Allegory vs Allegory: The divorce of different modes of allegorical perception in Coetzee'sWaiting for the Barbarians.

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Abstract
In this paper the allegorical mode of Coetzee's novels is situated in the context of contemporary constructions of allegory. This is done by tracing the points of intersection between Waiting for the Barbarians and those theories of allegory produced by contemporary readings of Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, by Paul de Man in “The Rhetoric of Temporality”, and by Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. It is suggested that allegory constitutes a paradigm for interpretive practice, and that in Waiting for the Barbarians a “Benjaminian” mode of allegorical perception acts as a corrective to an “Hegelian” mode of allegorical perception, which tends to offer definitive meanings and to posit a relatively stable connection between the allegorical signifier and extra‐textual reality.

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