At first thought, it may seem odd to consider silence as a method of practicing freedom of speech. However, upon deeper consideration, deciding to stay silent represents the choice not to exercise your speech. Although, does the same logic apply to someone who doesn’t necessary choose silence? Is there still a sense of power behind the silence of someone who simply cannot speak for themselves? These are just of few of the many questions that arise when analyzing the role of silence with Coetzee’s Friday, in Foe, and Michael, in The Life & Times of Michael K. Questions such as these focus on whether the silence of Friday and Michael is powerful or powerless. Moreover, it is an argument teetering between whether these men remain silent by choice, or if their silence arises from a disability or inability to speak. This argument is further complicated by the fact that there is no real evidence that Friday has no tongue or visa versa. Susan never looks into his mouth and cannot truthfully verify or deny Cruso’s claim that Friday has no tongue. Similarly, as the scenes dealing with Michael’s silence come from an outsider’s prospective, the reader does not really know Michael’s thoughts and if his silence arises from a logical choice or a decaying mind.
Although both sides provide convincing arguments, there is something more intriguing within the core of these debates that deserves equal attention. Going beyond why these characters remain silent, I will focus on how Friday’s and Michael’s silence effects those around them. Whether by choice or disability, Friday’s silence undoubtedly has a hold over Susan Barton. Similarly, whether by choice or inability, Michael’s silence demands the attention of the medical officer. Both Susan and the medical officer feel compelled to care for these silent characters that they view as helplessness in their inability to speak. They try to enable the helpless other and give their silence a voice. However, their silence resists any attempts to make it speak. The longer these characters remain silent, the more sympathy and action it arises from Susan and the medical officer.
Susan and the medical officer assume responsibility because they feel there is no one else to care for these disable, mutilated beings. As Mike Marais states in Disarming Silence, “it is therefore clear that, rather than simply being a “language of defeat” or the “voice of complicity,” silence may be interpreted in the novel as enabling a form of resistance that is grounded in ethical authority” (Marais 137). Susan and the medical officer act in a way they feel is ethically correct. Doing so leaves them tied to those they care for. The focus then shifts from why Friday and Michael remain silent to why their silence affects Susan and the medical officer.
This moral obligation to care for the disabled other also aligns with what the West has come to know as the relationship between “the Orient” and “the Occident” (Said 1991). It is no coincidence that the Orients, Friday and Michael, are black others that are politically under the power of Susan and the medical officer, the white Occidents. Said describes this relationship, which he called Orientalism, in the introduction of From Orientalism as “a way of coming to terms with the Orient” (Said 1991). Therefore, through attempting to make Friday and Michael speak, Susan and the medical officer hope to understand them (Said 1991). However, more than just coming to terms with the other, Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (1992). By defining the other, Susan and the medical officer hope to fit Friday and Michael into preconceived notions as a way of dominating over them.
Furthermore, being in a position of power and feeling superior, Susan and the medical officer feel the need to care for the less fortunate and able other. Their belief coincides with idea of “the white man’s burden” encountered in many colonial and post colonial texts. Like “the white man’s burden,” Susan and the medical officer feel obligated to understand, help, and dominate the other for the other’s own good. However, by caring for the other, Susan and the medical officer also place the other’s well-being over their own. This ties to Levinas assertion in Totality and Infinity, that “to welcome the other is to put to question my Freedom” (Levinas 85). By deciding to care for Friday and Michael, Susan and the medical officer are no longer autonomous figures, but dependent vehicles that accompany the silent other. They become defined by and operate within this relationship. That is why both eventually find the responsibility of caring for the other burdensome and restricting.
This dependent relationship between the characters proves that there is some kind of power behind the silence of the other. It becomes clear that the white characters are affected by the black characters they are in charge of. Yet, Friday and Michael are still under the political authority of Susan and the medical officer. Therefore, the power the other possesses over the subject must be different than the one they must succumb to. Friday and Michael represent what Levinas refers to as a “the resistance which has no resistance-the ethical resistance” (Levinas 199). In this way, their power arises from morals rather than politics. This supports Marais’ assertion that silence enables “an ethical authority that is to be distinguished from political power” (Marais 132). Friday’s and Michael’s hold over Susan and the medical officer derives from the obligation and responsibility these two feel for the disabled other.
Friday’s and Michael’s silence signifies “a relation between freedom and violence” (Marais 132). The freedom Marais refers to is the Occident’s freedom to “violate the otherness of the other, to force the unknown into “conformity” with the known” (Marais 132). However, since Friday and Michael do not speak, their truths remain mysteries. Friday and Michael maintain their otherness by remaining silent. Susan and the medical officer are obsessed with getting them to tell their stories because they wish to violate their otherness and reduce them into the known. Unable to do so and feeling sympathy for the other’s helplessness, they continue to care for them and try to get them to speak.
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