Contesting the (Post)Colonial Master Narrative: Epistemology, Authority, and the Transfer to Nonauthor in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe
Patrick Buchanan
Patrick Buchanan is a third-year undergraduate student at Presbyterian College, majoring in History and Religious Studies with two minors in Latin American Studies and English. He is interested in Latin American and Brazilian history and pays special attention to postcolonialism, race, and identity as essential factors in methodological, theoretical, and material concerns. He intends to pursue a PhD in history to research and teach on matters of race, national identity, and postcolonial thought. Currently, Patrick is researching nineteenth century marronage resistance in Brazil and liberation theology throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Abstract
This analysis assesses the power dynamics of Friday and Susan, the African and White subversives, respectively, in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe—a reconceptualization of Daniel Defoe’s master text, Robinson Crusoe. My reading of Foe captures the problematic middle ground narrator and memoirist Susan, postcolonial in theory, occupies as a European in practice—she is (post)colonial. In trying to understand Friday, Africanized in Foe, and place him in her island memoir, she superimposes onto him a European identity and epistemology. Significantly, she fails to comprehend that he operates in his own non-vocal, non-written narrative phenomenologically and ontologically, experientially and bodily—his own epistemological framework against the master text. To this end, I consider sources that explore Friday’s embodied meaning, Susan’s narrative authority, or Friday’s subversion. Such a critical conversation provides nuance to the analysis of master narrative and colonial superimpositions on epistemology and identity as they clash with Friday’s enduring, “nonauthorial,” phenomenological, and embodied narrative. This perdurable nonauthorship, non-phonological and non-literary, is Friday’s mode of resistance to communication or re-education at the hand of colonial, Western narrative authority, phonological and literary, through Susan. I coalesce such conflict and resistance into a direct assessment of the Susan–Friday relationship and power dynamic, a gap that must be properly bridged. I approach a reading of Foe with this identity-building power dynamic as my central focus. (Post)colonial Susan actualizes the colonialist narrative, though Friday’s nonauthorship resists such hegemony. As a discourse with Robinson Crusoe, I also evaluate how this resistance is a response to Friday’s characterization in Defoe’s master narrative.
Contesting the (Post)Colonial Master Narrative: Epistemology, Authority, and the Transfer to Nonauthor in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe
Texts are litmus tests for reality, presenting archetypes of humanity alongside paradigms of meaning for readers, most effectively in a “master” text. Colonialism as a theory and reality that iterates itself as archetype and paradigm in frameworks such as Manifest Destiny and scientific positivism, particularly in literature. Daniel Defoe produced one such colonialist text, Robinson Crusoe, which defined an entire literary genre (“Robinsonade”) and its trope of a White, often European, man stranded on an island, civilizing it at the risk of becoming uncivilized himself. Protagonist-archetype Robinson Crusoe is stranded yet persists as a civilized survivalist, ultimately returning home. He is not alone. Friday, the “indigenous element,” accompanies Crusoe on his return as a litmus test for civilizing the colonized “other.” The text ends here and does not explore the implications of bringing this “uncivilized” Caribbean native to England, nor the effects of the island. However, the narrator, Robinson Crusoe himself, is a clever statement of what might happen were it a historical event—the shipwrecked European would likely ruminate and translate his experiences to paper for a popular audience.
J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) both follows and strays from this gap in the master text. Coetzee materializes the “master” author as “Foe,” the character memorializing the story of the island through a new protagonist, Susan Barton. Its paradigms center around her and Friday, who is now an African shipwrecked alongside Crusoe—not a native. As a White South African (Afrikaner) and postcolonialist, he emphasizes the colonizer–colonized juxtaposition.
In Foe, Susan is not shipwrecked with Cruso (absent “e”) and Friday; instead, she is a late arrival in the beginning of the novel, understood to occur in the 18th century. She introduces herself to the reader by narrating the island story for Foe during the publication process and insinuates that she came from Bahia, Brazil: a center of the sugar- and slave-trade. She finds Friday unsettling, particularly because of a tongue mutilation either at the hands of Cruso or previous owners that renders him mute. As for his origin as slave or cargo in the Atlantic Trade, Coetzee does not explore ownership prior to the island and intentionally renders Friday silenced physically and, by extension, figuratively as a voice in the text—a rejection of the colonialist tendency to superimpose voice and identity onto a colonized character. As in Defoe’s text, the marooned are ferried back to England, though Cruso dies and Susan is left with, much to her chagrin, Friday in her care.
More direct than Crusoe in Defoe’s text, Susan wants to popularize her story and become a famous heroine of English folklore, obsessing over Friday as one does in the colonialist–colonized duality and literary juxtaposition. Though Friday is silenced as a speaker and narrative in the text, Coetzee adeptly offers a narrative through Friday’s resistance and inaction to Susan (and Foe, for that matter), intentionally ambiguous but subversive to Susan’s “civilizing” attempts. Friday is a nonauthorial positioning in Coetzee’s contestation of the master narrative. Essentially, Susan and Friday are the living inheritors of the island narrative, and textual authority is challenged by the phenomenological and ontological narrative of the silent Friday—action and embodiment over origin and thought, over writing and speaking.
However, Susan also occupies a middle ground as a subversive, if colonialist, female. She deconstructs the patriarchal norms that Foe propagates for the master narrative in her refusal to tell her story framed around her preliminary search for a missing daughter in Brazil, not to mention her obstinacy in giving Foe the details of her daughter’s disappearance, cognizant of what power and freedom the storyteller has in sharing and withholding (Coetzee 123). Her agency is subversive to Foe’s (patriarchal) intentions. This has led many scholars to argue she is a feminist, even postcolonial, interpretation of the master text, Robinson Crusoe. As a counterpoint to this monolithic reading, I read Foe with an understanding of the feminine, colonial White hegemony over the colonized African explicit in the novel. Her colonial identity as a Bahian resident and European and authority over Friday is antithetical, but not obliterating, to the postcolonial feminist identity Susan is granted. I argue that this middle ground appears (post)colonial as she tries to understand Friday, but actually reiterates colonialist frameworks and perspectives on the colonized—hence the parentheses.
Scholarship on Friday and Susan is not monolithic. Friday’s interpretation as a scapegoat for guilt and historic violence, albeit with its own meaning (Samolsky), finds friction with interpreting the actions of Friday as a zero, or negative space, subverting the colonial canon (Egerer). New scholarship increasingly marks Friday as literary silence—rendered subversive—in all cases, whether fiction (Coetzee) or metafiction, or the narratives in the story presented by Susan and Foe (Poyner). Others have, critically, acknowledged Susan’s dominance (Rickel), but failed to recognize the nonauthorial voice of Friday: literarily silent, though embodying his own narrative through his actions and traumatic bodily mutilations. This challenge to literary phono-centrism has become recently recognized in scholarship. Still, this scholarship falls short of placing it under the power-broking authority of Susan, who embodies this phono-centrism and tries to ignore, or overshadow, the phenomenological, embodied meanings of Friday (Daragmeh & Shehab). Some try to empower Susan as a subversive feminist in her bodily meanings, but, again, fail to assess the power dynamic and authority she more crucially and consistently embodies (Rejeb). A more recent conglomerate recognized this power dynamic, but like earlier scholars, they failed to scrutinize the Susan-Friday relationship (Abbasi, Dibavar, and Pirnajmuddin). My analysis extends the discourse of Friday’s embodied meaning as well as the authoritative, powerbroking nature of Susan, synthesizing what these essential sources explore in separate frameworks. However, I offer a contrast, too: Susan tries to contain Friday’s meaning within her epistemological framework, while Friday nevertheless persists as a resistor and nonauthorial master to his own identity and narrative. This occupies the latter half of my analysis.
Susan, a White European woman, occupies a unique middle ground that is an extension of hegemony over the colonized “other”. Thus, a central concern arises: How does Susan Barton, as (post)colonial authority, subvert the truth of Friday’s phenomenological, embodied meanings, and how does Friday contest this throughout the novel and cumulatively at the end? Susan wants to essentialize Friday and keep him within her own framework of meaning and truth, given her interpretations of Friday’s mutilation, ritual action, phenomenological activity, and writing. However, these elements place Friday as the inevitable storyteller of historical, organic truth—neither the subversive White European nor the colonist but a “nonauthor,” not speaking or writing within the Western milieu. This premise overtly operates throughout the text but becomes especially salient at the end, when Friday’s narrative endures past the lives of his colonial counterparts and remains inaccessible to Susan’s colonialist epistemology. Coetzee responds to Defoe, yet layers of meaning present themselves for postcolonial and identity studies.
I: Susan as Colonialist
To begin the approach, an understanding of Susan’s attempt to contain Friday narratively and epistemologically is necessary. This is done as they squat in Foe’s house, lacking the capital (and patriarchal-racial) means to subsist otherwise. To contain and subvert Friday’s truth and meaning, she treats Friday with paternalism and soliloquies in his presence as a medium for addressing her own meanings and sentiments. Moreover, throughout their time in London, she dwells on his aforementioned tongue mutilation for her own peace of mind and even assesses his ritual, cultural practices to fit her own worldview and interpretations of meaning in keeping with containment.
Susan incessantly paternalizes Friday and tramples his agency in accordance with her sense of authority and paternalistic benevolence over an inferior, “inept” African. To this point, Susan attempts to send Friday to Africa after what seems to be a revelation that Friday longed for Africa and shirked Susan’s presence (Coetzee 90-91). Nonetheless, she manages to find passage to Africa for Friday, but sees through the ship's plans to send him into the clandestine but booming slave trade and believes it would trouble her conscience if she returned him to such enslavement. Here, she claims protection over Friday as a begrudging mother does: “A woman may bear a child she does not want…yet be ready to defend it with her life” (Coetzee 100-103). She subdues his claim to freedom and autonomy, framing him as an incapable, universally-dominated archetype—the child. Aside from clearly overlooking her own complicity in enslaving Friday, she continually dehumanizes Friday. In her final statement, dialoguing with Foe, Susan claims she is a substantial character in the narrative of the island, though she overlooks Friday’s substance, instead turning to his incessant writing of “OOOOOO,” not deigning to communicate with or notate him, as evidence of his childlike progress towards humanity (Coetzee 142-143). She assumes it is slow progress at lettering and avoids any other meaning of overt resistance through perpetuating his own epistemology or narrative. In this way, she ensures she is the authority in the text and also avoids any contrition within her superiority complex. Indeed, she makes such a mindset all the more salient in acknowledging her greater agency and privilege, interpreting Friday as an “inept child” unable to speak and in need of parental guidance (Coetzee 113-114). Susan argues Friday is an infantile silence to be superimposed, a medium with which she can add or interpret meaning, whereas her silence is part of a resistant, mature identity.
When Susan does not condescend to educate or understand Friday, she tends to soliloquize to him on meanings of civilization or varied ruminations, especially so near the end of the novel when she is composing her memoirs on the island and reflecting on their newfound lifestyle. First, she discusses the island and the importance of altering their experiences in order to add “spectacle:” a cannibalistic, subservient Friday and a bellicose, virile Cruso conquering island and Susan alike (Coetzee 75). Here, she marks Friday as an edifice for her own interpretation and essentialization of their experiences together, as well as prior occurrences. She then discusses his tongue mutilation in detail, trying to come to terms with what she will never discern truthfully, but she hopes it resulted from the mere inhumanity of Cruso rather than admitting a history of violence towards Friday and slaves. This is reinforced by the fact that she has yet to observe Friday’s tongue as an “aversion came over [her] that we all feel for the mutilated” (Coetzee 77). Her aversive derision persists until the end, as does her obsession to find out the truth of the mutilation, though only within her letter writing or soliloquies—the Western frameworks of story and knowledge. This soliloquy places her many concerns and interpretations of Friday in an explicitly futile light—she is talking to someone who cannot respond, ensuring that her epistemology and frameworks coalesce rather than reshape themselves according to the colonized perspective, mutilated literarily.
As implied, Susan is incessantly occupied and appalled with Friday’s tongue mutilation. However, she cares less about justice or compassion and more about knowing the truth for herself and clearing her conscience as a European—hence her refusal to send him off to the slave trade prior. When she tries to initially cogitate on the origin of the mutilation, her disdain for Friday and his traumatic disfigurement wins out, allowing the colonialist Susan to deem him an unimportant (silent) figure needed for the colonial lifestyle but repulsive to the colonial social mind, like “any house slave in Brazil” (Coetzee 19). It is contempt that drives her need to know, in an attempt to clear her conscience of what would otherwise be recognized as simple barbarism towards slaves—and yet her ties to the slave trade are reiterated, referencing her Bahian experience of plantation (fazenda) slavery. Moreover, this mutilation has also been part of an interpretation of Friday as a scapegoat, or sort of pharmakos, in which colonial barbarities are sensationalized and exceptionalized, not archetypal of the greater colonial slave paradigms, but instead a severe “other” (Samolsky). However, his tongue is never directly denoted as mutilated or absent; all meaning is spoken or translated through Susan but ultimately comes from Cruso, the only one to ever observe and empirically interpret the condition of Friday’s tongue—and also the one who Susan scapegoats continually. It is mere hearsay the reader and even Susan is left with, rendering Friday not a scapegoat, but a marginal and silent narrative character—not an author.
Moreover, Susan tries to claim epistemological authority over the greater phenomenological, or embodied, meanings and cultural practices of Friday based on her narration and interpretation of the activities. These activities are Friday’s petal casting in remembrance or redress of the shipwreck, flute playing, and robe whirling, all of which leave him in an out-of-body trance. Initially, Susan ponders Friday’s petal casting over the shipwreck, which likely harbored other African slaves and European traders or merchants but only left him and Cruso alive. When she observes it on the island, the reader assumes with Susan that it is an offering to his gods or a rite of some sanctimonious sort, evidence of a “soul” she otherwise fails to recognize (Coetzee 26-27). However, Foe suggests it may be remembrance of lost ones on a slave ship, given Cruso’s dominance over Friday—the first recognition of a history of violence and trauma set against Susan’s recent reinterpretation of it as filial piety (Coetzee 131-132). Crucially, Susan as a subversive colonialist still sensationalizes and dehistoricizes what the Westerner will never know. Perhaps even more telling of Susan’s power-brokering, the master narrator, Foe, conjectures much more pragmatically. Rather than a phenomenological or ontological analysis, she tries to understand the activity in her own intellectual, Western framework, the epistemological essentialization over Friday.
Aside from petal casting, Susan is bewildered by Friday’s somatic and musical experiences. While at Foe’s house, Susan happens to see Friday wear Foe’s robe, followed by a whirling-dervish-esque experience that leaves him in an entranced state. Susan interprets this as an out-of-body, transcendent experience different from their existence in Foe’s dark, empty London house. Critically, he shirks Susan’s interruptions and even sings or enhances his trance according to uninterpreted stimuli (Coetzee 85). The reader does not literally know why Friday is doing this, nor how he appears to leave his body, but we are left with Susan’s, as well as our own, intentionally ambiguous interpretations. Despite the implications of such a phenomenological and ontological experience, Susan merely explains that she does not care so long as he carries out his duties, especially because he refuses to let her take the robe from him. Susan fails to come to terms with its meaning and repress the action, which becomes a challenge to her narrative epistemological authority, in that she cannot understand it from an intellectual and Western identity.
Paradoxically, when Friday plays the flute, Susan appropriates this entrancement. Repeating the same six notes, Friday plays the flute and whirls once again. Now, however, Susan tries to appropriate his practice and teach him more notes, an attempt to communicate: “Is conversation not simply a species of music[?]” (Coetzee 89). She thus reinforces her narrative and epistemological authority over Friday, rejecting his identity-crafting, separatist ritual by claiming that limited communication may occur. Since Susan is coercing communication through music and not reading or speaking, it challenges a reading of Foe as literarily- and phonologically-centric (Daragmeh & Shehab). Indeed, Susan’s statement is a scrutiny of the premise of hegemonic paradigms such as these, and an attempt to communicate in a phenomenological, versus linguistic, manner. It still remains, however, that the somatic experience of whirling and flute playing was not something within Susan’s interpretive milieu, prompting her to gloss over it in ignorance. Thus Coetzee at once subverts Western epistemology and implies that the Westerner cannot leave such a framework, although they may see the deconstruction, a new “species” of epistemology and interpretation.
Indeed, Susan’s appropriation and epistemological dominance are principal aspects of the Western social mind, which is explained in both the struggle between Foe and Susan over the master narrative and the triumph of the former as a patriarchal and colonialist master narrator (Abbasi, Dibavar, and Pirnajmuddin). Susan is susceptible to social authority in her attempt to understand and interpret Friday’s cultural and ritual practices for herself, even embodying them, too: an important hegemony during the colonial period and something which readers would want extrapolated or interpreted during the period Foe occurs (the 1700s). Susan attempts to gain authority, yet adheres to the greater social authority of her time—a reinforcement of colonial ties and tendencies. The social authority of Western epistemology, too, contains Susan—and yet fails to contain Friday.
II: Friday as Nonauthorial Resistor
With Susan’s authoritative epistemological conquests in mind, the underlying subversion to the narrative and epistemological authority of the colonialist comes to fruition. Friday remains resistant to the master narrative and epistemology with the very same practices Susan tries to interpret and superimpose meaning onto—petal casting, whirling, and flute playing. Despite Susan’s attempt to essentialize Friday’s actions and meanings, Friday’s character remains an illuminating narrative in and of itself, an interesting inversion and subversion of master narrative as well as epistemological authority as presented in the metafictional (present in another fiction, but characterized as we have seen) Susan and Foe. These master writers and even Coetzee himself have been charged with essentialization (Poyner). Nevertheless, this research argues that Friday becomes an effective, particularized nonauthor in the sense that he is outside of the literary, phonological framework of Susan and Foe but inside a salient system of phenomenological and ontological narrative meaning for himself and silent to the reader through the tongue mutilation. Prior to this analysis, Susan’s interpretations are seen as modes of authority for Susan (Rickel). I contend that Friday’s actions are a nonauthorial narrative with an inherent and overt subalternity.
These paradigms are opaque yet granular in the island section of Foe, considering the general enslavement of Friday in both Defoe’s and Coetzee’s texts, though now he is a detailed representation of African slavery and colonialism (Coetzee 17-20). More specifically, he is a servant to Susan and Cruso, but shirks wholesale colonization under Cruso as he refuses to learn language or culture like the celluloid Robinson Crusoe Friday. This is especially true because of a history of bodied violence and trauma, not mythic noble savagery, being the paradigmatic feature of Foe’s versus Robinson Crusoe’s Friday, respectively. Additionally, Friday works better with Cruso than with the later authority, Susan, who is both derisive of and appalled by Friday. This is because Cruso does not “civilize” Friday in the way that Susan attempts to. He instead works with his “servant’s” milieu: his humming and phenomenological rites as evinced in the whirling, flute playing, and petal casting which Susan inevitably disdains and hegemonically reinterprets (Coetzee 16-18). Thus, colonialist Susan continues to be bewildered and stupefied by Friday, attempting to change his character whilst the original colonial authority acted accommodatingly and thereby more comfortably with the colonized. This is a result of their alliance being a necessity of survival, whereas Susan is a mere colonial authority superimposing meaning and narrative in a mother country space upon their return—the new, historical colonialist authority that Coetzee posits.
A salient example of Friday’s resistance to authority is the way in which he ignores Susan’s bewilderment at his music from the very start—indifferent, not scared or subservient to the whim of his master (Coetzee 23). This is the way in which Friday begins his operation in the colonial milieu, shifting from Cruso to Susan, though it is explicit that power dynamics shift for the worse for Friday under explicitly colonialist Susan in London. Critically, however, he acts indifferent to domination when it comes to his own actions and epistemology and shirks his new colonizer’s communication attempts, as we have seen.
Returning to the cultural, ritualistic elements of Friday, his entrancement practices using the robe and the flute in London are also a form of subaltern resistance, perpetuating the nonauthorial narrative in Foe. In other words, he obstinately retains his practices, seeing through Susan’s intentions to stamp them out from the start. Initially, when Susan tries to take Foe’s robe from him during the night “to bring him to his senses,” he is awake and holding the robe, to Susan a sign that he “read her mind” or expected such an action, though this is, like all other instances, the textual authority of Susan (Coetzee 85). The true nonauthorial resistance is the fact that the reader and narrator (Susan) do not know what Friday is thinking nor doing, he is merely an actor and resistor to Susan’s designs.
This narrative of resistance is later reinforced by the aforementioned flute playing, which places “his soul more in Africa than in Newington,” an interesting salience present for Susan’s part on his phenomenological experience (Coetzee 89). Though within Susan’s interpretive framework, it is still an illuminating reminder that he does not merely appear dead or catatonic, but entirely absent from consciousness yet exhibiting his own mode of meaning and feeling. Otherwise, he would feel her touch more than what Susan likens to a “fly’s” touch. A direct implication of his resistance is the anger that it provokes in Susan, correctly seeing this as a challenge to her attempts in educating and communicating with Friday within colonial Western paradigms. Essentially, Friday is reinforcing his phenomenological entranced experiences as a type of nonauthorial narrative and identity recognizable by the reader in the abstract but not epistemologically—the experience holds a secret experiential meaning for Friday. Moreover, it is a means of escape from London, Susan, and narrative colonial authority—a materialization of resistance and escape from the colonial mind and authority.
An interesting enterprise near the end of the novel occurs, in which Susan elects to teach Friday writing. Though this is a form of narrative authority and epistemology-crafting, it is more effectively interpreted as a mode of resistance for Friday. When the colonial authority, alongside Foe, tries to teach Friday to write, the latter imposes his own meaning onto the slate. Susan, reiterating her paternalism, teaches him as an adult teaches a child, starting with letters, but grows annoyed by his apparent indifference, even at one point detecting mockery as she chastises him: “Would it not be an African [mockery], dark to my English eye?” (Coetzee 137). This is a cogent representation of the Western, White interpretation of actions as mockery or a manifestation of vulnerability—and a direct challenge to feminist interpretations of Susan, manifested through her challenge to Foe and precarious position as storyteller (Rejeb). Nonetheless, Friday draws “walking eyes”—to the colonizers, a meaningless, primitivistic scrawling. When the authority figure, Susan, tries to erase it in scrutiny, he holds tight to the slate and erases it to avoid translation or reformation (Coetzee 138). Here, he is claiming his own nonauthor notation and refusing epistemological transmutation for the Western mind.
Additionally, the conclusion to Susan’s narrative (though not the novel, which will be addressed shortly) ends with her discussion of substantiality and humanity, which she argues she and her daughter had, thereby legitimizing their presence in Foe’s master narrative of her island memoirs. When Foe questions Friday’s place in her example, she looks over at his reformed writing, in which he now writes “OOOOOO” on multiple pieces of paper, claiming he has begun to learn letters (Coetzee 142-143). Ambivalent on purpose, Foe’s colonial conclusion to the narrative implies that Susan is unsure of Friday’s humanity and substantive nature, despite his embodied experience and literal existence as well as his customs (some of which, like humming and music playing, persist), from her arrival on the island until their life with Foe. These two writing interactions have been interpreted as a metaphor for tabula rasa, the Enlightenment concept of the blank slate (tabula rasa) humans are born with as children, a reinforcement of new meaning and innocence, in this case representing the postcolonial subaltern position, as evinced by Friday, the “zero,” in the latter half of Foe (Egerer).Under a nonauthor lens, however, it seems that his writing enterprise harbors resistant meaning for himself, a pure Friday-epistemology that is resistant and not under the whim of the colonial mind. From his whirling and flute playing to his writing systems and early forms of autobiographical autonomy, this resistance by and for Friday is the nonauthorial contestation to the master narrative.
The crucial element of Friday’s nonauthorial precedence is Foe’s final chapter, in which Friday’s permanence and narrative voice is illuminated. At the end, the narrative departs from the contest over narrative between Foe and Susan and the authority over Friday. Here, Friday is free from colonial authority when a new and unknown narrator visits a house, likely Foe’s house. This unknown narrator arrives on site posthumously in the case of Susan and an unidentified man found in the house. Significantly, Friday is still alive and lets out “voices of the island,” sounds of nature and his world, his own form of nonauthorial meaning. This was not a phenomenon easily interpreted by the narrator, who also hears sparrows chirp, mattocks thud, and “the call of a voice” (Coetzee 146-147). However, Friday is on the floor while Susan and the unknown man are lying in a bed, an important reinforcement of colonial authority. Though seemingly antithetical to his persistence, it is all the more telling of Friday’s narrative authority in the conclusion—he is the final exposé and denouement. As this analysis has also shown, Friday is alive and autonomous as an embodied, nonauthor force, operating with phenomenological, embodied meanings intentionally silent in the literary, phonetic frameworks of Susan, Foe, and even Cruso. While colonial authority persists, as Susan’s does both in her dominance throughout their relationship as well as the narrative authority present in her narration of Foe, Friday is the only one who remains alive to tell a firsthand account, albeit an account using the voice of the island, sparrows and mattocks. This is Foe’s way of avoiding a superimposition of meaning and narrative on the African Friday, though still allowing his nonauthor presence to persist even after the conclusion of Susan’s, and Foe’s, narrative and epistemological authority over both text and reader—not the othered character.
In the following section, the narrator finally acknowledges the history of violence present on Friday’s body as well as the endurance of his petal casting and a reinforcement of his immortalized narrative when he visits the shipwreck of Cruso and Friday. Significantly, a rope or chain scar is found on his neck posthumously during this second interaction (Coetzee 147). Furthermore, the narrator sees the petals Friday cast into the water directly above the shipwreck, enduring yet still—intentionally—lacking interpretation. Eventually, the unknown narrator finds Friday, who turns and lets out a “slow stream” from his mouth, unending and without breath or any signs of physical exertion (Coetzee 149). Naturally, this is ambiguous and unanalyzed, representative of the meaning Friday harbors enduring past the Western canon and systems of knowledge. His body and self are meaningful enough and permanent enough for the reader and even the narrator to cogitate on, as it had been throughout Foe in light of the present analysis of resistance and nonauthorial narrative.
What is absent from the nonauthorial narrative but present in Susan’s is the manic search for why Friday’s tongue is mutilated, whether absent or deformed. This is a direct rejection of the colonial tendency to sensationalize the historicity of barbaric mutilations and violence on the colonized body, the only meaning of which is secondhand from Cruso, not even observed or analyzed by Susan outside of her ruminations and incessant curiosity, or rather derision. Though petal casting admittedly does not have an interpretation through Friday, it is intentional: a cogent reminder of the problem of cultural ritual interpretations and translations, always misunderstood, misinterpreted, or deconstructed by the Western colonial milieu. Different, here, however, is the fact that the tongue is not observed by the narrator nor did its mutilation, of course, occur through the agency of Friday. Aside from the nonauthor exposé, this absence in Friday’s nonauthor subaltern narrative impresses upon the reader its unimportance in interpreting and understanding the colonized as expressed by and for the colonized. It is, instead, a colonial trauma and barbarism, important for the colonial narrative of Susan and Foe.
Ultimately, the duality of Susan’s and Friday’s narrative impresses upon the reader and critic the contest between the colonizer and colonized over narrative. Susan’s goal is to reinterpret the colonized African for her own understanding and profit from memoir writing and publication of their island experience. However, Friday’s goal is an intentionally ambivalent enterprise which produces a resistant narrative of the nonauthor—the non-literary, non-phonological, phenomenological, and ontological narrative. Friday’s nonauthorial identity is unknown yet persistent in the mind of the reader and narrator of Foe alike, a material and phenomenological persistence that trumps the master narrative and transcends into its own reading of the text, as this section proves.
III: Final Reflections and Conclusion
Perhaps reflecting on the phenomenological reading of Friday’s whirling and flute playing reiterates the failed attempts of a feminist subversive to comprehend Friday’s nonauthorial identity. Though Susan tries to understand these practices, as explored in section I, she only perceives his indifference to her communication and attempts at understanding. She notes: “I began to recognize that it might not be mere dullness that kept him shut up in himself, nor [loss of tongue] nor even [speech incapacity], but a disdain for intercourse with me” (Coetzee 90). Thus, her feelings are of contempt and anger, even wanting to strike Friday for his phenomenology: eyes closed, “his soul more in Africa,” her touch no more than a “fly’s.” Susan understands Friday’s action as a denial of human connection, ignoring the fact he is returning to his own lived experience, escaping his prolonged enslavement and the authority Susan harbors over him. When she repeats this process by herself, however, she grows in understanding the rite’s significance, now interpreting it as an escape from colonial authority and displacement in England. She too, enters a trance and envisions “Berkshire,” but fails to feel guilt or compassion for Friday’s plight that she significantly worsened, and which rendered his escapism necessary as the colonized other (Coetzee 95-96). At her most postcolonial—accommodating, interactive—Susan fails to decolonize her behavior and actions, merely trying to embody the whirling process for her own epistemology and interpretation—she fails to understand the nonauthor as a colonial-era European mind and authority.
I present this final reading as a salient reminder of the problematic tendencies of authorities like Susan, less colonial and anti-African than master authorities like Foe, and more accommodating to the African experience and canonical, ideological existence. Even the (post)colonial attempt to come to terms with colonized history and identity falls short of a relativistic interpretation of non-literary, non-phonological meanings as presented in Friday’s phenomenological and embodied narrative. The very attempt to communicate and understand falls short, and it is instead a mere appropriation, or translation, of the subverted colonized experience, inorganic and artificial compared to the organic, authentic, and untranslated narrative that endures past Susan’s containment, yet is not written or spoken. This is the penultimate response to the master text: a nonauthorial, epistemological contestation with the master narrative of Daniel Defoe and, in Coetzee’s world, Susan—colonial and (post)colonial.
Bibliography
Abbasi, Pyeaam; Dibavar, Sara Saei; Pirnajmuddin, Hossein. “Social Mind as Author(ity) in J. M. Coetzee's Foe”, Research in African Literatures, vol. 51, no. 4, 2021, 190-210.
Daragmeh, Abdel Karim; Shehab, Ekremah. “Signs Tell Their Own Stories: Rethinking the Status of Writing and Speech in J. M. Coetzee's Foe.”, Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society, vol. 41, 2013, 183-196.
Egerer, Claudia. “Hybridizing the Zero: Exploring Alternative Strategies of Empowerment in J. M. Coetzee's Foe.” Postcolonialism and Cultural Resistance, IN: Nyman, Jopi(ed.); Stotesbury, John A.(ed.), 1999 pp. 96-101.
Poyner, Jane. “Bodying Forth the Other: Friday and the “Discursive Situation” in Foe”, J. M. Coetzee and the Paradox of Postcolonial Authorship. Ashgate Publishing Co., 2009.
Rejeb, Safia Sahli. “J. M. Coetzee’s Foe: Storytelling and the Power of the Body.” The Quint: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly from the North, vol. 6, no. 4, 2014 Sept, 66-79.
Rickel, Jennifer. “Speaking of Human Rights: Narrative Voice and the Paradox of the Unspeakable in J.M. Coetzee's "Foe" and "Disgrace".” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 40, no. 2, 2013, 160-185.
Samolsky, Russell. “Writing Violence: Bodies and Signs in J. M. Coetzee's Foe.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1993 Fall, p. 6-13.