Foe; 11-29-2019

 Nope, not writing about enemies. Only noting my reading of J.M. Coetzee's Foe (Viking Penguin, 1987).

Coetzee's reimagining of Robinson Crusoe, where the omni-competent Crusoe becomes the sourpuss, apathetic Cruso; where Friday's tongue has been cut out by who knows who; where a Susan Barton winds up on the island and becomes the book's narrator.

Quite a bit of the novel depends on Susan Barton's narration - it starts and ends in quotation marks. Yes, there is dialog with Foe - Daniel Defoe himself - and few other characters - but Coetzee is experimenting with the form in his own way, if not so frantically as Debald. The novel also runs only 157 pages - not enough time to tire of Susan Barton.

What does Coetzee experiment with besides form? He touches on racism, the nature of writing, and the relationship between writer and subject.

The "I" below belongs to Susan Barton:

`I am not a story, Mr. Foe. I may impress upon you as a story because I began my account of myself without preamble, slipping overboard into the water and striking out for the shore. But my life beings in the waves. There was a life before the water which stretched back to my desolate searchings in Brazil, there to the years when my daughter was still with me, and so on back to the day I was born. All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world. I choose rather to tell of the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there; for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire.'

p. 131

***

`But if these women are creatures of yours, visiting me at your instruction, speaking words you have prepared for them, then who am I and who indeed are you? I presented myself to you in words I knew to be my own - I slipped overboard, I began to swim, my hair floated about me, and so forth, you will remember the words - and for a long time afterwards, when I was writing those letters that were never read by you, and were later not sent, and at last not even written down, I continued to trust in my own authorship.

p. 133

Yes, probably a bit of feminism in there, too. Towards the end, Coetzee raises a question of reality - whose and what has been captured in words - and then offers up this paragraph:

But this is not a place of words. Each syllable as it comes out, is cuaght and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday.

p. 157

I suspect a doctoral dissertation could be - might have been - written on the effect of signs in this slim novel and whether we can communicate - whether we are not stories told by someone else.

I think I prefer the younger Coetzee of the Coetzee of The Schooldays of Jesus. His allegorical style feels to have lighter feet in 1986 - when the author was 46. To be 59 going on 60, 46 does feel young and spry!

sch 

[4-26-2025. I thought to add look up other critiques for Foe, and this is what I found: Foe | The problem with speaking on behalf of another (Hypercritic); AN ANALYSIS OF FOE BY COETZEE (PDF); Foe (1986), by J M. Coetzee (ANZ LitLovers LitBlog); and A Review of J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (by Bethany) (Postcards From Purgatory). sch]