Without Lifting A Finger

Or at least that seems to be part of the point Coetzee is trying to make. Barton speaking to Foe:    You err most tellingly in failing to distinguish between my silences and the silences of a being such as Friday. Friday has no command of words and therefore no defense against being re-shaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others. I say he is a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal; I say he is a laundryman and he becomes a laundryman. What is the truth of Friday? You will respond: he is neither cannibal nor laundryman, these are mere names, they do not touch his essence, he is a substantial body, he is himself, Friday is Friday. But that is not so. No matter what he is to himself (is he anything to himself? -- how can he tell us?), what he is to the world is what I make of him. * Another good quote--very similar to something Coetzee has written elsewhere (I can't track it down--was it in Summertime, In the Heart of the Country, or Youth ?--and if the wor...

Little more than half way through Robinson Crusoe . Crusoe first saw a single human foot mark; then he saw the body parts. He waffled like crazy re what to do, and then pretty much decided to play defense. Morally he had a hard time playing judge: I debated this very often with myself thus: "How do I know what God Himself judges in this particular case? It is certain these people do not commit this as a crime; it is not against their own consciences reproving, or their light reproaching them; they do not know it to be an offense, and then commit it in defiance of divine justice, as we do in almost all the sins we commit. They think it no more a crime to kill a captive taken in war than we do to kill an ox; or to eat human flesh than we do to eat mutton." *** Just started Coetzee's Foe and already I'm a third through (most of Coetzee's texts are quick reads). The curtain opens with three characters: Susan Barton (she gets thrown up on Cruso's island ...