Breathtaking Silence

"In every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe." (141)

Examining the last chapter of a book titled: Foe by J.M. Coetzee has led me to believe that there is only one cognizant thematic energy in the novel, an energy responsible for connecting the lives of four opposing personalities as a radio tower connects distant cities. The main characters include Susan, a castaway on an island inhabited by two men. Crusoe, a male castaway with a servant and a lover (who is also Susan). Foe, the writer of her novel with a lover (also Susan). And Friday, a black servant who on many occasions becomes the focus of everyone's attention. But why? Because he is mute. As one short paragraph from the last chapter puts it: "But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday." (157) The meaning of this will become blindingly apparent in this critique.

As the novel quickly unwinds itself the energy or non-energy of silence is responsible for the twists and turns, the progressions and relapses within. Every personal struggle, vocalized or otherwise, is amplified by the echo of silence. Susan washes up on Crusoe's island, only to find herself shore-locked with a man who has grown proud from years of loneliness. His unwillingness to speak with Susan beyond the minimal amount of communication to ensure their survival is exactly what creates her anxiety and turns the island into a place of uncertainty. This same uncertainty is carried over to Foe's house, a confining place where a different silence can be heard. It is a craftier silence. Nevertheless, the similarity between his silent moments and Crusoe's are that they both use them to devise a plan where Susan's will slips from her hands like a slippery eel...even though this "eel" bites and hangs on for its life all the way down. Whether she is trying to escape from the island or find companionship there, or relate the details of her epoch to the writer Foe, she is kept in a state of mental limbo between her complacency for being used (both physically and mentally), and her victory in obtaining equality among people in a position of power via attempting to bond with them through companionship or asserting her right to the authorial cohesion of her story.

Crusoe's dramatic silence during the long intervals of Susan's stay on the island spurred on in her a desire to escape. It was a silence measured in an prolonged, indistinguishable way. Whereas Foe's cunning, divided-up periods of silence re-enforce her drive to super-cede his encrouching opinions. Where before she tested Crusoe's boundaries, she now attempted to protect hers by focusing Foe's attention away from sensitive areas. Her silence surrounding the existence of her daughter prompts Foe to solidify her presence in his household by miraculously presenting her pseudo-daughter to her. Susan's two primary surroundings are an island of predictable, tediously quiet periods and Foe's house, transplanted to a quiet loft high above the commotion and activity of the streets of England. And even, harkening back to the island, we see that the relentless concussion of the wind throughout it presents a wordless, lifeless type of silence that must be blamed on something living to distinguish it from pure blankness, which in turn connects with Friday's apparent blankness. Who better to set at the core of this problematic web than the enigmatic Friday, whose whole world is expressed in silence?!

He is the only one who is set up within the narrative to exist apart from the friction and confusion, and yet he bares most of the blame for it. He continues through the story not so much because he is liked, but through his failure to communicate his feelings or thoughts he is turned into an anti-person, being referred to by Susan as her shadow. It is an insult that carries with it the opinion that he is a hovering, or otherwise looming silence, the kind that takes on metaphysical qualities of dreamlike proportions. Indeed, the last chapter of Foe is structured like a dream and at its heart and conclusion is none other than Friday, whose bared mouth produces the silence that transcends all of her experiences in the book. The person manifesting this dream, who I believe is Susan, pries her fingernails in-between his clamped teeth and observes that "His mouth opens. From 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. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face."

This dream is strikingly similar to Susan's own thoughts about Friday when she daydreams about his breath coming up the stairs of Foe's house to suffocate her. In brief, Susan's anxiousness to be heard, produced by a number of factors, is given the growth serum of Friday's company which amplifies her internal tension to an urgency to be understood, which he does worse than any of the other men because of his limited vocabulary. The quality of understanding her is something which both Crusoe and Foe considerably lack in abundance, but are time and again pardoned for their contributions due to the presence of Friday. A man who is "witless" enough to witness the behavior of these two men and be perceived as the one who acquiesces to it through his silence is a psychologically grey, yet ominously convincing trigger to Susan. Therefore, silence is the trait that Susan has been known to immediately pinpoint in others, arranging them by degrees of it, and does so with Friday in greater frequency than anyone else in the novel. Her interpretation of his world is the one of silence that she stepped into when she washed up on the shore of that remote island, which she continues in until the realization, or decoding of all of her experiences in the dream at the end. If Crusoe was the "king" of his island, the king of silence, Friday was his chief magician who, while being his subject, had the power to control him, and Foe, and her...but all in her unconscious mind.