“Castaways in the Very Heart of the City” ] ————————————————— Island and Metropolis in J.M. Coetzee’s

MARION FRIES–DIECKMANN

Topography and the narrative HE MOST STRIKING DIFFERENCE between ’s (1719) and its postmodern retelling Foe (1986) by T J.M. Coetzee is the female first-person narrator and protagonist Susan Barton, who is marooned on the island. There she meets Cruso – who obviously had suffered the same fate as her years before – and his servant . In contrast to their literary predecessor, Coetzee’s Cruso is a rather inert atheist, and Coetzee’s Friday an obedient but uncommitted servant. The fourth important character in Coetzee’s is the writer Daniel Foe, whom Susan Barton turns to, after her rescue from the island, as soon as she is back in . She wants him to write her story of the island. Yet there are a number of obstacles she is faced with, and thus the ‘writability’ of her story becomes the central topic of the novel. The key to her story is Friday, whom she takes back with her after Cruso’s death on the island. He does not – or cannot – speak, owing to an alleged mutilation of the tongue. Thus, he repre- sents a “hole in the narrative”1 throughout the novel. As a result, Susan’s story remains untold and unwritten. The reader gains the impression that Susan’s story is the Urtext of Robinson Crusoe,2 as Susan and Foe discuss precisely those modifications which would bring Susan’s story and Defoe’s novel in line. Accordingly, fiction and literary history are constantly blurred in this

1 J.M. Coetzee, Foe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987): 121. Further page references are in the main text. 2 See Dominic Head, J.M. Coetzee (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1997): 114. 168 M ARION F RIES–DIECKMANN ] piece of work which is as much concerned with postmodern as with postcolo- nial issues.3 This essay aims at analyzing the topographical setting of the plot and the ‘virtual’ setting of narration in Foe. Coetzee puts dichotomies such as peri- phery/centre and nature/culture upside down. He aligns this breakdown of traditional topographical patterns with the narration as such, and he does so by two strategies in particular. The first is the use of different styles and struc- tures of narration in each of the novel’s four chapters. The second is the first- person narrator’s sense perception, the auditory and the olfactory in particular. The first chapter consists of Susan Barton’s ‘travel account’, which is set on the island. Having landed in after their rescue, Susan and Friday move on to London, which is the main place of action from the second chap- ter onwards. However, life on the island keeps being discussed throughout, so that the island’s setting coexists as a sort of lingering presence alongside the ‘real’ scene of London. There, the setting shifts from Long Acre in central London, which is Susan’s and Friday’s first residence, to the north of central London. In they live in Foe’s deserted house, which had been occupied by bailiffs in search of Foe. Finally, they travel to Bristol on the west coast, where Susan fails to place Friday on a ship bound for his native land. Chapter three takes them back to London: to Foe’s hiding-place somewhere south of Whitechapel in East Central London. Finally, the plot returns to the island by a surreal slip into the island-narrative or, rather, the sea surrounding the island in chapter four. Once in England, Susan and Friday seem to go round in a circle: from Bristol to different locations within Lon- don, then back to Bristol, and finally back to the capital. However, they do not arrive anywhere in a teleological sense. The symbol of the circle is highly sig- nificant, as it is the only sign Friday notes down later when Susan attempts to teach him to write. Susan and Foe interpret it as the letter O. Calling to mind A(lpha) and O(mega), it could be seen as a symbol of the absence or futility which is at the heart of the story.4 At the same time, it might be interpreted as the number zero.5 Thus, it would even more strongly serve as a metaphor of silence which establishes Friday as a narrative absence and native black ex- pression as something unattainable.

3 See Richard Begam, “Silence and Mut(i)lation: in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe,” South Atlantic Quarterly 93.1 (1994): 113–29. 4 See Charles W. Pollard, “Teaching Contemporary Responses to Robinson Crusoe: Coetzee, Walcott, and Others in a World Literature Survey,” in Approaches to Teaching Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, ed. Maximilian E. Novak & Carl Fisher (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2005): 163. 5 See Begam, “Silence and Mut(i)lation,” 123–24.