Assignment on Paper no. 203

This is a blog on Assignment Paper no. 203 Postcolonial Studies and my topic is 'Foe' as a postcolonial novel. 

John Maxwell Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on 9 February 1940, the elder of two children. His mother was a primary school teacher. His father was trained as an attorney, but practiced as such only intermittently; during the years 1941–45 he served with the South African forces in North Africa and Italy. Though Coetzee’s parents were not of British descent, the language spoken at home was English.

Coetzee received his primary schooling in Cape Town and in the nearby town of Worcester. For his secondary education he attended a school in Cape Town run by a Catholic order, the Marist Brothers. He matriculated in 1956.

Coetzee entered the University of Cape Town in 1957, and in 1960 and 1961 graduated successively with honours degrees in English and mathematics. He spent the years 1962–65 in England, working as a computer Thought programmer while doing research for a thesis on the English novelist Ford Madox Ford.In 1963 he married Philippa Jubber (1939–1991). They had two children, Nicolas (1966–1989) and Gisela (b. 1968).

In 1965 Coetzee entered the graduate school of the University of Texas at Austin, and in 1968 graduated with a PhD in English, linguistics, and Germanic languages. His doctoral dissertation was on the early fiction of Samuel Beckett.For three years (1968–71) Coetzee was assistant professor of English at the State University of New York in Buffalo. After an application for permanent residence in the United States was denied, he returned to South Africa. From 1972 until 2000 he held a series of positions at the University of Cape Town, the last of them as Distinguished Professor of Literature.Between 1984 and 2003 he also taught frequently in the United States: at the State University of New York, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago, where for six years he was a member of the Committee on Social Thought.

Coetzee began writing fiction in 1969. His first book, Dusklands, was published in South Africa in 1974. In the Heart of the Country (1977) won South Africa’s then principal literary award, the CNA Prize, and was published in Britain and the USA. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) received international notice. His reputation was confirmed by Life & Times of Michael K (1983), which won Britain’s Booker Prize. It was followed by Foe (1986), Age of Iron (1990), The Master of Petersburg (1994), and Disgrace (1999), which again won the Booker Prize.

Coetzee also wrote two fictionalized memoirs, Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). The Lives of Animals (1999) is a fictionalized lecture, later absorbed into Elizabeth Costello (2003). White Writing (1988) is a set of essays on South African literature and culture. Doubling the Point (1992) consists of essays and interviews with David Attwell. Giving Offense (1996) is a study of literary censorship. Stranger Shores (2001) collects his later literary essays.

Coetzee has also been active as a translator of Dutch and Afrikaans literature.

In 2002 Coetzee emigrated to Australia. He lives with his partner Dorothy Driver in Adelaide, South Australia, where he holds an honorary position at the University of Adelaide.

Foe as a Post colonial Novel

J. M. Coetzee’s 1986 novel Foe is a postcolonial reworking of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The novel differs from other examples of postcolonial writing that undermine canonical authority by way of constructing alternative narratives and seeking to reassign agency to the deprived and marginalized subjects of colonialism. Coetzee shifts the focus away from the level of competing narratives to an alternative account of the genesis of the canonical text itself. The article argues that Coetzee produces a postcolonial critique of a second order by weaving together intertextual and metafictional elements. At the centre of this project stands the question of authorship. The struggle for authorial authority between the novel’s multiple author figures lays bare the structures of power and repression at work in the creation of colonialist literature by drawing attention to the acts of omission and silencing in its wake. 

Foe differs significantly from other postcolonial re-writings of canonical texts. Unlike Rhys in her prequel to Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Coetzee neither tries to fill the blank spots of the colonial narrative, nor does he attempt to undermine canonical authority by way of reassigning agency to the deprived and marginalized subjects of colonialism. His protagonist Susan Barton ultimately fails in her attempt to defend her narrative against the fictionalization of the professional writer Mr Foe and Friday’s mutilation renders the project of giving authentic voice to the experiences and aspirations of colonized people (within as well as beyond the dominant discourse) impossible. Foe evades such simplistic alternatives by shifting the postcolonial critique to the very heart of the canonical text, its production process and thus onto the question of its authorial authority. Consequently, Coetzee’s the novel does not discredit or dismantle the colonial discourse primarily by way of a postcolonial alternative narrative but by laying bare the structures of power and repression at work in the creation of colonialist literature. Re-writing becomes an exercise in opening up canonical fiction to the present while preventing it from being conclusive or teleological. 

Coetzee produces a postcolonial critique of a second order by interweaving intertextual and metafictional elements. By complementing the intertextual web of canonical and postcolonial texts with elements concerning the nature and practice of literature in general, Coetzee shifts the focus away from the level of competing narratives to an alternative account of the genesis of the canonical text itself. The novel’s multiple author figures (Susan Barton, Mr Foe and the historic Defoe) stand at the centre of this project.

Coetzee, however, casts the intertextual web wider. Besides challenging the colonial discourse in which Defoe’s novel occupies a central place, Coetzee’s ‘canonic intertextuality’ in Foe is not limited to re-writing Robinson Crusoe (Attridge, 1996: 169) but incorporates both the figure of the eighteenth-century author and several elements and characters of Defoe’s works. From the vantage point of a moment before the historic Defoe had turned to writing Robinson Crusoe, Coetzee speculates on the process preceding ‘the ‘fathering’ of the novel as genre’ and the omissions and silences that took place along the way. With hindsight, (De)Foe appears as personification of authorial manipulations. He effaces Susan from her own account in order to construct the Robinson ‘myth of the male pioneering spirit’ (Head, 1997: 115). He transforms the mute Friday (whose silence is both a reminder of the total exclusion of the colonized from the dominant discourse and an implicit challenge to its foundation, Western logocentrism) into the self-subordinating noble savage seeking to mimic his master. Put differently, rather than targeting the colonialist narrative of Robinson Crusoe head-on, Coetzee draws his readers’ attention to the formative elements of the colonial discourse and exposes the structures of power underpinning it.

In the final part of Foe, the dense, intersecting and overlapping textual levels of the novel converge in a surreal dreamlike scene full of contradictions and indeterminacies. Author, narrator and reader become indistinguishable. The unidentified narrator, ‘a fictional stand-in for the reader’ enters  Foe’s study (indicated by the reference to the commemorative blue plaque and the recourse to Susan’s vision of a stairway leading to the author’s hideout (F: 49). The room is littered with bodies (among them those of Susan and Mr Foe) resembling mummies. Friday is there too, barely alive. On the table, the narrator discovers Susan’s initial letter to Mr Foe. Upon reading her first words (‘Dear Mr Foe, at last I could row no further’)—from this point onwards the quotation marks used throughout the text to uphold the illusion of an autobiographical account disappear—the narrator/ reader literally dives into the underwater world surrounding Cruso(e)’s island. Like the room of the previous scene, the sea surrounding the wreck of the slave ship is full of dead bodies. Swimming into the hulk of the sunken vessel, it turns into the ship on which Susan Barton travelled. Her dead body lies besides that of the ship’s captain. She has never reached Cruso’s island, she has never passed on her account to Mr Foe, who never wrote Robinson Crusoe or Roxana. The text annuls itself; it robs itself of any closure (Spivak, 1990: 17).Again, Friday is there and again he features as the only animate body in the scene. Opening his tongueless mouth, a ‘slow stream, without breath, without interruption’ washing everything in its way comes out (F: 157). This cascade of surreal images is the climax of Coetzee’s dismantling of authorial authority, including his own. Taken together, the chain of conjured up images—the commemorative plaque dedicated to Daniel Defoe, the unread account of Susan Barton and Friday’s speechless underwater utterance is a stark reminder of the price of asserting authorial authority: marginalization, repression, silencing. Coetzee may be ‘asserting his authority,’ but at the same time he demystifies ‘the writer’s art (including his own),’ in the final part of the novel, ‘to find the traces of other voices, and to question any attempt at authority’. of his novel is emblematic of his second-order postcolonial critique. Colonialism is essentially a project of fixating differences. The colonizer imposes the closures of imperialism onto the colonized, simultaneously inscribing and marginalizing alterity. Put differently, both colonialism and canonicity depend on what it excludes. By denying closure, Coetzee destabilizes the very foundations of colonialist teleology and authorial authority. The one who possesses the key to the closure of the narrative is Friday. Friday’s utterance, however, remains unheard, his narrative unwritten.

Coetzee establishes a link between authority and marginality, merging them and reminding his audience of ‘the way the self-of-writing embodies counter-voices’ and that alterity and strangeness constitute essential conditions of literary narratives. This tension between the authoritarian nature of the narrative and the omnipresence of its discontents highlight what Linda Hutcheon has called the ‘contradictory doubleness’ of the novel. The novel, she stresses, is a potentially dangerous genre for it simultaneously reacts against and authorizes repression.Conflating colonialism and authorship, Coetzee exposes this fundamental ambivalence at work within and produced by the literary narrative. Through his self - critical exploration into questions of authorial authority, he, hence, provides a new vantage point from which a critical rethinking of questions concerning colonial marginalization and the  possibilities of postcolonial agency is made possible.

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