Foe (book)

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 Cruso and Friday.

The text analyses traditional canons of class, gender and race in the processes of cultural acceptance and exclusion. Written from the "marginal" position of South African literature 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.

Plot

"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 who 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)

Defoe in Foe

In the novel there's a living parody of the English novelist Daniel Defoe in the character of Foe. The name Foe is ambivalent: it was Defoe's real name before he gentrified it with the De-; and of course it's a synonim 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 colonizers in order to define as "foes" colonized peoples: that was a lexical attempt to justify their action over "un-civilized" countries.

Friday

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. He even refuses to learn how to communicate through written language: as Susan and Foe try to teach him to write the letter "a" he traces a big "o", which could stand for omega, the last letter in Greek alphabet. That's Friday's will in the story: he wants to put an end to it, he can't be penetrated by others, his story won't be told by them. That's his only possible rebellious act against European historical and cultural domination.

Changes from the source material

In Foe Coetzee introduces a fundamental change: the narrator is a woman. Robinson Crusoe lacked of feminine characters: the only feminine element in the story was the island, which was to be dominated and tamed by men. Susan Barton's narrative intoduces the feminist self-affirmation, specifically by taking the island conditions of Robinson Crusoeand overlaying them with the narrative of Defoe's Roxana, whose feminine 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, 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.