Hunting for Substance

We’ve talked a lot in class about what different ways that Part IV of Foe could be interpreted, but, for the enlightenment that comes with another perspective (and just for kicks), this is how I interpreted Part IV. The motif of adventure carried through to the very end in my eyes as the narrator of Part IV was a treasure hunter of sorts. He or she came upon the writing apartment of Daniel Dafoe in order to find anything which pointed in the direction of the “treasure.” After hearing the sounds of the island spill out of Friday, the narrator followed this clue to the shipwreck and then sought Friday’s guidance again. This time, Friday emitted pure and chilling silence: nothing. Or is it nothing? A theme that we, in our discussions, have dissected is that of the value of silence. Would this not, then, be a very valuable treasure after all as long as the narrator is able to appreciate it? This treasure theory is simple and honestly unsophisticated in that it forces the artistic and vague concepts of this novel into the chains of plot, but I find it very interesting that, even applying this interpretation, the reader arrives at the same moral. I believe this to be a testament to the power of Coetzee’s writing. No matter how or at what level the novel is interpreted, the reader will be left with a new appreciation for silence.

Happy Halloween!

I was watching episodes of The Twilight Zone last night to get into the Halloween spirit and happened upon this!

Four Paragraphs, No Feeling of Resolution

The beginning of the chapter four is confusing to me for several reasons, but one of which is the split between the two sections of the story - one of which occurs in a house, and then, after the line break and after the narrator sees the script, turns into a shipwreck scene.  What's the distinction?

The narrator is presented with heavy imagery on the Susan's story, the still born, the couple in the sheets, the staircase, the script, etc. and then both sections end with Friday - one in which Friday's mouth opens and the sounds of the island can be heard, and the other in which a stream comes up out of his mouth and passes throughout the world.

What is Friday doing here?  Is this his story, here in the world where "bodies are their own signs"?  This is where his silence is given in its purest form, when it comes straight out of him after the narrator finds him. I believe it is Coetzee who guides us through the haunting images of this book, and finally reveals the "silence" he's been alluding to so much throughout the last three chapters.  Coetzee is meticulously recapping the book that Coetzee made Susan badger Foe to write.  In essence, he's showing himself find the silence, which is basically a metaphor for what he had been trying to do with Friday over the duration of the entire book.

In this context, are the two "scenes" of the house and the house and the shipwreck analogous to the book as well?  They certainly mirror each other and provide eerily similar parallels like the first two chapters and the third did.  And the first two chapters do take place in a place where "bodies are their own signs" and would fit right in with the paper dry metaphors.  In this way, Coetzee could be rehashing his own novel.

Transparency.

Issues of eaves-dropping have been in the center of public attention over the past week; the US is listening not only to conversations of residents of other countries but to their leaders’ conversations as well. Surprise! Or is it? I believe this is one of the unspoken topics under consent. It is common knowledge that countries “secretly” gather information on each other and will continue doing so. Now it has been brought out to broad daylight, putting the US under scrutiny. But every detail presented to us must be questioned for its authenticity and wholeness. US’s allies that supposedly were/are under surveillance are expected to react in a certain way (as they do) to “protect” their citizen’s privacy while, I think, they are burying their own misdoings even deeper. We do not get the whole truths and people are naïve if they think that the US will actually shut down all these programs, as there are many we are not even aware of.

In relation to our discussion in class, this is a matter of transparency. The media represents it as new knowledge, but it has already been revealed that the US listens to its own citizens, so it was known that the ability exists. We are audience to a show of the involved (and uninvolved) countries as their leaders make their demands and we are reported of alleged conversations between them. How much can we believe?

In addition, I think that Edward Snowden, the leaker of the documents that have brought to this latest scandal, can be compared to Susan and Coetzee himself. He has revealed many incomplete stories/scandals, bits of information without context, and let the media attempt to complete the missing pieces, to create context, not necessarily in accordance to his intentions in revealing the classified information.

*Thank you Kevin for reviewing my post.

Telling Ghost Stories

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.

"Here In The Present Tense Nothing Is Making Sense"

Alright, so despite the misleading title, I'm not actually going to be talking about tense within Foe in this blog post, I'm going to be talking about Feminism and the empowerment of female characters, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to reference Guster (from one man wrecking machine- beyond that line the song really can't be applied to Foe anyways).
A question that arose for me throughout Foe was about the conception of Susan as an empowered character. Within Foe Susan routinely identifies herself as subordinant or without individual power. For example, she refers to herself as the Cruso's second subject on his island, "the first being his manservant, Friday." (11) Furthermore, she repeatedly suggests or even says that she is not able to tell her own story, not completely and meaningfully, and that she must tell it to a man who will put it together for her and bring her the meaning she seeks. Susan suggests this as she says, "return to be the substance I have lost, Mr. Foe"(51). Still, even as Susan disputes her own abilities to create meaning and stories, she does this throughout the novel. Although she says she cannot tell her own story, that is exactly what she does. Additionally, while Susan articulates her subordination to men, both in her description of life on the island as being under Cruso and her worries that without Foe her story cannot be complete, she also voices concern about the idea that she will be seen as under Cruso or that once put out her story will instead be seen by others as his as she says, "do you think of me, Mr. Foe, as Mrs. Cruso or as a bold adventuress?" (45)
Even though Susan sees herself as without power, to us as readers her power is clear. Though she speaks of the island as Cruso's, her experiences come across to us as complete and her own. Though Cruso may have been the first upon the island, to us the island is no more his than hers. While Susan says that she cannot tell her own story, it is clear to us that that's exactly what she's doing. Though Susan sees herself as powerless, it is clear to us that this is not truly the case.
That said, can we see Susan as a truly empowered character? While we see her power, she doesn't... is that enough? To be empowered do you have to be aware of your own power? I don't know. While I think Susan is clearly a strong and powerful female character, I'm not sure I'd be comfortable calling her empowered. At the same time, I find that it's hard to justify myself in that position.

The Repetition of Silence

            “From” Friday “comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption” which “runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth” (157). This story, which does not require breath, is the story of silence. Coetzee asserts through Friday that silence is ubiquitous; embedded in every story, supporting every truth, are certain absences.

            To me, the notion Coetzee constructs in Foe that truth requires silence reads very similarly to Vonnegut’s argument in Cat’s Cradle that beliefs entail lies. Susan agonizes about telling her story, because she believes the truth of her identity and her history is determined by the story that people (herself included) believe about her. Truth in Foe is the story that one has conviction in. However, every tellable story of Susan’s life must be built on silence: no one but Friday, who cannot tell stories, has access to Friday’s identity, so his history must be either contrived by the teller, or his silence must be included. In the former case, Friday is silenced, in the latter case, Friday is silent. Susan’s story is her truth, and it requires silence.

In Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut questions to veracity of every belief system. Whatever story his characters tell about the world, be it a scientific explanation or a spiritual paradigm, Vonnegut derides them when they believe they are objectively right. When beliefs become truths for individuals in his text, he illuminates how untruths lie beneath their conviction.  

Silence in Foe is omitted truth, lies in Cat’s Cradle are ignored and replaced truths; essentially, these are the same concepts, and they are both required in their respective tests for characters to understand their lives. Each text, however, presents silence (I use silence for both concepts here) in a different light. Where Foe cautions that when we tell stories about the world, we necessarily appropriate and silence other stories, Cat’s Cradle generally claims that truth is inherently meaningless, and advocates understandings rife with silence as long as they improve our lives.

Reading the novels together reinforces my understanding that conviction entails silence, while both making me cognizant of the impacts of my silencing, and impressing me with the capacity of conviction to imbue life with meaning.

Wait...What?

            “Hold on. Let me step back for a second. What did I just read?” Normally this is a thought that runs through my head after reading a paragraph inattentively. Rarely, with the possible exception of my econ textbook, does it refer to an entire chapter. Sure, part IV is only five pages long, but the entire body of the book is just a set-up for the last segment. So what does it mean? I have no idea, but I’ll give it a shot.

            The narrator is the most important question mark in part IV. It is unclear who exactly it is because he or she appears to be sort of hovering above the all of the characters in the book, including Susan Barton. The most obvious answer would be to say that J.M. Coetzee himself narrates the chapter and by doing so, looks back on his own characters as constructs. But I would argue that it goes deeper than that. I would argue that the narrator is actually representative of the reader. The best evidence for this is the very last sentence. Friday espouses not just hot breath, but the story from his mouth, which “beats against my eyelids, the skin of my face” (157). The book, of course, is not plot-based, but Friday, by not speaking, plays a central role. The reader is constantly seeking what he has to say, but by just being a construct, he says more at the end of the book than any other character.

Can we talk about the bodies? Let’s talk about the bodies. Every supposed character lying on the ground is wrapped or mummified and is described as having skin “dry as paper” (153). Thus, every character is insubstantial; a paper construct of a writer. The big exception to this is Friday. Though he is not conscious, he appears to the only substantial player in part IV. Therefore, I would argue that Foe is not the story of Susan Barton. It is the story of Friday.

I gotta hand it to you, Coetzee...

The question that remains unsolved, now that we've finished Foe, is why young Susan Barton says to older Susan Barton, "we have the same hand" (76). And perhaps that is the fate of some things, never being solved, merely circled around and around as we grow closer to the truth. Like the buttonhole analogy, part IV of Foe once again circles back to images that we've seen earlier in the novel. They are the same images we’ve seen before, but different. Barton and Foe lie in bed together once again, but are now dead. In Foe, when something is unwrapped, the truth within it is often revealed. Susan and Friday unwrap the dead baby that they find by the side of the road, revealing it beneath cloth. But in part 5, another wrapped thing is mentioned, and this time the narrator “begin[s] to unwrap it, but the scarf is endless” (153). The unwrapping goes on and on, the truth impossible to find.

Humans, over and over, take stabs at the truth. We try to work around it, hoping that by sewing around the buttonhole we'll reveal something that we might not have been able to see otherwise. The young Susan Barton stabs at the truth of herself and her mother, but falls short, managing to reveal only the differences between the two hands when we see them side by side. Foe is so much a novel about truth: the truth of Robinson Crusoe, the truth of Friday’s tongue, but in this scene, part of an incomprehensible chapter, it becomes clear that the truth about some things will never be revealed, only unwrapped endlessly.

Writing the Unwritten

Whenever we, as a society, have something to say, often times instead of just coming out and saying it, we simply try to talk around it. We feel as if, by not explicitly saying the obvious, we are not talking about it. We use small strings of other topics to talk around the point, however, by doing this, we are addressing just the thing we wanted to avoid.

            After revisiting part IV of Foe in class, there was one line that really stuck with me: “From his mouth, without a breath, issue the sounds of the island” (154 Coetzee). As the narrator (whomever that may be) observes Friday and listens to him, they hear the sounds of the island. The only problem is, Friday makes these ‘sounds’ without taking a breath, which indicates that all the narrator is hearing is silence. Silence is the sound of the island. In this novel, silence connects everything. The novel addresses silence, without making it speak. By talking around the silence, the reader recognizes its presence, and that is what is so empowering: knowing that you can write the unwritten by not writing it down.

Throughout the novel we see Susan Barton instructing Foe on how to write her story. She writes him her version of the events on the island, a number of letters, and she even tells him explicitly what she thinks is important to the story. By making the whole novel Susan’s attempt’s to get Foe to write the story she wants, she is thus writing the story herself. It is ironic that by trying to write around the story and create a frame for it, she is instead giving shape to it.

Truth, Lies, and Buddha

"In the life and teaching of Buddha, true silence leads to truth by avoiding wordiness and worldliness because such silence is truth." - A.J.V. Chandrakanthan from "The Silence of Buddha and His Contemplation of Truth"*

At first, in class, when we were equating silence and truth, I didn't fully buy it. It didn't feel applicable to me, and I couldn't figure out how they were one in the same. But then I dug back in my brain to my freshman year World Religions class and Buddhism, and specifically Buddha himself, came to mind. I remember my teacher talked about how he had gone on a 2 week silent meditation trip in the woods....two weeks...no talking...why?!... But of course the reason that he and those throughout history who have done the same do it to seek truth--whether truth about themselves or the world. It seems impossible in this day and age to completely disattach ourselves from everything like Buddha did, but silence though meditation, a glen walk, or a 2 week retreat, is a good start. 

Once I got thinking about Buddha, I realized that Friday is almost like a Buddha character of sorts, very sagely, honest, but more importantly, is the one character that we never see lie or make up stories. Susan Barton mother and Susan Barton daughter tangle themselves in endless lies from Susan Barton calling herself Mrs. Crusoe and not even sending nor writing the letters, to their tangled and unresolved relationship. We see lies from Foe about his stories and where he is when writing Susan's story, and we are skeptical of his name to begin with as we discussed in earlier classes (Foe --> Faux). But Friday is our silent constant that we trust because for one, he has never disproven this trust, and his form of expression is through dance or throwing petals as opposed to making up stories. It is in this that I buy into the silence = truth relationship. Friday is like our own Buddha that avoids "wordiness and worldliness" because "such silence is truth" regardless if he actually can talk or not. 

*www.spiritualitytoday.org/spir2day/884025chandrak.html

Narrator Confusion (and this doesn't make it any clearer...)

In part IV, the last 5 pages of Foe, the first person narrator changes. Up to this point, Susan Barton has been carrying us through her story, despite her doubt in her own story-telling ability. However, in part IV, Susan is referred to in the third person. The narrator notes two people in the room she has entered into saying, "they lie side by side in bed, not touching." (153) A number of times throughout Foe, Susan describes lying in bed next to a man. Therefore, the narrator must be describing Susan and either Mr. Foe, Cruso, or the other captain. Susan is no longer narrating.

This is where things get confusing. Of course, as analytical readers, our first instinct is to determine who this new narrator is. Is it someone we have been told about before in the novel? Is it a new character? Could it be a God-like figure? I may just be speaking personally, but I had trouble moving on to the content of the chapter without knowing who was giving me this information. This unknown narrator was a troubling problem that needed to be resolved. After our class discussion on Tuesday, however, I realized that this was my downfall in reading this book. While constantly searching for a concrete and tangible narrator (as well as setting, time period, plot elements, etc.), I missed out on some greater meaning. I was trying to read this novel as a story with a beginning, middle, and end, when the whole point is that this is not how Susan wants her story to be told. Now, I think that the identity of the narrator of Part IV is somewhat irrelevant. And if not irrelevant entirely, then at least flexible. Thus far, my best explanation for this is that the narrator of Part IV is simply (or not so simply, I suppose) a parallel to the reader, as we touched on briefly in class. The narrator's curiosity about what lies behind Friday's clamped teeth is not representative of the narrator we have seen, it is representative of the reader. In the end, it does not matter that the narrator cannot be named or identified specifically.

Another Approximation...

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.

Defining the Hole

When the term "gestalt" came up in class, I immediately thought of the Gestalt principles that I had learned about in psychology last year. In psychology, Gestalt principles refer to the ways in which we perceive what we see. The principles are based on the idea that the parts of whatever our brains are analyzing are what define the whole. Similarly, the literary gestalt acts as the framework for the gestell, or hole, in the story. Just like Gestalt principles are applied to define whatever is being perceived, the literary gestalt is used to define the hole that it surrounds.

One specific Gestalt principle that is especially relevant here is that of closure. The way that we perceive an object such as the ones below is that we first recognize the emergence of a pattern and then our brains construct the rest of the missing details. Thus when we look at the three incomplete circles in figure A, we see a triangle because our brain perceives the three angles and constructs the three sides to go along with the angles.

In much the same way, the literary gestalt acts as the black outline in any of these images; it establishes a clear pattern that helps us define an otherwise indefinable center. The center cannot be recognized without an outline to give it form, just as (as Coetzee tells us) a button hole cannot function without fabric surrounding it to define it as a button hole. Specifically in Foe, Coetzee is able to define the anchoring point of his story (and all other stories) as silence because he constructs characters whose own failed attempts to define that point paradoxically define it anyway. Although Susan and Foe are never able to put words to Friday's story, it is exactly this inability to pin down Friday's silence that gives it substance. By trying again and again to understand the story behind Friday's lost tongue (like by using pictures, making up the story, etc.), Susan and Foe establish a pattern that the reader can then use to define the hole in the story--because the characters continually fail at verbalizing Friday's silence, then the hole comes to represent that silence.

Thus the hole in the story and in the figures above is at once indefinable and only able to be defined by the contents that surround it--its existence, or as Coetzee would say: its substance, is contingent upon the external pattern that gives the hole its form.

--
Image is from here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Reification.jpg

Thanks to Prof. Schwartz and the class discussion for inspiring this post!

Sounds of Silence

Walking to a team meeting this afternoon, I was listening to my iPod and “Sounds of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel came on.  I immediately thought of Foe and our discussions about the significance of silence.

We talked about how silence is a common thread throughout our lives—that no matter what, in trying to understand our world, we are reinforcing the silence that is keeping us from reaching this understanding.  These ideas portray silence as something concrete, which is the opposite of what it is—the lack of substance.

Here are the lyrics:

Hello darkness, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again,

Because a vision softly creeping, Left its seeds while I was sleeping,

And the vision that was planted in my brain,


Still remains, within the sound of silence.

In restless dreams I walked alone, Narrow streets of cobblestone,

'neath the halo of a street lamp, I turned my collar to the cold and damp

When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light


That split the night, and touched the sound of silence.

And in the naked light I saw,

Ten thousand people, maybe more.

People talking without speaking, People hearing without listening,

People writing songs, that voices never share.


And no one dared, Disturb the sound of silence.

"Fools" said I, "You do not know, Silence like a cancer grows.


Hear my words that I might teach you, Take my arms that I might reach you."

But my words like silent raindrops fell,


And echoed, In the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed, To the neon god they made.


And the sign flashed out its warning, In the words that it was forming.


And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls

And tenement halls." and whisper'd in the sounds of silence. 

The song illustrates this concrete quality in the last lines of the verses—you can be in it, you can touch it, you can disturb it, it has hollowness (“wells”), etc.  Our constant efforts to fill silence is what makes it more concrete.  Silence makes us so uncomfortable that we either run from it or try to squelch it.  Either way we address it, we are reinforcing its existence.

Furthermore, the idea that silence can have a sound is confusing.  When I thought about it, it made me think about how we define “sound.”  If we only think of sound as noise, then of course, silence doesn’t have a sound.  But a sound carries more power than something that is simply heard.  We are so used to communicating through words that sometimes, we notice their absence more than we notice what is said.  Friday, for example, cannot say anything, yet is one of the most profound and powerful characters in the novel.

            The line that says, “People writing songs, that voices never share” can be related to the complexity of silence in storytelling illustrated in Foe.  Stories can be written by anyone about anything, that’s what makes them so interesting—what is “true” has different definitions based on perspective, and is therefore impossible to define.  In literature, as illustrated by Coetzee, truth is both silenced and illuminated by silence.  That is why people can write songs “voices never share”—because they can write anything about anything, stories and significance can emerge from the silence.

*Thanks Hayley for reviewing my post!