Both O'Brien and Coetzee like to the focus on the details of storytelling and the way they relate to storytelling, but they take different approaches. O'Brien is concerned with the essence of the story - the deeper truth about war and love. The details can be manipulated in order to make the reader feel something, and O'Brien takes a lot of liberties with the truth. He makes up almost all of the details, but somehow it doesn't matter. The Things They Carried doesn't suffer because most of it is manipulated details, but instead gets better than the simple truth of O'Brien's boring life as a foot soldier.
Coetzee, or rather his narrator of Susan Barton, is really set on the idea that her story has to be completely true. She wants it to sell well, to make her lots of money, but she doesn't want to compromise the truth by inventing things that never happened, no matter how exciting they might be. And unlike O'Brien, she thinks the truth is in the details, that those are things that should never be manipulated. Early on in her story, she tells Foe, "the truth that makes your story yours alone, that sets you apart from the old mariner by the fireside spinning yarns of sea-monsters and mermaids, resides in a thousand touches which today may seem of no importance..." (18). In this way, she's very different from O'Brien. She doesn't understand that the everyday details are unimportant, what matters is the heart of the story. She could make her story exciting, with cannibals and an ambitious life on the island, and it would still be the truth if the reader learned some deeper truth, her main point.
I think that Susan's point is that a story with attacking pirates and cannibals would not represent the same greater truth that she is trying to represent. As we said in class, Susan and Foe make themselves reliant on the hole that is Friday's story as the most important part of their tale. Susan doesn't want to tell the same island adventure story that's been told before, as demonstrated by your quote. She wants to tell a new story, the story of a void, the story of silence, and the details that she chooses to include in the novel are details that highlight that.
ReplyDeleteI like the way you drew a connection to O'Brien and the comparison you made between details and deeper essence. In some ways I think the way we arrive at the "truth" determines what "truth" we find. The details are what lead us to this final point-- the guidelines. Although O'Brien says he manipulates the details to help us really feel a truer truth, the details tell us the stories are not true, therefore changing the truth we find. Instead of insight into Vietnam and the truths about the war, we gain insight into humankind and how some kind of "truth" and be conveyed in a lie.
ReplyDeleteI think Allegra makes a good point. But I would add that the fundamental irony of the novel is that Susan attempts to tell every detail of her island story, while at the same time the novel itself relies on the unknown parts of her tale. She spends her time in England with a manservant with an unknown background, while sending letters to a potential author in an unknown location. Many of these letters are filled with her one-sided conversations with Friday, who has no idea what any of it means. All of this is not to mention the unknown woman who shows up outside the house claiming to be Susan’s daughter. Susan’s entire endeavor is to find meaning in the known details of her story when in reality, the truth lies in the unknown.
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