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The Violence of Sympathy

3. GENDER AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

At first, Susan’s purpose is not so much to testify but to gain money. As the captain says, who eventually rescues them: “It is a story you should set down in writing and offer to the booksellers,” he urged – “There has never before, to my knowledge, been a female castaway of our nation. It will cause great stir.”26 As the example of Defoe’s Moll Flanders also shows us, the only means for an eighteenth-century woman to earn money, if she cannot marry a rich man, and does not want to prostitute herself, or become a thief, is to write stories that sell well. It is, however, difficult for Susan to write, or, at least, as an eighteenth-century woman, she can never become a proper “writer”. Therefore, after their rescue, she turns to Foe, the famous author, to write her story in her stead.

Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr Foe: that is my entreaty. For though my story gives the truth, it does not give the substance of truth. [...] To tell the truth in all its substance you must have quiet, and a comfortable chair away

24 Ibid., p. 31.

25 Ibid., p. 67.

26 Ibid., p. 40.

from all distraction, and a window to stare through; and then the knack of seeing waves when there are fields before your eyes, and of feeling the tropic sun when it is cold; and at your fingertips the words with which to capture the vision before it fades, I have none of these, while you have all.27

What are the capacities of the author which Susan lacks? An author has to possess a room (of his or “her own”) and a comfortable chair, that is, they must have a social and financial position that allows them to practice writing as a profession. Then they must also have a window, which separates them from the outside world so that they can keep an aesthetic distance from reality. Third, they must have to be able to present things that are absent – this faculty will be called, in the nineteenth century, creative imagination.

Lastly, they must possess words that “capture” the products of this imagination.

Although this description suggests that Susan has an eighteenth-century conception of language, that she speaks from before the linguistic turn, we will later see that she is very much aware of the ways in which language shapes reality. Indeed, Susan, as we will see, is equally conscious of the immense power of language to do violence to the world, to Friday’s real.

But let us see first what Susan means by her “substance”; is there a selfhood that she is unable to (re)present? Susan is not an “author”, and the novel does not stage the process of her becoming one. On the contrary, it seems that the reason she can bear witness to the loss of Fridays tongue is precisely the fact that she never becomes a writer – as opposed to (the original, fictional) Robinson Crusoe, for instance, who was presented by Defoe as being able to shape the events of his life into a linear, teleological, autobiographical narrative. Can she represent Barthes’ intransitive writer, then?

Dear Mr. Foe,

I am growing to understand why you wanted Cruso to have a musket and be besieged by cannibals. I thought it was a sign you had no regard for the truth.

I forgot you are a writer who knows above all how many words can be sucked from a cannibal feast, how few from a woman covering from the wind. It is all a matter or words and the number of words, is it not?28

Indeed, Coetzee’s Foe is part of the strain of historical metafictions that ally with Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History in claiming that “there is no document of civilisation that is not at the same time a document of barbarism”.29 By focusing

27 Ibid., p. 51–52.

28 Ibid., p. 94.

29 Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn, edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, New York, Schocken Books, 1968, p. 236.

THE VIOLENCE OF SYMPATHY

on Friday and inventing a female narrator while rewriting Robinson Crusoe, this arch-colonial/imperialist novel of the West, Coetzee, just like Walter Benjamin’s good historical materialist, “brushes history against the grain”. Susan Barton resists Foe’s demand to write an adventure story and present Friday as a cannibal, instead, she insists that the “truth” must be told. She equally resists Foe when, rather than telling the story of her whole life, she only tells about the events that happened to the three of them in the island. Thus, even though she asks for her “substance” from Foe, she does not want to assume a narrative identity that would conform to the (male) literary and social norms of the eighteenth century.

I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world. I choose rather to tell of the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire.30

A gender-focused interpretation would only emphasise Susan’s subordination to Foe, and her attempts at finding her own voice. Indeed, Susan defies conventional narrative forms and thereby secures her freedom. She is a woman with desires, and wants to tell her story according to her own desires. And what we actually read are her letters to Foe rather than Foe’s or her own novel, in the conventional sense.

But the issue of gender is further complicated by the question of the postcolonial.

The female subject can have a voice and can gain the right to speak up, as opposed to the colonised subject who is, like Friday, forever deprived of his. He is doomed to silence.

You err most tellingly in failing to distinguish between my silences and the silences of beings such as Friday. 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. I say he is a laundryman and he becomes a laundryman. What is the truth of Friday? You will respond: he is neither a cannibal, nor a laundryman, these are mere names, they do not touch his essence, he is a substantial body, he is himself, Friday is Friday. But that is not so. No matter what he is to himself (is he anything to himself? – how can he tell us?), what he is to the world is what I make of him.

Therefore the silence of Friday is a helpless silence.31

30 Coetzee, Foe, p. 130.

31 Ibid., p. 121–122.

Friday is what words, what language and power, the performative power of language make of him. Since Susan should therefore represent an “other”, who falls outside all systems of representation (i.e. both outside language and politics).

4. THE TRAUMA OF THE OTHER –