Qué pasó con los niños

Susan Barton presents the story to the reader, and Coetzee’s rewriting of Defoe’s canonical text insinuates that Defoe appropriated Susan Barton’s story.102 At first glance this appears to be an act of female empowerment in the face of a story originally quite void of any female figures.103 Ultimately she loses her struggle to maintain control over her narrative, since the historical (De)Foe will omit her from the story and embellish her account to accommodate the thrills of adventure and exotism which the public seems to hunger for, the considerations of the book market outweighing all of Susan’s pleas for factuality and

102 _{Attridge discusses Foe as a comment on literary canonicity (Attridge 1992).} 103 _{See Atwell 1991: 106-110.}

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truthfulness.104 Susan Barton rebels against Foe’s utilization and appropriation of her life in terms of his fictional production:

I am not a story, Mr Foe. I may impress you as a story because I began my account of myself without preamble, slipping overboard into the water and striking out for the shore. But my life did not begin in the waves. There was a life before the water which stretched back to my desolate searchings in Brazil, thence to the years when my daughter was still with me, and so on back to the day I was born. All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world. I choose rather to tell of the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire. (131)

The substantiality Susan claims for herself here is questioned earlier in the narrative, when she speaks of herself as a “paper being” or asks: “Who is speaking me?” (117) Dominic Head comments this acutely: “The self-conscious ontological uncertainty of the character, familiar in postmodernist writing, is given a metafictional richness.” (Head 1997: 117)105 Derek Attridge comments: “We are both invited to give this first-person text, with its deictics and its direct address, the emotional and axiological investment of an autobiographical account and at the same time are kept at a distance, made to feel that the very status and function of autobiography are being put in question.” (Attridge 1998: 206) The letters in section II follow a similar logic, even though they are addressed directly to Foe: “To whom am I writing? I blot the pages and toss them out of the window. Let who will read them.” (64) In a different vein, Ulrich Horstmann sees Barton as a projective proxy of Coetzee, whereby he reflects on his artistic self-understanding and self-assessment (Horstmann 2005: 109). Although this follows the all too simple identification of author and character, I consider it as some indicator of Coetzee’s investment in his fiction. The figure of Foe also prompts self-reflection on the work of an author and his dealings with source material. Coetzee himself can be quoted with his comment on Bakhtin:

By no means all historical situations permit the ultimate semantic authority of the creator to be expressed without mediation in direct, unrefracted, unconditional authorial discourse. When there is no access to one’s own personal “ultimate” word, then every thought, feeling, experience must be refracted through the medium of someone else’s discourse, someone else’s style, someone else’s manner. (Coetzee 1996: 223)

104 _{Dominic Head discusses this as a “repression of male experience” and remarks: “Following the premise that} Susan Barton’s story of the island is the Ur-text of Crusoe, we must conclude that she is effaced from this text of Defoe’s, and placed in another (Roxana).” (Head 1997: 115)

105 _{Susan Barton repeatedly comments her own narrative in brackets and directly addresses the reader: “(of} whom I will say more later)” (7); “(I shall have more to say of the terraces later)” (15); “My palms were soon blistered –see! – but I dared not rest […] (11; emphasis added); “(I have not yet told you of Cruso’s stove, which was built very neatly of stone)” (14); “For readers reared on travellers’ tales, the words desert isle may conjure up a place [...]” (7)

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This pins down what Susan Barton somewhat naively was hoping to achieve with her narrative, asking Foe only to brush up on the language – of course a thorough reader of Coetzee will doubt the attainability of “one’s own personal ‘ultimate’ word.”

Narrative Cannibalism or Salvation? Kisses and Embraces

Barton characterizes Foe as “the author who had heard many confessions” (48), but soon she has to learn that his confidentiality is not to be trusted. In Stranger Shores Coetzee writes about Defoe’s original: “It [Robinson Crusoe] is fake autobiography heavily influenced by the genres of deathbed confession and the spiritual autobiography.” (Stranger Shores 22) Rosemary Jolly picks up on this:

The metaphor of salvation resonates throughout the tale of Susan Barton’s endeavors. This metaphor describes what Susan Barton believes narrative can do for her and her ghostly companions, “shipwrecked” by Coetzee in a narrative that imposes the problem of its own dis-closure on its own fictional narrator. Susan Barton has the desire of any castaway to be saved. However, in Coetzee’s novel this desire is given metafictional expression in the linking of Susan Barton’s desire to be saved literally –that is, from the island –to her desire to be saved literally, in and by her own narrative. [...]The rejection of salvation through narrative, signalled by the refusal or rejection of the figures of Friday and Cruso to be translated into narrative, suggests a violation demonstrated in and inflicted by Susan Barton’s narrative throughout the fiction. This violation has its basis in the inability of narrative, especially a narrative that attempts to de-scribe characters as figures of “the truth,” to deal with bodies as bodies, rather than as figures of speech. (Jolly 1996: 7-8)

In its narrative presentation Coetzee goes through similar notions as Defoe did in the original story. Birk and Neumann comment on the structuring of narrative perspective in Robinson

Crusoe: The homodiegetic narrator represents the sole normative centre of meaning and

orientation. In accordance with this unitary projection, polarizing differences are constructed between Crusoe’s European identity and the ethnic alterity of Friday and the indigenous tribes. This abets the idea of an imperial superiority and represents it as the only binding order of reality (Birk/Neumann 2002: 134).

Susan Barton’s struggle with the intended author of her story reflects the power play between character and author; something Coetzee might mean quite literal, as he professes to belong to the school of writers whose characters speak to them and develop their own life within the confines of a narrative (or at least of the paper it is written on). Again, Susan struggles to maintain control over her narrative against Foe’s suggestions of altering it by

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introducing elements such as cannibalism to increase sales.106 Rosemary Jolly applies the metaphor of cannibalism more extensively to the text:

The metaphor used to convey this violation of the body by narrative in Foe is that of cannibalism. The only cannibals in Foe are its narrator-characters, and the only cannibalism is that which they inflict upon their subjects in the process of turning them into stories. Foe, in the process of trying to turn Susan Barton into a story, is depicted actually biting her, then sucking the wound and murmuring, “This is my manner of preying on the living.” (139) (Jolly 1996: 7-8)107

Susan Barton, however, insists on her narrative authority and ownership: “It is still in my power to guide and amend. Above all, to withhold. By such means do I still endeavour to be

father to my story.” (123; emphasis added) Coetzee here highlights the traditionally male

image of the artist ‘giving birth’ to art. In her negotiations with Foe, Susan Barton again and again becomes susceptible to self-doubt – at this point it might be helpful to point out that Coetzee’s depiction of female narrators tends to cast them rather traditionally without reducing their complexity.108 Once Susan Barton finally encounters Foe face to face, she senses her insecure ontological status as a fictional character, even proposing the absence of any addressee (in section II her letters were explicitly addressing Foe):

Why do I speak, to whom do I speak, when there is no need to speak?

In the beginning I thought I would tell you the story of the island and, being done with that, return to my former life. But now all my life grows to be story and there is nothing of my own left to me. I thought I was myself and this girl a creature from another order speaking words you made up for her. But now I am full of doubt. I am doubt itself. Who is speaking to me? Am I a phantom too? To what order do I belong? And you: who are you? (133)

At this moment Foe kisses her, as if to prove her substantiality, and she returns the kiss; similarly Susan had embraced and kissed the girl, supposedly her child, just shortly before. These gestures are somewhat mechanical – as are both the intercourses with Cruso and later with Foe; almost as if Coetzee wanted to demonstrate how physical interaction (in the spirit of embodiedness) can run empty without an accompanying motion of the heart, i.e. the sympathetic imagination. A telling remark of Susan shows her emphasis on word exchanges as superior to physical contact: “Who would venture to say that what passes between lovers is of substance (I refer to their lovemaking, not their talk), yet is it not true that something is passed between them, back and forth, and they come away refreshed and healed for a while of their loneliness?” (97; original italcs) Immediately after their coupling Cruso dies aboard the

106 _{To which she candidly replies: “All I say is: What I saw, I wrote. I saw no cannibals; and if they come after} nightfall and fled before the dawn, they left no footprint behind.” (54) Which of course ironically alludes to the emblematic scene of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe discovering footprints on the beach.

107 _{Josephine Dodd takes this one step further and sees literary cannibalism at work in Coetzee’s appropriation of} intertexts: “There are plenty of stories of daughters in search of their mothers: A Room of One’s Own is one, and one which Coetzee seems happy enough to vampirise in Foe. Adrienne Rich’s poem ‘Diving into the Wreck’ is another.” (Dodd 1998: 161)

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ship carrying them towards the English metropolis; note the cannibalistic undertones of her appropriation of Cruso, of whom she claims to have inherited the story of the island: “Do you think of me, Mr Foe, as Mrs Cruso or as a bold adventuress? Think what you may, it was I who shared Cruso’s bed and closed Cruso’s eyes, as it is I who have disposal of all that Cruso leaves behind, which is the story of his island.” (52)

Of Foe she expects narrative salvation: “Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr Foe: that is my entreaty.” (51) These exchanges are not forms of empathetic engagement, but hollow attempts at feigning intimacy. As a reader we experience no warmth or gentleness in these proceedings, but observe a strategic interplay framed by issues of authorship and narrative authority. Susan’s comment points in a similar direction: “Thus I conclude you are aware that ghosts can converse with us, and embrace and kiss us too.” (134) Not the “full electric being” (EC 111) is enacted here, and Coetzee leaves little doubt about it. However, one can sense a yearning in Susan Barton. Susan craves for a kiss, for an embrace: an answering kiss: “Why do you think we do not kiss statues […]?” (79) But Cruso and Foe have little to give her; her reflections on being a saviour for Cruso and a muse for Foe are not shared by the men she preys upon (Foe could be said to prey on her as well, as the above scene shows; whereas Cruso is impartial to her advances. Cruso in particular is characterized as an anti-Robinson, void of any ambition to make the island inhabitable or any desire to be saved. Susan Barton stubbornly presupposes a mutual exchange of sympathies with Cruso and Foe, while doubting Friday’s capacities in this respect: “But Friday stood like a statue. [remember Susan asking: Do we kiss statues?] I have no doubt that amongst Africans the human sympathies move as readily as amongst us. But the unnatural years Friday had spent with Cruso had deadened his heart, making him cold, incurious, like an animal wrapt entirely in itself.’ (70) Her remark applies more to Cruso than to Friday, of whom she knows close to nothing.

Mutual Embrace of Paper Ghosts

In analogy to her craving for a mutual embrace, Susan Barton also craves for answers from Friday, whose muteness (he literally has no tongue) complicates the matter considerably and gives his paper being a ghostly quality.109 Susan senses the similarity of her desire for

109 _{See Kossew 1998: 172 and Marais 1996: 69. Also Jolly 1996: 144; and Dominic Head’s chapter “Maze of} Doubting,” (Head 2009: 112-128) which engages with Helen Tiffin’s 1987 essay “Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse.”

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mutual embraces and for answers from Friday: “I say that the desire for answering speech is like the desire for the embrace of, the embrace by, another being.” (80)

The trope of ghosts – which she also applies to her supposed daughter,110 points towards her doubts about her ontological status; even suspecting a force controlling her from the background of her narrative. One of her metafictional comments points – with obvious irony – to the voice that authors her, namely the author Coetzee:

Do we of necessity become puppets in a story whose end is invisible to us, and towards which we are marched like condemned felons? You and I know, in our different ways, how rambling an occupation writing is; and conjuring is surely much the same. We sit staring out the window, and a cloud shaped like a camel passes by, and before we know it our fantasy has whisked us away to the sands of Africa and our hero (who is no one but ourselves in disguise) is clashing scimitars with a Moorish brigand. A new cloud floats past in the form of a sailing-ship, and in a trice we are cast ashore all woebegone on a desert isle. Have we cause to believe that the lives it is given us to live proceed with any more design than these whimsical adventures?’ (135)

The logic of authorial identification with a character (author in disguise), both engaged with an emerging narrative, is almost a parody on Coetzee’s side, since his intricate narrative webs lay bare the mechanics of narrative construction without disrupting the narrative. Susan makes further observations on the profession of writing, which ring true and correspond to other passages in Coetzee’s oeuvre – both in his fiction and in his criticism: “Letters are the mirror of words. Even when we seem to write in silence, our writing is the manifest of a speech spoken within ourselves or to ourselves.” (142)111 Foe drives home the point of Susan Barton’s ontological uncertainty: “But have you considered that your doubts may be part of the story you live, of no greater weight than any other adventure of yours?” (135) This could be taken further and applied in a more general sense to most of Coetzee’s fictional characters, where doubt plays a central role, both for the character and for the reader. And often enough the characters themselves voice their own doubts. For Susan it culminates in her statement quoted above (I am doubt itself) that echoes the position of Magda in In the Heart of the

Country. Doubt also explains Coetzee’s reluctance to give in too easily to ready-made

assumptions. Foe says at one point, after Susan tells him a story about the endless confessions of a woman: “To me the moral of the story is that there comes a time when we must give reckoning of ourselves to the world, and then forever after be content to hold our peace.” (124) Susan comes to a quite different conclusion: “To me the moral is that he has the last word who disposes over the greatest force.” (124) In this case, Foe and his story about

110 _{Another context transplanted from Roxana, where the servant Amy presents the lost daughter to Roxana, who} refuses to acknowledge her. See Atwell 1991: 110 for more detail.

111 _{This points to the dialogism of Bakhtin, to the awakened countervoices within narrative discourse, on which} Carrol Clarkson has commented in terms of grammatical choices in her Coetzee monograph Countervoices.

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Robinson Crusoe prove more powerful than Susan’s narrative – it remains to be seen how Coetzee’s contestation of Defoe’s narrative fares over time.

In an exchange shortly after, Susan attempts again to assert her substantiality, and Foe tries to reassure her by reminding her of her perceptions of the girl, the embrace and kiss given and received, to which Susan replies: “No, she is substantial, as my daughter is substantial and I am substantial; and you too are substantial, no less and no more than any of us. We are all alive, we are all substantial, we are all in the same world.” (152) To which Foe curtly replies: “You have omitted Friday.” (ibid.) This small comment points to the centre of her engagement with Friday, who throughout the first three sections remains insubstantial in regard to his inner life, no matter how hard Susan tries to establish some kind of rapport with him. Accordingly, she announces herself at the beginning of section III on their first visit to Foe: “’It is I, Susan Barton,’ I announced – ‘I am alone, with Friday.’” (113) Friday is an insubstantial shadow to her, and she Claims to remain alone in spite of his company.