Deconstructing "Foe"

Don't delete this, we're working on this project for CLT 300 at Smith.

By" Jordan De Bor, Celia Kitchell, Elliott Berry

"Frame Narrative":

4 parts

Island

Letters to Foe

Discussion/Catching up with Foe

Epilogue-thing

Oppositions: Presence/Absence Voice/Writing Substance/ ? Fiction / “Truth”

Truth/representation

Voice/articulation

Silence/noise

It is dialogical, Bahktin; it refers to an other, which is Foe; he is not an absence (although he is, for much of the book), but a deferred presence- indirect discourse

A constant supplementation (Derrida), the last chapter is a supplement in order to add meaning

The “search for narrative” replaces the search for the daughter; but they are metaphorical inverse; related. Conflicted relation to birthing (dead baby scene), which manifests as a narrative problem.

Susan wants back on the island.

Is the storytelling ever going to give her back the essence? It does and it does not.

Fiction is a form of “lying”

Truth representative of which character? Subject-position. Who becomes powerful as a result of the discourse? Foe…

Reading lesson, writing lesson for Friday; how are going to extract the truth from him? Truth can only be found inrepresentation. “Why haven’t you taught him to speak, cruso?”

Voice, not articulation, is symbolic of Friday.

Body/soul of Friday. “Voice” is of the soul. His body is marked, obvious. His soul is not.

Author function; we have a disparate body of texts which must be unified; frame narrative.

“Invites multiple readings”

“Silencing the woman”: Susan’s role; a bearer of the text who ultimately must be invisible in it – the “father” of the text?

Prolonging of narrative to avoid a certain death, to escape back to the island. Writing to “the public”; writing for prosterity. Whose prosterity?

Mechanism by which the story is organized/told. How do these stories come to light?

What kind of penalty is Foe avoiding/inviting by the fiction he (supposedly) ultimately creates, in that it is fiction?

The organization of Cruso’s island defies colonial centre

The whole Friday's "song" and his "flower ritual" making sense of that "meaninglessness", Susan's attempt to paly along with him as a form of communication

In the final paragraphs of the first section we find that it is actually addressed to Foe.

Post-modern novel points:

What is an "original"

What is "authorization" for fiction?

Repetition.

In original robinson C.: he attempts to replicate colonial england, suceeds. "making bread" "seeing footprint"

Terraces are a gesture of a "meaning to come." Where is that quote about "seeds..?"??? They are also an uncanny repetition.

We are left to wonder "whose fuckin' narrative is this?!" Who is the VOICE HERE? Cruso dies, Friday can't speak, Susan is "Under erasure".? No?

Temporality (past/present) The past of cruso/friday can only be specuylated upon.

Real/unreal Cruso: "but where should I escape to..?" the island becomes the only real place in its unrealness.

Cruso seems to lie.

Trying to construct a "centre" under which meaning could thrive.

What is "false witness"? Inadequate representation?

The ocean as the "womb" in the final sequence of events.

 

Deconstruction

Foe = metafictional text Important b/c questions of authorship and deconstruction are explicit r/t implicit

• Deconstruction of DeFoe’s Cruso myth/story: recontextualization = o Different version of same story or narrative highlights the risk of closing the text to a single reading • Primary Decentering: Cruso denied authorship of his own story (dies before returning to England) o DeFoe’s novel: “The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” (Written by Himself) o New author of island narrative = shifts context + changes reading of the text. • Cruso’s death allow’s all that follow to occur – the ‘play’ of Friday, Susan, Foe o Barthes – “to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”

• Presence &amp; Absence o Presence is an “effect” created through difference, not pure and original • Character’s as texts themselves; lack of presence as writing – “skin, dry as paper, is stretched tight over their bones” • Friday: non-signifier - self-presence that Foe attempts to interrogate; failure for Friday is without language o Excluded from representivity in writing + provides no verbal/written signifier to aid the story-telling • Breath: Derrida, “discrepant by the time of a breath” – Friday, “His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption.” • Friday’s home is his body – Derrida “There is therefore a good and a bad writing: the good and natural is the divine inscription in the heart and the soul; the perverse and artful is technique, exiled in the exteriority of the body.” o Friday has the “voice of the body” o Voice is closer to soul o Writing closer to body • Friday’s lack of language = “a puzzle or hole in the narrative,” the absence at the center (but he is still present) • Writing: Soul v. Body • TEXT - (Friday might not know the meaning of the word truth, I reasoned; nevertheless, if my picture stirred some recollection of the truth, surely a cloud would pass over his gaze; for are the eyes not rightly called the mirrors of the soul?) • - This casting of petals was the first sign I had that a spirit or soul call it what you will - stirred beneath that dull and unpleasing exterior. o

• Speech v. Writing – first 2/3 of novel is speech, no writing • Friday (non-signifier) v. Cruso (possesses speech//can signify) o Cruso no need for writing (“nothing I have forgotten is worth remembering”) • Susan = phonocentrism, patriarchial western thought, speech over writing: everything is connected, where words signify singularly, and this connection is pure and original: belief in literary mimesis//representation o 142 “How can he write if he cannot speak? 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.” o Susan comprehends reality as graphic, as a form of writing (in Derrida’s sense), as signs of signs • Inversion of speech/writing opposition = o 143 “We are accustomed to believe that our world was created by God speaking the Word; but I ask, may it not rather be that he wrote it, wrote a Word so long we have yet to come to the end of it? May it not be that God continually writes the world, the world and all that is in it?” o 143 “Nevertheless, God's writing stands as an instance of a writing without speech. Speech is but a means through which the word may be uttered, it is not the word itself.” • Representation v. “Truth” - Susan’s Truth in opposition with writing’s imaginative aspects o Susan: “I will not have any lies told. If I cannot come forward, as an author, and swear to the truth of my tale, what will be the worth of it? o Captain Smith: authors, “their trade is in books, not in truth.” o However, without representation there can be no truth. So as much as Susan would like to capture the Truth, she can only do so in relation to narrative representation. • Transition into Difference:

• Difference o Susan speaks of the story as “weaving” and “braiding” the episodes of the story, which hold the “promise of fullness” i.e. (substance) as one braids a rope. • Susan represents philosophical position maintaining ideas as having presence and substance, which guarantee or authenticates their truth • 121 “You call it an episode, but I call it a story in its own right” o Foe insists on positioning episode on island within a larger narrative context – episode gains meaning from difference; Derrida: braiding the system, or network, of differences • Foe takes Derrida’s position – ideas function like units of language, having no substance (and thus no truth) apart from the systems of differences = no presence of their own o Friday is the only one who has presence &amp; substance, and therefore truth, but it is not representable

1. masculine/feminine 2. narrative structuring

• Masculine dominance: masculine/feminine author(ity) • Susan Barton (white, woman), marginalized position outside of authorship and the authority of writing, powerless to tell her story without the aid of Foe, the male writer. h/w as the “other” in the narrative she desires to rebel against the established patriarchy and take authority over her story o Established conventional power relationship: TEXT - 'With these words I presented myself to Robinson Cruso, in the days when he still ruled over his island, and became his second subject, the first being his manservant Friday. o Originally accepts imposed hierarchy of the male author: TEXT - “A liveliness is lost in writing down which must be supplied by art, and I have no art” o Eventually doubts then challenges societal hierarchy as she is progressively depicted as a strong, independent woman who is in charge of her sexuality and enjoys free sexual expression • Foe is interested in her tale but really wants to write her out of it: issues of identity o '"Better had there been only Cruso and Friday," you will murmur to yourself: "Better without the woman." Yet where would you be without the woman? Would Cruso have come to you of his own accord? Could you have made up Cruso and Friday and the island with its fleas and apes and lizards? I think not. Many strengths you have, but invention is not one of them.' • At the same time Susan opposes herself to Foe in order to validate her identity: o When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: a being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso. Is that the fate of all storytellers? Yet I was as much a body as Cruso”(51). o “Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr. Foe: that is my entreaty” • Gender reversal: Susan becomes the manly figure who “fathers” the story for Foe o “Am I to think of you as a whore for welcoming me and embracing me and receiving my story? You gave me a home when I had none. I think of you as a mistress, or even, if I dare to speak the word, as a wife” (152) o Reverse the myth of the female muse who divines the male author and begets their work, portraying herself as both the muse and the begetter of her story • Susan’s refusal to accept the daughter that Foe sends her = a refusal to acceed to Foe’s authoritative voice, a refusal to accept a particular narrative, a narrative that is Foe’s, not hers. o You are father-born. You have no mother. The pain you feel is the pain of lack, not the pain of loss. What you hope to regain in my person you have in truth never had.” (91). By truth Susan means a truth that is not her truth, a truth that is not found in her narrative

Narrative = constant search for a center Conflicted relation to birthing; furthering the text; search for narrative replacements, • Friday’s lack of language = “a puzzle or hole in the narrative,” the absence at the center (but he is still present)

Speech Act Theory • Performative - Friday, lack of tongue, dancing, dressing up in Foe’s robe and wig (drag, performance without words, singing)

There is an "agency" to actions but no "meaning" on the island

• The Island is not an environment that is conducive to performative utterance – it has no conventions, nothing is appropriate on it. * Austin – “The procedure is O.K. and accepted, but the circumstances in which it was invoked or the person who invoked it were wrong.” • Acceptance – Friday has no way (or is shown to express no way) to either accept or deny; (Friday is powerless) cannot consent o Friday and orders – wood; acceptance or denial redundant due to Friday’s lack of understanding of words, of language •

TEXT - I calmed Foe. 'Permit me,' I whispered – 'there is a privilege that comes with the first night that I claim as mine.' So I coaxed him till he lay beneath me. Then I drew off my shift and straddled him (which he did not seem easy with, in a woman). 'This is the manner of the Muse when she visits her poets,' I whispered, and felt some of the listlessness go out of my limbs. 'A bracing ride,' said Foe afterwards – 'My very bones are jolted, I must catch my breath before we resume.' 'It is always a hard ride when the Muse pays her visits,' I replied – 'She must do whatever lies in her power to father her offspring.'

Promises in “Foe”

"I am swimming in you, my Cruso," I whisper, and swim. He is a tall man, I a tall woman. This is our coupling: this swimming, this clambering, this whispering. 'Or I speak of the island. "We will visit a corn factor, I promise, my Cruso," I say. "We will buy a sack of corn, the best there is. We will take ship again for the Americas, and be driven from our course by a storm, and be cast up on your island. We will plant the terraces and make them bloom. We will do all this." 'It is not the words, it is the fervour with which I speak them: Cruso takes my hand between his huge bony hands and brings it to his lips, and weeps.

After a long wait we were presented to him. Again I related the story of Friday and his desire to return to Africa. "Have you been to Africa, madam?" asked the captain. "No, sir, I have not," I replied, "but that is neither here nor there." "And you will not be accompanying your man?" "I will not." "Then let me tell you," said he: "One half of Africa is desert and the rest a stinking fever-ridden forest. Your blackfellow would be better off in England. Nevertheless, if he is set on it, I will take him." At which my heart leapt. "Have you his papers of manumission?" he asked. I motioned to Friday (who had stood like a stick through these exchanges, understanding nothing) that I wished to open the bag about his neck, and showed the captain the paper signed in Cruso's name, which seemed to please him. "Very well," said he, pocketing the paper, "we will put your man ashore wherever in Africa he instructs us. But now you must say your farewells: we sail in the morning." 'Whether it was the captain's manner or whether the glance I caught passing between him and the mate I cannot say, but suddenly I knew all was not as it seemed to be. "The paper is Friday's," I said, holding out my hand to receive it--"It is his only proof that he is a free man." And when the captain had returned the paper to me, I added: "Friday cannot come aboard now, for he has belongings to fetch from our rooms in the city." By which they guessed I had seen through their scheme (which was to sell Friday into slavery a second time): the captain shrugged his shoulders and turned his back to me, and that was the end of that. 'So the castle I had built in the air, namely that Friday should sail for Africa and I return to London my own mistress at last, came tumbling about my ears. Where a ship's-master was honest, I discovered, he would not accept so unpromising a deck-hand as Friday. Only the more unscrupulous - of whom I met a host in the days that followed--pretended to welcome us, seeing me, no doubt, as an easy dupe and Friday as their God-sent prey. One of these claimed to be sailing for Calicut, making port at the Cape of Good Hope on the way, where he promised to set Friday ashore; while his true destination, as I learned from the wharfmaster, was Jamaica.

Truth

• Strong emphasis on the “truth” of representation; a faith in the power of mimesis

Post-Colonial

• Foe = allegory of colonization; counter-reading of a master narrative •

Authorship

Is the author dead or not? Susan, Foe, Cruso dead in the end...Coetzee left? [each of us talk about 1 character]

• Form of “Foe” = section 1 +2: quotation marks, relayed to Foe the author; section 3: no quotation marks, Susan becomes first-person narrator. • Who, in the end, is/does/will read(ing) Susan’s story? Who can we attribute authorship to the castaway narrative? • 2003 Nobel Prize Speech - Questions of authorship as a child: children’s encyclopaedia names Daniel DeFoe as the author of Robinson Cruso, contradicting what Coetzee understood as a story told and written by the man Robinson Cruso himself. o Coetzee asks: “How does this man (Daniel DeFoe) fit into the story? Who was Daniel DeFoe?” o DeFoe becomes a character in novel inspired by his own novel • Barthes (Death of the Author) – function and effect of intertextuality o Authorship and authority o Different version of same story or narrative highlights the risk of closing the text to a single reading • Foucault and authorship // deconstruction and opposites– physical attributes do not affect the author-function: o TEXT - I crossed the room. At my approach the girl, I observed, did not waver. What other test is left to me? I thought; and took her in my arms and kissed her on the lips, and felt her yield and kiss me in return, almost as one returns a lover's kiss. Had I expected her to dissolve when I touched her, her flesh crumbling and floating away like paper-ash? I gripped her tight and pressed my fingers into her shoulders. Was this truly my daughter's flesh? Opening my eyes, I saw Amy's face hovering only inches from mine, her lips parted too as if for a kiss. 'She is unlike me in every way,' I murmured. Amy shook her head. 'She is a true child of your womb,' she replied--'She is like you in secret ways.' I drew back. 'I am not speaking of secret ways,' I said - 'I am speaking of blue eyes and brown hair'; and I might have made mention too of the soft and helpless little mouth, had I wished to be hurtful. 'She is her father's child as well as her mother's,' said Amy. To which I was about to reply that if the girl were her father's child then her father must be my opposite, and we do not marry our opposites, we marry men who are like us in subtle ways, when it struck me that I would likely be wasting my breath, for the light in Amy's eye was not so much friendly as foolish. • Foucault – kinship between writing and death: immortality of a hero in writing o Friday – Narrative would redeem not only his acceptance of death (can he accept death?) but also his lack of linguistic aptitude o Defeating death: relationship between silence and speech • = prolongation of either writing or not writing (story is never completed) to delay moment of silence

TEXT - 'Or I bring a book to the scullery. "This is a book, Friday," I say. "In it is a story written by the renowned Mr Foe. You do not know the gentleman, but at this very moment he is engaged in writing another story, which is your story, and your master's, and mine. Mr Foe has not met you, but he knows of you, from what I have told him, using words. That is part of the magic of words. Through the medium of words I have given Mr Foe the particulars of you and Mr Cruso and of my year on the island and the years you and Mr Cruso spent there alone, as far as I can supply them; and all these particulars Mr Foe is weaving into a story which will make us famous throughout the land, and rich too. There will be no more need for you to live in a cellar. You will have money with which to buy your way to Africa or Brazil, as the desire moves you, bearing fine gifts, and be reunited with your parents, if they remember you, and marry at last and have children, sons and daughters. And I will give you your own copy of our book, bound in leather, to take with you. I will show you how to trace your name in it, page after page, so that your children may see that their father is known in all parts of the world where books are read. Is writing not a fine thing, Friday? Are you not filled with joy to know that you will live forever, after a manner?"

Friday may have lost his tongue but he has not lost his ears - that is what I say to myself. Through his ears Friday may yet take in the wealth stored in stones Sand so learn that the world is not, as the island seemed to teach him, a barren and a silent place (is that the secret meaning of the word story, do you think: a storing-place of memories?)

• Writing linked to sacrifice, sacrifice of life itself – Susan sacrifices a “normal” life and continues to live in poverty, continues to guard Friday, all to get her story told. o Foucault – “Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author.” • Foe’s ending = loss of Susan Barton’s voice (which articulates the story’s beginning), focus on speechless Friday (Friday’s presence within absence) o Does Friday eventually enter language and tell his story of the island • “From his mouth, without a breath, issues the sounds of the island.” • Who is the narrator at the end? Coetzee?

• Susan, hey daughter(s), and authorship o Susan leaves stillborn girl on roadside o Privileging the creation of fictional life over real, biological life; focus on posterity/immortality through literature; reproduction in the literary •

Sections of Interest

• 36: Laws o Cruso – “Laws are made for one purpose only: to hold us in check when our desires grow immoderate. As long as our desires are moderate we have no need of laws.” • 40: Art, Experience and Truth o “As I relate it to our, my story passes the time well enough; but what little I know of book-writing tells me its charm will quite vanish when it is set down baldly in print. A liveliness is lost in the writing down which must be supplied by art, and I have no art.” o Susan: “I will not have any lies told. If I cannot come forward, as an author, and swear to the truth of my tale, what will be the worth of it? o Captain: authors, “their trade is in books, not in truth.” • 51: Authorship: Substance &amp; Truth o “Who but Cruso, who is no more, could tell you Cruso’s story?” o “When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: a being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso. Is that the fate of all storytellers?” o “For though my story gives the truth, it does not give the substance of the truth.” • 58: Words and Literary Immortality o Susan to Friday – “Mr Foe has not met you, but he knows of you, from what I have told him, using words.” o “Are you not filled with joy to know that you will live forever, after a manner?” • 79-80: Speech &amp; the Other o “the cravings felt by us who live in a world of speech to have our questions answered!” • 91: Susan’s Daughter &amp; Authorship o “What you know of your parentage comes to you in the form of stories, and the stories have but a single source.” o You are father-born. You have no mother. The pain you feel is the pain of lack, not the pain of loss. What you hope to regain in my person you have in truth never had.” • 100: Words and Meaning o “He does not know what freedom is. Freedom is a word, less than word, a noise, one of the multitude of noises I make when I open my mouth.” • 121: Stories and Difference • 133: Authorship and Product • 142-143: Speech v. Writing • 149-150: Arbitrariness of Language

in "Foe" there is no transcendentalism of "the state" : "There are no rules here..." (cruso)

"This is not a place of words" (157)

[your story] "is in books, not in truth" -- Captain smith (40)

"We must make Friday's silence speak, as well as the silence surrounding friday" (142)

In a life of writing books, I have often, believe me, been lost in the maze of doubting. The trick I have learned is to plant a sign or marker in the ground where I stand, so that in my future wanderings I shall have something to return to, and not get worse lost than I am. Having planted it, I press on; the more often I come back to the mark (which is a sign to myself of my blindness and incapacity), the more certainly I know I am lost, yet the more I am heartened too, to have found my way back. (135-36) --Foe