Summary
The third chapter opens with a shift in tense and point of view. It remains a third-person narrative, but the second-person address is gone as are the quotations. It’s not a letter being written.
Susan climbs stairs and knocks on a door. Mr. Foe opens the door and Susan tells him that she and Friday came back to London and by chance saw Mrs. Thrush. They asked her where to find Mr. Foe and Mrs. Thrush trusted them this time to give them directions. Susan asks him how her story is going. He says it’s going slow, but it’s good that she came because he needs to know more about what happened to her in Bahia. She says that Bahia isn’t part of her story, but she agrees to tell him some things about the place. She describes the details of the street life there. She explains that Portuguese women stay inside and “a woman who goes around freely is thought a whore.” She says “I was thought a whore, but there are so many whores there, or, as I prefer to call them, free women, that I was not daunted” (115).
Foe asks if Friday loves her and she says that Friday is like her shadow; he loves her like a shadow loves its subject. Foe wants to hear more about Bahia, but she says that her story starts on the island. Foe disagrees and says it starts in London when her daughter disappears or elopes. Then he pushes her on the mystery of her survival in Bahia saying, “these are the questions that are asked which we must answer” (116). He muses then about her daughter’s search for her mother, imagining her daughter hearing of her mother in Bahia and trying to follow her to Lisbon, where she hears of a woman who was marooned on an island and wonders if it was her mother. Foe explains that in the construct of a compelling narrative, all the time on the island is only the middle. As he says this, Susan states, “All the joy I had felt in finding Mr. Foe fled me” (117).
She argues that the story is about the loss of Friday’s tongue. She explains that that story is unable to be told. Then she tells Foe more: she says that there’s something she never explained about when they were in his house and Friday found the robes and danced. When he would do this, he would wear nothing underneath. She says that when she first ever learned that Friday was missing his tongue, she had wondered if he was missing anything else. Then on the first day that he began to dance in the robes, she came down and saw him. But what she describes is ambiguous. She says, “I saw and believed I had seen, but afterwards I remembered Thomas who also saw, but could not be brought to believe until he had put his hand on the wound” (120). She explains her appeal then to Foe as being an appeal to an expert writer, to describe what she saw or thought she saw. She says, “I do not know how these matters can be written of in a book unless they are covered up again in figures” (120).
Foe pushes Susan again to tell him about Bahia. She asserts her authority, saying that it’s by choice that she’s not speaking of it. She argues that it’s Friday’s story that needs to be told. She tells Foe that he makes a mistake in “failing to distinguish between my silences and the silences of a being such as Friday. Friday has no command of words and therefore no defense against being reshaped in conformity with the desires of others. I say he is a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal” (121).
Susan and Foe extensively debate the relevance and consequence of telling intimate stories. He pressures her to relieve herself of the burden her story, comparing it the process of confessing to a chaplain before facing the gallows. She resists, comparing herself to the Muse who has arrived to him and burdens him with the obligation to represent a different story than the one he wants to. He offers her almond wafers. She eats hungrily and shares them with Friday.
A young boy named Jack arrives to tell Foe that he’ll fetch his meal. Foe tells him to make it enough for Susan as well. Susan points to Friday as well and says they must get enough for him too. Jack goes off and Susan and Foe discuss Susan’s care of Friday. She compares herself to a mother. Jack returns and they eat hungrily and drink ale.
Then two others arrive: it’s the girl who claims to be Susan’s daughter, and a woman who the girl says was her nurse, Amy. Susan goes weak upon seeing them and explains to Foe why it’s unreasonable to try to make her submit to his hired actors. Susan calls them ghosts who don’t have anything to do with her story. She kisses the girl and sees that she’s very much real, but nothing like her daughter. But as Foe, Amy, and the girl all push Susan to believe that the girl is her daughter, Susan begins to doubt her story, her sanity, and herself, saying: “I am doubt itself. Who is speaking me? Am I a phantom too? To what order do I belong? And you: who are you?” (133) Foe kisses her. He questions who has authority and agency in life. He discusses the place of doubt in writing and in life. Jack and Amy and the girl leave.
Susan says that she and Friday must go too, but Foe invites them to sleep in his place. Susan finds a spot for Friday in the curtained alcove. She closes the curtain and tells him not to worry about what she does with Foe. She gets undressed down to her shift and gets in bed with Foe. They lie in the dark talking about the nature of ghosts. They begin to have sex. He reminds her of Cruso, heavy on the bottom end, pinning her. She stops him doing what he’s doing and then she straddles him. He’s taken aback; he doesn’t know what to do but she tells him to think of her as the Muse who straddles her poets this way. “A bracing ride,” he says to her afterward, “my very bones are jolted" (140). She says that it’s always a hard ride when the Muse pays a visit.
They lie in the dark and she thinks he’s gone to sleep but he begins to speak about Friday putting flower petals in the waves. He says that she thought Friday was making an offering to the gods to deliver fish, but what if he was making an offering to something else. She doesn’t understand. He explains that he thinks that every story has a “heart,” a question that must be asked. “Until we have spoken the unspoken,” he says, “we have not come to the heart of the story” (141). He says that Friday was drawn out on a log into the sea in a dangerous place where he would throw his petals; and what if there was something below him looking up, Foe imagines. What if the place where Friday put the petals was the place where the ship he was on went down? Who else would be down below, he asks, if not his fellow slaves, chained up, who went down with the wreck. His offering, Foe imagines, is to them. Foe says that they must make Friday’s silence speak. Susan asks how, and she imagines putting an ear to Friday as though he’s a shell. Inside you’d hear the ocean. That night she can’t sleep. In the morning, she gets up to leave but Foe wants her to teach Friday to write. He sends her out with a slate and with a few shillings. She gets milk and fresh bread for her and Friday and then she attempts to show him to write though she believes it’s of no use. He copies what she writes. Back in Foe’s flat, Friday sits with the slate and draws eyes and feet all over it. She’s amazed and wants to show Foe, but Friday resists her. He won’t let go of the slate and he wipes it clean.
Susan feels upset about her responsibility to Friday and argues about it with Foe. She and Foe debate the meaning of freedom and what it might be to someone like Friday. Foe says that Friday is less of Susan’s charge than she knows. He sends Susan out for a stroll. She’s happy to go. When she returns she finds Foe in bed and Friday wearing Foe’s wig and robe, sitting at his desk using his pens and papers. She tells him to stop, but Foe sits up and tells her to let him go on. Friday has covered the slate in the o. Foe says that tomorrow she must teach Friday a. Foe calls himself a whore, a story whore.
Analysis
In this chapter, a battle of authorial will takes place between Foe and Susan over the meaning of her story and the reason for telling it. Foe wants Susan’s confessions of what she experienced in Bahia. He wants to write a story about Bahia; he urges her to tell him what happened in Bahia. The implication is clear: Susan must’ve resorted to licentious activity, if not prostitution, in order to survive unaccompanied in a New World colony like Bahia. Foe knows this and though he pressures her for the sake of narrative logic – saying the story of the island needs a setup, a cause – the real story that he’s after is the scandalous story.
As their dialogue unfolds, it becomes apparent that Susan understands exactly what Foe wants from her, stating that she will not “gabble a confession and be whipped off to [prison] and eternal silence” (123). She says, “It’s still in my power to guide and amend. Above all, to withhold. By such means to I still endeavor to be the father of my story” (123). She understands well that the scandalous story is the sensational story, the one that Foe can sell, but she pushes him further. She believes in his power as an author to tell other, more challenging stories, stories like that of Friday.
Susan’s insistence that the story is about the island is an insistence that the story is about Friday. She claims that the story that needs to be told is the one that is unable to be told. She still has the power of her own voice, whereas Friday has lost his tongue. It’s Friday’s silencing, and arguably the silencing of all subaltern bodies, that Susan recognizes as the author’s obligation.
In revisiting Robinson Cruso and bringing Susan Barton into Daniel Defoe’s life, Coetzee is taking up a challenge to one of the first English language novels (if not the first). Susan’s argument is an argument about the ethics of fictional representation and the responsibility of the author, which is being injected in the formative period of the English novel. It’s a fantasy about an intervention into fantasy generally and specifically that of Robinson Crusoe, which sits firmly at the foundation of the English novel tradition. It’s an argument against sensationalism, in favor of an attempt toward some form of responsible representation. Of course, such representation may itself be a fantasy, impossible and itself easily unethical, but the debate itself is what Coetzee is imagining (fantasizing) happening at the founding of the novel. He asks: what if Defoe faced the challenge of responsibility and the questions of ethics that Susan brings to him here? What if the English novel was born out of the dilemma of Susan and Foe’s encounter?
It would certainly be a stretch to imagine that Defoe himself tarried with ethical dilemmas that his fictional representative (Foe) takes up here. Defoe’s Friday is a black, savage cannibal, a heathen by nature. Friday’s salvation comes through the good, white Christian, Robinson Crusoe. It’s hard to imagine that Defoe ever considered the humanity of a non-Christian black person, let alone the experience of violent subjugation. Certainly he never attempted to work out the ethics of representing this victim, the one who can’t speak for himself, the subaltern, or at least that challenge is not apparent in the fantasy of the white castaway who survives with the help of a reformed savage.
Susan believes that the story has to do with Friday’s tongue. Through her insistence, we come to learn that the mystery of his tongue—that is, his story—has made its way to the center of her story. Indeed, the man of the previous chapter who lurked silently downstairs in Foe’s abandoned house, while upstairs Susan waited for Foe to tell her story, was in fact the one she was waiting for. His placement downstairs, his silence, his darkness, easily brings to mind thoughts of the unconscious, the repressed. Certainly any possible realism of a character like Defoe’s Friday is repressed in the original Robinson Crusoe, but is Coetzee arguing that the maimed and mute slave is the repressed of all English novels? Is there a tongue-less, castrated subaltern figure lurking downstairs for every English language novel writer who has taken up the art since Defoe first attempted to spin a long tale about the adventures of New World expeditions? Is it just by chance that this early English novel deals with fantasies of colonial exploits and the slave trade? Or is there something in conquest, piracy, and domination that draws the long-form tale-spinner in? Is the experience of power an experience at the heart of novelistic representation?
The story of the subaltern is repressed in the imagination of Defoe. For Coetzee, however, the questions of how to represent it are central. The subaltern’s inability to tell his or her own story is at the heart of this novel’s concern. Friday can’t speak but Susan argues that the novel writer has great power—the power to label him a “cannibal.” Surely that power has lasting resonance. The story of the castaway in a time of pirates, alone on “a desert island” has somehow made its way into our imagination like a modern archetype. But where did such a figure come from? The story of Robinson Crusoe has become an archetypal story. But what might’ve happened if Defoe attempted to represent the realism of that castaway, his tedium and his dependence on his castaway slave? And what indeed of that slave’s suffering? Perhaps the book itself would’ve been censored and repressed, or it would’ve made no waves at all
Beneath the fantasy of Christianizing the savage is the repressed actuality of that maimed and coerced human. Coetzee is opening up Robinson Crusoe and asking what stories are not being told.
