FACETS OF SOME WRECKS: WATER

Abstract

The essay is a comparative analysis of the function and meaning of water into three novels dealing with shipwrecks and outcasts: Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), Tournier’s Friday, or The Other Island (1967), Coetzee’s Foe (1986). In Lord of the Flies the water is not, seemingly, a significant actor of the narration, it has no notable role, it is not a structural element to entail the development of the internal history. Yet, a close reading reveals a meaning in an unobtrusive accordance with the main topic: the confrontation between civilization and savageness within the human nature with uncomfortable triumph of the latter. In Friday, or The Other Island there is an abundance of water on the island, which is a sign for its lubricity or/and its fecundity. The island with inner wet gallery is metamorphosed by Robinson in a living feminine companion. Robinson enforces upon the island not only the perpetual erotic availability, but the motherly vocation as well. The flow of water is factitiously driven, with effort, for the conception and maintenance of an anthropogenic reservoir; the description of the paddy can be read as that of a womb bearing a constrained pregnancy. In Foe from the very beginning the water is related to the apparent impossibility of an exact report of the reality through words. The subject is further expanded both through Friday’s muteness, which makes him an enigma, and through the configuration of a history by means of writing; a history that is phony in principle when tackled by the author Foe, a history that is ostensibly faithful to the reality and for which Susan is (unsuccessfully) striving, a history that is willfully neglected by Robinson, the thoroughly nameless history of Friday.