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HER MAN FRIDAY

Date: February 22, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 1; Book Review Desk
Byline: By Denis Donoghue; Denis Donoghue holds the Henry James Chair of Letters at New York University. His most recent book is ''We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society.''
Lead: LEAD: FOE By J. M. Coetzee. 157 pp. New York: Viking. $15.95.
Text:

FOE By J. M. Coetzee. 157 pp. New York: Viking. $15.95.

''T HE Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner'' was published on April 25, 1719. The author of the book was Daniel Defoe or, to revert to his given name, Daniel Foe. In ''Foe'' J. M. Coetzee has written a superb novel by reconsidering the events of ''Robinson Crusoe'' and presenting them from a new point of view. He may have been impressed by Jean Rhys's conversion of ''Jane Eyre'' into ''Wide Sargasso Sea'' or by other experiments in displacing an official perspective.

The human image in ''Robinson Crusoe'' is unforgettable, but limited: it is a man's world; women appear only as terrified anonymities, domestic servants in Cape Verde, or the honest widow in London who holds Crusoe's money for him. Crusoe seems to have managed well enough without women during the 28 years, 2 months and 19 days he spent on the island. Near the end of the book we hear that he has married, ''not either to my disadvantage or dissatisfaction,'' that he has had two sons and a daughter, and that his wife has died: these matters are accomplished in a sentence. Crusoe goes back to his island, and then to Brazil, ''from whence I sent a bark, which I brought there, with more people to the island; and in it, besides other supplies, I sent seven women, being such as I found proper for service, or for wives to such as would take them.'' ''Foe'' makes up for these severities: it tells a woman's story, and lets her prescribe the terms on which it is to be construed. Susan Barton, of an English mother and a French father, has a daughter of the same name. The daughter is abducted by an Englishman ''and conveyed to the New World.'' Susan follows her to Brazil, but in Bahia the trail goes cold. She stays there for two years, then takes ship for Lisbon and becomes the captain's lover. On the voyage, the sailors mutiny, kill the captain and set Susan adrift in a small boat. She lands on an island, where she is found by Friday and brought to his master, here called Cruso. Cruso is an irascible, lazy, imperious fellow: he has lost interest in escaping from the island or even in recalling the events of his early life there. Friday's tongue has been cut out, either by slave owners or by Cruso. After a year on the island, the three are rescued by an English ship under Captain Smith, but on the voyage back to England, Cruso dies, pining for the island. THE rest of the book deals with Susan and Friday in England, and her efforts to persuade Daniel Foe to turn her account of life on the island into a popular book of adventure. Foe is not much interested in Cruso and Friday; he regards their island as a boring place on which the same nothing happened every day. He is far more interested in Susan's two years in Bahia, a time of indifference to her. But Foe is too busy, and too pestered, to get the book going: he is sunk in debt, the bailiffs have taken his house. Susan tries to write the story as ''The Female Castaway,'' but she thinks she needs Foe's flair and fancy to turn it into fame and money. Then the daughter turns up; or perhaps she is not the daughter but a changeling. Now read on.

''Foe'' differs from Mr. Coetzee's earlier novels most in its tone. The exhilaration of imagining ''Robinson Crusoe'' afresh, and the sense that while much has Continued on page 26 has changed in the past 250 years, much remains the same: these sentiments have combined to give Mr. Coetzee's style - Susan's, rather - its radiance. Here she is, urging Foe to tell her story and give her the substance she has lost:

''The island was Cruso's (yet by what right? by the law of islands? is there such a law?), but I lived there too, I was no bird of passage, no gannet or albatross, to circle the island once and dip a wing and then fly on over the boundless ocean. Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr. Foe: that is my entreaty. For though my story gives the truth, it does not give the substance of the truth (I see that clearly, we need not pretend it is otherwise). To tell the truth in all its substance you must have quiet, and a comfortable chair away from all distraction, and a window to stare through; and then the knack of seeing waves when there are fields before your eyes, and of feeling the tropic sun when it is cold; and at your fingertips the words with which to capture the vision before it fades. I have none of these, while you have all.'' IN fact, Susan's style is not disgraced by comparison with Defoe's, if lucidity and verve are in question. But she lacks the dramatic imagination that prompted Defoe's Crusoe to report of his drowned comrades that ''I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them, except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows.''

But if ''Foe'' presents Coetzee in a new tone, it still maintains continuities of pattern and implication with the earlier novels. Mr. Coetzee has long been occupied with political or administrative systems and the people they exclude or fail to contain. In ''Life & Times of Michael K,'' when Michael has escaped from the camp hospital, the kind doctor imagines himself running after him and calling out: ''Your stay in the camp was merely an allegory, if you know that word. It was an allegory - speaking at the highest level - of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it.''

Mr. Coetzee's heroes, though they rarely feel heroic to themselves, are such scandals: they are like Melville's Bartleby or Graham Greene's burnt-out cases, who live in society only as an irony and maintain the substance of their truth as if elsewhere. In ''Waiting for the Barbarians'' the Magistrate is a meaning that refuses to become a term in an imperial system:

''What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era.''

In some of Mr. Coetzee's novels the heroes and heroines express a desire to become a term in a system, but only in a transfigured system and never in the one at hand. In ''In the Heart of the Country'' Magda confides to her diary: ''I live inside a skin inside a house. There is no act I know of that will liberate me into the world. There is no act I know of that will bring the world into me. I am a torrent of sound streaming into the universe, thousands upon thousands of corpuscles weeping, groaning, gnashing their teeth.''

Her fantasies, lurid indeed, are lived as an adversary life, one form of totality as an affront to another, but she would live differently if she could:

''We are the castaways of God as we are the castaways of history. That is the origin of our feeling of solitude. I for one do not wish to be at the centre of the world. I wish only to be at home in the world as the merest beast is at home. Much, much less than all would satisfy me: to begin with, a life unmediated by words: these stones, these bushes, this sky experienced and known without question; and a quiet return to the dust. Surely that is not too much.''

It is, alas, too much; especially if you believe, as Magda does, that ''it is not speech that makes man man but the speech of others.''

A transfigured system, then, or none at all: these are the alternatives between which Mr. Coetzee's characters veer. Presumably the Magistrate of ''Barbarians'' would have been content if his loose, unsystematic life had continued indefinitely. Empire would have been a distant shadow, and its appalling instrument, Colonel Joll, would never have appeared. The Magistrate would have continued to exert his authority so lightly, so genially, that it would have amounted to constraint. But the Colonel removes that felicity, and tortures the Magistrate to take his official part in history and empire. Thereafter, transfiguration persists only as the desire for it, and as the nostalgia which gives images of the past their doomed life beyond the history that has otherwise defeated them. MUCH of this sentiment in Mr. Coetzee's novels, and not least in ''Foe,'' posits an ideal pastoral harmony between nature and man, a state free of cultural systems and formations. In ''Life & Times,'' when Michael goes back to the deserted house and farm once owned by the Visagies, he sets about cultivating a vegetable garden, planting seeds, growing pumpkins. Till the soldiers come, he is as content as he has ever been, a gardener at heart. Somewhere else, in the towns and cities, there is a war, but Michael keeps quiet, survives, tends his garden. When the soldiers take him to camp, he refuses to eat the camp food and quietly becomes a skeleton. The kind doctor sees him as a rudimentary man, made of clay, botched in some details - mouth, mind, sex - but good enough for a life of burrowing, and ready at any time to dig his grave and slip into it without fuss. So long as Michael feels himself in contact with the earth, he is not unhappy: for misery, he can rely upon institutions, structures, authority, the social determinants. The doctor would have said to the escaping Michael - he calls him Michaels, as if to recognize his representative force:

''Let me tell you the meaning of the sacred and alluring garden that blooms in the heart of the desert and produces the food of life. The garden for which you are presently heading is nowhere and everywhere except in the camps. It is another name for the only place where you belong, Michaels, where you do not feel homeless. It is off every map, no road leads to it that is merely a road, and only you know the way.''

Nowhere and everywhere: Utopia and the Earthly Paradise, except where systems are intolerable.

These novels, culminating in ''Foe,'' have a suggestion of parable about them. Sometimes they imagine further forms of man's inhumanity to man - ''Waiting for the Barbarians'' is extraordinarily convincing in this regard - and sometimes we are allowed to interpret them more specifically, their moral brought nearer home. Mr. Coetzee was born in Cape Town, and now teaches there. He has not been profuse in speaking of the situation in South Africa. Even in ''Life & Times of Michael K,'' technically a realistic novel, there is a certain fictive haze between the events and their local reference, a suggestion of ancestral lore and balladry. What the novels seem to say - though it would be indecent to attribute the saying to Mr. Coetzee himself, as a private citizen - is that there was a time, in South Africa and elsewhere, when life was agreeable, a matter of local custom and the drift of the seasons, the productive earth the beginning and the end. A COMPARISON with Kipling's ''Kim'' is not bizarre, because that book implies that India before the Fall was indeed an earthly paradise, open-hearted, diverse, nature's glory. If the Fall - the Mutiny of 1857 - had not happened, the lama could have gone on pilgrimage without danger of assault, and boys like Kim could have played as children of the earth. After the Fall - and here Kipling's political rhetoric swerves away from Mr. Coetzee's - it was necessary for Empire to assert itself again, more insistently, and to deploy a Secret Service which Kim, entering history, would join.

The comparison with ''Kim'' ends now. What Mr. Coetzee's novels imply is that every colonial society is caught between a past so seemingly changeless that it may be conceived as beyond time and history, and a present moment entirely given over to power, empire, history and the systems that further those interests. In ''Waiting for the Barbarians'' the past is rural, nomadic, pious, reverent. The Magistrate identifies himself with it to the extent of fancying that he has lived ''in the time of the seasons, of the harvests, of the migrations of the waterbirds,'' with nothing between him and the stars. Forced to become a term in the system of Empire, he identifies himself with the barbarians, those who live apart from the system till the army descends upon them. ''Shall I tell you what I sometimes wish?'' he says. ''I wish that these barbarians would rise up and teach us a lesson, so that we would learn to respect them.'' These people regard the Empire as transient, the secretion of a mere hundred years. One day the imperialists will pack their carts and return to wherever they came from, and leave the land to the mice and lizards:

''You smile? Shall I tell you something? Every year the lake-water grows a little more salty. There is a simple explanation -never mind what it is. The barbarians know this fact. At this very moment they are saying to themselves, 'Be patient, one of these days their crops will start withering from the salt, they will not be able to feed themselves, they will have to go.' That is what they are thinking. That they will outlast us.''

The book ends with a pastoral of children making a snowman.

In ''Foe'' the political parable issues from Friday's tonguelessness. Susan is beset by the question of responsibility; though it hardly matters whether Cruso or a slave-owner cut out Friday's tongue, the deed is done. Susan insists that her enterprise has two parts: she must regain the substance she has lost, and she must find ''a means of giving voice to Friday.'' Friday is ''the child of his silence, a child unborn, a child waiting to be born that cannot be born.'' Gaining Foe's interest at last, Susan engages him in an elaborate hermeneutical exercise in which she urges the claims of voice and he those of sight, meaning, perception, the eye. ''It is for us,'' she says, ''to open Friday's mouth and hear what it holds: silence, perhaps, or a roar, like the roar of a seashell held to the ear.'' Friday utters himself only in music and dancing. He can play one tune on a rudimentary flute: when he finds Foe's cloak, he drapes it around his shoulders and - it is one of the imaginative triumphs of ''Foe'' - dances to an unheard music. Foe, who has evidently been reading Jacques Derrida's ''De la Grammatologie,'' wants to teach Friday to write: ''Writing is not doomed to be the shadow of speech,'' he tells Susan. ''Speech is but a means through which the word may be uttered, it is not the word itself.'' NEAR the end, the parable virtually breaks its cover. Perhaps we who can speak are secretly grateful that Friday can't, because ''we can tell ourselves his desires are dark to us, and continue to use him as we wish.'' No, Susan answers: ''Friday's desires are not dark to me. He desires to be liberated, as I do too. Our desires are plain, his and mine. But how is Friday to recover his freedom, who has been a slave all his life? That is the true question. Should I liberate him into a world of wolves and expect to be commended for it? . . . Even in his native Africa . . . would he know freedom?''

The end of the book is ambiguous: who is speaking, in the last few pages? I take it as the voice of the poetic imagination, its sympathies expanding beyond all systems to reach the defeated, the silenced, in a gesture which I associate, perhaps arbitrarily, with Joyce's imagining at the end of ''The Dead.'' Joyce's Gabriel Conroy looks from the window of the hotel bedroom. ''His soul swooned slowly,'' we are told, ''as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.''