Foe

''But 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 beasts 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 (the needle you store in your belt), 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 indeed once an island in the middle of the ocean where the wind blew and the gulls cried from the cliffs and a man named Cruso paced about in his apeskin clothes, scanning the horizon for sail."

I have just reread J. M. Coetzee's Foe for the first time since I wrote my final undergraduate paper on it back in 1987, right when the novel was published. I had always remembered it as a powerful book, and in the meantime I have become a enthusiastic reader of Coetzee, but still, I was taken aback by just how powerful a book it is. I should not have been surprised to discover that JMC writes great books, but just how great they are never ceases to amaze me.

Here, the castaway Susan Barton is speaking to Robinson Cruso; she arrived as a new castaway on "his" island many years after he first landed on it with Friday (who, in this book, is mute because he had his tongue cut out).

Or rather, Susan Barton, having returned to England with Friday (Cruso died on the return voyage), has written a sketch of her experiences for one Daniel Foe, whom she has asked to write a book about her (and not about Cruso and Friday alone). In that sketch, she includes this comment she made to Cruso, who was completely uninterested in producing any sort of "version" of his story (whether oral or written), and who did not want to return to England.

The "thousand touches" of everyday life are necessary to make a story (whether the adventure story of a castaway, in this case, or the story of a disillusioned professor who loses his job because of an affair with a student, as in Coetzee's Disgrace, or the story of a young wizard at a wizarding school) into an individual story, rather than an archetypal one.

It almost reads like advice in a good workshop for beginning or intermediate writers: stop treating writing as an attempt to produce archetypes, and focus instead on the details that both ground and undermine the archetypal elements of the stories you want to tell.

Or in the language of my post on Arthur Ransome's Great Northern?, you cannot get away with writing that is just in your "favorite style"; you have to ground that style in "the simple dreadful truth" — in the physicality of the experience that renders it individual, precise, and perceptible for others who have not shared that experience (be it real or imagined).

The Simple Dreadful Truth

"Life and death," whispered Titty.

"It really is," said Dorothea. "Even now the foul murderers are stealing towards their helpless victims. And that beast'll take the eggs and Dick will wish all his life he'd never found them." Dorothea began with a sentence in her favourite style but ended with the simple dreadful truth.

(Arthur Ransome, Great Northern?)

This passage from the climax of Ransome's Great Northern? perfectly captures (in the last pages of the final book of the series) what makes Ransome's Swallows and Amazons books such wonderful reading. The children who are the books' main characters imagine adventure stories (here, Dorothea's "favourite style") around their experiences, and yet those experiences themselves are adventures, "the simple dreadful truth," in no need of the embellishment of style. In fact, the two most exciting books in the series (at least as far as Miles and I are concerned) are We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea and Great Northern?, the books in which the experiences are so exciting that the children do not need to embellish them with fantasy at all.

But the contrast between a "favourite style" and "the simple dreadful truth" is more than just a self-reflexive comment on Ransome's part; it also symbolizes two different approaches to literature, one in which the purpose of literature is style (not only adventure stories, but adventure stories told in a particular way), the other in which the purpose of literature is to get at "simple dreadful truths" (even when the author is making things up).

Latin

Miles and I are reading Missee Lee (our eighth "Swallows and Amazons" book by Arthur Ransome). Chapter Five is called "Hic Liber est Meus." Miles asked me what it meant.

I told him it was Latin and that I did not know what it meant, but that we might find out in the chapter.

"It must be about God," he said. "Latin is always about gods."

Kick Me

So last night Miles and Luisa were watching Swallows and Amazons. Miles was lolling about on the floor, and Luisa was sitting on one of their two small white chairs (which they usually sit on to watch their movies, right next to each other, soooo cute). Luisa was pestering Miles with her feet.

Andrew: Luisa, don't kick Miles. Kick me if you want to kick somebody!
Miles (standing up): I want to have somebody to kick, too!

Evening Snack

After they have put their pyjamas on, Miles and Luisa often have an evening snack of fruit while watching a bit of one of the movies they like (lately, Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Swallows and Amazons have been their favorites). This evening, they watched the scene in which Mary Poppins arrives, the "Step in Time" sequence, and the finale, "Let's Go Fly a Kite" (what a cool song that one is), and they each ate quite a few pieces of apple and banana as a snack.

When movie-watching time ended, I asked Miles to go brush his teeth. He insisted that he was still hungry and wanted to eat some more, which I did not believe (sometimes he asks for more just to further delay going to bed, and it was already quite late). So I decided to tease him and offer him something more to eat that would be as small as possible: "Okay, you can have one piece of rice or a piece of cold macaroni."

"Okay," he said, "I want a piece of cold macaroni!"

At which Luisa said, "Auch cold macaroni!" (If she had not said it bilingually, she would have said something like "me-too cold macaroni!")