Heart of the Barbarians

In my reading of Douglas Kerr’s article, “Three Ways of Going Wrong: Kipling, Conrad, Coetzee”, the similarities between Conrad’s Kurtz and Coetzee’s Magistrate were explored from all angles, but what I found more interesting was how the article allowed me to appreciate the commonalities between Jolle and Marlow. These two characters are foils for Kurtz and the Magistrate, respectively. Marlow and Jolle personify the power of the empire. The two men are stringent followers of orders and both believe fully that everything they do is in the best interest of their empires. The obvious reluctance any skeptic should have with this argument is the drastically different feelings a reader has towards these two characters. Jolle is seen as a heartless, war-crazed colonel obsessed with justifying the empire’s need to have an enemy. In contrast, Marlow is a bit arrogant, but overall, an amiable man, who politely narrates his treacherous adventure into Africa. While Coetzee and Conrad portray these two characters very differently, the two men serve the same quintessential purpose: they exemplify a reliable and constant image of what a respectable gentleman, in the eyes of the empire, should look and act like. Both men prove to be obedient, blind followers of the empire, the perfect civil servants of any empire, in contrast to the actions of the magistrate and Kurtz as they both fall victim to “temptations” of the barbarians.
A second contrast between the two novels I believe worth mentioning is the concept of who is really the savage/barbarian that both writers briefly address. Conrad broaches the subject in the way he eloquently describes the beauty of the Africans in the way they do their work and how they are in tune with nature. Coetzee delves into this notion through the thoughts of the Magistrate when he is reflecting on the idea that none of the barbarians will ever collect his tools and remains as artifacts or decorations. The barbarians are far too pure to be fixated on objects that do not benefit their survival. The elemental purity that both Conrad and Coetzee bestow upon the theoretically savage people leaves the reader of either novel with a question: which people are truly the “civilized” ones and which are the “savages”?
Finally, the role of sex in the two novels seemed to be both authors’ ultimate way of expressing how the Magistrate and Kurtz eventually accepted the cultures of the savage people. Through their respective lovers, both men subscribed to a logical notion that the beauty they saw in these women was in no way sub human or in any way inferior to their own humanity.

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Language and Racism

Only seventeen pages into J.M Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and it already echoes parts of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Okay you probably could have seen striking similarities between the two stories after a glance at each stories respective first pages, but the similarity I am talking abut goes a bit deeper than the brutally animalistic way white people view nonwhite races in the stories. The similarity that stands out to me is the role that both writers give language in their particular brands of racism. Conrad and Coetzee both use language as a defining characteristic of the inferiority of the nonwhite race. When reading Heart of Darkness we discussed the extreme infrequency that Conrad bestowed the English language on the blacks. Coetzee uses the spoken language of the outpost in a similar fashion. When the fishermen are brought back to the outpost as prisoners Coetzee describes their inability to really communicate with any of the towns people through language. This rift proves to solidify their image as zoo pets for the towns people to look at, mock openly and laugh at. It also allows the narrator of Waiting for the Barbarians to portray the fishing people as inferior to the other nomads because he can not communicate with this brand of wild people. I find the emphasis that both writers put on the ability to communicate and language to be a very interesting way of expressing the racism the two groups of white people demonstrate. Personally, in a modern sense I do not witness or even think of language as a racial barrier as much as it is a cultural barrier. This observation lead me to wonder if Conrad and Coetzee heavy emphasis on the language barrier between races is a result of their understandably high regard for language, or was language once a central characteristic of racism?
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