On the Threshold of the Twentieth Century: History, Crisis, and Intersecting Figures of Barbarians in C.P. Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians” (“Περιμένοντας τους βαρβάρους,” 1898/1904)

"Waiting for the barbarians" (1898 / 1904), probably the best-known poem by the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, has been cited, adapted, restaged, and evoked in a plethora of media, genres and cultural or geopolitical contexts throughout the twentieth century and up to the present: novels, plays, poems, cartoons, operas, songs, internet blogs, works of cultural and political theory, and articles in the press. Critics have commonly projected the poem’s symbolic character as the crux of its appeal and adaptability to different contexts and uses. As ahistorical figures that capture a mythical archetype or a historical constant – the oppositional structure between civilized and barbarians – the poem’s empire and its anticipated (yet never arriving) barbarians become applicable to different historical, artistic, cultural and political contexts.
Challenging this assumption, this chapter advances the hypothesis that the centrality of this poem in the Western literary, artistic, political, and cultural imaginary in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries stems from its immersion in history. The chapter reads “Waiting for the barbarians” as a meta-historical poem and probes the ways it relates to, and challenges, specific traditions of use of “the barbarian” in Western thought: the barbarian in Enlightenment historiographical narratives of progress and evolutionary models as well as in European decadent literature and in the intellectual climate of the (late) nineteenth century. The poem summons and pieces together divergent barbarian figures from European historical narratives – eg., the barbarian as a dreaded destroyer and bearer of the new, the Germanic and the Oriental barbarian, the barbarian as interiorized or concomitant with civilization, the positive barbarian – exposing the contradictions and ambivalences that inhere in uses of this figure.
By unraveling the poem’s metahistorical vision, this chapter finally explores the entanglement of the barbarian with the concept of crisis, as it is dramatized in the poem. Since 1770, according to Koselleck, crisis has become a key concept for interpreting historical time. The poem’s staging of civilization’s crisis becomes an occasion for exploring different conceptions of history and historical time, in all of which the barbarian plays a pivotal role, either as a fundamental figure from civilization’s past or a figure invested with future expectations. The crisis the poem instigates to European narratives dependent on the barbarians, creates the possibility of a history, in which the future is neither determined by eschatological, nor by linear progressive narratives, nor by cyclical or mythical conceptions of history. What is more, the poem invites the imagination of alternatives to the oppositional structure of civilization and barbarism and, more generally, to the dualistic choices often forced upon the ever-recurring ‘crises’ of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.