a little of everyday

Before I begin, I would like to thank a friend in class who had given me much encouragement from one single conversation we have had. I now emerge from my weeks of hiatus to engage again in discussions of corporeality. This essay is dedicated to him.


Foe, Part IV

Part IV of Foe, albeit short – five pages in all – in its physical length, carries a wealth of meanings which can only be summed up by the word “indeterminate”. Or perhaps “enigmatic” is a better choice. Yet, it is this ambiguity and the difficulty to find an appropriate word to describe the chapter that reinforces its multiple meanings.

To begin with, there is clearly a change in the narrative voice. It is definitely not the voice of Susan, Foe, or Friday, for the narrator sees them as “others” in the discourse. So then the narrator is Coetzee. But this in itself is problematic. We all know that, in a fiction, the speaking voice should always be distinct from the authorial voice, and that the views in the fiction should never come to fully represent the writer’s own opinions, although most of the time they do. (This is the reason why Salman Rushdie prefers writing fiction to news commentaries; it keeps him alive longer than it otherwise would.)

At the end, the narrative voice is and can never be identified, and like all other ambiguities in Coeztee-fictions, we have to be satisfied with ambiguity for our conclusion and continue with our lives. And so I have established that the issue of the narrative voice in Part IV is never resolved with the end of the novel.

But that is only the beginning of the many ambiguities and multiplicities in the chapter. Consider the pause in the chapter, as marked by

* *
on the page. Think of this as a boundary, something that dichotomises the narrative into two. The question is: why? I argue that the two asterisks function as a border that demarcates the two sides of the narrative, marking them out as two mirror images that juxtapose one onto the other. If we consider the discourse in the two parts of the narrative, we can find many similarities between them.

Here is a list that presents some of these similarities:
§ The speakers in both instances enter a room
§ The speakers find a woman and a man lying on a bed
§ In both instances Friday is found in an alcove

Let us now pause and think for a moment. Although it is true that these similarities exist between the two halves of the narrative, there remain certain disparities in the details. Just like how a mirror image is always a lateral-inverted image of the original, and hence similar but not identical to the original, these disparities reveal more profound meanings between the two (similar) discourses.

Let me elaborate. In the first part of the narrative, Susan and Foe lie in bed, “not touching” each other (153), but in the second part, they have turned and now lie “face to face”, with “her head in the crook of his arm” (155). This change in physical intimacy is important and I shall come back to it shortly. For now, consider the other subtle nuances in the two parts. In the first part, the speaker enters without noticing whose residence it is, but in the second part the place is identified to belong to “Daniel Defoe, Author” (155). Finally, the position of Friday is also changed in the second part when compared to the first. While he is first seen to be “stretched at full length on his back” (154), he is later seen to have “turned to [face] the wall” (155), revealing a scar about his neck.

These differences suggest, I think, the subjectivity in human perception when looking at the same thing/s at different times. These differences, subtle or drastic, may occur because of a change in lighting, a newly acquired worldview, or the loss of a previously subscribed value or belief. Coetzee here is showing, through these subtle differences between the two parts of his narrative, the multiplicity of fiction and the multiple interpretations that can be gotten within a single narrative. To come back to my previous point, the change in physical intimacy between Susan and Foe can generate many new meanings surrounding their relationship. While a lack of body contact would suggest a platonic relationship between the couple, the fact that Susan is “face to face” with Foe, with “her head in the crook of his arm” allows the reader to infer a more intimate, probably sexual, relationship between the two.

To further develop this point, consider the association of the room with Daniel Defoe. The fact that Coetzee attaches the word “Author” to Defoe’s name opens up the many possibilities of Defoe’s actual vocation instead of closing it. If it is so easy to attach an identity to an individual, Coetzee seems to say, how can we be sure that this individual is who he is supposed to be? For that matter, if another name has appeared on the wall, say Susan Barton, would we now be reading Robinson Crusoe as a novel written by a female novelist instead? The issue of multiplicity is not a simple one to resolve.

So what is the moral of the story? The moral of the story here, to me at least, is that the story is what the writer makes it out to be. And the writer, being a product of social, cultural, and historical influences, always carries with him the writers of previous epochs, their thoughts and ideas, their values and belief systems. As such there is no original story. Neither is there a fixed or original text; all texts are inter-texts of previous texts and the texts to come.

By revealing this intertextual quality within his novel, Coetzee reinforces the fact that his text is yet another intertext, this time to Daniel (De)Foe’s Robinson Crusoe. (Incidentally, Defoe’s original last name was Foe; he changed it to Defoe to increase the literary reception of his writings by allowing people to associate him with the French.) And that his text is a reinterpretation of Defoe’s text, just like Defoe’s text might have been a rip-off of some other (unknown) text that came up during or before his time. To bring this to another level, writing can be both a physical and metaphysical process that transcends time and space. Similarly, ideas, fiction, values, and entire belief systems are not fixed but rather fluid entities that may mix, match, and transcend time and space to make their presence felt in different societies depending on the varying needs of these societies