I might have lived most happily on my island, but who, accustomed to the fullness of human speech, can be content with caws and chirps and screeches, and the barking of seals, and the moan of the wind?
This early statement from Susan about life on the island reflects more than her feeling about living away from civilization in a natural environment. A central theme in the book is centered on the concept of human speech. From Friday’s perspective, human speech might indeed sound like caw and chirps and screeches; the life that Friday sees in London, which terrifies him, might seem to have a logic of its own compared to the life on the island. Susan’s statement highlights an important dichotomy between human civilization and natural life that plays out through the narrative.
Why they chose to cast me away I do not know. But those whom we have abused we customarily grow to hate and wish never to lay eyes on again.
In this passage, Susan is referring to the men on the ship who threw her overboard along with the murdered captain. The quote not only reveals the fact that she was “abused” on board the ship; it also makes a profound and chilling claim about the nature of abuse. As though stating a well-known proverb, she says that those whom we have abused, we grow to hate. She doesn’t explain or qualify the statement and it is thus left hanging, like a question waiting to be answered. Is it true that we grow to hate those whom we abuse? If so, why? And what might this say about the continued relations between white and black people that Foe is so much about. Who, in the story, has been more abused than Friday and his fellow slaves? Is Coetzee suggesting that the original abuse of slavery accounts for subsequent race-hatred and racism?
I would gladly now recount to you the history of this singular Cruso, as I heard it from his own lips. But the stories he told me were so various and so hard to reconcile one with another, that I was more and more driven to conclude age and isolation had taken their toll on his memory, he no longer knew for sure what truth, what fancy.
The Cruso that Susan finds on the island is significantly different from that of Defoe’s Robinson Cruso. As is implied by this quote, reality is far different than the dramatized and romanticized material of fiction—particularly in the case of a story like Robinson Cruso. Coetzee is here asking: what would the reality of the contented castaway truly be? Quite likely he would have lost all track of reality.
“Nothing is forgotten," he said. And then "Nothing I have forgotten is worth remembering."
This is Cruso’s response to Susan when she asks him if he’s been keeping a journal of any kind or tallying his days or keeping any kind of record whatsoever. He hasn’t, and as it turns out, he’s lost all track of his personal history. When he tells it, it comes out all confused. His stories are contradictory. But his feeling about it is captured by the quote. He retains everything in such a disorganized manner that it seems worthless. Susan is Cruso’s foil character, arguing for the purpose of keeping a record.
“I will leave behind my terraces and walls," he said. "They will be enough. They will be more than enough.”
Following from the previous quote, Cruso here reveals that he has no interest in claims to history or civilization. His useless terraces are all he will leave behind and this is enough for him. Unlike the previous quote, there seems to be a logical resolve in this. He is happy to have his legacy be something that will only effect the shape of the island, and as Susan notes, eventually it will all be eroded.
Perhaps they wanted to prevent him from ever telling his story, who he was, where his home lay, how it came about that he was taken.
In this passage, Cruso has just told Susan about Friday’s tongue. She has asked him why it happened and he is imagining the many different reasons. This reason stands out, not only for how true it feels (for it is certainly the outcome of Friday having no tongue), but also for the sinister nature of Cruso’s thinking. It’s only later that Susan lets on that she wonders if Cruso was the one who removed Friday’s tongue. Here we see Cruso articulating a very plausible logic for the reason for removing a slave’s tongue. Does he articulate it so well because he understands it?
Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr. Foe. That is my entreaty.
Susan’s appeal to the writer to reanimate her comes after she has reflected that she has been so far telling the story of Cruso and not of herself. The quote is important for how it reveals Susan’s belief in the almost mystical power of writing to reanimate a person and their history. At this stage she has immense faith in Foe as a master of this art. She treats him almost as a magician. Later she comes to see that he has the power to animate her in ways that she doesn’t want.
To tell the truth in all its substance you must have quiet and a comfortable chair away from all distraction, and a window to stare through and then the knack of seeing waves when there are fields before your eyes…
This quote, which follows from the previous, expands on Susan’s belief in the power of fiction to “tell truth.” Again the writer to Susan is a kind of conjurer of past reality. The tools this form of “truth-teller” needs however is not merely a voice, it’s a physical position at a comfortable desk by the window to deeply meditate and create “truth.”
My thoughts ran to Friday… Had I not been there to restrain him, would he in his hunger have eaten the babe? I told myself I did him wrong to think of him as a cannibal or worse, a devourer of the dead. But Cruso had planted the seed in my mind, and now I could not look on Friday’s lips without calling to mind what mean must once have passed them.
The quote is one of the instances in which Susan considers Friday’s possible cannibalism. This quote is notable for how she claims that it was Cruso who “planted the seed.” The language of this signals more than just the Cruso of Coetzee’s novel. The Crusoe of Defoe’s novel (in which Friday is a reformed cannibal and other cannibals are on the island), also surely also helped “plant the seed” in the fearful imaginations of generations of readers.
This is the place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday.
In the closing of the novel a version of Susan descends under the water and finds a version of Friday with a chain around his neck in the slave hold of a sunken ship. In this visionary passage, he is preserved and as Susan states, his body is its own sign. It’s an ambiguous concept, arguably quite a negative one—for the what else is Friday’s body a sign of if not a sign of horror: chained, drowned, invisible under the sea?
