Colonialism and Postcolonialism, Civilization and Barbarians, Male and Female Roles… Juxtaposition is Having a Heyday

This article, “Three Ways of Going Wrong” by Douglas Kerr, really helped me to understand more about how to compare Heart of Darkness and Waiting for the Barbarians. I had already drawn the most obvious conclusions; both are books about the effects an empire has on both the “civilizers” and the “barbarians.” Both books, also, have a figure of law and the strict codes of the Empire encountering a figure representing a collusion with the lawlessness of the barbarian hordes. Both books also seem to, in some respects, comment on the negative effects that the Empire has on the land it tries to civilize. Both are the personal journey of a man through an extended contact with the barbarian world. However, after reading this article, the different perspectives of the two books are much clearer to me.
We had already discussed several times in class how Waiting for the Barbarians had several modern elements to it, including the namelessness of the particular Empire that the Magistrate and Joll live in, the inability of the characters to connect, and the many similarities to George Orwell’s 1984. This article gave me the word “postcolonialism,” which appears to sum up everything we were trying to discover through our discussions about the novel. Heart of Darkness shows the barbarians as seen by the uncontaminated conqueror, the colonialist; Waiting for the Barbarians is the empire as seen by a conflicted man who sympathizes with the barbarians. The article brings up the point that both books have these two types of characters in them; in Heart of Darkness, Marlow is the first and Kurtz is the second; in Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate is the second and Joll is the first. These two types of men provide two different ways to view the situation of the barbarian-civilizer relationship.
After reading this article, I also thought about the article I read in regards to Heart of Darkness. This article, while providing several points I did not agree with regarding the homosexual nature of the book, did bring up some interesting ideas about the importance of the barbarian woman that Kurtz takes as a lover. She represents the unnamed mysteries of the barbarian lands; in Heart of Darkness, knowledge and the known are represented by male figures and the unknown and ignorant by women. Similarly, in Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate (the man contaminated by the Barbarian culture, Kurtz’s mirror) is obsessed with understanding a Barbarian woman. Until he actually goes into the wilderness, he is not interested in her sexually – instead, he longs to make an impression on her. His interest in her and the girl herself, like much of the rest of the book, can be viewed as a larger allegory for more abstract notions: the girl for all the Barbarians and his obsession with her as the futile attempt of any man of the Empire to own or understand the wilderness.
Clearly, these books are very complex. I would like to read some more criticism as well as more about the actual events of colonialism before I can feel that I completely understand all the topics presented in these intricate works.
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