Foe (novel)
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| Author | J. M. Coetzee |
|---|---|
| Country | South Africa |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Viking Press |
| Released | 1986 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 157 pp (hardcover edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-670-81398-2 (hardcover edition) |
Foe is a novel by J. M. Coetzee published in 1986. It is based on a re-imagining of Daniel Defoe's classic novel Robinson Crusoe with a woman, Susan Barton, cast away on the same island as Robinson Crusoe (here called Cruso) and Friday. It uses allegorical techniques and is considered by many critics as the archetypal post-modern novel, examining the creative process of storytelling, narrative, language, as well as issues of gender, race and colonialism.
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[edit] Plot summary
"Returning from Bahia, where she has been searching for a lost daughter, Susan Barton is put off the ship after a mutiny; she is accompanied only by the dead body of the captain, whose mistress she had been. She swims ashore and finds herself on the island with Cruso and Friday. Friday has been mutilated: he has no tongue. Who did this, where or how it happened, we are never told. After their rescue by a passing merchantman, Cruso dies aboard the ship and Susan and Friday are left to make their way in England. After she arrives in England, Susan drafts a memoir, "The Female Castaway," and seeks out the author Foe to have her story told. Coetzee's novel comprises four parts: beginning with Susan's memoir, it continues with a series of letters addressed to Foe, letters that do not reach him because he is hiding, trying to evade his creditors. The novel proceeds to an account of Susan's relationship with Foe and her struggle to retain control over the story and its meaning; it ends with a sequence spoken by an unnamed narrator (possibly standing for Coetzee himself) who revises the story as we know it and dissolves the narration in an act of authorial renunciation." (from D. Attwell, J.M.Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, University of California Press)
[edit] Interpretations
[edit] Art of storytelling
The main focus of the novel is on the art of storytelling. Primarily it examines the issue of narrative "voice", who is telling the story. Coetzee turns the story, characters, and subject positions of Defoe's novel on their heads to disrupt notions of truth, trust, and story. The major question asked throughout is 'Whose story is the right one?' Is there ever one right story?
Susan Barton begins as narrator of the novel. She battles the punningly-named Foe for the survival of her original conception of herself as Cruso's living successor, while Foe, becoming more authoritative than mere scribe of her exploits, posits such possibilities as her daughter's reunion with Susan, and those details which actually appear in Robinson Crusoe. The focus shifts from what is in Susan's mind, to what could be in Foe's. Susan is transformed from an actual character to merely the muse that drives Foe to write his book. In the end, what we get is the story of how a story changes into its final form and how its failed possibilities are no less alive than its successful ones. The novel dives into the wreck of Daniel Defoe's failed alternatives, examining the depths Robinson Crusoe did not cover.
[edit] Gender, race, colonialism
In the novel, Foe is a parody of the English novelist Daniel Defoe. The name Foe is ambivalent: it was Defoe's real name before he gentrified it with the De- and it is a synonym of "enemy". This word is specifically present in protestant religious texts where it stands for the enemy, the devil himself. In its historical use it was exploited by British colonists in order to define colonized peoples as "foes", a lexical attempt to justify their actions over "un-civilized" countries.
The text analyzes traditional canons of class, gender and race in the processes of cultural acceptance and exclusion. Written from the "marginal" position of South Africa, it questions marginality itself in an attempt to break the silence of post-colonial voices. The author Coetzee places his novel against the traditional British "master literature" and examines the historical and discursive conditions under which South African authorship must operate.
Based on a revision of Robinson Crusoe, one of the founding narratives and prototype of colonial storytelling, the novel develops a re-conception of the plot, of the act of creation of the book by his author Foe, and of the famous characters of Crusoe (in Foe Cruso) and Friday with the help of a new woman protagonist.
Throughout the novel Friday's silent and enigmatic presence gains in power until it overwhelms the narrator at the end: the silence of Friday "passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth." Friday's silence wins in the end on all narrative voices. His only weapon against cultural prepotence is to remain silent, to turn his back to the European attempt to have his story told. This might be seen as his intention throughout the story: he wants to counter domination, he cannot be penetrated by others and so his story will not be told by them. This leads to the interpretation that this is his only possible rebellious act against European historical and cultural domination.
In Foe Coetzee introduces a fundamental change: the narrator is a woman. Robinson Crusoe lacked female characters: the only feminine element in the story was the island, which was to be dominated and tamed by men. Susan Barton's narrative introduces the feminist self-affirmation, specifically by taking the island conditions of Robinson Crusoe and overlaying them with the narrative of Defoe's Roxana, whose hero's real name is of course Susan. Susan is in a struggle to get her story told by the novelist Foe: she wants to protect her vision of the island but needs Foe to write the story down for her, thus providing it access to tradition and institution of letters.
Another important difference with Defoe's novel is in the character of Friday: in Robinson he was a handsome Carib youth with near-European features, yet in Foe he is an African; "He was black: a Negro with a head of fuzzy wool...flat face, the small dull eyes, the broad nose, the thick lips, the skin not black but dark grey, dry as if coated with dust." The pertinence of Friday to black history is not in question: the inaccessibility of his world to the European world is a consequence of colonialist oppression and racism. The mutilation in his mouth is emblematic of black-African cultural castration operated by the white invaders.
[edit] External links
| John Maxwell Coetzee |
|---|
| Novels |
| Dusklands (1974) • In the Heart of the Country (1977) • Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) • Life & Times of Michael K (1983) • Foe (1986) • Age of Iron (1990) • The Master of Petersburg (1994) • Disgrace (1999) • Elizabeth Costello (2003) • Slow Man (2005) • Diary of a Bad Year (2007) |
| Essays |
| White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988) • Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (1992) • Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (1996) • The Lives of Animals (1999) • Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986–1999 (2001) |
| Autobiographical works |
| Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997) • Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002) |
