i. Introduction
It was Friday, with Foe’s robes on his back and Foe’s wig, filthy as a bird’s nest, on his head. In his hand, poised over Foe’s papers, he held a quill with a drop of black ink glistening at its very tip. (Coetzee 151)
In J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1987), Susan Barton returns from a stroll and is greeted by the above scene. Friday, the mute black slave, wears the robes of Foe, Coetzee’s recreation of Daniel Defoe. In this pivotal scene, Coetzee shows Friday learning English while clad in the Englishman’s robes, illustrating the tension between language, silence, and representation. While Friday in Robinson Crusoe (1994[1719]) has his tongue intact, the Friday in Foe has his tongue removed as he is displaced from one novel to another.
The silence of the subaltern is made material through the tongueless hollow of Friday’s mouth. In her seminal essay Can the Subaltern Speak? (1994), Gayatri Spivak argues that the subaltern — in this case the Hindu widow — is muted in the “violent shuttling” (Subaltern 102) between imperialist representation by the British, and patriarchal representation by the Hindu men. Any attempt at representing the subaltern is a form of catachresis, or “a false but useful analogy” (Theory 8) that substitutes the original figure of the subaltern with a representation of hegemonic discourse, effectively erasing her voice in the process. Though catachresis is useful in making people aware of the subaltern’s existence, and in the process producing new narratives about her, the subaltern’s voice is ultimately muted, for she cannot inhabit the heterogeneous space between the attempts at representation. Spivak represents the subaltern as a disappearance; a blank space without any solidity or agency (Subaltern 83). However, while the Hindu widow is voiceless and her self-immolation further erases the physical signs of her body, Friday remains an aggressive presence in the text. His tongueless mouth has a materiality that Spivak’s subaltern does not have. In Barton’s words: “[the] shadow whose lack you feel is there: it is the loss of Friday’s tongue” (117). Friday’s mouth is a blank space that can defy the imprint of hegemonic discourse because of his defiant silence.
The notion of the subaltern must therefore be modified to provide a better framework through which the reader can better elucidate the character of Friday. Wolfgang Iser in The Art of Reading (1978) introduces the term Leerstelle to describe blanks within texts. He defines Leerstelle as “the blanks which the reader is to fill in” and which “guide [the reader] to adopt a position in relation to the text” (169). Leerstelle forces the reader to recognise the marks that they inscribe upon the text and realise that their readings are “individual concretisations” (171, emphasis mine); provisional rather than authoritative interpretations. The reader is removed from the position of an authoritative interpreter of the text and placed within a subjective position in which his interpretation is only one of many. Leerstelle is a blank with agency and materiality. It brings a new dimension to Spivak’s subaltern’s inevitable silence because silence is not merely a sign of disappearance but also a sign of agency.
The figure of Friday is Leerstelle concretised. He is a mute character that asserts his agency through silence. Coetzee’s reformulation of Friday problematises the notion that speech entails agency, and silence means disempowerment. My thesis therefore aims to construct a new framework whereby Friday’s silence may be interpreted, not traditionally as disempowerment, but as agency and empowerment. However, Friday’s silence can only be understood as an imperfectLeerstelle, with its imperfections arising from the problematic nature of the agency that Friday gains through that very silence.
ii. Disempowered Speech
The character of Friday is not Coetzee’s own creation; rather, Friday is an adaptation from Defoe’s colonial discourse, now displaced onto postcolonial discourse. The changes Coetzee makes to Friday, and his possible intentions through the change, can only be elucidated through a close examination of the original Friday from Robinson Crusoe.
Specifically, this section will examine how and why speech can be interpreted, not as agency, but as disempowerment. In his “dynamic stratification grid”, Ranajit Guha attempts to identify different hierarchies of power (8). The “dominant foreign groups”, for example, occupy the highest position, while the “dominant indigenous groups” essentially dominate the subalterns because of their ability to communicate with the elite foreigners (8). Leaving aside the figure of Friday for a moment, Robinson Crusoe as the elite foreigner is incapable of communicating with his subjects because of the language barrier. Defoe makes no mention of Crusoe ever learning the savages’ language, or even Spanish, to communicate with the Spanish Captain who eventually returns him to civilisation. Crusoe’s inability to communicate marks his power, for all who wish to speak to him must learn English and speak to him in English, hence recreating themselves within the ideological structures that Crusoe is familiar with.
However, Guha’s framework is based on the fundamental assumption that speech is a form of agency. This is evidently not the case because Defoe’s Friday is capable of speech, a fact that Crusoe makes use of by re-naming him in Crusoe’s own language: “I made him know his name should be Friday.” (203). Crusoe’s act of naming Friday is a form of catachresis: the nameless savage rescued by Crusoe has been replaced by “Friday”. As Crusoe continues to teach Friday English and the precepts of Christianity, he effectively obliterates all traces of the nameless savage. Friday’s identity is entirely dependent on Crusoe, and all identities Friday may have previously possessed are destroyed. He has been subsumed within the colonial hegemony and reconstructed as a submissive subject from his very introduction. Friday is immediately relegated to a submissive position because his voice is not his own. Even though Friday forms the words he speaks, the words themselves are the words of the governing ideology that Crusoe represents and are controlled by Crusoe’s teachings. Within English, Friday is re-imprinted as the subaltern that is unable to “know and speak itself” (Subaltern 80). Furthermore, when Friday first learns English, he is taught to call Crusoe “Master” (203). From the first words Friday learns to speak, he is placed within the hegemony as a subject who has to submit to the wants and directions of his master. Crusoe’s agency determines Friday’s speech. Therefore for Friday, speech does not entail agency.
Even before Friday learns English, Defoe already constructs him as lacking in agency; the site of agency is always with Crusoe. This is apparent through the paralinguistic elements in Friday’s first encounter with Crusoe: [Friday] “laid his head upon the ground, and taking [Crusoe] by the foot, set [Crusoe’s] foot upon his head; this, it seems, was in token of swearing to be [Crusoe’s] slave for ever” (200). Through this silent gesture, Friday submits to Crusoe.
Within Guha’s framework, Friday should gain dominance in his position as Crusoe’s “interpreter” (237) because he controls the words and meanings of Crusoe and other speakers through his decision of the ‘best interpretation’ to use. However, Friday is no more than an interstitial, transparent communicator without agency of his own. He is nothing more than a translator; a device that changes words from one language to another. Speech, yet again, is not seen to be empowering. “[Crusoe] set[s] Friday to inquire of his father what he thought of the escape of the savages... [Friday’s father’s] first opinion was...” (238): though Crusoe and the older savage are only capable of communicating through Friday, Friday disappears in the space between Crusoe’s question and the answer Crusoe receives. Rather than being given agency in any form, Friday’s ability to communicate instead reinforces that he is a subaltern figure. Friday’s words and actions are controlled by Crusoe who “set[s] Friday to inquire” for him. In fact, Friday- as-interpreter has even less agency than the nameless, older savage for whom he is translating for, because Friday is but a mouthpiece of the savage. His words are only echoes of the original speaker’s speech. Even Friday’s promotion to “lieutenant-general” — a rank higher than the white Captain’s rank — is undermined because the emphasis is not on Friday’s exalted position, but on the word that precedes it: “my” (261). Friday is Crusoe’s lieutenant-general, belonging to him so wholly that Crusoe’s agency drives Friday’s every form of speech. The traditional framework that links speaking to agency is thus destabilised because Defoe’s Friday’s speech re- emphasises his position as the disappeared subaltern.
The figure of Friday in Defoe’s novel is comparable to Barton in Coetzee’s Foe. Even though Barton is a carrier of words between Cruso and Foe, she is not a mechanical translation, but an interpreter. Even then, however, she does not wield any agency. Barton is an interpreter because she is the narrator of Foe; it is through her viewpoint that the story of the island is translated for Foe and the reader. However, her status as narrator does not prevent her from being “a being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso” (51) because she is unable to shape the story of the island. She has no authority over the story since she has not “brought back [...] a feather, [...] a thimbleful of sand, from Cruso’s island” (51). The island, and its narrative, still belongs to Cruso. Her desperate attempts to fill the “shadow” (117) of Friday’s tongue only reasserts her position as a subordinate interpreter because her part of the narrative is insufficient to tell the entire story. Furthermore, Barton’s attempts to interpret the remnants of Cruso’s story are futile because Foe ultimately holds the power to shape the narrative according to his ideology. By defining the story of the island as “not a story” (117), Foe places himself as the maker of the narrative and the elite foreign adjudicator. As a writer-adjudicator, he has power over the narrator Barton. Barton’s struggle with the future writer of her story is thus emblematic of the power of the silent writer who inevitably recreates narratives of those he writes about. Barton’s speech allows Foe to demand from her a narrative that suits his ideology. Although she resists Foe’s efforts, Barton has already been catachresised by Coetzee from her original place in Defoe’s Roxana (1904[1724]). Although Barton remains recognisable as Susan of Roxana, her speech does not mark agency; instead, it renders her vulnerable to being exploited. Therefore, while Barton has not completely disappeared in the heterogeneous space between Cruso and Friday, she remains like the stillborn child on the road (105) — present but lacking in agency. If speech allows for catachresis, then it can indicate a lack of agency. Similarly, as my next section will show, silence may be alternatively interpreted as a mark of empowerment.
iii. Empowered Silence
In the displacement from Defoe’s texts to Coetzee’s narrative, the names of the characters have been changed. For example, Robinson Crusoe the obsessive event-recorder becomes Cruso, who “no longer knew for sure what was truth, what fancy” (12). The act of naming—or renaming—is indicted to be a removal of “original” identity. However, in order for Cruso, Barton, and even Foe to remain recognisable, Coetzee denies the very catachresis that he accuses Defoe of committing. Coetzee’s removal of Friday’s tongue without changing his name is an indictment of the speech in the mouth of Defoe’s Friday; that is, Friday’s physical muteness becomes a resistance against Defoe’s catachresis of Friday.
Scholarship on Foe subscribes to the traditional framework that links silence to disempowerment. As Derek Attridge states: “Friday’s tonguelessness is the sign of his oppression; it is [...] the sign of [...] the absolute otherness, by which he appears to his oppressors, and by which their dominance is sustained” (86). Yet if Friday could speak, “he would melt into a class which is already constituted and socially placed by a pervasive discourse” (86). Attridge portrays Friday as being trapped in a double-bind where neither silence nor speech is capable of giving him any agency. However, I will argue that Friday’s constant and deliberately maintained silence asserts his agency within Foe, allowing him to break free of this very bind.
Friday can learn to speak, albeit through writing, but his refusal to do so marks the potential of catachresis within speech. He refuses to learn writing, much to Susan Barton’s frustrations: “[a]ll my efforts to bring Friday to speech, or to bring speech to Friday, have failed.” Furthermore, in Foe’s own words: “Friday has fingers. If he has fingers he can form letters. Writing is not doomed to be the shadow of speech” (142). After Barton’s efforts to teach Friday writing through the use of a slate, “Friday put three fingers into his mouth and wet them with spittle and rubbed the slate clean” (147). Friday’s act of erasure is the concretisation of the agency of his silence: he does not remain passively and helplessly silent. Instead, he purposefully silences his own utterances. When Friday is being taught again, he writes only “the letter o” (152): a single letter that is both devoid of meaning and hauntingly reminiscent of the hollow space of his own mouth. The image of Friday learning to write is not, as Chris Prentice interprets, “an optimistic image of a beginning, the possibility of Friday’s self-representation in a world at that point yet to be written” (96). Foe and Barton are only capable of teaching Friday English—a colonial language that will erase his identity just as it had Defoe’s Friday. In fact, when Friday dons Foe’s robes, Friday is literally assuming Foe’s mantle and writing in Foe’s words. Friday’s active resistance against speaking transforms the hollow space of his mouth into a material space, for his refusal to speak points towards a story that exists.
Postcolonial scholarship, like Spivak’s formulation of the subaltern, has so far understood silence to be empty of meaning; however, reader-response theory has often taken textual silence to embody meaning. As Merleau-Ponty states, “the lack of a sign can itself be a sign” (qtd. in Iser 169). Iser explicates upon the point, defining Leerstelle and claiming that silence in a text is eloquent in that it “guides” the reader to an interpretation “in relation to the text” (169; italics in original). The reader is made aware that the materiality within the blank prevents him from inserting any interpretation he wishes. In other words, the reader cannot perform catachresis on the text. Silence is not an empty space but a material blank, a sign in itself that the reader has to learn to understand. If Friday allows himself to be taught English, his own voice will be displaced, disappearing between Foe’s and Barton’s. This would leave him not only incapable of speaking but incapable of acknowledging the ventriloquism of the dominant discourse because the concepts and words that he is taught are not his own. Barton acknowledges this: “[w]as my Africa the Africa whose memory Friday bore within him? I doubted it” (146). As ‘Africa’ is a concept born from the dominant, colonial discourse, utterly separated from the lived experiences of the colonised subject, Friday will be reproducing the very hegemony that keeps him subordinate. He will be replacing his own memory of the land of his origins with that which was created by the dominant discourse—that, he refuses.
As a form of Leerstelle, any attempts to represent the hollow of Friday’s mouth inevitably fail, because, in Iser’s words, it would be “filling the blank exclusively with one’s own projection” (167). While “many stories can be told of Friday’s tongue [...] the true story is buried within Friday” (118). Friday’s silence is not hollow and therefore, it cannot be filled with Foe or Barton’s words. Although Foe and Barton may attempt to speak for him and represent him, they cannot help but be aware that their interpretations are merely provisional.
Silence within Coetzee’s novel is not limited to Friday alone; however, only Friday’s silence can be classified as a form of Leerstelle. Barton’s silence, for example, is futile. Although she claims her silence is “chosen and purposeful” (122), she has to constantly fend off Foe’s attempts to invade the space of her silence in order to recreate her narrative within his ideology (116). Furthermore, Barton is unable to deny that “Susan Barton” is her daughter because Foe continually insists, on her behalf, that Susan is Barton’s “own child” (152). Barton’s silence is re- imprinted as the very “helpless silence” (122) that she claims it is not. Her narrative of herself is only a singular interpretation of the story, and her struggle with Foe over her own narrative once again shows the disempowerment of speech. While Leerstelle is a blank with materiality that denies any interpretive projections, Barton does not have a similar right to deny the interpretations projected upon her. This is despite her ability to vocally deny attempts to reshape her narrative. Barton’s temporary silence still does not allow her agency. Within Foe, it seems that only unbroken, maintained silence is a form of Leerstelle and therefore capable of wielding agency. Barton is in a double-bind; whether she attempts to speak or stay silent, her narrative will still be reshaped by Foe. While Barton’s silence about Bahia might be her last resort to prove that she is a “substantial being” (131), it does not succeed. Her silence is made porous through her ability to speak.
Barton’s insubstantiality as a narrator is further contrasted with the materiality of Friday’s tongueless mouth as her narrative is made subordinate to Friday’s silence in Coetzee’s text. Barton cannot tell Foe the story of the island until Friday learns to speak and helps to fill in the blanks of her story. If the story of the island makes little sense because of Friday’s stubborn silence, then whatever part of the island narrative that Barton tries to tell is only useful as a way of guiding the reader — in this case Foe — to interpret Friday’s silence. Friday’s silence is therefore the focal point of the narrative and Barton’s narrative is thus subordinate to Friday. In other words, Barton’s narrative consists of insubstantial words that circle around the materiality of Friday’s tongueless mouth. Although she claims that all characters except Friday are beings of substance (152), the truth is instead the opposite — Friday’s body is the most substantial within the text because he can deny attempts to reshape his story while Barton, a speaking subject, cannot do so.
Furthermore, as a form of Leerstelle, Friday’s silence is a sign that Foe and Barton acknowledge and are fascinated by. As Foe presses his ear to Friday’s mouth, “[he begins] to hear the faintest faraway roar” (154). The audible yet incomprehensible roar is a primitive bellow that resists being structured by language. While Foe hopes for “the call of a voice”, he only receives “the sounds of the island” — sounds that are not formed into English words that Foe can understand. These wordless sounds are filled with materiality so much so that Friday’s breath “beats against [Foe’s] eyelids” (157). Friday’s world is one where “bodies”, and not necessarily words, “are their own signs”. The words that Foe wants to hear from Friday are “caught and filled with water and diffused” (157) and their incoherence denies Foe’s desire for coherence. In the absence of speech, Friday’s bodily gestures are all the more meaningful and intriguing: for instance, the scene where Friday scatters petals upon the sea haunts Barton (87), and later Foe (155). As Leerstelle shifts the burden of understanding from the author to reader, Foe and Barton have to remove themselves from the hegemonic colonial discourse and attempt to understand Friday’s story on his own terms.
The concept of Leerstelle grants the reader a better understanding of silence in Coetzee’s novel. However, Friday nevertheless remains an imperfect Leerstelle because he does not wield the full agency that Iser’s material blank possesses. Leerstelle in the text has power over its reader, forcing it to understand the material blank, because the reader of a text submits immediately to the text’s authority during the act of reading. However, Friday’s agency is still limited because he is still dependent upon Foe and Barton to subscribe voluntarily to his world and learn his language. Ultimately, it is Barton’s own choice to “[begin] to turn in Friday’s dance” (103). In the relationship between the curious, fascinated reader and the silent Friday, power still remains invested in the former: Friday is still a subject within the text. The materiality of his tongueless mouth may disallow authoritative interpretation, but his very muteness prevents him from representing himself. Friday’s silence therefore constitutes a series of denials without truly guiding the reader towards possible readings of the signs of his body.
The imperfect Leerstelle that is Friday’s mouth not only refuses to reveal itself but is unable to do so. Notably, Iser’s Leerstelle is only able to guide the reader because the text surrounding the blank is written by the author; however, the text surrounding Friday is that of Barton’s. Friday is thus incapable of writing the text around and about himself. Any attempts to understand Friday are not only dependent upon the reader but also on Barton’s narrative. After all, he is only able to voice H (22), which is nothing but “the failed echolalia of the mute” (Theory 15). Friday might resist catachresis, but he is no less silent than Defoe’s Friday for still nothing is known of Friday’s narrative. The imperfect Leerstelle of Friday’s mouth is a marked lack of representation; a material blank that in order to refuse being projected upon has to give up the ability to represent itself.
The only avenue of representation left for the subaltern is to leave this marked lack: if the material blank of Friday’s mouth is uncovered, he will disappear from the text. When her attempt to find Friday a way home fails, Barton states, “[w]here a ship’s-master was honest [...] he would not accept so unpromising a deck-hand as Friday” (111). Friday’s stubborn muteness renders him “unpromising” because he cannot be subsumed within the colonial discourse as a subject. However, his silence allows him to remain within Barton’s narrative instead of disappearing to Jamaica where Barton would have sent him if he could speak. If the disappearance of the nameless savage in Defoe’s text is metaphorical, Coetzee makes explicit the link between the ability of the subaltern to speak and the potential of his disappearance. While Friday’s muteness prevents him from being authoritatively represented, his silence also allows him to be controlled by Barton who can decide, on his behalf, whether he remains within her narrative.
Friday’s agency is further compromised because he does not represent himself: he remains represented by Coetzee. He is trapped both by Barton’s narrative and Coetzee’s narrative about him. As a character, he occupies a space within the text that is hermeneutically impenetrable to the reader. Furthermore, Coetzee has little choice but to represent Friday through silence because by representing and revealing Friday’s story, he risks catachresising Friday and aligning him with Defoe’s Friday. Hence it is not just speech, but silence that is controlled by Coetzee because even an imperfect Leerstelle is only marked by its surrounding text.
It remains that Friday’s silence still holds some agency; albeit an imperfect agency that Leerstelle illuminates. Friday cannot be shuttled between two heterogeneous representations, and while his agency is limited, he still occupies a material blank that interpretative attempts cannot perforate. Foe and Barton’s readings of Friday are therefore not authoritative; while Friday may not be able to tell his story, he is still capable of denying them any authority in their interpretations.
iv. Conclusion
The traditional postcolonial framework linking silence with disempowerment and speech with agency therefore becomes inadequate in accounting for Friday’s silence or Barton’s speech. By using Wolfgang Iser’s Leerstelle to modify Spivak’s concept of the subaltern, I have shown that while the figure of the subaltern is still subordinate to the writer, he holds a limited form of agency through his denial of the authoritative nature of the reader. Yet his silence remains an imperfect Leerstelle because he has little choice but to be represented through that silence. He cannot tell his story within Foe because any act of representation will be a catachresis.
My essay has attempted to interpret the material blank that is Friday’s mouth; in so doing, this blank is shaped by my viewpoint and given agency through my act of writing. In writing in English, I also become complicit with the dominant discourse. However, this interpretation remains provisional, with as much or as little authority as other critics of Coetzee’s work. As a form of Leerstelle, Friday’s silence gives rise to many possible interpretations, but he, unlike Spivak’s subaltern, has the power to deny the authority of such interpretations. The dominant discourse may attempt to interpret Friday; however, it is denied the power of the hegemony in Foe.
Justine Yoong has recently graduated with a Literature major from NUS. She likes to make life difficult for herself by writing ideas that are extremely complicated and nearly impossible to define. She also likes thinking of herself as a ‘multidisciplinarian’ when in fact she just has a very limited attention span and might have been reincarnated from a magpie.
Works Cited
Attridge, Derek. “The Silence of the Canon: Foe.” J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the
Event. London: University of Chicago, 2004. 65-90. Print. Coetzee, J. M. Foe. London, New York, and South Africa: Penguin, 1997. Print. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. London: Penguin, 1994. Print.
Guha, Ranajit. “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India.” Subaltern Studies I: Writing on
South Asian History and Society. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982. 1-9. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Trans. John Hopkins University Press.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Print. Prentice, Chris. “Foe (1986).” A Companion to the Works of J.M. Coetzee. Ed. Tim Mehigan. New York:
Camden House, 2011. 91-112. Print. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A
Reader. Ed. Patrick Williams/Laura Chrisman. New York: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1994. 66-111. Print.
Volume 1.1: “Edges of the Print” 24
———. “Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s “Crusoe/Roxana”", English in Africa 17.2 (Oct
1990):1-22. Print.
Works Consulted
Attwell, David. “Writing in ‘the cauldron of history’: Life and Times of Michael K and Foe.” J.M. Coetzee:
South Africa and the Politics of Writing. USA and UK: University of California Press, 1993. Print. Defoe, Daniel. Roxana. Cambridge and USA: Cambridge University Press, 1904. Gutenberg.org. 27 Oct.
2009. Web. 13 Oct. 2012. <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30344/30344-h/30344- h.htm>. Jameson, Fredric. “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” Social Text 15 (Autumn,
1986): 65-88. Print. Robbins, Bruce. “Secularism, Elitism, Progress, and Other Transgressions: On Edward Said’s ‘Voyage In’.”
Social Text 40 (Autumn, 1994): 25-37. Print. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. Print. Poyner, Jane. “Bodying Forth the Other: Friday and the ‘Discursive Situation’ in Foe.” J.M. Volume 1.1:
“Edges of the Print” 25
Coetzee and the Paradox of Postcolonial Authorship. By Jane Poyner. UK and USA: Ashgate Publishing
Limited, 2009.