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
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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
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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
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“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)
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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 definitiongiver” (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
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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
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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
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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:
She is building a fort of snow, a walled town which I
recognize in every detail: the battlements with the four
watchtowers, the gate with the porter’s hut beside it, the
streets and houses, the great square with the barracks
compound in one corner. And here is the very spot where
I stand! But the square is empty, the whole town is white
and mute and empty. I point to the middle of the square.
‘You must put people there!’ I want to say. No sound comes
from my mouth, in which my tongue lies frozen like a fish.
(Coetzee 1980: 53)
Because of the Magistrate’s inability to fight the blankness represented by native culture,
the blankness has engulfed, erased him. The Magistrate is disempowered by this
blankness, unable even to speak. The barbarians, with their insistent blankness, resist his
naming and categorizing, and so the connection between name and named is, according
to Coetzee, tenuous at best.
This failure in naming due to the disconnection between name and function
extends not only to the body of the other, but to the other as a group. This conflict plays
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out most notably in Heart of Darkness with the terms “savage” and “enemy.” In her essay
“Naming and Silence: A Study of Language and the Other in Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness,” Dorothy Trench-Bonett notes that Conrad calls into question the European
deployment of the term “savage” against native Africans by using it to refer to Africans
(Conrad 2000: 120) and Europeans alike (Trench-Bonett 2000: 5). Early in the novel,
Marlow imagines England as it must have seemed to its Roman conquerors: “Land in a
swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter
savagery, had closed around him – all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in
the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men” (Conrad 2000: 112). In this passage
Marlow mirrors Africa and pre-Roman England both explicitly and implicitly, by
conflating forests and jungles, as well as, earlier in the passage, by saying the Roman
conquerors were “man enough to face the darkness” (Conrad 2000: 112), a quality more
often associated with Africa, even by Marlow himself: “It had become a place of
darkness” (Conrad 2000: 114). “Enemy,” too, is used to refer to Africans only with a
large dose of irony, given that it is Kurtz, a European, who impales heads on sticks
(Trench-Bonett 2000: 5). At times, Marlow objects to the designation outright, as when
he observes the native Africans building a railway: “I could see every rib, the joints of
their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were
connected together with a chain… These men could by no stretch of the imagination be
called enemies” (Conrad 2000: 120). This image resonates powerfully with the scene in
Waiting for the Barbarians in which the Magistrate sees the prisoners bound together by
rope and loops of wire (Coetzee 1980: 105), and Trench-Bonett notes the comparable
themes of the two texts: “[Marlow], like Coetzee’s magistrate, sees a dichotomy between
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this label and what he actually observes about the Africans’ behavior. By the time he
reaches Kurtz's home and sees the impaled heads, the divergence between the language of
colonialism and the facts of what is happening is absolutely clear” (Trench-Bonett 2000:
5). Because of colonialist tactics, the binaries between colonizer and colonized, civilized
and uncivilized which symbolized the basis of their power can no longer hold. That
which colonialists used to define others could be easily exploited to define the
colonialists instead.
What Conrad reveals with his use of “enemy” and “savage,” Coetzee reveals with
the terms “enemy” and “barbarian.” Of course, in Waiting for the Barbarians,
“barbarian” most frequently refers to the natives, in recognition of the threat that they
supposedly pose to the Empire and its citizens in the settlement. But as the Third Bureau
usurps the Magistrate’s control, “barbarian” comes to connote not necessarily racial
difference, but anyone of any ethnic background who is perceived to pose a threat. Thus,
during the scene in which Mandel simulates the Magistrate’s execution by hanging,
Mandel says of the Magistrate’s cries, “That is barbarian language you hear” (Coetzee
1980: 121). The Magistrate’s difference is phrased in terms of language, in opposition to
the language of conquerors, the language of coherence, naming and power. However, as
Waiting for the Barbarians illustrates, those who are supposed to pose a threat and those
who actually do pose a threat are quite different. In fact, though the barbarians cause
relatively little damage to the settlement in the course of the story, the extra soldiers
brought in to fight them wreak havoc on the town: “There have been incidents in which
soldiers have gone into shops, taken what they wanted, and left without paying. Of what
use is it for the shopkeeper to raise the alarm when the criminals and the civil guard are
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the same people?” (Coetzee 1980: 123). It is in recognition of this behavior, as well as
their proclivity for torture, that the Magistrate calls these representatives of Empire “the
new barbarians” (Coetzee 1980: 78). The Magistrate bespeaks the ability of humans to
embody contradictions at the same time that he insists upon a connection between
characteristics and naming, connecting the accusation of barbarism to those who have
perpetrated bad deeds.
On the other hand, for the government and the settlement in general, “barbarian”
is divorced from behavior and applied to an all-purpose, ever-shifting enemy. Indeed,
even when the settlement witnesses the barbarians helpless, bound by rope and loops of
wire, they are referred to as barbarians (Coetzee 1980: 103). It is this slippage between
words and meaning that the Magistrate parodies when Colonel Joll asks him to decipher
the text on the poplar slips. Although the Magistrate cannot read the slips, he alleges that
they testify to the cruelty of the Empire, and ends by saying, “It is the barbarian character
war, but it has other senses too. It can stand for vengeance, and, if you turn it upside
down like this, it can be made to read justice. There is no knowing which sense is
intended. That is part of barbarian cunning” (Coetzee 1980: 110-2). The Magistrate not
only unmasks the Empire’s use of euphemism – vengeance masquerading as justice – but
adds a cloaked insult. Of course, it is the Empire, and not the barbarians, whose meanings
are slippery. Thus it is the Empire, and not the barbarians, who are the true barbarians.
Ultimately, the Empire’s sense of meaning has shifted so that naming does not reflect
true meaning as much as hollow ideology. As a young lieutenant tells the Magistrate,
“Prisoners are prisoners” (Coetzee 1980: 22). Naming is dependent not on inherent
characteristics but on current conditions. And since current conditions are ever-changing,
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how can they provide a solid source of meaning for names, or a source of philosophy for
an empire?
The definition of “enemy” is similarly difficult to pin down. Like “barbarians,” an
enemy of the Empire is theoretically anyone without the best interests of the Empire at
heart, and again, the barbarians are the group that most frequently bears this title,
famously in the whipping scene (Coetzee 1980: 105). However, this word, too, is turned
against the Empire by the Magistrate on multiple occasions. He tells Colonel Joll:
Those pitiable prisoners you brought in – are they the enemy
I must fear? Is that what you say? You are the enemy,
Colonel! … You are the enemy, you have made the war, and
you have given them all the martyrs they need – starting not
now but a year ago when you committed your first filthy
barbarities here! History will bear me out! (Coetzee 1980: 114)
Once more, the Magistrate emphasizes the connection between deeds and titles. If it is
Colonel Joll who commits barbarities, causing needless sacrifice on the part of the
settlements’ citizens, then it is Colonel Joll, and the Empire he represents, that is its own
enemy. The Empire’s binaries no longer represent reality, that is, if they ever truly did.
The Empire’s power rests in its ability to name, to label, to categorize, to define
the world according to its own whims. However, in practice, the Empire divorces names
from their intrinsic meaning, and by divorcing names from their meanings, the Empire
undermines the basis of its power – the absoluteness of its own definitions. In so doing,
the Empire undermines its ownership, for if the Empire cannot categorize a person or a
place, how can the Empire be said to possess them? By losing control of words and their
meanings, the Empire conquers itself. At the end of both texts, the outposts of empires
depicted by Coetzee and Conrad are crumbling, or have already crumbled. At the end of
Heart of Darkness, the outpost under Kurtz’s control is abandoned, and its productivity
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lost. It is ironic that Kurtz fails to realize the humanitarian rhetoric of Empire – whether
imperialism ever had real humanitarian intentions is less important than Kurtz’s
interpretation – because, as Bruce Johnson notes, his own name does not reflect his
characteristics. While “Kurtz” means “short” in German, Kurtz himself is remarkably tall
(Johnson 1971: 677). It could be argued that Kurtz is destined to fail at his enterprise
because his very name subverts the name and characteristic correspondence of colonialist
rhetoric, making him unsuitable for the post. The images of Kurtz’s downfall are
accompanied or predated by a number of scenarios in which language falters, including
his statement, “I am lying here in the dark waiting for death,” while Marlow notes he
stands with a light “within a foot of his eyes” (Conrad 2000: 164). The ideals and
language of Empire, with their inability to reflect truth, are encapsulated by a
hallucination. As Kurtz is “hollow at the core” (Conrad 2000: 155), so is imperialist
language: a passing hallucination, an impression without meaning.
Likewise, Waiting for the Barbarians ends with Mandel and the army pulling out
of the settlement, leaving it unprotected and vulnerable to barbarian attack, still a
terrifying prospect to the settlers despite the lack of any explicit threat on the barbarians’
part. Perhaps more importantly, the town is depleted of supplies: “Two [soldiers] struggle
to load a handsome cast-iron stove looted from an empty house. Another comes back
smiling in triumph bearing a cock and a hen … The cart is piled high with sacks and
kegs from a looted shop, even a small table and two chairs” (Coetzee 1980: 141). The
soldiers are the only visible marauding force. One shopkeeper who remains behind
explains his reasons: “I was born here, I’ll die here, I’m not leaving” (Coetzee 1980:
150). As this makes clear, though representatives of the settlement’s governing body, the
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army is as alien to the settlement as the barbarians would be, perhaps more so because the
soldiers have never lived on the land as the barbarians and settlers do, and possess it in no
actual sense, other than in name. And naming, as the novel proves, is a perilous hold. In a
parallel to Marlow’s map image, the Magistrate once warns Colonel Joll that his maps of
the region “are based on little but hearsay” and that he has “never set foot” in most of the
territory himself (Coetzee 1980: 12). Who, then, are the true invaders? Not the
barbarians, who, after all, are the original owners of the land, and not the townspeople,
like the Magistrate, who have coexisted with them to this point, but the Third Bureau and
the army, those that act as forces of chaos.
The breakdown of the Empire is associated with a recognition of the breakdown
of binaries and previously reliable definitions, as well as of language itself and its ability
to reflect truth. The Magistrate sets out to write a history of the settlement, but can record
only clichés: “Perhaps by the end of the winter,” he writes, “when hunger truly bites
us…when the barbarian is truly at the gate, perhaps then I will…begin to tell the truth”
(Coetzee 1980: 154). Even in this passage, the Magistrate fails to recognize that the
damage has already been done by the Empire itself, and at the novel’s close the citizens
of the settlement are left waiting for an attack that, we are led to believe, will never occur.
The true barbarians have already fulfilled their objective. Thus, the settlement faces
failure simultaneously because their use of language has led them to fear the wrong
enemy, leaving them vulnerable to attack from the true threat, and because the ideals of
Empire have been undermined, also by the use of language.
Of course, Heart of Darkness and Waiting for the Barbarians, fictional though
they may be, are not meant to explore an abstract issue. Heart of Darkness is highly
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autobiographical (Trench-Bonett 2000: 6), and though Waiting for the Barbarians is set
in no specific place or time, there are clear parallels to the history of apartheid in
Coetzee’s South Africa, as well as other instances of European imperialism. Both are
intended as indictments of existing empires, asking readers to examine their rhetoric
more carefully. And though the conflicts the novels discuss often take place on the level
of language, the atrocities language legitimates and covers over are real. Conrad and
Coetzee suggest that actual empires, like the empires depicted by the two novels, are both
misguided, for their illusions of humanitarianism, and doomed, because their rhetoric is
based upon lies and unsupportable binaries. Ultimately, these novels show not that words
and names cannot express truth, although this possibility is considered in both, but that
where words and names are bound with power, their definitions must always be suspect.
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WORKS CITED
Baker, David J. and Barbara Fuchs. “The Postcolonial Past.” Modern Language
Quarterly. 2004: 65 (3). 329-340. EBSCOHost.
Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin, 1980.
Conrad, Joseph. “Heart of Darkness.” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Eds. R.V.
Cassill and Richard Bausch. 6th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000.
109-171.
Johnson, Bruce. “Names, Naming, and the ‘Inscrutable’ in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”
Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 1971: 12. 675-88.
Quine, Willard Van Orman. Word and Object. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1960.
Schwartz, Stephen P. Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds. Ithaca: Cornell
U P, 1977.
Trench-Bonett, Dorothy. “Naming and Silence: A Study of Language and the Other in
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Conradiana. 2000: 84-95. Literature Online.
<http://lion.chadwyck.com>
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