Foe (novel)
Encyclopedia
Foe is a 1986 novel by South Africa
n author J. M. Coetzee. Woven around the existing plot of Robinson Crusoe
, Foe is written from the perspective of Susan Barton, a castaway who landed on the same island inhabited by "Cruso" and Friday
as their adventures were already underway. Like Robinson Crusoe, it is a frame story
, unfolded as Barton's narrative while in England attempting to convince the writer Daniel Foe
to help transform her tale into popular fiction. Focused primarily on themes of language and power, the novel was the subject of criticism in South Africa, where it was regarded as politically irrelevant on its release. Coetzee revisited the composition of Robinson Crusoe in 2003 in his Nobel prize
acceptance speech.
on a ship to Lisbon
. When she comes ashore, she finds Friday and a Cruso who has grown complacent, content to forget his past and live his life on the island with Friday—tongueless by what Cruso claims to have been the act of former slave owners—in attendance. Arriving near the end of their residence, Barton is only on the island for a year before the trio is rescued, but the homesick Cruso does not survive the voyage to England. In England with Friday, Barton attempts to set her adventures on the island to paper, but she feels her efforts lack popular appeal. She tries to convince novelist Daniel Foe to help with her manuscript, but he does not agree on which of her adventures is interesting. Foe would prefer to write about her time in Bahia
looking for her daughter, and when he does write on the story she wishes, fabulates about Cruso's adventures rather than relating her facts. Frustrating Barton's efforts further, Foe, who becomes her lover, is preoccupied with debt and has little time or energy to write about anything. Barton's story takes a twist with the return of someone claiming to be her missing daughter.
claimed that one of Coetzee's central themes throughout his body of work is the "linkage of language and power, the idea that those without voices cease to signify, figuratively and literally"; McGrath pointed to Foe as the "most explicit expression" of that theme. Barton longs to tell her own story, but lacks the language to do so in a way that the public will accept. The agent she chooses to help give her the words necessary to communicate persists in erasing her history, by minimizing what she perceives as important and supplanting her remembered facts with adventurous fiction. As Foe takes over her tale, McGrath said, Barton "loses her voice in history, and thus her identity."
In addition to trying to preserve herself and her history, Barton is attempting to give voice to the even more graphically silenced Friday. Denis Donoghue
of New York University
stated that "the political parable [of the novel] issues from Friday's tonguelessness", as one of the central themes of the novel is the imperative to give voice to the oppressed. Barton sees Friday as caught on the edge of birth by his speechlessness, though she believes that his desire for liberation is explicit, if unspoken; Foe – though wondering if those who are not speechless "are secretly grateful" for the opportunity to project their thoughts onto Friday – believes that Friday could overcome his speechlessness by learning to write. While the book depicts the struggle to control text, Donoghue concludes that the undefined narrator of the book's finale (which Sam Durrant in "J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello and the Limits of the Sympathetic Imagination" pointed out could only have been written after the deaths of Barton and Defoe) is "the voice of the poetic imagination, its sympathies expanding beyond all systems to reach the defeated, the silenced…" Friday is afforded a final opportunity to tell his story, but can only communicate through the release of bubbles from his waterlogged corpse, a communication which neither the narrator nor the reader can interpret.
David Attwell in J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing saw this inability of a silenced black character to communicate as central to the book, indicating that "Friday's enforced silence represents what a monocultural, metropolitan discourse cannot hear". South African writer Rian Malan
also felt the racial gap was key, describing Foe as "the most profound book ever written about race relations in a society where whites were often separated from blacks by an abyss of linguistic and cultural incomprehension." When Malan interviewed Coetzee for Time Magazine, he questioned the writer about this theme, who only replied, "I would not wish to deny you your reading." Professor Manju Jaidka
of Panjab University, Chandigarh
noted that Barton, as a woman in a very masculine text, in herself represents "the minority, the marginalised, or the silenced other." Jane Poyner in J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual highlighted the inherent tension in Barton's role, as she simultaneously struggles against the efforts of Foe to appropriate and misrepresent her story and unintentionally "'colonizes' Friday's story" herself as she interprets his silence.
." Attwell, however, noted in 2003 that the novel is contextualized to Africa by the transformation of Friday from a Carib who looked nearly European to an African.
In the United States, reception was less politically charged. The novel received a positive review in The New York Times, where Michiko Kakutani
praised the writing as "lucid and precise; the landscape depicted, mythic yet specific", concluding that "the novel - which remains somewhat solipsistically concerned with literature and its consequences - lacks the fierceness and moral resonance of Waiting for the Barbarians
and Life and Times of Michael K, and yet it stands, nonetheless, as a finely honed testament to its author's intelligence, imagination and skill." Andrew O'Hehir for Salon
described the novel as "a bit dry." In his review for Time Magazine, Stefan Kanfer questions the impact of what he describes as an "achingly symbolic retelling", suggesting that readers may be more self-congratulatory for discovering the author's "brilliantly disguised" themes than moved by "urgencies that are neither fresh nor illumined."
becomes the ambivalent muse of Defoe. According to The Guardian
, this act of composition "write[s] "Defoe into existence, rather than the other way around." Although Crusoe is the narrator of the piece, Coetzee indicated he did not know whether Crusoe or Defoe represented him in the lecture. By contrast, he clearly identified himself with Barton in Foe: "the unsuccessful author—worse authoress."
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
n author J. M. Coetzee. Woven around the existing plot of Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe that was first published in 1719. Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is a fictional autobiography of the title character—a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and...
, Foe is written from the perspective of Susan Barton, a castaway who landed on the same island inhabited by "Cruso" and Friday
Man Friday
Friday is one of the main characters of Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe names the man, with whom he cannot at first communicate, Friday because they first meet on that day...
as their adventures were already underway. Like Robinson Crusoe, it is a frame story
Frame story
A frame story is a literary technique that sometimes serves as a companion piece to a story within a story, whereby an introductory or main narrative is presented, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage either for a more emphasized second narrative or for a set of shorter stories...
, unfolded as Barton's narrative while in England attempting to convince the writer Daniel Foe
Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe , born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, and pamphleteer, who gained fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain and along with others such as Richardson,...
to help transform her tale into popular fiction. Focused primarily on themes of language and power, the novel was the subject of criticism in South Africa, where it was regarded as politically irrelevant on its release. Coetzee revisited the composition of Robinson Crusoe in 2003 in his Nobel prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
acceptance speech.
Plot
Susan Barton is on a quest to find her kidnapped daughter whom she knows has been taken to the New World. She is set adrift during a mutinyMutiny
Mutiny is a conspiracy among members of a group of similarly situated individuals to openly oppose, change or overthrow an authority to which they are subject...
on a ship to Lisbon
Lisbon
Lisbon is the capital city and largest city of Portugal with a population of 545,245 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Lisbon extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of 3 million on an area of , making it the 9th most populous urban...
. When she comes ashore, she finds Friday and a Cruso who has grown complacent, content to forget his past and live his life on the island with Friday—tongueless by what Cruso claims to have been the act of former slave owners—in attendance. Arriving near the end of their residence, Barton is only on the island for a year before the trio is rescued, but the homesick Cruso does not survive the voyage to England. In England with Friday, Barton attempts to set her adventures on the island to paper, but she feels her efforts lack popular appeal. She tries to convince novelist Daniel Foe to help with her manuscript, but he does not agree on which of her adventures is interesting. Foe would prefer to write about her time in Bahia
Bahia
Bahia is one of the 26 states of Brazil, and is located in the northeastern part of the country on the Atlantic coast. It is the fourth most populous Brazilian state after São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro, and the fifth-largest in size...
looking for her daughter, and when he does write on the story she wishes, fabulates about Cruso's adventures rather than relating her facts. Frustrating Barton's efforts further, Foe, who becomes her lover, is preoccupied with debt and has little time or energy to write about anything. Barton's story takes a twist with the return of someone claiming to be her missing daughter.
Themes
Analysts of the book have primarily focused on themes of power and language use, particularly as it relates to marginalized people. In 1994 Patrick McGrath of The New York TimesThe New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
claimed that one of Coetzee's central themes throughout his body of work is the "linkage of language and power, the idea that those without voices cease to signify, figuratively and literally"; McGrath pointed to Foe as the "most explicit expression" of that theme. Barton longs to tell her own story, but lacks the language to do so in a way that the public will accept. The agent she chooses to help give her the words necessary to communicate persists in erasing her history, by minimizing what she perceives as important and supplanting her remembered facts with adventurous fiction. As Foe takes over her tale, McGrath said, Barton "loses her voice in history, and thus her identity."
In addition to trying to preserve herself and her history, Barton is attempting to give voice to the even more graphically silenced Friday. Denis Donoghue
Denis Donoghue
Denis Donoghue is an Irish literary critic. He is currently the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters at New York University....
of New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
stated that "the political parable [of the novel] issues from Friday's tonguelessness", as one of the central themes of the novel is the imperative to give voice to the oppressed. Barton sees Friday as caught on the edge of birth by his speechlessness, though she believes that his desire for liberation is explicit, if unspoken; Foe – though wondering if those who are not speechless "are secretly grateful" for the opportunity to project their thoughts onto Friday – believes that Friday could overcome his speechlessness by learning to write. While the book depicts the struggle to control text, Donoghue concludes that the undefined narrator of the book's finale (which Sam Durrant in "J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello and the Limits of the Sympathetic Imagination" pointed out could only have been written after the deaths of Barton and Defoe) is "the voice of the poetic imagination, its sympathies expanding beyond all systems to reach the defeated, the silenced…" Friday is afforded a final opportunity to tell his story, but can only communicate through the release of bubbles from his waterlogged corpse, a communication which neither the narrator nor the reader can interpret.
David Attwell in J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing saw this inability of a silenced black character to communicate as central to the book, indicating that "Friday's enforced silence represents what a monocultural, metropolitan discourse cannot hear". South African writer Rian Malan
Rian Malan
Rian Malan is a South African author, journalist, documentarist and songwriter of Afrikaner descent. He first rose to prominence as the author of the memoir My Traitor's Heart, which, like the bulk of his work, deals with South African society in a historical and contemporary perspective and...
also felt the racial gap was key, describing Foe as "the most profound book ever written about race relations in a society where whites were often separated from blacks by an abyss of linguistic and cultural incomprehension." When Malan interviewed Coetzee for Time Magazine, he questioned the writer about this theme, who only replied, "I would not wish to deny you your reading." Professor Manju Jaidka
Manju Jaidka
Manju Jaidka is a Professor of English at the Panjab University, Chandigarh, in India. She is regarded as a leading Indian academic, best known for her contribution to American Studies in India. She is the author of critical books regarded as standard texts in the field and regards her teaching job...
of Panjab University, Chandigarh
Panjab University, Chandigarh
Panjab University is one of the oldest universities in India. The university campus is residential, spread over an area of in sectors 14 and 25 of the city of Chandigarh...
noted that Barton, as a woman in a very masculine text, in herself represents "the minority, the marginalised, or the silenced other." Jane Poyner in J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual highlighted the inherent tension in Barton's role, as she simultaneously struggles against the efforts of Foe to appropriate and misrepresent her story and unintentionally "'colonizes' Friday's story" herself as she interprets his silence.
Critical reception
Foe attracted criticism on South Africa upon its publication. According to Michael Marais in "Death and the Space of the Response of the Other in J.M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg", Foe met "acrimony, even dismay" at the time of its publication, as one of South Africa's "most prominent authors" seemed to turn his attention from compelling events in South Africa to "writing about the writing of a somewhat pedestria n eighteenth century novelist." In detailing that receipt, Marais quotes Michael Chapman in "Writing of Politics" as typical with his dismissive comment: "In our knowledge of the human suffering on our own doorstep of thousands of detainees who are denied recourse to the rule of law, Foe does not so much speak to Africa as provide a kind of masturbatory release, in this country, for the Europeanising dreams of an intellectual coterie IT IS WRITTEN BY .JM." Attwell, however, noted in 2003 that the novel is contextualized to Africa by the transformation of Friday from a Carib who looked nearly European to an African.
In the United States, reception was less politically charged. The novel received a positive review in The New York Times, where Michiko Kakutani
Michiko Kakutani
is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The New York Times and is considered by many to be a leading literary critic in the United States.-Life and career:...
praised the writing as "lucid and precise; the landscape depicted, mythic yet specific", concluding that "the novel - which remains somewhat solipsistically concerned with literature and its consequences - lacks the fierceness and moral resonance of Waiting for the Barbarians
Waiting for the Barbarians
Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel by the South African-born author J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. The novel was published in 1980. It was chosen by Penguin for its series Great Books of the 20th Century and won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and...
and Life and Times of Michael K, and yet it stands, nonetheless, as a finely honed testament to its author's intelligence, imagination and skill." Andrew O'Hehir for Salon
Salon.com
Salon.com, part of Salon Media Group , often just called Salon, is an online liberal magazine, with content updated each weekday. Salon was founded by David Talbot and launched on November 20, 1995. It was the internet's first online-only commercial publication. The magazine focuses on U.S...
described the novel as "a bit dry." In his review for Time Magazine, Stefan Kanfer questions the impact of what he describes as an "achingly symbolic retelling", suggesting that readers may be more self-congratulatory for discovering the author's "brilliantly disguised" themes than moved by "urgencies that are neither fresh nor illumined."
Nobel acceptance speech
In 2003, when Coetzee was awarded a Nobel prize in literature, he revisited the theme of composition as self-definition in his acceptance speech, entitled "He and his Man". Coetzee, who had lectured in character before, narrated a situation in which an elderly Crusoe quietly living in BristolBristol
Bristol is a city, unitary authority area and ceremonial county in South West England, with an estimated population of 433,100 for the unitary authority in 2009, and a surrounding Larger Urban Zone with an estimated 1,070,000 residents in 2007...
becomes the ambivalent muse of Defoe. According to The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, this act of composition "write[s] "Defoe into existence, rather than the other way around." Although Crusoe is the narrator of the piece, Coetzee indicated he did not know whether Crusoe or Defoe represented him in the lecture. By contrast, he clearly identified himself with Barton in Foe: "the unsuccessful author—worse authoress."
Further reading
- "He and his Man", transcript. The Guardian
- The castaway: DJ Taylor on JM Coetzee's intriguing Nobel acceptance speech, The Guardian