“Faux Apparitions: Angels or Cannibals, Between Coetzee and Defoe”

ABSTRACT

How should the relation between Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) be theorised? Using the paradigm of angels and cannibals – figures that appear throughout both texts – I suggest that most attempts to read Coetzee and Defoe together have failed to appreciate the stakes of this question. Angels and cannibals are dialectically entwined: the cannibal is the one who anticipates the angel as an end; the angel is the one who awakens to the cannibalism of the present. Only a form of criticism that fully recognizes this fact can refunction the cannibalism of literary studies – which each time devours the texts it takes as its objects – into an angel of the coming times. Foe is not a corrective to Robinson Crusoe, its ideal or end. Instead, it embraces it as a fellow cannibal.

To what extremes of destitutions must we be driven for our souls to become visibly apparent on our hands, our faces, our eyes, in our gestures and our sublimated bodies – as if emanating from every part of our bodes?

– Michel Serres, Angels, 17.

In his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, “He and His Man”, J.M. Coetzee returns once again to Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Friday, who has in this version learned to read and write, tours Britain, we learn, dispatching letters back to his master. Robinson Crusoe himself, now back in the comfort of his home country, is assailed by the chatter of civilization – “It seemed to him […] that there was too much speech in the world” – and “debtors [who] descend upon him like flies or like crows.” At this point in the speech, there appears a long passage describing the relation between the text, Robinson Crusoe, supposedly authored by the titular character (Robinson Crusoe himself), and its various imitations (sometimes called Robinsonades):

When the first bands of plagiarists and imitators descended upon his island history and foisted on the public their own feigned stories of the castaway life, they seemed to him no more or less than a horde of cannibals falling upon his own flesh, that is to say, his life; and he did not scruple to say so. When I defended myself against the cannibals, who sought to strike me down and roast me and devour me, he wrote, I thought I defended myself against the thing itself. Little did I guess, he wrote, that these cannibals were but figures of a more devilish voracity, that would gnaw at the very substance of truth.

But now, reflecting further, there begins to creep into his breast a touch of fellow-feeling for his imitators. For it seems to him now that there are but a handful of stories in the world; and if the young are to be forbidden to prey upon the old then they must sit for ever in silence. (“He and His Man”)

Crusoe wards off the cannibals, which are also, he thinks, “the thing itself.” Daniel Defoe, for his part, seems to mention “the thing itself” mostly in reference to providence and apparitions: “All this seem’d inconsistent with the Thing it self, and with all the Notions we usually entertain of the Subtilty of the Devil” (Crusoe 131); “I have first given you several Specimens of real Apparitions well attested [that] all together may convince the Reader of the Reason and Reality of the thing it self” (Essay 7). The thing itself seems to allude to the various spirits found throughout Defoe’s oeuvre. In the example from Coetzee’s speech, these take the infernal form of cannibals (We shall see there is good reason to suppose that cannibals for both Coetzee and Defoe belong to the realm of apparitions: “Is that not why ghosts return,” says Susan Barton to Foe, “to drink the blood of the living?” 139). But there is more. For when Crusoe considers that these cannibals “were but figures of a more devilish voracity, that would gnaw at the very substance of truth” we might understand “the thing itself” in another sense still. It is also a reference to the philosophical tradition that stems from Kant: das Ding an sich, the noumenon, “the very substance of truth.” It is not, however, difficult to reconcile these two meanings. If there “begins to creep into [Robinson Crusoe’s] breast a touch of fellow feeling for his imitators,” this can only be because the truth – the thing itself – is at the same a cannibal. As a way to begin, Coetzee’s speech stages the impossibility of beginning. For what one took as the origin was only an apparition.

Contagion

If we continue reading Coetzee’s Nobel Acceptance Speech, we eventually encounter a reference to Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year. The passage concerns the appearance of an angel during the Great Plague of London:

I came upon a crowd in the street, he writes, and a woman in their midst pointing to the heavens. See, she cries, an angel in white brandishing a flaming sword! And the crowd all nod among themselves, Indeed it is so, they say: an angel with a sword! But he, the saddler, can see no angel, no sword. All he can see is a strange-shaped cloud brighter on the one side than the other, from the shining of the sun. It is an allegory! Cries the woman in the street; but he can see no allegory for the life of him. Thus in his report. (“He and His Man”)

Where the band of cannibals from earlier in the speech preys on flesh and bones, the allegory of the “angel in white” threatens to vanish into air. There will be reason to dwell on this imagery at greater length in the coming pages. What is important for now is to note another hidden allusion here – in addition to Defoe’s A Journal of a Plague Year – to a prior text of Coetzee’s, namely, Elizabeth Costello. We read there of contagion and angels with flaming swords too:

A time of affliction I call the present time; yet in the company of my Philip I too have moments when soul and body are one, when I am ready to burst out in the tongues of angels. My raptures I call these spells. They come to me – I write without blushing, this is no time for blushing – in my husband’s arms. He alone is guide to me; with no other man would I know them. Soul and body he speaks to me, in a speaking without speech; into me, soul and body, he presses what are no longer words but flaming swords.

We are not meant to live thus, Sir. Flaming swords I say my Philip presses into me, swords that are not words; but they are neither flaming swords nor are they words. It is like a contagion, saying one thing always for another (like a contagion, I say: barely did I hold myself back from saying, a plague of rats, for rats are everywhere about us these days). (Elizabeth Costello 228)

If the cannibalism of “plagiarists and imitators” models a time of elusive origins – in which “the thing itself” is at once the truth and its frustration – the time of angels offers another paradigm of semantic relation. Where plagues of rats and hordes of cannibals characterize “the present time,” the time to come will be one in which giants and angels “stride the earth:” “There may come a time when such extreme souls as I write of may be able to bear their afflictions but that time is not now. It will be a time, if ever it comes, when giants or perhaps angels stride the earth” (Costello 229). No longer “saying one thing always for another,” soul and body, origin and copy, have been restituted here and speak only in the heavenly tongue of their union. The angel Philip inaugurates a totally new form of relation between the two meanings of “the thing itself” (the truth and its imitation). Words and things have disappeared entirely (“they are neither flaming swords nor are they words”) because the sign, no longer devouring its signified, instead rests comfortably in an embrace with its meaning. It is as if, to anticipate the argument that will unfold in this essay, the new form of relation between original and the copy is not a relation at all. The two have instead fallen into each other’s arms and can no longer be told apart (“They come to me […],” says Costello, “in my husband’s arms […] Philip presses into me swords that are not words”). What is in any case clear is that our time is not yet this time. Ours is the time of contagion and cannibals, of saying one thing always for another.

I want to use these two paradigms – of cannibals and of angels – to rethink a relation that, although written about extensively, is still too often taken for granted: between the original The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), written by Daniel Defoe, and its copy, J.M. Coetzee’s Foe. One need only summon up some examples from the last few years: “the novel of which Foe is a rewriting, Robinson Crusoe, is probably Western Culture’s most potent crystallization of its concern with the survival of the individual, the fundamentals of civilized life, and the dialectic of master and servant” (Attridge 70); “The novel’s emphasis on (un)likeness serves to counter the idea of adequacy – of a simple one-to-one identity, or lack thereof, between figure and ground – that the original Robinson Crusoe depends upon” (Bongie 269); “Robinson Crusoe, like so many other texts, is not only, as I have said, ripe for retelling, it positively rots from the once solid ribs of the Symbolic” (Morgan 83); “Susan Barton’s decision to tell her version of the island’s history implies that Coetzee’s text will resist bondage to its patriarchal master text” (Macaskill & Colleran 133) etc. Like Susan Barton admonishing the ghoulish child who claims to be her daughter – “You must think of a better story!” (78) – the lust for rewritings, counter-narratives and correctives seems complicit with precisely the contagion Coetzee cautions against. “Whether the object is read with a view to evaluate it according to available norms,” so Wayne Stables writes, “or as a means to show how these norms are exceeded, something is prone to remain the same: the object precedes the act of criticism” (1536). Robinson Crusoe is reduced to just such an “object” – the “thing in itself” of an original emptiness. Casting judgment on its “patriarchal master text,” Foe would descend on the island of Robinson Crusoe and leave nothing but bones behind. But is not another paradigm possible? How might we read Foe in a way that does justice to Robinson Crusoe without swallowing it? What would it take to refunction Foe, in other words, from a cannibal into an angel? This essay presents itself as an attempt to answer these questions.

Apparitions

Let us begin again, then, this time with Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe has salvaged some ink and paper from the wreckage in order to record his “State of Affairs” and also, he tells us, to “set the good against the Evil, that I might have something to distinguish my Case from worse […], like Debtor and Creditor” (Crusoe 57). On a date marked “June 27,” we read of a dream that befalls Crusoe in which he is visited by an apparition:

I thought, that I was sitting on the Ground on the Outside of my Wall, where I sat when the Storm blew after the Earthquake, and that I saw a Man descend from a great black Cloud, in a bright Flame of Fire, and light upon the Ground: He was all over as bright as a Flame, so that I could but just bear to look towards him; his Countenance was most inexpressibly dreadful, impossible for Words to describe; when he stepp’d upon the Ground with his Feet, I thought the Earth trembl’d, just as it had done before in the Earthquake, and all the Air look’d, to my Apprehension, as if it had been fill’d with Flashes of Fire.

He was no sooner landed upon the Earth, but he moved forward towards me, with a long Spear or Weapon in his Hand, to kill me; and when he came to a rising Ground, at some Distance, he spoke to me, or I heard a Voice so terrible, that it is impossible to express the Terror of it; all that I can say, I understood, was this, Seeing all these Things have not brought thee to Repentance, now thou shalt die: At which Words, I thought he lifted up the Spear that was in his Hand, to kill me. (Crusoe 75)

For readers of Daniel Defoe’s An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions, the indeterminacy of this vision – a “Man” who “was all over as bright as a Flame” and whose “Countenance was most inexpressibly dreadful” – will perhaps not come as a surprise. It is a mark of all true apparitions, according to Defoe’s angelology, that one cannot tell based on appearance alone whether they are evil angels or good angels, incarnations of devils or providence: “IT is as difficult too to determine whether the Spirits that appear are good or evil, or both; the only Conclusion upon that Point is to be made from the Errand they come about” (Essay 7). But the predicament Crusoe finds himself is precisely the legibility of that “Errand.” Not only eluding physical description, the apparition’s voice, too, seems to press at the very edges of speech: “he spoke to me, or I heard a Voice so terrible, that it is impossible to express the Terror of it.” Crusoe cannot convey the content of the message, but only its general affect: “all that I can say, I understood, was this, Seeing all these Things have not brought thee to Repentance, now thou shalt die.” Jayne Elizabeth Lewis teases out what Defoe calls “the Oeconomie of the Invisible World”¹: “If apparitions were anything, then, they were representations of the strangely suspended conditions of their own sightings” (118, 119). For Crusoe, who is here being called on to bear witness to a thing that is not a thing, everything hinges on how he responds. The apparition, we shall see, marks a point of undecidability between the time of redemption and the time of cannibalism. It is the harbinger of a humanity who, although the “Things” it needs for its salvation are ready to hand (“all these Things have not brough thee to Repentance”), may nevertheless die unredeemed, as a “Debtor.”

The indeterminacy between angel and demon will also, at times, menace the line that separates man from apparition. In the same History and Reality of Apparitions, Defoe explains that, because angels most often appear in the guise of men – “an apparition assumes the shape and appearance of man himself” – some may be said to have “entertain’d angels unawares” (Essay 18). After Friday’s father and the rescued Spaniard depart for “the Main” on a mission to save the latter’s compatriots, Crusoe grows suspicious of an English long boat he spies moored off the coast of the island. That the English sailors spell trouble is soon confirmed by the prisoners they carry to shore. (Friday, meanwhile, suspects the sailors to be cannibals preparing for a feast). Crusoe and Friday, “Spectre-like,” go to free the prisoners:

The poor Man with Tears running down his Face, and trembling, looking like one astonish’d, return’d, Am I talking to God, or Man! Is it a real Man, or an Angel! Be in no fear about that, Sir, said I, if God had sent an Angel to relieve you, he would have come better Cloath’d, and Arm’d after another manner than you see me in; pray lay aside your Fears, I am a Man, an English-man, and dispos’d to assist you, you see […]. (Crusoe 214)

This is not the last time Robinson Crusoe will be taken for a specter or angel. Charles Gildon, who authored perhaps the most well-known Robinsonade pamphlet, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Mr. D – De F, of London Hosier (1719), has Crusoe and Friday haunt their author, Daniel Defoe, in a dream in which the latter is forced to eat and swallow his own book. Homer Obed Brown has suggested that Crusoe, as an avatar of Defoe, stands for the figure of Providence – “While Defoe is impersonating Robinson Crusoe, he is also impersonating on another level Providence itself” (80) – and Daniel Johnson supposes that “Crusoe becomes [in the course of the novel] something of a spectre himself” (256). It is as if the apparition that descends on Crusoe in his dream, and which threatens to kill him, was nothing but an imitation of himself. Indeed, another scene from the second half of Robinson Crusoe, which depicts a mirror reflection of Crusoe’s initial dream vision, appears to support this hypothesis. Debating whether the cannibals, who had just been attacked by Crusoe and his party, would return to exact revenge, Crusoe relays Friday’s speech in indirect discourse – but in a symbolic reversal, Crusoe and Friday now resemble the spirit who, in Crusoe’s dream, had descended, if we recall, “from a great black Cloud” and filled the air “with Flashes of Fire:”

it was his [Friday’s] Opinion that they [the cannibals] were so dreadfully frighted with the Manner of their being attack’d, the Noise and the Fire, that he believed they would tell their People, they were all kill’d by Thunder and Lightning, not by the Hand of Man, and that the two which appear’d, (viz.) Friday and me, were two Heavenly Spirits or Furies, come down to destroy them, and not Men with Weapons. (Crusoe 204)

In order to save Friday’s father – who is also a cannibal – from the fate of being eaten by cannibals, Friday and Crusoe appeared as “two Heavenly Spirits or Furies”. (Very similar imagery is used to express Crusoe’s rescue of Friday, after which Friday prays to Crusoe as a deity: “he came close to me, and then he kneel’d down again, kiss’d the Ground, and laid his Head upon the Ground, and taking me by the Foot, set my Foot upon his Head,” 172). It seems that rescue – and rescue from the time of cannibalism, above all – depends in this story on Crusoe assuming the shape of an angel. The threshold in which man and angel seem no longer strictly determinable is also where – and this exhibited so many times throughout Robinson Crusoe that it cannot be taken as merely incidental – man comes to save man from, in a certain sense, himself (the cannibal from the cannibals, the Englishman from the Englishmen etc.). So much for the time of angels.

Let us now consider the form of the cannibal in Robinson Crusoe. Dianne Armstrong has suggested they are in fact an allegory for the God Cronus (i.e., Saturn) who eats his own children (208). But we need no recourse to psychoanalysis to appreciate the supernatural patina they are so often imbued with. They are described, in turn, as “inhuman” (140), “hellish” (141), “Monsters” (142), “Creatures” (142) and Crusoe’s aversion to them is nothing short of religious: “I was fearful of seeing them, as of seeing the Devil himself” (141). (Just before calling off his mass slaughter of the cannibals, Crusoe reasons that they have been “abandon’d of Heaven:” “to act such horrid Things, and receive such dreadful Customs, as nothing but Nature entirely abandon’d of Heaven, and acted by some hellish Degeneracy, could have run them into,” (144). There is in fact good biblical precedence for the unclear status of angels and cannibals. In the Book of Genesis, for example, we read of the Nephilim – angels that are also sometimes named as “giants” – who are responsible for the world’s descent into sin before the Great Flood. The Book of Enoch, which is considered apocryphal, elaborates on the sin of cannibalism these “watchers” or “angels” commit: “And these consumed all the acquisitions of men till men could no longer sustain them | Then the giants turned them against mankind in order to devour them | And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood thereof” (65). It is unclear whether Defoe read the Book of Enoch, despite a fairly lengthy tract on Genesis in his The Political History of the Devil (1727), although he would have encountered a variant of the story in Michel de Montaigne’s “Of Cannibalism” (1580).² But even without specific knowledge of the apocrypha, it is unlikely that the blurring of the distinction between angel and cannibal is any less decisive for interpretations of Robinson Crusoe than that between angel and savior.

If, throughout Robinson Crusoe, man becomes apparition-like in order to rescue fellow man, it is no less true that the language of apparitions might be deployed in service of Crusoe’s greatest fear, cannibalism. In the semantic sphere where man and angel coincide, we either find the hell of cannibalism or the principle of salvation, either the time of contagion or the time of angels, but we can never tell which in advance. It is as if the apparition itself were merely a blank or a clearing, an unspeakable figure, “impossible for Words to describe,” suspended between these two antithetical possibilities. The time of angels, redemption, is in this way initially indistinguishable from hell, the time of cannibals.

Terracing

This is precisely the ambiguity with which Foe begins too. After slipping off the side of her rowboat, Susan Barton makes for the shoreline of the island where she lies “sprawled on the hot sand” until the “dark shadow” of Friday falls upon her: “not of a cloud but of a man with a dazzling halo about him” (Foe 5). But it is not only the dark cloud or the halo that draws our gaze from this angel to the one that appears in Robinson Crusoe’s dream vision. For here, like there, the apparition carries a spear: “At his side he had a spear. I have come to the wrong island, I thought, and let my head sink: I have come to an island of cannibals” (6). The ease with which angel passes into cannibal – and, indeed, cannibal passes into angel – recurs in various guises throughout Foe, least of all in a clear allusion to the Nephilim, the beasts that eat mankind, who are taken as an allegory for the island itself. “As you have walked on the hillsides or clambered on the cliffs in quest of eggs,” Barton asks Cruso,

have you never been struck of a sudden by the living, breathing quality of this island, as if it were some great beast from before the Flood that has slept through the centuries insensible of the insects scurrying on its back, scratching an existence for themselves? (89)

The great antediluvian mass of the island exists as a sediment of the sin – which is not unrelated to that of angel copulating with man – that the Flood did not manage to completely expunge. “For surely eating human flesh is like falling into sin,” Barton muses later, “having fallen once you discover a taste for it, and fall all the more readily thereafter” (94). Friday, as with the island and Nephilim, marks the indeterminacy between angel and cannibal, the apparition or form of appearance that continually suspends its own conditions of emergence.

Let us try get a clearer understanding of this complex relation between cannibals and angels by considering the labors performed on the island. We know that the work to which Friday (the angel or cannibal) is put is a kind of terracing. “Within each terrace the ground was leveled and cleared” Barton explains, “the stones that made up the walls had been dug out of the earth or borne from elsewhere one by one” (33). The drudgery is undertaken not only to secure some trace of the Cruso’s existence – “I will leave behind my terraces and my walls” (18) – but also to ward off the idleness of the present, not to mention gift something to the future:

I asked Cruso how many stones had gone into the walls. A hundred thousand or more, he replied. A mighty labour, I remarked. But privately I thought: Is bare earth, baked by the sun and walled about, to be preferred to pebbles and bushes and swarms of birds? “Is it your plan to clear the whole island of growth, and turn it into terraces?” I asked. “It would be the work of many men and many lifetimes to clear the whole island,” he replied; by which I saw he chose to understand only the letter of my question. “And what will you be planting, when you plant?” I asked. “The planting is not for us,” said he. “We have nothing to plant – that is our misfortune.” And he looked at me with such sorry dignity, I could have bit my tongue. “The planting is reserved for those who come after us and have the foresight to bring seed. I only clear the ground for them. Clearing ground and piling stones is little enough, but it is better than sitting in idleness.” (33)

Rather than while away the time doing nothing, Cruso would rather do nothing: which is to say, clear an opening. This is no doubt why the act of terracing is anaphorically linked to the act of not acting: “When I had exhausted my questions to Cruso about the terraces, and the boat he would not build, and the journal he would not keep, and the tools he would not save from the wreck, and Friday’s tongue, there was nothing left to talk of save the weather” (34). The terracing is nevertheless consuming enough, Cruso tells Barton, to swallow a number of lifetimes (“It would be the work of many men and many lifetimes to clear the whole island”) – even if it is not, in the strict sense, to be considered useful at present. “It seemed to me,” Barton surmises, “he might occupy his time as well in digging for gold, or digging graves, first for himself and Friday and then if he wished for all the castaways of the future history of the island, and for me too” (34). Cruso’s terraces are indeed more like the “dreadful gulf[s]” we find in Defoe’s A Journal from a Plague Year (1722), into which masses of the dead and dying are cast: “for all the bodies that were thrown in were immediately covered with earth by those they called buriers, which at other times were called bearers” (Plague Year 59). Between the walls that will testify to its existence and the moment (still to come) in which the terraces will be planted with seed, this moment, now, is what is continually buried by a labor bereft of any use. Terracing is like a delinquent writing – if one may call it that – bent on inscribing what cannot be expressed in words; and the bare earth is like an apparition, an indecipherable message of “the future history of the island.”

Given the apparent similarity between cannibalism and this work that devours and buries the lives of its workers, it is perhaps unsurprising that Cruso’s terraces will be mistaken, at least in some hypothetical future, for the “ruins of a cannibal city:” “And of the walls they will say, These are cannibal walls, the ruins of a cannibal city, from the golden age of the cannibals” (54–55); nor, perhaps, that Cruso himself becomes in Barton’s eyes something of a cannibal: “No pirates landed on our shores, no freebooters, no cannibals save yourself, if you can be called a cannibal” (81). Why do Friday and Cruso labor in this way, as cannibals? Why cannibals and not something other? We discover it is because they are beholden to the apparitions of the end: “The planting is reserved for those who come after us and have the foresight to bring seed,” says Cruso. But who are “those that come after us”? They are mentioned at several times in Foe: as “seafarers [who] would come with a sack of corn for them to sow” (55); as “some saviour castaway [who will] arrive in a boat with a sack of corn at his feet” (32); but perhaps most intriguingly, as “a golden-haired stranger with a sack of corn” (67). If it is true, as Alena Dvorakova remarks, that Coetzee “is familiar with Nietzsche’s writing to the point where he feels able to use easily and identifiably Nietzschean ‘formulae’” (360), and, as Tzvetan Todorov holds, that “Coetzee’s real inspiration, even if he refers to him only in passing, is Nietzsche” (31), then it is entirely possible that “a golden-haired stranger” is a reference to Nietzsche’s Übermensch, “the Grim golden-locked | Lion monster” (Nietzsche 251). (It is very likely that the description of Cruso’s island in terms of the Nephilim, the beasts before the Flood – “as if it were some great beast […] insensible of the insects scurrying on its back” – is another allusion to Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His kind is ineradicable, like the flea-beetle,” 10).

If this allusion holds true, then Cruso is none other than the one on whom Zarathustra calls to make of the earth a home for the Übermensch: “I love the one who works and invents in order to build a house for the overman [Übermensch] and to prepare the earth, animal and plants for him: for thus he wants his going under” (8). The Übermensch (who also, it just so happens, descends from a “dark cloud,” 12) is the blond-haired stranger who brings corn and sows seeds, the redeemer of what seems futile and empty at present: “Dead are all gods: now we want the overman to live” (59). The present is thus formed according to the image of its end. And the overman is articulated in the bare earth. He is the angel of the coming humanity.

The Cannibal

It is now possible to theorize the uneasy distinction between angel and cannibal without further ambiguity. If Cruso and Friday’s work has meaning only with an eye to the “golden-haired stranger,” the angel or Übermensch, who will bring the tilled soil to fruition – and if we can rightly call this work cannibalistic, not only because its products might be confused one day for the ruins of a cannibal city, but primarily because theirs is a labor that produces and consumes their life – then this suggests that what is diabolic in our present is precisely that which assumes the future as its ideal. What makes us cannibals today is the same thing that would fend cannibalism off. The cannibal is precisely the one who anticipates the angel yet to come. I am not the first to offer this definition. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, for instance, have suggested that “the meaning of cannibalism is […] eating the name [and] it is animated by a keen sentiment of what is to come” (118). And in his Totem and Taboo, Freud comes to understand the “more sublime motivation” for cannibalism:

By absorbing parts of the body of another person through the act of eating we also come to possess the properties which belonged to that person […] We can therefore see how true Tyler’s quoted characteristic of magic: ‘mistaking an ideal connection for a real one,” proves to be. (112, 113)

In his aspiration to imbibe the future, the cannibal presupposes an “ideal” in place of the “real.” This no doubt bears on literature too. For as long as it cannot reconcile itself to this fact, criticism becomes infernal in its desire to conjure a vision out of what has already elapsed. “Closing my eyes,” Barton remarks, “I gather my strength and send out a vision of the island to hang before you like a substantial body” (53). That which morphs the island text, Defoe’s or Coetzee’s, into a “substantial body” – an object for critics to sink their teeth into – in fact leaves it dead like a statue: “Why do you think we do not kiss statues, and sleep with statues in our beds, men with the statues of women and women with the statues of men, statues carved in postures of desire?” Barton asks Friday, rhetorically, “it is not because the statue is cold but because it is dead” (79). Rewritings, counter-narratives and correctives are cannibalistic because they desire a dead end, and are willing to barter a contagious body of work with its angelic equivalent.

But if not the “golden-haired stranger,” who is to come and save us from ourselves? Perhaps we have missed something. Let us return to this idea of the Übermensch, who has the roar of a beast, the golden mane of a lion and who is to arrive, at least in Foe, as a “stranger.” For Cruso, if we read him very carefully, is described by Barton in precisely these terms too: “Cruso himself with his lion’s mane” (67) and “great beard he never cut and his yellow eyes” (30). “I knew it was all true,” Barton laments, “I was indeed cast away on an island with a man named Cruso, who though an Englishman was as strange to me as a Laplander” (30). Is it possible that the Übermensch Cruso awaits – the blond-beast of a stranger – is none other than Cruso himself?³ Could his infernal terracing be explained by what he does not see: that he is himself the angelic messenger, not of a future apparition, but of an already attained present? Is the age in which angels and giants stride the earth inaugurated when we learn what was already apparent on Defoe’s Island, that man has always been indistinguishable from angels? There are times when Susan Barton might agree:

I recall an author reflecting that after death we may find ourselves not among choirs of angels but in some quite ordinary place, as for instance, a bath-house on a hot afternoon, with spiders dozing in the corners; at the time it will seem like any Sunday in the country; only later will it come home to us that we are in eternity. (113–114)

The angel and the cannibal are in this way dialectically entangled. And Cruso, growing “pale as a ghost,” cannot survive the journey away from his island text: “With every passing day he was conveyed farther from the kingdom he pined for, to which he would never find his way again. He was a prisoner, and I, despite myself, his gaoler” (43). Just as so many critics claim Foe functions as the future ideal of Robinson Crusoe, its angelic end, so the thing itself, transported like cargo, is sucked and cleared of meaning – reduced to an insubstantial specter of itself. If the cannibal is the one who presupposes the angel of the future, perhaps the angel is the one who awakens to the cannibalism of the present.

Idle Fridays

Susan Barton appeals to Mr Foe: “When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: a being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso […] Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr Foe: that is my entreaty” (51). It is surprising that no critic, apart from a brief mention in J.S. Bolin’s “Thresholds of the Novel” (447), seems to have remarked on the significance Coetzee’s 1982 essay, “Idleness in South Africa,” (or, indeed, “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee” in Dusklands (1974), out of which that essay was presumably born) has had for Foe, which was written only a few years afterward (1986). Even on a cursory reading of that essay, one would struggle to deny the correspondences between “the Boer” and Cruso, or between “the Hottentot” [Khoisan] and Friday. Just as the Khoisan community, for example, is described by 19th century anthropologists of the Cape as possessing not “a language of human articulations” but rather one of “animal noises” and are “to be counted among the dumb beasts” (Coetzee “Idleness” 5), so Susan Barton mulls over Friday: “I had given to Friday’s life as little thought as I would have a dog’s or any other dumb beasts” (32). And when Friday obstinately refuses to relinquish his flute, Barton fumes in the language of Empire: “How like a savage to master a strange instrument – to the extent that he is able without a tongue – and then be content forever to play one tune upon it! It is a form of incuriosity, is it not, a form of sloth” (95); “What had held Friday back all these years from beating in his master’s head with a stone while he slept, so bringing slavehood to an end and inaugurating a reign of idleness?” (Foe 36–7). “Idleness, indolence, sloth, laziness, torpor,” Coetzee writes in his essay, “these terms are meant both to define a Hottentot vice and to distance the writer from it” (“Idleness” 3). It is crucial not only that much attention is paid to the Khoisan diet, which supposedly consists of raw meat and entrails (ethnographers charge that “the Hottentots [Khoisan] are ugly, that they never wash but on the contrary smear themselves with animal fat, that their food is unclean, that their meat is barely cooked, that they wear skins, that they live in the meanest huts […] that their speech is not like that of human beings,” 5) but that Khoisan idleness is primarily seen as a sin that shirks the labors of repentance: “preachers placed increasing emphasis on work as the fundamental divine edict, an edict that all men must obey to atone for Adam’s fall. To be idle was to defy the edict […] In Calvinism in particular, Max Weber writes, waste of time [becomes] … the first and in principle deadliest sin” (“Idleness” 4). According to the protestant work ethic of Weber, to be truly idle is to reside in sin. The Khoisan, on the other hand, provides an exemplary model of a community that has no need to presuppose its future, and so rests content in the full substance of its present.

Cruso, on the other hand, must surely be considered in terms of the Boers, who are described in “Idleness in South Africa” as “living in mean dwellings set on vast tracts, barely literate, rudely clad, surrounded by slaves and servants with too little employment, disdainful of manual labor, content to carry on subsistence farming in a land of potential plenty” (“Idleness” 9). What is most scandalous about the Boer, however, is that his languor places the colonial project in jeopardy:

The spokesmen of colonialism are dismayed by the squalor and sloth of Boer life because it affords sinister evidence of how European stock can regress after a few generations in Africa […] In being content to scratch no more than a bare living from the soil, the Boer seems further to betray the colonizing mission, since in order to justify its conquests colonialism has to demonstrate that the colonist is a better steward of the earth than the native. (“Idleness” 9)

In the language of Foe, we might say that Friday and Cruso live on their island at the very threshold of European civilization, the demonic point beyond which the colonial mission would be shipwrecked without the possibility of rescue. This means that the labor of terracing – which is “better than sitting idle” – is precisely what guards against the “regress” into the sloth and squalor of Khoisan and Boer. In fact, Ian Watt has shown that the castaway stories on which Defoe depended for source material evidenced precisely this relapse: “In Defoe’s sources for Robinson Crusoe what actually happened to the castaways was at best uninspiring. At worst, harassed by fear and dogged by ecological degradation, they sank more and more to the level of animals, lost the use of speech, went mad, or died of inanition” (87). Because terracing ensures that the time of torpor will be put to work so that days of rest might be enjoyed as leisure rather than laziness, it is not only the very limit case of instrumental reason, but the capitalist activity par excellence (even more so than Defoe’s Crusoe’s cunning industry, or what Peter Mcdonald rightly calls Susan Barton’s “countervailing individualism,” 204). For the only thing standing between Cruso becoming like the Khoisan or Boer of colonial ethnography – and the only legitimate claim he has to being a better steward of the earth, not to mention Friday’s master – is the work of clearing a space for those who are still to come, the “blond stranger” that will plant seed. The imagination of an end in this way thwarts the very thing it would bring about: redemption. And the fundamental question of literary criticism becomes: how might one transpose a textual relation – the cannibalism of original and copy, the labor that incessantly clears the ground of meaning – into the renewed idleness of Khoisan and Boer?

Recovered Eden

Cruso aspires to build a garden of labor: “your master would have had it [the island] be a garden of labour,” Barton remarks, “but, lacking a worthy object for his labours, descended to carrying stones, as ants carry grains of sand to and fro for want of better occupation” (Foe 86). Where no object exists, Cruso is forced to engender his own. And yet no one seems to ask whether such a labor – which everywhere maintains the rule of master over slave, which always works through Fridays – is compatible with life lived in the garden of Eden. No one stops to think that terracing might be a far more rapacious kind of cannibalism. “[N]o one bothers to put, save rhetorically,” says Coetzee, “the ethical question: which is better, to live like the ant, busily storing up food for the winter, or like the grasshopper, singing in the sun all day, heedless of the morrow?” (“Idleness” 4). Perhaps, on the contrary, were he to give up the ghost of his labors, Cruso would attain to his garden of Eden and he and Friday would fall back into a state of innocence (as we find, for instance, in The Life and Times of Michael K. or even, in a far from simple sense, with David Lurie’s dog-opera in Disgrace and the beggars in Waiting for the Barbarians). “Nowhere in the great echo chamber of the Discourse of the Cape is a voice raised to ask whether the life of the Hottentot [Khoisan] may not be a version of life before the Fall,” Coetzee writes in a passage that at first glance seems naïve, perhaps even romantic, but nevertheless contains the truth of a platitude,

a life in which man is not yet condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow, but instead may spend his days dozing in the sun, or in the shade when the sun grows too hot, half-aware of the singing of the birds and the breeze on his skin, bestirring himself to eat when hunger overtakes him, enjoying a pipe of tobacco when it is available, at one with his surroundings and unreflectively content. (“Idleness” 3)

It is as if everything relied on Cruso’s capacity to ward off this life of the Khoisan – for then he would be no better than a Boer who falls into the arms of his former slave. A life without terracing, without the empty or inexpressible apparitions that stand over and above us, would truly be a life in which the fullness of nothing is lived – as opposed to a life of frantically doing nothing, making preparations for a non-future, reducing all apparitions or texts to blank clearings.

And “if we ignore the dirty skins, the clouds of flies, the rude clothing,” Coetzee continues,

can these frontier farmers [the Boers] not [also] be said to stand for a rejection of the curse of discipline and labour in favour of a prelapsarian African way of life in which the fruits of the earth are enjoyed as they drop into the hand, work is avoided as a scourge, and idleness and leisure become the same thing? […] Certainly no one asks whether the torpor of the Hottentot or the sloth of the Boer is a sign that all wants have been met, all desires have been stilled, and Eden has been recovered. (“Idleness” 10)

The cannibalistic labors of Friday, in which days of rest cannot be differentiated from days of work and otherness is produced for its consumption, are saved, it seems, only with the angelic idleness of Friday, in which, as Coetzee writes, “the fruits of the earth are enjoyed as they drop into the hand, work is avoided as a scourge, and idleness and leisure become the same thing.” To salvage Eden would thus mean turning our gaze away from the apparition of the angel, the Übermensch and the ideal equivalent, but only because we come to see that we are already Übermenschen, and have, in a sense, rescued ourselves from ourselves. “What if Friday and his countryfolk,” Coetzee asks in his essay on Robinson Crusoe, “are unfallen creatures, in no need of redemption?” (“Daniel Defoe” 22). The same might be asked of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe : “[Have you considered that] your search for a way out of the maze,” asks Foe, “might start from that point and return to it as many times as are needed till you discover yourself to be saved?” (136). Each attempt to rewrite that text, to clear it of what offends or to trouble its assumptions, must in the first place find an exit from its maze. But such a search may soon discover it has been sentenced to the very same judgment it has passed on what it seeks to escape: “This island is our punishment,” says Barton, “this island and one another’s company, to the death. My judgment on Cruso was not always so harsh” (37). If idleness can be considered a recovered Eden – a time of angels – this is not because it lays claim to an outside, an unfallen substance or unmediated grasp of its object, but rather because it learns that rescue resides where the beginning was once thought to be. True idleness couples itself to an origin that is also an apparition. Foe, in other words, must learn to embrace Robinson Crusoe. “I lie against Cruso,” says Barton, “[…] I spread myself over him, I stroke his body with my thighs. ‘I am swimming in you, my Cruso,’ I whisper, and swim. He is a tall man, I a tall woman. This is our coupling” (44). Later in the text, Barton reminisces over this moment:

But the reader is bound to ask why it was that, in all the nights I shared your master’s hut, he and I did not come together more than once as man and woman do. Is the answer that our island was not a garden of desire, like that in which our first parents went naked, and coupled as innocently as beasts? (86)

This is how we might understand the thing itself too. For the truth is not a lie per se, it is the cannibal with which we must learn to lie and spread ourselves over. Sharing the same hut, the same island, even the same story, Foe would no longer stand over and above Robinson Crusoe, as an apparition and cannibal, but neither would Robinson Crusoe be the patriarchal master text of Foe. They would instead come to swim in each other’s arms – like Elizabeth Costello and her angel, Philip, or like the Khoisan and Boer in their garden of desire.

Pure Media

But nothing in the whole Course of his Providence is more worthy our Regard, especially as it concerns us his Creatures, than the silent Voice

–Daniel Defoe, Serious Reflections

The angel of a redeemed humankind arrives when it no longer points beyond itself, when the apparition recognizes that the message it was supposed to transmit was not of an end but only of a means. This is what Walter Benjamin suggests when he writes, in his “Critique of Violence” (1921), of a “pure means” or a means without end (239). It is all the more interesting that recent scholars of Daniel Defoe’s philosophy of apparitions have pointed to the medial nature of their occurrence. “Crusoe and Mahmut agree,” writes Sara Landreth, for instance, “that, rather than attempt to understand the mind/soul [Landreth makes no distinction between mind/soul and the angel] as a body that moves through what Isaac Newton called the ‘aetherial medium’ or ‘ambient medium,’ it is more apt to envision the mind/soul as the in-between medium itself” (145). And Jayne Elizabeth Lewis supposes, for a similar reason, that Defoe’s spirits are “pure media: pneumatic impersonations of the absent that both validate and objectify the very faculties that perceive them” (122). Spirits, in this case, must be seen not in terms of conveyors of content but rather as vortices, effluvia, celestial fluids, vapors and streams that flow without interruption. If the apparition or form of appearance is a pure means, then the presupposition that it bears a message must necessarily betray it. (In the third installment to Robinson Crusoe, Serious Reflections, Defoe makes the distinction between the man who reads the apparition for its meaning and the “stupid, supine Man” who does not heed “the voice of Providence,” 212. The latter might be read as the figure of man before the Fall). There is no better way to turn the angel of a means without end into a cannibal than by presuming it to be a means to an end (especially when that end is taken to be perfectly empty, like bare earth or bones stripped of flesh).

What literary critics have failed to appreciate is that Foe is not the enemy of Robinson Crusoe; on the contrary, Robinson Crusoe is already faux, a cannibal and a devil. But as soon as one reads it in this way, the text is, in a messianic reversal, de-fauxed and transformed from a cannibal back into an angel. To read Defoe as Foe, is to de-faux Defoe. Coetzee remarks in his essay on Robinson Crusoe: “Defoe is in fact […] an impersonator, a ventriloquist, even a forger” (“Daniel Defoe” 20). To recognize that Robinson Crusoe is already an angel – that the thing in itself is nothing other than its appearance – is to come back to the impossibility of the start. And it is to know that the cannibals that were to be massacred by Robinson Crusoe are, as he later appreciates, in reality “innocent creatures” (146). This is in fact the same reversal we find in de Montaigne too: “to my apprehension,” he writes in “Of Cannibalism,” “what we now see in those nations [of cannibals], does not only surpass all the pictures with which the poets have adorned the golden age, and all their inventions in feigning a happy state of man, but, moreover, the fancy and even the wish and desire of philosophy itself” (219). When Robinson Crusoe ceases to function as something Foe points toward – whether out of warning or judgment, submission or punishment – the two copies might be lifted up together into the pure means of the coming times. Susan Barton recounts:

“Long ago, Mr Foe,” I said, “you wrote down the story (I found it in your library and read it to Friday to pass the time) of a woman who spent an afternoon in conversation with a dear friend, and at the end of the afternoon embraced her friend and bade her farewell till they should next meet. But the friend, unknown to her, had died the day before, many miles away, and she had sat conversing with a ghost. Mrs Barfield was her name, you will remember. Thus I conclude you are aware that ghosts can converse with us, and embrace and kiss us too.” “My sweet Susan,” said Foe – and I could not maintain my stern looks when he uttered these words, I had not been called sweet Susan for many years, certainly Cruso had never called me that – “My sweet Susan, as to who among us is a ghost and who not I have nothing to say: it is a question we can only stare at in silence, like a bird before a snake, hoping it will not swallow us.” (134)

We know that the final embrace of Foe – in which apparitions converse with and kiss each other – will take place in the broken middle of the sunken ship: between that island and this, Robinson Crusoe and Foe, but also perhaps Friday and Barton, Defoe and Coetzee, the cannibal and angel. (So many originals and so many copies!). Nothing, of course, can guarantee in advance that the two visions will stay their angelic intercourse and “not swallow us.” The task of literary criticism is rather to press them together, level the field, be the medium of this broken middle. It is, above all, to show that Robinson Crusoe is already within Foe, just as Foe is at every moment prefigured in Robinson Crusoe. There are no terraces, no future ideals or dead ends, but only the imperceptible coupling of cannibals. That Robinson Crusoe’s “dream vision” – whose “Countenance was most inexpressibly dreadful” and who threatens the protagonist with a “Voice so terrible” – is really a cannibal of the coming times is suggested by the fact that an angel never refers to another in judgment but rather rests, allegorically speaking, in its arms.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Peter Hitchcock and Peter McDonald for their comments and insights in the course of writing this article. I would also like to thank Michael Whitworth for his constant support and advice.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Rhodes Scholarships and Skye Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Kieran Brown

Kieran Brown is a DPhil student in English at the University of Oxford, Hertford College. He is writing his dissertation on the philosophy of language and capitalism, mostly through the work of Walter Benjamin. Kieran works primarily in literary theory and philosophy and is currently compiling an edited collection with Prof Wayne Stables (UNISA) entitled, Inflationary Modernities.

Notes

1. This phrase occurs in Daniel Defoe, Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World (229).

2. “[I]n old times, even before the flood, there was a great island called Atlantis […] But that some time after, both the Athenians, and they, with their island, were swallowed by the deluge […] But it is not very probable that the new world lately discovered was that island” (de Montaigne 215, 216).

3. This argument would certainly hold for Susan Barton too, who arrives in a rowboat not “with a sack of corn at [her] feet,” but with “the captain lying dead at my feet” (9).