Friday Night FOE

By Stefan Kanfer

Robinson Crusoe, apotheosis of the desert island castaway, throws one of the longest shadows in literature. For more than two centuries, he and his black companion Friday have provoked countless imitations, parodies, cartoons and advertisements. But from the earliest days, in addition to the parasol and firearm, the beachcombers have also carried some heavy moral baggage. Rousseau considered Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel vital to the education of ambitious youth; Coleridge regarded Crusoe as the "universal representative"; and Karl Marx found the plot an illustration of basic economics.

J.M. Coetzee, a widely praised South African writer (Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K), sides with the serious Crusoeites. In this terse sequel, he imagines an Englishwoman, Susan Barton, marooned on the same island with the lonely men. For almost three decades, according to the original version, the Yorkshireman lived womanless, out of reach of the English language. In Coetzee's tale, the estrous Susan is in search of an abducted daughter. En route, she becomes the mistress of a ship's captain. Mutineers seize command and set her adrift in a small boat. It grinds ashore on the celebrated island, and within hours she is in the company of the white man and his mutilated servant, made tongueless by some cruel and nameless enemy.

But this is only the start. After an idyllic interlude, the trio are rescued by a British merchant vessel and taken back to England. Before he can touch soil, Susan's last great love, Crusoe, dies of woe, sighing for his island. In London, Susan finds her way to a tale spinner significantly surnamed Foe -- Defoe's real name -- and persuades him to tell her story. But Foe keeps emphasizing the wrong themes. Susan rebels and then suffers remorse. "I am growing to understand why you wanted Crusoe to have a musket and be besieged by cannibals," she writes him. "I thought it was a sign you had no regard for the truth. I forgot you are a writer who knows above all how many words can be sucked from a cannibal feast, how few from a woman cowering from the wind."

Some woman. Some wind. Without formal education or social aptitude, she manages to elicit some highly sophisticated concerns: the limits of language ("God's writing stands as an instance of a writing without speech. Speech is but a means through which the word may be uttered, it is not the word itself"); the kinship of the oppressed ("Friday's desires are not dark to me. He desires to be liberated, as I do too. Our desires are plain, his and mine"); and historical irony ("Even in his native Africa, dumb and friendless, would ((Friday)) know freedom? There is an urging that we feel, all of us, in our hearts, to be free; yet which of us can say what freedom truly is?").

But these very apercus are what mar the text. In adding to Defoe's repertory company, Coetzee has introduced urgencies that are neither fresh nor illumined, only brilliantly disguised. Flashing back and forward, scattering allusions, adopting a series of poses and styles, the author is less reminiscent of a prior novelist than of contemporary street mimes who build hints until the audience shouts in recognition. Readers of this achingly symbolic retelling are likely to give a similar response. But will they applaud the author -- or will they really be congratulating themselves?