Barbarians and Savages:
The Difficulty of Naming in Heart of Darkness and Waiting for the Barbarians
Alice Holbrook
Traditionally, philosophers have argued that words and names represent reality because of a connection between the name and the thing itself. In Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds, philosopher Stephen Schwartz summarizes the positions of thinkers from Locke to Wittgenstein: “A general term or name refers to whatever fits the characteristics the term or name means” (Schwartz 1977: 13). Names suggest a property, or a collection of properties (Schwartz 1977: 14). It is by containing their definitions that names “generate necessary truths” (Schwartz 1977: 19). Put another way, identity can be expressed in English as an equation where one half is the name and the other is the collection of properties, separated by an equals sign. “The sentence thus formed is true if and only if those component terms refer to the same object” (Quine 1960: 114-5). This vision of language underlies the way in which naming and language can become a power struggle: Who decides what properties are suggested by a name? Whose point of view is primary in naming? Names seek to express truth, but their deployment is bound with issues of identity and power. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, imperial forces use naming as a tool of oppression, forcing language which represents their point of view upon those they have conquered. However, in their novels, Conrad and Coetzee also portray imperialists as perverting the correspondence of naming and characteristics and destroying the basis of their own power, precipitating a moral, and finally a physical, downfall. Heart of Darkness and Waiting for the Barbarians use similar perspectives on the inabsolute in imperial language to reach the same conclusion about imperialism itself: it is misguided, and, ultimately, doomed.
Naming and language are key from the beginning of Heart of Darkness and
Waiting for the Barbarians, used to define the goals of imperialism. Both novels are set in obscure outposts of Empire, Heart of Darkness in the Congo and Waiting for the Barbarians in an unnamed settlement, settings which are instructive precisely because of their function as borders between the “civilized” and the “uncivilized”: the power of Empire is precarious, making the triumph of naming and language all the more important. And at first it is this rhetoric of civilization that is used by representatives of Empire to justify their presence. Kurtz is sent to the Congo not only to represent Belgium’s business interests – “He is a very remarkable person… Sends in as much ivory as all the others put together” (Conrad 2000: 123) – but to act as “an emissary of pity, and science, and progress” (Conrad 2000: 128), everything which imperialism holds makes Europe superior. His station is meant to be “a center for trade…but also for humanizing, improving, instructing” (Conrad 2000: 134). Kurtz himself adopts this perspective for at least a portion of his pamphlet for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. He writes, “By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded” (Conrad 2000: 148). In Waiting for the Barbarians, too, the Magistrate views the Empire at first as a benevolent force, and the settlement as overwhelmingly peaceful. He explains to Colonel Joll that the settlement has no prisons because there is rarely cause to take prisoners (Coetzee 1980: 2). He also believes that the Empire’s purpose is to convert the barbarians: “…When the barbarians taste…bread and gooseberry jam, they will be won over to our ways. They will find that they are unable to live without the skills of men who know how to rear the pacific grains, without the arts of women who know how to use the benign fruits” (Coetzee 1980: 155). As both texts make clear, the objective of Empire is to civilize, to stand for peace and to oppose chaos.
In these texts, naming functions not only as a means to define the goals of Empire – and, by contrast, what Empire is set against – but as a means to power. By defining themselves as a civilizing force, imperialists create a dichotomy between Empire, those who are civilized, and “savages” or “barbarians,” those who must be civilized, distinctions which are also morally and racially coded. Here, naming becomes central. For in order to convince the “savages” or “barbarians” that they need to be instructed, the imperialist forces in both novels must first win a war over the interpretation of words. Critic Bruce Johnson reads Heart of Darkness as a search for meaning on Marlow’s part. Johnson believes that in the Inner Station, Marlow hopes “that things will somehow be final and absolute” (Johnson 1971: 679), a feeling he has lost since leaving Europe, which he portrays as “a world of straightforward facts” (Conrad 2000: 118). Johnson defines the work of the conqueror of natives as “the need to create significance” from “the sights and sounds coming from this primitive world” (Johnson 1971: 680). What Marlow seeks in Kurtz, the “savages” seek in him. Johnson uses the example of Marlow explaining the ship’s boiler to one of the “savages” to prove that for them, Marlow is a source of “absolute authority” (Johnson 1971: 682). Accordingly, “Savages” and “barbarians” must accept the Empire’s definition of them as uncivilized before they can be civilized. In order for the Empire’s ideals to be realized, their naming and language must become dominant in native culture. As Barbara Fuchs and David J. Baker note in “The Postcolonialist Past,” colonialism necessarily “engage[ed] the universals – such as the abstract figure of the human or that of reason – that were forged in eighteenth century Europe and that underlie the human sciences,” insisting also upon a “unitary history” (Fuchs, Baker 2004: 331). The Empire’s ideals could not allow for debate. And for the Empire’s ideals to become dominant, at least in a way which creates a more “humane” environment, the Empire’s representatives must truly embody these progressive ideals. In short, a correspondence must be recognized between the term “civilized” and peaceable behavior, and between the term “uncivilized” and chaos. To have power, names must suggest characteristics. They must have meaning. The philosophy of a correspondence between names and meaning, and the binaries this philosophy creates, are symptomatic of and central to imperialist power.
Naming and blankness, its opposite, are important to imperialism on a practical
and a metaphorical level. Analyzing these concepts in Waiting for the Barbarians and Heart of Darkness, it becomes clear that they are deeply intertwined with the goals of empire. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow explains his earliest dreams of exploration in terms of named and unnamed spaces:
Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps.
I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or
Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration.
At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and
when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but
they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I
grow up I will go there … But there was the biggest one yet –
the biggest, the most blank, so to speak – that I had a hankering
after.
True, by this time it was not a blank space anymore. It had
got filled since my childhood with rivers and lakes and names.
It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery…
(Conrad 2000: 113-4)
Marlow envisions the unnamed space as literally blank, and views the process of naming and the process of creation as synonymous. It is as if, prior to their discovery and naming by Europeans, these lakes and rivers did not exist. Similarly, Bruce Johnson finds that colonialist rule could only be legitimated by a sort of a god-complex: “Kurtz had been acting as a god among these natives, had been an unchallenged namer and definition-giver” (Johnson 1971: 685). Here, Johnson makes a link between colonialist aspirations and religious powers. For the imperialists with their moral rhetoric, it is, after all, the Christian God who is the ultimate “namer and definition-giver.” Imperialists seem to wish to rewrite Eden by positioning themselves, rather than God, as the source of both the African land and the words which describe it. This, in turn, naturalizes Europeans ownership of Africa and its products, like ivory. For Marlow, blank space on a map connotes space that is unowned and somehow unrealized, and his speech makes clear ties between the impulse to naming and the impulse to colonialism. Though Africa was inhabited prior to European control, only European ownership, connected as it is with naming and the written word, as represented by maps, is meaningful.
In Heart of Darkness, Conrad applies this confluence of naming and ownership to land. In Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee extends a similar philosophy to the ownership of human beings. During a meeting with several young soldiers, the Magistrate explains the point of view of the barbarians: “They want an end to the spread of settlements across their land… They want to be free to move about with their flocks from pasture to pasture as they used to” (Coetzee 1980: 50). Here, the Magistrate makes the connection between ownership of land and culture, tying a loss of barbarian land to a loss of barbarian selfhood. But the connection between naming and ownership operates on another level. By naming the other as a “barbarian” or enemy, representatives of the empire in Coetzee’s novel give themselves the right to imprison and torture.
This connection between naming and ownership is represented literally when Colonel Joll writes the word “ENEMY” on the backs of barbarian prisoners, and subsequently orders the soldiers to whip them (Coetzee 1980: 105). Again, the power to name and to record names combine to suggest ownership. The connection also operates metaphorically in the Magistrate’s relationship with the barbarian girl, implicating the Magistrate himself in the lust for ownership that characterizes the empire he criticizes. Though the Magistrate pursues a sexual relationship with her, characterized not by violence, but by rituals like bathing (Coetzee 1980: 30), his interest is still tainted by a desire for ownership and control, as he demonstrates by comparing the girl to a wild
animal (Coetzee 1980: 34). He admits as much when he likens himself to the torturers
that crippled the girl and rendered her nearly blind:
Though I cringe with shame, even here and now, I must ask
myself whether, when I lay head to foot with her, fondling and
kissing those broken ankles, I was not in my heart of hearts
regretting that I could not engrave myself on her as deeply.
However kindly she may be treated by her own people, she
will never be courted and married in the normal way: she is
marked for life as the property of a stranger, and no one will
approach her save in the spirit of lugubrious sensual pity that
she detected and rejected in me (Coetzee 1980: 135).
Once more, ownership is connoted as much by naming as by marking, as in Marlow’s example of the maps. The power of naming is linked to the power of writing, and the ability to record names. Thus, the power of recording or marking, too, operates to secure ownership, not only of places, but of people. By comparing intimacy to torture in that both spring from the desire to mark, the Magistrate ties both to ownership, and thus to the ideals of Empire.
In theory, the act of naming endows Empires with great power. To name in these texts is to exert ownership, over both a past and a present. Fuchs and Baker quote philosopher Edward O’Gorman: “language [is] an ‘instrumental tool for constructing history and inventing realities” (Fuchs, Baker 2004: 338). However, as Heart of Darkness and Waiting for the Barbarians also demonstrate, the connection between naming and characteristics is, in imperialist practice, not absolute. Both novels identify imperialist naming as something arbitrary and something ultimately reductive. This occurs with the character of the Magistrate, who is still called the Magistrate long after he is imprisoned and no longer fulfills that role (Coetzee 1980: 105). Likewise, the repeated images of sleeping sentries (Coetzee 1980: 90) call into question the relationship between naming and function. If a sentry is sleeping, can he truly be called a sentry, and if the Magistrate no longer acts in that capacity, can he truly be called by his old title? Perhaps the most potent image illustrating the conflict between naming and function appears in the Magistrate’s recurring dream of the children playing in the snow. The Magistrate is particularly haunted by his vision of the hooded child: “The face I see is blank, featureless; it is the face of an embryo or a tiny whale; it is not a face at all but another part of the human body that bulges under the skin; it is white; it is the snow itself” (Coetzee 1980: 37). Again, can a face truly be called a face if it does not act as a face? Is a face defined by its placement or by its function?
Anxieties over blankness relate to anxieties over the possibilities of true ownership. After their first sexual encounter, the Magistrate finds himself disquieted by the fact that the barbarian girl’s face is “blank,” expressionless (Coetzee 1980: 44). Soon he finds that her face becomes literally blank to him, much like the girl in his dreams, noting that she fails to occupy space even in his memory. Reconstructing the scene of their first meeting, the Magistrate states, “I can remember the bony hands of the man who died; I believe I can even, with an effort, recompose his face. But beside him, where the girl should be, there is a space, a blankness” (Coetzee 1980: 47). Blankness, the result of obliteration, can function as a proof of power, as when the Magistrate recognizes that he is intentionally obliterating the girl from his memory (Coetzee 1980: 47), but when it appears at a subconscious level, because the Magistrate cannot control the blankness, it functions instead to question his power. This is illustrated during another one of the Magistrate’s recurring dreams. He observes: