Telling stories, telling tales, telling fiction
Francis King FOE J. M. Coetzee Secker & Warburg, £9.95 Like the relationship between Prospero and Caliban, that between Robinson Cru- soe and Man Friday has, in recent years, acquired a new and therefore more potent significance. Each has tended to be seen as a parable of colonialism, in the first case less benign than in the second, with a supposedly inferior class of being subjected to the intelligence and will of a supposedly superior one.
J. M. Coetzee's new novel Foe, which is set in the early 18th century, which has as its pivotal event a marooning on a mid- Atlantic island, and which contains charac- ters called Daniel Foe, Robinson Cruso (sic) and Friday, may also be interpreted as a parable of colonialism, particularly since its author, who comes from South Africa, is well known as an opponent of apartheid. But to place only that interpretation on a work so complex despite its brevity, would be to diminish it, just as to do so would diminish that even more complex work The Tempest.
The novel begins with the account by a woman called Susan Barton of how she was cast off by mutineers from a ship sailing from Bahia to Europe, in a small boat in which her only companion was its dead captain; of how she was washed up on a desert island in nothing but her petticoat; of how she was found by a savage, whom she at first assumed in terror to be a cannibal; and of how she was taken by the savage to his white master, with whom she then found refuge. Having been rescued and finding herself back in England with Friday — Cruso has perished of a fever on the long voyage home — Susan, now friendless and penniless, is writing this record for a novelist Daniel Foe, who, she hopes, will pay her for it.
The point of her account — which Mr Coetzee has written in an unobtrusive pastiche of 18th-century English, similar to that used by William Golding in his Rites of Passage — is that there is so much less incident than in the Robinson Crusoe familiar to us all. Cruso, who refuses either to talk about the past or to envisage a future in which the trio might be rescued, who shows no ingenuity in devising solu- tions to the problems of grubbing for a living and combating the elements, and who expends most of his energy in terrac- ing the island, even though there are no seeds to plant on the terraces, is a charac- ter as bleak and unwelcoming as the island itself. Friday, whose tongue has been cut out — whether by Cruso or, as Cruso claims, by African slave-traders, is never established — and who is therefore unable to communicate, is in his total lack of affection even less of a companion than would be a cat or a dog. Surviving on a diet of bitter lettuce, fish and birds' eggs, each of the three lives in a solitude within a solitude. Only once, when Cruso is suffer- ing from the fever that eventually kills him, do he and Susan make loveless love. It is because of this one act of love that, after her return to England, she calls herself Mrs Cruso.
That Susan's narrative should, despite its lack of drama, be so compelling, is due in some measure to the sharpness of its observation but in even larger measure to the beauty of the style — measured, limpid, euphonious — which Mr Coetzee has devised for it. But although it is so compelling, it is unlikely to satisfy the novelist to whom Susan is offering it as a butcher or a greengrocer might offer his wares to a master chef. Nothing happens, will be the novelist's response. And so he will introduce pirates, cannibals and all kinds of other adventures such as never in fact befell the castaways in their monoto- nous solitude.
Foe is not content merely to embroider Susan's narrative •of her months on the desert island. He must also invent for her a whole past, totally unlike her real one. What first took her from England to Bahia was a fruitless quest for a missing daughter. But for Foe, another, stronger, fictional truth demands that the quest should not have been fruitless; and so it is that, on her return to England, Susan is confronted by a young woman claiming to be her long- lost daughter, even though she looks no- thing like her, and by an older woman claiming to have been that daughter's nurse, even though there was never any nurse in the household.
What, essentially, Mr Coetzee's allegory is therefore about is not colonialism — though my guess is that some people will rush to assume that it is — but about the conflict between those who record life and those who live it. The recorders are inevit- ably the foes (or Foes — hence the title) of the livers, since they not merely appropri- ate, alter and add to the livers' memories but also destroy them.
The cutting-out of Friday's tongue may, on one level, be seen as an allegory of colonialism committing a form of spiritual genocide by the eradication of a language and therefore of a culture. But on another, deeper level, Friday's inability to com- municate and his consequent inaccessibility — Susan can never be sure what he is thinking and feeling — represent that bedrock of the individual personality to which no novelist, however piercing his intuition, can ever hope to tunnel deep enough to reach.
Apart from its central theme, this diffi- cult but always immensely rewarding book has many other ones, often merely adum- brated in a paragraph or even a single sentence. If Susan is slave to Foe's im- agination, then Friday is slave to hers, since, in bringing him back to England, she has made him 'the helpless captive of my desire to have our story told.' Again, just as the novelist longs to be freed of the burden of the story that demands to be told, so Susan longs to be freed of the burden of looking after the silent man always with her. Yet, in each case, separa- tion is inconceivable.
Like the work from which it derives, this is a novel in which reality and myth are held in perfect balance.
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