When Susan Barton, the narrator of J. M. Coetzee’s novel Foe, tries to tell the story of her time on Robinson Cruso’s island, she struggles to make the story interesting: after all, so much of her time there was monotonous, spent braving the elements in silence with Cruso and his servant Friday. So in an effort to entice her audience, Susan begins to embellish, comparing herself to a painter “selecting and composing and rendering particulars in order to body forth a pleasing fullness in his scene.” When Susan first begins refining her narrative, she experiments with harmless modifications: condensing events so that there is less dull time in between or including more scandalous details from her own private life. But as she gets increasingly desperate for attention (and the material wealth and fame that it will bring), Susan also gets increasingly dishonest in her storytelling. She invents romantic and sexual feelings for Cruso in direct contrast to the disinterest in him she had earlier expressed, and she starts editing out any details about her life before the island that could be seen as shameful. Most frighteningly, when Susan’s collaborator Mr. Foe suggests that adding some cannibalism could make the story more attention-grabbing, Susan begins to paint Friday as a cannibal, a lie that immediately makes Friday a subject of speculation and distaste in their London neighborhood. In Susan’s journey from boring honesty to salacious fantasy, Foe reveals the difference between embellishment and deception—and shows that while honest narration might be less interesting, invention can create prejudice and enact harm.
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Embellishment vs. Deception ThemeTracker
Embellishment vs. Deception Quotes in Foe
One day [Cruso] would say his father had been a wealthy merchant whose counting-house he had quit in search of adventure. But the next day he would tell me he had been a poor lad of no family who had shipped as a cabin boy and been captured by the Moors (he bore a scar on his arm which was, he said, the mark of the branding iron) and escaped and made his way to the new world. Sometimes he would say he had dwelt on his island in the past 15 years, he and Friday, none but they having been spared when their ship went down. […] Yet at other times, as for instance when he was in the grip of the fever…he would tell stories of cannibals, of how Friday was a cannibal whom he had saved from being roasted and devoured by fellow cannibals…So in the end I did not know what was truth, what was lies, and what was mere rambling.
Seen from too remote a vantage, life begins to lose its particularity. All shipwrecks become the same shipwreck, all castaways the same castaway, sunburnt, lonely, clad in the skins of the beast he has slain. The truth that makes your story yours alone, that sets you apart from the old mariner by the fireside spinning yarns of sea monsters and mermaids, resides in a thousand touches which today may seem of no importance, such as: when you made your needle…by what means did you pierce the eye? When you sewed your hat, what did you use for thread? Touches like these will one day persuade your countrymen that it is all true, every word, there was an indeed once an island in the middle of the ocean where the wind blew and the gulls cried from the cliffs.
“Where is the justice in it? First a slave and now a castaway too. Robbed of his childhood and consigned to a life of silence. Was Providence sleeping?”
“If Providence were to watch over all of us,” said Cruso, “who would be left to pick the cotton and cut the sugar cane? For the business of the world to prosper, Providence must sometimes wake and sometimes sleep, as lower creatures do.”
I used once to think, when I saw Cruso in this evening posture, that, like me, he was searching the horizon for a sail. But I was mistaken. His visit to the bluff belonged to a practice of losing himself in the contemplation of the waste of water and sky. Friday never interrupted him during these retreats; when one site innocently approached him, I was rebuffed with angry words, and for days afterwards he and I did not speak. To me, sea and sky remained sea and sky, vacant and tedious. I had not the temperament to love such emptiness.
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: of being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso. Is that the fate of all storytellers? Yet I was as much a body as Cruso. I ate and drank, I woke and slept…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.
Day by day the wind picks at the roof and the weeds creep across the terraces. In a year, in ten years, there will be nothing left standing but a circle of sticks to mark the place where the hut stood, and of the terraces only the walls. And of the walls they will say, These are cannibal walls, the ruins of a cannibal city, from the golden age of the cannibals. For who will believe they were built by one man and a slave, in the hope that one day a seafarer would come with a sack of corn for them to sow?
It is not wholly as I imagined it would be. What I thought would be your writing-table is not a table but a bureau. The window overlooks not woods and pastures but your garden. There is no ripple in the glass. The chest is not a true chest but a dispatch box. Nevertheless, it is all close enough. Does it surprise you as much as it does me, this correspondence between things as they are and the pictures we have of them in our minds?
Dubiously I thought: are these enough strange circumstances to make a story of? How long before I am driven to invent new and stranger circumstances: the salvage of tools and muskets from Cruso’s ship; the building of a boat, or at least a skiff, an adventure to sail to the mainland; a landing by cannibals on the island, followed by a skirmish and many bloody deaths; and, at last, becoming of a golden haired stranger with a sack of corn, and the planting of the terraces? Alas, will the day ever arrive when we can make a story without strange circumstances?
A painter engaged to paint a dull scene—let us say two men digging in a field—has means at hand to lend alert to his subject. He can set the golden hues of the first man’s skin against the sturdy hues of the seconds, creating a play of light against dark. By artfully representing their attitudes he can indicate which is master, which slave. And to render his composition more lively he is at liberty to bring into it what may not be there on the day he paints but may be there on other days, such as a pair of gulls wheeling overhead, the beak of one parted in a cry, and in one corner, upon a faraway crag, a band of apes. Thus we see the painter selecting and composing and rendering particulars in order to body forth a pleasing fullness in his scene. The storyteller, by contrast (forgive me, I would not lecture you on storytelling if you were here in the flesh!), must divine which episodes of his history hold promise of fullness, and tease from them they’re hidden meanings, writing these together as one braids a rope.
I forgot you are a writer who knows above all how many words can be sucked from a cannibal feast, how few from a woman cowering from the wind. It is all a matter of words and the number of words, is it not? Friday sits at his table in his wig and robes and eats pease pudding. I ask myself: did human flesh once pass those lips - truly, cannibals are terrible; but most terrible of all is to think of the little cannibal children, their eyes closing in pleasure as they chew the tasty fat of their neighbors. I shiver. For surely eating human flesh is like falling into sin: having fallen once you discover in yourself a taste for it, you fall all the more readily thereafter. I shiver as I watch Friday dancing in the kitchen.
I calmed Foe. “Permit me,” I whispered—”there is a privilege that comes with the first night, that I claim as mine.” So I coaxed him till he lay beneath me. Then I drew off my shift and straddled him (which he did not seem easy with, in a woman). This is the manner of the Muse when she visits her poets, I whispered, and felt some of the listlessness go out of my limbs.
“A bracing ride,” said Foe afterwards—”My very bones are jolted, I must catch my breath before I resume.” “It is always a hard ride when the Muse pays her visits,” I replied—”she must do whatever lies in her power to father her offspring.”
“If we devote ourselves to finding holes exactly shaped to house such great words as Freedom, Honor, Bliss, I agree, we shall spend a lifetime slipping and sliding and searching, and all in vain. They are words without a home, wanders like the planets, and that is an end of it. But you must ask yourself, Susan; as it was a slaver’s strategem to rob Friday of his tongue, may it not be a slaver’s strategem to hold him in subjection while we cavil over words in a dispute we know to be endless?”
“Friday is no more in subjection than my shadow is for following me around. He is not free, but he is not in subjection. He is his own master, in law, and has been since Cruso’s death.”
“Nevertheless, Friday follows you: you do not follow Friday. The words you have written and hung around his neck say he is set free; but who, looking at Friday, will believe them?”
