Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
English Language and Literature
Bc. Barbora Novotná
Castaway Crusoe contra Colonialist Criticism: Racial and Gender Stereotyping in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and Derek Walcott’s Pantomime
Master‟s Diploma Thesis
Supervisor: Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph. D.
2014
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
…………………………………………….. Author‟s signature
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank my supervisor, Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph.D., for directing me towards postcolonial and feminist literary criticism, for her careful reading of my drafts, as well as for providing me with many insightful comments and suggestions.
Table of Contents
Introduction ...... 1 1. Castaway Crusoe and Colonial Criticism ...... 5 1.1 Crusoe‟s Origins ...... 5 1.2 Crusoe‟s Inspiration ...... 8 1.3 Imperial Legacy ...... 10 1.4 Postcolonial Responses ...... 13 1.5 Crusoe‟s Metamorphoses ...... 17 2. Mocking Movies and Madness of a Man ...... 23 2.1 Authorial Identity ...... 23 2.2 Pastiche vs. Parody...... 27 2.3 Self and Other ...... 31 2.4 The Male Gaze ...... 34 3. Prosaic Patterns and Postcolonial Play ...... 38 3.1 Narrative Strategies ...... 38 3.2 Verisimilitude and Mimesis ...... 44 3.3 The Three Unities ...... 48 3.4 Stylistic Devices ...... 53 4. Foe, Friday and Feminism ...... 63 4.1 Feeling Displaced ...... 64 4.2 The Power of Metafiction ...... 67 4.3 A Woman‟s Story? ...... 72 4.4 Suffering Bodies ...... 80 5. Race and Role Reversal ...... 85 5.1 Racial Perceptions ...... 85 5.2 Indigenous Voices ...... 90 5.3 The Politics of Naming ...... 95 5.4 Crusoe the Mimicked Man ...... 98 5.5 Friday the Master ...... 102 Conclusion ...... 109 Bibliography ...... 113 Appendices ...... 121 Appendix 1: Crusoe‟s Sequels ...... 121 Appendix 2: Film Adaptations ...... 123
Appendix 3: Figures of Speech ...... 125 Summary ...... 127 Resumé ...... 129
Introduction
Postcolonial literatures have attracted a considerable amount of scholarly attention in the past four decades. Similarly to other disciplines beginning with the prefix „post‟, postcolonial studies respond to history and tend to explore, challenge and deconstruct historical consequences from modern perspectives. Moreover, postcolonial rewritings have been particularly important in addressing the issues of otherness, questions of identity and specific problems of cultural appropriation that often come to the fore in various postcolonial contexts. J. M. Coetzee‟s novel Foe (1986) and Derek
Walcott‟s play Pantomime (1978) are, in this respect, an ideal response to the imperial discourse in Robinson Crusoe (1719), the classic tale that stood the test of time. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the story of Robinson Crusoe within the postcolonial and feminist contexts of the two creative rewritings under scrutiny. The primary focus is on the deconstruction of racial and gender binaries as well as on the reversal of roles that often intertwine in these works. The thesis, divided into five chapters, aims to explore the ways in which the concept of race and gender intersect and how it constructs the identities of the postcolonial characters incorporated in the works in question.
Daniel Defoe‟s eighteenth-century novel, that has established its firm position in the English literary canon as a master narrative, has been reworked in many ways.
Over centuries it has captured the imagination of countless readers until it has acquired the status of a cultural myth. This phenomenon is explored in the first chapter of the thesis since it is necessary to historicize literary practices at the time to be able to adequately understand the postcolonial responses that followed afterwards. Therefore, the first part of the thesis deals with the historical background of Robinson Crusoe,
Daniel Defoe‟s literary inspiration and the eighteenth-century cultural context. The aim is to explore the ways in which the famous story inspired so many postcolonial and
1 feminist writers and resulted in numerous adaptations. For this purpose, Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson‟s Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses provides a comprehensive collection of data. Further, the chapter introduces the theoretical concept of postcolonial rewriting and the „writing back‟ paradigm in general, discussing the impact of colonization on gender and racial construction. The books by John Thieme,
Homi K. Bhabha, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, prove to be a valuable source of information to outline a necessary theoretical background in this part.
Responses to the canonical „pretexts‟1 that were obviously engaged with colonialism, Robinson Crusoe in particular, have been produced across cultures in many different forms, including numerous film adaptations. This is seen for example, in the phenomenon of popular Hollywood-made films like Cast Away (2000) featuring Tom
Hanks, and Robinson Crusoe (1997) featuring Pierce Brosnan, which more or less successfully helped Defoe‟s hero to survive in the contemporary mass culture. By focusing on these two American films, the second chapter demonstrates that cinematic adaptations may usurp reader‟s imagination and cause distortions from the original book. This is confirmed by literary and film critic Linda Hutcheon who examines the impact of adaptations on the readers of literature. This chapter is significant in that it addresses the transposition of a written text to a performance medium and its consequences.
Methodological and theoretical approach in the thesis is achieved by applying the postcolonial and feminist concepts to the chosen texts. They are explored primarily from the perspective of literary criticism; nevertheless a transposition of a written text to a performance medium is also concerned. Thus, the third chapter is devoted to the creation of Walcott‟s two-hander play Pantomime, which represents a parodic
1 This term has been employed by John Thieme to refer to the canonical texts to which postcolonial texts respond (Post-Colonial Contexts: Writing Back to the Canon 4).
2 investigation of the roles between the colonizer and the colonized. Since the play is a text originally written to be spoken on stage, it requires a necessary theoretical background. This is achieved by comparing written and oral language as well as by describing the dramatic narrative strategies. These concepts are examined with the help of Walter J. Ong, Ian Watt, James Howe and William Stephany.
Postcolonial rewriting is a specific subgenre in that it often provides a new insight into the literary tradition. In this respect, the South African novelist
J. M. Coetzee is one of the most creative postcolonial authors who brings postmodernist
(and in the case of Foe also feminist) aspects into his fiction. Foe, narrated by several unreliable narrators, often combines elements that are rather illogical and distorted. Or so it seems, with regard to the interrupted narrative voices, incomprehensible emotional expressions of the protagonists and the dream sequences presented within the novel.
The fourth chapter therefore considers Coetzee‟s approach to postmodernism, feminism, and focuses on the complex relationship between “the oppressed” characters in greater detail. Although the colonized Man Friday is not a central character in any of the literary works under scrutiny, a closer analysis demonstrates the significance of his character. Chandra Mohanty‟s Feminism Without Borders, Sandra Gilbert‟s and Susan
Gubar‟s The Madwoman in the Attic are crucial for this part of the thesis as it develops the argument of feminist self-presentation and tries to understand Coetzee‟s female castaway figure as a violator of male dominance in Defoe‟s original.
Foe is often described as a postmodernist novel with non-realistic elements.
Pantomime, on the other hand, is a relatively comprehensible play. While Coetzee‟s fiction and Walcott‟s play differ considerably in their literary form, they have one feature in common – the struggle of the protagonists who compete for some sort of authority via racial and gender stereotypes. The construction of identities of the
3 oppressed characters is best demonstrated in a comparative literary analysis. The last chapter thus analyzes particular examples from the texts and comments predominantly on gender and racial struggle between the main protagonists who have been, in one way or another, silenced. It further concentrates on the narrative authorship, dramatic and social dominance and the importance of language as a medium of power.
The core theme of the thesis lies in the argument that postcolonial responses to the dominant power of imperial countries are not mere oppositional reactions to colonialism but rather, that they are creative rewritings that shed new light on the traditional novels. The fundamental question to be answered is how the identities of the characters in Foe and Pantomime are constructed, with respect to the common stereotypes of racial and gender binaries. The thesis argues that the minority groups of colonized people, women, and racially oppressed characters are at least equal, if not more important, complex and wittier than their superior counterparts from the Western literary canon. The writing-back paradigm is usually shaped by colonial experience and practices of colonialism in the writer‟s country of origin. J. M. Coetzee and Derek
Walcott, in this respect, seem to be very well aware of the fact that to re-examine the social discourse between the colonizer and the colonized, the oppressed, rather than the oppressor, needs to be given a chance to speak. Similarly to Robinson‟s urge to discover an uninhabited island, this thesis also promises a challenging task in revealing the impact of colonization on a Caribbean play and a South-African narrative.
4 1. Castaway Crusoe and Colonial Criticism
A myth, perhaps, cannot be „created‟, but exists only insofar as its potential for reinvention
remains alive. (Stimpson ix)
It may seem a contradiction in terms to talk about a “modern” myth when Daniel
Defoe‟s pseudo-autobiographical tale The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner2 (henceforth Robinson Crusoe) was published as early as 1719. However, it is not a coincidence that people all around the world understand the „Crusoe myth‟ even without actually having read the book. Various films, plays and texts have drawn public attention to the Crusoe „phenomenon‟, albeit often with a shift from the adventurous view of Defoe‟s shipwrecked castaway to different versions of his story. Daniel Defoe, and his eighteenth-century readership, would have been surprised to find out what had happened with his protagonists in the numerous interpretations of his original book. It is no longer only a unique story of a man‟s survival on an island nor a concept of a do-it-yourself manual that continues to fascinate contemporary readers and critics. Robinson Crusoe has gradually developed into a tale which raises questions and addresses the issue of otherness. Or, to put it more precisely, it has become a pretext worth of further examination, a pretext to which postcolonial and gender perspectives can be properly applied.
1.1 Crusoe‟s Origins
In Robinson Crusoe: Myth and Metamorphoses, Louis James states that “any investigation of the Crusoe phenomenon must begin with the original book” (1). Indeed,
2 The first part of Defoe‟s original story was published in 1719 under its long title: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates (for further details see Appendix 1).
5 although Robinson Crusoe serves as a pretext to the works under scrutiny in this thesis, it seems indispensable to introduce the context from which it has emerged.
Daniel Defoe centres the story on a solitary man who spent 28 years on a desert island and whose attempt to escape and seek redemption leads him through various adventures and ordeals. Many a scholar, such as Ian Watt, Jean-Paul Engélibert or
Henry S. Pancoast, has posed a question whether there is a parallel between the life of the author and the character, i.e. Daniel Defoe and Robinson Crusoe. Daniel Defoe was born in London in 1660 simply as Daniel Foe. It was not until 1695 that he finally garnished his surname with the more genteel prefix „De‟ Foe. This seemingly playful, but deeply intriguing way of shaping someone‟s identity did not escape the attention of
J. M. Coetzee and, as such, it emerges some two hundred and sixty years later in the title of his postmodern novel Foe. Nevertheless, leaving aside the rhyming resemblance between “Defoe” and “Crusoe” until chapter 5, it is believed by some critics, such as
Alan Downie, that it is possible to discern similarities between the author‟s real life and character‟s fictional life (18). Up to a point, this is true. Daniel Defoe was the son of the middle-class parents and despite the fact that his father wished him to enter the ministry,
“the boy‟s tastes lay in other directions”, claims Henry S. Pancoast in An Introduction to English Literature (364). Such disobedience is not dissimilar to Robinson‟s escape from home in spite of his father‟s attempts to dissuade him from adventures. And yet, while young Robinson is significantly punished for not obeying his father (in terms of his subsequent shipwreck on a desert island with the lack of human companionship or material possessions whatsoever), Defoe‟s determination to leave school at the age of eighteen and to become a merchant resulted in “the most prosperous and honourable period of his life” (Pancoast 365).
Pancoast further assumes that “in the course of a long and adventurous career”
6 Daniel Defoe changed the roles of a “hosier, tile factor, foreign tradesman, printer, volunteer trooper, confidant to the king, inmate of a Newgate cell, government spy, a fugitive from political prosecution and a hero in the pillory of a sympathetic mob” (146). From this enumeration, it is safe to conclude that Defoe was an active, adventurous and resourceful man, to say the least. The same applies to his protagonist, since, as Ian Bell puts it, “Crusoe gradually improves his dual competence in both husbandry and housewifery – cooking, cleaning, and making pots, at the same time as he hunts, tills and forages – and he comes close to an idealised and androgynous version of self-sufficiency” (34). Thus, it is Defoe‟s insistence on realistic details and imagery of every-day life what makes his narrative so authentic and credible (Watt 15).
While little is known about his personal life, presumably due to the lack of reliable sources, it is beyond doubt that Daniel Defoe was a born journalist and political pamphleteer (Watt 103). Some of his most successful political satires written in favour of William III of Orange, Dutch-born King of England, include “The True-Born
Englishman”, a satirical poem which “shed light on racial prejudice in England following attacks on William for being a foreigner” (“Daniel Defoe”, n. pag.). Of central interest to Defoe in this defensive poem is the question of xenophobic intolerance. He ridicules the primacy of English purity which is also echoed later in his sequel to Robinson Crusoe, in which, as Keymer observes, the English settlement, with its indigenous wives and Anglo-Carib children, contrasts with the settlement of
Spaniards who “did not like Women that were not Christians ... and would not touch one of them” (Defoe qtd. in Keymer xxxv).
In the early eighteenth century, in a time when religious Protestants were still persecuted in England for holding discordant views on the Church of England, Defoe among them, he kept a sharp eye both on the Churchmen and the so called “Dissenters”
7 (Morgan 302) for he had not agreed with certain attitudes of neither group. With the spirit and sarcasm of his own, Defoe achieved to mock each of the involved authorities, which, in the end, earned him two years of imprisonment (Pancoast 366). This misfortune, however, was not a long-term hardship for Defoe. Rather the opposite, he was loyal to his writing in prison, and produced numerous works and pursued his studies “without great disturbance” (Rogers 181). Defoe‟s religious beliefs and his experience with social and political practices in society undoubtedly contributed to the creation of “the dominant literary form of the last centuries” (Watt 301). More importantly, in Robinson Crusoe Defoe confirms that there is a deep and personal relationship between the author and his works. This is supported by Pat Rogers who explains that Defoe saw a kind of allegory of his own fate in Crusoe, for he had suffered from “solitude of soul” (173), and further concludes that Robinson Crusoe “like many of the best ever written [novels], has in it the autobiographical element which makes a man speak from greater depths of feeling than in a purely imaginary story”
(Rogers 173).
1.2 Crusoe‟s Inspiration
In approaching the question of Robinson Crusoe‟s originality it is interesting to mention a unique claim by James Joyce who once argued that “the first English author to write without imitating or adapting foreign works, to create without literary models and to infuse into the creatures of his pen a truly national spirit [...] is Daniel Defoe”
(qtd. in Stimpson and Spaas 78). Though paying tribute to his literary colleague, Joyce‟s assertion might seem a bit bold nowadays; especially, if we link it to a large number of recent investigations, all aiming to discover a potential source of inspiration for Defoe‟s novel.
A commonly held belief, presented by many historians and theoreticians
8 (e.g. Downie 13; Smith 62; Thieme 56), is that Defoe‟s only and immediate source of inspiration was a non-fictional adventure of the castaway Alexander Selkirk.3
Nonetheless, as Samar Attar points out, “there were, indeed, foreign works that could have been used in the writing of Robinson Crusoe” (78). She presumes that Arabic literatures have produced two prototypes of Robinson Crusoe – Sinbad the Sailor and
Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (79). The former is known in Western culture as a famous voyager and merchant, while the latter was known in Defoe‟s time as “a man on a desert island, who keeps goats, builds a shelter and finally discovers footprints in the sand”
(Wainwright, n. pag.). Attar‟s essay is dedicated to demonstrating some remarkable parallels between the English figure of Robinson Crusoe and his two foreign literary ancestors. For instance, she shows that they all equally question traditional doctrines and values, suggest innovations in religious and educational concepts and advocate religious tolerance, non-violence and peaceful coexistence among people “who adhere to various sects” (81). But to her observations, which are perfectly valid and enriching, it must be added that it is disputable whether Defoe ever considered the two models and sought inspiration in the Arabic world. At any rate, this question is beyond the scope of this paper.
It may also be argued that Defoe was rather influenced by the colonial experience of his own country, as well as by a representation of the social world he lived in. Defoe was educated at the Morton Academy where he had access to vast number of literatures and philosophies. Thus, according to Lieve Spaas, Robinson
Crusoe is inspired by classical myths including, for example, Odysseus, Oedipus and the Narcissus stories, which describe, respectively, the irresistible urge to go to sea, the conflict with a father and the questioning of the status of the “other” (100).
3 Alexander Selkirk is thought to be a real-life Scottish sailor who was abandoned by his companions on the Juan Fernández island near Chile in 1704. He was rescued after about four years of exile. The place is known today as the Robinson Crusoe Island (Thieme 56; Rogers 77).
9 Interestingly, the latter carries a significance to the concept of what Ferdinand de
Saussure called the „signifier‟ (an image) and the „signified‟ (the concept of meaning) in structural linguistics (Eagleton 84). Within the postcolonial discourse, the signifier- signified relationship is of particular interest as it may refer to the representation of the
„self‟ and the „other‟. The importance of the visual perception for the maintenance of power can be seen, for example, in the egoistic master-slave relation between Robinson and Friday. Friday‟s role as a signifier of class is extremely important to the making of
Robinson‟s colonialist identity. Robinson‟s attempts to transform the “primitive” Friday into a civilized man not only violate Friday‟s cultural rights but it also refers to the dominant position of white male authority. In this sense, the figure of Robinson Crusoe bears a worrying resemblance to Defoe‟s predecessors, i.e. the pilgrims who came to the
„New World‟ not to trade but to invade and forcibly possess Indian lands.
1.3 Imperial Legacy
Being a representative of the eighteenth-century capitalist society, it is perfectly plausible that Robinson Crusoe considers himself a master of the island, a domesticator of animals and farmer of the crops sprouting from a non-English land. In other words, he is a colonial settler. It is not until the moment of Friday‟s arrival, however, that
Defoe finally presents Crusoe with another, yet fundamental attribute – namely becoming a master of the colonized subject.
English expansionism had an immense impact on the sense or even loss of one‟s identity. In A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Ronald Takaki presents a story in which Native people first encountered European invaders arriving to the shores of the New World. Observing their arrival in “wonderfully large canoes” with “great white wings like those of a giant bird”, the Indians were only able to
10 exclaim: “Mannittowock. They are Gods” (25). These white Gods, however, saw
Indigenous people simply as savages incapable of becoming civilized, and as such, these Natives were, some decades later, brutally massacred and deprived of their lands.
During the first phases of British imperialism, history witnessed various aspects of colonization. Christopher Columbus was once reported to say that “Indians were gentle and without knowledge of evil”, loving their “neighbours as themselves” with the
“sweetest talk in the world”, and “always with a smile” (qtd. in Takaki 32).
Unfortunately, none of these proposed virtues discouraged Columbus from the practise of kidnapping Carib Indians during his voyages and displaying them triumphantly in
Europe (Takaki 30). Another event that posed a threat to Indigenous people was buccaneering, or what was then known as a “sea dog tradition”, as James Lang explains
(107). Coastal attacks were not unique in the Caribbean during much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Maintaining territories in the New World for military base was a common practice of the English (and also the French and the Dutch) in waging their sea war against the Spanish empire (Lang 107). Yet the buccaneers were not to all intents and purposes the colonists.
Colonialism, as Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin understand it, is a “historically specific form of imperialism” in which “the relation between the colonizer and colonized [is] locked into a rigid hierarchy of difference deeply resistant to fair and equitable exchanges” (Post-Colonial Studies 40, emphasis added). It is often accompanied by racism and racial prejudice, and the practise of colonialism has been often used as a justification for the unequal treatment of enslaved peoples. Moreover, its
“violent and essentially unjust processes” have been hidden behind a “smoke-screen of civilizing task” (Ashcroft et al., Post-Colonial Studies 41). The forms of devastation delivered by colonialism on Native people usually reflected the imperial treatment of
11 colonized countries and their inhabitants. Probably the most terrible legacy of English colonialism is to be found in Virginia. In 1607, some fifty years before Daniel Defoe‟s birth, the English established the first English settlement at Jamestown with the intention of “friendship and interdependency” towards Native people (Takaki 33). Soon after, however, the settlers had to face the starvation period, during which they ate
“dogs, cats, rats and mice” and even “corpses dug from graves” (34). Their starvation forced them to attack Native people and destroy their supplies. Such terrible was their hunger that they even “slew and buried a savage” and then “the poorer sort took him up again and ate him, and so did diverse one another boiled and stewed with roots and herbs” (Takaki 34). With the view of “rooting out the Indians from any longer being a people”, English soldiers gradually burnt Native people‟s houses, boats, canoes and even pursued them with the dogs to tear them (Takaki 34-36). These examples set a precedent for centuries to come. The need for the cultivated land grew stronger and hostilities between the settlers and Native people intensified. To delineate the boundary between civilization and savagery meant to remove, (and here read exterminate)
Indigenous people and acquire their lands for white settlers.
Colonists often justified their violence by emphasizing the visibility of signs of difference and constructing Indigenous people as inferior. It was at that time that the form of “otherness” began to take its shape. Takaki draws attention to the fact that
Native people were viewed as “frightening threat” (41), a demonic race to which
“nothing but fear and force can teach duty and obedience” (27). Moreover, colonialism produced political ideologies that would excuse increasingly violent struggles for resources and Native people‟s territories. A typical one rested in the idea that colonization represented necessary “civilizing task involving education and paternalistic nurture” (Ashcroft et al., Post-Colonial Studies 41). Even in 1781, when Thomas
12 Jefferson declared that “whites and Indians were both Americans, born in the same land” and should long live in friendship together, he, in the meantime, wrote to his colleague that “[n]othing will reduce those wretches so soon as pushing the war into the heart of their country [...] until [none of them] remained on the face of the earth”; then he “explained” to Native people that in order to survive, they need to be civilized, i.e. they “must adopt the culture of the white man” (Takaki 47).
This attitude exemplifies what Antonio Gramsci calls „hegemony‟ – “the power of the ruling class to convince other classes that their interests are the interests of all”
(qtd. in Ashcroft et al., Post-Colonial Studies 106). The “success” of such an ideology applied to Native people is that the colonized subject understands itself as peripheral to imperial values, beliefs and attitudes, and accepts their centrality. And this is why the relationship between Friday and Crusoe, who refers to himself as “Master” and who imposes a new religion, language and culture on Friday, is a crucial point examined at large by literary (mainly postcolonial) critics. With regard to the historical context of colonialism, Friday represents the legacy of not only the Carib Indians but also of other
Indigenous peoples enslaved and colonized all around the world regardless of their skin colour.
From what has just been demonstrated in the previous subchapters, it can be concluded that there were indeed three key events that may have influenced the birth of
Robinson Crusoe: first, the story of Alexander Selkirk; second, Defoe‟s religious, political and capitalistic beliefs; and third, colonial practices since Christopher
Columbus “discovered” the New World in 1492.
1.4 Postcolonial Responses
The era of imperial domination left behind ills that have long been waiting for remedy, and as such it could not remain without a literary response. While early
13 postcolonial texts were still under the control of imperial power, for they were either produced by “a literary elite whose primary identification is with the colonizing power”
(i.e. gentrified settlers, travellers and sightseers) or the representatives who wrote
“under imperial licence” (i.e. natives and outcasts), as Ashcroft et al. explain in The
Empire Writes Back (5), it was not until the late 1970s that the term „postcolonial‟ started to be used by literary critics to discuss cultural effects of previous imperial expansion (Ashcroft et al., Post-Colonial Concepts 168).
To find a politically and theoretically correct term that would appropriately describe then emerging literatures, has been a challenging task up until the 1980s when the terms „Commonwealth literature‟ or „Third World literatures‟ (which came into being in the 1960s) were deliberately replaced by a less connotative term „postcolonial literatures‟ (Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back 22). Nevertheless, as Julie
Mullaney observes, there is no strict consistency in usage, and postcolonial literatures are still variously called by the terms that survived until today, such as “New literatures in English” or “World literatures” (3). In contrast to continuing debates about the lack of a suitable term that would describe the works emerging from the postcolonial societies, there is a general consensus among scholars (and not necessarily the postcolonial ones) that postcolonial writing mostly represents the focus on „cultural difference‟ (Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back 4; Bhabha 233; Mohanty 106-107;
Thieme, Post-Colonial Contexts 6; Eagleton 205).
The depiction of such a difference in postcolonial texts, however, is a painstaking and complex process. It is “not simply a matter of language”, as Homi K.
Bhabha argues, but more often a “quest for the Voice” (177). This approach is in accordance with the argument of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who in her ground- breaking essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” suggests that the Western act of
14 benevolence toward the Third World others is indeed an act of violence since the intellectual tradition of the Western world that attempts to teach, and eventually save, the oppressed by “civilizing” them indeed denies their voices. Moreover, “if, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow” (Spivak 83). Foe and Pantomime certainly share these elements as they stress their protagonists‟ resistance to colonization imposed on them by those in power (i.e. black males are subordinated to
Western white men and a woman is subordinated to men in general). The concept of silence and the quest for the Other‟s voice is thus an effective way to study what the oppressed feel and desire rather than what they need in terms of Western prejudices.
Franz Fanon asserts that “the colonized is either doomed to be a mere reflection of his master ... or he must fight his master through active struggle” (qtd. in Mishra and
Hodge 277). If we apply this principle to the master/servant relationship in the works under scrutiny, then it is obvious that the former condition applies to Defoe‟s construction of unequal relationship between Crusoe and his man Friday while the latter reflects the role reversal between Harry Trewe and Jackson Phillip in Pantomime and the narrative play of power between Susan Barton and Friday in Foe. Indeed, the active struggle that the inferior protagonists lead for equality against their masters is a shift often used by postcolonial writers as they draw on the concepts of „Othering‟ and
„Stereotyping‟.
Stereotyping is, according to Bhabha, a perspective where the symbolic relationship of “race-sex” comes in (98). He further asserts that:
Skin, as the key signifier of cultural and racial difference in the
stereotype, is the most visible of fetishes, recognized as „common
knowledge‟, in a range of cultural, political and historical discourses, and
15 plays a public part in the racial drama that is enacted every day in
colonial societies. (Bhabha 112)
The consideration of skin colour as “common knowledge” is what causes the problem of discrimination within a racist discourse. Indeed, this kind of racial stereotyping affects, for instance, Susan Barton‟s behaviour towards Friday in Foe since she immediately considers him inferior on the basis of his physical features (see chapter
5.1). The same applies to sexism in gender studies since “questions of race and cultural difference overlay issues of sexuality and gender and overdetermine the social alliances of class and democratic socialism” (Bhabha 251). To put it simply, stereotypes are attitudes (mostly negative) based on sexist and racist intolerance, deeply embedded in the tradition of the past, which are unlikely to change.
The paradox of distinguishing otherness from self-consciousness has been fundamental field of study for many great thinkers, ranging from German (Hegel and
Husserl, for example) to French philosophers (e.g. Lacan and Derrida). In postcolonial studies, the concept of Othering is often perceived as a “process by which imperial discourse creates its „others‟” (Ashcroft et al., Post-colonial Studies 156). More striking still is that “the construction of the O/other is fundamental to the construction of the
Self” (Ashcroft et al., Post-colonial Studies 156). In other terms, an exclusion of the others who are supposedly inferior to the ruling group is essential to define such group‟s existence. And it is this notion of self/other binary which is often the focus of the postcolonial and/or feminist debates. Both patriarchally and racially oppressed groups – women and colonized people – are often (but not always) subject to othering and stereotyping with regard to their ethnicity4. The representation of the minority groups as subaltern subjects within the notorious white/black, man/woman binary oppositions
4 Here, ethnicity is understood in terms of an account for “culture, tradition, language, social patterns and ancestry, rather than the discredited generalizations of race with its ... genetically determined biological types” (Ashcroft et al., Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts 75).
16 depends on the perception of domination/subordination – that is to say, on their access to power within the majority group. The sense of belonging is thus an important feature here. And if Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin are right in claiming that ethnicity is a
“positive self-perception that offers certain advantages to its members” (Post-Colonial
Studies 75), then being a member of an ethnic group is therefore a powerful tool of challenging and, most importantly, breaking the stereotypical images, which Coetzee‟s
Friday and Walcott‟s Jackson Phillip repeatedly demonstrate through their own types of rebellion (as shown in chapter 5). In this respect, the argument that ethnic group is
“such a powerful identifier” within which one‟s identity “cannot be denied, rejected or taken away by others” appears to be true (Ashcroft et al., Post-Colonial Studies 75). If stereotypical views about the oppressed groups form an inseparable part of the
(post)colonial studies, it is in the postcolonial literatures where these, sometimes still prevailing prejudices, are effectively rewritten.
1.5 Crusoe‟s Metamorphoses
What kind of story is Defoe‟s Robinson Crusoe? Is it a “children‟s story, a traveller‟s tale, a religious diary, a myth for adults or all those things at once?” ask
Brian Stimpson and Lieve Spaas in the preface to Robinson Crusoe: Myths and
Metamorphoses (viii). In fact, Robinson Crusoe is all those things, and many more; some of its features are more relevant to children‟s adventure books, some relate Crusoe to a pre-capitalist entrepreneur, and some are specific for postcolonial and gender studies, which is the case of Foe and Pantomime that reverse the master-slave relationship and redirect attention to the aspects that were previously seldom considered. However, this does not intend to say that Robinson Crusoe is a randomly shaped mixture of genres but, rather, that such a composed form of a master narrative is
17 open to a multiplicity of readings and implies possible, and often desirable, interpretations and deconstructions.
Indeed, postcolonial responses to the Western canon of literary texts can be compared to the art of literary translation, to a certain extent. While a translator‟s major task is to render a text from one language into another, it is the aspect of cultural transposition that differentiates between an ordinary translation and the exceptional one
(Knittlová 21-22). With postcolonial rewritings it may be similar: it needs to transfer not only one‟s language, but also the connotative meaning and the cultural ideas with regard to the impact of the time period and social conventions that may have influenced the text. This is why Foe and Pantomime challenge the conventional style of writing and investigate, among others, the stereotypical status of race by subverting the hegemony of the „white elite‟, as will be shown in chapter 5.
The factor of cross-cultural influence has been shown to be relevant by John
Thieme in Postcolonial Con-texts: Writing Back to the Canon. He explores various responses to the canonical novel and claims that “despite its apparent simplism”,
Robinson Crusoe has a great potential for further reinterpretation because of its “focus on concrete particulars” (55). For the purposes of this paper, these particulars are understood in terms of the three key concepts: place, language, and history.
From the postcolonial and feminist perspectives, it is interesting to observe how individual writers from different countries tackle the issues of stereotyping. Be it in the form of an essay, a poem, a play, or a novel, the most notable is the context depending on the writer‟s country of origin. Thieme assumes that in the South African responses to
Robinson Crusoe writers, perhaps under the influence of the post-apartheid period, often focus on a stereotype of black savagery and racial implications (Postcolonial Con-texts
67); hence Coetzee‟s representation of the silenced black African version of Friday in
18 Foe. Whereas in Australian (e.g. A. D. Hope) and Caribbean responses (e.g. Walcott,
V. S. Naipaul), the emphasis is on hierarchy and pragmatism (58); hence Walcott‟s comic investigation of social roles between a calypso singer and a British guest-house owner in Pantomime. Another important example connected with place is a “desert island setting” (Thieme, Postcolonial Con-texts 55). It can be argued that the basic analytical procedure of the writers who deconstruct the canonical novel is to take the original setting from the source text and to renew it by applying appropriate cultural discourses to it. Using the example of Jane Gardam5, Thieme explains that British authors regard the desert island as Eden, a place that represents British “microcosm” where the protagonists struggle to adapt themselves into the modern world like biblical
Adam or Eve (Postcolonial Con-texts 55-56). Quite a similar viewpoint is represented in Foe and Pantomime. Both Coetzee and Walcott adopt the location of Crusoe‟s island to a certain extent, although with one elementary difference: the idea of British microcosm is remarkably subverted as the supposedly inferior protagonists – African slave and Trinidadian servant – succeed in relegating the seemingly superior English protagonists to a secondary position. A place of origin therefore plays a crucial role in addressing specific locations and, more importantly, their colonial histories.
The second concept to be investigated is the historical influence on the process of rewriting the master narrative. From a contemporary standpoint, the absence of female characters in Defoe‟s novel is noteworthy, to say the least. Arnold Saxton‟s generalization that “women on islands spell trouble” (142) does not provide a satisfying explanation, though. What about Crusoe‟s sexual life, for instance? Some critics, like
Samar Attar, see it as “inexcusably unrealistic” (84). Strangely, Crusoe seems to have
5 Jane Gardam is a British author of children‟s and adult fiction, whose novel Crusoe‟s Daughter (1985) tells the story of Polly Flint, a young sea captain daughter, who is orphaned and sent to live with two maiden aunts on the north east coast of England into a house surrounded by salt marshes on an island that looks like a ship.
19 no sexual instinct; he rarely, if ever, thinks of a woman other than his mother, and when he finally marries, there is nothing to be found about his wife, not even her name (Defoe
297). Attar further claims that “sexual apathy” is a “human trait which has no specific affinity to one race more than the other” (91). The same perhaps applies to gender categories since Robinson‟s insularity is metamorphosed into a sexual urge through the character of Susan Barton in Foe. Absent in Defoe‟s narrative, a woman‟s point of view is somehow foregrounded in this postcolonial response. The reason for including/excluding female perspective might thus be found in the historical and regional specificities. It seems that postcolonial authors write to (and from) their particular cultures with respect to a society‟s varying approaches to delicate issues.
Perhaps not so surprisingly then, Daniel Defoe wrote his novel with the early- eighteenth-century “Puritan” readership in mind when he had omitted femininity and sexuality from his master narrative. Coetzee, on the contrary, shifts the patriarchal history of the male-dominated Western literature and, with the growing interest in the feminist studies since the 1950s, he perhaps attempts to reject patriarchal values and double standards imposed on women throughout Western history by integrating the female voice. It can be also argued that Coetzee chooses to have Foe narrated by the white woman simply because “the figure of the white woman is crucial to the complex positioning of the anti-apartheid author both within and outside the „infected‟ state/nation” (Kossew 105). In other words, Susan Barton might be given the literary power because she represents an ambivalent, and thus ideal, position to describe the
South African realities.
Similarly, a considerable amount of attention is given to the issue of race through the interaction of language and racial status. Racial supremacy comes to light especially in the Caribbean responses because the location of Robinson‟s shipwreck is
20 set in the Caribbean Islands, and as such, it “has a particular significance for the
Caribbean” since the novel‟s geographic focus has popularized the region6 (Thieme,
Postcolonial Con-texts 56). Walcott‟s “Crusoe” – Harry Trewe, who lives on the island of Tobago, is thus “creolized to suit a Caribbean context” (Thieme, Postcolonial Con- texts 57). In effect, this means that Pantomime draws attention to the Crusoe-Friday relationship through the abundant humour, jokes and the interplay between the Creole language and numerous allusions that revert the stereotypical notions of subaltern servitude. On one hand, English language has been perceived as a standard means of inter-cultural communication in postcolonial writing, i.e. “a universal norm” for postcolonial writers (Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back 7). On the other hand, as
Mishra and Hodge observe, “postcolonial writers who write in the language of the
Empire are marked off as traitors to the cause of reconstructive post-colonialism” (277).
The usage of English instead of indigenous languages still remains a disputable issue in numerous postcolonial debates. Not surprisingly, the question of language as a means of communicating one‟s cultural experience is also employed in the texts analyzed in this paper. Walcott‟s fascination with Creole – the language of his native island – shapes his work, and although he does not deny the privilege of the English language in his writings, he appropriates it by linguistic devices that satirise it at the same time.
Coetzee, on the other hand, makes use of postmodernist strategies and employs multiple voices as well as silence to prevent Friday from telling his story verbally (as also illustrated in chapter 3).
To conclude this section, it is safe to say that it is not the plot itself where the strength of the original Robinson Crusoe lies but rather, as the opening quote of the first
6 Jennifer Maclean light-heartedly points out that Trinidadians and Tobagonians even “know without a doubt that Tobago is the world‟s most famous deserted island” and “many of them will also say they are descended from the famous castaway, and that the goats there are descendants of his [Crusoe‟s] goats (n. pag.).
21 chapter aptly hinted, it is the story‟s potential for alternative readings, retellings and rewritings that is so haunting. In the words of Michel Foucault, “the frontiers of a book are never clear-cut […] it is a node within a network” (Archaeology of Knowledge 25).
The purpose of many postcolonial and feminist writers is thus to dismantle the original story and indicate its gaps preferably from the viewpoint of language, place and history.
As long as the canonical text is open to various interpretations, there is always a desired gap to be filled.
22 2. Mocking Movies and Madness of a Man
The Crusoe myth extends beyond literature as it is obvious from numerous stage and screen adaptations that have been inspired by Defoe‟s pretext. Films based on novels, or books in general, can be indebted to the literary art form, yet their authenticity is often put in question since cinematic versions might be purposely or inadvertently altered from the literary source for a number of reasons. The awareness of alternative possibilities that might result from various ambitions (prestige, art creativity, financial and distributional aspects, etc.) has given rise to various kinds of cinematic
Robinsonades7. This chapter thus deals with the story of Robinson Crusoe as it has been adapted by contemporary Hollywood filmmakers. The cinematic adaptations of principal concern here are Cast Away (2000), starring Tom Hanks, and Robinson
Crusoe (1997), starring Pierce Brosnan. They are chosen not so much for any kind of favouritism, but particularly for three reasons: firstly, they are probably the most popularized and more recent Hollywood film adaptations of the Crusoe myth, and as such they are worthy of investigation in light of postcolonial and feminist theories; secondly, with Hollywood‟s legendary (mis)treatment of literary works, the adaptations might be different in conveying the “Crusoe message” yet they share specific characteristics that link them back to Defoe‟s novel; and thirdly, the film is a powerful medium that uses dramatic and visual devices to retell the written story anew and thus assimilate it for general audience.
2.1 Authorial Identity
By introducing Cast Away and Robinson Crusoe (hereinafter referred to as
7 The term was originally coined by a German novelist, Johann Gottfried Schnabel in 1731, and used as a “trope drawn from Daniel Defoe‟s Robinson Crusoe” to indicate the genres inspired by “lost-adventure images that continue to stimulate the literary imagination” (O‟Brien 135).
23 “RC”)8 hand in hand with their leading stars – Tom Hanks and Pierce Brosnan – rather than attaching the names of the directors to the films, I have deliberately touched upon the issue of authorship. The film is hardly ever made by one person, yet if the names
Robert Zemeckis (director of Cast Away), Rod Hardy and George Miller (directors of
RC), were referred to instead of the names of the leading actors, there would be a considerably smaller group of readers and viewers alike who would recognize the films in question. The concept of authorship plays an equally important role in the film industry and postcolonial literature (narrative authority is of particular importance in
Foe, for instance). But, who is the real author of a film adaptation? The film production represents an ambivalent authorship with directors, screenwriters, producers, actors, musicians, etc., all attempting to shape the film with their own points of view.
In answer to the above question, an approach of Linda Hutcheon seems particularly illuminating. In her article “In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural
Production”, she takes the notion of authorship into account with the more critical eye.
She is primarily interested in the process of remaking literary adaptations onto the screen and its impact on audiences. As a crucial element, Hutcheon sees the originality of a literary work and its adapted film form. She further states three reasons that lead to the privilege of a written text: first, historical priority of literature; second, the ability of cinematic versions to usurp reader‟s imagination; and third, film distortions and displacements, which arise from the desire to supply the demand of the global market
(n. pag.). On one hand, Hutcheon presumes that literary writers create a unique artwork, which is an example of a “one-stage art work” (n. pag.), that is to say, the definite end product. On the other hand, she advocates the interference of the other artists and creators who “are needed to bring it [literary work] to life”, and, in that case, she speaks
8 For practical reasons, and to avoid ambiguity with respect to Defoe‟s Robinson Crusoe.
24 of a “two-stage” art (n. pag). This is in keeping with David MacDougall who reminds that “[f]ilms are objects, and like many objects may have multiple identities” (2).
Perhaps the best way to illustrate these theoretical perspectives in practice is to look at what the filmmakers have done by juxtaposing the author‟s voice and appropriating one‟s ultimate product to suit their cinematic needs.
Hutcheon declares that “all art is bred of other art, though sometimes artists seem to get carried away” (n. pag.). Her statement is particularly applicable to RC.
Although Hardy and Miller adopt the same title9, names, context, historical setting and other particulars in order to interpret the original text, RC does not resemble the Crusoe story written by Daniel Defoe in many ways. Crusoe‟s knowledge, ingenuity and perseverance are remarkably absent from this film adaptation. Moreover, Defoe‟s authorial voice is diminished and what is left from it are mere historical references. As the first scene of RC unfolds, the screen reveals the headline “London, 1718” (the year before Robinson Crusoe was published), and leads the viewers to a room where a dialogue between two men proceeds:
A MAN‟S VOICE. I am a journalist, Robert, I assure you. I have very little
interest in your flights of fancy.
ROBERT. You, Daniel Defoe, are a writer. It is your destiny as such to bring
this remarkable man‟s story; a story of intense struggle, extraordinary
friendship, and undying love to the world.
DEFOE. Well, done, well done; full of life, death, passion. You could indeed
give up publishing for the stage, sir. Tell me, what relevance has this fine
story to an impoverished scribe like myself?
ROBERT. Because Daniel, you are my favourite impoverished scribe.
9 Actually, the film‟s full title is “Daniel Defoe‟s Robinson Crusoe”, perhaps to double-emphasize the connection to the world-famous literary work.
25 DEFOE. And what is this?
ROBERT. A recently discovered journal of one Robinson Crusoe.
DEFOE. Then this tale you tell me is true?
ROBERT. Every word of it.
DEFOE. A travelogue of a wayward seaman.
ROBERT. Read this journal, Daniel. I am confident, sir, you will find a great
interest in the story he has to tell. (RC)
Regardless of whether or not Hardy and Miller‟s film-opening is particularly alluding to Defoe‟s editorial intervention in the novel‟s pseudo-preface (as pointed out in subchapter 3.2), it is a powerful strategy of drawing attention to the source work. In fact, the above literary reference to Daniel Defoe, the writer, may be an example of
„intertextuality‟. Julia Kristeva, who coined the term, argues that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (66). In other words, the authors are inspired by literary models and thus compile their own texts from the pre-existent ones. Intertextuality thus can be understood as one‟s references to the characters, societies, storylines and ideologies established by other authors. It is without doubt that the film‟s direct references are designed to indicate the inspiration by Defoe‟s Robinson Crusoe. But, ironically, recalling the aspects of the life of the writer in the opening scene puts an end to the story of Daniel Defoe, the character, and introduces the story of Robinson Crusoe played by Pierce Brosnan. From this moment on, fiction is conjuring up more of an imaginary than a historical character since this film version seems to be the “Hollywood bone-in-the-nose variety” (Mayer 50).
Interestingly, Coetzee‟s Foe also emphasizes the power of the author by employing the figure of Daniel Foe as one of the characters (as elaborated on in chapter
26 4). However, while Coetzee‟s intertextuality is powerful in shaping authorial identity, it can be argued that the intertextual allusion addressed in RC serves the film‟s ideology only in that it attempts to replicate Defoe‟s novel. RC, unlike Foe, which enters into dialogue with Defoe‟s source novel, fails in its attempts to interpret it, critique it and confront both Defoe‟s authority and historical priority of the source text. It is nevertheless important to acknowledge that Coetzee‟s high-culture novel and the
Hollywood-film adaptation are obviously aimed at a very different audience.
It is not without interest that the following rule applies in most countries, such as the UK: if an author of a literary work has been dead for over 70 years, then the copyright to his/her work has expired and is available for use basically by anyone
(Pietri, n. pag.). The filmmakers thus do not have to pay for the rights to adapt Defoe‟s novel and his characters are vulnerable to various reductions and permutations.
2.2 Pastiche vs. Parody
Film adaptations with “two separate cultural meanings embodied in one image” represent a “paradox” and as such, they must be properly “grasped to generate new perceptions” (MacDougall 2). This is true not only of films, but it can be applied to the postcolonial writing as well. MacDougall‟s “paradox” is a significant feature that distinguishes „pastiche‟ from „parody‟. MacDougall argues that paradoxical features in film tend to discredit the (original) author‟s voice (2). It can be therefore assumed that the film with paradoxical features inclines towards parody, while pastiche “usually differs from parody in that its imitations involve affectionate or respectful tribute rather than mockery” (Birch and Hooper 535, emphasis added). While pastiche is often used as a literary device that imitates a famous literary work, parody can be the strength or the demise of the film.
Depending on the degree of faithfulness to the original text, Michael Klein and
27 Gillian Parker divide film adaptations into three main categories. The first group takes into consideration the viewers‟ expectations and therefore films within this category
“attempt to give the impression of being faithful, that is, literal translations of the text into the language of film” (9). The second category includes film adaptations “that retain the core of the structure of the narrative while significantly reinterpreting or, in some cases, deconstructing the source text” (10). And the third group of films is one
“that regards the source merely as raw material, as simply the occasion for an original work” (Klein and Parker 10). According to this typology, RC seemingly falls into the first category and Cast Away might be put into the third category. However, the success of an adaptation rests not in fidelity but perhaps in the ability of the filmmaker to build upon the success of the adapted work, as it is analyzed in the following paragraphs.
With regard to the aim and limited length of this thesis, there is no space, and need, indeed, to retell the plots of the films under scrutiny in greater detail (for further synopses see Appendix 2). However, a brief exploration of the films‟ noteworthy elements to discover what happens to a literary text that is being adapted on screen seems to be appropriate here. Directors Miller and Hardy have the film‟s central character – Robinson Crusoe – kill his lifelong friend (and rival in love) in a duel at the very beginning of the film. Robinson then has to flee from Scotland with the intention of coming back a year later, but the merchant ship on which he travels gets shipwrecked in a violent storm at sea near the coast of Guinea. Crusoe is stranded on a desert island where he has to envisage the incursions of cannibals. On one hand, Robinson Crusoe is portrayed as a highly religious man who advocates love and respect among people and obeys what is written in the Bible. On the other hand, he shoots at cannibals without hesitation at any time, and it is not much of an exaggeration to say that by the end of the film he has killed more men than a serial killer. The second questionable aspect of this
28 film version is Robinson‟s nationality. Unlike Defoe‟s Crusoe, the film‟s protagonist is a Scotsman. Nevertheless, as the story develops, it reveals no circumstantial evidence to explain the attribution of this particular citizenship, except perhaps to allude to Selkirk or give Brosnan a Scottish accent and ability to play bagpipes before he goes into the battle. The third “disturbing” element is Robinson‟s varying attitude to religion: in his attempts to convert Friday to Christianity, for instance, Robinson puts the iron shackles upon Friday‟s feet to prevent his running into the wilderness, which apparently does not correspond to the depiction of Crusoe as a morally just character in the earlier scenes.
But it may be argued that his ambivalence refers to Crusoe‟s moral hypocrisy in the pretext as he, too, despite his newfound religiosity, continues to slaughter the cannibals and refers to Spaniards as “[his] prisoners” (Defoe 270). The film‟s Hollywood-style happy ending is also questionable: after only six years spent on the island, Crusoe returns home without Friday and in the voice-over narration he concludes his story with a happy-couple cliché: “And so, Mary and I settled down to marriage and a family of our own. We were blessed with happiness and prosperity”. Ultimately, the film‟s postscript text is designed to read: “Daniel Defoe completed his first novel in 1717”.
However, even this piece of information cast doubts on the reliability of the Miller and
Hardy‟s film version. As mentioned in the previous subchapter, the initial headline of
RC proclaims the story to begin in 1718, which means that Daniel Defoe, the character in the film, first encounters Crusoe‟s journal in that year and as such, he could have hardly finished it by 1717. Notwithstanding, literary critics also claim that Defoe, the writer, wrote the text in his sixtieth year (he was born in 1660), and 1719 is generally assumed to be the correct date of Robinson Crusoe‟s publication (James 2).
Typically, the above examples show that film is able to undermine an internal consistency of the plot, characters and perhaps even the original intention of the literary
29 author. It can be understood, to a certain extent, that the filmmakers need to condense the plot of the book to fit it in a time frame. Hutcheon‟s previously mentioned claim that certain changes are inevitable to make the film culture-specific for the target audience is also plausible. Nevertheless, with the changes so substantial within the adaptation of
Defoe‟s narrative to the screen, it remains unclear why Miller and Hardy promoted the film as Daniel Defoe‟s Robinson Crusoe. The reason, perhaps, may be found in the commercial and economic purposes of the American film industry. RC aims at mainstream Hollywood audiences, and accordingly, takes great artistic liberty with the original text, rather than being a seriously developed adaptation. In this case,
Hutcheon‟s notion of the one-stage art work prevails because RC does not deconstruct the narrative but merely detracts from the canonical text and fails to explore its gaps and silences. RC is neither a faithful adaptation of the source text nor a raw material, but a hybrid (although not strictly a pejorative one) with the features of unintentional parody that does not fit in any of the Klein and Parker‟s film categories.
The first film adaptation of Robinson Crusoe should be compared with a view of the second. In the opening scenes of Cast Away, Chuck Noland (a modern, capitalist version of Robinson Crusoe) leads a hectic life of a FedEx systems engineer. During one of his business trips, Chuck‟s airplane is caught in a violent storm and crashes into the ocean. The reference to the Cook Islands approximately reveals the location of an uninhabited island on which he is cast ashore. Since that moment, Tom Hanks plays a spectacular one-man show, exploring the interplay between loneliness and human determination. Cast Away, contrariwise to RC, does not highlight Defoe‟s story explicitly, but by shifting the focus from the author to the message it succeeds in conveying its original meaning (that is, how solitude can change the emotional and psychological conditions and perspectives of a human being), while it still shares
30 specific motifs, such as a desert-island setting, travelling, isolation, a representative of
“the other” culture, etc., that link it back to Defoe‟s narrative. This time, Robinson
Crusoe serves as a “raw material” for another original work, or, to adopt Hutcheon‟s terminology, Cast Away is an example of a “two-stage art” because it offers a new perspective; it has its own authorial voice and gives a new life to the original artwork. In this sense, the above film adaptation precisely embodies what postcolonial writing is about: the production of reinterpreted works that continue to live successfully outside their original context and culture.
2.3 Self and Other
Human desire for companionship on an uninhabited island (and perhaps not only there) is one of the most pressing needs to preserve one‟s sanity. Moreover, “the existence of others is crucial in defining what is „normal‟ and in locating one‟s own place in the world” (Ashcroft et al., Post-Colonial Studies 154). The presence of the
“Other” is therefore equally important for the fictional (albeit subverted) representatives of Robinson Crusoe – Susan Barton, Harry Trewe, Chuck Noland, Robinson Crusoe – and for numerous literary and non-literary castaway characters indebted to Daniel Defoe as well. The Crusoe-Friday relationship still resonates on screen but the representation of the “Other” undergoes a radical change from the original version.
In RC, Miller and Hardy closely follow the Crusoe-Friday storyline set by Defoe but, at the same time, depart from it in significant ways. Perhaps due to the film‟s extremely rapid pace, there is not enough time to explore Crusoe‟s consciousness and psychological implications of his solitude. The arrival of Friday therefore stems from the need to introduce an external conflict in the film, rather than from Crusoe‟s desperate longing for human contact. From the moment Crusoe discovers a footprint in the sand until Friday‟s determination to save Crusoe‟s life in their fight-to-the-death
31 battle, the recurring motif of barbarous cannibals is central to the film. RC accepts the stereotypical view of the natives as primitive savages: black men with painted faces and pagan ornaments pierced through their noses, who occasionally arrive on the island to perform their ruthless rituals. Moreover, they are constantly drumming and yelling in a state of trance while they prepare to eat the hearts of their tribesmen prisoners. All of these features are used to highlight the sensationalist notion of “otherness”, and accordingly, attract the audience by visually exotic sceneries. However, the major shift from the novel is reflected in Friday‟s death: he is killed by a white trader-captain and dies as a savage without a chance to become “civilized”. This somehow justifies the superior position of the white people in power, as no one is punished for Friday‟s death, and he thus remains an excluded representative of the “other” culture. For those familiar with The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Friday‟s death perhaps comes as no surprise since Defoe‟s Friday is destined to die after having been shot with arrows by some cannibals in this first sequel to Robinson Crusoe. Nevertheless, the reason why
Friday needs to die by the hands of the white man in the film is perhaps to demonstrate that Friday does not belong to Crusoe‟s civilized world, and his death thus becomes his symbolic rescue. Unlike in Robinson Crusoe, in which Friday accompanies Crusoe to some European countries; or in Foe, where Susan Barton brings Friday to Britain; the
Friday figure in RC is marked by European civilization but spared from being conquered by colonial powers in the “civilized” countries.
In contrast to Hardy and Miller‟s film, Cast Away re-examines the issue of
“otherness” in a completely different way. Chuck Noland is a representative of the
“modern” consumer society who tends to prioritize professional life over any other aspects of his life. After the plane-crash, however, he finds himself in a perfect isolation when money and material possession can no longer be of any value to him. For most of
32 the film‟s time-frame, Chuck is the only character on the screen depicted in a great detail as he struggles for survival. For more than an hour, there are no dialogues, no music but the island‟s natural sounds in the realistic scenes that evoke Defoe‟s narrative realism. Chuck learns how to fish, build fire, find water and shelter but there is one thing he cannot master – his extreme solitude. Unlike in Defoe‟s narrative or Hardy and
Miller‟s film, there is no footprint but a symbolic handprint which plays a significant role in Cast Away. The bloody hand print (that was caused by Chuck‟s cutting his hand and throwing a ball away in anger) forms a face of Chuck‟s imaginary friend: Wilson the volleyball. Wilson is the only one to talk to; in order to escape madness and thinking about suicide, Chuck has regular conversations and arguments with the ball (even if
Wilson cannot respond). Very much like Defoe‟s Friday, Wilson is under the control of his master – and he becomes the “Other”. By reinventing the Friday figure into an inanimate subject, the filmmakers succeeded in maintaining the Other‟s absolute obedience. Even if Wilson is shouted at, kicked into, thrown away in the emotionally powerful scenes, he never resists, and neither gets angry nor upset. Interestingly, Wilson the volleyball represent‟s both sides of the self/other dichotomy. He is Chuck‟s obedient companion and, more importantly, the projection of the Chuck‟s “Self”. The volleyball internalizes human feelings of his master as Wilson‟s “mind” is freed from any fears and thoughts but Chuck‟s own. To state this in a different manner, Wilson‟s physical non-being reflects the state of Chuck‟s mental being. Throughout the film Chuck and
Wilson remain together until the scene in which Wilson accidentally drifts away from
Chuck‟s raft and is separated from him forever.
What the above analysis implies about the Friday figures is that the death of
Friday in RC represents the loss of the “Other”, while Wilson‟s “death” equals the loss of the “Self”. The island experience is essential to both characters of each film in that it
33 helps them confirm their own existence and understand what is truly important:
Robinson Crusoe who lives in the eighteenth century must overcome his paranoia about the savages and his fear of the unknown world to realize that he cannot judge people based solely on stereotypes; and Chuck who lives in the twenty-first century must tackle the concerns and anxieties of modern society to discover the importance of human relationships. The sense and affirmation of identity is certainly very different in both films. Most importantly, though, it delivers the message that the need to define the
“Other” is necessarily connected to the need to define the “Self”, which is a recurring paradox in postcolonial writings.
2.4 The Male Gaze
One of the film‟s qualities, in comparison to the written works, is the ability to offer a visual representation. While a book mediates its characters indirectly by letting a reader‟s imagination bring the written words to life, visual images stimulate readers‟ perceptions directly. Undoubtedly, the filmmaker‟s stylistic vision influences the final product, yet it is assumed that the director‟s interpretation rarely matches the imagination of the reader as they are of divergent opinions, understanding and ideas
(MacDougall 9). The following paragraphs look in more detail at the director‟s interpretation of a literary text in terms of gender-related issues.
Although it has been previously demonstrated that Zemeckis and Miller and
Hardy approach Defoe‟s ur-text differently, there is a common feature to be detected in both film adaptations: they introduce a woman into the plot. With the love story involved, the films enhance a female element that is remarkably absent from Robinson
Crusoe. The representations of women in RC and Cast Away differ in their nature. In
Cast Away, the addition of romance between Chuck Noland and his fiancée Kelly is, as
34 Mayer observes, the result of a commercial need to “tailor it to a contemporary movie audience‟s expectations” (35), while in RC the love story is central to the plot.
Robinson‟s fiancée Mary, much like Chuck‟s Kelly, both appear at the beginning of the film saying goodbye to their love interests, then they are removed from the plot until the final scenes. Although they are not depicted throughout the middle, which is the most important part of each film, both women are symbolically present on the island: Kelly in the form of a photograph, and Marry as Robinson‟s fantasy in the form of the flashback scenes. Interestingly, thinking of a woman is what keeps both men alive: “Where love of God was important to Defoe‟s readers, love of one another is what strikes a chord with modern moviegoers” (Walker-Bergström, n. pag.). The strategy of including an element of romance therefore has a specific narrative point of view which, in addition to its purpose, also reflects the concerns of mainstream audiences.
Even more striking than a typical Hollywood romance, however, is the representation of a female as a subject of male visual appreciation. In RC, Hardy and
Miller occasionally make use of camera shots that tend to capture the curves of a female body. Within the dramatic moments on the island, Robinson tends to recall Marry in the situations that do not have a specific narrative purpose other than to mediate her as
Robinson‟s erotic object. In one scene, for instance, Marry is shown retrospectively as she sits on the bed giggling and slowly unlacing her white night-gown. Then she suddenly walks across the room to stop in front of a fireplace where she lets her gown slip off her body onto the floor. The image that completes this representation of female sexiness is one of the camera shot that freezes the flow of action and focuses on Marry‟s naked buttocks for a while. This tendency of filmmakers to implicitly use various close- ups of the woman body is what Laura Mulvey termed “male gaze” (837). In her theory, the purpose of the camera movements is to mediate woman as an “erotic object for the
35 characters within the screen story, and erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium” (Mulvey 838). This suggests that Marry is admired primarily for her physical appearance, but her human identity is denied since her female image is under the absolute control of men (both on the part of the directors, viewers and the male character). Therefore it can be argued that, from the feminist perspective, RC is a rather sexist film adaptation of Robinson Crusoe.
Another feature in RC that assumes a straightforward male perspective is the employment of action-like scenes. The theme of violence, killing, shooting and fighting permeates the film from the beginning to its end. For example, when Crusoe discovers that the cannibals have arrived to the island to sacrifice their tribesmen, he shoots two of them from a distance. Soon after, he encounters Friday, and as they are attacked by the tribesmen, Crusoe shoots another two. Since that moment, Robinson is portrayed as a stereotypical action hero: half-naked sweaty “brute” who lurks in the jungle and sets various traps, including spring-guns or spike boards, around the island. He constantly uses his rifle to intimidate Friday by firing his gun. Moreover, the viewers are distracted from the main storyline by the scenes in which the film is addressing an unrelated topic, such as the moment in which Friday learns the right meaning of the word “master”.
Instead of elaborating on the colonizer-colonized relationship, the filmmakers portray
Friday as a violent revenger who simply jumps on Crusoe and almost chokes him to death for that master-servant reference. Later, Robinson and Friday even ensnare the cannibals into a cave loaded with gunpowder, and kill many of them in the explosion, which is also fatal for Crusoe‟s dog Skipper. As the film draws to its close, there is more fighting and natives killed either by a rifle-shot, arrow or an axe struck in the middle of their foreheads. All this violence is in sharp contrast to Crusoe‟s statement from the earlier scenes: “The true God is love. He teaches us to love our enemies.”
36 Again, it can be argued that the genre demands such artistic transformation and inclusion of visually “rich” effects. Whether or not this was intentional on the directors‟ part, however, the paradox of watching the scenes of violence and Crusoe‟s proclaimed devotion to God is one of the most disturbing elements in the film. Perhaps the best way to understand this masculine perspective in RC is to consider Robert Stam‟s observation about the casting of Pierce Brosnan which “inevitably brings with it the intertextual memory of the James Bond films, so that we subliminally align enterprising twentieth- century Cold War heroes with eighteenth-century colonial entrepreneurs like Crusoe, whose gun retroactively seems to foreshadow James Bond-style gadgetry” (97). While
Cast Away succeeds because it is an original and “visually stunning” representation of the Crusoe Myth (Meyer 35), RC seems to imitate Defoe‟s pretext in a sarcastic way.
A number of interesting points arises from the analysis carried out in this chapter. First, there are good and bad desert-island inspired adaptations, and all shades between. Second, although some screen adaptations are not faithful to the original text in that they alter the style, tone, characterization, and suggest alteration or adjustments, it is because of Defoe‟s novel and the proliferation of the on-screen Robinsonades that the Crusoe myth became firmly established. And last but not least, knowledge of authorship has been shown to play a key role in understanding and appreciating a literary text. This is, however, not to suggest that literary originals should be prioritized over their film versions. Rather, the aim was to show that the Crusoe Myth exists on many levels and its interpretation is open to different approaches, as it is broadly discussed in the following chapters of this thesis.
37 3. Prosaic Patterns and Postcolonial Play
In his famous essay “The Death of the Author”, Roland Barthes claims that
“writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin” (142). While this argument is certainly valid for many texts, drama differs from novels in that the words of a screenplay are usually not intended to be read but to be staged. In the chapter on film adaptations, in has been demonstrated that there is a very fine line between fidelity and parody because of the fundamental differences of the film medium. Similarly, much has been written about the film form and its ability to translate narrative features to the screen. And yet, it is interesting to compare the novel with another medium where written and spoken language are most intimately connected: a play. In this sense, Derek
Walcott‟s choice of genre in Pantomime is crucial since the role-playing mode of the play allows the elaboration on themes, such as Friday‟s voice, that remain buried in the first-narrative discourse of Defoe‟s prose. This chapter therefore examines the genre features as well as the narrative conventions that (dis)allow Walcott‟s Friday figure to affirm his personality on stage.
3.1 Narrative Strategies
Since the birth of the English novel in the eighteenth century, the question of who should be qualified as its “father” has been much debated by literary critics.10
Generally speaking, it is Daniel Defoe who is often considered to be “the first English novelist” (Phelps 37), “the first English writer to perceive the uses of the new method of imaginative expression” (Dawson 9), or the first key figure who “created his own personal genre, which stands wholly alone in the history of literature” (Watt 131).
According to Ian Watt, a novel consists of the following elements: “simple language,
10 Ian Watt, for example, suggests that Samuel Richardson was the founder of the English novel (131).
38 realistic descriptions of persons and places, and a serious presentation of the moral problems of ordinary individuals” (80). All these aspects seem to be duly incorporated in Robinson Crusoe, and yet the following excerpt from the text, when Robinson Crusoe begins to consider his situation on the island, shows why Defoe‟s literary style has been widely criticized:
Even when I was afterwards, on due consideration, made sensible of my
condition, how I was cast on this dreadful place, out of the reach of human
kind, out of all hope of relief, or prospect of redemption, as soon as I saw
but a prospect of living and that I should not starve and perish for hunger,
all the sense of my affliction wore off, and I began to be very easy, applied
myself to the works proper for my preservation and supply, and was far
enough from being afflicted at my condition, as a judgement from Heaven,
or as the hand of God against me; these were thoughts which very seldom
entered into my head. (Defoe 91)
It is Defoe‟s wordiness and particularity of description, among others, that the early eighteenth-century critics paid attention to.11 Despite this fact, “[b]y the end of the 19th century, no book in English literary history had enjoyed more editions, spin-offs and translations than Robinson Crusoe, with more than 700 alternative versions, including illustrated children‟s versions” (McCrum, n. pag.). While a small group of critics denounced Defoe‟s verbosity, a considerably greater group of readers all over the world have enjoyed an exciting story with vividly realistic moments and multiple themes
(such as religion, philosophy, middle-class values, imperial expansion, adventure- travelling to exotic countries, to name only a few) that have attracted readership since the eighteenth century, whereas their popularity has survived until today.
11 Pat Rogers states that “for well over a century … Robinson Crusoe was seen as a freakish tour de force – a single-shot triumph by a writer otherwise mediocre in achievement” (1).
39 Derek Walcott, who grew up in St. Lucia in the late colonial period, was fascinated by Robinson Crusoe since his childhood, as he explains in one of his lectures:
“Crusoe is a figure from our schoolboy reading. He is a part of the mythology of every
West Indian child” (qtd. in Brown 212). It should not be surprising then to find out the
Crusoe figure omnipresent throughout the body of Walcott‟s work, ranging from early poems, such as “The Castaway” (1965), to his most well-known poems, such as the epic
“Omeros” (1990). However, it is not explicitly the Crusoe figure but rather the castaway experience that is reflected in Walcott‟s poetry, plays and essays. Thieme mentions that
Walcott was born into an English-speaking family but “both his grandfathers were white and both his grandmothers were predominately black” (Derek Walcott 5).
Furthermore, his family was a part of a minority Methodist community which, together with mixed racial background, resulted in fusion of traditions and Walcott‟s “journeying between cultures” (Thieme, Derek Walcott 4). Walcott was the ultimate outsider who was, in Brown‟s terms, “only, ever, half-home” (215). This notion of split personality has been amplified by Walcott‟s patriotic tendencies towards his homeland and his career outside the Caribbean region. As he puts it in an interview with Stephen Moss, “I am not defined as a black writer in the Caribbean, but as soon as I go to America or the
UK, my place becomes black theatre. It's a little ridiculous. The division of black theatre and white theatre still goes on, and I don‟t wish to be a part of any one of those definitions. I‟m a Caribbean writer” (n. pag.). Based on Walcott‟s experience, the dominant theme of Pantomime seems to evoke the tension of postcolonial country and cultural ambiguity as the dramatic protagonists undergo so many metamorphoses in the play that it is inevitable to compare it with the mixed racial and cultural heritage of their creator.
Ian Watt observes that Daniel Defoe was himself a solitary man in his time,
40 given the example of the summary of Defoe‟s own life which he wrote in the preface to a 1706 pamphlet:
[H]ow I stand alone in the world, abandoned by those very people that
own I have done them service; ... how, with ... no helps but my own
industry, I have forced misfortune, and reduced them, exclusive of
composition, from seventeen to less than five thousand pounds; how, in
gaols, in retreats, in all manner of extremities, I have supported myself
without the assistance of friends or relations. (Defoe qtd. in Watt 90)
Apart from solitude, there are probably other reasons for Defoe‟s innovative approach
(in terms of his fidelity to human experience and an accessible colloquial style of writing) and pragmatic tone in Robinson Crusoe. For example, Watt further draws attention to the fact that Defoe:
[H]ad some memory of the days before the Great Fire, and the London he
had grown up in was still an entity, much of it enclosed by the City Wall.
But ... although Defoe had since seen enormous changes, he himself had
participated in them actively and enthusiastically; he lived in the hurly-
burly where the foundations of the new way of life were being laid: and
he was at one with it. (181)
As shown in these testimonies, Daniel Defoe and Derek Walcott came from very different family and cultural backgrounds but their preoccupation with loneliness and uncertainty is what ultimately connects their stories. The personas of Walcott and Defoe have undergone many social and cultural changes that can be traced in the thematic characteristics of their works: Like Defoe‟s Crusoe, who spends twenty-eight years in isolation, Walcott‟s Crusoe, Harry Trewe, lives in tropical Tobago with the “terror of
41 emptiness” and crazy loneliness, although not a physical but emotional one
(Walcott 135).
A part of the writers‟ interest in creating a literary work is the unmistakeable style and personality which they should project into the literary form chosen. It is not without interest that both Walcott and Defoe each practised two different and yet paralleled careers in their literary lives. Walcott is known, above all, as a “West Indian poet” (Brown 210), who in spite of his commitment to painting began to shape his perception of colonial St. Lucian world in an early age only to realize that “his real métier lay in metaphor” (Thieme, Derek Walcott 6). This is also the case of Daniel
Defoe who, as elaborated in the first chapter, devoted his writing to journalism and the style of verse satire before he turned to prose fiction. Although it is Defoe the novelist and Walcott the playwright in whom this chapter is particularly interested, the writers‟ direct experience with other literary genres can be seen as a good premise for each of the text under scrutiny. One perhaps cannot expect a satirical pamphleteer and an ambivalent poet (in the best sense), to adhere to the conventional norms. When Defoe, for example, began to write fiction he took “little notice of the dominant critical theory of the day, which still inclined towards the use of traditional plots; instead, he merely allowed his narrative order to flow spontaneously from his own sense of what his protagonists might plausibly do next” (Watt 14-15). Similarly, Walcott‟s dramatic approach varies from the classical conventions of the Ancient Greek theatre or
Shakespearian theatre: in Pantomime, he simply relies on two actors who are permanently onstage, letting the meaning of his words, his metaphors, to speak up in the play. The consciousness of being a writer, preoccupied with the concerns of multiple genres, perhaps intrudes to Walcott‟s and Defoe‟s artistic craftsmanship, and therefore provides a valuable starting point to the literary forms that explore the Crusoe story.
42 No less important than the innovative approach to a literary form is the perception of the reading public. Defoe‟s conception of a novelistic form certainly brought innovations to the former style of writing, and although he was criticized by the great Augustans, Pope and Swift, for his middle-class style, he “disparaged the aristocracy of the world of letters; he poked fun at the culture of the universities which did not prepare for the practical life, but turned out learned fools” (Ross 113). Defoe‟s treatment of literary structure may have provoked disagreement among literary critics, nevertheless, his primary interest was his readership. On one level, the eighteenth-century readers were restricted by many factors such as the unequal distribution of literacy, the high cost of books or persistence of religious doctrines (Watt
37-41). On another level, Defoe‟s primary purpose, that of giving the impression that
Robinson Crusoe is a literal and authentic autobiography, seemed to provoke an increasingly popular interest among his readership, especially when it comes to the middle- and upper-class women. Those, as Watt reminds, were excluded from the male activities (be it the politics, business or hunting and drinking), and thereby had a “great deal of leisure” which was often occupied by “omnivorous reading” (44). Additionally,
Defoe, as a former journalist, also made good use of the print in order to spread his stories into the so called “circulating libraries”, which led to the most remarkable increase in the reading public in the mid-eighteenth century (Watt 42). In other words,
Defoe‟s novel challenged literary traditionalism and tended to focus on practical experience of an individual in the first place, which was presumably regarded as the main attraction of his narrative style.
In comparison to Defoe, Thieme reveals that the readers of Walcott‟s plays and poetry were both “the poor, barefoot, uneducated, unsophisticated, shy people” and “the well-dressed, well-spoken and better read city folk” (Derek Walcott 8). The split
43 between the capital and countryside in St. Lucia is typical of the Caribbean region and it results from the country‟s colonial history. This, Thieme presumes, has been shaped by
Francophone and Anglophone cultures before the island eventually became a British colony in 1802 (Derek Walcott 7). Walcott‟s experience with the plurality of Caribbean society has been addressed in his writing which, paradoxically, finds success internationally (particularly in North America), while local audience finds Walcott‟s literature inaccessible both for its “hermeticism” and, more importantly, for the use of
English as the main language (Thieme, Derek Walcott 2). Walcott‟s potential readership in the Caribbean is therefore limited. Yet, it is arguably this duality of Walcott, revering
English literature and maintaining his native traditions simultaneously, that fascinates his worldwide audience. The reaction to these trends reached its peak in 1992 when
Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
It is noteworthy, that in order to understand the narrative strategies used by
Defoe and Walcott, it is essential to be aware not only of their specific genres but also of their specific literary backgrounds. Irrespective of the differences caused by the progress of time, it seems that both authors engage in the representation of a personal as well as a collective history.
3.2 Verisimilitude and Mimesis
It has been already mentioned many times that the composition of a novel and a play differ, thus the three following sub-chapters are dedicated to demonstrating how.
Both genres depict events, prosaic or dramatic, and give them a distinctive narrative structure that corresponds with particular details within a larger conceptual unity.
Although Robinson Crusoe purports to be “a just history of fact” (Defoe 7), written by Robinson Crusoe himself, there is little doubt that Defoe acts cleverly as the
44 book‟s Editor to conceal his own identity. In the preface to Robinson Crusoe, the Editor
(and most likely the author/narrator at once) insists that the writing shall be taken as an authentic history without “any appearance of fiction in it” (7). Ironically, the Editor is the first fictional figure that appears in the novel. This intentionally masked character somehow foreshadows the narrative storyline which is produced by the author‟s imagination and invention, and yet it is based on the experience with the context of a real historical period.
Indeed, the act of editorial intervention in any of the eighteenth-century fiction was a common practice among earlier novelists. Everett Zimmerman observes that justification of history in the eighteenth century was a distinctive narrative method to achieve „verisimilitude‟ – that is the appearance of truth, adequacy and verifiability
(11). Not only verisimilitude in the form of the book‟s Editor, but also Defoe‟s abundant attention to detail and focus on concrete action is what distinguishes narrative fiction from Walcott‟s drama:
I had been now thirteen days on shore, and had been eleven times on
board the ship; in which time I had brought away all that one pair of
hands could well be supposed capable to bring … two or three razors and
one pair of large scissors, with some ten or a dozen of good knives and
forks ... [and] thirty-six pounds value in money, some European coin,
some Brazil, some pieces of eight, some gold, some silver. (Defoe 60)
Having described Crusoe‟s journeys to the shipwreck, Defoe draws attention to a large scale of practical things with which Robinson could furnish himself (and eventually use them for his survival). Although his further reference to money contemplates on its relative value, “upon second thoughts” (60) he brings it with him and thus exhibits the characteristics of a capitalist, homo economicus, which is a notion in Robinson Crusoe
45 widely criticized by literary scholars primarily for the fact that instead of living in harmony with nature, Crusoe wishes to possess and exploit his environment.12 Material value, even if worthless on a desert island, can be perceived as another realistic feature of human nature. In fact, the above example illustrates a very interesting use of the novelistic convention of „formal realism‟ which was first described by Watt as:
the narrative embodiment of a premise [...] that the novel is a full and
authentic report of human experience, and is therefore under an
obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as the
individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and
places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely
referential use of language than is common in other literary forms. (32)
Watt‟s definition is in accordance with William Phelps who praises Defoe‟s genius for detail: “In subject-matter, Robinson Crusoe is wildly romantic; in method and in style, it is studiously realistic” (36).
Robinson‟s keeping of a journal is another technique showing that Crusoe‟s story records real events in the life of a “real” character. The function of Crusoe‟s diary in the novel is twofold: first, it serves as an account of keeping a spiritual project and, more importantly, it is a factual and objective account of Robinson‟s days on the island:
“September 30, 1659. I, poor, miserable Robinson Crusoe, being shipwrecked during a dreadful storm in the offing, came on shore on this dismal unfortunate island, which I called „Island of Despair‟, all the rest of the ship‟s company being drowned, and myself almost dead” (Defoe 72, original emphasis). Apart from the first-person narrative technique revealed through the journal, Defoe tends to convince his readers that
Crusoe‟s story occurs at a particular place and a particular time.
12 For further discussion and criticism of Crusoe‟s „homo economicus‟, see e.g. Cunningham (95-96) or Watt (66).
46 If verisimilitude is a technique to which Defoe‟s novel is particularly prone, then the notion of mimesis is a milestone in Walcott‟s play. Although the concept of mimesis dates back to Aristotelian tragedy, as Amélie Rorty describes in Essays on Aristotle‟s
Poetics (1), its use in literary art is timeless. Accordingly, Rorty‟s definition of mimesis is useful here: mimesis is employed when one “imitates or takes on the persona of someone else, speaking as though he were the person, creating a fictional voice through which his discourse is accomplished” (51, original emphasis). Throughout Pantomime,
Walcott‟s protagonists contrast the canonical discourse of Defoe‟s novel by imitating the voices and characters of Man Friday, his white master, and even a woman, as it is illustrated in greater detail in chapter 5. To provide a brief example here, let us consider the beginning of the play when Harry Trewe, (a hotel owner who is possessed with the idea to rehearse a Christmas show about Robinson Crusoe), tries to get into his role and imitates Friday: “Mastah ... Mastah ... Friday sorry. Friday never do it again. Master”
(102). Although Walcott indicates that Harry is speaking in broken English, it is particularly in those scenes that Barthes‟s previously mentioned assertion about the destruction of voice in writing applies. Luckily for drama, there are always actors who can translate the script to stage. It is therefore illuminating to watch Harry Trewe in the performance of Pantomime13 imitating Friday both physically (as he crawls humorously on the stage) and verbally (as he exaggeratedly pronounces “Maastah, Maastah” in a supposedly characteristic deep black man‟s voice). Ironically, trying to describe the performed verbal act in written form fails even herein. Nevertheless, the idea of mimesis is pursued both in the dramatic script and in the staged performance, and they can be said to be the different sides of the same coin.
13 The performance of Pantomime from May 2012, which was directed by Derek Walcott himself and featured Wendell Manwarren (as Jackson Phillip) and David Tarkenter (as Harry Trewe) in the lead roles.
47 3.3 The Three Unities
While the unities of time and place are usually associated with the conventions of drama, the setting and the time frame are also crucial to Robinson Crusoe. Robinson returns to England on “the 11th of June, in the year 1687, having been thirty-and-five years absent” (Defoe 272). He spends “eight-and-twenty years, twelve months and nineteen days” (271) on the island, presumably in the Caribbean near the Orinoco river
(212). However, the setting of the plot is scattered through England (8), Africa (22),
Brazil (38), Portugal (273), France and Spain (282); in other words, in actual physical environment. This novelistic use of the time dimension and denial of a single setting is, according to Watt, a “way the characters of the novel can only be individualised” (21).
It is, again, the break with the earlier literary tradition but, importantly, by having
Robinson Crusoe set in a background of particularised time and place, Defoe allows the readers to follow the development of his character.
In comparison to the formal realism of Robinson Crusoe, Pantomime adheres to the strict dramatic unities: unity of place, unity of time and unity of action. These three principles, “derived by French classicists from Aristotle‟s Poetics, require a play to have a single action represented as occurring in a single place and within the course of a day” (“Unities”, n. pag.). In this respect, Pantomime takes place in one location only,
“in a gazebo on the edge of a cliff, part of a guest house on the island of Tobago, West
Indies” (Walcott 91). The action is divided into two Acts with two characters – “Harry
Trewe, English, mid-forties, owner of the Castaways Guest House, retired actor” (91) and “Jackson Phillip, Trinidadian, forty, his factotum, retired calypsonian” (91).
Walcott‟s reference to time is communicated to the readers of the script only through the stage directions; in Act One there is “a table set for breakfast” (93), and in Act Two, the background information reads simply as “Noon” (130). Thus the action takes place
48 within 24 hours and covers one main plot in a single physical space. The stage directions, of course, are not presented to the audience during the performance of the play, and it is, again, a challenge for the actors to reveal the time action through their monologues.
At first sight, Pantomime provides a simple structure of the dramatic practise and seems to follow the conventional rules of Aristotle‟s three unities.14 Nevertheless, as the following example from one of the performances of the play demonstrates,
Pantomime is not a traditional play but a modern-day reinvention that tends to amuse audience by employing humorous allusions to the Crusoe story. For example, it parodies sexual tension between Crusoe and Friday in the scene during which Harry
Trewe removes his shirt and trousers, and stands on the stage wearing just his underpants, when Jackson enters with a breakfast tray:
JACKSON. Mr. Trewe, what it is going on here this blessed Sunday morning, if
I may ask?
HARRY. I‟m feeling what is like to be Friday.
JACKSON. You don‟t mind putting back on your pants?
HARRY. Why can‟t I eat breakfast like this?
JACKSON. Because I am here. I happen to be here. I am the one serving you
breakfast, Mr. Trewe.
HARRY. There‟s nobody here.
JACKSON. Mr. Harry, you putting on back your pants?
HARRY. You‟re frightened of something?
JACKSON. You putting on back your pants?
14 Despite the fact that Aristotle deals only with the genre of tragedy in his Poetics, the unities of time, place and action seem well applicable to comedy, too.
49 HARRY. What‟re you afraid of? You think I‟m bent? Aaah, that is such a corny
interpretation of the Crusoe-Friday relationship, boy. ...
JACKSON. Mr. Trewe, I am trying to explain that I myself feel like an ass
standing up here, holding this tray, while you standing up there naked, and
that if anybody should happen to pass, my name is immediately mud. So,
when you put back on your pants, I will serve your breakfast.
This humorous modernization of the original script spontaneously develops the unity of action (as Friday resolutely, yet still politely, begins to undermine the employer- employee relationship) and, at the same time, retains the unity of time by referring to
“Sunday morning” which replaces the stage direction written in the script.
The unity of place, though not strictly in the sense of a dramatic structure, can be explored from the perspective of a colonial history in Pantomime. In the course of the play, Walcott frequently jokes about the postcolonial condition of the island. Harry
Trewe, for example, refers to the impracticability of committing suicide in a Third-
World Country, since “you can‟t leave a note because the pencils break, you can‟t cut your wrist with the local blades” (97); then Jackson describes the dilapidated state of the hotel: “The toilet catch asthma, the air-condition got ague, the front-balcony rail missing four teet‟, and every minute the fridge like it dancing the Shango ... brrrgudup
... jukjuk ... brrugudup. ... Termites jumping like steel band in the foundations” (98); or comments on the shortage of food: “How long you on this hotel business, sir? No butter.
Marge. No sugar. Big strike. Island-wide shortage. We down to half a bag” (101); and finally, Jackson describes his servitude: “The smile kinda rusty, sir, but it goes with the job. Just like the water in this hotel: (demonstrates) I turn it on at seven and lock it off at one” (140). In a light-hearted manner, Walcott mocks the local appliances, manufacture
50 and local supplies. Perhaps being an optimist by nature, but a pessimist by experience,
Walcott claims that in reality the Caribbean islands:
still have a tourist economy in which people are asked to behave in a
certain way. It‟s become very emphatic now, the idea of service. But you
have to be careful it doesn‟t turn into slavery: the insistence that you
must smile and serve for the sake of the island. Advertisements that have
everybody grinning and insisting you have to make people happy, that‟s
our job in life. That‟s dangerous. It‟s even worse that it‟s black people –
the tourist board, the government – doing it to themselves. (Walcott qtd.
in Moss, n. pag.)
In this respect, Walcott‟s confession confirms the claim by Bridget Jones who points out that “Pantomime already is in, and of, the Caribbean, but politely offers lessons for
Europe” (227). The comic parody of a local place differs diametrically from the unintentional parody of RC discussed in chapter 2, mainly in that Pantomime is a purposeful satire of the local history that “has transplanted very successfully to the West
Indian stage” (Jones 230). Moreover, Walcott alludes to a patriotic attitude toward the place and the importance of social roles affected by such patriotism in his country.
The unity of action, which is of Aristotle‟s particular interest, is somewhat difficult to trace in Pantomime. According to the principles of Aristotelian model elaborated by Howe and Stephany in The MacGrow-Hill Book of Drama, a well- constructed plot should “be single in its issue” with no or few subplots (39). While the first prerequisite is fulfilled in Pantomime by a central focus on rehearsing a „panto‟
(i.e. a show) which should rewrite the Crusoe story, the production of subplots mostly remains open to the characters‟ ability to improvise and re-appropriate the original story to suit it to the Caribbean context. More often than not, the plot somehow results in a
51 random string of events. In addition, the occasional switching to the calypso singing and dancing in the play seems also incompatible with the Aristotelian focus on unity.
On the contrary, Defoe‟s concentration on a sequence of events in the story seems purposely diverse as it depicts a chronological narrative model. It first describes
Robinson‟s adventure on a sea voyage (8); then his capture by the pirates (20); his trial on the island (51); an encounter with Friday (152); the march against the cannibals
(226); the mutiny of Spaniards (244); and finally, the trek through the mountains and escape from wolves while crossing the Pyrenees (286). The multiplicity of various subplots, even if individually-oriented, is desirable in the novel, and it may be regarded as typical of the narrative form.
It follows that the role of unities in the play is certainly very different from that in the master narrative. Perhaps the most notable unity that attracts further attention in both genres is that of time. It might be argued that keeping the track of time in Robinson
Crusoe stresses the importance of temporal duration in his human life. And if the
Crusoe story should convince its readers of an autobiographical truth of Crusoe‟s account, there is no better method perhaps than to concentrate on the flow of experience which, in accordance with formal realism, confirms Crusoe‟s lifetime existence.
Walcott‟s satirical play is in the striking contrast to reality, it denies the principle of formal realism and its power over temporal dimension. The restriction of the action to one single day succeeds in having the dramatic protagonists concentrated on the presence rather than dwelling on the past. The concept of time can encompass years, or a single day, if required, and still can arouse an illusion of reality in reader‟s imagination. That is arguably the magic of the fictional unities.
52 3.4 Stylistic Devices
Similarly to films, which use various special (audio-visual) effects to attract viewing audiences, Robinson Crusoe and Pantomime also emphasize an aesthetic function by employing numerous stylistic devices, literary and dramatic, to convey a large variety of tones and themes.
Although the forms of these two works are very different, they are easily comparable in that they both lack a third-person narrator who would comment objectively on the multiple characters‟ emotions and thoughts. The writers therefore have to deal with this seemingly problematic communication with their readers and audience. To begin with the novel, Defoe‟s narrative manner in Robinson Crusoe has been already shown to be true to faithful experience. Crusoe‟s journal is the most remarkable device to report his experience to readers. Nevertheless, the journal writing represents a relatively small part of Crusoe‟s stay on the island; out of 28 years he keeps the diary regularly for about one year until he runs out of ink (Defoe 105). Whether
Robinson‟s story is then completed retrospectively from the incomplete journal or with the fictional help of the “Editor” is questionable. However, it is reasonable to assume that Defoe‟s primary concern was the use of a first-person narrative, contained both within the journal itself and in the rest of the story afterwards. The literary device of using the first-person voice has both advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, the first-person narration most fully reflects thoughts, feelings and subjective viewpoints of the main character; it allows the reader to identify the perspective of the narrator and also corresponds with the purpose of formal realism. On the other hand, without the presence of an objective observer (a third-person narrator typically), Robinson Crusoe inclines to a somewhat biased report of events. Crusoe‟s single viewpoint furthermore limits other characters in the story. As a result, Friday is allowed no more than few
53 occasional lines of his broken English in the novel: “FRIDAY: My nation beat much, for all that. MASTER: How beat? If your nation beat them, how came you to be taken?
FRIDAY: They more many than my nation in the place where me was; they take one, two, three, and me; my nation overbeat them in the yonder place, where me no was;”
(Defoe 210). This excerpt is the only longer piece of conversation in the story that violates the principle of Defoe‟s narrative manner, and (untypically for a novel) makes use of a dramatic convention of a dialogue. Despite this fact, the author‟s biased reference to Crusoe as the “master” still recalls the first-person narrative mode.
In Pantomime, as well as in many other plays, the problem of how to provide background information about the plot and its characters without a narrator is usually resolved by what Howe and Stephany call an „exposition‟, i.e. a piece of “information that an audience must have in order to understand what is going on” (9). An exposition is for the most part conferred through a dialogue. It is worth mentioning here that we must distinguish between a spoken dialogue performed by actors and a dialogue of the script which is usually accompanied by a stage direction:
JACKSON. Morning, Mr. Trewe. Your breakfast ready.
HARRY. So how‟re you this morning, Jackson? ...... JACKSON. I bringing in breakfast.
HARRY. You do that, Friday.
JACKSON. Friday? It ain‟t go keep.
HARRY. (Gesturing) Friday, you, bring Crusoe, me, breakfast now. Crusoe
hungry.
JACKSON. Mr. Trewe, you come back with that same rake again? I tell you, I
ain‟t no actor, and I ain‟t walking in front a set of tourists naked playing
cannibal. Carnival, but not canni-bal. (Walcott 95-96)
54 What this implies about the dramatic exposition is that by mentioning the names of the characters “aloud” in the first two lines, Walcott draws a closer attention to Harry‟s next line, in which he, all of a sudden, addresses Jackson as Friday. This is all the more intensified by the stage direction instructing Harry to signal who should be played by whom. In other words, the dialogue communicates to audience that Harry and Jackson are (and maybe are not) going to play a scene from Robinson Crusoe. Similarly to the first-person narrative technique in Defoe‟s novel, the employment of „exposition‟ in the play demonstrates its ability to convey background information to the audience without a narrative mediation.
In Orality and Literacy, Walter J. Ong notes that “because it [writing] moves speech from the oralaural to a new sensory world, that of vision, it transforms speech and thought as well” (84). His conception of writing as a tool of imagination is not inappropriate to my design in the following paragraphs. Figurative language, as an expressive way to transcendent literal meaning, is potentially rich in the works under scrutiny. The list of aspects that need consideration in Robinson Crusoe and Pantomime includes, for example, metaphors, similes, idioms, collocations, hyperboles (for a detailed overview of figures of speech detected see a list of examples in Appendix 3), redundancy/repetition, imagery, expletives, verbal irony, dance and body language, etc.
An interesting stylistic feature that attracts attention in Robinson Crusoe is
Defoe‟s plentiful use of contracted forms and apostrophes: “I‟ll warrant I‟ll find some way or other to get it along, when „tis done” (127, emphasis added); “So I e‟en let him out” (144, emphasis added); “„tis certain I was superior to them” (228, emphasis added);
“I had ne‟er a cave now to hide my money in” (279, emphasis added). In a similar way, it is the eighteenth-century diction of Defoe‟s prose that is most noticeable:
55 “O Drug!” said I aloud, “what art thou good for? Thou art not worth to
me, no, not the taking off of the ground; one of those knives is worth all
this heap; I have no manner of use for thee; e‟en remain where thou art,
and go to the bottom as a creature whose life is not worth saving” (60).
Defoe‟s inclination to Elizabethan English – “thee”, “thou”, “art” – in this example is perhaps employed to express a symbolic parallelism with the Middle English texts. This device particularly occurs in the story when Robinson muses about God and religion:
“dost thou ask what thou hast done; … why is it that thou wert not long ago destroyed?”
(94, emphasis added), “I durst not speak the words ... how canst thou be such a hypocrite, ... for a condition which however thou may‟st endeavour to be contended with, thou wouldst rather pray heartily to be delivered from?” (114, emphasis added).
Similarly, he uses religious allusions and sacred expressions, such as “O God!” (48),
“He that miraculously saved me” (69), “the work of Providence” (81), “Lord, have mercy upon me” (83) “hand of God” (90) “grace of God” (91), “justice of God” (92),
“will of God” (132), “judgement from Heaven” (91), “our great Creator” (146), “the
Devil himself” (164), “Divine justice” (168), “the wise Governor of all things” (193),
“the kingdom of Christ” (214), “blessed Redeemer” (216), etc., and they are indeed exceedingly abundant in the text. Such stylistic devices are probably employed to add an occasionally solemn mood to the original text. And, of course, with regard to the cultural and spiritual perception of the eighteenth-century England, Defoe naturally tends to be more secular than, for example, Derek Walcott (who is known for the use of profanity in his writing), or the twentieth-century writers in general. In other cases,
Defoe's prose “fully exemplifies the ... close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness; ... and [it] prefer[s] the language of artisans, countrymen and merchants before that of wits or scholars” (Watt 101). Defoe naturally
56 prioritized factual and plain style of writing since he was a merchant himself and, most of all, a former journalist. It is by virtue of journalism, Watt continues, to which “we can also attribute much of the responsibility for what is probably Defoe's supreme gift – his readability” (104).
There is a sharp contrast between Defoe‟s formal prose and Walcott‟s improvised calypso songs in Pantomime. Christopher Balme points out that “if the driving force motivating it [dancing and singing] is the desire for a culturally appropriate form of theatre which can accommodate indigenous performance forms, then dance, as an almost universal form of performative expression, must find a place in these experiments” (203). Interestingly, Balme also observes that “when dance appears in dramas in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is certainly an exception to the rule” (202).
Not surprisingly, Walcott is the exception that proves the rule. Throughout the play,
Harry Trewe (and Jackson Phillip, too) composes some calypso lyrics and rehearses dancing on the stage (93, 94, 117, 119, 140, 164), so he could eventually write a script which should be solemnly read aloud by Robinson Crusoe (performed by Jackson at this part of the play):
JACKSON. You want me to read this, right?
HARRY. Yeah.
JACKSON. (Reads slowly) “O silent sea, O wondrous sunset that I‟ve gaze on
ten thousand times, who will rescue me from this complete desolation?...”
(Breaking) All o‟ this?
HARRY. If you don‟t mind. Don‟t act it. Just read it...... JACKSON. (Pauses then continues) “How I‟d like to fuflee this desolate rock.”
(Pauses) Fuflee? Pardon, but what is a fuflee, Mr. Trewe?
HARRY. A fuflee? I‟ve got “fuflee” written there?
57 JACKSON. (Extends paper, points at word) So, how you does fuflee, Mr.
Harry? Is Anglo-Saxon English?
HARRY. (kneels down and peers at the word. He rises) it‟s F ... then F-L-E-E to
express his hesitation. It‟s my own note as an actor. He quivers, he hesitates ...
JACKSON. He quivers, he hesitates, but he still can‟t fuflee?
HARRY. Just leave that line out, Jackson.
JACKSON. I like it.
HARRY. Leave it out!
JACKSON. No fuflee?
HARRY. I said no. (Walcott 143)
Harry‟s effort to provide a pastiche of Defoe‟s traditional prose and Jackson‟s comic allusion to the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary satirizes the eighteenth-century narrative mode.
It is perhaps more perceptible a few lines later when Jackson, being now enraged, mocks Harry‟s written script and suggests his own version:
“O silent sea, O wondrous sunset,” and all that shit. No. He shipwrecked.
He desperate, he hungry. He look up and he see this fucking goat [...]
putting out its tongue and letting go one fucking bleeeeeh! And Robbie
ent thinking „bout his wife and son and O silent sea and O wondrous
sunset, no, Robbie is the First True Creole, so he watching the goat with
his eye narrow, narrow, and he say: blehhh, eh? You muther-fucker, I go
show you blehhh [...] and next thing is Robbie and the goat [...] wrestling
on the sand [...] we hearing one last faint, feeble
bleeeeeeehhhhhhhhhhhhh, and Robbie is next seen walking up the beach
with a goatskin hat and a goatskin umbrella. (148)
58 Crusoe‟s solemn narrative, his contracted forms, sacred and flamboyant language is parodied by blatant, and even insulting, creolized version invented by Jackson Phillip.
However, it is not just Jackson‟s pure intention to vulgarize and subvert Harry‟s perception of the canonical English text, there is perhaps a hidden message in Jackson‟s
“First True Creole” exclamation. Possibly a message in terms of advocating native folk practicality, probably a message of despising traditional English writing as being superior to the native culture, but most certainly the message of a triumphant patriotism.
It is perhaps irrelevant to discuss conventions of a dramatic form at a larger space in this paper, yet it is applicable to at least analyze the humorous features in
Pantomime as they form an indispensable part of the play‟s aesthetic appeal. There is little doubt that audience expects laughter in a comedy. But what is it exactly that makes people laugh in a play? Howe and Stephany distinguish three kinds of laughter; in the first one we “laugh with a character whom we like or admire” (16, original emphasis).
In Pantomime, both characters fulfil this characteristic. Ironic remarks, such as
Jackson‟s: “You start to exploit me already?” (119), when Harry runs away for a tape to record Jackson‟s singing; or Harry‟s racialized comment in: “Am I supposed to play the beach? Because that‟s white” (Walcott 121), are those kinds of jokes that turn the play into a comedy. The second case occurs when “we laugh at characters” as the acting shows the character‟s wisdom or foolishness (Howe and Stephany 17, original emphasis). Thus, for example, while Jackson repairs a sun-deck and the deafening noise of his hammering (which he does on purpose to annoy Harry) repeatedly lifts Harry from his deckchair, Jackson asks him quite a matter-of-factly: “the hammering not disturbing you?” (112), and Harry, with an over-exaggerated calmness responds: “No, no. It‟s fine” (Walcott 131). This kind of sarcasm, used to ridicule the characters, is a powerful device of satire. The last type of laughter, called „farce‟, comes in handy when
59 “what happens on stage seems so crazy, so incongruous to our normal view of reality that the world seems turned upside down” (Howe and Stephany 17). When Harry, for example, finally persuades Jackson to play Robinson Crusoe and encourages him to improvise, Jackson suddenly clears the breakfast tray to one side of the stage floor, overturns the table and sits in it as if it were a boat. Then he rows calmly and from time to time surveys the horizon, shielding his face from the glare with one hand and gestures to Harry. However, Harry does not understand him, so Jackson flaps his arms like a large seabird and pantomimes that Harry should do the same:
HARRY. What?
JACKSON. (steps out from the table, crosses to Harry, irritated) […] I was in
that boat, rowing, and I was looking up to the sky to see a storm gathering,
and I wanted a big white sea bird beating inland from a storm. So what‟s the
trouble, Mr. Trewe?
HARRY. Sea bird? What sea bird? I‟m not going to play a fekking sea
bird. (Walcott 120)
A few lines later, Harry is standing in the upturned table, theatrically waves his arms and makes funny sounds (supposedly those of a sea-bird):
HARRY. Kekkkk, kekkkk, kekkk, kekkkk! (Stops) What‟s wrong?
JACKSON. What‟s wrong? Mr. Trewe, that is not a sea gull … that is some kind
of … well, I don‟t know what it is … some kind of jumbie bird or
something. (Walcott 122)
The comicality of this situation is redoubled by Jackson‟s reference to a jumbie bird, which, in local folklore, means a small owl whose screeching is perceived as a sure sign that someone would soon die (“Birds of Trinidad: Home and Garden 2”, n. pag.). Of
60 course, this scene finally comes to fruition, when performed audio-visually by the actors on stage.
The above mentioned limits of the dramatic form are nonetheless compensated by figurative language or, to be precise, by dramatic „imagery‟, which “reinforce, modify or in some other way illuminate an aspect of plot, character, or theme” (Howe and Stephany 35). This is achieved by Walcott‟s use of symbolic language in
Pantomime. For instance, in one scene Jackson attempts to demonstrate to Harry the absurdity of his playing the white colonizer and making Harry (as Friday) to tell
Jackson: “For three hundred years I have made you my servant. For three hundred years
...”, but, apparently in the middle of an ongoing conversation, Jackson is suddenly overwhelmed by his part, and gives a clear way to his thoughts:
JACKSON. For three hundred years I served you. Three hundred years I served
you breakfast in ... in my white jacket on a white veranda, boss, bwana,
effendi, bacra, sahib ... that was my pantomime. Every movement you
made, your shadow copied and you smiled at me as a child does smile at
his shadow‟s helpless obedience, boss, bwana, effendi, bacra, sahib, Mr.
Crusoe. (Walcott 112)
Walcott makes the audience feel that imperialism is at stake in Jackson‟s act. With an ironic subtext, Jackson repeats the indigenous titles for a master in several formerly colonized countries – “boss” (South Africa), “bwana” (Sub-Saharan Africa), “effendi”
(Egypt), “bacra” (Caribbean), and “sahib” (India) – and brings back to memory the postcolonial legacy of the colonizer and the colonized. In this sense, his powerful tirade beautifully evokes Oscar Wilde‟s famous quote “give a man mask, and he will tell you the truth” (Wilde 36). Moreover, by using the rhetorical device of repeating the same phrase (“three hundred years”) several times, Jackson emphasizes its significance in the
61 text. This rhetorical strategy is used both to stress his point and because of “repetition of the just-said, keeps both speaker and hearer surely on the track” (Ong 40).
As shown in this chapter, there are important differences in the degree to which the narrative style of Defoe‟s prose and dramatic conventions of Walcott‟s satirical play imitate reality; whether with the aim to entertain audience or to gain readers‟ interest, both authors engage in representing the story challenging imperialism. Both authors were very much influenced by their cultural experiences – individual countries, histories and societies. Therefore, the implications of being either a mulatto in a world divided along colour lines or an impoverished scribe attacked for innovative style of writing are revealed accordingly and differently in their works.
62 4. Foe, Friday and Feminism
As it was already suggested in the beginning of the previous chapter, Barthes stresses the need to examine the author‟s voice. The focus on the struggle for a narrative voice is certainly appropriate to examine J. M. Coetzee‟s postmodern novel Foe, in which at least five authors – Coetzee, Defoe, Foe, Susan and Friday – try to tell (or not to tell) their story. Yet there is another, equally brilliant, idea of Roland Barthes: “Isn‟t storytelling always a way of searching for one‟s origin ... ?” (The Pleasure of the Text
47). Despite the fact that Foe deals directly with the theme of Robinson Crusoe, and thus seems to be a story about the classic English novel, Foe is more complex than it would appear at first glance. It is a text that indeed engages with the Crusoe myth but at the same time allows Coetzee to pose questions about the multiple issues of representation and individuality. Although Coetzee‟s insight into the troubling topics
(e.g. injustice of apartheid, power of language, or oppressive manners of the patriarchal authorities, to name but a few) is often hidden behind the metafictional discourse, and indirectly hinted at through allusions, he attempts to offer answers to all sorts of questions asked not only by the writer himself but also by each character involved in the story. By shifting the attention away from Cruso(e) towards Friday and Susan, Coetzee centres on the subaltern characters and their individualities. Foe differs from the previous forms of fictional Robinsonades by the amount of attention it draws to the postmodern and postcolonial discourse, as well as to the presentation of a female castaway. This chapter thus deals with the novel‟s challenging form and explores its postmodern and female perspectives.
63 4.1 Feeling Displaced
The South African novelist John Maxwell Coetzee was born in Cape Town, on
9 February 1940, to a primary school teacher and a lawyer. Although Coetzee‟s parents were not of British descent, they spoke English at home, which became one of the reasons why Coetzee‟s boyhood in South Africa was dominated by cultural conflicts, despite the fact that he was conversing in Afrikaans with his other relatives. Coetzee‟s situation as an English-speaking white boy was confronted with the questions about his religion and social location of his dissociated family. He graduated at the University of
Cape Town where he studied English and mathematics. In 1965 he moved to the
University of Texas in order to write his doctoral dissertation on the style of Samuel
Beckett‟s fiction and graduated there with a PhD in English, linguistics and Germanic languages. He taught frequently in the United States and when his application for permanent residence in the USA was denied in 1972, he returned to South Africa to accept a teaching position at the University of Cape Town. Coetzee won many prestigious literary awards (e.g. the Booker Prize in 1983, and 1999, and the Nobel
Prize in 2003) but his international acclaim was not matched by its reception in South
Africa (Head 1-2). “No Afrikaner would consider me an Afrikaner”, admits Coetzee in an interview with David Attwell. As Coetzee talks about his ethnicity, he reveals that being a white South African who speaks global language has been a crucial aspect in treatment of his identity:
That [being considered an Afrikaner], it seems to me, is the acid test for
group membership, and I don‟t pass it. Why not? In the first place,
because English is my first language, and has been since childhood. An
Afrikaner (primary and simplest definition) is a person whose first
language is Afrikaans [...]. In the second place, because I am not
64 embedded in the culture of the Afrikaner [...] and have been shaped by
that culture only in a perverse way. What am I, then, in this ethnic-
linguistic sense? I am one of many people in this country who have
become detached from their ethnic roots [...] and have joined a pool of no
recognizable ethnos whose language of exchange is English. (Coetzee,
Doubling the Point, 341-342)
Coetzee‟s work has “inevitably attracted censure from those impatient for political change in late- and then post-apartheid South Africa, who felt that a novelist has had a duty to engage overtly with the world of history and politics” (Head x, emphasis original). Literary representation can of course be political and nationalism sometimes leads to the control of the public spheres. Nevertheless, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak concisely points out, “the imagination, literature and the arts belong neither to reason nor to unreason” (Nationalism and the Imagination 20). This applies exactly to
Coetzee‟s creative writing for his novels are often challenging and “elusive of interpretation” (Head 1). Coetzee‟s sense of national independence is reflected not only in his voluntary exile but also in his characters, who are reluctant to sympathize with the ruling system. Unlike many South African writers, Coetzee has never been directly involved in the political struggle of his native country and resisted the popular mood of being an “apartheid novelist”, for which he has been criticized by his fellow South
African colleagues, particularly by Nadine Gordimer, who claimed that his works are
“too oblique, with an insufficient political charge” (Head 22). Having been a postcolonial writer with strong anti-imperialist feelings, Coetzee naturally focuses on many contemporary concerns of South Africa: in Foe, for instance, the mutilation of
Friday draws on South African troubling issue of slavery and bodily violence. Also, his other works have been received as a response to the era of apartheid in South Africa, as
65 stated by Head (x). Thus Coetzee certainly deals with the unavoidable topics of his country but, rather than engaging his characters (and himself, too) in political debates and making them (dis)sympathize with a group of either the imperial whites or the marginalized others, he seems to follow Spivak‟s idea, enjoying conveying a message through the fiction-play of imagination.
Homi K. Bhabha characterizes Coetzee‟s power as lying “precisely in his ability to unsettle” (qtd. in Donadio, n. pag.). This kind of literary unsettlement is perhaps what differentiates Coetzee from other South African writers as he simply believes that
“stories finally have to tell themselves, [...] the hand that holds the pen is only the conduit of a signifying process” (Doubling the Point, 341). To discuss realism in
African fiction, Coetzee uses techniques that do not provide a direct solution but rather encourage his readers to make their own conclusions. The concept of silence, for example, is not the only technique but an important one in Foe to depict a complex relationship between the characters and to make their voices heard in the end. It is indeed a prominent feature that allows a discussion about South African oppression, silencing and granting a voice to those who were repressed in the colonial era and during the regime of apartheid as well.
What Coetzee‟s biography also reveals is that his personal background is strikingly similar to that of Derek Walcott. Both men come from families with mixed origins; both witnessed cultural or political conflicts in their countries; both have been preoccupied with ethnicity as their experience of growing up in the ambiguous environment (in terms of the double presence of Caribbean/South African and Euro-
American elements) made it difficult for them to conform to society or identify with either of the cultures; and both finally moved to the USA to teach and give lectures at prominent universities; and while their international prominence was secured by the
66 Nobel Prize for Literature, their bilingual status as both Creole/Afrikaans and English- speaking public figures placed them paradoxically at the margin of the
Caribbean/South-Afrikan life. It is perhaps this kind of experience that leads both writers to focus on solitary and subaltern characters; and one can finally understand the importance of their “Fridays” who suffer the same crisis of identity and life in what
Foucault calls „heterotopia‟.15
4.2 The Power of Metafiction
In terms of the narrative methods, Foe can be seen as a postmodern text that transforms the traditional model of novel writing. It is divided into four parts (the island episode, Susan‟s letters to Mr. Foe, confrontation with Foe, and the appearance of an unknown narrator) and follows a non-linear structure of narrative fragmentation which makes it challenging for the reader to follow who is telling whose story. Coetzee‟s narrative performance starts in the following way:
„At last I could row no further. My hands were blistered, my back was
burned, my body ached. With a sigh, making a barely splash, I slipped
overboard. [...] I swam towards the strange island … carried by the
waves into the bay and on to the beach. [...] “Castaway,” I said with my
thick dry tongue. “I am cast away. I am all alone”. (5)
What a reader familiar with the Western canon of literary texts can learn from this opening is that the story is told in the first person narrative mode (as if to give a realistic account of someone‟s story) and that the first person-narrator recounts his/her landing on an apparently desert island, which is indeed an intertextual reference to Robinson
15 A heterotopia is a real place which stands outside of known space. Foucault compares heterotopia to life in colonies in the 17th century and calls it a “perfect other place” in which “existence was regulated at every turn”, but warns that heterotopia may also “create a space of illusion that exposes every real space” (“Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” 8).
67 Crusoe. Susan Barton, one of the protagonists of Foe, emerges within textual boundaries as a would-be castaway narrator who is about to provide a true account of a female Robinson Crusoe. Yet nothing can be farther from the truth. As Hutcheon observes in The Politics of Postmodernism, metafiction undermines any illusion of reality (35). Apart from indicating the first person narrative, Part I of Foe begins with the quotation marks to indicate that Susan is perhaps telling her story to someone in particular rather than to her readers. A few lines later, Coetzee offers another narrative shift:
I sat on the bare earth with my sore foot between my hands and rocked
back and forth and sobbed like a child, while the stranger (who was of
course the Cruso I told you of) gazed at me ... (9)
This is the first time that Cruso‟s name is ever mentioned in the text, so Susan‟s reference to mentioning him previously to the readers seems quite obscure, and one can hardly put together any coherent pieces of the narrative, let alone make a sense of it. It is at this point that readers might begin to realize that Susan‟s tale is a story set within another story. And here the question of authorship, already touched upon in chapter 2, calls for special attention. No sooner is the meaning assigned to Susan‟s seemingly incoherent remark than “Mr Foe the author who had heard many confessions and were reputed a very secret man” appears in the story (Coetzee 48). In the fictionalized character of Daniel Foe, Coetzee unmasks Daniel Defoe, the historical author, and recalls his biography. This is noticeable not only for his name and his status as a writer but also for the intertextual references to Defoe‟s other works, i.e. Moll Flanders,
Roxana and “A True Revelation of the Apparition of one Mrs Veal”, as Head observes
(62). This kind of hypertextuality allows Coetzee to introduce postmodern features in
Foe for, as Victoria Orlowski describes, “creating biographies of imaginary writers and
68 presenting and discussing fictional works of an imaginary character” is one of the widely used techniques of postmodern metafiction (n. pag.).
The notion of revealing the boundary between fact and fiction and the reader‟s ability to distinguish between the real and the fictitious author is one of many unconventional and experimental techniques employed in Foe. Others include, for example, what Patricia Waugh calls “the principle of a fundamental and sustained opposition” (6). Patrick Corcoran seems to voice similar ideas, as he believes that Foe
“foregrounds oppositional forces and antagonistic relationships” (256). This is reflected both in the structure of the novel and its characters, too. Coetzee detracts from Defoe‟s idea of verisimilitude and, instead, invites his readers to speculate on the plausibility of the canonical text. Thus, any original attempt to represent reality in Robinson Crusoe no longer exists in Foe: the resourceful and adventurous Crusoe is changed into an old stubborn and indifferent Cruso with no ambition whatsoever to escape the island; the obedient and faithful Friday is turned into a rebelling servant; the only and authoritative narrator is substituted by several unreliable narrators; chronological sequences are interrupted by independent narrative layers; and the exotic island is replaced by “a great rocky hill with a flat top [...] with drab bushes that never flower” (Coetzee 7). These oppositional features in the story only confirm Head‟s observation about “postmodern
Coetzee” for he believes that the writer works according to the principle that his novel
“should not supplement history but establish a position of rivalry with it” (x).
Furthermore, in order to prove that “no singular truth or meaning exist” (which
Orlowski presents as a popular way to violate narrative layers in metafiction), Coetzee chooses not to follow the rules of rationality and rather employs some seemingly illogical and distorted elements, such as the psychodrama with the mysterious re-
69 appearance of Susan‟s lost daughter16, or the novel‟s unconventional closing (further elaborated in 4.4) in which Coetzee introduces an omniscient narrator whose genderless identity remains open to readers‟ interpretation. This, according to Waugh, is also typical for metafiction as the novels “often end with a choice of endings or they may end with the impossibility of endings” (29).
From the postmodernist point of view, it is hard to overlook the fourth and final part of the novel since the dream-like image described there fully corresponds with the
“fragmentation, indeterminacy, and intense distrust of all universal or totalizing discourses”, which, according to Harvey, “are the hallmark of postmodernist thought”
(9). First, Foe‟s narrative structure is suddenly changed in its last section: complex sentences are replaced by considerably shorter ones; the choice of vocabulary reminds the style of the Decadent writers, for instance, the place the narrator enters is “dark and mean” with a rat “scurrying across the floor” (153), there are bodies with the skin
“stretched tight over their bones” and receded lips “uncovering their teeth” as if they were “smiling” (153); after a section break which is marked by two asterisks, the narrator sees a black “hole” where “the kraken lurks” and the “dirty”, “dank” and
“slimy” sand circulates in the waters “like the mud of Flanders, in which generations of grenadiers now lie dead” (156). Second, Coetzee plays with linguistic devices that resemble poetry as he uses alliteration: “disturbance, dust, decay” (153), “stirs and sighs”, “faintest faraway”, “whine of the wind” (154), and he chooses mostly monosyllabic words to evoke rhyming resemblance. Last but not least, there is a
“dispatch box with brass hinges and clasp” which contains a script with the following words: “„Dear Mr Foe, At last I could row no further‟” (155). At this point, the observant reader will not fail to notice that this sentence is the beginning of Foe except
16 In fact, the motif of the lost daughter is, according to Thieme, another metafictional device used by Coetzee for it “involves a clear intertextual relationship with another Defoe novel, Roxana” (Postcolonial Con-Texts 65).
70 that the name of the addressee has been originally omitted. On one hand, this manuscript might serve as an evidence proving that Susan has finally persuaded Foe to write up her story; and there is all the more reason to think so as the dispatch box has been already presented in Part II when Susan occupied Foe‟s empty house and put her completed sheets into his “chest [which] is not a true chest but a dispatch box” (65). It would also explain the quotation marks at the beginning of the book, for it suggests that
Foe is the author who quotes Susan Barton and narrates her story. On the other hand, there is one tiny but important detail that further complicates Foe‟s authorship: there is a plaque bolted to the wall of the (presumably Foe‟s) house, which reads “Daniel Defoe,
Author” (155). Why does Coetzee recall the historical figure here? It may be that
Coetzee makes an allusion to Defoe‟s editorial intervention in Robinson Crusoe and believes that the authors have total control over their stories no matter what pen names and pseudonyms they adopt to hide their real identities. Or he may pay tribute to the writer whose ur-text he had rewritten and thus prove the fact that the persona of the writer is inseparable from his works and characters. Yet it still leaves open the question of Foe‟s fictional authorship for only the first section of the book can claim to be a version of Robinson Crusoe, while the rest is Susan‟s attempt to have her (and Friday‟s) story told.
The very extensive metafictional discourse Coetzee offers in Foe, and especially in its last chapter, offers various interpretations.17 Many of the apparent discrepancies in
Foe, are concerned with authority, ownership and identity. And indeed the emphasis on
17 According to Radhika Jones, Spivak, for example, is sceptical of the novel‟s intent, citing its implicit wish of “if only there were no texts” as indicative of the “impossible politics of overdetermination,” for “Coetzee‟s entire book warns that Friday‟s body is not its own sign” (qtd. in R. Jones 63). Attridge, argues that “the narrator of the closing section has made the last of many attempts to get Friday to speak, and the hauntingly allusive description of the soundless stream issuing from his body is a culmination of the book‟s concern with the powerful silence which is the price of our cultural achievements” (qtd. in R. Jones 63). Thieme reads the final section as evidence that the text “resists closure” (qtd. in R. Jones 63). And Newman observes that “at the close of the novel the reader is re-reading,” thus the novel “is not about the need to avoid telling the black story; rather it concerns the necessity for repeated efforts to overcome divisions and categorizations,” i.e. apartheid (qtd. in R. Jones 63).
71 the novel‟s textuality draws us back to Coetzee‟s life and career. The fictional stereotypes that are challenged by Coetzee‟s creative approach and inventiveness of the text may again reflect his inspiration by Samuel Beckett who, as Head observes, was obsessed “with language permutations and word games” (33). More importantly though, the strength of Coetzee‟s literary creativity might rest precisely in his ability to blur the boundaries between past/present, fact/fiction, conventional/modernist or, in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, “to use and abuse history” (qtd. in Hutcheon, The Politics of
Postmodernism 58). The textual twists that Coetzee creates through the use of metafictional and postmodernist devices in Foe encourage his readers to question the nature of narrative representation and support the idea that there is no single truth of representing history which, I would argue, is one of the strongest premises of postmodern writing.
4.3 A Woman‟s Story?
“In every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Till we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story”, says Mr Foe during one of his conversations with Susan Barton in Foe (141). And
Coetzee indeed employs a theme in his novel that Defoe omits in his narrative: femininity. What we can learn from Defoe‟s novel is that there is a brief but insignificant reference to Crusoe‟s mother, two sisters, a widow, his nameless wife, and finally “seven women” whom Crusoe has sent to the men on the island “besides other supplies” together with “five cows, three of them being big with calf” (298). The analogy between women and cows, who are equally considered to be the supplies
“proper for [men‟s] service” (298), would undoubtedly attract attention of many a feminist literary critic. In contrast to Defoe‟s power-relation between Crusoe and
72 Friday, Coetzee offers a shift from the entirely male characters and, after Cruso‟s death in Foe, he replaces his position by a woman, Susan Barton.
Coetzee‟s choice of the characters of a white woman and mutilated black slave is a symbolic one: by virtue of her skin colour Susan holds authority over the black servant, who in turn takes control over her by withholding his secret story. It is undeniable that through this reversal Coetzee explores the African experience with colonialism. Moreover, the introduction of the female protagonist is an effective way to discuss the position of gender in relation to storytelling and within the feminist context.
The former is reflected in Susan‟s inability to express herself in the novel writing, the latter implicitly in her mother-daughter relationship.
Susan is a white woman abandoned by the rest of the world. Apparently she has no family except, perhaps, for the lost daughter, whom she had been searching for in
Bahia. Shortly afterwards, Susan is stranded on a desert island after having been cast adrift by the Portuguese crew during a mutiny. A stereotypically viewed woman in her situation would perhaps cry or feel the need to talk it out. Susan Barton does both things. As soon as she is carried to Cruso‟s house by Friday, she starts giving account of her story: “„My name is Susan Barton‟, I said. „I was cast adrift by the crew of the ship yonder. They killed their master and did this to me‟ [...] and all at once [...] I fell to crying” (9). This confession meets no reaction from Cruso except that he gazes at Susan more as if she was “a fish cast up by the waves than an unfortunate creature” (9). Yet
Susan is not discouraged and continues in her narration: “„Let me tell you my story‟, said I; „for I am sure you are wondering who I am and how I come to be here. My name is Susan Barton, and I am a woman alone.‟” (10). As Susan cries, talks and repeats what she had previously told to Cruso, he remains silent and answers her questions by nodding or just matter-of-factly. When Susan recalls her life in Bahia, she further
73 reveals that she was “thought a whore” (115), though not because of her sexual behaviour but because of going abroad freely, for “the Portuguese are a very jealous race” and local women are not allowed to leave the house alone (Coetzee 115).
Considering that Susan had had casual sexual relationship with three different men in the novel (starting with the captain of the Portuguese ship, then she becomes a sexual mistress of Cruso, and finally she seduces Foe), her behaviour can be interpreted as a need to express her sexuality, or more likely, to get what she wants. On one hand, Susan is similar to the image characterizing Western women described by Chandra Talpade
Mohanty as “having control over their own bodies and sexualities and the freedom to make their own decisions” (22). On the other hand, Susan‟s attempt to ingratiate herself with the men of power (the master of the ship, the master of the island and the master of words) falls short of achieving her goals and, ironically, she is reduced to the status of a mere tool for men‟s purposes. In fact, Coetzee may have deliberately created the contrast of talkative, “promiscuous” Susan and taciturn, frustrated Cruso in order to undermine patriarchal values and present a complex female character to confront long history of representing women as either angels or whores with nothing in between.
One cannot fail to notice that, apart from the above “weaknesses” (or strengths?), Coetzee also deals with Susan‟s loneliness, lost love, bereavement and lack of confidence in storytelling. In her attempt to write her story, Susan acts as the Muse and offers herself to Foe as his lover to promote the creative process of writing (Coetzee
139). Indeed, Susan‟s sexual behaviour resembles that of black slave women who “were literally forced to offer themselves willingly to their masters” (Carby 21). The ambivalent paradox of being “willingly forced” might reflect Susan‟s own ambiguity and her struggle to affirm her identity. Susan‟s failure to produce her own fiction reflects her fears of female insubstantiality: instead of telling the story about Bahia and
74 the lost daughter, she rather claims to need Foe‟s expertise as professional writer and becomes in a way a puppet of his literary ambitions. In this sense, an analogy can be made between black women‟s writing and Susan‟s quest for the narrative voice. Carby claims that “the black woman repeatedly fail[s] the test of true womanhood because she survive[s] her institutionalized rape, whereas the true heroine would rather die than be sexually abused” (34). In other words, Carby refers to the failure to embody the values of „true womanhood‟18 in a black female character, who often survives hard labour, beatings, rape, etc., and thus cannot conform to the ideology which portrayed women as virtuous, delicate and physically weak. Similarly to „women of colour‟, Susan would be also excluded from true womanhood, most likely because of her status of an unmarried mother, her open sexuality or travelling alone freely. Comparison between Susan and black women may suggest that the patriarchal interferences (the awareness of the cult of true womanhood and Foe‟s control of Susan‟s narrative) reject uniquely female perspective in writing and affect the ways in which the women would otherwise desire to tell their “true” stories.
In fact, Susan perfectly fits into three of Mohanty‟s categories typical for the so- called “Third-World” women: woman as a victim of male violence; woman as a universal dependent; and woman as a victim of the colonial process (23). The first category echoes when Susan suffers mistreatment and “all the insults done [her] on board ship” after the crew killed their captain and briefly before she was unceremoniously cast adrift (Coetzee 9); or on her arrival to Bahia where she is “met with denials”, and “rudeness and threats” on the part of the officers of the Crown
(Coetzee 10). It is nevertheless important to acknowledge that Susan is an unreliable
18 “The cult of true womanhood” was the dominating ideology to define the boundaries of acceptable female behaviour from the 1820s until the Civil War. The attributes by which a woman was judged by her husband, her neighbours and society were “piety”, “purity”, “submissiveness” and “domesticity” (Carby 23).
75 narrator and the reader can always doubt her credibility. As for the second category,
Susan is dependent on both dominant male figures; she first relies on Cruso for food and living, and then on Foe for his financial and material support. But still, it must be added that in relation to Friday, Susan is the dominant figure and Friday is dependent on her.
The last category relates to her difficulties with authorship. As a reflexion of the eighteenth-century women writers, who have been for a long time confronted with the predominantly male literary history19, Susan too feels the necessity to express herself through writing. Nevertheless, she still believes in the stereotypical idea of storytelling as an exclusively male discipline, which is also why she turns to Foe to write up her story. As a result, however, she becomes a colonized subject of another male figure, for
Foe‟s desire to control Susan‟s story and shape it according to his own design is not what she really wants: “Once you proposed to supply a middle by inventing cannibals and pirates. These I would not accept because they were not the truth. Now you propose to reduce the island to an episode in the history of a woman in search of a lost daughter.
This too I reject” (Coetzee 121). These examples show that Susan is threatened by unequal relations of power as she faces marginalization in patriarchal society. In order to restore her identity, she thus tries to produce the first female narrative since, as Jean-
Paul Engélibert observes, for Susan to “be” means to “be narrated” (273).
An interesting point about women‟s anxiety about authorship is also made by
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic. They claim that a female writer seems to be “anomalous, indefinable, alienated, a freakish outsider” (48), who further “experience[s] her gender as a painful obstacle, or even a debilitating inadequacy” (50). It is perhaps the most concise characteristic of Susan Barton for she feels that her own substantiality may indeed be at stake. Such a restless apprehension
19 It is nevertheless important to stress that “the majority of eighteenth-century novels were actually written by women” (Watt 298).
76 about the crisis of her female identity is evoked in the following lines:
I wished that there were such a being as a man-Muse, a youthful god who
visited authoresses in the night and made their pens flow. But now I
know better. The Muse is both goddess and begetter. I was intended not
to be the mother of my story but to beget it. (Coetzee 126)
Obviously, Susan is trying to deny her own gender and wishes to act as a man. To put it differently, she endeavours to be the “father” of her story. Through this “cloak of maleness”, in the words of Gilbert and Gubar (65), Susan perhaps hopes to gain male acceptance. She even tries to usurp Foe‟s role of the writer by gender reversal. On several occasions, she refers to Foe as “a mistress” and “a wife” to assert her power
(Coetzee 152). Once she even tells him: “many strength you have, but invention is not one of them” (Coetzee 72), as if to highlight that invention is one of those artful creations of the feminine minds. Thus, she attempts to prove that she could invent her story as no one else would have done. Yet when it comes to casting her thoughts into a form, she always begs Foe to do it for her: “Will you not bear it in mind, however, that my life is drearily suspended till your writing is done?”, or “Can you not press on with your writing, Mr Foe, so that Friday can be speedily returned to Africa and I liberated from this drab existence I lead?” (Coetzee 63). Susan‟s letters to Foe are thus the means through which she demonstrates her anxiety about women‟s writing. Indeed, Susan‟s sense of urgency is not driving at Friday‟s story but rather at her own story. As Gilbert and Gubar expertly call it, it is a “woman‟s quest for self-definition” (76).
It is not without interest that, by the end of the island episode in Part I, Susan seems to almost subjugate male characters as Cruso and Friday are commanded to leave their island and are “rescued” by the Hobart ship; Susan actually invents her new identity as she thenceforth acts as “Mrs Cruso” (Coetzee 42). Yet, as Corcoran
77 observes, Cruso and Foe are complementary rather than oppositional characters. The island trio Susan-Cruso-Friday is replaced by England trio Susan-Foe-Friday and the castaway who was reluctant to be rescued is only replaced by the writer who is reluctant to write (Corcoran 260). This is a significant statement as it addresses Susan‟s constant power struggle with male figures.
Similarly, another example which further illustrates that Susan‟s female identity is considerably threatened is her relationship with young Susan Barton, the would-be daughter. While some critics state that the character of the lost daughter is, in many respects, a clear intertextual reference to Roxana (e.g. Thieme 65; Head 64; Engélibert
281), there is yet another, feminist perspective. Gilbert and Gubar examine the role of a
“madwoman” in women‟s literature and argue that her character is not employed merely as an antagonist to the main heroine but, more importantly, as “the author‟s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage” so the protagonist could “come to terms with her own feelings of fragmentation” and the “sense of the discrepancies” between what she
“is” and what she is “supposed to be” (78). Although Susan‟s daughter is not a mad character as such, she haunts her “mother‟s” footsteps and is capable of driving her crazy, just like many literary madwoman predecessors evoked in the novels by famous female writers, such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Emily
Dickinson and Mary Shelley.
Not only does the daughter bear the same name but she also epitomizes Susan‟s fear and insecurity: “I thought I was myself and this girl a creature from another order
… But now I am full of doubt. 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?” (Coetzee 133).
Following Harvey, who suggests that postmodernist characters are often confused “as to which world they are in, and how they should act with respect to it” (41), Susan doubts
78 what is reality and what is a dream: “I say to myself that this child, who calls herself by my name, is a ghost, a substantial ghost, if such beings exist, who haunts me for reasons
I cannot understand, and brings other ghost in tow” (Coetzee 132). Whether the daughter is a substantial being or the creation of Susan‟s paranoia remains open. In any case, Susan rejects any prescriptive stereotypes of motherhood and tries to get rid of the girl to regain her own reality. She does not believe the girl‟s story and remains emotionally unmoved by her pleas: “I do not believe you, […] I believe you were sent here, and now I am sending you away. I request you to go away and not to trouble me again” (Coetzee 77).
Several things are notable about Susan‟s mother-daughter relationship. The first is that she rejects the girl primarily for the reason of disbelief as she does not recognize her. Secondly, she is angry at Foe and believes that the daughter visits her at his instruction, which proves her distrust of men. And last but not least, she wishes to be devoid of any maternal feelings or instincts so she could complete her narration solely about Cruso, Friday and herself, which, as she says, “will make us famous throughout the land, and rich too” (Coetzee 58). Susan desires to establish her centrality as a writer, thus, in trying to write herself out of the margins, she cannot afford to include the daughter story as it would perhaps mean to reveal her secret about a dead stillborn girl.
This is also why she suggests that little Susan was invented by Foe to imply that the girl has “no mother” (Coetzee 91). It is clearly indicated that the more Susan wishes to conceal the daughter story the more she wants to reveal Friday‟s story and engender her own text. This theory could be also supported by Spivak who claims that the island story and the mother-daughter story “cannot occupy a continuous space” (“Theory in the Margin” 12). As a woman, Susan may be a victim, but the power (over Friday) that
79 springs from her weakness (the trouble of motherhood and womanhood) illustrates how victims too can simultaneously be oppressors.
4.4 Suffering Bodies
Throughout his fictional works, J. M. Coetzee has been concerned with the violence of colonization and obsessive desire for absolute control.20 Representation of torture in South African literature is, according to Coetzee, a question of a dilemma: the
South African writer either has to “ignore the [State‟s] obscenities” or “produce representations of them” (qtd. in Jolly 123). Coetzee usually chooses to deal with both views. The former brings him criticism for his revulsion from history21, the latter results in his being accused of true savagery.22 Indeed, the representation of imaginative fiction
(even if scandalous or violent) is in a way not dissimilar to the concept of visual pleasure and the voyeurism inherent in cinema (as shown in subchapter 2.4). The horrors of imperialism are perhaps best to be seen in Coetzee‟s first novel, Dusklands.
The novel‟s violent scenes are “uncomfortable” to such an extent, Head observes, that
“some readers will continue to be repelled by the book” (38). Yet he further asserts that
“Coetzee became more cautious in his treatment of violence in subsequent works”
(Head 38).
Going back to Foe, the novel itself does not offer any appalling description of violent scenes, but there is a considerable number of dead and suffering bodies.
Interestingly, the dead ones are all those who have had a certain intimate relationship with Susan Barton. First, it is the body of a mutinied ship‟s captain “lying dead at
[Susan‟s] feet, a handspike jutted from his eye-socket” (9). Second, it is Cruso who
20 See e.g. Rosemary Jolly‟s chapter on “Forms of Violence in J. M. Coetzee‟s Dusklands and Waiting for the Barbarians” for a discussion of territorial aggression and acts of torture exercised against the racially or sexually others (110-137). 21 See Nadine Gordimer‟s “The Idea of Gardening” (3-4). 22 See Peter Knox-Shaw‟s “Dusklands: A Metaphysics of Violence” (32-33).
80 physically does not survive the journey back to England (44). Third, it is a dead babe wrapped in bloody wrapping-cloth – is this Susan‟s secret story? – which reveals to be a body of a little girl “stillborn or perhaps stifled, all bloody with the afterbirth” (105).
And fourth, it is Foe, whose dead body is to be found lying in bed towards the end of the novel (Coetzee 153). As mentioned before, Susan has been a mistress to all the three men; and, as for the girl, she obviously has had to come out of her mother‟s body during delivery. All dead characters thus can be said to have a special “physical bond” with
Susan. The only one who has not such a bond (and who, perhaps owing to this, still remains alive) is Friday.
In comparison to his eighteenth-century counterpart, a “handsome fellow, perfectly well-made, [...] tall and well-shaped, [...] with all the sweetness and softness of an European”, who has a “tawny” skin, long and black hair “not curled like wool”, a small nose “not flat like the Negroes‟” and thin lips with teeth “white as ivory” (Defoe
202), Coetzee‟s Friday is transformed into a black “Negro with a head of fuzzy wool, naked save for a pair of rough drawers” with the “flat face, the small dull eyes, the broad nose, the thick lips, the skin not black but a dark grey, dry as if coated with dust”
(Coetzee 5-6), which apparently evokes the direct opposite of Defoe‟s Friday. Susan is not attracted to Friday, which is further amplified by Friday‟s mutilated body. As far as
Cruso‟s tale can be trusted, Friday‟s tongue was cut out by the slavers and Friday is thus forced into silence. Having discovered this, Susan cannot help herself but to shrink from
Friday:
I could not speak while he was about, [...] I saw pictures in my mind of
pincers gripping his tongue and a knife slicing into it, as must have
happened, and I shuddered. I covertly observed him as he ate, and with
distaste heard the tiny coughs he gave now and then to clear his throat,
81 [...] I caught myself flinching when he came near, or holding my breath
so as not to have to smell him. Behind his back I wiped the utensils his
hands had touched. (Coetzee 24)
Quite an interesting point, one which further brings Susan‟s above mentioned behaviour to light, is made by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin who observe that, in postcolonial studies, a body is
a crucial site for inscription. How people are perceived controls how they
are treated, and physical differences are crucial in such constructions. [...]
The visibility of signs of difference [...] became prime means of
developing and reinforcing prejudices against specific groups. Such
prejudices were generated [...] to control indigenous populations in
colonial possessions by emphasizing their difference and constructing
them as inferior. (Post-Colonial Studies 166)
If, according to the above proposition, it is crucial to treat the body as an inscription, that is a text, then Susan can neither read Friday nor can she translate Friday‟s body language, which, otherwise, might be the key to Friday‟s story. The stereotypes upon which her fear of Friday‟s torture-marks rests prevent her from mastering him. What is more, Friday seems to be very well aware of this. He may not have words but he has other means of expression: the ritual of scattering the white petals, his tune playing, or dancing “beyond human reach” (Coetzee 92). However, all of these actions are a constant puzzle to Susan. She cannot figure out their meaning and thus fails to fill the gaps in her narrative. Susan is frustrated by Friday‟s behaviour and, as a result, it is ironically she who seems to be the inferior character while Friday can be easily considered her torturer. Susan may not be a suffering body but she is definitely a suffering spirit.
82 The significance of suffering bodies is perhaps best illustrated in the end of the novel. In Part IV, an unknown persona steps into the narration and speaks as if from beyond the whole story. This omniscient narrator describes twice an event of finding dead bodies of the novel‟s protagonists. In Foe‟s lodgings, this new narrator finds a girl whose “face is wrapped in a grey woollen scarf” (apparently Susan‟s daughter), and two bodies which “lie side by side in bed, not touching [...] he in a nightshirt, she in her shift” (Coetzee 153). Then the same scene repeats, yet this time the narrator slips overboard and floats in the water down to a wrecked ship where s/he finds “Susan
Barton and her dead captain” (Coetzee 157). Interestingly, all characters are dead except
Friday who outlives all his oppressors so he could perhaps tell his final story. When the narrator finds Friday in the corner, with a “chain around his throat”, s/he informs us that it is no “place of words” but “the home of Friday” (Coetzee 157). Although Friday‟s syllables are “caught” and “diffused” in water, his message is still delivered as his mouth opens and “[f]rom inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth” (Coetzee 157). The meaning of the final scene is hidden behind the veil of postmodern illusion but, with Coetzee‟s fancy for symbolism, it can be guessed that the narrator is Coetzee himself and it is him who, through the act of storytelling, figuratively removes the chain from Friday‟s neck to let him speak for the first time since he was imprisoned in the eighteenth-century discourse, although the story itself still remains unknowable to readers. The final scene thus might be seen as an allegory of the colonial oppression in general and of South African slavery in particular.
It is Friday who finally speaks for the oppressed minorities and it is postcolonial writer
Coetzee who, having found a means of giving voice to Friday (albeit soundless),
83 encourages his readers to consider the inferior mutilated character in a new light.
Moreover, the slow stream that comes out of Friday‟s mouth can be seen as a metaphor for written letters, syllables, words or sentences. These are also soundless on their own, yet when they are arranged into a coherent pattern, a novel perhaps, they might be then distributed “northward and southward” to the readership all around the world. And as such, they can find their way to individual readers who are able to give them sound while reading them (even if subconsciously and silently). The symbolical effect of novel-reading and that of telling Friday‟s story through his silenced body is thus very similar: the message is subconsciously heard and received even if it is not spoken aloud.
Maybe this is Coetzee‟s way to show that language (or the act of story-writing and story-telling, to be specific) has a magical potency regardless of any substantial, gender and/or racial limitations.
From what has just been demonstrated, it is obvious that Foe is a challenging novel dealing with issues of self-representation and providing intricate network of power relations. The physical and spiritual survival of the subordinate characters depends on their struggle to assert themselves in society and, of course, on such society‟s acceptance of their (un)importance. Coetzee‟s postmodern practises in storytelling that depart from tradition can be indeed understood as an intriguing way of searching for one‟s origin.
84 5. Race and Role Reversal
The experience of a woman in patriarchal society and that of a colonized subject can be paralleled in a number of ways, yet the representatives of both groups in Foe and
Pantomime somehow subvert the long-term perception of colonial oppression. Thus, though they share common concerns, such as loss of individuality, involuntary need of appropriation, representation of the “other” body, etc., the form of domination in these works is reversed to such an extent that, for example, Susan Barton is only half- colonized (in terms of her white skin colour and gender category) and Friday and
Jackson Phillip fight tooth and nail to make sure that they are not the ones to be easily governed by any representative of the (former) imperial power. The application of two key postcolonial concepts already defined in chapter 1, that is othering and stereotyping, seems vital for this part of the thesis. This section thus explores the issue of race and gender with respect to the construction of the colonized peoples‟ identity through the subversive strategies of irony, mimicry, parody and the focus on language, silence and voice.
5.1 Racial Perceptions
The fact that people have been treated in very different ways according to their race is a recurring topic discussed in numerous studies. Kwame Anthony Appiah, drawing on Du Bois, assumes that race is not biologically given but rather socially constructed (22-23). At one point Appiah even goes so far as to claim that “there are no races: there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask „race‟ to do for us” (35).
Although his former idea is perfectly valid in that it emphasizes the incorrectness of judging the inequalities between human groups solely on biological traits, the latter one would suggest that all men are created equal. However, as it has already been
85 demonstrated in subchapter 1.3, this “self-evident” truth does not always apply. In Foe and Pantomime, for instance, the bias towards the members of subordinate groups and the differences between them in language, morality and cultural ideologies are strongly associated with race.
One aspect which serves Walcott‟s purpose to subvert the prejudiced attitudes in
Pantomime, for instance, is the comic symbol of a parrot in Mr. Trewe‟s guesthouse.
The parrot is used to repeat the words “Heinegger, Heinegger” (99) in a parrot-like voice, naturally; of which Jackson presumes that the bird is racially biased toward him and so he makes a complaint to Harry Trewe:
JACKSON. Wait, wait! I know your explanation: that a old German called Herr
Heinegger used to own this place, and that when that maquereau of a macaw
keep cracking: “Heinegger, Heinegger,” he remembering the Nazi and not
heckling me, but it playing a little havoc with my nerves. This is my fifth
report. I am marking them down. Language is ideas, Mr. Trewe. And I think
that this pre-colonial parrot have the wrong idea. (Walcott 99)
Harry readily explains to Jackson that the bird is a Creole parrot and it is his natural accent to pronounce the name as [haɪ ˈnɪgə]. Nevertheless, Jackson insists that the parrot is prejudiced and “if it want to last in Trinidad and Tobago, then it go have to adjust”
(Walcott 100). Jackson‟s latter remark is, no doubt, an allusion to cultural appropriation of the colonial language. Most importantly, Jackson‟s comment on the “Nazi” as a reference to German people should not be passed over for it exemplifies the findings of
Michael Omi and Howard Winant who flatly deny the idea that “racism is solely a white problem” (137). In this respect, the use of the term “Nazi” by a black person might be considered equally offensive as the term “nigger” used by white people (albeit historically neither of the terms originated as a swear word).
86 In Foe, Part I reveals that Susan Barton longs for human companionship and sympathetic attention from Cruso and not from Friday who, according to her, equals to a “dumb beast” and a “poor simpleton” (Coetzee 32, 39). It is perhaps a stereotypical distinction between “primitive” and “civilized” that makes Susan to confide her story to a white European rather than to a black “Negro” with obvious physical features of difference. In fact, Friday‟s non-whiteness is the only decisive (and at the same time discriminative) factor that determines Susan‟s affection towards Cruso. Considering that
Coetzee describes Cruso as a stubborn old “morose” (107) with “wild hair and the great beard he never cut[s]” (29), who takes “his food in his unwashed hands and gnaw[s] at it on the left side” where his decayed teeth allow him to do so (19), it is reasonable to assume that Susan‟s very prejudiced attitude prevents her from seeing Cruso‟s aesthetic appeal and his general apathy in the same light as she perceives Friday. This is explained by Omi and Winant who claim that the “patterns of racial inequality have proven, unfortunately, to be quite stubborn and persistent” (129).
In Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould undermines the arguments of leading scientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who held the view that intelligence is racially dependent, and who compared human skulls (and the level of intelligence) of native Africans to various kinds of monkeys23. Basically, there were two scientific views on race at that time. Monogenists believed that people have all a common origin, and that human differences are caused by the influence of climate. Samuel S. Smith, president of the College of New Jersey, for instance believed that “American blacks, in a climate more suited to Caucasian temperaments, would soon turn white” (qtd. in
Gould 71). Polygenists, on the contrary, believed that human race has descended from
23 Nott and Gliddon suggested a strong affinity between blacks and gorillas or chimpanzees (Gould 65- 67); Charles Darwin elaborated on the comparison between a baboon and the “negro” (Gould 69), Georges Cuvier, the French founder of paleontology, compared Africans to orang-utans (Gould 118); and Charles Lyell, the founder of modern geology, claimed the brain of the Bushman to be equal to Simiadae – monkeys (Gould 69).
87 separate origins and interbreeding among races is thus a “repugnant” and unnatural
“perversion of every natural sentiment” (Agassiz qtd. in Gould 80). As can been seen from this short scientific account, the researchers misrepresented the differences between races and often incorporated stereotypes and generalizations. Interestingly, the idea of monkeys‟ great resemblance to humans (or vice versa) also appears in the works examined in this thesis. Walcott sarcastically fabricates this theme into the situation when Jackson needs to go to the bathroom and Harry is about to join him:
JACKSON. So because I go and pee, you must pee, too?
HARRY. Subliminal suggestion.
JACKSON. Monkey see, monkey do.
HARRY. You‟re the bloody ape, mate. You people just came down from the
trees. (149)
Harry‟s racial allusion is, in fact, another part of his rehearsing, as he often switches into the role of Robinson Crusoe without prior warning. Yet his remark invites reverse discrimination since Jackson, during his elaboration on how long it would take him to return from the bathroom, eventually tells him: “I could go and you could time me, to see if I on a go-slow, or wasting up my employer‟s precious time, but I know it will take at least five [minutes], unless, like most white people, you either don‟t flush it, [...] or just wipe your hands fast fast or not at all ...” (Walcott 151). On Harry‟s surprised question which white people do so, Jackson responds that he was “a bathroom attendant at the Hilton, and [he] know[s] men and races from their urinary habits, and most
Englishman ...” (151). This comic exchange of views, and especially Jackson‟s offhand reply, proves that innate intelligence and wit has nothing to do with racial inferiority.
Coetzee incorporates the “monkey” theme differently in Foe. Apart from that
Cruso‟s island is full of apes, and the hut smells of “apeskins” (16), there is a passage in
88 the text that further offers a gender-related examination: Cruso warns Susan not to venture from his castle because the apes “would not be as wary of a woman as they were of him and Friday” (15). Susan thus wonders if “a woman is, to an ape, a different species from a man?” (Coetzee 15). In fact, Cruso‟s forbiddance suggests that Susan cannot take care of herself, or worse, that females might even rank lower than the apes.
It is not a coincidence that racial and gender boundaries overlap in this example and it brings into being the general premise: “In many respects, race is gendered and gender is racialized” (Omi and Winant 132).
Another example of racist stereotyping is the supposed nobility of the white race. In Foe, Susan longs for Cruso‟s attention but, ironically, gets none because he directs all his attention first towards his terraces and then towards his manservant.
Despite this, it never occurs to Susan to treat Friday as equal, and even after Cruso‟s death she takes the supposed responsibility and accepts him as the „white man‟s burden‟. In her imperialistic view, Friday is a helpless being in need of care. She beseeches the crew of the Hobart ship to go ashore and fetch Friday since “inasmuch as
Friday is a slave and a child, it is our duty to care for him in all things, and not abandon him to a solitude worse than death” (Coetzee 39). This example clearly shows how imperial ideology operates to exclude and marginalize its colonized subjects. Ashcroft,
Griffiths and Tiffin imply that “the category of white has a special force, since it is un- stated, set apart by its force as the normative” (Post-Colonial Studies 220). And it is this
“normative” perception of the nobility of her kind that also entitles Susan to give Friday the commands like “Now do, Friday!” or “Watch and Do” (56, original emphasis), as she tries to turn him into the (stereotypically perceived) low-class worker, that is a laundryman and a sweeper (Coetzee 56, 58). This reflects the ideas of Louis Agassiz
89 who advocated that blacks should be trained in hand work and whites in mind work
(qtd. in Gould 79, emphasis added).
Walcott‟s Jackson is also aware of the civilizing mission of the imperial ideology. He calls attention to the “power and black magic of the shadow” of “them
Pakistani and West Indians in England, all them immigrant Fridays [who are] driving all you [white people] so crazy” (Walcott 113). By the “shadow” Jackson means the colonized people, while the implication of “black magic” alludes to their skin colour. In addition, Jackson is offended when Harry tells him to stop acting and forget about the panto: “I am not leaving in the middle of a job [...] You see, it‟s your people who introduced us to this culture: Shakespeare, Robinson Crusoe, the classics, and so on, and when we start getting as good as them, you can‟t leave halfway. So I will continue?”
(Walcott 124). Thus Jackson refuses Harry‟s (and, by extension, white men‟s) interference. In a similar way, Coetzee‟s Friday tries to affirm his self-determination or even supremacy (as discussed later) by his powerful silence.
As shown in this section, racial inequalities have unfortunately been historically constructed and the biological status was often used to justify enslavement. Walcott and
Coetzee both attempt to reverse the roles of racially dominant and racially subordinate people to thoroughly explore racial ranking which is still a hindrance to social relations in some, formerly colonized, countries.
5.2 Indigenous Voices
Since Jackson‟s pre-colonial parrot already touched upon the issue of colonial language in the previous section, let us now consider the significance of language for
Indigenous peoples. Friday in Foe and Jackson in Pantomime differ considerably in their approaches to language: one is mute and the other is excessively talkative and
90 invents his own words. Though they share more dissimilarities than similarities in this regard, their different approaches do serve the same function: to overwhelm their masters.
Jackson‟s Trinidadian Creole language which is employed in a variety of ways in the play contrasts sharply with formal British English and implies oral rather than literate culture. An effective demonstration of this occurs at the beginning of the play:
JACKSON. Mr. Trewe?
(English accent) Mr. Trewe, your scramble eggs is here! are here!
(Creole accent) You hear, Mr. Trewe, I here wid your eggs!
(English accent) Are you in there?
(To himself) And when his eggs get cold, is I to catch.
(He fans the eggs with one hand) What the hell I doing? That ain‟t go heat
them. It go make them more cold. Well, he must be leap off the ledge. At
long last. Well, if he ain‟t dead, he could call. (Walcott 94)
There are two principles operating in this passage: first, the theory of the Creole continuum which “involves an adjustment of word use and spelling to give and accessible rendering of dialect forms” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, The Empire
Writes Back 45); and second, a strategy by which language might be „liberated from within‟. This strategy, following Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, reflects Rasta speech in
Jamaican Creole: Rastas insists on the use of „I‟ for the personal pronoun in all positions because to the Rastafarians „me‟ “conjures the subservient attitude into which Blacks were forced for their own survival under the plantation system” (The Empire Writes
Back 48). However, Walcott advocates appropriation and celebration of language rather than historical struggle over the word. This is also true of his creation of a native-born
Caribbean servant who challenges language by playing with linguistic associations to
91 signify difference. Such difference is constructed by his choice of grammar, syntax and lexical vocabulary that indicate interspersion of Standard English and Trinidadian dialect. Walcott, through Jackson, thus plentifully employs linguistic methods that are most common within the Caribbean continuum, such as code-switching: e.g. “I ain‟t know what it is eating you this Sunday morning, Mr. Trewe, but I don‟t feel you have any right to mamaguy me, because I is a big man with three children, all outside (105); vernacular language: e.g. “Get offa that ledge” (96), “Is a li‟l obscene” (118); puns: e.g.
“tradegy” and “codemy” (139), “goat-to-bed”, “e-goat-istical” (169); or interlanguage:
JACKSON. So, I put on this hat, I pick up this parasol, and I walk like a
mama-poule up and down this stage and you have a black man playing
Robinson Crusoe and then a half-naked, white, fish-belly man playing
Friday, and you want to tell me it ain‟t shit? (Walcott 111)
Clearly, the term “mama-poule” is left untranslated in the text on purpose. Not only does it convey the sense of cultural distinctiveness but it is also used as a linguistic device for humorous effect since, according to the Dictionary of the English/Creole of
Trinidad & Tobago, the term is derived from French “mother hen” and its meaning in
English is “an effeminate; fussy man; mama man; man-woman” (Winer 561).
Another technique that deserves attention is the strategy of allusion. The following passage from Pantomime demonstrates how the context of literary and cultural allusion can mock the privileged centrality of English:
JACKSON. That ain‟t Crusoe, that is “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
(He pronounces it “Marina”)
HARRY. Mariner.
JACKSON. Marina.
HARRY. Mariner.
92 JACKSON. “The Rime of the Ancient Marina.” So I learn it in Fourth Standard.
HARRY. It‟s your country, mate.
JACKSON. Is your language, pardner. I stand corrected. Now, you ain‟t see
English crazy? I could sit down right next to you and tell you I stand
corrected. (Walcott 165, original emphasis)
Perhaps to shift the border of interlanguage beyond its original intention (i.e. to foreground cultural distinctions), Walcott also gives Jackson the opportunity to employ neologisms, as it follows from the passage in which Jackson (as Friday) encourages
Harry (as Robinson) to speak his language and obey Friday‟s gods:
HARRY. Jesus Christ!
JACKSON. Amaka nobo sakamaka khaki pants kamaluma Jesus Christ! Jesus
Christ kamalogo! (Pause. Then with a violent gesture) Kamalongo kaba!
(Meaning: Jesus is dead!) (Walcott114)
The words are obviously invented by Jackson and carry not only a religious allusion to imperial practises of the imposition of Christianity (though here it is wittily subverted) but also to the postcolonial appropriation of English language.
Coetzee adopts different strategy in Foe to highlight the role of language:
Friday‟s silence. In Defoe‟s novel, Crusoe makes no single attempt to learn or even acknowledge Friday‟s language though he must have known that the savages must have been able to somehow communicate with each other. Instead of engaging in a meaningful dialogue, Defoe‟s Man Friday is “named by Crusoe, taught to speak by him, clothed in uncomfortable skins, taught what to eat and what to believe” (Jones 225). In a similar way Susan attempts to suppress Friday in Foe. She believes that the novelistic reality should be re-constructed through storytelling – a written record. And while Susan struggles mainly with her verbal in/ability to express herself in writing, mute Friday, on
93 the contrary, uses body language to communicate his internal state of emotion. He dances in the sunlight with his eyes shut “holding out his arms and spinning in circle”
(92) or keeps playing his six-tune melody on the flute to express his feelings through the medium of music (Coetzee 97). Friday‟s silence is his response to all the attempts to discover his story but, interestingly, his physical and mental ecstasy which he experiences thanks to music and dancing might be seen as a higher degree of communication; and it can actually replace human language, which, however, Susan is unable to understand. Indeed, there is an interdependence of language and identity within indigenous dancing. Cult dancing or local dance is “an eminently important expressive form in Caribbean culture”, Balme observes, and “the central importance of dance in Caribbean performance culture can, of course, be traced back across the middle passage to its African origins” (209). This is the reason why both African servant Friday and Caribbean servant Jackson keep dancing (as discussed in chapter 3.4) and playing or singing. In other words, dance and music are both indicators of traditional culture.
They should not be confused, however, with indigenous dancing and drumming as
Western audience often perceives it in films. The depiction of bush-drumming and savages dancing around the fire is, “a well-worn cliché deriving from countless
Hollywood films in which white explorers are surrounded at night by ominous drumming preceding an onslaught by the natives” (Balme 215). This is also true of
Miller and Hardy‟s RC (see chapter 2) and even of Defoe‟s novel in which savages
“were all dancing in I know not how many barbarous gestures and figures, their own way, round the fire” (197).
Friday‟s silence and Jackson‟s metaphoric use of language have important function in inscribing the difference. It signifies certain cultural experience, and the specific messages which are communicated symbolically in the text actually reveal that
94 language might serve as a purposeful weapon. An interesting point about written texts is made yet again by Roland Barthes: “it is language which speaks, not the author” (“The
Death of the Author” 143).
5.3 The Politics of Naming
It is generally believed that with a name the person receives identity. Thus, it is not without interest that many characters in Robinson Crusoe, Pantomime and Foe are deprived of their original names and later renamed. To begin with Defoe‟s novel,
Robinson Crusoe is originally called Robinson Kreutznaer and even his first name is taken from the surname of his mother‟s relations, yet by “the usual corruption of words in England” they are called “Crusoe” (Defoe 8). Coetzee reveals a striking parallel between Defoe‟s hero and his heroine in Foe since Susan Barton is a daughter of a
Frenchman whose “name was properly Berton, but, as happens, it became corrupted in the mouths of strangers” (Coetzee 10). While Crusoe‟s and Barton‟s names have been linguistically corrupted due to a certain kind of mispronunciation, the other characters‟ names embody what Ong formulates in Orality and Literacy: oral peoples commonly think of names as conveying power over things and “names do give human beings power over what they name” (33). This is why Robinson Crusoe shows no interest in
Friday‟s original name; he does not ask him his name but imposes an English one on him (in addition to religion and language) and turns him into his obedient servant who cannot rebel against the dominant master. In reaction to this event, Walcott‟s Friday –
Jackson Phillip – refuses to be called Friday:
HARRY. ... and, anyway, he comes across this man called Friday.
JACKSON. How do you know I mightn‟t choose to call him Thursday? Do I
have to copy every ... I mean, are we improvising?
95 HARRY. All right, so it‟s Thursday. (Walcott 126)
Thus, Jackson renames himself Thursday and, on the contrary, makes an excellent point in connecting the name of Harry Trewe to Robinson Crusoe:
JACKSON. Thank you, Mr. Robinson ... Thank you, Mr. Trewe, sir! Cru-soe,
Trewe-so! (Faster) Crusoe-Trusoe, Robinson Trewe-so!” (Walcott 133)
The role-playing allows Jackson to revert the position of the master, who originally had the power over his slave by naming him, and instead asserts his own supremacy.
Coetzee and Walcott also elaborate on the names of their works. The symbolic title of Foe is an allusion to Daniel Foe, who is a half-real, half-fictional character in the text. The interplay of the biographical details – Defoe‟s financial crisis, or intertextual indications of Defoe‟s other novels24 within the text – clearly show the link between fiction and reality. By disclosing Defoe to be Foe, Coetzee not only reminds the original name of the eighteenth-century writer who, as mentioned before, added „De‟ to improve his social status but, more importantly, he draws on the name‟s intriguing signification in English where “foe” is another term for “enemy”. And fictional Daniel Foe is indeed an enemy, at least for Susan‟s female voice. As a writer, Foe is the representative of the elite patriarchal culture and his potential power over Susan‟s story marginalises the voice of the woman. Susan furthermore blames Foe for conjuring up the little girl who bears Susan‟s own name and claims to be her daughter.
The title of Pantomime is also rich in meaning. Pantomime, or informally,
„panto‟ is a traditional English type of comedy and should not be confused with a silent mime show. Pantomime is essentially performed during Christmas and includes dancing, singing (hence Jackson‟s and Harry‟s musical interludes), and the performers
24 The characters whose names remain unchanged in the novel often pass from one novel to the other, e.g. the servant girl Amy (as well as Susan) come from Roxana (see Engélibert 281), and Jack, the boy whom Foe found among orphans, may refer to Colonel Jack.
96 often swap their antagonistic roles (regardless of gender) for comic effect (Jones 230). It is believed by Howe and Stephany that “playwrights will almost always choose titles that will imply part of what they think matters in their plays” (26). The titles of both works thus suggest antagonistic struggle over authority; Foe is a text that represents a power play between man and woman, and Pantomime is a power play between rival males.
While dealing with the influence of names, it should be mentioned that through the name, the individual becomes part of the history. Robinson Crusoe is undoubtedly a model which writers of Foe and Pantomime incorporated into the characters of Harry
Trewe and Robinson Cruso. One of the major differences between Defoe‟s Crusoe and
Coetzee‟s protagonist is the lost of the final –e. Although this is noticeable only in the written form, the difference between Crusoe and Cruso cannot be merely ascribed to
Coetzee‟s liking for linguistics. The protagonists are indeed in a sort of binary opposition in many aspects of their features and characteristics. Defoe‟s Crusoe starts his journey as a young and active adventurer while Cruso is a “dark-skinned”, “heavily bearded” man of “sixty years of age” who looks like a “mutineer” from the very beginning of Coetzee‟s story (Coetzee 8). Crusoe has also undergone changes in his thinking. Whereas Susan would have Cruso keep a journal, he considers it a waste of time and has little interest in keeping track of days spent on the island. He is neither interested in improving his house and saving tools from the shipwreck nor does he care what will be left behind him as his terraces and walls “will be enough” (Coetzee 18).
And the list of striking differences between him and Crusoe goes on.
What this comparison suggests is that regardless of how a name shapes one‟s identity in one work, the assumptions about a person with similar name cannot be applied to the other. Quite the contrary, the sense of personal identity and uniqueness
97 that a name gives us reveals that there really is a link between name and identity and those who attempt to adjust or deprive others of their names indeed enslave and ignore their individualities.
5.4 Crusoe the Mimicked Man
Bhabha is instructive in pointing out that “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (122, original emphasis). The colonized subjects copy (often involuntarily) the colonizers‟ habits, manners or culture in order to conform to dominant society. And postcolonial works are often engaged in disclosing the mockery under the surface of such a mimicking behaviour. In fact, mockery is the driving force of behavioural mimicry in the colonizer/colonized relations.
Crusoe‟s parrot Poll, “the sociable creature”, that continues talking to Robinson
Crusoe is a seemingly ideal symbol of mimicry: it repeats sounds, it learns “so perfectly” from Crusoe and keeps calling his name “Robin, Robin, Robin Crusoe, poor
Robin Crusoe!” (Defoe 141-142); yet, as Spaas observes, “Poll is a mere voice, a signifier without a signified, which Robinson Crusoe attempts to create into a character”
(101). Like Poll in Defoe‟s novel, the parrot in Pantomime also mimics, but because of the racist stereotypes articulated in his parodic repetition of “Heinegger”, his behaviour is fatal and results in his death:
HARRY. You‟re a bloody savage. Why‟d you strangle him?
JACKSON. (As Friday) Me na strangle him, bwana. Him choke from prejudice.
(Walcott 155)
The parrot serves as a symbolic victim and it is sacrificed because it can only repeat the past and cannot adjust to changing times. Similarly, Coetzee‟s Cruso, who dwells in the
98 past, dies in Part I of Foe. Cruso‟s reference to the colonial world is echoed only in his superior attitude towards Friday. Otherwise, Cruso‟s monotonous life and reluctance to keep a diary, upgrade his uncomfortable house or, ultimately, leave the island, contradict the colonial-imperialistic attitude of his literary predecessor. The death of
Cruso also subverts natural selection and the Darwinian concept of the „survival of the fittest‟ – instead of a white man, it is the black one who is rescued and given more prominence in the text. In comparison to Defoe‟ Crusoe, Robinson Cruso is doomed to die due to his idleness and lack of desire to adapt.
However, those who are meant to really mimic the colonizing masters are the representatives of the Friday figure. Defoe‟s Friday obeys his master and does whatever
Crusoe wishes him to do: speaking English, reading the Bible, learning Christianity, accompanying Crusoe on his journeys and wearing “Western” clothes in which he is
“almost as well clothed as his master” (Defoe 104). Thus, Crusoe‟s relation with Friday is quite egocentric and it intentionally suppresses Friday‟s cultural identity. Coetzee and
Walcott see the Friday figure from the very different standpoint of the twentieth century. Jackson Phillip and Coetzee‟s Friday, by contrast, prove that absolute mimicry is always somewhat unnatural and so they seem to parody history by reverse subjugation. The notion of Bhabha‟s “almost the same, but not quite” proves useful to explore the differences between colonial Friday and postcolonial Friday. Although
Coetzee retains the “original” name of Friday, his manservant character is not a blurred copy of his master, Cruso. The affinity between Friday and Robinson Cruso can be traced primarily within Part I of Foe when they build terraces together or kill apes for skins, for example; yet, as the story develops, Friday becomes an independent individual rather than an obedient slave. In Pantomime, Friday‟s obedience is satirized mostly by racialized allusions, as shown and further elaborated on in the following
99 subchapter. Jackson imitates British language, he wears a uniform, but his mimicry is different in character from that experienced by Defoe‟s Friday. The fact that Jackson, as an “inferior” slave, travels freely into the West counterbalances the need to mimic his master to gain access to the power: “Now, being served by a white man ain‟t no big deal for me. It happen to me everyday in New York, so it‟s not going to be any particularly thrilling experience”, Jackson informs his employer (Walcott 105).
There is yet another time in the play when mimicry goes hand in hand with mockery: the passage in which Jackson comically impersonates Harry‟s wife Ellen, “a brilliant actress who drank too much” (Walcott 136). Jackson holds the photograph of
Harry‟s ex-wife, assuming that “the dame in the pantomime is always played by a man”
(Walcott 160), and imitates what he thinks to be Ellen‟s behaviour:
JACKSON. (In an Englishwoman‟s voice) How can we conduct a civilized
conversation if you don‟t give me a chance? What have I done, Harold, oh,
Harold, for you to treat me so?
HARRY. Because you‟re a silly selfish bitch and you killed our son!
JACKSON. (Crying) There, there, you see...? (He wipes the eyes of the
photograph) […] Can‟t you ever forgive me for that, Harold? […] (Weeping)
I love you, Harold. I love you, and I loved him, too. (Walcott 161)
At this point, Harry grabs an ice pick, determined to destroy the photograph, but
Jackson exclaims, in a high-pitched voice, “my face is my fortune” (162), and he runs around the gazebo, shrieking: “Help! Help! British police! My husband trying to kill me! Help, somebody, help!” and then scrambles onto the edge of the gazebo getting ready to jump down:
HARRY. Get down off there, you melodramatic bitch. You‟re too bloody
conceited to kill yourself.
100 JACKSON. (As wife) Push me, Push me, Harry! You hate me so much, why
you don‟t come and push me?
HARRY. Push yourself, then. You never needed my help. Jump! (Walcott 163)
Although Jackson‟s parodic imitation is quite excessive in that it evokes many gender- based stereotypes of a woman‟s weakness: manipulative crying, obsession with beauty, emotional blackmail, threatening suicide, etc., it represents the deeply ironic way in which mimicry works. In order to be effective, “mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference”, Bhabha persists (122). In other words, Jackson‟s role-playing enables him to show that mimicking someone in power might be empowering in that it reveals how hollow the behavioural tokens of the mimicked person really are. Thus, by putting the character of Harry‟s wife on a performance,
Jackson actually offers a healing truth to his master.
Mimicry can also operate beyond race and class. It occurs, for example, when
Indigenous people are taken from their native environment and brought into the
“civilized” West. In Foe, Friday is made to live in London with Susan, and whereas
Susan goes “by the name of Mrs Cruso” (47) and tries to mimic the cultural practises of the middle class, Friday is captured by the city, “he rarely goes abroad, being too fearful” (Coetzee 55). What Susan does not realize in her attempts to “westernize”
Friday is that a native land, the place to which Indigenous people always have had strong ties, remains deep-rooted in him and so does his cultural and ethnic heritage.
This is the reason why Friday goes barefooted, sleeps on the floor or dances in the sunlight to remove his spirit from England. By no means does he wish to mimic the life of Western people. Interestingly, the displacement also works in the opposite direction.
In Pantomime, Harry Trewe moves from England to Tobago presumably to escape memories of his family, yet he later realizes he is not happy there:
101 HARRY. At the beginning it‟s fine; there‟s the sea, the palm trees, monarch of
all I survey and so on, all that postcard stuff. And then it just becomes another
back yard. God, is there anything deadlier than Sunday afternoons in the
tropics when you can‟t sleep? The horror and stillness of the heat, the shining,
godforsaken sea, the bored and boring clouds? […] You sit by the stagnant
pool counting the dead leaves drifting to the edge. I daresay the terror of
emptiness made me want to act. (Walcott 135)
Walcott‟s experience of being a stranger in a seemingly hostile environment is reflected in the character of Harry Trewe. Mimicry cannot function well enough as a way to express one‟s „self‟, but it is a fitting way to stress the interdependence between the subjectivities of the colonizer and the colonized.
5.5 Friday the Master
If there is anything worth pointing out in both postcolonial works under scrutiny, then it is the depiction of the slave enslaving his mistress and the idea of black Crusoe saving white Friday. The role reversal gives the reader some clues about the concept of otherness and reveals that the problem with colonizing people (represented by Susan
Barton and Harry Trewe) is not that the colonized people (Friday and Jackson Phillip) would not consider them superior enough, but, rather, that Susan and Harry secretly consider themselves inferior.
Howe and Stephany explain that a complex character whose personality seems to evolve in the play or whose behaviour is actually rooted in his depths is called a
“developing or revealed character” (34). Perhaps Jackson Phillip could be said to serve this function in Pantomime, having acted as a servant who first pretends indifference to
Harry‟s idea to play a Robinson-Crusoe game but then taking the initiative, so he could
102 eventually manipulate the panto his way. Indeed, it is Harry Trewe who, ultimately, adapts to Jackson:
HARRY. Wait, wait a minute. Cut! Cut! You know what would be a heavy
twist, heavy with irony?
JACKSON. What, Mr. Trewe?
HARRY. We reverse it.
JACKSON. You mean you prepared to walk round naked as your mother make
you, in your jockstrap, playing a white cannibal in front of your own people?
You‟re a real actor! And you got balls, too, excuse me, Mr. Trewe, to even
consider doing a thing like that! (Walcott 100-101)
The idea of black Crusoe and white Friday seems excellent to Harry until they actually begin to act the panto. As the play develops, however, Jackson quickly enters into his part and begins to take control of the script:
JACKSON. Mr. Trewe, I‟m only asking you to play a white sea bird because I
am supposed to play a black explorer.
HARRY. Okay, if you are a black explorer ... Wait a minute ... wait a minute. If
you‟re really a white explorer but you‟re black, shouldn‟t I play a black sea
bird because I‟m white? (Walcott 120- 122)
Jackson systematically employs his colour and “lower” rank to perplex Harry and attempts to reverse the roles. In addition, he overwhelms his master with satirical calypsonian songs:
JACKSON. I want to tell you „bout Robinson Crusoe.
He tell Friday, when I do so, do so.
Whatever I do, you must do like me.
103 He make Friday a Good Friday Bohbolee25;
That was the first example of slavery,
„Cause I am still Friday and you ain‟t me.
Now Crusoe he was this Christian and all,
And Friday, his slave, was a cannibal,
But one day things bound to go in reverse,
With Crusoe the slave and Friday the boss. (Walcott 117)
Harry Trewe is touchy whenever Jackson mocks his script or criticizes its obscenity:
“Well, better to be obscene than not heard”, Harry insists (Walcott 118). The fusion of
Creole acting and classical acting is a recurring theme in Pantomime. It is perhaps due to their experience with “show business” that both Harry and Jackson continue in their comic debate about the final shape of the panto, and it is the same world of theatre- entertainment, Thieme observes, that “has destroyed [Harry‟s] confidence while making his wife a star” (Derek Walcott 128). Harry irritates Jackson by boasting of his acting experience: “Well, I got the part. Wrote the music, the book, everything [...] Terrific reaction all around. Thanks to me ...” (Walcott 107). And while the play includes mild innuendo about violence, such as “If you want me to learn your language, you‟d better have a gun” (117); or Harry‟s fighting episode: “[I] was waiting outside for [a big maintenance sergeant] who kept pinching my arse and so on [...] with a wrench this big, and after that it took all of maintenance to put him back again” (107), and Jackson‟s fighting episode: “I nail that ice pick through [the feller‟s] hand to the table, and I laugh” (154), it is due to humour only that the comedy masks potentially dangerous antagonisms. As the emotions are surfacing in Act Two, we can learn that both actors are truly stubborn but non-violent men as they haggle about properties:
25 Walcott‟s footnote in Pantomime explains that „Bohbolee‟ is “Judas effigy beaten at Easter in Trinidad and Tobago” (117).
104 HARRY. It‟s my property. Don‟t get in there.
JACKSON. The hut. That was my idea.
HARRY. The table‟s mine.
JACKSON. What else is yours, Harry? (Gestures) This whole fucking island?
Dem days gone, boy.
HARRY. The costume‟s mine, too.
JACKSON. Suit yourself (he removes the hat and throws it into the arena, then
the parasol)
HARRY. The hammer‟s mine.
JACKSON. I feel I go need it. (Walcott 157)
Jackson‟s dominance is also confirmed when, instead of “sir” or “Mr. Trewe”, he starts to address Harry by his first name or plain surname: “it go have to be man to man and none of this boss-and-Jackson business, you see, Trewe ... I mean, I just call you plain
Trewe, for example, and I notice that give you a slight shock. Just a little twitch of the lip, but a shock all the same, eh, Trewe? You see? You twitch again” (Walcott 138).
The power struggle suddenly finds Harry in the position of a servant who lights a cigarette to Jackson (109), offers him the Scotch whiskey (159), and, most importantly, who accepts orders and instructions from his Caribbean employee. The result is the disturbed hierarchy of the master-servant relationship and the idea of a panto fusing both English and Creole identities.
In Foe, the situation is more straightforward; Susan inherits mastery over Friday and, eventually, she becomes his “slave”. In the complex relationship between Friday and Susan, Coetzee undermines the stereotypical principles of white superior individual and black inferior servant. Yet in their power struggle of authorship, there is no winner or loser since there is a barrier of silence between them. In Foe, the view of white
105 superiority and black inferiority is deconstructed to such an extent which suggests that a female “imperialist” is somehow weaker than the male one. In other words, the idea of white superiority cannot work between Susan and Friday in the same way as it has worked between Cruso(e)-Friday because Susan and her servant are both marginalized:
Susan is the gendered Other while Friday represents the racial Other.
Similarly to Coetzee who, as a white South African, often acknowledges he is not entitled to speak for Black Africa, Susan performs a mediatory role between the oppressed and the oppressive. She often claims control and ownership: “I do not love him [Friday], but he is mine. That is why he remains in England. That is why he is here”
(Coetzee 111). However, people‟s right to freedom, as it has been already established in
5.1, does not depend on their level of intelligence. Susan believes that “what [Friday] is to the world is what I make of him” (Coetzee 122). This attitude is similar to that of
Robinson Crusoe who does not save Friday‟s life out of a feeling of moral obligation so much as of his fancy to “manage one, nay, two or three savages, ... so as to make them entirely slaves to me, to do whatever I should direct them” (Defoe 197). Nevertheless,
Susan‟s presumption appears to be wrong as Friday withholds his story and, ironically, succeeds in holding power over her.
Friday‟s silence can be seen as a purposeful rebellion. Unlike his eighteenth- century counterpart who is shaped into a “faithful, loving, sincere Servant” who obediently learns English from his master (Defoe 205), Coetzee‟s Friday pretends to not understand Susan‟s attempts to teach him. And still, there are tokens in his behaviour suggesting that he is indeed able to communicate, or at least convey a message by drawing and writing. When Susan draws a house with a door and a chimney on a child‟s slate, it turns out that Friday is capable of making letters or symbols since he writes “the four letters h-o-u-s” on it (Coetzee 145). Moreover, when nobody watches him, Friday
106 takes the slate and draws an enigmatic image of “eyes, open eyes, each set upon a human foot: row upon row of eyes upon feet: walking eyes,” but before Susan can get a closer look, he “put[s] three fingers into his mouth and wet[s] them with spittle and rub[s] the slate clean” (Coetzee 147). It can be only guessed what those symbols mean but an image of a foot and eyes serves as a reminder of the moment when Robinson
Crusoe set his eyes upon “the print of a man‟s naked foot” in the sand (Defoe 152, emphasis added). Or, as Head suggests, it may “evoke images of slaves being forced to journey to places of enslavement” (65). In any case, the symbols on the slate are probably as important to Friday as the footprint was to Crusoe, and they indeed may be the key to Friday‟s secret, yet he will never let Susan discover it. Friday‟s desire not to be interpreted can be viewed as a means of revenge for all the suffering he has experienced in the past. More specifically, his rebellion towards Susan, a white
European who attempts to control him, might be an allegory of black resistance, which reminds of the tyrannies and cruelties of that part of African history in which Europeans conquered its territory, dragged slaves in chains and violated their rights.
Spivak reads the character of Friday as a “guardian at the margin” (“Theory in the Margin” 16). Friday‟s silence is perhaps an effective way to put the masters/colonizers into the shades and finally step out of the margins. Friday‟s supposed
“dumbness”, which Susan often ascribes to his race, may be indeed a sign of his higher intelligence. Friday‟s identity has been mutilated by the slavers, ignored by his master, reshaped by his mistress, but it is the liberating power of silence which, despite the lost of his tongue, eventually enables him to become the master of the story.
By set of shifting variations on the master-and-servant relationship, Walcott and
Coetzee demonstrate that the colonizing master from Defoe‟s narrative is no longer a central and superior character in the rewritings analyzed in this thesis. In Foe and
107 Pantomime, the “persona of Friday” has ceased to be a reflection of Crusoe‟s own beliefs and desires and rather embodies “the Other” with newly created and independent identity.
108 Conclusion
This thesis has been largely concerned with the diversity of interpretations which
Defoe‟s master narrative continually offers in different forms and media; but since the primary reason of interest is the way it constructs postcolonial identities in the two creative rewritings – Foe and Pantomime – its thematic focus on gender and racial roles required a thorough examination of the Crusoe myth and exploration of areas that deal with relation between otherness and (in)equality. The depiction of the stereotyped images of native cultures and gender categories helped indicate that the often overlooked characters have been given more of a voice in these postcolonial rewritings.
As shown in the first part of the thesis, the fascination with the story of Robinson
Crusoe was not shared in general. Indeed, to call Daniel Defoe “the most prolific writer of his time” or “the first true novelist in the English language” would have been a bit presumptuous in his own time. His significant break with literary conventions and tradition was a thorn in the side of many a literary representative of the Augustan Age.
Nevertheless, many eighteenth-century readers, especially those from the “less” educated strata of society, found the man‟s struggle for survival fascinating to such an extent that the formal realism in Defoe‟s first work of fiction had a great immediate success, which has continued to resonate across many genres – films, plays or postmodern novels – until today.
Neither of the works that have been analyzed in this work simply replicates the original narrative. Even chapter two, which deals with the Hollywood film adaptations of Robinson Crusoe, has revealed the novel‟s vast potential to be shaped, reinvented and reinterpreted. Miller and Hardy‟s film version does copy the text in its portrayal of
Crusoe‟s cultural superiority, however, it also integrates a love story and considerable amount of violence typical in American action movies, which is at odds with Defoe‟s
109 concept. Zemeckis‟s Cast Away, by contrast, rejects the label of a faithful adaptation of
Defoe‟s novel and rather delivers a message of Western capitalism, individualism and social values. Despite the films‟ apparent ideologies, it would be a mistake to prioritize literary originals over their film adaptations. Robinson Crusoe is, in effect, a blank screen onto which a large number of people (readers, writers and filmmakers alike) attempt to project contemporary values and anxieties – about society, culture and world in general – which they find consistently ill-advised, controversial or just worthy of critical attention.
The Crusoe myth has been retold through successive generations, yet it is noteworthy that the story of a white castaway has been recently replaced by events which comprise such a minor but memorable part of Defoe‟s narrative: first, the story of black servant Friday; and second, the unanswered questions of „self‟ and „other‟ dichotomy. The irony of such contrast is emphasized in Coetzee‟s South African novel and Walcott‟s Caribbean play in which people living outside the “civilization” – supposed “savages” who lack knowledge of God and good manners, or women caught between patriarchy and imperialism – ostentatiously end the master-slave era.
Owing to the character of a female castaway, Foe, of course, includes many feminine traits; perceptions of a woman‟s body, female literary tradition, maternal concern, and gender stereotypes were all taken into account when examining Susan‟s female identity. The direct connection between Susan‟s quest for her own story and her idea of the “tremendous” importance of gender is made clear by the contrast with Mr.
Foe who proves that patriarchal gender system is sometimes still at work. It is perhaps the complexity of Susan Barton, representing a patriarchal victim and authoritative oppressor simultaneously, that reflects an ambivalent position of her creator, who, as the white South African, equally occupies the place of the centre and the margin. While
110 Susan recognizes the importance of giving a voice to Friday and struggles to have her story told, the “true” story remains buried within Friday, who is mute. However, his mutilation is both his (moral) advantage and (physical) disadvantage. On one hand, he stands as a symbol of suffering in South Africa and, on the other hand, he uses his silence as a powerful tool of resistance against dominant society.
Derek Walcott has disguised the issue of racial prejudice and subjugation into a playful and comic performance in Pantomime. It is nevertheless important to stress that the play‟s intention is not to sneer at racial implications, but to dignify them. The play is an essential factor in understanding English/Caribbean history since its plot is set in the postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago. The pragmatic Creole and conventional Englishman reverse their roles in order to explore class and race hierarchies. Through the interplay of allusions on social and racial inequality, the protagonists finally succeed in revealing the dark and potentially dangerous sides of colonial past.
If, as has been argued, a text reveals certain characteristics of the author, then this thesis proved that neither Foe nor Pantomime is a mere imitation of the source text.
It is possible to detect biographical features and lived experiences that perhaps allow both Noble Prize winners to define their own reality. Like other arts and films, which make use of visual effects, the analyzed literary works incorporate unique literary techniques, such as metafiction, verisimilitude, mimesis, figures of speech, imagery, verbal irony, etc. that have been accordingly defined, and appeared to be a useful analytical tool to decode the deeper meaning of the texts.
Postcolonial rewritings can be seen as an effective way to illuminate historical processes initiated by imperial exploitation and expansionism. Some scholars, mostly those who have witnessed the suffering of postcolonial trauma, including Walcott and
Coetzee, reveal their culture‟s own dilemmas by addressing the burning issues of
111 subordinate groups. They argue that, in many respects, the racist attitudes and practices of imperial culture had victimized and oppressed Indigenous people. Racial and gender stereotypes permeate Foe and Pantomime and, in most cases, confirm the findings presented in the theoretical part. It is nevertheless important to acknowledge that the objective of this thesis was not to prove that postcolonial rewriting seeks to contradict stereotypes only and celebrate minorities instead. Foe and Pantomime actually echo the warning of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who reflects on the need to understand cultural difference, but reminds that Western theorists and writers should be aware of their own cultural bias. The fact that the “white” representatives of European culture, Susan
Barton and Harry Trewe, were, in one way or another, overpowered by the representatives of the “other” culture signalizes that the interference of Western world into the concerns of Indigenous peoples should be accordingly approached with utmost care.
This thesis proved that subordinate groups that were previously seldom considered in the works of classic literature form an indispensable part of postcolonial history. Perhaps a fitting way to characterize peoples formerly colonized by imperial power is to portray them as souls of (postcolonial) literatures since, in the words of
Daniel Defoe,
The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond,
and must be polished, or the lustre of it will never appear.
Daniel Defoe, “An Essay upon Projects”
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120 Appendices
Appendix 1: Crusoe‟s Sequels
The story, which is known today simply as Robinson Crusoe, was first published on 25 April 1719, with the complete title as follows:
The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner:
Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of
America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates.
Four months later, on 20 August 1719, it was followed by a sequel called The
Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Being the Second and Last Part of His Life,
And of the Strange Surprising Accounts of his Travels Round three Parts of the Globe.
This volume brings account of Crusoe‟s return to his island and his further travels to
121 Madagascar, Asia and Russia. The map displayed in that volume offers an interesting view of the world, as understood in 1719. It is nevertheless important to stress that this sequel brings death to the character of Friday, and focuses, to the disappointment of readers, primarily on Crusoe and his preoccupation with Christianity.
Despite claiming it to be the “second and last part” of Crusoe‟s adventures, the second part was followed once more. The third, and final part, was published on
6 August 1720 as Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of
Robinson Cruse: with his Vision of the Angelick World. This story consists of Crusoe‟s essays on religious and moral ideas in general. None of the two last parts, however, reached the potential of the first and both are usually excluded when referring to
Robinson Crusoe.
Source: Alan Downie‟s essay “Robinson Crusoe‟s Eighteeth-Century Context”.
Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses. Eds. Lieve Spaas and Brian
Stimpson. London: Macmillan Press, 1996. 13-27. Print.
122 Appendix 2: Film Adaptations
Robinson Crusoe (1913) by American director Otis Turner; Robinson Crusoe
(1927) by British-South African director M. A. Wetherell; Mr. Robinson Crusoe (1932) by British director A. E. Sutherland; The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1952) by
Spanish director Luis Buñuel; or Caleb Deschanel‟s film Crusoe (1988) represent only a small fraction of the cinematic Robinsonades aimed at a mass audience. The two film adaptations that have been recently reviewed, appraised, criticized, loved or hated are
Daniel Defoe‟s Robinson Crusoe (1997) by George Miller and Rod Hardy, and Cast
Away (2000) by Robert Zemeckis.
Robinson Crusoe (1997) – Synopsis
The film opens as the fictionalized writer Daniel Defoe reads a castaway‟s autobiography and begins to write his novel. Robinson Crusoe (Pierce Brosnan) is a Scottish gentleman who accidentally kills his friend Patrick in a duel over his childhood love Mary. Patrick's brothers arrive and threaten Crusoe, but he escapes and joins the merchant ship transporting assorted cargoes between ports in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans. Crusoe chronicles the ship‟s journeys until a typhoon shipwrecks him near the coast of New Guinea. As the rescue does not come, he decides to acclimate on the island and builds a shelter and grows food. He finds a tribe from a nearby island making human sacrifices and intervenes after two prisoners have been sacrificed. One of the prisoners (later named Friday) escapes and attempts to befriend Crusoe. Crusoe attempts to convert Friday to Christianity and deprive him of his savage manners. Within six months Friday has learned the basics of English and became Crusoe‟s companion. Together they set various traps for the tribe of natives who attempted to sacrifice Friday before, but the tribesmen arrive in force. Crusoe and Friday manage to defend the island, but Crusoe is shot by an arrow. Friday decides to try to save him by taking him to his home island. Friday‟s tribe however captures Crusoe, believing him to have come to enslave their people. The savages force Crusoe to fight Friday to the death for his freedom. After sparing Friday, Friday is about to land a killing blow when he is
123 hit by a bullet. Instead of being saved, he is killed on his native island. European sailors then rescue Crusoe and return him to Scotland where he is reunited with Mary.
Cast Away (2000) – Synopsis
Memphis-based FedEx operations executive Chuck Noland and grad student Kelly Frears have long dated and lived together, and despite each being the love of the other's life, have not gotten married because of their respective busy schedules, especially Chuck‟s as he is more often on business trips than he is at home. That marital status changes when on Christmas Day 1995 as Chuck is rushing off to catch yet another FedEx plane for a business trip, he gives Kelly a ring. That flight experiences technical difficulties, and crashes down somewhere in the south Pacific. Unaware of what has happened to any of his fellow flight mates, or the plane, Chuck drifts ashore of what he will learn is a deserted island. Chuck realizes that his priority is survival – which primarily means food, water, shelter and fire – and rescue. But survival is also in an emotional sense. To fulfil that emotional need, he has an heirloom pocket watch with Kelly‟s photo that she gave him as a Christmas present, and eventually opening the FedEx packages, a Wilson volleyball on which he paints a face and which he names Wilson. As time progresses, Chuck goes through a range of emotions, but if rescue is ever in the cards, he realizes that he has to find a way to get off the island, which is seemingly impossible in his circumstance due to the strong on shore surf he cannot get beyond without assistance. What Chuck may not fully realize is the longer he is not rescued, the harder it will be for him to return to his old life in its entirety if he ever is rescued. Although the thought of Kelly is what largely keeps him motivated to be rescued, Kelly, who probably believes him to be dead, may have moved on emotionally from him in the intervening time.
Source: International Movie Database
124 Appendix 3: Figures of Speech
The corpus of data below represents the most commonly used types of figures of speech according to their occurrence in Robinson Crusoe and Pantomime. Since figurative language differs from the actual literal meaning of the words, it is used primarily to visualize the text and thus spark the imagination of readers.
For practical reasons, the following abbreviations are used for the techniques detected:
C = Collocation OX = Oxymoron ON = Onomatopoeia SN = Synecdoche MT = Metonymy SB = Symbolism I = Idiom E = Euphemism PR = Proverb M = Metaphor A = Alliteration H = Hyperbole SM= Simile PS = Personification
Figures of Speech PANTOMIME page type ROBINSON CRUSOE page type I‟m so bloody bored I could burst into 95 H Life of slavery for daily 10 M tears bread With the peanuts you pay him for 96 SB The labours of the hands 10 SN overtime or of the head I‟m rotting from insomnia 97 H Came now fresh into my 12 I mind Fridge dancing 98 ON Wave would have 13 PS brrgudup...jukjuk...brrugudup swallowed us up Termites jumping like steel band 98 SM Fresh-water sailor 14 C The toilet catch asthma 98 PS My heart died within me 16 H So, Mr. Jackson, it‟s your neck and 98 SN My ill fate 18 C mine Playing a little havoc with my nerves 99 I He swam like a cork 27 SM A fair trial 99 C Swear by Mahomet and 28 PR his father‟s beard I‟m not making an ass of myself 100 I Fallen into the hands of 30 M lions and tigers He was the size of a truck 107 M They go like an army 31 SM What I had in mind 107 I Stark naked 35 C Have a cup of tepid coffee 108 C All have perished 46 E Want to take the hat off? 110 I Saved out of the grave 50 H You had the bloody guests in stitches 110 H After my health or 66 E strength should decay This is the point of the hat 110 I Beasts of prey 70 C I want you to come to your senses 111 I Thin as a plank 71 SM The shadow pray too 112 PS Weep like a child 72 SM Servant dominating the master 112 OX Gusts of wind 73 C Driving you crazy till you go mad 112 H My spirits began to 83 PS revive
125 Rattles beach chair 115 ON I thought the earth 89 H trembled The music hall‟s loss is calypso‟s gain 118 PR I was an unfortunate dog 91 M To draw the line 125 I The country looked like 101 SM a planted garden White would become black 127 OX I went to work like a fool 126 SM I don‟t give an Eskimo‟s fart about the 127 H My heart would shrink 142 H world and my blood run chill Making such a fool of myself 129 I Run for my life 157 I A black sea gull 131 OX With a flood of tears 163 H First lash ... Pow! Second lash 133 ON It is never too late to be 173 PR ...Pataow! wise The bored and boring clouds 135 PS If I had a hat on my 175 H head, my hair might have lifted it Dead leaves drifting 135 PS The ill luck 177 C Terror of emptiness 135 C One soul saved 185 SN That‟s neither here nor there 136 I Deliver myself from this 196 OX death of a live You ain‟t parrot to repeat opinion 136 M Pursued by whole body 198 MT soul as dry as the sun suck a crab shell 136 SM Stood stock still 199 A People go flock like sandpipers 137 SM Let my dream come to 201 I pass You make your car nervous 137 PS Teeth white as ivory 202 SM It‟s a smile in front and dagger behind 140 I His affections were like 205 SM those of a child to a father Me wife looks like a horse 140 SM Having two mouth to 209 SN feed She‟s my Worcester sauce 140 M There dwelt white 212 M bearded men And vam, vam, next think is Robbie 148 ON Intercessor at the 215 SB wrestling footstool of God‟s throne Monkey see, monkey do 149 PR The savage was a good 217 OX Christian The solemn tucking in, like you putting 150 M Strong inclination 223 C a little baby back to sleep Still on duty 153 I Fit of fury 227 A You‟ve been running your mouth like a 153 SM Spaniard as bold as brave 231 SM parrot‟s arse as could be imagined Bloody mess 153 C Put my life in their hands 239 SN Out of the blue 154 I Take my side to the last 240 H drop of his blood If you have to tell somebody something, 159 PR the heads of the mutiny 251 MT tell them to their face I‟m giving up this bloody rat race 161 M They holloed again 260 ON My face is my fortune 162 M from head to foot 268 I And ... tata tee-tum-tum... God, my 164 ON They fallen into the pit 269 PR memory which they had digged for others You making a mole hill out of a 170 I Up he scrambles into the 288 ON mountain tree
126 Summary
The thesis analyzes two literary works of the two Nobel Prize winners, namely
Foe, by South African writer John Maxwell Coetzee, and Pantomime, by Caribbean author Derek Walcott, in relation to Daniel Defoe‟s literary masterpiece – Robinson
Crusoe. The first chapter of the thesis considers the critical and theoretical approaches to postcolonial works and the contextual framework of Defoe‟s master narrative. It gives an overview of Defoe‟s sources of inspiration and explores the metamorphoses which the eighteenth-century narrative has undergone in the context of British imperialism and colonization.
The second chapter examines the themes and elements that persist in the cinematic Robinsonades, namely in Cast Away (featuring Tom Hanks) and Robinson
Crusoe (featuring Pierce Brosnan). Despite the genre differences and the (sometimes disturbing) differences in the interpretation of the plot in these Hollywood film adaptations, the analysis revealed some important features such as the horrors of solitude, respect towards others, anti-slavery ideas or the mastery of the „self‟ that draw the film adaptations near to postcolonial literature.
In the following sections, the narrative forms of Foe and Pantomime are thoroughly considered. The third and fourth chapter explore different modes of the postcolonial play and the postmodern novel respectively, and draw attention to the stereotypes that constitute gender and racial identity of the subordinate characters.
Observations on bodily violence as a legacy of South African slavery or the reflection of the apartheid era, as well as the construction of female motherhood and womanhood are also explored.
Finally, the analytical part of the thesis presents some subversive strategies that the chosen texts employ in order to replace Western superiority. More specifically, this
127 includes, but is not limited to, the depiction of mimicry, language or racial stereotypes as they are experienced by “Friday figures”. It is revealed that the postcolonial representatives of Defoe‟s Friday play a significant role, and that the supposed supremacy of the master is reproved by the reversal of social, gender and racial roles.
The strength of the analyzed works consists in their ability to escape all imperialistic strictures and also in their potential to see the subaltern characters in a completely new light.
128 Resumé
Tato diplomová práce analyzuje dvě literární díla držitelů Nobelovy ceny za literaturu, konkrétně novelu Foe od jihoafrického spisovatele Johna Maxwella
Coetzeeho a divadelní hru Pantomime od karibského dramatika a básníka Dereka
Walcotta v kontextu Defoeova nejslavnějšího románu. První kapitola specifikuje teoretické přístupy k dílům postkoloniální literatury a blíže představuje historický i kulturní původ díla Robinson Crusoe, autorovu inspiraci a literární proměny, které tento dobrodružný román z 18. století prodělal vlivem britského imperialismu a období kolonizace.
Druhá kapitola se zabývá tematikou tzv. filmových robinsonád, konkrétně americkými filmy Cast Away (v hlavní roli s Tomem Hanksem) a Robinson Crusoe (s
Piercem Brosnanem). Navzdory tomu, že zejména posledně zmíněné hollywoodské zpracování klasické předlohy vykazuje značné nesrovnalosti, obě filmové adaptace zachycují témata (např. strach ze samoty, boj se sebou samým, respekt vůči rasově odlišným lidem, protiotrokářské idey), jež se svým charakterem přibližují hlavním námětům postkoloniální literatury.
Následující část práce rozebírá literární formu zkoumaných děl s ohledem na formální a stylistické odlišnosti postmoderní novely a divadelní hry. Třetí a čtvrtá kapitola zároveň upozorňuje na rasové a genderové stereotypy, které svým diskriminačním způsobem značně ovlivňují utváření identity skupiny lidí, jež byly kdysi dominantním mocenským diskursem považovány za „podřadné“. Dílo J. M. Coetzeeho obsahuje nejen narážky na tělesné násilí z dob otroctví či režimu apartheid, ale i na patriarchální pojetí ženy a jejího vnímání tradičních hodnot mateřství a literárního autorství.
129 Analytická část se zaměřuje především na chování postav evokujících kolonizovaného sluhu Pátka. Ovšem jeho přestavitelé, na rozdíl od literární předlohy, hrají ve vybraných postkoloniálních dílech klíčovou roli. Nadřazenost západní kultury je parodována dějovými zvraty, které umožňují, aby se z původně rasově utlačovaného otroka stal pán a naopak. Výměna sociálních rolí na pozadí rasové diskriminace, utlačování domorodého jazyka a přizpůsobování se imperialistické kultuře tak umožňuje vidět „podřadné“ postavy ve zcela novém světle.
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