II. Silent Friday: The Tongueless Other
While discussing the role and effect of silence in Coetzee’s novels, Friday provides one of most interesting examples. This is because of the speculation that Friday has no tongue and is forced to remain silent forever. Foe explores Friday’s permanent silence through the viewpoint of Susan Barton and analyzes how the silence affects her. Initially, the relationship between Susan and Friday does not significantly stand out prior to Susan’s knowledge of Friday’s mutilation. However, once Susan discovers that Friday “has no tongue” she is appalled and begins to look at him differently (Foe 23). Therefore, the relationship between the two changes as Susan’s perception of Friday alters.
Susan comments on this change when she states: “Hitherto I had found Friday a shadowy creature and paid him little more attention than I would have given any house-slave in Brazil. But now I began to look at him- I could not help myself- with the horror we reserve for the mutilated” (Foe 24). Friday can no longer be identified with all the other slaves Susan has encountered. Instead, he becomes the mutilated other, a mystery that resists being conformed to common, preconceived ideas. His silence cannot support or deny any of her thoughts, leaving her unable to completely understand him. Additionally, his mutilation haunts Susan and generates pity as image of losing a tongue is too violent and upsetting to ignore.
This change in perception also emerges from Susan’s inability to accept that Friday can never tell his story. This need to make Friday tell his story represents yet another attempt to reduce Friday to what she knows. As Levinas argues “comprehension [intelligence]-the logos of being-… [is] a way of approaching the known being such that its alterity with regard to the knowing being vanishes” (Levinas 42). Susan tries to deal with the obtrusive other “by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it … [and] ruling it” (Said 1992). However, by remaining silent, Friday “maintains his exteriority” and doing so “absolves him from the relation that Barton attempts to establish with him” (Marais 134). As long as Friday remains silence he “challenge[s]…her autonomy” as she is forced to acknowledge his singular existence (Marais 134-5). She is unable to dissolve his alterity and dominant him.
Unsure of what to make of him, Friday’s mutilation continues to profoundly disturb Susan and creates a “tension in the novel between silence and freedom” (Marais 132). His silence, as stated before, reflects on her sense of freedom. Susan, in turn, becomes obsessed with how Friday lost his tongue, in the hopes of regaining her autonomy. Susan even questions Cruso, hoping to hear the story she cannot hear from Friday. However, Cruso claims Friday was tongueless when he met him. Nevertheless, Cruso does try to provide Susan an answer, and suggests that Slave owners perhaps cut out his tongue because “they wanted to prevent him from ever telling his story” (Foe 23). This answer does not satisfy Susan and further frustrates her. Susan cannot fathom why anyone would purposely commit such a cruel act.
Unable to get the answers she craves, Susan is left questioning, “How will we ever know the truth?” (Foe 23). This attempt to discover the truth represents Susan’s desire to expel the feeling of pity and responsibility by getting rid of Friday’s alterity. The truth she seeks isn’t an actual truth, but evidence that supports the truth she creates about him. Her need to relieve pity is clearly seen in her weighing the possibility that Friday’s own people cut out his tongue (Foe 69). By placing the blame on Friday’s people and making the removal of the tongue a cultural ritual vs. a cruel act against his will, makes dismissing sympathy and moral obligation towards him easier. However, she has no way of verifying these stories and her mind is left exploring all possibilities, even one that suggests Cruso committed the violent act. Each version of the story seems just as likely as the other and she left struggling between truth and fiction.
It is important to note that although Susan views Friday as weak and powerless, she does not initially accept responsibility for Friday. This is due to the fact that she is not needed to take care of Friday while he is taken care of by Cruso. Aside from giving Cruso her feedback about his treatment of Friday, Susan does not assume responsibility over Friday until Cruso becomes ill and dies. Once Cruso dies, Susan can not help but feel the need to take care of Friday as she is the only person he knows. To support the helpless Friday, Susan is required to give up her independence and accommodate to his needs. In this way, Friday’s silence “is a silence of authority” as it controls how Susan lives her life (Marais 135). However, it is an authority that is “one without power” (Marais 135). Marais explains that “Friday derives authority, as opposed to force or power, from the weakness of his silence” (Marais 135). This is because Friday’s “utter helplessness demands responsibility from Susan, it demands that she care and ‘be for the other’ rather than for herself” (Marais 136).
Aside from being different, Friday’s mutilation makes him inferior in Susan’s eyes and therefore, relies on the care of those superior to assure his survival. This sense of devote responsibility is best seen when they finally are discovered and saved from the island. When the ship arrives, Susan comes willingly and Cruso is too sick to object. Friday, however, frightened, runs away and hides. Instead of leaving him on the Island, where after so many years of living there, he would undoubtedly be fine, she insists that the crew find him and bring him on the ship. Susan explains to the ship mates that Friday is like “a child,” and therefore it is their “duty to care for him in all things” (Foe 39). Here, she clearly makes an ethical argument to appeal to the crew. Saving Friday is not only right, but their duty as moral, able beings.
In the metaphor Susan uses, if Friday is the child, than Susan clearly takes on the role of the parent. She feels ethical responsible for him because she believes, like a child, he is incapable of taking care of himself. As the parent, she looks over Friday and makes sure his needs are fulfilled. This parent-child role is further displayed in her treatment of Friday once he is on the ship. Susan knows that Friday doesn’t understand words, but she believes that he understands “tones” and can “hear kindness” (Foe 41). Therefore, in an attempt to console him, she speaks in a soft, gentle tone and says “the same words over and over, laying [her] hand on his arm to soothe him” (Foe 41). She repeats words of comfort like a parent does to a child that is frightened. She also caresses him in an attempt to make him feel safe. By this point, Friday is already on the ship and there is not real need for Susan to make him feel better, yet she feels compelled to do so anyways.
This parental care and acceptance of responsibility continues once they arrive in London. Although Susan is not really required to take care of Friday, she decides to assume responsibility over him because she feels “a great city is no place for him” (Foe 47). The idea of him running around in “confusion and distress…wrenche[s her] heartstrings” (Foe 47). Her conscious will not let her leave him to fend for himself in a city he is unfamiliar with. Later, when she first meets Foe, she tells him she has “a man to care for, a Negro man who…lost his tongue” (Foe 48). By describing Friday’s lack of tongue while claiming her responsibility for him, it seems Susan feels the need to justify why she is taking care of him. His disability is the reason Susan uses.
Susan’s role as the parent is further explored in Susan’s attempt to educate Friday. She instructs Friday as one would a child and directs him to “watch” and “do” (Foe 56). Susan also attempts to “teach him names of things” (Foe 57). Susan tries to emplace the basic skills of language and speech within him, in order to make him more independent and able, thus removing some of her responsibility towards him.
In teaching him language, Susan also still hopes to unlock the truth about Friday. By making Friday’s silence speak through the written word, his secret can be revealed without the use of a tongue. Speaking, as stated before, would also allow her to dominate over Friday and define him into the known. This is seen her observation: “I tell myself I talk to Friday to educate him out of darkness and silence. But is that the truth? There are times when benevolence deserts me and I use words only as the shortest way to subject him to my will” (Foe 60). Attempting to subjugate him to her will, Susan tries arguing “who was to say there do not exist entire tribes in Africa among whom the men are mute” (Foe 69). Thinking so makes Friday’s silence a choice and not a disability, relieving her from pity. Furthermore, it shifts the loss of the tongue from a violent act forced on a helpless being, to decision made by someone in control of their life. However, Friday remains silent even in writing and art, and Susan remains tied to him.
That is why when Susan fails to teach Friday language, she becomes frustrated. She feels unable to free herself from Friday. She exclaims, “I am wasting my life on you Friday” (Foe 70). Susan feels she is not getting anywhere with him. There is also a sense of loneliness in her role as the superior being. She tells Friday “Oh, Friday, how can I make you understand the cravings felt by those of us who live in the world of speech to have our questions answered!” (Foe 79). His silence not only challenges her autonomy but makes her feel singled out and alone. She continues to say, “It is like our desire, when we kiss someone, to feel the lips we kiss respond to us” (Foe 79). Aside from dominance, it is human interaction she craves.
Susan also feels she carries “the burden of [their] story” as she must speak for both of them (Foe 81). However, the story she tells Foe remains an incomplete one. Some of the story died with Cruso and the rest with Friday’s tongue as she cannot answer questions such as “how many stones did you and your master move?” (Foe 83). More importantly she finds herself revisiting the question “how did you lose your tongue?” when retelling her story to Foe (Foe 84). Susan also tells Foe, “Sometimes I believe it is I who have become the slave” (Foe 87). By looking after the other, she feels like he has become the one in control. Furthermore, she wonders if Friday “found life with [her] as burdensome as [she] found life with him” (Foe 104). This suggests their may be a mutual sense of burden and enslavement shared by the two characters.
This feeling of burden and imprisonment even affects her physically. At one point, having failed to teach him to speak, Susan exclaims, “Friday was upon me” (Foe 104). Unable to change him, she feels like his weight is pressing down on her. Aside from being dead weight, she views Friday as her “shadow” (Foe 115). She feels that he has become a part of her, making her unable to get rid of him. This frustration and anxiety suffocates her. She describes his silence as “a silence that rose up the stairway like smoke…before long I could not breathe (Foe 118). Friday’s silence is not only a challenge to deal with mentally, but physically as well.
In an attempt to regain control, Susan tries to deny the power Friday has over her by claiming “Friday has no command of words and therefore no defense against being re-shaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others. I say he is a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal” (Foe 121). She claims she can “conform” him into anything she “desires” but clearly his silence does not allow her to do so (Foe 121). She does not make him to whatever she wants him to be. Marias points out that Friday’s silence has power in the way that it “resists Barton’s attempts to make it “speak,” and thereby points to his irreducibility to logocentric conceptuality” (Marais 133). Moreover, he argues that in “assuring the irreducibility of Friday’s otherness, it enables this otherness to surprise the subject and…in surprising the subject, the other challenges his/her autonomy” (Marais 134). That is why Marais believes Susan is “mistaken when she states that Friday’s silence is “helpless” …On the contrary, this silence ultimately precludes, even forbids, her from doing so by assisting in the production of infinity and thereby disturbing her ontological solitude” (Marais 134). Therefore, the power of Friday’s silence emerges from how it affects Susan.
Unable to deny his authority, she questions whether Friday presents to be helpless in order to maintain control over her. She wonders, “Somewhere in the deepest recesses of those black pupils was there a spark of mockery? I could not see it. But if it were there, would it not be an African spark, dark to my English eyes?” (Foe 146). Here, she debates with herself about the potential power Friday may have that she was unaware of. This idea of mockery drives her mad and she exclaims after this exchange “Mr. Foe I must have my freedom!” (Foe 147). Realizing the power Friday may have over her makes her feel even more trapped and suffocated.
When explaining this imprisonment to Foe, Susan uses the tale of Sinbad of Persia. Susan describes Friday as “the old man of the river” (Foe 147). She tells Foe, “I am Sinbad of Persia and Friday is the tyrant riding on my shoulders” (Foe 148). Friday, like the old man, first seemed harmless and powerless to her, but became an unexpected, heavy burden that falls on her shoulders. This story also represents the feeling of being tricked into the responsibility she feels as the mockery Friday may have for her. Just like Sinbad, Susan realizes too late that the other has her under his control.
Susan cannot be antonymous and free as long as the responsibility of Friday lies on her shoulders. However, no matter how much she tries, she is unable to get rid of him. Moral obligation and the pity she feels keeps her from abandoning him. Furthermore, although Friday is “his own master” and affects Susan’s so, he is also the “helpless captive of [Susan’s] desire” (Foe 150). Susan is tied to Friday and much as he is tied to her. There is an exchange of power passing between them. It is an interaction between political power and ethical power. Friday is at the mercy of Susan’s help and Susan is at the mercy of his needs. As long as Friday remains irreducible and silent, Susan will feel morally obligated to him and he will continue to rely on her help.
Above is just a silly youtube video of what one reader got from reading Coetzee's Foe. Interestingly, he pronounces Coetzee wrong. I was so excited and proud to point this out to my roommate. I know, I'm a dork lol.
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