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

1

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

2

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).

3

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

4

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.

5

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).

6

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”

7

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”

8

(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

9

(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).

10

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

11

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

12

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

13

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

14

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

15

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

16

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).

17

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

18

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

19

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.

20

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

21

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.).

22

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.

23

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).

24

“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.

25

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.

26

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

27

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

28

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

29

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

30

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

31

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

32

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

33

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

34

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

35

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

36

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.”

37

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.

38

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).

39

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).

40

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,

41

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

42

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.

43

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

44

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

45

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

46

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).

47

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.

48

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

49

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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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)

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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:

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“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

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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?

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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)

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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

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“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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

66

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

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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).

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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

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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-

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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).

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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).

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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

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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

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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

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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).

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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).

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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

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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

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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

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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).

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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,

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[...] 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.

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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),

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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.

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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

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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).

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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).

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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?

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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:

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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

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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.

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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).

105

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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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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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

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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.

123

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

124

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

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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

tears

95 H Life of slavery for daily

bread

10 M

With the peanuts you pay him for

overtime

96 SB The labours of the hands

or of the head

10 SN

I’m rotting from insomnia 97 H Came now fresh into my

mind

12 I

Fridge dancing

brrgudup...jukjuk...brrugudup

98 ON Wave would have

swallowed us up

13 PS

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

mine

98 SN My ill fate 18 C

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

his father’s beard

28 PR

I’m not making an ass of myself 100 I Fallen into the hands of

lions and tigers

30 M

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

strength should decay

66 E

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

revive

83 PS

126

Rattles beach chair 115 ON I thought the earth

trembled

89 H

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

a planted garden

101 SM

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

world

127 H My heart would shrink

and my blood run chill

142 H

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

...Pataow!

133 ON It is never too late to be

wise

173 PR

The bored and boring clouds 135 PS If I had a hat on my

head, my hair might have

lifted it

175 H

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

death of a live

196 OX

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

pass

201 I

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

those of a child to a

father

205 SM

Me wife looks like a horse 140 SM Having two mouth to

feed

209 SN

She’s my Worcester sauce 140 M There dwelt white

bearded men

212 M

And vam, vam, next think is Robbie

wrestling

148 ON Intercessor at the

footstool of God’s throne

215 SB

Monkey see, monkey do 149 PR The savage was a good

Christian

217 OX

The solemn tucking in, like you putting

a little baby back to sleep

150 M Strong inclination 223 C

Still on duty 153 I Fit of fury 227 A

You’ve been running your mouth like a

parrot’s arse

153 SM Spaniard as bold as brave

as could be imagined

231 SM

Bloody mess 153 C Put my life in their hands 239 SN

Out of the blue 154 I Take my side to the last

drop of his blood

240 H

If you have to tell somebody something,

tell them to their face

159 PR the heads of the mutiny 251 MT

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

memory

164 ON They fallen into the pit

which they had digged

for others

269 PR

You making a mole hill out of a

mountain

170 I Up he scrambles into the

tree

288 ON

127

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

128

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.

129

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.

130

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.