In class, we talked about how important it was for Friday's silence to remain unarticulated. Rather than speaking what is meant to be a void, Coetzee throws the hole into relief with closer and closer approximations. All the talk about gestalts and gestells made me realize that I've been doing the same thing with my analysis (much to my personal frustration). Forget Friday--I can't say anything about Foe without making an approximation. Last week I struggled to come up with a blog post, so I compared Foe to Avatar. While trying desperately to understand Part IV, I made mental analogies to episodes of The Twilight Zone and parts of Fahrenheit 451. Try as I might, I can't quite get at what Foe is saying. I can only make better and better frames. Judging by some of the other posts, I have a feeling that I'm not the only one who feels this way. Maybe this is exactly what Coetzee intended.
And now I'm going to repeat the process, trying yet again to frame the hole just right:
In my Native American religious studies class, we're reading Black Elk Speaks, the supposed autobiography of a Lakota man named Black Elk as transcribed by John Neihardt. My edition of the book reads as a pure transcription, straight from Black Elk's mouth. But most of my classmates have a newer edition, and it denotes certain places where Neihardt inserted his own commentary, speaking as Black Elk. Many Native American cultures highly value silence, and here Neihardt unintentionally stifles what was probably a very conscious decision by Black Elk. Generally speaking, native people try to leave room for silence in their stories so that the listeners can create their own mental images and form their own conclusions. Neihardt erased most of this subtlety by adding his own sentimentality and trying to gain an emotional reaction from his audience.
Basically, Black Elk has the same mission as Coetzee. Both storytellers are aware of the role of silence in their stories and try to create sharp contrast in order to reveal it.
I feel exactly the same way. I can't come up with any tangible answers to the questions we have been discussing in class, and I don't think I will ever be able to. I won't ever know who exactly narrates Part IV, and I won't know where they are located in the last few pages of the novel. But yes, I think this is exactly the point. Coetzee is trying to get us to read this book differently than other books, just as Susan is trying to get Foe to write her story differently than other stories. This does not have "loss, then quest, then recovery; beginning, then middle, then end." (117) If we try to read the novel as such, we will only become frustrated. In the end, all we can do is create frames, and possible answers to our questions so as to create an idea of what Coetzee is trying to portray.
ReplyDelete