Figures of Authority

It is not surprising that Coetzee, having explored the social meaning of textuality, should subject the authority of textualization to such careful scrutiny in his next novel, Foe (1986). The later work represents a withdrawal from the achievement of Michael K to examine the historical and discursive conditions under which white South African authorship must operate—a typically cautious gesture of qualification on Coetzee's part. It might be said that this very skepticism, and the fictional forms that Coetzee finds to elaborate it in Foe, serve only to reinforce the freedom of textualization embodied in Michael K. There would be some truth in this observation; however, it seems more appropriate simply to ask whether Coetzee is able to balance the claim of freedom with an equally rigorous acknowledgment of constraint. I read Foe with this question in mind: How does Coetzee define the limits of whatever textual authority he is able to achieve?

Coetzee positions Foe in the discursive field of postcoloniality, but he does so in peculiarly South African terms. Based on a revision of

Robinson Crusoe, the novel develops a characterology of the relations of power between the metropolitan center and the settler-colonial and native sectors of colonial society. Returning from Bahia, where she has been searching for a lost daughter, Susan Barton is put off the ship after a mutiny; she is accompanied only by the dead body of the captain, whose mistress she had been. She swims ashore and finds herself on the island with Cruso and Friday. Friday has been mutilated: he has no tongue. Who did this, when or how it happened, we are never told. After their rescue by a passing merchantman, Cruso dies aboard ship and Susan and Friday are left to make their way in England.

After she arrives in England, Susan drafts a memoir, "The Female Castaway," and seeks out the author, Foe, to have her story told. Coetzee's novel comprises four parts: beginning with Susan's memoir, it continues in a series of letters addressed to Foe, letters that do not reach him because he is evading his creditors; it proceeds to an account of Susan's relationship with Foe and her struggle to retain control over her story and its meaning; and it ends with a sequence spoken by an unnamed narrator (possibly standing for Coetzee himself) who revises the history as we know it and dissolves the narration in an act of authorial renunciation. Throughout the novel, Friday's silent and enigmatic presence gains in power until it overwhelms the narrator at the end. As Ina Gräbe succinctly puts it, in paying more attention to the telling of the story than the story itself, the novel clearly participates in postmodernism's favoring of the signifier over the signified (147–48).

Although I support Gräbe's view, I also intend to show that in this case the signifier itself is localized in allusive ways in order to make this story of storytelling responsive to the conditions that writers like Coetzee are forced to confront. To appreciate the scope of Coetzee's allegory—and this novel seems more consistently allegorical than the preceding ones—we might invoke the legacy of Olive Schreiner. As Stephen Gray has shown in his classic description of the liberal-realist tradition, Schreiner's Story of an African Farm (1883) is written in a genre of antipastoralism that leaves to later writers a particularly focused account of the intransigence of the interior landscape, the stultifying effects of colonial culture, and the futility of attempts to live meaningfully in South Africa (Gray 150–54). Transcendence of these conditions is impossible, and death comes as a final defeat. Such is the fate of Lyndall, the novel's hero; in Waldo, Schreiner creates a figure of Emersonian wishfulness whose dying moments simultaneously confirm the prevailing conditions and surmount them in a rare moment of lyrical

absorption into Nature. Schreiner's novel offers an interesting pairing partly because of the intriguing possibility that Michael K is Coetzee's Waldo: although Waldo perishes and K survives, they are both little men of the earth who do not fully inhabit their history. More important, though, I turn to Schreiner because in Foe Coetzee finds the means to fictionalize the watchful presence that can be seen—from a symptomatic perspective—standing behind such limited affirmations as there are in the tradition. Consider Schreiner, preparing for Waldo's ambiguous death:

Waldo was at work in the wagon-house again. He was making a kitchentable for Em. As the long curls gathered in heaps before his plane, he paused for an instant now and again to throw one down to a small naked nigger, who had crept from its mother, who stood churning in the sunshine, and had crawled into the wagon-house. From time to time the little animal lifted its fat hand as it expected a fresh shower of curls; till Doss, jealous of his master's noticing any other small creature but himself, would catch the curl in his mouth and roll the little Kaffir over in the sawdust, much to that small animal's contentment… Waldo, as he worked, glanced down at them now and then, and smiled; but he never looked out across the plain. He was conscious without looking of that broad green earth; it made his work pleasant to him. Near the shadow at the gable the mother of the little nigger stood churning. Slowly she raised and let fall the stick in her hands, murmuring to herself a sleepy chant such as her people love; it sounded like the humming of far-off bees. (273)

By the end of the century, of course, Schreiner was to confront the question of race directly, notably in her indictment of colonial violence in Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, but this moment in African Farm defines the structural limitations that white writers have had to deal with from Schreiner on. The mother's chant, blending into the circumambient lyricism of the landscape "like the humming of far-off bees," will, in Coetzee, become the silence of Friday, which "passesthrough the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth"(Foe 157).

Schreiner is taken to represent a turning away from a colonial literature of exploration and adventure to a critical acceptance of the South African locale (Gray 136). In the famous preface to the second edition, she herself enjoins her reader to see African Farm in this light: "Should one sit down to paint the scenes among which he has grown, he will find that the facts creep in upon him" (24). Although Magda, in In the Heart

of the Country, has prepared the way in Coetzee's own oeuvre, Susan Barton's arrival on Cruso's island can be taken to represent Schreiner's moment: it implies the division of a previously monolithic colonizing subject and the emergence of a dialogic structure within what is now settler-colonial culture. Like Schreiner, Susan resists making an adventure out of the story of the island (Foe 67). Through Schreiner, moreover, this transition in South African literary history was gendered; indeed, one can argue that gender made it possible. Susan Barton's narrative replicates this feminist self-affirmation, specifically by taking the island conditions of Robinson Crusoe and overlaying them with the narrative of Defoe's Roxana, whose picaresque feminine hero's real name is, of course, Susan.

The image of a beleaguered, hopeful Susan Barton—in her struggle to get her story told and in her relationship with Foe, author and agent of authorization—is strongly reminiscent of Schreiner's situation in London in 1881–82, when she was looking for a publisher for African Farm. This resemblance is especially strong in Schreiner's account of walking in the rain in Regent Street, feeling that "everyone could know that what was stuck under my cloak was a rejected ms." (Rive 8). One of the paradoxes that Schreiner lived out was that, although she had made her break with the colonial adventure, it was nevertheless in the metropolis that she had to seek publication. Her situation with respect to the metropolis was one of both distance and proximity. Such is Susan Barton's lot, too: she protects her version of the island but needs Foe to authorize it, to provide access to tradition and the institution of letters.

For Susan, however, the relationship with Foe is such that the authority of literariness recedes infinitely before her, confirming her marginality and lack of completion; the novel's title therefore gives prominence to Susan's anxiety about having her reality, what she frequently calls her "substantiality," confirmed in narrative discourse. Foe is her watchful confessor, imaged more than once as a dark spider (48, 120). Teresa Dovey's thesis concerning the Lacanian associations of Coetzee's fiction seems to have a particular relevance here; but as Dovey has also shown, Foe dramatizes the Foucauldian notion of the "author-function" as a regulatory principle (Novels of J. M. Coetzee 333–34). Coetzee exploits the concept of the "fathering" of prose narrative through a parody of one of its "founders," Daniel Defoe. Annamaria Carusi has taken this process further in a materialist-psychoanalytic analysis of the novel as an allegory of narrative as a form of commodity in which a chain of association is created between notions of truth, the body, and story, to

be installed and circulated as Law ("Foe " 137–39). The changes Coetzee makes to the original patronyms would seem to confirm the direction of these readings: Defoe's historical name was, of course, Foe before he gentrified it (Dottin 65); similarly, Coetzee reverts to "Cruso,"the name of Defoe's long-standing friend Timothy Cruso, a dissenting minister who seems to have provided the name of Defoe's adventurer (T. Wright 243). In both instances Coetzee sheds a "preliterary" light on his protagonists in order to place the transformations of the "literary" in question.

Coetzee's Cruso is unmoved by Susan's desire for authorization. In fact, in his taciturn resistance and self-absorption, his refusal to keep a journal, his reluctance to do anything to save himself, he is quite unlike his model (being closer, if anything, to Defoe's model, Alexander Selkirk).^[6] Susan reflects: "Cruso rescued will be a deep disappointment to the world; the idea of a Cruso on his island is a better thing than the true Cruso tight-lipped and sullen in an alien England" (35). Coetzee's differentiation of Defoe's narrative according to South African conditions really begins here, rather than with Susan, for Afrikaners began turning their backs on Europe at approximately the time Defoe was writing, entering the interior of the Western Cape as pastoralists in unequal competition with the Khoisan, against the wishes of the Dutch East India Company. The second narrrative of Dusklands tells this story in terms of violence, but it is equally possible to tell it as a story of entrapment: not only is there a spatial entrapment for which an island in the Atlantic might serve as a suitable metaphor, but there is also a temporal and cultural entrapment in a time before the Enlightenment.

Coetzee brings these threads together in an image of seemingly futile labor: Cruso's terraces are enigmatic, but their principal function is that they provide work for Cruso and the enslaved Friday. Two cultural injunctions from the colonial past are invoked here. The first is Calvinism, which enjoins its adherents to labor on the road to perfection; an echo of Calvinism is found in Cruso's comment "I ask you to remember, not every man who bears the mark of the castaway is a castaway at heart" (33). The second injunction is linked to pastoralism, in which the land "is humanized when inscribed by hand and plough" (White Writing 7). This is a pastoralism of settlement rather than ownership. As Cruso says: "The planting is reserved for those who come after us and have the foresight to bring seed. I only clear the ground for them. Clearing ground and piling stones is little enough, but it is better than sitting in idleness" (33). Finally, Cruso's love of emptiness in the seascape and his irritation at being disturbed from his reverie (38) parallel

Coetzee's description in his Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech of the "failure of love" in South Africa, that is, the settler's love of the land and landscape at the expense of the polity ("Apartheid" 124).

Friday's differentiation within the South African situation is equally specific. As Coetzee himself has noted, in Robinson Crusoe "Friday is a handsome Carib youth with near-European features. In Foe he is an African" ("Two Interviews" 463). "The man squatted down beside me," says Susan, "He was black: a Negro with a head of fuzzy wool, naked save for a pair of rough drawers. I lifted myself and studied the flat face, the small dull eyes, the broad nose, the thick lips, the skin not black but dark grey, dry as if coated with dust" (5–6). Friday's contextualization is most clearly rendered, however, in his mutilation and lack of speech. This seems to be Coetzee's unique, and uniquely South African, contribution to the tradition of Robinsonades spawned by Defoe.^[7] In his review of the novel Neville Alexander, a theorist of the national question and a linguist who spent many years on Robben Island, argues that the pertinence of Friday to black history is not in question: "The apparent inaccessibility of Friday's world to the Europeans in this story is an artist's devastating judgement of the crippling anti-humanist consequences of colonialism and racism on the self-confident white world" (38).

Collectively, therefore, Coetzee's protagonists represent the ambiguous condition of postcoloniality that South Africa inhabits. What distinguishes white South African literature from other "postcolonizing" literatures is not only that white South African literature is linguistically diverse but that the territorial capture underpinning it was always less complete; the consequence is a form of postcoloniality that, to the extent that it is critical, stands under an ethical and political injunction always to defer to the authority of an emergent nationalist resistance that will inaugurate the age of postcoloniality proper. When such a moment will arrive, and, indeed, whether such a moment will "arrive," what political form it might take, and whether there is a unitary voice that can be taken to model the nationalist alternative—these are all valid questions. Coetzee's approach to such issues, however, in the figure of Friday, is cautious: preferring not to presume too much, Coetzee allows the representation of Friday to be shaped by the obvious political and epistemological limitations of colonial discourse, a position from which even the critical, self-consciously marginal, and feminist colonial discourse represented by Susan cannot entirely escape. In other words, in Friday's silence Coetzee acknowledges where he stands while simultaneously

fictionalizing the transformative power that threatens, or promises, to eclipse the voices of what we might call, for want of a better term, colonial postcolonialism.

Let me turn to Foe in more detail to demonstrate how its elements are set in motion. Susan's quest to get her story told begins as a desire for substantiality: "Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr Foe: that is my entreaty" (51). At this stage, her conception of Foe's power is that he can provide sufficient realistic detail to give her story the density of "truth." She tells herself that the word "story" means "a storing-place of memories" (59) and that language creates a "correspondence between things as they are and the pictures we have of them in our minds" (65). As she deepens herself in composing letters to Foe, however, she begins to find this version of truth to be unworkable. For one thing, her story lacks adventure, though she is also unwilling to invent episodes that did not happen. More seriously, she realizes that she does not know how to account for Friday's mutilation: "What we accept in life we cannot accept in history. To tell my story and be silent on Friday's tongue is no better than offering a book for sale with pages in it quietly left empty. Yet the only tongue that can tell Friday's secret is the tongue he has lost!" (67).

Later she reflects directly on the difficulties of writing stories, comparing it to Cruso's and Friday's labor on the terraces and speaking of it as requiring the power of divination, a power she lacks (87). She lists what she calls the "mysteries" of the island, a series of unresolved questions: What was the meaning of the terraces? How did Friday lose his tongue? Why did Friday submit to Cruso? Why did neither Cruso nor Friday desire her? What was the meaning of Friday's act of scattering petals on the water near the site where she imagines they were shipwrecked? Such questions remain unanswered. What we are witnessing in this sequence is Susan's increasing engrossment in language as resistant material; needless to say, even at this early stage of the process much of the intractability Susan feels can be ascribed to Friday's enigmatic presence.

But the appearance of a girl claiming to be Susan's daughter taxes her patience more than Friday at this point, and it is here that Coetzee introduces Roxana. Defoe's novel is the confessional narrative of a woman who achieves prosperity by living as a courtesan or, as she prefers to call herself, a "free woman"—a term that Susan Barton uses as well. Toward the end of the novel Defoe introduces the daughter, named Susan after her mother (whose identity as "Roxana" is thereby

undermined), as a reminder of the children Roxana deserted when her first husband left her and she set off on her path to fortune and independence. Roxana refuses to acknowledge the daughter, who is subsequently murdered in a misguided act of service by the servant, Amy. She repudiates Amy but lives on in torment, the condition that generates the confession. With the return of the daughter, therefore, as John J. Richetti points out, "the center of the narrative shifts from the controlled external world of financial and sexual relationships, from clothes, rich furniture, investments and titles, to the controlling internal world of memory and guilt" (118). Control is the key here: Roxana's desire to remain author of her life is superseded by her past catching up with her, which turns her story into a morally ironic drama of psychological destiny. Her identity as the girl's mother is the essential ingredient in this transition: in a phrase suggestive of Coetzee's concerns, Roxana calls it "the grand reserved article of all" (Roxana 319).

In Foe, Susan Barton's desire to control her destiny is sustained in her repudiation of the daughter as Foe's own invention. Unlike Roxana, the embrace of the mother and daughter produces no memorable bonding. The daughter figures as the point of dispute between Susan and Foe in their different versions of Susan's narrative and of the role of the island in it: to Foe, once Susan returns to England, the daughter successfully takes up the quest abandoned by the mother, thus producing a neatly resolved plot; this resolution traduces Susan's account, which preserves the centrality of the island and leaves the daughter forever lost. Which of these versions is ultimately the "truth" is unimportant; what matters is that a struggle for control over the narrative is staged between Foe and Susan and that Susan does not succumb. In fact, it is possible to measure Susan's success in several ways. When she explains to the "daughter" that she actually has no mother, that she is "father-born" (91), she is responding to Foe's imposition, asserting her will at the same level as Foe's, that is, at the level of invention or plot construction. When she and Foe couple, she mounts him as the Muse, both "goddess and begetter" of her story (126). That she manages to effect a reversal of gender roles on Foe is clear when, not long thereafter, Foe imagines himself as Susan's "old whore" and Susan savors the thought of having turned Foe into her "mistress" and, finally, her "wife" (152). (This moment recalls the transvestism of The Story of an African Farm, when Gregory Rose dresses as a woman in order to attend to Lyndall on her deathbed [252–65]; perhaps gender reversal represents a pattern of

limited victory in the colonial feminist's desire for authorization in South Africa.)

The question arises of whether Susan's assertions are enough to bring her the substantiality she longs for; in this respect, her very determination gives the game away. On the journey to Bristol, during the fruitless attempt to manumit Friday and return him to Africa, she discovers a dead baby in a ditch and asks, "Who was the child but I, in another life?" (105), as if at the core of her desire for self-representation she senses a lack that will always leave her incomplete, inchoate. She nevertheless pursues her project to the point of despair: "Now all my life grows to be story," she says to Foe, speaking of the daughter figure, "and there is nothing of my own left to me. I thought I was myself and this girl a creature from another order speaking words you made up for her. But now I am full of doubt. I am doubt itself" (133).

Critics have responded to the uncertainties in Susan's quest in interesting ways, two of which I shall mention here. When Susan asserts a counterstory to Foe's, she places the year on the island at the center. The problem, however, is that Friday cannot be incorporated into this story: his mutilation, his ritual of scattering petals on the water at the site where Susan assumes he was shipwrecked, his subjectivity—all are simply inaccessible to Susan. She says to Foe, "If the story seems stupid, that is only because it so doggedly holds its silence. The shadow whose lack you feel is there: it is the loss of Friday's tongue" (117). Dovey discusses this inconsistency in terms of the intersection between feminist and postcolonial discourses ("postcolonial" implying, in this case, anticolonial nationalism), arguing that Coetzee's purpose is to show how the more prominent forms of Western feminism have appropriated the colonized subject to their own ends, using the native Other as a convenient figure for feminine difference (Novels of J. M. Coetzee 356–66). Spivak notices not only that the gendered position is strained but that the novel strains to make it appear so; she then suggests, more positively, that Coetzee wishes to demonstrate "the impossibility of restoring the history of empire and recovering the lost text of mothering in the same register of language " ("Theory in the Margin" 162–65). (It seems possible, incidentally, to read Schreiner's life and career as partly an attempt to reconcile these differences.)

To these arguments one must add that the feminism Coetzee constructs through Susan carries additional allegorical burdens that have little to do with gender. In the allegory of white South African author-

ship, Susan's womanhood suggests the relative cultural power of the province as opposed to the metropolis and of unauthorized as opposed to authorized speech; gender therefore serves as the sign of the position of semimarginality that I have called colonial postcolonialism. In terms of the politics of agency, this is the position with which Coetzee identifies, and in an interview he has proved to be protective of this selfpositioning. When asked whether Foe's reflection on the book trade implied a critical retreat from the notion of being a "successful author," Coetzee responded with some asperity that the question was barbed, for it associated him with Foe whereas his sympathies in the novel were clearly with "Foe's foe, the un successful author—worse, authoress—Susan Barton" ("Two Interviews" 462). This comment can be taken as a measure of how gender is complicated through Susan, as the representative of a marginality that has more generalized implications.