I say this now to remind myself how words can squirt sideways, mute and mad; you think they are tools, or toys, or tame, and all at once they burn all your clothes off and you are standing there singed and ridiculous in the glare of the lightning.
Anne Carson, Wrong Norma
In a book published last year about the history of the idea of revolution, the author, citing the famous novel Gattopardo, writes: “prince Fabrizio Tomasi saw the revolution in that white tie…” (Edelstein 2025, 228). The historian happily amalgamates the author, prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, with the main fictional character of the novel, Fabrizio Corbera, prince of Salina. This may be due to shoddy scholarship or lack of knowledge; if the historian had read the novel instead of perhaps seeing Visconti’s film, that error would not have occurred. Yet he chose to grace his text with an appropriate citation from the novel, thereby blurring the frontier between the historical world of the author and the fictional world of the novel. The fact that the operation of the historian can replace the character in the novel by a makeshift author character, thus unproblematically transforming fiction into historical reality, tells us something about the place of the novel and of fiction in the contemporary system of veridiction. As the imaginary “abolishes the ‘as’ of the ‘see as’ and absolutizes the experience of seeing” (Guénancia 2009, 77), this amalgamation can be seen as a shorthand of a certain theoretical and critical imaginary in a world dominated by AI summaries and “digital humanities that at once represent and explain reality” (Jablonka 2014, 274).
On a more imperial, or serious, level of explaining past reality, Roman historian Walter Scheidel in his erudite Escape from Rome, published in 2019, concludes: “The very notion that Rome may have had the potential to industrialize, is thus hardly worth considering, and best left to novelists, who have indeed on occasion tried their hand at developing such scenarios” (Schiedel 2019, 504). In a footnote, Scheidel offers three appropriate candidates: science-fiction novels as Helen Dale’s Kingdom of the wicked, Kirk Mitchell’s Procurator, and Robert Silverberg’s Roma eterna.
The relationship that Scheidel outlines between the novel and history, especially through the lens of counterfactuals and the history of the Roman Empire, presents a curious dynamic. Historian of repute, Scheidel is not opposed to exploring counterfactuals himself, but in this interplay between text and footnote, that is usually a “place where a citation can ‘subpoena’ a referential language that acts therein as reality, and judge it in the name of knowledge” (Certeau 1988, 94), science fiction novels serve as illustrative examples that support his historical thesis about the vulnerability and limitations of the Roman Empire and its negative impact on world’s progress, powered by competition that the empire hindered. In this way, in a speculative “what if” mode – as humans have the capacity to be touched by the spectacle of reality and not only by reality” (Guénancia 2009, 86) – the novel becomes a privileged, albeit problematic, sign where the fictional signified is associated to the historical signifier as part of a certain referential language. Furthermore, these novels serve, among other purposes, as representations of the Empire’s misinterpreted reality, shaped by the previously mentioned interpretive frameworks intended to rectify assumed historical inaccuracies. The same goes also for modernity, as can be seen in Edward Said’s analysis of theme of pleasure in Kipling’s Kim: the example of the pranks of Kim, via the story of the boy-scouts, becomes a sign “turning these images directly into a grand scheme of imperial authority”, and slides effortlessly into a representation of the Empire, “because boys should ultimately conceive of life and empire as governed by unbreakable laws […]” (Said 1993, 166). As for the Roman Empire, its historical record is notoriously lacunary and is usually supplemented by what is called useful explanatory fictions; modern empires present more copious records, but this does not defend their reality against fiction and novels. No Roman emperor will re-enchant our present; novels, however, as examples, inviting signs and shaping representations, line up to try.
In this intertwined relationship, history and the novel are not opposites, but rather depend on one another, much like fiction and reality do. The discipline of history draws from the novel, while novels draw from history – each field regularly adopts the methods of the other. For example, the techniques used to ensure operational accuracy in historical writing often become narrative strategies in novels. It can be said, and this is not new, that this pair and its complex relations constitute a cultural style of modernity in the broadest sense, as opposed, also in very broad terms, to the cultural style of antiquity, characterized by myth and its critique, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the Middle ages, with its concentration on the Bible and religious history. Antiquity relished dialogue and paradoxography; novels, when they appeared in 12th and 13th century, offered a safe, loosely controlled and relatively open playground of mildly heterodox ideas. After Cervantes and the demise of classical poetics, modern global popularity of this vertumnian genre as a relatively safe place of imaginative re-enactment, where, anthropologically speaking, emic, insider’s view is always already etic, outsider’s view, can be seen, contrary to the minefields of politics and science, as an instance of globalatinization avant la lettre.
Derrida linked globalatinization to the spread of ideas connected with the Christian religion and, among other things, with the hegemony of one language, English or Globish, replacing Latin. Globalatinization imposes “surreptitiously a discourse, a culture, a politics and a right”, where “religion ‘in the singular’ accompanies and even precedes the critical and teletechnoscientific reason, it watches over it as its shadow. It is its wake, the shadow of light itself, the pledge of faith, the guarantee of trustworthiness. The fiduciary experience presupposed by all production of shared knowledge, the testimonial performativity engaged in all technoscientific performance as in the entire capitalistic economy indissociable from it” (Derrida 2002, 78). Its performance guarantees the revealed truth it spreads. The novel, whose appearance as roman in the Middle Ages is connected to Latin as translation (roman or romance derives from romanice, i.e. translated from Latin to romance language), and to Christan religion (imaginative re-enactment, via adventures, of the Christian mystery of the Graal), in its diversity and global proliferation, globalatinizes the world, offers revealed truths by producing the world effect, but also, simultaneously, as if actualizing its genealogy in translation and contact of languages, situates truth elusively in the process of revelation itself: the action of the novel, translation of history into the novel, becomes the action in the novel, a spectacle of putting the novelistic problem in history, in a story.
By relegating the absence of Roman industrialisation to the realm of fiction, Scheidel seeks to reinforce his argument, simultaneously excluding certain possibilities from the domain of history by declaring them fictional, while also co-opting fiction to serve obliquely as evidence within historical discourse. This ambiguous stance reveals a complex relationship between fiction, or the novel, and history, that is only exacerbated by the actual changes of systems of veridiction, storytelling etc. It raises an important question: if fiction or the novel – whose primary power is to create a convincing world effect – fails to do so, because the work is deemed “bad”, can it still serve as a valid argument? Conversely, if fiction about the industrialisation of Rome succeeds in creating a persuasive world, does this success lend weight to the historical possibility it depicts? Credo quia absurdum: religion preceding critical reason. The possibility to consider a novel as a valid, albeit counterfactual proof, points to the fact that “the [actual] system of poetic fiction” as it was the case in 18th century, “is placed [again] in the dependence of an ideal of efficacious speech, which in turn refers back to an art that is more than an art, that is, a manner of living, a manner of dealing with human and divine affairs: rhetoric” (Rancière 2011, 26), i.e. the art of persuasion, couched in the legitimizing crypto-religious belief that truth is a truth only if it is revealed.
To paraphrase Pliny’s famous remark about narration in fiction and in history (5.8): persuadet illa, persuadet haec, adding sed aliter, but differently. It is this difference, that is so difficult to pin down “in the world [that] has lost its capacity to ‘form a world’ [faire monde): it seems only to have gained that capacity of proliferating, to the extent of its means, the ‘unworld’ [immonde], which, until now, and whatever one may think of retrospective illusions, has never in history impacted the totality of the orb to such an extent” (Nancy 2007, 34). Unworld inadequately translates immonde, meaning in French impure, dirty, filthy: Nancy is mobilizing the etymology of the French monde and the ambiguous meaning of Latin mundus: world and clean. To put it bluntly, the proliferating of the unworld in the actual world is, in effect, the proliferation of verbal filth. It makes the invocation of novels, and the actual axiomatic that makes them the safe playground for ideas a double-edged sword. Even for historians who are willing to entertain counterfactuals, or literary theoreticians whose worries about the dispossession of the dispossessed (Biti 2022, 151) mask a revamped Blut und Boden ideology and for whom belonging is the primordial blissful scene of anthropogenesis, enshrined in the “everything-was-miserable-after-we-left-the-jungle” paradigm – the reality drive of interpretations, relying on fiction and the novel as historical or theoretical evidence, is fraught with complications and might well be another minefield that, over and over again, asks for a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Said 1993, 308) and demands to tread lightly.
Jean-Luc Nancy suspected it playfully in La Jeune Carpe, his pastiche of Paul Valéry’s La Jeune Parque (Nancy 2018, 205-206):
Civilized at last by knowing we are mortal
Our genius decorates its altars with prose,
Fragile liturgy, biblical memorial
Drunk with histories whose perishable essence,
Beneath the ink that constellates a pallid firmament,
Ferments in the bitter odor of the novel.
Our stories are filled with this absence of order.
Novels are neither magnifying lenses nor prisms; their magnifications, refractions, reflections or dispersions cannot be taken at face value. Novels, especially good ones, are slippery: whatever we think their meaning or truth is, it tends to morph into something different the very moment it is observed. In the 19th century, realist novels embodied strength as “unifiers, like novels of Balzac, well-rounded with their solid kernel of meaning and truth” (Robbe-Grillet 2001, 32); by the late 20th century, they also reflected vulnerability, showing how reality and history can undermine their role as witnesses to both. If the “whole of the modern fiction is in its phrasing” (Rancière 2014, 61), their vulnerability is nothing less than the acid scent of the relativism of their meaning, generally abhorred in actual political thinking and literary criticism. “Relativism is from its origin, an invitation to judgement, an injunction, politics included, to judge about what is the best for oneself and for the community. It is from the start an exhortation to implicate oneself” (Cassin 2025, 130) in the phrasing, in the appearance and meaning of words, in their uncertain fermentation that reconfigures the thinkable and the possible. Novels participate in the making that unmakes the unworld, the immonde, because they are delusional, chimeric, porous and precarious, not because they are impervious, mighty and monumental.
A voice in the novel lingers over his life: “If I lived in the magistrate's villa on the quietest street in town, holding sittings of the court on Mondays and Thursdays, going hunting every morning, occupying my evenings in the classics, closing my ears to the activities of this upstart policeman, if I resolved to ride out the bad times, keeping my own counsel, I might cease to feel like a man who, in the grip of the undertow, gives up the fight, stops swimming, and turns his face towards the open sea and death” (Coetzee 2000, 22). And again: “I spend my time in my old recreations. I read the classics; I continue to catalogue my various collections; I collate what maps we have of the southern desert region […]” (Coetzee 2000, 41). The classics that the narrator of Waiting for the barbarians wants to read and does read, are not named in the novel. Their names are supplemented by the published prolific readings of the author: Dostoevsky and Kafka, among others. This conflation of the author and the narrator is largely reductionist and founded on problematic critical premises: like Fabrizio Tomasi, a Magistrate John Maxwell. “The narrator is always the most important invention of the author of the novel. It is a character most difficult to create because the truthfulness or falsity, richness or poverty of what he narrates depends exclusively […] on facts that he offers or conceals.“ (Vargas Llosa 2007, 43). The author’s reading of the classics, “his undergoing of the impact of the classic” (Coetzee 2001, 10), and the Magistrate’s silence on them occur in separate realms; what the author discusses or omits – he does not mention Cavafy in his notebooks written at the time of composition (Ullman 2016, 444) – does not always explain the discussions and the silence of the narrator. In the author’s terms, is the criticism of the elusive and unmentioned classics, “indeed of the most sceptical kind […] what the classic uses to define itself and ensure its survival”? (Coetzee 2001, 19), or, in more appropriate manner, how the narrator makes himself a critic to ensure the survival of the classics and, more importantly, of himself and his tale as a classic?
A voice in a novel ponders: “I think: ‘I wanted to live outside history. I wanted to live outside the history that Empire imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects. I never wished it for the barbarians that they should have the history of Empire laid upon them. How can I believe that that is cause for shame?’” (Coetzee 2000, 169). The scene of this aggressive imperial grab is set at the end of the novel whose title is reminiscent, as is well known, of the famous poem by Constantin Cavafy. “The poem 'Waiting for the Barbarians' represents a microcosm or a simulacrum of European despair and its cultural deadlock” at the turn of the 19th century; “[it] makes a parody out of the mythology of salvation and negates messianic consolation” (Tziovas 1986, 170-171, 175). Ιατί ενύχτωσε κ’ οι βάρβαροι δεν ήλθαν… Και τώρα τι θα γένουμε χωρίς βαρβάρους./Οι άνθρωποι αυτοί ήσαν μια κάποια λύσις: “Barbarians didn’t come. … /Now what’s going to happen to us /without barbarians/Those people were a kind of solution” (trans. Keeley). It is absurd to maintain that the “’waiting’ of the novel’s title could also then refer to the process of waiting for the other to speak without having to use words that have been chosen for him” (Boletsi 2007, 85), because, the only voice of the novel is the voice of the narrator, even when he makes other characters speak in oratio recta or has the barbarian wishes interpreted by a barbarian go-between (Coetzee 2000, 78): words of the other are always already chosen. The barbarian as a denaturalized other is not the solution and yet there is one, hesitant and irresolute: “perhaps when the barbarians come riding in…” (Coetzee 2000,167). The critic is right to say that the novel “perpetuates the search for another ‘solution’ – beyond barbarians – in the present, and the present of every reading” (Boletsi 2007, 91). Reading of what? I would suggest, aside from the novel, as if to escape somewhat from the imposed story, a careful reading of the last word of Cavafy’s poem. Solution, λύσις: in ancient Greek, disentanglement, liberation (from servitude), ransom, absolution, resolution of a problem, loosening. Perhaps, the novel that waits for the barbarians would be some kind of λύσις: disentanglement from history, loosening of ties that tie the present to the past, liberation from servitude to history resulting in the absolution from the past that tentatively questions the present, but also, ominously, a ransom to be paid for thus acquired freedom.
What does it mean to live outside history? To embrace the condition of peuples sans histoire, criticized rightly by anthropologists, to recapture a state of authenticity and bliss, as opposed to the history imposed by the Empire and the barbarian solution? This is a banality and the narrator knows it: “but when I sit down at my writing table […] what I found myself beginning to write is not the annals of an Imperial outpost or an account of how the people of that outpost spent their last year composing their souls as they waited for the barbarians” (Coetzee 2000, 168). And “perhaps by the end of the winter […] when hunger truly bites us, when we are cold and starving, or when the barbarian is truly at the gate, perhaps then I will abandon the locutions of the civil servant with literary ambitions and begin to tell the truth” (Coetzee 2000, 169). The narrator sets the scene of himself as a critical seeker of truth by a series of exclusions: he is not a historian, nor an annalist; he is not a philosopher, composing a sort of consolatio animae in front of imminent danger, however imaginary. For him, truth is not to be found in historical writing or in consolatory discourse, but, predictably, in the commonplace of naked life, nuda vita, provoked by torture, hunger and cold. “[My torturers] were interested in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, which can entertain notions of justice as long as it is whole and well […]. They did not come to force the story out of me […]” (Coetzee 2000, 126): the truth is to be found in his already narrated experience of abasement and abjection, of torture imposed upon him by the military that disrupted the quiet life of the sleeping frontier settlement. “Pain is truth, all else is subject to doubt” (Coetzee 2000, 5) learns the narrator from colonel Joll, a character that exists only through his own narration: the truth is not to be found in something that is outside the text, it is to be found in the narration itself, in a production of always already forced story: “I struggle with the old story” (Coetzee 2000, 26), as if he were torturing himself to revive a commonplace, to tempt it, feel, put it to the test and disturb it (temptare), by piercing what Tacitus called, in a memorable formula, arcana imperii (arcana imperii temptari: Annales, 2.36 [Heubner]), mysterious secrets of governing humankind that the text almost literally renders as “preserve of the mysteries of the State” (Coetzee 2000, 7). One other classical historian, Thucydides, seeps through Michael Kritoboulos of Imbros (Μιχαήλ Κριτόβουλος), a XVth century Greek historian and adroit imitator of Thucydides (Roderich Reinsch 2003, 303-305), whose Ιστορία of the conquest of Constantinople by Mehmed II in English translation played a part in configuring the genotext of the novel (Uhlmann 2016, 444-445). But, unlike Thucydides, or the omniscient narrators found in classical novels – who exhibit confidence in their perspectives and subject to torture external testimonies and traditions – the narrator-critic demonstrates a distinct lack of self-assurance. He applies to himself the “method of the butcher”, which is notably the only method that Thucydides claims as his own when ascertaining the facts (1.20.1: ἀβασανίστως, related to βασανίζω, to question, to torture: Darbo-Peschanski 2007, 297). Here, writing itself, rather than what writing evokes, becomes both the bare essence of life and a state of exception: forcing the story out of old stories, it forces the narrative out of the act of writing itself.
The mise-en-abîme technique that affirms the narrator by reaching towards history and its methods to cut his ties with the outside of the text is also a line of flight that weakens the conventional relation between novel and history, reality and fiction, author and narrator. Interpreters maintain that his “voice is unable to answer the question of what should come in the place of the constitutive outside for which the barbarians stood now that their construction has collapsed” (Boletsi 2007, 91); and, moreover, that “despite his systematic efforts [sic!], the Magistrate does not succeed in reintegrating the excommunicated [Lacanian] ‘real’ into the historical reality” (Biti 2022, 172). To what the voice replies: “I am like an incompetent schoolmaster, fishing about with my maieutic forceps when I ought to be filling her with the truth” (Coetzee 2000, 44): “If the barbarians were to burst in now, I know, I would die in my bed as stupid and ignorant as a baby” (Coetzee 2000, 156). It is precisely this sounding of ignorance, this incompetence and absence of ability, and not only author’s presumed, pompously generalized and mighty “stag[ing] of the capitulation of this reality before the flood of the ‘real’” that reduces the novel to the impossibility of seeing through the eyes of the other (Biti 2022, 172), that permits to the novel to liquidate history and replace it with itself. The festering wound of the novel enhances and obliterates history; by forcing a story, it “places [the novel] in the position of the remnant and as such able to testify” (Agamben 1998, 150): a strategy of escape turns into a strategy of survival. To ensure the survival of classics and of itself as a classic, history is, in a sense, transubstantiated and transfigured by his tortured, forced story: Christian undertones, reminiscent of the Bible and the passion of Christ, give form to this strategy of escape and survival.
Allegorical polysemy as defined by the Magistrate is what characterizes the very concept of allegory in Waiting for the Barbarians. The novel depicts the failure of traditional allegory and its ‘naturalization’ of a system of univocal correspondences; it subverts colonial allegory by disclosing its Manichean code; it refers to those hermeneutic allegorical readings that add new meanings to old texts; it portrays a protagonist supporting modernist allegories and their polysemy; it may be seen as a structuralist allegory that flaunts the arbitrary nature of the link between signifier and signified. (Chantot 2004, 34)
And more recently, drawing on Walter Benjamin:
The novel […] reassembles its narrative fragments into a visually rendered allegorical sign without abstracting from the material reality, indeed, the historicity, of these fragments within its storyworld. Thus, it can be said to have a political agenda only to the extent that it invites readers to respond to the imperatives of history itself. […] if Waiting for the Barbarians invites readers to allegorically glean from it a political message of racial reconciliation, it is only by first showing – through its sheer formal transformation from narrative to image – the immanence of politics to history. (Bhattarai 2026, 95)
How is this made possible? Can historicity of the storyworld be unproblematically distinguished from “history itself” in what appears as an ultrapositivist, curiously anti-Benjaminian stance? Allegorical writing and interpretation have a long history, one that not only goes back further than structuralism, postcolonial theory, and Walter Benjamin, but also lays the groundwork for them.
“How can I believe that a bed is anything but a bed, a woman's body anything but a site of joy?” (Coetzee 2000, 48), on the one hand, and on the other: “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”. “World as it stands” that is no “illusion” (Coetzee 2000, 156) is contrasted to “figural interpretation [that] establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfils the first” (Auerbach 1984, 53). This contrast of relatum and revelatum, of what is as it is and what is more than it is, introduces, complicating what the critic calls the Manichean code, in the simultaneously historical and spiritual world reminiscent of the world of the Bible, where meaning is constantly produced along the separation and the conjunction of literal, or historical, sense on the one hand, and spiritual, allegoric, anagogic, and moral sense, on the other. Also, in an almost imperceptible way, it ties the narrative to the Augustinian interpretation of history.
Making the case against classical thought, Augustine in De civitate dei, “united and transformed many of the themes of early Christian apocalypticism”; he disjoined the City of God from the city of men and “translated apologetics into history”; for him “history was not merely and account of the succession of church by the Apostles” or the succession of historical facts, “but the whole way of divine providence” (Pelikan 1971, 41). In his view, “the civitas terrena, the ‘city’ of men pursuing earthly things, had to be seen to draw its strength from a history that stretched far beyond the Bible” (Brown 2000, 319). The narrator simultaneously distances himself from it and embraces its tenets: “Ridiculous, I thought: a greybeard sitting in the dark waiting for spirits from the byways of history to speak to him before he goes home to his military stew and his comfortable bed. […] Space is space, life is life, everywhere the same. But as for me […], I pamper my melancholy and try to find in the vacuousness of the desert a special historical poignancy” (Coetzee 2000, 17-18), as if, setting itself in the vacuous desert of textuality that marks the boundary of accurate representation, the story of history detailed in the narrative presents itself as always different from what is extratextual and outside the story and history, and yet as the extratextual itself.
Classical, Augustinian reading of Christian apocalypticism is questioned by the critic in a move where religion, understood as primordial obligation and re-binding (cf. Meillet 2001, s.v. religio) precede critical reason: ensuring the survival of the classic, the story secures its own survival. But the storyteller critic does not survive and resuscitate in some New Jerusalem or paradise:
Is there any better way to pass these last days than in dreaming of a saviour with a sword who will scatter the enemy hosts and forgive us the errors that have been committed by others in our name and grant us a second chance to build our earthly paradise? I lie on the bare mattress and concentrate on bringing into life the image of myself as a swimmer swimming with even, untiring strokes through the medium of time, a medium more inert than water, without ripples, pervasive, colourless, odourless, dry as paper. (Coetzee 2000, 156)
As in Augustine, where “the normal human society has to make room for a group of men who must remain aware of being different […], for resident strangers” (Brown 2000, 323), the survival of the critic in the narrator is assured by writing: writing introduces the resident stranger in the vacuous desert of paper. It does not “claim any ahistorical universality because”, like Cavafy’s poem ”[it] constitutes unique events anchored in the present of their own literary universe” (Boletsi 2007, 84), where its effaced author, manipulating the instance of enunciation, guides the hand of the narrator writer and, like Christian Holy Spirit (aka Great Globalatinizator) measuring the proportions in Sacred Scriptures (Spiritus sanctus ita scripturas sanctas modificavit: Augustine, de doctrina christiana 2.6.8 [Simonetti]), takes the role of divine disposition, inventing and accomplishing his own plan.
And as a Benjaminian allegory, [the novel] invites readers to use its distinctive structure of rationality to grasp their own historical reality in new ways and to discern signs of community that had hitherto remained invisible. It performs – or, at the very least, strives to – the messianic function that Benjamin ascribes to allegory, awakening new – and potentially revolutionary – ways not just of thinking and sensing but also of acting.” (Bhattarai 2026, 94)
The voice in the novel angrily protests: “I shake my head in a fury of disbelief. No! No! No! I cry to myself. It is I who am seducing myself, out of vanity, into these meanings and correspondences. What depravity is it that is creeping upon me? I search for secrets and answers, no matter how bizarre, like an old woman reading tea-leaves” (Coetzee 2000, 47-48). This invention of a plan laden with meanings and correspondences, of the Augustinian “existence, in every age, of a single, fundamental tension” (Brown 2000, 321), is compared to an old woman’s tales, to superstition as if to relieve it of its heavy burden of universality, and thus deprived of Augustinian direction, even to the Hegelian, secularized Age of Reason; it is “a road that may lead nowhere” (Coetzee 2000, 170). The tension of the novel’s apocalypticism weaned of ahistorical universality is poignant precisely because it is weak and vacuous; it is more akin to something like a “pre-season that errs the whole life, that haunts the seasons of the calendar, that visits daily activities a little and feelings frequently […] strange to any constituted and therefore inconsequential literary genres, that leads, simply by default, to a genre that is not a genre, rather a dump […] a tiny, miserable and obsessed rumination” (Quignard 1990, 54-55).
What is the narrator escaping from? “Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth, recurrent spinning time of the cycle of 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“ (Coetzee 2000, 146). It is, he says, the history imposed by the Empire. A unique time of rise, fall and catastrophe, reminiscent of Gibbon, is confronted to the repetitive time of seasonal cycles, reminiscent of contemporary historical models, such as Braudel’s three-tiered model of history. The narrator is escaping from the bubbles of history to what Braudel would call long-term, longue durée: trying to escape from history, he founds refuge in a story that is always history. He is, like the Empire, doomed to live in history, but also to plot against history. In a sense, Magistrate’s plotting against history is the emplotment, both tragic and fictional, of his miserable and obsessed rumination, his forced story that makes a novel: his misfortune is at once a suffered condition, like tragic fate, and a consequence of his own error, like in fictional reason (cf. Rancière 2017, 7), at once necessary and contingent. His line of escape or flight is also his line of closure.
The voice in the novel grapples with his own writing: “I struggle on with the old story, hoping that before it is finished it will reveal to me what was that I thought it worth the trouble” (Coetzee 2000, 27). To finish the old story, to put an end to it, fatally produces a new story that only reveals that there is no end to it. The inability to achieve finality or closure stems from the cunning of the narrative, wilfully creating bewilderment. Empire and history are closely interrelated. It is a pairing similar to that of the linguistic sign and its simultaneously arbitrary and necessary nature. In contrast to the linguistic sign, which maintains a clear separation between form and content, the relationship between history and Empire in this context is far more fluid and reciprocal. Here, content is perpetually capable of transforming into form, and form into content. History may be conceived as the very shape or structure of Empire, while Empire serves as the substance or material of history. This interchange ensures that neither history nor Empire occupies a fixed position; each continually informs and shapes the other, blurring the boundaries between what is considered form and what is understood as content. Thus, the narrative reveals a constant interplay in which the roles of history and Empire are reversible, each perpetually becoming the other and confounding any possibility of becoming stable, reality-oriented referential language, even if we accept a barbarian migrations historian’s basic definition of the Empire as “any political entity that defines itself as such” (Dumézil 2025, 8).
Empire is a presence of unknowing: its ambiguous cunning is cornered by the cunning of stories, old and new, at once united and divided in the narrative. As in Cavafy’s poem, inhabited by “citizens of an imaginary city, which is characterized by terms offered within the poem rather than by a historical allusion” (Keeley 1996, 30), the narrative, by negative approach, by denying to its Empire any historical foundation, seems to affirm that there is no extratextual Empire that it exemplifies, signifies or represents. Far beyond the textual Empire that anticipates the arrival of the barbarians, there exist various historical formations known as empires. Each of these is distinct and refers to a specific historical context. The narrative-managed evanescence of particular extratextual situations is a ransom to be paid for the hope of revelation of the worth and the trouble of writing, and also for the liberation of the text from ahistorical universality and for the freedom from its servitude to specific history. But, for a critic as well as for a classic, there is no survival outside history: the narrative emancipates itself from imperial history by fettering its story to the history that stretches far beyond history.
The fettering of the story to history that stretches far beyond history, realizes the Augustinian unifying disjunction, empties it of its strong messianism and assures the novel’s survival as a classic. The story is situated in an undefined town and period and attempts to link the geopolitics of the textual Empire to any particular Empire and its geopoetics, though many, are largely wanting (cf. Boletsi 2007, 83). The narrative presents the Empire as a solid lump of “it”, so to speak, a sort of City of Evil, whose “line that marks the frontier on the maps […] will grow hazy and obscure till we are blessedly forgotten” (Coetzee 2000, 149), a grotesque inversion of the City of God, disjoined and united with the city of men. But the city of men is not made of characters from the novel; it is made of readers. It is precisely by this casting of the Empire as porous, hazy and transient, as “a figure that is infinitely fulfillable by the recognition of the adequacy of its form to the expression of its peculiarly human content” (White 2022, 93), manifesting the fundamental tension between the Empire that is and the Empire that is to be in the mind of the reader, that the text can meaningfully inform the succession of particular historical events, and, as a pre-season, haunt the South African or any other imperial calendar and subvert particular, naturalized and denaturalized readings of the Empires of the earth. It is the abstraction and tension, and not the piling up of petits faits vrais or the imaginative arrangement of chunks of historical reality, that lead, simply by default, to a genre that is not a genre, rather a disquieting dump.
A certain order can be glimpsed in the deep recesses of the dump. It can be described as a known figure of topothesia, setting of a place: topothesia est, id est fictus secundum poeticam licentiam locus (Servius, In Vergilii Aeneidos Libros, 1.159.1-2 [Thilo]), a place imagined with liberty that one assumes: “no haulsers need to bind the vessels here,/ Nor bearded anchors” (trans. Dryden, hic fessas non vincula navis/ ulla tenent, unco non alligat ancora morsu: Aen. 1.168-9). The novel’s imaginary geography, with no anchors in reality, is a dumping ground of ancient beliefs on the Empire and its fringes based on maps “based on little but hearsay” (Coetzee 2000, 13) that ferment along two axes: the axis of rumour and the axis of fear. As Tacitus explains in his description of the German frontier and its would-be imperial conquerors: “Every one, as he returned from some far-distant region, told of wonders, of violent hurricanes, and unknown birds, of monsters of the sea, of forms half-human, half beast-like, things they had really seen or in their terror believed” (ut quis ex longinquo revenerat, miracula narrabant, vim turbinum et inauditas volucris, monstra maris, ambiguas hominum et beluarum formas, visa sive ex metu credita, Tacitus, ann. 2.24.6 [Heubner]). As frequently in Tacitus, what is said about the exterior of the Empire, applies equally to the Empire itself and its centre. Things seen like the military of the Empire, or in their terror believed, like the barbarians, and told and retold, written and rewritten like the story of the Magistrate. And in this story of the Magistrate, the imaginary fear of the barbarians – vana formido – that causes chaos in the Roman camp: “It chanced that a horse, which had broken its halter and wandered wildly in fright at the uproar, overthrew some men against whom it dashed. Thence arose such a panic, from the belief that the Germans had burst into the camp” (forte equus abruptis vinculis vagus et clamore territus quosdam occurrentium obturbavit. tanta inde consternatio inrupisse Germanos credentium: ann. 1.66 [Heubner]). Rumours fuel fear and, in turn, fear amplifies rumours, ultimately forming a foundation of obscure and confidential truths. This simultaneously internalized and externalized dynamic provides an insightful perspective on the current system of public veridiction, which is faced by poetica licentia – the creative latitude that Waiting for the barbarians exercises in shaping its geopoetic narrative.
In the world whose cultural style is dominated by storytelling, post-truth, AI summaries and digital humanities, where “the need to believe, exacerbated by the society [of the spectacle] is combined with the need to belong, whose content is also empty” (Certeau 1987, 205), those tiny, miserable and obsessed ruminations ask, by their sheer rummaging through the dirt of classical, humanist culture, for pause and thinking, “because they ask the question of truth differently, outside its opposition to falsity (false, lie, error, fiction, all that Greek says with ψεῦδος)”. Those ruminations are, to be sure, forced stories, inventions, but “they are not invented directly from falsity or geopolitics, but in both cases according to something that is much more strange, biased and elusive: culture” (Cassin 2025, 120). Culture that is history that stretches far beyond history, where a prince from the novel would never be turned into a monstrous, mythical centaur, half history half fiction, that revels the truth of revolutions and Empires, but keeping his personae clearly separated, would retain, as a resident stranger, the right to speak to the reader, with equal authority and on equal terms, both about reality and about fiction.
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