John Coetzee
Foe
Daniel Defoe - 1650-1731
John Coetzee
The Text
Coetzee's Foe has as intertext Daniel Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe written in 1719. (p. 134)
Coetzee writes a minimalist text, highly palimsestic,
which confronts the past (colonization and slavery) and
the present of South Africa (the result of colonization
and slavery).
At the same time Foe parodies the XVIII century travel
and adventure genre, which included castaways,
abductions, piracy, legends of cannibals and the city of
the Amazon, etc.
John Coetzee
There is also marked metafictionality and selfreflexivity in the text which deals with questions of
language, writing, reality and fiction.
John Coetzee
Although Foe does not deal directly with the South
African situation, it is clear that the relation of
colonizer-colonized is in Cruso and Friday, and also
the great divide of race, inscribed by Susan Barton
and Friday.
“He desires to be liberated.... all his life?” (Foe p. 148)
Colonial powers have thus expressed this
contradiction since the very start of colonization over
500 years ago, until this very day.
John Coetzee
The text it is clearly a postmodern/postcolonial text, and
this is reflected in highly ambiguous plots, time is also
ambiguous (1702:?75), there are several modes of
narrations (letters, diary, oral narration), plus numerous
intertextual allusions (Morrison’s “spoken the
unspoken” Foe 141 or Derrida on writing and speech:
Foe 142-143)
The very title of the text is already an intertextual and
ambiguous play of meanings.
Coetzee diverges considerably from the original text
(some fragments during part I of the text), and invites the
reader to an intertextual activity (the double coding).
John Coetzee
A fundamental alteration of the original story consist in
making Cruso a secondary figure by the introduction of
Susan Barton: he does not tell the story, as it is the case
in the original, but Susan Barton is the narrator who
brings the story to Foe (Foe 7, 9, 11, 14, 26, 38, 40, 45:
Mr. Foe)
The introduction of Susan Barton dissolves the centre of
masculinity of Robinson Crusoe
Friday is another substantial alteration: he is not an
aboriginal but African, and mute.
John Coetzee
By Friday being an African allows us to see Foe as a
reflexion on England in the XVIII century and as a
metaphor for contemporary South Africa.
Friday is reduced to animality, and his story cannot be
told by proxy.
He reflects the unbearable oppression undergone by all
oppressed people who are prevented from giving the
other side of the story.
John Coetzee
Foe is a tissue of other texts (genres)which attempts to
deconstruct the grand narratives of the past (civilazation,
progress, etc.)
At the same time, Coetzee’s text depends, substantially
on the reader’s recognition of the intertext, which has
been radically transformed and therefore difficult to
decode.
This is why the text introduces formal markers which
help the reader to find various genres present in the text.
 Coetzee, in a very Borgesian manner, is only the editor
of a book invented and narrated by Susan Barton.
John Coetzee
Foe, because of these formal characteristics represent a
reflexion on form, since the various ‘documents’ and
genres which constitutes the narration, hardly allow to
call this text a novel.
What we have is a highly palimsestic text which at the
same time that it reflects on form and language, it also
reflects on colonization, slavery and silence.
John Coetzee
One of the most important formal genre markers used by
Coetzee is the epistolary genre so typical in the XVIII.
The first two parts are written in an epistolary style,
being intended for Foe who was expected to write the
whole story.
The third part is a direct account of Susan Barton’s
life and confrontation with Foe.
The fourth part, a real narrative relay, is meant to solve
the mysteries surrounding Friday, but it does not.
John Coetzee
This last part has two endings, both narrate Friday’s
death.
There is an ambiguity regarding time and space, it
seems a mixture of Foe’s home, the ship wreck, and the
island.
Friday dies because there is no return: no country, no
identity, no language.
His death symbolizes the death of a whole people
dispossessed and silenced.
John Coetzee
This goes back to a European epistolary novel tradition
where the story, in order to pass as true events, must be
written as a personal story, address directly the
reader, and placing the reader in a very close
proximity to the text.
In part I, we have Susan Barton's account where she
addresses a ‘you’, which at first we believe it is
addressed to the reader, but later becomes Mr. Foe
(Foe 7, 9, 11, 14,26, 38, 40, 45: Mr. Foe)
John Coetzee
She does this by parodying her intent in part II, where
she writes on the road to Bristol (Foe 99), and earlier it
is stated that the letters have never been sent, (Foe
72) and again, in part III it is stated that "those letters
that were never read by you" (Foe 133), thus
undermining the writing of the story and leaving only
the narrative by Susan Barton.
Parts of the novel engages in metafictional comments
on writing and on the nature of storytelling in general
(7, 12, 17, 40, 47, 51, 58, 67, 81-83, 86, 88-89, 99, 116122, 131, 133, 134, 140-143 (142-143).
John Coetzee
But the book also offers a hypothesis on the possible
genesis of Robinson Crusoe, and that tackles questions
of gender and race and destabilizes this famous narrative
by foregrounding the masculine, white colonial
discourse that shaped it, and in turn was to shape
future historical events.
 Susan Barton’s story is from 1702, and Robinson
Crusoe was written in 1719, and this suggest an
interesting play of intertextuality, where Foe becomes
the intertext for Daniel De Foe, and at the same time,
Robinson Crusoe becomes the intertext for Coetzee.X
John Coetzee
 Susan Barton and writing
Susan Barton has a story to tell, but she cannot write it
and make it public since she does not have a voice,
that is why she needs Foe.
Susan is the narrator of the story transmitted to us, but
this story never gets written by Foe who is the only one
who can provide her with a substance: “When I reflect
on my story I seem to exist ....it doesn't give the
substance of the truth.” (Foe 51)
John Coetzee
Susan and Friday represent Coetzee’s desire to tell a
story without being ‘present’ in it.
In the third part the correspondence is replaced by
speech: Susan doubts to whom she is speaking to.
(Foe 133)
By speaking to him she takes control of the narrative
but also doubts about her own existence if she enters
into langue: “But now my all my life grows to be story
and there is nothing of my own left for me. […] But now
I am full of doubt. Nothing is left to me but doubt. I am
doubt itself. Who is speaking me? (Foe 133)
John Coetzee
In part III Susan Barton refers to part I and II of the text
referring to the letters that Foe never read: “‘In the
letters you did not read,’ I said, ‘I told you of my
conviction that, if the story seems stupid, that is only
because it so doggedly holds its silence” (Foe 117).
Near the end of the novel, Foe states: “In every story
there is silence, some sight concealed, some word
unspoken, I believe” (Foe 141).
These quotations are from passages of metafictional
commentary in which Susan Barton and Foe try to
“make sense” of the story of the island and of Friday.
John Coetzee
These attempts by the characters in the novel to “make
sense” of Friday reflect the reader's attempts to “make
sense” of the novel as well.
The interest of the story does not lie in Susan's
negotiations with the author, whom she quickly suspects
of thinking it is 'better without the woman' (Foe 72),
nor in the tension between the historical text of Robinson
Crusoe and what is presented here as the original
narrative, but in the concepts of the subject that are
explored, and the relation between power and
language, where Susan Barton is central.
John Coetzee
The novel presents two opposites poles of the linguistic
constitution of the subject.
At one extreme we have Susan, the female castaway who
is ‘silenced’ by history but who speaks and writes
almost the entire novel.
At the other we have the forceful presence and
absence, speech versus silence, or writing as opposed to
the void or blank, represented by Friday.
John Coetzee
Susan Barton attaches a great importance to language,
nothing is more understandable than her wish to
communicate her story of the island to Foe.
And despite the signs she picks up that herself is
disappearing from the story she is telling, that she is
becoming merely a linguistic element (133) or, as she
herself says, ‘a being without substance, a ghost beside
the true body of Cruso’ (p. 51), she also believes to the
end that she is ‘a free woman who asserts her freedom
by telling her story according to her own desire’ (Foe
131).
John Coetzee
She starts to worry, that the powers of language, the
constrains of narrative, will suppress her, but Foe
dismisses this fear of the powers of language with the
familiar disclaimer that words as such are merely
empty signs.
What matters is who possesses the voice to speak. The
paradox of being a subject constituted in language is,
in Barton’s case, her desire to exist in language and take
possession of her own personal history, and this leads to
a loss of a sense of self, and ultimately, in the world
outside this particular text, to her complete suppression.
John Coetzee
Language is treacherous: once you truly become a
subject in language it betrays and silences you, and
this is why she says: “Be attentive to yourself as you
write and you will mark there are times when the words
form themselves on the paper de novo, as Romans use to
say, out of the deepest of inner silences”. (Foe 142-143)
Earlier in the text she says: “But now my life grows to be
a story and there is nothing of my own left to me. […].
Nothing is left to me but doubt. I am doubt itself. Who is
speaking me? (Foe 133)
John Coetzee
The text demonstrates that becoming a subject in
language involves a subjection to discourse.
It highlights the dangers that lie in speaking ‘for’ the
‘other’ instead of letting him or her speak, as the
language used for representing ‘other’ constantly seems
to betray intended meanings and is an instrument of
power rather than an innocent mediator of truths.
It quietly but insistingly tells us that he who does not
speak is not ‘dumb’.
John Coetzee
Friday’s Silence
 Is the most obvious link that conveys an almost
unbridgeable gap between races and cultures.
The failure of communication is conveyed most clearly
by Coetzee through the language of music.
Friday’s silence makes us aware that language, although
an instrument of self-expression, is also a tool of
oppression when that language is the language of the
oppressor.
John Coetzee
Coetzee does not deprive Friday of expression, since
his silence is expression, or rather the impossibility to
have a voice both in history and in the present.
Coetzee cannot speak for Friday, and this is yet
another reason why Friday does not speak, and if
Coetzee would have chosen to make him speak he would
have engaged in a representation which he, Coetzee,
refuses to provide.
John Coetzee
Language is identity, and this is why also Friday
refuses to speak, since speaking the language of the
oppressor does not allow him to express his identity
and that of his story, which would remain untold.
Susan Barton states: “All my efforts to bring Friday to
speech, or to bring speech to Friday, have failed”. (Foe
142)
John Coetzee
The only power Friday has is his silence and Foe is fully
aware of his resistance: “Friday has no command of
words and therefore no defence against being re-shaped
day by day in conformity with the desires of others […].
No matter what he is to himself... what he is to the world
is what I make of him.” (Foe 121-22)
John Coetzee
The silence is a refusal to be represented, but because
of its silence he can be represented at will. (Foe 121122)
Friday's refusal to acquire language can be read as a
metaphor for the fact that white colonialists never
listened to the people they subjected.
Friday is merely a sytlistic ‘double’ to Susan’s gender;
both are speechless because they are not heard.
John Coetzee
The fact that Coetzee takes his cue from feminist
discourse and includes the possibility that Friday’s
missing tongue is perhaps only a metaphor for ‘a more
atrocious mutilation’, leaving us to wonder whether ‘by
a dumb slave [we are] to understand a slave unmanned’
(Foe 119), only reinforces that impression.
How can the privileged white writer give voice to the
black person without falling into the trap of speaking
‘for’ him?
Would not that be perfectly in line with the old colonial
maxim that ‘they cannot represent that themselves,
they must be represented?’ (Said, 1978: 21).
John Coetzee
Friday’s silence is a deliberate act in the text, which
comes from a white writer who realizes that any voice
he will give to the Black man will necessarily sound
false.
John Coetzee
 Difference and Alterity
Foe, the very title of the of the text suggests issued
related to post-colonial aspects of difference and
alterity.
 It exposes the the difficulties in reconciling the idea of
belonging to a nation with the wish to express
singular cultural identities and differences.
In rewriting Foe Coetzee cast light on the deep forces
that have driven a voice from the ‘periphery’ or ‘edge’
of the imperial world to engage in open and dialectic
conflict with the voice of the ‘centre’.
John Coetzee
 By reworking Robinson Crusoe it becomes the battle
ground for the conquest of identity and difference.
It is a place where the struggle between the I and the
Other is ignited.
For instance, Susan Barton manages to find a voice,
an outlook, a way of her own to tell her story.
When this happens, Foe leaves the scene and in the
end it is Susan who writes of her adventures on
Cruso’s island.
John Coetzee
In this way, the old Subject (Defoe, the Western novel,
the myths of the cultural supremacy of the white race,
the male, power-based relationships between mater and
slave) is displaced by the Other.
However, it would be disingenuous to think that the
question of alterity and difference is to be resolved by
substituting the ‘centre’ with the ‘periphery’ or the
‘margin’.
It is not this what happens in Foe. Here, there is an
attempt to create a notion of marginality (and thus of
alterity) that differs from then prevailing one.
John Coetzee
The ‘margin’ in Foe’s characters is not a space of
marginalisation but, rather, one of resistance; a space
for creativity in which the binary ‘colonised/coloniser’
is put under erasure and overwritten by a plurality of
multiple subjects.
The idea of marginality constructed from an ‘uscentred’ vision disappears.
With it disappears the image of a ‘them’ solely
considered as food and sustenance for the identity
and integrity of ‘us’.
John Coetzee
To choose the margin is a political act. As bell hooks,
the African American writer, points out, to speak, write
and place oneself in the margin does not mean to
withdraw into marginality.
Hooks: I am located in the margin. I make a definite
distinction between that marginality which is imposed by
oppressive structures and the marginality one chooses as
site of resistance – as location of radical openness and
possibility. This site of resistance is continually formed
in that segregated culture of opposition that is our
response to domination.
John Coetzee
We come to this space through suffering and pain,
through struggle. We know struggle to be that which
gives pleasures, delights, and fulfils desire. We are
transformed, individually, collectively, as we make
radical creative space which affirms and sustains our
subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to
articulate our sense of the world.