Torturing the Other: Who is the Barbarian?

Torturing the Other: Who is the Barbarian?

Towards the end of J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, his protagonist the Magistrate speculates about how much pain he, Coetzeean ageing, out-of-shape man, will be able to withstand.

 In this elliptical novel, which owes a debt to Kafka's 'The Penal Colony', the Magistrate is about to be tortured at the hands of the Empire. 

Despite years of loyal service, his antagonist Colonel Joll believes that the Magistrate has betrayed the Empire because of his romantic entanglement with a girl from the enemy 'barbarian' community.

The passage encapsulates many of torture's most important features. While the Magistrate's anxieties revolve around what degree of pain he can tolerate, that is not the purpose of torture. 

Instead, the Magistrate's tormentors reduce him to a body or a thing that is incapable of thought or political ideals. Coetzee conveys this in part through the use of the third person singular gender neutral pronoun 'it':

its head is gripped and a pipe is pushed down its gullet and pints of salt water are poured into it till it coughs and retches and flails and voids itself.

The diction here also exposes the elaborate, quasi-medical, inventive methods that torturers use on their victims. Finally, Coetzee emphasizes that the central event of torture, the interrogation of the prisoner, is in fact a cover story: a huge lie.

 The InterrogationMagistrate has prepared 'high-sounding words' with which to answer the interrogator's questions about his dealings with the barbarians. 

But there is no conversation, no questions, and no single interrogator; instead 'they came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity, and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal'.

 What 'they' demonstrate to the Magistrate is that when his body is in severe pain, he is incapable of thought, language, or ethics. 

As Coetzee puts it, he learns 'what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well'.

Five years after the publication of Coetzee's novel, in 1985, the literary critic Elaine Scarry published The Body in Pain. 

At the risk of stating the obvious, in this seminal book she explores what happens to people when their bodies are in pain. 

And in the most important chapter for our purposes, 'The Structure of Torture', Scarry examines what the consequences are of inflicting pain on others – both for the inflictor and the afflicted. 

She argues that torture pivots on a display of agency, which often involves the victim being confronted with or 'being made to stare at' an outlandish and often outsized weapon.

Scarry asserts that torture is not only physical, but also verbal. The spoken component is the interrogation, which is almost always Interrogation 2an integral part of the torture process.

 Interrogations provide a justification for torture, via the idea that it is the necessity of information-gathering that propels the violence. However, torturers' questions are usually irrelevant or even meaningless. 

All that is important about the words is their tone and the unequal power relations that they dramatize. 

As the prisoner is broken down, she becomes increasingly quiet and preoccupied with her body, and the torturer exponentially verbose and concerned with words and explanations. 

Eventually, if she says anything at all, the prisoner comes to speak the torturer's language, since her own has ceased to exist.

Whether questioning the prisoner, or hurling asseverations, abuse, and orders at her, the interrogator does not make important discoveries.

 Instead, he produces the interrogation as a performance that is at centre-stage of what Scarry terms 'the structure of torture'. She goes on to write, in terms that chime plangently with Waiting for Barbarians:

Confronting severe anguish, the prisoner finds that questions and answers fade into the background and seem trivial and inconsequential. 

Towards the end of this excerpt, Scarry twice uses the term 'world-destroying' to describe pain's effects. 

This resonates with her larger thesis, which is that pain is destructive and unmakes the world, whereas the creation of life is constructive and makes the world – her book is accordingly divided into two parts, 'Unmaking' and 'Making'.

In torture the pain inflicted is so intense that a confession is almost inevitable. Despite this, both torturers and people who are Tortureopposed to torture share a veiled contempt for confession. 

Confession tends to be interpreted as a betrayal of one's people, politics, and principles. Yet it is impossible either to betray or be true to something that no longer exists for you. 

During torture, the world shrinks to the size of the torture chamber and even language ceases to exist, despite the torturer's incessant chatter. 

Nothing else is real other than room, torturer, prisoner, and weapon. As Scarry puts it, 'The body is its pains, a shrill sentience that hurts and is hugely.

Thanks for reading.