In every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Till we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story. I ask: Why was Friday drawn into such deadly peril, given that life on the island was without peril, and then saved? (141)
The peril Foe refers to here draws on two of his constructions, the one involving an enormous kraken hidden beneath a bed of seaweeds, the other imagining a ship at the bottom of the pool with all its dead people (slaves and sailors) staring up at Friday while he rows on the surface of the pool and spreads petals over the water, as if he is commemorating the lost souls. To the reader Foe’s thrill-seeking comment bears some irony, since Friday is more at peril in London than he ever was on the island. Susan initially surmises Friday’s ritual to be an “offering to the god of the waves to cause the fish to run plentifully, or performing some other such superstitious observance.” (31) Rosemary Jolly, like Marais drawing on Spivak, summarizes Coetzee’s narrative setup in Foe:
The figure of Friday, noncenter of the narrative of Foe (as Susan Barton keeps on pointing out to Foe), can be situated at the nexus between these two “contradictory” (from our point of view) movements in postcolonialism, namely the maintenance of a mimetics that is not simplistically recuperative but is nevertheless recreative, and the simultaneous refusal of a fixed referent. (Jolly 1996: 144)
To the reader the centre (or anchor) of the narrative remains obscure. We reach no comprehensive understanding of Susan Barton and her lost daughter, of Cruso and how he came to live on the island, of Foe and his debts, and ultimately of Friday and the story of his mutilation. In White Writing Coetzee poetically compares the reflecting surfaces of water pools with earth’s eyes staring at the sky. In a similar vein, Foe remarks:
136 “I said the heart of the story,” resumed Foe, “but I should have said the eye, the eye of the
story. Friday rows his log of wood across the dark pupil – or the dead socket – of an eye staring up at him from the floor of the sea. He rows across it and is safe. To us he leaves the task of descending into that eye. Otherwise, like him, we sail across the surface and come shore none the wiser, and resume our old lives, and sleep without dreaming, like babes.” (141)
Foe’s comment anticipates the final fourth section of the novel, the point of which he seems to foreshadow: “It is for us to open Friday’s mouth and hear what it holds: silence, perhaps, or a roar, like the roar of a seashell held to the ear.” (142) This is the roar that issues from the lips of Friday in the very final lines of the narrative. In section IV (no quotation marks!) an unnamed narrator enters a sunken ship, then the home of Foe. A girl sits on the landing (maybe Susan’s lost daughter), Foe and Susan lie in bed together, Friday on the floor next to them, wrapped in “soft, heavy stuff” (a body bag?). The unnamed visitor touches Friday’s hair, testing its quality.
After a long while, [...] he stirs and sighs [...] The sound his body makes is faint and dry, like leaves falling over leaves. [...] His teeth part. [...]
At first there is nothing. Then, if I can ignore the beating of my own heart, I begin to hear the faintest faraway roar: as she said, the roar of waves in a seashell; and over that, as if once or twice a violin-string were touched, the whine of the wind and the cry of a bird. Closer I press, listening for other sounds: the chirp of sparrows, the thud of a mattock, the call of a voice.
From his mouth, without a breath, issue the sounds of the islands. (154)
Two asterisks mark the end of this passage, after which the narrator enters a house, remarking on a plaque marking it as the house of Daniel Defoe (not Foe!). While it was night in the first sequence, we now read “a bright autumn day.” (155) The personnel in the room is nearly the same (the girl is omitted); the visitor notices a scar running around Fridays neck, “left by a rope or chain” (marking him as ex-slave and as a tortured body). In a dispatch box the visitor finds Susan Barton’s text and begins reading its first sentence, marked by quotation marks. The text continues as before in the first person narrative only now the narrative “I” re-enacts Susan’s slipping out of her boat, thereby re-entering the narrative beginning of Foe, only now being caught in seaweed and descending into the pool where Friday casts his petals. The “stub of candle” (156) carried around the neck is useless; no hermeneutic light will shine in these depths. The “mud of Flanders” (the infamous battlefield WW II) is invoked as the narrative voice crawls into the wreck, situating its individual fate in a long history of death (shortly after, the wreck is dated back three hundred years, quite likely dating the given account in Coetzee’s present time). In the cabin, behind the bloated bodies of Susan Barton and the captain, Friday sits in the corner, “half-buried in sand, his knees drawn up, his hands between his thighs” and a “chain about his throat.” (157) The narrative voice addresses him by name, which approximates it to the voice of Susan Barton:
137
But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday. (157)
The foregrounding of Friday’s body as his primary and incorruptible signifier complies with Coetzee’s idea of embodiment as a central function of literary representation. Like in the first sequence, the visitor wants to hear Friday’s voice, only now his fingernails probe the closed mouth of Friday for a way of entry. Just then:
His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face. (157)
The final words of Foe direct our attention to the face of the narrative I, in whose shoes we have been walking and diving through this final section, submerging ourselves into the narrative. In the light of my larger argument, this passage is a strong example for how Coetzee manages to manipulate the reader and awaken our sympathetic imagination. The shift of narrative position and focalization in this last section redirects our narrative attention and shifts our position beyond a mere observer, luring us into an inside perspective.
As readers we are strongly invested in the focalisation of the final passage. At this point, we have lost any certainty as to who is speaking the narrative. At first the reader will assume that the first person perspective still refers to Susan Barton, as she has narrated all previous sections in the first person present tense. This assumption gets tested when a female dead body appears; one might argue that it now is the disembodied narrative voice of Susan Barton speaking, visiting her own history and seeing her own dead body. This idea might lead to the competing notion of the voice of Coetzee entering his own text in the first person form – not all too implausible considering Coetzee’s fondness of literary experiments and metafictional and metanarrative interruptions and intrusions.118 In the second passage the same options could be considered. So far the narrative visitor was in a neutral mode of observation, making its way into the setting, but taking no action and not interfering with the scene. The unexpected turn of events as the narrative voice enters the narrative and takes action topples all previous assumptions of a disembodied narrator. We as readers can no longer avoid inhabiting the narrative point of view, having lost all footing of where to locate the narrative I. Coetzee’s handling of perspective draws us into the text, forces us to inhabit the central perspective and look into the century-old face of slavery, condensed in the face of
118 This taste for experiments can be seen in his criticism, linguistic studies, fictions and reading preferences: “But I must say that I get impatient with fiction that doesn’t try something that hasn’t been tried before, preferably with the medium itself.” (Auster/Coetzee 2013: 165)
138
Friday, who speaks for all of them as his roar flows out to all corners of earth. This account should move any reader and touch his emotions, ultimately awakening our empathy in listening to the pain of Friday closing this narrative.119
Rosemary Jolly speaks of the “helplessness of power” (read: narrative authority) being demonstrated in the final section exposing the “heartlessness of the enterprise of representation.” (Jolly 1996: 7) According to her postcolonial reading, “[t]his violence [of representation] becomes evident, ironically, when the narrative fails to master its subjects: when it ‘loses its voice.’” (Jolly 1996: 3) In her reading Susan Barton narrates the final section, but at the very end makes way for the embodied Friday, “speaking in the voice of the unnamed, indeterminate narrator.” (Jolly 1996: 144) Helen Tiffin sees Coetzee’s narrative method as “continually rehearsing Friday’s silence itself as the interpretative problem which fractures all the potential narratives Barton and Foe attempt to construct.” (Tiffin 1987: 30-31) The argument continues:
In the final chapter of the novel he dispenses with the author, Foe, whose image now coalesces with that of the Captain, Cruso/e, and all of white slaving imperial history and its complicit narrativization, and with the female “castaway” Susan Barton. The “I” narrator now becomes “Coetzee,” who, as author still necessarily the “foe” of alterity, but who now situates himself directly in relation to Friday and Friday’s potential for speech. (Tiffin 1987: 31)
Dominic Head, citing Ina Gräbe, also proposes that Coetzee himself enters the narrative, as suggested above:
[T]he final section represents the most self-conscious diegetic level, so that the appearance of a voice representing Coetzee permits the author to occupy the ‘privileged position of the ultimate focalizer of the previous three levels’. This also demands of the reader ‘a reassessment of the entire foregoing enterprise’. [...] Indeed, the effect of the final section is to offer a compromise rather than an authorial imposition. (Head 1997: 123)
This argument tunes in well with the entire text’s questioning of narrative authority. Denis Donaghue is quoted by Robert Post: “I take it to be the voice of the poetic imagination.” (Post 1989: 152) Post also quotes Jane Gardam as being convinced that in these pages “Coetzee himself goes searching for the body of Friday, seeking it in the waters off the island in the wreckage of the slave ship.” (Post 1989: 153) Post himself offers another reading:
119 In the first section of the narrative Susan uses earplugs to “shut out the sound of the wind. So I became deaf, as Friday was mute; what difference did it make on an island where no one spoke?” (35) The roaring wind corresponds with the roar emitted from Friday’s mouth in the final section, and Susan’s refusal to listen is telling. On another level, she seems to attempt to equal Friday’s lack of his speaking faculty, but oddly by shutting off her hearing. If she were interested in a shared experience, not talking and thereby turning mute would be a more adequate but just as pointless an exercise. Instead, she closes off her receptive faculty in favour of her transmitting faculty; Susan Barton must insist to maintain her sender position for the sake of her narrative, holding on to her authority. Giving up her narrative authority would mean the immediate end of the story, but by keeping it she can impossibly achieve any more intimate proximity and understanding of Friday: she is caught in her own world of words and meanings.
139 Another possibility is that Susan Barton continues to speak in these final pages as she has
done throughout the narrative […] Through his speaker, Susan Barton, the poetic imagination of Coetzee is calling out for nonwhite South Africans to be permitted speech so that their plight will be heard and recognized throughout the world. (Post 1989: 152-53)
Apart from the last bit about a direct reading it cannot be dismissed too easily. Though a literary-minded reader would most likely prefer more complex interpretations, such as that offered by Sue Kossew:
Coetzee’s rewriting of this ending evokes a complex and ambivalent response: Friday’s “voice” still has no words (“bodies are their own signs”) and the author-figure of the final section is unable to resist its power (“it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face”), yet avoids speaking for Friday, allowing his voice to emerge only in a metaphoric way. It could be argued that, after the models of authorship rejected in the previous sections, this model most closely approximates that of Wilson Harris’s “infinite rehearsal” (and the repetition, echoing and rewriting of previous sections reinforces this reading), which seeks to avoid appropriation, absorption and betrayal of the subject by restructuring patriarchal language. (Kossew 1996: 175; drawing on: Maes-Jelinek 1989)
One critic sees a possible connection to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Mike Marais an allusion to Wordsworth – the second thought more original and likely (Marais 1998b: 57). Surely many more varieties of similar and maybe more ingenious readings are imaginable. The final section takes seriously Walter Benjamin’s notion of the end of a narrative representing death (in: Der Erzähler, 1936/37), which Rukmini Nair could be imagined giving a comment on in her volume Narrative Gravity:
Death. The point has been made before that the end of a story anticipates death. The closing of the narrative sequence, its coda, marks a formal separation from all the other cogs still merrily spinning along. It metaphorically describes the final dissolution of the ‘self’. (Nair 2003: 24)