pp. 157
Published: Secker and Warburg, 1986.
A retelling of Robinson Crusoe from a female perspective, Coetzee's fifth novel performs an intelligent dance around notions of authorship, storytelling, and truth versus fiction.The book opens with a straightforward rendering of the protagonist's, Susan Barton's, castaway period on a desert island, where she spends years with Robinson Cruso and his mute slave Friday. She discovers that Cruso, as master, has built a two-man society based on industry and order. It is a spare existence, resistant to the outside interference of Susan, who attempts on numerous occasions to improve life on the island (by making shoes, by planning to recover tools from a wrecked ship submerged just off the coast). Yet the pattern of days falls into mere tedium, and deeper concerns such as law-making, the recording of history, and how Friday came to lose his tongue, are left unanswered.
Back in London, with Friday as her silent companion and witness, Susan seeks out Daniel Foe, the author whom she wishes to write their story. However, Foe believes that the island portion of Susan's life to be merely the middle of a much larger story, a story about the search for her kidnapped daughter (which resulted in her sailing for Brazil and ultimately being cast away during a mutiny onboard), and the eventual reunion with her. The novel descends from here into a post-modernist allegory where even Susan becomes doubtful of whether she is a real person or a character. She asks 'Who is speaking me? Am I a phantom too? To what order do I belong?'
Friday, and the question of whether his tongue was cut out by Cruso or by a slave-trader when he was a boy, offers the most telling contribution to the novel. Because of his silence, he is easily manipulated. As Susan says, he 'has no command of words and therefore no defence against being re-shaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others. I say he is a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal; I say he is a laundryman and he becomes a laundryman.' Dumb and changeable as Michael K. in Coetzee's previous novel, he is the character of whomever decides to tell his story.
First of all, on the island, he is Cruso's character. Cruso tells Susan he is a cannibal, therefore that is what he is. In London, he is Susan's character, though she is less certain of what she wishes to make of him (cannibal or laundryman or victim of the slave trade). Yet her attempts to understand him better, as when she learns to play the same rudimentary tune he plays infernally on his flute, trying to take him further, into different notes and a different song, prove to be fruitless. He resists interpretation, remains steadfastly ambiguous, to be altered at will.
Foe is a difficult novel, engaging as it does obliquely and from many angles the issues around storytelling. How can we call our individual perception of something the truth of that something? As a consequence, is everything fiction? Yet does fiction, once believed to be the truth, become truth? These are some of the questions posed but not answered by Coetzee. Answers will probably forever remain illusive in a fable so coiled within itself and its very own nature.
This brilliantly executed novel forces readers into an intellectual spiral where they will never be able to look at life, at what is supposedly real, in the same way ever again.
