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Cannon Schmitt
Department of English, Duke University

Abstract

Writing over a period from the 1830s to the 1870s, Charles Darwin repeatedly invokes "savages": in the midst of, and then again when bringing to a close, the account of his youthful circumnavigation of the globe, The Voyage of the Beagle; at the end of the first full-scale elaboration of the theory of evolution, On the Origin of Species; and as part of the conclusion of his efforts to demonstrate the applicability of that theory to human beings, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Apparently lacking any sense of history or memory and thus without a past of their own, savages nevertheless refuse to be relegated to Darwin's past. Returning to them at crucial moments of retrospection and summation, he seems as incapable of moving beyond them as he believes them to be of moving beyond their state of savagery. While at points material to the theoretical explication and empirical demonstration of the workings of evolution, savages also serve crucial rhetorical functions. Their supposed position "between" animals and humans makes them indispensable to the argument that, like all other beings, humans evolved from earlier forms of life. At the same time, the horror Darwin evinces at the sight of savages and the thought of their proximity to civilized humanity demands that they be disavowed, willfully forgotten.

In this paper I trace the workings in Darwin's corpus of this "savage mnemonics," which can be understood to comprise two logically distinct but ineluctably conjoined elements. On one hand, Darwin exploits a mnemonics of savagery, invoking savages in remembrance of the origins of the civilized. In doing so he takes up and strengthens the hierarchical narrative of human development running from J. S. Mill to W. H. Hudson and beyond. On the other hand, Darwin possesses a mnemonics like that he believes proper to savages, which is to say no mnemonics or memory at all. Postulating human evolution requires that he forget--and, in particular, that he forget the savage. Such a vacillation between amnesia and total recall may appear idiosyncratic or even pathological--some Darwinian version of Freud's repetition compulsion, with the trauma of initial contact repeated endlessly in a fruitless search for mastery. Its insistent presence, though, speaks to the degree to which anxieties about savages take on new and intensified force in the context of evolutionary theory. Further, it marks a signal moment in the Victorian relation to the primitive. A definitive version of the familiar story of civilization's construction of itself in opposition to savagery, Darwin's savage mnemonics also reveals the paradoxical imperative within that story for the civilized to become savage.