Part 2
 Spatial (capital – settlement – frontier and
beyond)
 Behavior (acting civilized)
 Appearance (physical traits and poverty)
 Young woman as interpreter. “We have
crossed the limits of the empire. It is not a
moment to take lightly.”
 At the meeting, the Magistrate asks, “Blind:
what is the word for blind?” (69)
 “What a waste,” I think: “she could have
spent those long empty evenings teaching
me her tongue!” (70)
 Page 70
“Speak to them,” I tell her. “Tell them
why we are here. Tell them your story.
Tell them the truth.”
She looks sideways at me and gives a
little smile. “You really want me to tell
them the truth?”
 Language and Truth
 Magistrate as a Changing/Aging Figure
 Gender and inequality
 Magistrate’s Desire in relation to Sexual Desire
 Magistrate’s (narrator’s) inability to write
 Relationship of the novel to author and readers
 Writing without leading somewhere
Page 5:
“How do you ever know when a man has told
you the truth?”
“There is a certain tone,” Joll says…
“The tone of truth!...”
“Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.
That is what I bear away from my
conversation with Colonel Joll...”
 “I bellow again and again, there is
nothing I can do to stop it, the noise
comes out of a body that knows itself
damaged perhaps beyond repair and
roars its fright.” (119)
 “He is calling his barbarian friends,”
someone observes. “That is barbarian
language you hear.” There is laughter.
(119)
 Reads the classics
 Catalogues his collections
 Makes maps (and collates them)
 Goes to archeological site
 Visits women (and he is the one that
discusses this among his passions)
 “The distance between myself and her
torturers, I realize, is negligible; I
shudder.” (27)
 “a jackal of Empire in sheep’s
clothing!” (71)
 The Magistrate visits a brothel and he has access to
the women in the town.
 Page 22:
 “I feel a quiet affection for her which is perhaps the
best that can be hoped for between an aging man
and a girl of twenty; better than a possessive
passion certainly. I have played with the idea of
asking her to live with me. “
 How does sexual desire connect to a
part of the Magistrate’s life that has
passed?
 Age?
 Privilege?
 An attitude of disregard?
 Manipulation of his surroundings?
 Notion of male superiority
 Foot washing as a
religious rite
PAGE 28
“I lose myself in the rhythm of what I
am doing… I am not event present…my
head droops.”
Page 42
“I have just come from the bed of a
woman for whom, in the year I have
known her…the secret body of the
other.”
 “Not only that; there were unsettling
occasions when in the middle of the
sexual act I felt myself losing my way
like a storyteller losing the thread of his
story.” (44)
 “a man who does not know what to do
with the woman in his bed should not
know what to write.” (57)
 Metaphor takes over: “in which events
are not themselves but stand for other
things” (39)
 Inability to make sense of the changing
Empire and his role in it
 Unable to interpret the young woman
 “It has been
growing more and
more clear to me
that until the marks
on this girl’s body
are deciphered and
understood I cannot
let go of her.” (31)
 “I have been trying
to remember you as
you were before all
of this happened.”
(48)
 “I also found a cache of wooden slips on
which are painted characters in a script I
have not seen the like of.” (14)
 “Now, in the hope of deciphering the script,
I have set about collecting all the slips I can,
and have let the children who play here
know that if they find one it is worth a
penny.” (14-15)
 Magistrate’s difficulty - deciphering
himself, wooden slips, and the
experience of the woman.
 Reader’s difficulty - placing events and
limited access to the torture.
 Coetzee’s commitment to tell a story
that neither ignores torture nor
represents it in a realistic way.
 “For the writer the deeper problem is not to
allow himself to be impaled on the dilemma
proposed by the state, namely, either to
ignore its obscenities or else to produce
representations of them. The true challenge
is how not to play the game by the rules of
the state, how to imagine torture and death
on one’s own terms.”
 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/02/home/coetz
ee-chamber.html
 “I look into his clear
blue eyes, as clear as  “as my feet leave the
if there were crystal
ground I feel a
lenses slipped over
terrible tearing in
his eyeballs. He
my shoulders as
looks back at me. I
though whole sheets
have no idea what
of muscle are giving
he sees.” (115)
way.” (119)
*I think: “I wanted to live outside the
history that Empire imposes on its
subjects, even its lost subjects.” (151)
*I think: “I have lived through an
eventful year, yet understand no more
of it than a babe in arms. Of all the
people of this town I am the one least
fitted to write a memorial.” (151)