One detail from Part IV that stuck with me when I re-read Foe over the weekend, and when we dissected the chapter sentence by sentence in class, was the narrator's comment that "it is not a country bath-house," when she enters the ship's cabin (156). Why would Coetzee say that? I knew it had to mean something, and eventually I realized it was repeated imagery from the very beginning of Part III. When Susan enters Foe's apartment, she muses, " 'I expected dust thick on the floor, and gloom. But life is never as we expect it to be. I recall an author reflecting that after death we may find ourselves not among choirs of angels but in some quite ordinary place, as for instance a bath-house on a hot afternoon, with spiders dozing in the corners; at the time it will seem like any Sunday in the country; only later will it come home to us that we are in eternity' " (113-114). The ship's cabin at the end of the novel must be eternity then; we talked in class about it being a whole different world, one that doesn't exist in this realm. It's the 'place of stories', a place of silence.
I think it's also a place of ghosts. The characters - Friday, Susan, Foe, the captain - are all ghosts. Susan mentions ghosts a lot, and is often concerned with whether or not she really exists, asking "nothing is left to me but doubt. I am doubt itself. Who is speaking me? Am I a phantom too? To what order do I belong? And you: who are you?" (133). If they're all ghosts, just constructs of the story, of Coetzee, how does that relate to the overall meaning and does it help us understand the novel better? If the novel is constructed to show silence without saying it out loud, what's the relationship between ghosts and silence. In our legends, ghosts are restless, looking for comfort or a final purpose. Susan is exactly like that for most of the novel, waiting for Foe to write her story and bring her money and substance. Ghosts themselves can't tell their own stories-by definition, they're largely silent, only making noises like bumps in the night. They are silence itself. Both Susan and Friday can be viewed as different kinds of ghosts. Susan fits because she refuses to write her own story, preferring it to be interpreted by Foe. Friday is far more ghost-like, mysterious in his silence, a void where his story is lost. A ghost story always has to be told by someone else, or not at all. The ghost himself is always silent.
I love your points. I am also interested by the implications for the narrator in part IV raised by the fact that the narrator has some ownership of Susan's notion of the country bath-house. The narrator overlaps some with Susan: he/she either shares with Susan this suspicion about eternity, or at least knows of the suspicion. Whoever is leading us through part IV seems to be carrying part or all of Susan as well.
ReplyDeleteI was also really intrigued by the country bathhouse reference in part IV and immediately searched for the first mentioning of it in the text. I think that it is important to note (in reference to both the post and to Dan's comment) that Susan speaks of her bathhouse idea only to Foe, so the narrator must be connected to either Susan or Foe as he also knew this about Susan.
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