something; in art forms when we can do casting calls, this becomes politicized. What does a hero look like? What does a funny person look like? Conversely, what characteristics are made available to certain bodies? Can a fat person be smart? Can a woman be crude? Or, as Barbarians asks, can a dandy be a barbarian?

In this case, absolutely. Joll is a covert barbarian, which says something about how bureaucracy and modernization have forced us to revise our image of the savage. Joll’s first interrogation produces a corpse, explained to the Magistrate in the neutral language of a police report. According to Joll, “the prisoner fell heavily against the wall.”

When the Magistrate takes it upon himself to examine the body, he finds this:

The grey beard is caked with blood. The lips are crushed and drawn back, the teeth are broken. One eye is rolled back, the other eye-socket is a bloody hole.

At this point on page six, Joll’s fledged as a character. You’ll agree that’s not a long time to get a character going, and it may be because so many bases have been touched in short order. We have learned about his appearance, social role, his manner of speech, something of his philosophy, and his patterns of behavior. What else might we want to know? Motivation is a particular interest to readers, as is history – and the latter influences the former. But these are internal things, invisible until articulated by their possessor. Since that doesn’t happen much in real life, we shouldn’t consider a character who says nothing of these things to be incomplete; were that the case, many of our good friends wouldn’t qualify as “well-rounded.”

This is a monstrously long scene breakdown. If you want to read it through once without my commentary interrupting, click here

It’s a big moment in the book, and contains my favorite sentence of Coetzee’s. This is the moment: in which the Magistrate, after bearing witness to indignities and being made to suffer them, after his confused affair with the native girl, his living in the dark, finally rises up and says no. It sounds dry and esoteric to call this book an examination of the semantics of the word barbarian, but this scene is where Coetzee finally inverts the term. It’s wrapped up in such a dramatic scenario; really, this scene demonstrates fiction’s ability to get at ideas and make arguments other artforms cannot. Emotion and intellect fuse, and you’re transported: what you would do, if you were here?

I’m raving about the scene because it’s a snowball that’s been tumbling downhill for one hundred pages, picking up weight and velocity along the way. All of the Magistrates spare thoughts and experiences inform this, freight this, so it’s got some tonnage behind it. But I think that even taken in a vacuum it’s an interesting scene because it requires quite a bit of blocking, which can be challenging.

Let’s get into it.

In this scene the Magistrate finally transitions from witness to martyr. The prose pays a great deal of attention to his acts of witnessing. Since he begins in his dark cell, he’s only witness to sound.

First there is the sound of muskets far away, as diminutive as popguns.

Then from nearer by, from the ramparts themselves, come volleys of answering shots. There is a stampede of footsteps across the barracks yard. “The barbarians!” someone shouts; but I think he is wrong. Above all the clamour the great bell begins to peal.

Kneeling with an ear to the crack of the door I try to make out what is going on.

The noise from the square mounts from a hubbub to a steady roar in which no single voice can be distinguished. The whole town must be pouring out in welcome, thousands of ecstatic souls. Volleys of musket-shots keep cracking. Then the tenor of the roar changes, rises in pitch and excitement. Faintly above it come the brassy tones of bugles.

First we have the “sound of muskets” diminished by distance into “popguns”. An interesting sentence that plays on our mode of perception. We know that quiet sounds are distant, in the same way that we know blue terrain is distant.

I think it’s the modification of sounds that makes them come alive. You give the reader a basic clip from their own personal soundbank, and then force them to do processing on it. It’s that processing that makes for good description, which is maybe counterintuitive.

Another note on sound: our primary metaphor for sound is height. Low voices, deep voices, high voices, etc. (Perhaps there’s a connection between slope-pitch and sound-pitch?) Therefore, Coetzee uses verbs like mount and rise to describe the changes in the sound.

The temptation is too great. What have I to lose? I unlock the door. In glare so blinding that I must squint and shade my eyes, I cross the yard, pass through the gate, and join the rear of the crowd. The volleys and the roar of applause continue. The old woman in black beside me takes my arm to steady herself and stands on her toes. “Can you see?” she says. “Yes, I can see men on horseback,” I reply; but she is not listening.

Once again, the “; + but” construction.

Pay attention to blocking from here on out. Sometimes Coetzee will elide movement, but he ensures we keep track of the Magistrate, here, because the staging counts for so much.

We go now from the aural to the visual.

I can see a long file of horsemen who, amid flying banners, pass through the gateway and make their way to the centre of the square where they dismount. There is a cloud of dust over the whole square, but I see that they are smiling and laughing: one of them rides with his hands raised high in triumph, another waves a garland of flowers. They progress slowly, for the crowd presses around them, trying to touch them, throwing flowers, clapping their hands above their heads in joy, spinning round and round in private ecstasies. Children dive past me, scrambling through the legs of the grownups to be nearer to their heroes. Fusillade after fusillade comes from the ramparts, which are lined with cheering people.

Twice the Magistrate writes “I see…” Our perspective is locked to his, at the back of the crowd.

One part of the cavalcade does not dismount. Headed by a stern-faced young corporal bearing the green and gold banner of the battalion, it passes through the press of bodies to the far end of the square and then begins a circuit of the perimeter, the crowd surging slowly in its wake.

The stage is the town square, and our final performers are about to come on from the wings.

The word runs like fire from neighbour to neighbour: “Barbarians!”

The standard-bearer’s horse is led by a man who brandishes a heavy stick to clear his way. Behind him comes another trooper trailing a rope; and at the end of the rope, tied neck to neck, comes a file of men, barbarians, stark naked, holding their hands up to their faces in an odd way as though one and all are suffering from toothache. For a moment I am puzzled by the posture, by the tiptoeing eagerness with which they follow their leader, till I catch a glint of metal and at once comprehend. A simple loop of wire runs through the flesh of each man’s hands and through holes pierced in his cheeks. “It makes them meek as lambs,” I remember being told by a soldier who had once seen the trick: “they think of nothing but how to keep very still.” My heart grows sick. I know now that I should not have left my cell.

The wire is such a nasty and unusual detail. Coetzee teaches us very quickly what it is. Notice that the Magistrate, who has heard of this before, doesn’t recognize it at first either. So we’re both perplexed, and then he explains it to us, briefly pulling in the voice of a soldier to elaborate. Definitely a literary technique, I can’t imagine this sort of voiceover playing well in a movie.

I have to turn my back smartly to avoid being seen by the two who, with their mounted escort, bring up the rear of the procession: the bareheaded young captain whose first triumph this is, and at his shoulder, leaner and darker after his months of campaigning, Colonel of Police Joll.

Finally Joll has returned. Coetzee heightens the suspense by saving Joll’s name until the very end of a sentence stuffed with parentheticals. Nothing beats a parenthetical for suspense. The reader must hold her breath while reading the new, syntactically – and therefore perhaps semantically – superfluous detail.

The circuit is made, everyone has a chance to see the twelve miserable captives, to prove to his children that the barbarians are real. Now the crowd, myself reluctantly in its wake, flows towards the great gate, where a half-moon of soldiers blocks its way until, compressed at front and rear, it cannot budge.

The blocking confuses me here. Is the great gate the one separating the barracks yard from the square, or the one that leads out of town? Is the crowd flowing toward the gate because they want to get away, now? I think so.

“What is going on?” I ask my neighbour.

“I don’t know,” he says, “but help me to lift him.” I help him to lift the child he carries on his arm on to his shoulders. “Can you see?” he asks the child.

“Yes.”

“What are they doing?”

“They are making those barbarians kneel. What are they going to do to them?”

“I don’t know. Let’s wait and see.”

As a practical matter a kid is a pretty good periscope when you’re stuck in a crowd, but this also reminds us of the sort of audience the execution will have.

Slowly, titanically, with all my might, I turn and begin to squeeze my body out. “Excuse me… excuse me…” I say: “the heat–I’m going to be sick.” For the first time I see heads turn, fingers point.

Nice first sentence. The triple delay at the beginning supports the Magistrate’s slowness. I read a book on prosody once that mentioned how l syllables can be the slowest in the English language.

That last sentence is quintessential Coetzee. Diazeugma till I die.

I ought to go back to my cell. As a gesture it will have no effect, it will not even be noticed. Nevertheless, for my own sake, as a gesture to myself alone, I ought to return to the cool dark and lock the door and bend the key and stop my ears to the noise of patriotic bloodlust and close my lips and never speak again. Who knows, perhaps I do my fellow-townsmen an injustice, perhaps at this very minute the shoemaker is at home tapping on his last, humming to himself to drown the shouting, perhaps there are housewives shelling peas in their kitchens, telling stories to occupy their restless children, perhaps there are farmers still going calmly about the repair of the ditches. If comrades like these exist, what a pity I do not know them! For me, at this moment, striding away from the crowd, what has become important above all is that I should neither be contaminated by the atrocity that is about to be committed nor poison myself with impotent hatred of its perpetrators. I cannot save the prisoners, therefore let me save myself.

Now we’re at the crux of the scene. Coetzee pulls us into the Magistrate’s deliberations. Notice how concrete they are, though. The Magistrate imagines what he’ll physically do, imagines even the coolness of his cell. And the prospect of his comrades is similarly concrete: he pictures them at their possible labor, making shoes or shelling peas.

Then there’s the implicit metaphor of disease in regards to the atrocity. Contaminated, poison: he will expose himself to a moral contagion by witnessing the execution.

Let it at the very least be said, if it ever comes to be said, if there is ever anyone in some remote future interested to know the way we lived, that in this farthest outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian.

That’s the sentence, right there. The word barbarian finally flips from a description of the low-tech desert nomads into the attitudes of a torturer. Barbarity is a state of mind, an attitude towards custom, conduct, manners. I like the overlapping repetitions of “be said” and “if”. Both are used twice, and interleaved in the second dependent clause, something like this: A,BA,B.

Terrific abstention on the commas in the back half. In a few paragraphs I’ll take exception to some of the comma use, but this is as good as it gets here. The rhythm reminds me of a batter taking some practice cuts, two short ones to get his body aligned, one more at half speed, and then the swing at full speed. Coetzee makes a strong slide into home by ending the sentence on barbarian.

I pass through the barracks gate into my prison yard. At the trough in the middle of the yard I pick up an empty bucket and fill it. With the bucket held up before me, slopping water over its sides, I approach the rear of the crowd again. “Excuse me,” I say, and push. People curse me, give way, the bucket tilts and splashes, I forge forward till in a minute I am suddenly clear in the frontmost rank of the crowd behind the backs of the soldiers who, holding staves between them, keep an arena clear for the exemplary spectacle.

The last sentence is another candidate for Quintessential Coetzee: a multiple comma splice with a relative clause to avoid an extra sentence.

Four of the prisoners kneel on the ground. The other eight, still roped together, squat in the shade of the wall watching, their hands to their cheeks.

Why not “watch from the shade of the wall” instead of “squat in the shade of the wall watching”?

The kneeling prisoners bend side by side over a long heavy pole. A cord runs from the loop of wire through the first man’s mouth, under the pole, up to the second man’s loop, back under the pole, up to the third loop, under the pole, through the fourth loop.

A perfect example of how sentence structure can create imagery. If I was adapting this book to film, I know exactly how I would shoot this. You put the camera on a rig capable of executing a precise sawtooth motion, and then track the cord at an excruciatingly slow speed, up from the pole – to the shocking image of a face pierced by wire – down to the pole, up and down again.

As I watch a soldier slowly pulls the cord tighter and the prisoners bend further till finally they are kneeling with their faces touching the pole.

This is the comma usage I object to. Since watch can take a direct object, the reader naturally assumes it has taken “a soldier”, but the pulls disproves that. An unnecessary distraction.

One of them writhes his shoulders in pain and moans. The others are silent, their thoughts wholly concentrated on moving smoothly with the cord, not giving the wire a chance to tear their flesh.

Directing the soldier with little gestures of the hand is Colonel Joll.

There the Colonel is, once again in “Joll position” – that is, right at the end of the sentence for dramatic effect. (Accept my deepest apologies for the Joll position thing, I’ve been working on this study for too long.)

Though I am only one in a crowd of thousands, though his eyes are shaded as ever, I stare at him so hard with a face so luminous with query that I know at once he sees me.

“Luminous with query”. I like it when the prose becomes temporarily florid. (It’s pretty funny when the Magistrate describes his morning wood as a “rod of blood”.) In this case it may be by necessity – I’m having a hard time thinking of alternatives for that phrase.

Behind me I distinctly hear the word magistrate. Do I imagine it or are my neighbours inching away from me?

The Colonel steps forward. Stooping over each prisoner in turn he rubs a handful of dust into his naked back and writes a word with a stick of charcoal. I read the words upside down: ENEMY… ENEMY… ENEMY… ENEMY. He steps back and folds his hands. At a distance of no more than twenty paces he and I contemplate each other.

This moment echoes the marshbuck, though Joll and the Magistrate are ten paces closer to each other.

Then the beating begins. The soldiers use the stout green cane staves, bringing them down with the heavy slapping sounds of washing-paddles, raising red welts on the prisoners’ backs and buttocks. With slow care the prisoners extend their legs until they lie flat on their bellies, all except the one who had been moaning and who now gasps with each blow.

The first sentence is brusque and unceremonious, like the event itself. That second sentence uses a common structure for Coetzee.

The slowness with which the victims lower themselves to the ground is a gut-wrenching detail.

The black charcoal and ochre dust begin to run with sweat and blood. The game, I see, is to beat them till their backs are washed clean.

That “I see” is important; it signals the Magistrate’s disavowal of the “game”.

I watch the face of a little girl who stands in the front rank of the crowd gripping her mother’s clothes. Her eyes are round, her thumb is in her mouth: silent, terrified, curious, she drinks in the sight of these big naked men being beaten. On every face around me, even those that are smiling, I see the same expression: not hatred, not bloodlust, but a curiosity so intense that their bodies are drained by it and only their eyes live, organs of a new and ravening appetite.

Nice line at the end, there.

The soldiers doing the beating grow tired. One stands with his hands on his hips panting, smiling, gesturing to the crowd. There is a word from the Colonel: all four of them cease their labour and come forward offering their canes to the spectators.

A girl, giggling and hiding her face, is pushed forward by her friends.

“Go on, don’t be afraid!” they urge her. A soldier puts a cane in her hand and leads her to the place. She stands confused, embarrassed, one hand still over her face. Shouts, jokes, obscene advice are hurled at her. She lifts the cane, brings it down smartly on the prisoner’s buttocks, drops it, and scuttles to safety to a roar of applause.

Coetzee is unearthing all these facets of humanity within this violent spectacle. The blushing girl participating in a sexualized degradation, the townsfolk treating it like a kiss cam… I simply believe it.

There is a scramble for the canes, the soldiers can barely keep order, I lose sight of the prisoners on the ground as people press forward to take a turn or simply watch the beating from nearer. I stand forgotten with my bucket between my feet.

Then the flogging is over, the soldiers reassert themselves, the crowd scrambles back, the arena is reconstituted, though narrower than before.

Over his head, exhibiting it to the crowd, Colonel Joll holds a hammer, an ordinary four-pound hammer used for knocking in tent-pegs. Again his gaze meets mine. The babble subsides.

“No!” I hear the first word from my throat, rusty, not loud enough.

Then again: “No!” This time the word rings like a bell from my chest.

The colon before dialogue is something I picked up from M John Harrison, and Coetzee uses it quite a bit too. I like the drama of it.

The soldier who blocks my way stumbles aside. I am in the arena holding up my hands to still the crowd: “No! No! No!” When I turn to Colonel Joll he is standing not five paces from me, his arms folded. I point a finger at him. “You!” I shout. Let it all be said. Let him be the one on whom the anger breaks. “You are depraving these people!”

Coetzee always makes sure we know how far away the principals are.

He does not flinch, he does not reply.

“You!” My arm points at him like a gun. My voice fills the square.

There is utter silence; or perhaps I am too intoxicated to hear.

Something crashes into me from behind. I sprawl in the dust, gasp, feel the sear of old pain in my back. A stick thuds down on me. Reaching out to ward it off, I take a withering blow on my hand.

It becomes important to stand up, however difficult the pain makes it. I come to my feet and see who it is that is hitting me. It is the stocky man with the sergeant’s stripes who helped with the beatings. Crouched at the knees, his nostrils flaring, he stands with his stick raised for the next blow. “Wait!” I gasp, holding out my limp hand. “I think you have broken it!” He strikes, and I take the blow on the forearm. I hide my arm, lower my head, and try to grope towards him and grapple. Blows fall on my head and shoulders. Never mind: all I want is a few moments to finish what I am saying now that I have begun. I grip his tunic and hug him to me. Though he wrestles, he cannot use his stick; over his shoulder I shout again.

This is an odd problem that I have, but I’m never satisfied with how I describe characters getting off the ground. I usually write “got to his feet.”

“Not with that!” I shout. The hammer lies cradled in the Colonel’s folded arms. “You would not use a hammer on a beast, not on a beast!” In a terrible surge of rage I turn on the sergeant and hurl him from me.

Godlike strength is mine. In a minute it will pass: let me use it well while it lasts!

The structure of “Godlike strength is mine” is suitably archaic to capture the biblical wrath the Magistrate now feels. An interesting idea, using old-fashioned phrasings when discussing old-fashioned ideas.

“Look!” I shout. I point to the four prisoners who lie docilely on the earth, their lips to the pole, their hands clasped to their faces like monkeys’ paws, oblivious of the hammer, ignorant of what is going on behind them, relieved that the offending mark has been beaten from their backs, hoping that the punishment is at an end. I raise my broken hand to the sky. “Look!” I shout. “We are the great miracle of creation! But from some blows this miraculous body cannot repair itself! How–!” Words fail me. “Look at these men!” I recommence.

WFTB is about cycles: of season, desire, empire. All of it burgeons and then goes dormant, awaiting its next flowering. Permanent damage breaks the cycle, and so it is a great sin in the eyes of the Magistrate, who was once amazed by the convalescent efforts of the barbarian girl’s body.

“Men!” Those in the crowd who can crane to look at the prisoners, even at the flies that begin to settle on their bleeding welts.

NB: crane as a verb derives from the motion of the bird, not the construction equipment. So you can use it in pre-modern settings.

I hear the blow coming and turn to meet it. It catches me full across the face. “I am blind!” I think, staggering back into the blackness that instantly falls. I swallow blood; something blooms across my face, starting as a rosy warmth, turning to fiery agony. I hide my face in my hands and stamp around in a circle trying not to shout, trying not to fall.

~18 times in the book the Magistrate quotes his own thoughts. Why? From what I can tell, he uses it during moments of excitement or surprise – as above – or when he has dissociated from himself, either because the I is his dream-I, or because he is having an argument with himself, or because he is lying to himself.

What I wanted to say next I cannot remember. A miracle of creation–I pursue the thought but it eludes me like a wisp of smoke. It occurs to me that we crush insects beneath our feet, miracles of creation too, beetles, worms, cockroaches, ants, in their various ways.

I take my fingers from my eyes and a grey world re-emerges swimming in tears. I am so profoundly grateful that I cease to feel pain. As I am hustled, a man at each elbow, back through the murmuring crowd to my cell, I even find myself smiling.

For more about the structure of the last sentence.

Block characterization – given when the protagonist looks in a mirror, or God forbid a pool of still water – has brought us so many great cliches: those blue eyes like chips of ice, the curly tresses, the heart-shaped face, etc.

It’s a point of interest to me because it’s one of those fundamental writerly tasks, like being able to scramble an egg as a chef. Every book has a few you can study. Here is one from Coetzee.

A man sits at my desk in the office behind the courtroom. I have never seen him before but the insignia on his lilac-blue tunic tell me that he belongs to the Third Bureau of the Civil Guard. A pile of brown folders tied with pink tapes lies at his elbow; one is open before him. I recognize the folders: they contain records of taxes and levies dating back fifty years. Can he really be examining them? What is he looking for? I speak: “Is there anything I can help you with?”

Something about this scene inspires Coetzee to paint us a picture. The paragraph is unusually colorful by his standards; perhaps the unique color of the man’s uniform got him thinking visually. I won’t make too much of it, except to say that the active elements – folders and man – receive color nominations. This could have a highlighting effect.

But our focus is the man. We see his uniform first because his primary attribute is his membership to the Third Bureau, the agency to which the torturer Joll also belongs.

He ignores me, and the two stiff soldiers who guard me might as well be made of wood. I am far from complaining. After my weeks in the desert it is no hardship to stand idle. Besides, I sense a faraway tinge of exultation at the prospect that the false friendship between myself and the Bureau may be coming to an end.

“May I speak to Colonel Joll?” I say. A shot in the dark: who is to say that Joll has returned?

He does not answer, continuing his pretence of reading the documents. He is a good-looking man, with regular white teeth and lovely blue eyes.

In film and TV everyone’s good-looking because every character has to be played by an actor with a face and a body, and our sense of aesthetics predisposes us to pretty people. So the looks gamut in visual media is compressed and set well towards the hot side of the human attractiveness spectrum. There’s no one to see in fiction, so if one makes a point about a character’s attractivenes, that must be motivated by more than aesthetics. (Unless we prefer imagining attractive people?)

The in-story reason for this man to be good-looking is that he’s from the capital, and is probably well off. Thematically, he’s good-looking because the Third Bureau is full of torturers, and WFTB has a point to make about what our torturers look like, what masks we wear, and how torture tries to rip those masks from us.

But vain, I think. I picture him sitting up in bed beside a girl, flexing his muscles for her, feeding on her admiration. The kind of man who drives his body like a machine, I imagine, ignorant that it has its own rhythms. When he looks at me, as he will in a moment, he will look from behind that handsome immobile face and through those clear eyes as an actor looks from behind a mask.

Coetzee is moving from surface to substance. Uniform to body to the personality such a body would contain. I like how the protagonist imagines this man in another, more representative context.

He looks up from the page. It is just as I thought. “Where have you been?” he says.

“I have been away on a long journey. It pains me that I was not here when you arrived to offer you hospitality. But now I am back, and all that is mine is yours.”

This doesn’t define the Third Bureau man, but such dialogue further clarifies our Magistrate.

His insignia say that he is a warrant officer. Warrant Officer in the Third Bureau: what does that mean? At a guess, five years of kicking and beating people; contempt for the regular police and for due process of law; a detestation of smooth patrician talk like mine. But perhaps I do him an injustice–I have been away from the capital for a long time.

If you think like a filmmaker, you might forget that you’ve got access to more than appearance. Your character/narrator can speculate on attributes that would not be evident to a camera.

Coetzee specifies the man’s occupation now that the major details are out of the way.

“You have been treasonously consorting with the enemy,” he says.

So it is out. “Treasonously consorting”: a phrase out of a book.

Speech patterns say a lot about character. The Magistrate knows that he himself uses “smooth patrician talk”, and this guy is clearly an establishment man. He literally goes by the book.

“We are at peace here,” I say, “we have no enemies.” There is silence.

“Unless I make a mistake,” I say. “Unless we are the enemy.”

I am not sure that he understands me. “The natives are at war with us,” he says. I doubt that he has ever set eyes on a barbarian in his life.

---

After a stretch in solitary, the Magistrate is hauled out and brought before the man in the lilac-blue tunic once again. They are again in the Magistrate’s office, but Tunic has straightened up.

The shelves have been cleared, dusted and polished. The surface of the desk glows with a deep lustre, bare save for a saucer of little glass balls of different colours. The room is spotlessly clean. A vase of hibiscus flowers stands on a table in the corner filling the air with scent. There is a new carpet on the floor. My office has never looked more attractive.

The purpose of this baffles the Magistrate.

After a long while he enters, tosses a sheaf of papers on the desk, and sits down. He stares at me without speaking. He is trying, though somewhat too theatrically, to make a certain impression on me. The careful reorganization of my office from clutter and dustiness to this vacuous neatness, the slow swagger which he uses to cross the room, the measured insolence with which he examines me, are all meant to say something: not only that he is now in charge (how could I contest that?) but that he knows how to comport himself in an office, knows even how to introduce a note of functional elegance. Why does he think me worth the trouble of this display? Because despite my smelly clothes and my wild beard I am still from an old family, however contemptibly decayed out here in the back of beyond? Does he fear I will sneer unless he armours himself in a décor picked up, I have no doubt, from careful observation of the offices of his superiors in the Bureau? He will not believe me if I tell him it does not matter. I must be careful not to smile.

Coetzee is sensitive to the performances we put on for others and how we tailor them to our audience. The Magistrate detects insecurity in the young man, manifested by the paradoxically genteel behaviors of the brutal Third Bureau. We learn – for the first time, on page 82 – that the Magistrate is a blueblood, so this does not quite impress him.

The man then reads a number of depositions which paint the Magistrate in a bad light. These were probably obtained by torture, but that will not matter: depositions is such an official word, they will not be questioned.

Sufficiently threatened, the Magistrate is taken back to his cell. He keeps thinking about the man in the lilac-blue tunic. (And I’m thinking, where is Joll?)

I think about him a great deal in the solitude of my cell, trying to understand his animosity, trying to see myself as he sees me. I think of the care he has spent on my office. He does not simply hurl my papers in a corner and prop his boots on my desk, but instead takes the trouble to display to me his notion of good taste. Why?

That’s the ironic thing about our social performances: we take pains to demonstrate something like our high-breeding and good taste, and it proves exactly the opposite in the mind of our audience. How can this be? Perhaps it’s an inability to authentically imagine the perspective of the audience, so our pantomime is performed, really, for ourselves as we would be wearing our desired audience’s mask. Tunic does not actually have the good taste he pretends; if he did, he would not imagine that good taste would impress an aristocrat like the Magistrate. By following this logic backwards, the Magistrate can make deductions like these:

A man with the waist of a boy and the muscular arms of a streetfighter crammed into the lilac-blue uniform that the Bureau has created for itself. Vain, hungry for praise, I am sure. A devourer of women, unsatisfied, unsatisfying. Who has been told that one can reach the top only by climbing a pyramid of bodies. Who dreams that one of these days he will put his foot on my throat and press. And I? I find it hard to hate him in return. The road to the top must be hard for young men without money, without patronage, with the barest of schooling, men who might as easily go into lives of crime as into the service of the Empire (but what better branch of service could they choose than the Bureau!).

Joll’s continued absence perplexed me until I read this passage. Economy suggests that, if you’ve already got Joll set up, and have need in the story for a man whose role Joll could fulfill, you cast Joll in that part. But we get Tunic here instead. I think it is because Coetzee wants to consider the Civil Barbarian from another angle. Joll grants us a look at the secret sadist, but a fascist regime cannot fill its ranks entirely with such deviants: there are simply too many jackboots and not enough deviants to fill them. So common thugs like Tunic are recruited.

For an ambitious young man born to nothing, who cares if the career ladder is in fact a pyramid of bodies? (Marvellous metaphor from Coetzee, and a good example of how he keeps things concrete whenever possible.) Only men like the Magistrate, born with a silver spoon, can afford to have a conscience.

Take another look at how the Magistrate looks down his nose at his captor. The camera would see a fit, powerful man wearing the crisp uniform of a powerful agency, seated behind an administrator’s desk. An imposing figure, right? Well, the Magistrate manages to give us that impression while also biasing it through simile and conjecture. Tunic’s waist is not impressively trim, it is like a boy’s waist (emasculating). His muscled arms are like those of a streetfighter (low class). His lilac-blue uniform is something “created for itself” by the Bureau (factitious). Even his presumed female conquests (projecting much, Magistrate) are cast as piddling, insecure: “unsatisfied, unsatisfying.”

The Magistrate already occupied the moral high ground, and now he’s added his socioeconomic high ground to it. Which is how he can justify his lack of reciprocal rancor towards Tunic, who could at any time have him broken with an iron rod.

Today I leave my horse hobbled where the line of marshgrass ends on the bleak south-west shore and begin to push my way through the reeds. The wind blows chill and dry straight into my eyes, the sun is suspended like an orange on an horizon streaked black and purple.

Weather! Bleak, chill dry wind, dramatic morning light. I get the sense that weather reportage is not a popular technique, because I’m a little shy about writing it, but this crystallizes so much of the scene for me.

Almost at once, with absurd good fortune, I come upon a waterbuck, a ram with heavy curved horns, shaggy in his winter coat, standing sideways on to me, teetering as he stretches up for the reed-tips. From not thirty paces I see the placid circular motion of his jaw, hear the splash of his hooves. Around his fetlocks I can make out circlets of ice-drops.

Notice the order of the details. First the animal itself, then its orientation and attitude, then distance. We see a little more of its activity, and then a truly tiny detail: the ice-drops encircling the fetlock. (The fetlock is the “ankle” of the ungulate, that knob right above the hoof.) In my writing workshops we spent a lot of time talking about “telling details,” always leaning on the last syllable of details, and I think this qualifies. A telling detail works because it depends on broader details. By asking the reader to imagine that fetlock, you’re secretly asking them to picture the entire ram. Another point in this detail’s favor: it coordinates the ram with its environment.

I am barely attuned yet to my surroundings; still, as the ram lifts himself, folding his forelegs under his chest, I slide the gun up and sight behind his shoulder. The movement is smooth and steady, but perhaps the sun glints on the barrel, for in his descent he turns his head and sees me. His hooves touch ice with a click, his jaw stops in mid-motion, we gaze at each other.

“Lifts himself” doesn’t help me much, I would have preferred stand or “hind legs” in there.

As he x’s, I y is the template for simultaneous action.

My pulse does not quicken: evidently it is not important to me that the ram die.

He chews again, a single scythe of the jaws, and stops. In the clear silence of the morning I find an obscure sentiment lurking at the edge of my consciousness. With the buck before me suspended in immobility, there seems to be time for all things, time even to turn my gaze inward and see what it is that has robbed the hunt of its savour: the sense that this has become no longer a morning’s hunting but an occasion on which either the proud ram bleeds to death on the ice or the old hunter misses his aim; that for the duration of this frozen moment the stars are locked in a configuration in which events are not themselves but stand for other things. Behind my paltry cover I stand trying to shrug off this irritating and uncanny feeling, till the buck wheels and with a whisk of his tail and a brief splash of hooves disappears into the tall reeds.

The sentence about the “stars locked in a configuration” is so good I remember exactly where I was when I read it for the first time five years ago. It’s also the reason you’re about to read an absurd amount of analysis about this passage.

---

One of the better exercises for writing is the “Ben Franklin”. Franklin taught himself to write by reading the Spectator, a short-lived English daily, published from 1711-12, that talked about society with a Swiftian sensibility. After reading, Franklin would make notes on the text and try to reconstruct it later. It’s difficult but worthwhile. Even if you remember the content of the scene you’re trying to recreate, the challenge of finding the proper expression and flow for it is exactly the same feeling you’ll get writing your own stuff. As such, it’s just as difficult, if not more so.

I encourage you to try this out. Below you’ll find my paraphrases so that you can, tomorrow, attempt a recreation. Once you’ve done that, check out my own reconstruction at the bottom of this post. It might help to see what kind of things I’m grading myself on. And if you don’t feel like trying it yourself, read on anyway; I learned a few things while doing the exercise.

Paraphrases

1. leave my horse, marshgrass, south-west shore, enter reeds.
2. wind in eyes, cold/dry, sun an orange, horizon black/purple.
3. right away see waterbuck (ram), curved horns, shaggy winter coat, seen in profile, stretching for “reed-tips”.
4. 30 paces off, see chewing motion, hear hooves splashing.
5. see rings of ice around fetlocks.
6. hardly locked in yet to environment, ram stands up (forelegs under chest), lift gun and take aim.
7. smooth motion but maybe sun on metal gives me away, he spots me as hes coming down.
8. hooves click on ice, stops chewing, staredown.
9. heart doesnt beat faster, guess it doesn’t matter if I kill this ram or not.
10. ram chews once more, stops.
11. morning clear/silent, i’m vaguely aware of a feeling I’m having.
12. ram frozen in front of me, time stops, no rush, problem with hunt, feeling like this isn’t just a hunt but a binary, me or him, for right now the stars are locked as is and events are symbols of other things.
13. poorly concealed, shake off the feeling, but the ram vanishes – tail, hooves, reeds.

My attempt

(Coetzee) Today I leave my horse hobbled where the line of marshgrass ends on the bleak south-west shore and begin to push my way through the reeds. The wind blows chill and dry straight into my eyes, the sun is suspended like an orange on an horizon streaked black and purple.

(Me) One morning I left my horse hobbled where the marshgrass ended by the bleak south-west shore. A cool dry wind blew in my face, the sun hung like an orange in a sky streaked with black and purple.

First off, I forgot that WFTB is in the present tense. Not the best. Didn’t put the narrator in motion through the reeds, an obvious oversight. I avoided the dry-eyes rhyme from the original. I was hesitant about how to link the wind and sun clauses. I flirted with “wind blew in my face as the sun…”, but eventually settled for that Coetzee comma splice. Vindicated. Not sure if sun/hung sounds goofy.

(Coetzee) Almost at once, with absurd good fortune, I come upon a waterbuck, a ram with heavy curved horns, shaggy in his winter coat, standing sideways on to me, teetering as he stretches up for the reed-tips. From not thirty paces I see the placid circular motion of his jaw, hear the splash of his hooves. Around his fetlocks I can make out circlets of ice-drops.

(Me) Almost immediately, by absurd good fortune, I came across a marshbuck: a sheep with heavy curved horns, shaggy in its winter coat, teetering on its hooves as it reached for the reed-tips. Around its fetlocks were circlets of ice-drops.

Do you remember hearing about The Cuckoo’s Calling, a book that JK Rowling published under the pen name of Roger Galbraith? To discover Galbraith’s true identity, some journalists asked Peter Millican and Patrick Juola for help. These guys used a technique called “forensic stylometry” to test Rowling’s style against Galbraith’s, and found strong similarities. Juola wrote up a very cool explanation of the technique on Language Log. He mentions the diagnostic value of the arbitrary “function words”. He writes:

The basic theory is pretty simple: language is a set of choices, and speakers and writers tend to fall into habitual, or at least common, choices. Some choices come from dialect (the reason an Englishman drives a lorry but an American a truck), some from social pressure (if I need to impress someone with my vocabulary, I can utilize a polysyllabic lexicon instead of just using big words), and some just seem to come. An example of the latter category is in the use of many function words. If you ask yourself where the salad fork is relative to the plate, you quickly realize that it’s usually to the left of the plate. Or is it? It’s just as likely to be “on” the left of the plate, “at” the left of the plate, or perhaps “to” the left SIDE of the plate. Same fork, same position, and at least four different choices for how to describe it, none of which correspond to any sociolinguistic or cognitive variable with which I’m familiar.

I mention this because Coetzee and I differ on function words, and I’m not too worried about it. Though I suppose with pairs better with “absurd good fortune” than by. (I must have been thinking of the phrase by chance as I was working.) But as Juola illustrates with the table setting, it all gets the job done. However I do admire Coetzee’s restraint with function words. We’ll see shortly that I don’t always trim my sentences’ fatty syntax.

(Coetzee) I am barely attuned yet to my surroundings; still, as the ram lifts himself, folding his forelegs under his chest, I slide the gun up and sight behind his shoulder.

(Me) Hardly attuned yet to my surroundings, still I do not hesitate as the ram lifts himself, folding his forelegs beneath his chest, to raise my gun and sight just beyond his shoulder.

You’ve noticed that I switched into the correct tense all of a sudden. That’s because I took two days for this exercise, and on day two I relied on brief paraphrases to jog my memory. The paraphrase for this sentence read: “hardly locked in yet to environment, ram stands up (forelegs under chest), lift gun and take aim.”

I pulled attuned, and the crucial still, but missed the semicolon. You can see how badly my sentence is botched as a result. I split hesitate from its infinitive verb by 11 words – lousy. I did this because I know Coetzee is sparing with commas. Not the case here.

(Coetzee) The movement is smooth and steady, but perhaps the sun glints on the barrel, for in his descent he turns his head and sees me.

(Me) The motion is smooth and even, but perhaps a glint from the sun betrays my position, for he spots me in his descent.

Roughly equivalent here. I knew the movement wanted two adjectives. The sun glinting on the barrel is lost in my version, I don’t even mention the rifle barrel. Also, Coetzee uses glint as the verb, while I use betray. We’re really splitting hairs here, but it’s not necessary to explain why the sun on the rifle is a problem. The reader can infer that. I prefer Coetzee’s handling of

for in his descent he turns his head and sees me.

to mine because verbs at the end of sentences have real punch.

I correctly guessed that Coetzee would go for a double comma splice in this moment:

(Coetzee) His hooves touch ice with a click, his jaw stops in mid-motion, we gaze at each other.

My version:

(Me) His hooves click on the ice, his chewing freezes, we gaze at each other.

“Touch ice” sounds great to me. The lack of a determiner gives it an… urgency, almost? Assertiveness? (Possible that I think this because it has the same pattern as eat shit.)

Moving on to structure. These comma splices are so far the most distinctive sentence type that Coetzee uses. Here are the ones I’ve collected, as of page 40:

The room is warm, her coat hangs in a corner with the boots below it, she wears only the white smock and drawers.

Then he withdraws it, his hand returns to his side, he stands waiting.

His face is ghastly, he sits his horse uncomfortably, his wounds plainly still cause him pain.

It is clean, it is swept daily, it is like the floor of any room.

My eyes are sharp, my hearing is keen, I sniff the air like a hound, I feel a pure exhilaration.

Do you notice any patterns? From what I can tell, there are two guidelines to their use.

1. Some variation in the clauses’ subjects.
2. Subjects tend to belong to the character, who may or may not appear in the sentence. (His hooves, her coat, his face, my eyes)

(Coetzee) My pulse does not quicken: evidently it is not important to me that the ram die.

(Me) My pulse does not quicken: evidently it is not important to me whether the buck lives or dies.

A great use of first-person, that evidently.

(Coetzee) He chews again, a single scythe of the jaws, and stops.

(Me) He chews once more, a single scythe, and stops.

Jonathan Franzen once said that interesting verbs are rarely that interesting, but scythe is quite memorable here. An off-kilter, inapt verb choice presents the reader a square peg for a round hole, and jolts their attention, while the most common collocations (he said) are effectively invisible.

Once again, the sentence ends on a verb. Works well here, because of course the period, or full stop, reinforces the word.

(Coetzee) In the clear silence of the morning I find an obscure sentiment lurking at the edge of my consciousness.

(Me) On this clear and silent morning I dimly perceive a sentiment at the periphery of my awareness.

I substitute dimly perceive for find and periphery for edge. I did that because the sense of the sentence is rather airy, so I wanted a tone to match. But Coetzee didn’t go there. Also, that sentiment does not lurk in my sentence. Since this is an undesireable feeling for the Magistrate, that missing verb matters.

(Coetzee) With the buck before me suspended in immobility, there seems to be time for all things, time even to turn my gaze inward and see what it is that has robbed the hunt of its savour: the sense that this has become no longer a morning’s hunting but an occasion on which either the proud ram bleeds to death on the ice or the old hunter misses his aim; that for the duration of this frozen moment the stars are locked in a configuration in which events are not themselves but stand for other things.

(Me) With the buck suspended motionless before me, time stands still and I feel that this is more than a morning’s hunting, but a choice: either the proud ram bleeds to death on the ice or an old man misses his aim, for at this moment the stars are locked in their configuration and events are not themselves but stand in for other things.

Where should the before me be placed? Much like the phrase “for in his descent he turns his head and sees me,” Coetzee seems to prefer his prepositional phrases to precede the verbs.

(Coetzee) Behind my paltry cover I stand trying to shrug off this irritating and uncanny feeling, till the buck wheels and with a whisk of his tail and a brief splash of hooves disappears into the tall reeds.

(Me) From my sparse cover I try to shake this feeling, but the ram wheels and vanishes with a flick of his tail, his hooves pounding as he disappears into the tall reeds.

Till rather than but seems right. I seem to hate adjectives, so something like “irritating and uncanny” wouldn’t occur to me; I probably internalized some writing advice on adjectives five years ago and never thought about it since. I like the lack of punctuation on the buck’s escape. I fought against the parallelism, but why? I’ll keep an eye out for parallelism use going forward.

Do all assured writers tend towards minimalism? Perhaps minimalism suggests assuredness. Though Coetzee’s is not the pugnacious minimalism of Hemingway: Coetzee writes abstemiously. His sentences are nicely balanced and never overstuffed. He displays no particular aversion to adverbs or punctuation but still uses them infrequently. I tend to underline his paragraphs and not sentences; the prose’s charm accumulates.

Monotony threatens any minimalist writer. If the sentences tend to be short, and begin in the same ways, they will assume a robotic affect, like those in the paper of an 8th grader who gets solid B’s. The middle schooler’s minimalism is unintentional; having never considered prose style, it defaults to plain. But slightly older young writers also adore minimalism. (That or the other, ultraviolet extreme.)

Minimalism is appealing because it is simple, and it can be difficult for readers to separate simple-simple from simple-profound. Good logic: if you couldn’t paint a lick but were desperate to get into a museum, abstract modernism would be a much surer ticket than realistic figural painting. Apparently – and I stress that word – minimalism demands only a refined sensibility and not technique.

---

Except for that monotony problem. There’s a well traveled piece of writing advice from Gary Provost which begins, “This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous.”

The conclusion – “Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.” – is correct, but the explicit technique for accomplishing this is narrow. Provost says that you create this word music through sentence length alone, which is like saying you create a great song through rhythm alone. What about melody, harmony? Provost obliquely acknowledges these when he writes, “[I’ll write] a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals – sounds that say listen to this, it is important,” but I bet most readers just think, “Vary sentence length – got it.” To be clear: sentence length affects prosody only in how it determines the deployment of full stops. There’s also meter and punctuation to consider.

Here is an excerpt with sentences of similar lengths (10/10/10/11/8/2). Read it clean, and then see it looks scanned. (Sorry if my scansion is sloppy, I’m not great with it.)

From the sky thousands of stars look down on us. Truly we are here on the roof of the world. Waking in the night, in the open, one is dazzled. The sentry at the gate sits cross-legged, fast asleep, cradling his musket. The porter’s alcove is closed, his trolley stands outside. I pass.

From the sky thousands of stars look down on us.

Truly we are here on the roof of the world.

Waking in the night,

in the open,

one is dazzled.

The sentry at the gate sits cross-legged,

fast asleep,

cradling his musket.

The porter's alcove is closed,

his trolley stands outside.

I pass.

Just the inclusion of linebreaks emphasizes the poetic form. Line six is a mirror, reflecting lines 2-4 onto lines 7-9.

I see a number of trochees: thousands, truly, waking, dazzled, sentry, legged, porter’s, alcove, trolley. I’m not qualified to talk about the meter too much, but here’s what sticks out at me. “Waking in the night, in the open, one is dazzled,” each stressed syllable is separated by two or three unstressed syllables, creating a wave pattern in the emphasis with particular weight given to each of the cresting stresses: waking, night, open, dazzled. By bumping up against the comma, the stress on night evokes urgency. In that sentence the commas are breaker walls, rebuffing the flow and then being overwhelmed by another surge.

Notice the couplets created by punctuation. The period between sentences 1 & 2 mirrors them. The commas in sentence three (lines 3-5) splits the sentence into even thirds. I mentioned well balanced sentences earlier, and this is what I mean.

Sentence five is interesting because it shifts into a loose iambic. Prose rhythms can and must be varied. To stay in one rhythm for more than a few sentences begins to draw attention. I’m not certain how many sentences a reader holds in mind. The magic number for working memory is supposedly 7 plus or minus 2, but I’d guess that a reader’s ear operates on a much smaller window. Echoic memory, our rolling buffer for auditory information, holds 2-4 seconds of data – perhaps 15 words. And Gary Provost’s example of monotony? A neat 15 words. Something to consider.

I included that last sentence so I could point out the “comma countdown” in the final three sentences. With commas, there are three, two, and one portion(s) in each.

---

Sometimes you don’t want to avoid repetition. Here, Coetzee exploits a repetitive rhythm to connect ideas.

But last year stories began to reach us from the capital of unrest among the barbarians. Traders travelling safe routes had been attacked and plundered. Stock thefts had increased in scale and audacity. A party of census officials had disappeared and been found buried in shallow graves. Shots had been fired at a provincial governor during a tour of inspection. There had been clashes with border patrols. The barbarian tribes were arming, the rumour went; the Empire should take precautionary measures, for there would certainly be war.

The various episodes of barbarian unrest are described in declarative sentences of similar length. Since they have the same shape and rhythm, it reinforces the idea that they are similar in content: all examples of the same idea.

I suggest that I take him out fishing by night in a native boat. “That is an experience not to be missed,” I say; “the fishermen carry flaming torches and beat drums over the water to drive the fish towards the nets they have laid.”

I have never seen a semicolon precede dialogue. Coetzee only does it twice, so I didn’t see enough of it to decide if I liked it.

Here’s another odd one: an ellipsis leading into an em dash. I think I like it.

“You do not understand. You do not want someone like me.” She gropes for her sticks. I know that she cannot see. “I am…”–she holds up her forefinger, grips it, twists it. I have no idea what the gesture means.

---

Oddballs out of the way, let’s look at Coetzee’s comma usage.

Of the screaming which people afterwards claim to have heard from the granary, I hear nothing.

Some of the most noticeable bits of punctuation are those omitted. Many times Coetzee will not bother with a comma that I would. My impulse would be to write:

Of the screaming which, afterwards, people claim to have heard from the granary, I hear nothing.

But that wouldn’t sound right, and so I’d opt for something else. This sentence is a good reminder that main clauses don’t have to come before their dependent clauses, and when the main clause is so short, you get an interesting punch by placing it at the end.

Here’s another sentence with fewer commas than you’d guess:

Also what was once an outpost and then a fort on the frontier has grown into an agricultural settlement, a town of three thousand souls in which the noise of life, the noise that all these souls make on a warm summer evening, does not cease because somewhere someone is crying.

Here’s my instinctive markup.

Also, what was once an outpost – and then a fort – on the frontier has grown into an agricultural settlement, a town of three thousand souls in which the noise of life, the noise that all these souls make on a warm summer evening, does not cease because somewhere, someone is crying.

I’ll stick by the comma after “Also,” but otherwise I think Coetzee’s version reads much better.

One more:

When he looks at me, as he will in a moment, he will look from behind that handsome immobile face and through those clear eyes as an actor looks from behind a mask.

Coetzee can get away with less punctuation because the sentences are well structured. The prepositions from behind and and through serve as a sort of comma, signalling to the reader that the sentence is moving to a new clause. If you didn’t know, it is standard to divide adjectives of the same type – such as handsome and immobile – with a comma. Obviously commas aren’t needed when you have a few different classes of adjective, as in the phrase “three big red houses”.

The grey beard is caked with blood. The lips are crushed and drawn back, the teeth are broken. One eye is rolled back, the other eye-socket is a bloody hole.

---

Coetzee simply does not care about comma splices (when two independent clauses are joined by a lone comma instead of a comma and a conjunction, or a semicolon).

We begin with some conservative two-clause splices.

• She will not yield it up, we have to tear it away from her.
• Bugle-calls from the ramparts break into my sleep, the barracks hall erupts in uproar as the soldiers go scrambling for their weapons.

We ramp up to three clauses:

• The room is warm, her coat hangs in a corner with the boots below it, she wears only the white smock and drawers.
• Then he withdraws it, his hand returns to his side, he stands waiting.
• His face is ghastly, he sits his horse uncomfortably, his wounds plainly still cause him pain.
• It is clean, it is swept daily, it is like the floor of any room.
• My eyes are sharp, my hearing is keen, I sniff the air like a hound, I feel a pure exhilaration.
• His hooves touch ice with a click, his jaw stops in mid-motion, we gaze at each other.

What tone does a comma splice strike? To me it can suggest urgency, in the same way that a sentence fragment does. Syntactical niceties like conjunctions fall away as the action intensifies.

Here’s a good example.

I try to smile and touch them as I pass on my way to the girl, but my features are frozen, the smile will not come, there seems to be a sheet of ice covering my mouth. I raise a hand to tear it off: the hand, I find, is thickly gloved, the fingers are frozen inside the glove, when I touch the glove to my face I feel nothing.

No time for conjunctions! In this case there’s a horror to these splices, a staccato chain of realizations, much like in the “Tiny Whale”.

But look at those examples again. They aren’t all intense. In some cases the description is quite mundane. This is when the splice operates like a slideshow, a quick succession of fixations, as disconnected as the saccades of an eye.

---

When Coetzee does use conjnctions, he’ll frequently pair them with semicolons. (In defiance of all the laws of the SAT, by the way.) There are 91 instances of “, but” and 42 of “; but”. It is less common with and: 177 “, and” versus 12 “; and”. Why the disparity? I think the semicolon reinforces the negation of but, gives him an extra pause that he likes to exploit.

Towards evening the door opens and my little friend enters with my supper. I can see that he is bursting to tell me something; but the guard has come in with him and stands with a hand on his shoulder.

The little friend’s desire to share news with the Magistrate is more strongly denied with the addition of that semicolon.

Blood and matter

Nimbly, with hand and teeth, the boy begins unwrapping the rags that bandage his forearm. The last rounds, caked with blood and matter, stick to his flesh, but he lifts their edge to show me the red angry rim of the sore.

I picked up this sentence structure from Harrison’s Empty Space. If you want to showcase an adverb or participle, there you go: [Adverb/participle] , […]. I love the orderliness of the modifying clauses that build out from the sentence germ “the boy begins unwrapping the rags”.

Two standouts from the next sentence: the choice of “rounds” and “caked with blood and matter.” Rounds is not an obvious term for that motion, but it fits precisely. And using matter for that understatement is excellent. I’ve found that general – not necessarily euphemistic – word choice can drive home descriptions of the violent or gross.

Ghosts Awaken

One evening I lingered among the ruins after the children had run home to their suppers, into the violet of dusk and the first stars, the hour when, according to lore, ghosts awaken.

I like three things about this sentence:

1. The sentence is about ghosts, and what could be more ghostly of the Magistrate than lingering among ruins?
2. “the violet of dusk.” Those are two words that just look right together, and it sets a palette for the scene.
3. The first half runs smoothly, and then four commas speedbump the back half, so that the forceful “ghosts awaken” – trochaic, hard g and k – can hit harder.

Knitting itself

Perhaps I simply blow out the lamp and settle down with her. In the dark she soon forgets me and falls asleep. So I lie beside this healthy young body while it knits itself in sleep into ever sturdier health, working in silence even at the points of irremediable damage, the eyes, the feet, to be whole again.

I’d tend to put em dashes around “the eyes, the feet”, but Coetzee treats them like appositives to “irremediable damage,” and tacks them on with commas.

Tiny Whale

In the night the dream comes back. I am trudging across the snow of an endless plain towards a group of tiny figures playing around a snowcastle. As I approach the children sidle away or melt into the air.

Only one figure remains, a hooded child sitting with its back to me. I circle around the child, who continues to pat snow on the sides of the castle, till I can peer under the hood. The face I see is blank, featureless; it is the face of an embryo or a tiny whale; it is not a face at all but another part of the human body that bulges under the skin; it is white; it is the snow itself. Between numb fingers I hold out a coin.

I really like that penultimate sentence. “Tiny whale” is an unusual bigram, for starters. And then see how the semicolons are employed to give the sense of the Magistrate’s snap judgements and their quick revisions. It’s this; wait, no, it’s this; it’s this; it’s this. That pause, slightly harder than a comma, lets you feel the reassessment.

These sentences appear in a recurring dream. Here is a snippet from the next recurrence. The girl has built a snow model of the town.

I point to the middle of the square. “You must put people there!” I want to say. No sound comes from my mouth, in which my tongue lies frozen like a fish. Yet she responds. She sits up on her knees and turns her hooded face towards me. I fear, at this last instant, that she will be a disappointment, that the face she will present to me will be obtuse, slick, like an internal organ not meant to live in the light.

Such a classic horror trope. What primordial dread is excited in us by the obscured, potentially hideous face of a child? If I may ape Freud for a second, perhaps this evokes the anxious moment during childbirth when the parents, fearing grievous defects, first look on the newborn.

“Like an internal organ not meant to live in the light”! A great line and addition to the earlier descriptions of the face, which all cluster tacitly around the concept of tumor, a perfect metaphor for this book. In WFTB you have an Empire and these nomads embedded within its body, albeit at an extremity. There is growing tension, fear that the barbarians may become malignant and attack. The Capital mobilizes an immune response – squads of soldiers, torturers named in the text as “doctors of pain” – to excise the barbarian tumor.

I’ve explained elsewhere why we should make our themes as concrete as possible, but in short, we think most clearly about the tangible. If properly encoded in concrete scenarios, very complex ideas and arguments can become intuitive and accessible, which is why so many of our great political statements have been wrapped up in literature.

So if you’re struggling to come up with the right scenario to approach your themes, maybe try and concoct a dream that would be a belt-high meatball for a psychoanalyst. Because for all their lack of narrative sense, dreams are great texts, ones we love to unpack.

Since we’re on the topic of body horror, here’s one more snippet from WFTB:

Sometimes my sex seemed to me another being entirely, a stupid animal living parasitically upon me, swelling and dwindling according to autonomous appetites, anchored to my flesh with claws I could not detach. Why do I have to carry you about from woman to woman, I asked: simply because you were born without legs?

Would it make any difference to you if you were rooted in a cat or a dog instead of in me?

Troublemakers

After Colonel Joll leaves, a lieutenant and his troops arrive, three fewer than they set out with. One died accidentally, and two were deserters. “Troublemakers, [the lieutenant] calls them, whom he was not sorry to be rid of.”

The Magistrate agrees with the lieutenant that it was foolish of these men to desert. It is winter, and the landscape is harsh. We readers move on. A few pages later, the deserters’ corpses are found. The Magistrate wants them recovered and buried. The lieutenant says:

“Thirty miles there and thirty miles back in this weather: a great deal for men who are no longer men, don’t you think?”

But the Magistrate insists, and

two days later [the party] returns with the crooked ice-hard corpses in a cart. I continue to find it strange that men should desert hundreds of miles from home and within a day’s march of food and warmth, but I pursue the matter no further.

You know that feeling you get when you miss a stair? That’s what this moment does for me. It’s understated and quietly horrific. The text moves on, but as a reader you kind of have to pursue it a little bit, imagining the two men executed at the end of a hard march for … what crime exactly?… and left to freeze and harden as their comrades walk into town with its warm beds.

And it’s the understatement and the delayed fuse that makes this happen. We’ve seen this before in WFTB: for instance.

Meet and Greet

The Magistrate is out in the desert, searching for the barbarians. For some time they have seen riders in the distance. They have chased without effect.

We have reached the foothills. The strange horsemen plod on far ahead of us up the winding bed of a dry stream. We have ceased trying to catch up with them. We understand now that while they are following us they are also leading us.

As the terrain grows rockier we progress more and more slowly. When we halt to rest, or lose sight of the strangers in the windings of the stream, it is without fear of their vanishing.

Then, climbing a ridge, coaxing the horses, straining and pushing and hauling, we are all of a sudden upon them.

The sentence structures reinforce the tone. During the fruitless chase, the sentences are clipped, pessimistic. They’re not catching up to these horsemen.

Then they do. The last sentence is almost constipated with all these commas, the punctuation strains as much as the characters before opening on the quick-hitting final clause.

Folding sentences

It doesn’t feel great to rattle off three consecutive sentences with the same subject. To avoid this, you can use conjunctions. But there are other techniques. Here’s a marked up scene from WFTB featuring one of Coetzee’s favorites.

From horizon to horizon the earth is white with snow. It falls from a sky in which the source of light is diffuse and everywhere present, as though the sun has dissolved into mist, become an aura. In the dream I pass through the barracks gate, pass the bare flagpole. The square extends before me, blending at its edges into the luminous sky. Walls, trees, houses have dwindled, lost their solidity, retired over the rim of the world.

Those sentences with bolded phrases are examples of diazeugma, a figure of speech in which one subject controls mutiple verbs.

So in this sentence:

It falls from a sky in which the source of light is diffuse and everywhere present, as though the sun has dissolved into mist, become an aura.

the sun is doing two things: dissolving into mist and becoming an aura. But it’s only mentioned once. The reader remembers the last subject it saw, and appends the new verb to that subject. Which isn’t a big deal when one subject controls two verbs. But you can save space in situations like this:

We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

The effect a figure of speech creates depends on what the sentence is about and how exactly it’s employed. In the example above, from John F. Kennedy, the diazeugma underscores America’s energy and activity. It’s just a list of verbs. The Coetzee sentence has a dreamier effect, partly because we’re talking about auras and partly because the diazeugma is one element of the sentence, rather than the sole attraction. That “become an aura” feels almost like an afterthought.

As I read further I’ll track this figure’s usages, but for now it reads to me like a nice way to sneak in one more verb without creating the busy effect a conjunction has.

Here’s another diazeugma from Coetzee:

I catch my head drooping, my body falling forward in a stupor.

In contrast, here it is with a conjunction:

I catch my head drooping, and my body falling forward in a stupor.

I think the and actually muddles our parsing. With it, I catch is no longer the obvious candidate for the controlling subject. We think, briefly, that maybe my body is the new subject.

I should mention that Coetzee is remarkably stingy with and. Project Gutenberg lists and as the third most frequent word in the English language, appearing on average once every 33 words. In WFTB, Coetzee uses it once every 47. I have no opinion on that – just thought it’s interesting.

Coetzee also indulges in participial phrases to cram in more information. These work only when the sentence is simple at the root level.

So “The men straggle behind us” is simple enough to support:

The men, tired and queasy after their night of revels, straggle behind us.

These participial phrases can go anywhere. In this sentence:

In the middle of the column, supported by a guard who rides side by side with him, comes the prisoner.

The prepositional and participial clauses give the air of an unveiling. A natural outcome to delaying the subject to the very end. Consider this alt:

In the middle of the column comes the prisoner, supported by a guard who rides side by side with him.

Less of a build up.

Double Dependent, Independent

• Then on hands and feet, dragging the felts, I inch my way back towards the girl.
• In the morning, even under the severest flogging, it will not rise.
• Moving to the front, quickening my pace, I turn our march towards the three tiny figures in the distance.
• As I am hustled, a man at each elbow, back through the murmuring crowd to my cell, I even find myself smiling.

I’m suddenly nervous about my use of the term clause. I’ll do some grammar research later, but for now when I say clause, just know that I’m referring to those sentence units that are bounded by punctuation. So in all these sentences the main verb is delayed to the last clause. What is the purpose of this?

Since the structure is roughly the inverse of this, I believe the function is roughly inverse as well. In the present + progressive sentences, the focus is on the action, and the other clauses clarify that general action.

Here I believe that the shading takes precedence over the main action. That may be because the process is what’s important (in the first and last example) or because the anchoring details are (as in the second example).

This structure is also used to create suspense, as here:

In the middle of the column, supported by a guard who rides side by side with him, comes the prisoner.

Relative Clauses

This is another technique for folding sentences. As defined by Wikipedia:

A relative clause is a kind of subordinate clause, one of whose arguments shares a referent with a main clause element on which the subordinate clause is grammatically dependent.

Here are four sentences that haven’t been compressed yet:

It is the same room in the barracks. This is where they held their interrogations last year. Some soldiers have been sleeping inside. I stand by while they drag out their mats and rolls and pile them at the door.

Coetzee’s version, with relative clauses:

It is the same room in the barracks that they used for their interrogations last year. I stand by while the mats and rolls of the soldiers who have been sleeping here are dragged out and piled at the door.

Let’s focus on the second sentence, about the mats and rolls. It is a great example of using sentence structure to foreclose ambiguity. Did you notice any hesitance over the pronouns in my version? They refers to the soldiers, and them refers to the mats/rolls. Two plural pronouns pointing at different things. Since the mats and rolls are adjacent to the pronoun, there’s seemingly no confusion. Readers are so good at resolving grammatical ambiguities that they may not even notice they’re doing it, but I’m convinced that each ambiguity takes a tiny toll, which will add up as the pages are turned. Coetzee’s version is even cleaner.

The macro structure of the sentence is this:

I-clause + while + I-clause

The Magistrate is present in this sentence, but only briefly, and he is clearly not the focus. That while lets us know that his action within the sentence is concluded, and our focus moves now to the mats and rolls as they are dragged out. The passive construction – who is doing the dragging? – is helpful because we do not want another person in the sentence: the focus is on the process. Is this version appreciably better?

I stand by while the soldiers who have been sleeping inside drag out their mats and rolls and pile them at the door.

No – in fact it’s worse, due to the interruption of the verb and the echoing of and. The phrase “of the soldiers who have been sleeping here” solves both problems, keeping the verb whole and putting distance betweeen the two ands. (I guess that a word will not echo if it is separated from itself by four, maybe five words.)

And for the future takers of the SAT: comma goes before which, and not before that. This is because which is used for “non-restrictive” relative clauses.

Ethan From

Coetzee likes this structure. Nothing too spectacular about it, but it’s a nice way to vary your sentence structures if you’ve got too many starting the same way, and it obviously places an emphasis on location.

• From under the walnut trees on the square I still hear the murmur of conversation.
• From the sky thousands of stars look down on us.
• From horizon to horizon the earth is white with snow.
• From the darkness comes a snort of laughter.
• From this structure, perhaps a public building or a temple, I have recovered the heavy poplar lintel, carved with a design of interlaced leaping fish, that now hangs over my fireplace.
• From my window I watch them cross the square between their mounted guards, dusty, exhausted, cringing already from the spectators who crowd about them, the skipping children, the barking dogs.
• From the gloom inside the prisoners stare apathetically back.
• From our ramparts we stare out over the wastes.
• From not thirty paces I see the placid circular motion of his jaw, hear the splash of his hooves.
• From nearer we see that it stretches east and west for miles.
• From as far away as ten miles we can make out the jutting watchtowers against the sky; while we are still on the track south of the lake the ochre of the walls begins to separate out from the grey of the desert background.
• From across the yard comes his grandmother’s call.
• From her empty eyes there always seemed to be a haze spreading, a blankness that overtook all of her.
• From all corners chickens come scurrying.
• From the ditches comes the first cricketsong.
• From behind the walls the dogs of the town bay their response.

Present, Then Progressives

• I am a country magistrate, a responsible official in the service of the Empire, serving out my days on this lazy frontier, waiting to retire.
• Handful after handful of snow they bring, plastering the walls of their castle, filling it out.
• The soldiers use the stout green cane staves, bringing them down with the heavy slapping sounds of washing-paddles, raising red welts on the prisoners’ backs and buttocks.
• I wash slowly, working up a lather, gripping her firm-fleshed calves, manipulating the bones and tendons of her feet, running my fingers between her toes.
• She eats like a blind person, gazing into the distance, working by touch.
• It howls at us across the ice, blowing from nowhere to nowhere, veiling the sky in a cloud of red dust.

In this structure, there is an action named in the first clause, followed by any number of dependent clauses, each starting with a progressive verb that shades or specifies the original action.

It’s one of Coetzee’s many ways to save a sentence, since the first noun controls all of these added clauses.

What are the skills every writer has to have? If we grind fiction down to its atoms, then split those, we can see it clearly.

Fiction is the communication of consciousness through text. Consciousness is sensation plus subjectivity. Sensation is created by the activity of entities in the physical world. Subjectivity is an awareness capable of processing the stimuli of the physical world (sensation) and its own (thoughts). Text is communication. Communication requires a speaker and a listener, who is him- or herself a subject.

So if we gather up these pieces, we see the writer must be able to write about:

1. Sensory details. All five senses, nouns and the verbs allowed to them.
2. The thoughts and feelings of people.
3. The thought process, both so you can create a legible character and so you can make sense to the reader.

And then,

1. A writer must know what to communicate, what is relevant and what is understood. This affects diction, syntax, but also the selection of details and the ordering of material.

The Magistrate rides with three volunteers and the barbarian girl into the frigid waste, in hopes of returning the girl to her people. It’s a brutal trek across badlands; tough on the old Magistrate, tougher on the horses. It’s actually the horses that provide the section its emotional stakes – we never learn the volunteers’ names, and no one talks much.

Though the loads grow lighter every day, it hurts our hearts to have to flog the emaciated animals on.

After a perilous traversal of an ancient lake-bed whose surface sometimes breaks underfoot and opens on a pit of “foul green slime”, the party ascends to a plateau. There’s grass there, and “it is a great relief to see [the horses] eat.” The humans are relieved, too. During the night, something unusual:

I wake up with a start in the middle of the night, filled with a dire sense that something is wrong. The girl sits up beside me: “What is it?” she says.

“Listen. The wind has stopped.”

Barefoot, wrapped in a fur, she crawls after me out of the tent. It is snowing gently. The earth lies white on every side beneath a hazy full moon.

Next time you’re reading a description of terrain, look at the verbs. I predicted you’ll see a lot of stretch and lies. Also, I’m a big fan of the [modifier], [modifier], [independent clause] sentence.

I help her to her feet and stand holding her, staring up into the void from which the snowflakes descend, in a silence that is palpable after a week of wind beating ceaselessly in our ears. The men from the second tent join us. We smile foolishly at each other. “Spring snow,” I say, “the last snow of the year.” They nod. A horse shaking itself off nearby startles us.

A perennial question: what animates a good image? Last night I was writing a scene that takes place on a streetcorner in Paris in the rainy dark. I mentioned the zebra crossing (after Google Image Searching to see what their crosswalks looked like), the sound the tires made as they whizzed through the standing water. All fine, but I wasn’t really happy until I came up with the image of the pedestrians passing before the cars, and the way the headlights make their legs glow. After that, I felt the image had “gotten in.”

This description of the snow falling through the void feels similarly complete to me. We have a camera position, the key elements, and can imagine the rest.

So what we just read is, very literally, the calm before the storm. Which strikes the next morning.

An action scene? In the middle of Waiting for the Barbarians? Shockingly, yes.

Rolling down upon us over the snowy plain is a gigantic black wave. It is still miles away but visibly devouring the earth in its approach. Its crest is lost in the murky clouds.

This resembles the snow + void image we just saw, but there is added detail. Deciding upon the order of ideas is a constant problem for writers. You can link through similarity or contiguity. Contiguity – this touches this – suggests a more rigid order. You proceed from best to worst, front to back, beginning to end, general to specific, etc.

But say you’re describing this storm. It has a number of facts we can associate with it, and no obvious contiguity between them. The trick is to figure out what order these facts should be presented in, as determined by the order in which human cognition would notice them.

The first sentence lays in all the basic details and puts them in their proper proportions and relations. The white plain, the huge black wave, the rolling motion, the endangered us. Nouns and verbs are the foundation of prose description, as I argue in this article. I talk about how one might describe a squirrel being chased by a dog:

In prose, nouns and verbs are value, those black and white tones that construct our mental images. That’s only a probabilistic statement however, because we perceive what is salient, and nouns and verbs are usually more important than any modifiers. Our fleeing squirrel doesn’t give a damn what color of dog is chasing him, after all. He’s a lot more interested in the verb: is it a charge or a trot?

Once the mind has apprehended the elements, they can be enlarged upon. After the initial shock, what would you notice next about the storm?

It is still miles away but visibly devouring the earth in its approach.

Distance takes precedence, because the character is doing a risk analysis. How fucked am I, here? The sentence’s second half is devoted to the storm’s ferocity. Devouring: a verb for a beast. These details can reside in the same sentence because they relate to one another. The speed of the storm negates its farness (but is one of the negation conjunctions).

What do you notice next?

Its crest is lost in the murky clouds.

The storm is not just nasty, but huge. That is a natural linkage from ferocity to size.

And then?

“A storm!” I shout. I have never seen anything so frightening.

Now that the entity has been perceived, it can be named (thanks, Magistrate) and judged. Coetzee was constrained in how expansive the perception could be. A two paragraph description of the storm would sap the moment’s urgency. He had, at best, four sentences, and took three, making sure they were short and free of punctuation.

When the Magistrate calls the storm the most frightening thing he’s ever seen, I don’t think that’s the hyperbole such a construction usually is. The Magistrate is a sedentary intellectual trapped on an open plateau with a winter storm bearing down on him. His usual dangers – melancholy, infirmity, compromised ethics – don’t quite compare to death by wind.

The men hurry to take down their tent. “Bring the horses in, tether them here in the centre!” The first gusts are already reaching us, the snow begins to eddy and fly.

The girl is beside me on her sticks. “Can you see it?” I say. She peers in her crooked way and nods. The men set to work striking the second tent. “The snow was not a good sign after all!” She does not reply.

Though I know I should be helping, I cannot tear my eyes from the great black wall roaring down upon us with the speed of a galloping horse. The wind rises, rocking us on our feet; the familiar howl is in our ears again.

Note the diction’s rising physical intensity. Tear, roar, galloping, rocking, howl.

(A minor convergence with Paul Valery, too: “The wind is rising! We must try to live!”)

I bestir myself. “Quick, quick!” I call out, clapping my hands. One man is on his knees folding the tent-cloths, rolling the felts, stowing the bedclothes; the other two are bringing the horses in. “Sit down!” I shout to the girl, and scramble to help with the packing. The storm-wall is not black any more but a chaos of whirling sand and snow and dust.

A number of actions in progress, all simultaneous. We ping from man to man, observing his preparations. Nothing but nouns, verbs, and prepositions.

Then all at once the wind rises to a scream, my cap is whirled from my head, and the storm hits us. I am knocked flat on my back: not by the wind but by a horse that breaks free and blunders about, ears flat, eyes rolling. “Catch it!” I shout. My words are nothing but a whisper, I cannot hear them myself. The horse vanishes from sight like a phantom.

The first sentence deserves special attention:

Then all at once the wind rises to a scream, my cap is whirled from my head, and the storm hits us.

It begins as a typical Coetzee comma splice. Both independent clauses end with prepositional phrases – “to a scream”, “from my head” – establishing a pattern which is broken by the third independent clause. “And the storm hits us.” No prepositional phrase, so the sentence feels abrupt, we are expecting more but get only the full stop. Ending a sentence with a verb imbues it with more force, as well.

The overall effect is a three-punch combo, a jab/jab/straight.

Some actors have little tics they repeat in every role. Harrison Ford points at people angrily, Jon Hamm pulls his scalp back whenever he is moved, Al Pacino does his whole routine. These generally don’t stick out that much on film, because there are minor variations in the execution or context. In prose you can’t repeat yourself as easily; emoting is analog and sentences are digital. So if you want to describe the sun – and often you’ll have to when describing an outdoors scene – you need to come up with new ways to describe it, new things for it to do. It’s quite a challenge; at a certain point, a sunset is a sunset is a sunset. How many ways can you describe it?

Below you can see Coetzee paraphrasing his archetypal image of the sun: this big glowing fruit on the horizon. So sometimes it hangs, sometimes it is suspended, sometimes it rests.

• The sun beats down.
• It falls from a sky in which the source of light is diffuse and everywhere present, as though the sun has dissolved into mist…
• The sun is up and glares so savagely from the surface that I have to shield my eyes.
• The sun still hangs bronze and heavy over the water.
• The sun is setting behind a strip of black cloud
• The sky is full of fine dust, the sun swims up into an orange sky and sets copper-red.
• The wind blows chill and dry straight into my eyes, the sun is suspended like an orange on an horizon streaked black and purple.
• Through the river of dust that courses majestically across the sky the sun glows like an orange but warms nothing.
• As the pinks and mauves of the sunrise begin to turn golden, the specks materialize again on the blank face of the plain
• The sun rests huge and red upon the western horizon.
• Behind me the sun is setting in streaks of gold and crimson.
• The sun turns coppery.

Occasionally you’ll need to write a tableau. Creating images through text presents some challenges painters never have to worry about, but it also is very easy in some ways.

The difficulties for the word painter:

• Some sequence must be imposed. Painters worry about guiding the viewer’s eye through the painting, but the visual system can be relied upon to look at faces, areas of high contrast, etc.
• You cannot describe anything without names. Visual artists have a catch-all term, “greeble”, to describe the little bits and bobs which add texture to surfaces.
• The frame must be defined. Where is the spectator positioned?
• It takes a long time to describe anything.
• You need verbs, preferably interesting ones.

Some advantages:

• Not constrained to the visual.
• Can do some motion.

See how Coetzee addresses these issues in this description:

I carry my sleeping-mat out on to the ramparts where the night breeze gives some relief from the heat. On the flat roofs of the town I can make out by moonlight the shapes of other sleepers. From under the walnut trees on the square I still hear the murmur of conversation. In the darkness a pipe glows like a firefly, wanes, glows again. Summer is wheeling slowly towards its end. The orchards groan under their burden. I have not seen the capital since I was a young man.

Coetzee uses prepositional phrases to lead us through the image. “On the flat roofs”, “from under the walnut trees of the square”, “in the darkness.” There are just four details here, but all depict life in motion, things moving along as they should. This flows into the consideration of time. Summer’s end means something to an old man like the Magistrate, and I read an ambivalence in this scene to him. Things are peaceful, productive (the orchards groan), and yet this is all he’s seen for many years. The novel fixates on cycles, and so this is fitting.

---

How do we transcribe a glance? What is the shape of a sentence that best matches the act of looking neutrally upon a scene? Look at how Coetzee describes a room.

I close the door and stand in the empty room. The air is still and cold. Already the lake is beginning to freeze over. The first snows have fallen. Far away I hear the bells of a pony-cart. I close my eyes and make an effort to imagine the room as it must have been two months ago during the Colonel’s visit; but it is difficult to lose myself in reverie with the four young men dawdling outside, chafing their hands together, stamping their feet, murmuring, impatient for me to go, their warm breath forming puffs in the air.

I kneel down to examine the floor. It is clean, it is swept daily, it is like the floor of any room. Above the fireplace on the wall and ceiling there is soot. There is also a mark the size of my hand where soot has been rubbed into the wall. Otherwise the walls are blank. What signs can I be looking for? I open the door and motion to the men to bring their belongings back.

Coetzee, acknowledging the limitation of is as a main verb, goes simplistic. You can see that the final paragraph of the first sentence perks up when those busy humans cameo.

The flat sentences may also be selling the Magistrate’s disappointment. He’s standing here in a torture chamber trying to commune with the mutilated spirits, but there is nothing. The sentences empty themselves in solidarity.

So this is it for my study of Waiting for the Barbarians. I wrote an awful lot of prose about a book just 64,000 words long. If you read even a tenth of this study, I appreciate it, and I hope you picked up a few things.

To wrap it up here’s a last quote that I liked but didn’t have anything to say about.

What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe.

Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies.

It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision yet a virulent one: I, wading in the ooze, am no less infected with it than the faithful Colonel Joll as he tracks the enemies of Empire through the boundless desert, sword unsheathed to cut down barbarian after barbarian until at last he finds and slays the one whose destiny it should be (or if not he then his son’s or unborn grandson’s) to climb the bronze gateway to the Summer Palace and topple the globe surmounted by the tiger rampant that symbolizes eternal dominion, while his comrades below cheer and fire their muskets in the air.