Silence and alternative voices: the loss of origin/voice:
In June 2011, a singer called Ibrahim Qualoush performed a song at an anti-regime demonstration in Hama, Syria. It was based on a simple lyric that a crowd had chanted back at him, “come on Bashar (Assad), leave!” A few days later, Ibrahim’s body was pulled out of the Orontes River. His vocal chords had been cut out.
By killing those who gave voice to the revolution, the Assad regime was trying to re-establish a silence that it had imposed on the country for 40 years.
However, although the regime silenced Ibrahim, there has been during the past decade an outpouring of artistic expression. Painting, song, satire, poetry, film, graffiti, posters and cartoons as well as bloggers speak of the horror of tyranny. Add to these stories, that of the image of the drowned three year old boy, one of 2,500 Syrians who have drowned fleeing the country. The Syrian regime cannot silence the stories of horror, which like the stories of victims, everywhere, undermine the official, government story.
Much of the story of Foe revolves around the plight of Cruso’s “black” assistant, Friday, so named, in Daniel Defoe’s original source material because he was found by Cruso, who kept a meticulous diary, on that day. The loss of the tongue and the plight of both Cruso and Friday give rise to numerous explanations and assumptions which cannot be verified, and which, therefore, do not yield to a single truth.
The loss of Friday’s tongue is the loss of speech and hence the audience can only guess at the series of events that prompted its loss. A contradiction therefore lies at the heart of the story: “The only tongue that can tell Friday’s secret is the tongue he has lost” (67). (And Friday may not even be aware of the meaning of “truth”). Susan later realises and tells Mr Foe that neither she, nor anyone else, can tell the story of Friday’s tongue because “the true story remains buried within Friday, who is mute”. In order to relay the story, they must find a “means of giving voice to Friday” (18)
Whilst on the island with Cruso, Susan accepts the loss of the tongue, “as I accepted that I should never learn how the apes crossed the sea”. But she knows she must delve deeper: “what we can accept in life we cannot accept in history” (67)
The “Singular Cruso”
Cruso believes that his story is the only story worth remembering: “Nothing I have forgotten is worth the remembering” (17).
As the “king” in his own realm, the conqueror of the island, who “brooks no change”, Cruso believes that the story of conquest begins with his arrival. He lays the “terrace” foundation for his followers who, he presumes, will bring the seed to harvest for a more plentiful society. Cruso wishes to fix his story in an absolute timeframe and believes that his story is the absolute truth based on the details that he remembers, as origin. Likewise there is no need of laws, so long as individuals have a common experience of what is “moderate”. He believes the concept of moderation should hold true for all citizens. “Laws are made for one purpose only … to hold us in check when our desires grow immoderate” (36)
Unlike Cruso, Susan recognises the subjective element of moderation: “I have a desire to be saved which I must call immoderate” (36). “It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island” (37). The fact that Cruso did not tyrannise over Friday could be attributed to his values of fairness, but we must also consider the fact that Friday submits absolutely and does not question his reign. “He has known no other master. He follows me in all things.” (37).
According to Foe, the colonialist has a tendency to reduce everything to his horizon; he, this “king of his tiny realm” had “so narrowed his horizon” that he did not see any use for a “record”. He states: “nothing I have forgotten is worth the remembering” (17). Life is losing its ‘particularity’. Cruso would “brook no change on his island” (27). Cruso has no “stories to tell of the life he had lived as a trader and planter before the shipwreck” (34) . He was a truly “kingly figure” (the true king of his island) 37.
Susan comments, “it was as though he wished his story to begin with his arrival on the island, and mine to begin with my arrival, and the story of us together to end on the island too.” (34).
Those in positions of power ….
Parallel: Likewise, the story of the conqueror, those in positions of power, always takes priority. As Naomi Klein asserts in her book, Shock Doctrine, the American Government’s anti-Marshall Plan formed the basis of the war against Iraq in 2002, and the theme of the conquest was the rise of corporate America. Like all conquest stories, it was based on the unquestioned assumptions about U.S. superiority and Iraqi inferiority. “The US federal government contracts commissioned a kind of country-in-a-box, designed n Virginia and Texas, to be assembled in Iraq.” The occupation authorities repeatedly said, “It was a “gift from the people of the United States to the people of Iraq”. All Iraqis needed to do was to “unwrap it”. However, in the unwrapping process, foreign labourers employed by the major U.S. contractors were used. Iraqi workers were cast in the role of “awed spectators”. Klein concludes that just about all key Iraqi governmental functions in Iraq were handed over to U.S. private contractors and Iraqis themselves were excluded from the gold rush.
The loss of the tongue leads to assumptions and projections
Whilst Cruso is certain with regards to his identity, his place and his origin, Friday is subject to infinite conjecture. Whilst he shows a “taught” understanding of the world, (he understands “firewood” and not “wood”), we can never be sure what has happened to his tongue and what he actually understands.
Cruso believes that the slavers cut out his tongue to prevent him, from “telling his story” (23.) He believes that they “hold the tongue to be a delicacy… or perhaps they grew weary of listening to Friday’s wails of grief, that went on day and night.”
Cruso also seems to have fixed on the idea of the “cannibal child”, perhaps as a reflection of, or projection of his own worst fears about the tongueless savage, Friday. “Was it his dark fear that the craving for human flesh would come back to you, that you would one night slit his throat and roast his liver and eat it?” (82) Such fears also ensure his eternal vigilance which is important for his survival. (82)
Susan wonders that maybe Cruso sought to punish Friday for his sins (the original sin), and so he was the one who “cut out Friday’s tongue” (95) She compares cutting out the tongue with gelding a stallion. She wonders if this reinforced Friday’s servitude and taught him “eternal obedience” (98)
The “secretness of his loss” causes Susan to shrink from him in horror. She imagines the pincers and somebody gripping his tongue. The secrecy of the mutilation, she believes, could be a sign of yet another more grotesque mutilation – castration. “The very secretness of his loss that caused me to shrink from him.”
Likewise Susan often wonders to what extent she, too, is projecting her own assumptions, fears and desires onto Friday. He often seems too self-enclosed; his flute-playing; his trance; he seems so much himself (98) She acknowledges that she has done Friday a disservice by imagining him a cannibal. But ever since Cruso planted the idea, she cannot stop herself from looking at Friday’s lips and thinking about what type of meat he has eaten (106) She and Foe also differ as to their assumptions about Friday’s fate; and whether he would survive on the streets of London as what Susan believes is a “helpless” negro. (128) And the trip back to Africa rendered the negro vulnerable to exploitation because of assumptions regarding helplessness and slavery.
Susan also knows that Friday has his own way of seeing. Friday can “hum” in a low voice and he understands “tones”, even if he cannot understand words. According to Susan, “he could hear kindness in a human voice when kindness was sincerely meant’ (41). (What benefit is there of a life of silence”. 22)
The loss of the tongue leads to different stories
This absence or lack at the origin (the tongue/voice) gives rise to multiple versions of truth, rather than the reduction to just one ultimate version. As Susan notes, Friday’s “tongue belongs to the world of play”. He is a “child waiting to be born” (122) the tongue gives rise to numerous metaphoric representations and mysteries that complicate rather than solve the reason for Friday’s loss of speech.
It is only upon his death that such difference will be dispelled – obliterated. And finally, “this is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday” (157)
The loss becomes a sign in a change of metaphors: it points to another mutilation; Susan wonders whether the “lost tongue might stand not only for itself but for a more atrocious mutilation, whether by a dumb slave I was to understand a slave unmanned” (119).
Defoe also believes that this loss and the silence gives rise to the constant embellishment against which he has no defence. “Friday 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.” (121).
The problem with language: there are no fixed connections
Susan seeks to teach Friday the “names of things’ (57). She wonders whether the “very notion of speech may be lost to him” (Friday). Saussure points out, the link between the signified (the thing itself) and the signifier (the name for the object) is arbitrary; likewise, Susan cannot be sure that the word “spoon” will echo in his mind every time she flashes the object in front of him. “When I take the spoon from his hand (but is it truly a spoon to him, or a mere thing? – I do not know), and say Spoon how can I be sure he does not think I am chattering to myself as a magpie or an ape does” (57)
Susan also hopes that Friday’s grasp of the sign will help restore to him the knowledge of absence (the loss of the tongue). Language, words will function as a “bridge”, and will transport him back to the “time before Cruso, the time before he lost his tongue, when he lived immersed in the prattle of words as unthinking as a fish in water”. Recovering this loss, will help him inhabit the world of words as mediated by Susan and Mr Foe.
Language is an ambiguous tool with ambivalent ends: Whilst words are the key to enlightenment; they have the potential to elevate Friday above the world of “darkness and silence” (60), but words are also a tool of oppression and can be used, to “subject him to my will” (60). For this reason, perhaps Cruso chooses not “to disturb his muteness”, but in doing so, Cruso also doomed Friday to a life of darkness and one that also suited the slave owner.
Defoe’s Cruso teaches Friday: the taught version
Interestingly, this is an important difference between Defoe’s Cruso and Coetzee’s, showing that the differences in the story are just as important as the similarities. Defoe’s Cruso is intent on teaching Friday to speak his language so that he can groom his perfect companion. Learning English, the oppressor’s tool, enables Friday to become more useful; he also learns the language of religion and becomes a worthy Christian which complements his “educated” status. “I was greatly delighted with him, and made it my business to teach him every thing that was proper to make him useful, handy and helpful; but especially to make him speak, and understand me when I spake, and he was the aptest scholar that ever was, and particularly was so merry, so constantly diligent and so pleased, when he cou’d but understand me.. that it was very pleasant to me to talk to him” (213)
It is after the fact that Cruso has taught Friday English that he is able to retrospectively, and in the language of the oppressor, explain his origins. After a detailed discussion about the nation’s wars “I understood that my man Friday had formerly been among the savages who used to come on shore on the farther part of the island, on the same man eating occasions that he was no brought for”. (In this source material, Cruso rescued Friday from the hands of the cannibals; victors in war capture the victims of the vanquished nation for a feast.)
In other words, any narrative or any story is a selective reinterpretation of the teller, narrator. We conceal, manipulate, alter, colour and reinvent stories to suit the audience, the narrator and our own personal objectives.
Susan moves into Defoe’s attic; she takes up residence in his house in order to write at his table, living the author’s life, writing at his table with his pen and gazing out of his window. Susan reflects upon the correspondence between how things are and the pictures we have of them in our mind. There are differences, she notes. Whilst everything is “close enough”, the window does not overlook woods and pastures but the garden; the chest is a dispatch box (65). The author becomes the “slave” to the story (87)
The loss of the tongue is a sign of blindness
In the absence of an absolute starting point or an origin or centre; in the absence of a fixed point of reference, Defoe creates his own, which “is a sign to myself of my blindness and incapacity” (136). This sign marks the place of Friday’s missing tongue. Defoe explains that when lost in the “maze of doubting” he often plants a sign or a “marker on the ground to mark his spot so that he knows to where he should return, “so that in my future wanderings I shall have something to return to, and not get worse lost than I am”. He explains the contradiction thus: “the more certainly I know I am lost, yet the more I am heartened too, to have found my way back”. Defoe urges Susan also to think in terms of the mark, or the sign, or the “token” that has been “left behind on your behalf”. This, too would be a sign of “blindness” (why else would one need a sign?), but it serves as a convenient starting point. “Your search for a way out of the maze.. might start from that point and return to it as many times as are needed till you discover yourself to be saved” (136).
Susan wonders whether the intimacy between author and narrator might complicate and change the story (137). Foe sexually bites and sucks the wound and repeats the sexual relationship that Susan had with Cruso (139)
The act of teaching: self-knowledge and difference
The two sketches p. 68 (doomed from the start because of Susan’s involvement and a lack of shared understanding because of the tongue)
Susan completes two sketches in an attempt to ascertain how Friday lost his tongue. She hopes that he may register some sense of understanding or recognition upon seeing a sketch, such as Cruso cutting out Friday’s tongue. But she also realises that such a glimmer of understand, this cloud that may “pass over his gaze” may also be a response to Susan’s demand that he look at the pictures. It might be her manner or demeanour; the pictures may confuse rather than enlighten. (68) He might also understand the sketch in benevolent terms of Cruso attempt to feed him. Even if Susan sticks out her tongue, this in itself may give rise to ambivalent interpretations. The natives may be embarrassed; it might be a provocative and sexualised sign relating to feminine desire (69).
(IN order to embellish the story, Susan would need to elaborate on her fears, prejudices and assumptions relating to the loss of Friday’s tongue. In fact, Cruso may have cut out the tongue which was a convenient way to stop him from telling his story, from “telling the world who slew him” (84) She professes to an aversion herself, especially when the master asked her to look at Friday’s tongue. “Toward you I felt a deep revulsion” (85) The “tongue belongs to the world of play”: the tongue gives rise to numerous metaphoric representations and mysteries that complicate rather than solve the reason for Friday’s loss of speech and the origin of the erasure (of the tongue).
The second sketch depicts the Moors and palm trees; the slave traders are cutting out the tongue, but this, too, could be problematic. He could have lost his tongue like the castrated Jewish children; muteness could be an ethnic ritual of which westerners are unaware. It may have various significance beyond the fact that the slave-trader-cannibal mutilated the tongue as a sign of conquest.
What then, Coetzee asks, is the relationship between signifier and signified – between the label and the picture?
The way Susan asks the questions, her manner and her bearing will all impact upon the response. Her questions are also a product of her assumptions; what if she asks the question in a different way? (71).
Likewise, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Paul Dirac identified how light appears to be a particle if we ask a particle-like question, and a wave if we ask a wave-like question. (As Ludwig Wittgenstein would say, “all I know is what I have words for.”)
Upon Defoe’s instructions Susan teaches Friday to write on the premise that he will be guided to self-expression. Defoe believes that if Friday learns to write it would be possible to break the silence. Contrary to Susan’s thoughts that “letters are the mirror of words” (142), Defoe protests that “writing is not doomed to be the shadow of speech”. At times, words form themselves “de novo”, out of the “deepest of inner silences”. For traditional philosophers, writing reflects and translates speech. It is secondary in nature and depends upon speech for meaning. Contrastingly, Defoe posits a form of writing that relates equally with speech, that does not presuppose a prior purpose or origin. For example, “God’s writing stands as an instance of a writing without speech”. Likewise, “Friday has no speech” but he has fingers to write (145).
Also the daughter stalks Susan; the same questions must be asked. Can we trust Susan’s story about her own adventures and loss of the daughter? (74-75). Susan says, “the world is full of stories of mothers searching for sons and daughters they gave away once, long ago. But there are no stories of daughters searching for mothers”. (77)- only in books that children are stolen by gypsies. She wonders if this child is a sign of anything? “Does he send her as a sign? What is she a sign of? (79). She later concludes that this girl “stands for the daughter I lost in Bahia” (132). She is in other words a substitute daughter, sent in this instance, to “console me”. Once again, how do we make connections between the signified and signifier if in fact the relationship is arbitrary? The daughter says her name is Susan Barton: “what you know of your parentage comes to you in the form of stories, and the stories have but a single source” (91).
And if these women are creatures of yours, substitutes in a chain, then “who am I and who indeed are you? (133) As her life turns into a story, there is precious little left of her own to relate. She is left with sce
One’s experiences feeds into our perspective on reality
In this case, the narrator believes that Foe’s 20 year experience on the desert island had “so narrowed his horizon” that he had come to be persuaded he knew all there was to know about the world” (13). In this case, his experience of ownership and conquest breeds a sense of arrogance and omnipotence. He preferred to remain “to his dying day king of his tiny realm” than be rescued. (14)
Our realities are influenced by practical concerns: In his case, Cruso’s attitude is influenced by “stubbornness of old age”, “indifference to salvation” and habit. (14) He is very much influenced (or a prisoner) of his tools; he rescued just a knife from the wreck which determines his lifestyle (and reality). Had he managed to salvage some carpenter’s tools he might have built a boat “and escaped to civilisation” (16). (Cruso believes “we have no need of tools”, 32.)
The story therefore leads to difference without end.
The story and its “thousand touches” which brings it to life – the world expects ‘stories from its adventurers”. He knows that “a liveliness is lost in the writing down which must be supplied by art and I have no art” (Captain Smith) 40.. Susan maintains control over the story of the island (43)
Susan makes a comparison between the author and the artist/painter: “thus we see the painter selecting and composing and rendering particulars in order to body forth a pleasing fullness in his scene. The storyteller, by contrast… must divine which episodes of his history hold promise of fullness and tease from them their hidden meanings, braiding these together as one braids a rope” (89) He waits on the “grace of illumination” .
Stories: the stories we tell and circulate are metaphoric: there is no absolute origin
Expectations also shape the story: its retelling is also dependent upon a certain sense of drama, vividness and spontaneity which is often lost in the art of writing, which in itself is a substitute for the lack (the absence of the tongue). “A liveliness is lost 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”. What is needed is a “dash of colour, too, here and there”. “Their trade is in books, not in truth” (40) Susan agonises over the truth. (“What I saw, I wrote.” 45). She professes that she cannot write about cannibals if she did not see any. She does not meant to “mock the art of writing”, because she knows that Defoe labours in his attic over the role and the life he will bring to the “courtesans” and the “grenadiers”. (52). Susan knows that she has supplied the content of the story; she is one such origin, and yet Mr Foe will weave them into a story “which will make us famous throughout the land, and rich too” (58)
But she also knows that their life on the island was comparatively dull. “We faced no perils, no ravenous beasts, not even serpents” (81). She acknowledges that “we will never make our fortunes being merely what we are, or were” (82). She knows that there were touches of ‘mystery’ but she will need to embellish these (83)
She writes the story, “the Female Castaway. Being a True Account of a Year Spent on a Desert Island” and reflects upon how she should embellish the story. “How long before I am driven to invent new and stranger circumstances” (67) and “will the day ever arrive when we can make a story without strange circumstances” (67) But she also knows that “my stories seem always to have more applications than I intend, so that I must go back and laboriously extract the right application and apologize for the wrong ones and efface them”. (81). And yet as Derrida would remind us, each and every story already contains the seed of its effacement; what remember is at the expense of what we forget or suppress or overlook.
She makes assumptions about what Friday does and does not desire (148). She wonders how Friday is to recover his freedom, presupposing that any “of us can say what freedom truly is” (149) Freedom, like any other word, could be interpreted as a puff of “air”, “seven letters on a slate”. Many such words are “without a home, wanderers like the planets”, slipping and sliding and searching, and all in vain” (149). In some ways, Friday was the “helpless captive of my desire to have our story told” (150) (Perhaps not unlike Foe – another captive).
Memory: the paradox of remembering and forgetting
Our personal narratives (or stories) involve a paradoxical process of selectivity: what we tell presupposes information that is forgotten or suppressed. We necessarily prioritise and foreground certain elements of the story, whilst minimising or omitting others. As Susan reminds Cruso, forgetting is as natural as birth and death. “It is our nature to forget as it is our nature to grow old and pass away”. (18). “But seen from too remote a vantage life begins to lose its particularity.”
What sets a particular story apart? What makes it unique? Coetzee suggests that recorded histories rely on a “thousand touches” (18) Susan urges Cruso to record the details. She explains that what makes his story uniquely his, resides in a “thousand touches” which to him may seem of little significance but which will persuade the audience, one day, that the life experience may have occurred. And she also knows that in years to come, the stories will change, as the walls crumble and the proof of Cruso’s story recedes and those rewriting the story will insist on cannibals that did not exist. “And of the walls they will say, These are cannibal walls, the ruins of a cannibal city from the golden age of cannibals.” (54). So how can we trust the recorded memories as relayed by our historians and writers.
Stories: fact and fancy as they are mediated through another
Cruso’s story will always be second-hand; it is mediated through Susan to Defoe so that one can never be completely sure about the veracity of his experience; and the missing tongue cannot verify Susan’s version either. “Would you not regret it that you could not bring back with you some record of your years of shipwreck, so that what you have passed through shall not die from memory? (p. 17)
Cruso believes that his story is the only story worth remembering: “Nothing I have forgotten is worth the remembering” (17). Susan begs to differ. She believes that with every passing day, he forgets increasingly more details. “It is not whoring to entertain other people’s stories and return them to the world better dressed” . If there were not authors to perform such an office, the world would be all the poorer”. (152).
From the shipwreck, Susan searches Friday for the cause and the reason. “I begin to hear the faintest faraway roar”. From his “mouth, without a breath, issue the sounds of the island.” Friday alone seems to hold within him the truth, the answers, the unspeakable silence holds the key. And finally, at the end, Friday’s “mouth ejects a single stream, a burst of air, flowing and without interruption. It is “soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face” (157)
In this regard, who shapes the narrative and how it is told is critical to the version of reality that is peddled, circulated.
Return to notes for Whose Reality: summaries