Foe - J.M.Coetzee

 “Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.”

John Maxwell Coetzee 

(born 9 February 1940) 

is a South African–Australian novelist, essayist, linguist, translator, and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in the English language. He has won the Booker Prize twice, the CNA Prize, the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina étranger, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. He holds a number of other awards and honorary doctorates.

Coetzee moved to Australia in 2002 and became an Australian citizen in 2006. He lives in Adelaide.

The foe is a 1986 novel by South African-born Nobel laureate 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 upon its release. Coetzee revisited the composition of Robinson Crusoe in 2003 in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Susan Barton is on a quest to find her kidnapped daughter who she knows has been taken to the New World. She is set adrift during a mutiny on a ship to Lisbon. When she comes ashore, she finds Friday and 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 on the island for only 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 set her story of the island as one episode of a more formulaic story of a mother looking for her lost daughter, and when he does write the story she wishes, fabulates 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.

Critical Reception

Foe attracted criticism in 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 pedestrian 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 providing a kind of masturbatory release, in this country, for the Europeanising dreams of an intellectual coterie"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, the 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, 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."

Thinking Activity Task

How would you differentiate the character of Cruso and Crusoe?

Cruso’s lack of journaling is a stark contrast to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

Robinson Crusoe is much less passive and senile in regards to his own development on the island. Crusoe kept a painfully detailed account of every action he does on the island in a journal he updates daily. In this journal, Crusoe records every step of all of the tools he crafts, and he writes about his own progress with his newly acquitted relationship with religion.

This Robinson Crusoe is much more in tune with his own reality and interested in his own accomplishments than Foe’s Cruso.

 Robinson Crusoe fills his multiple homes with various types of pots, tables, chairs, fences, and even a canoe. All of these items Crusoe builds are to improve and aid in his growth on the island, and he must be mentally sharp in order to build these items. Cruso in Foe has not put any effort towards building tools, as he only has a bed when Susan arrives at the island, and from the quote, it seems like he may not have the mental capacity to build these tools. Although Cruso does build many terraces, he exclaims that they are for future generations and not himself.

One explanation for the difference in mindset and mental stability in the two Robinson Crusoe may be that in Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe felt that his island life had more value than Cruso did. 

Friday’s characteristics and persona in Foe and in Robinson Crusoe.

Defoe used Friday to explore themes of religion, slavery, and subjugation, all of which were supposed to be a natural state of being at that time in history, and Coetzee uses him to explore more strongly themes of slavery, black identity, and the voice of the oppressed. In neither book is Friday left simply to be a character, he is instead always used as a device through which the reader can explore other topics.

‘Your master says the slavers cut [your tongue] out, but I have never heard of such a practice… Is it the truth that your master cut it out himself and blamed the slavers?’ (Coetzee, J.M, ‘Foe’.)

The fact that this question is never answered, and that all attempts to force Friday to communicate fail drastically leave the reader wondering whether the slavers that captured Friday removed his tongue, or whether that was done by the colonialist Cruso, who felt there was ‘no need of a great stock of words.

 Is Susan reflecting the white mentality of Crusoe (Robinson Crusoe)?

In Coetzee`s version, ''Robinson Crusoe'' becomes the story of ''A castaway and a dumb slave and now a madwoman.'' The ''madwoman'' is Susan Barton.

J.M. Coetzee presents Barton as a submissive supporting actress to the extremely dominant character of Robinson Crusoe.

Barton’s role as a submissive supporting character to Cruso displays Coetzee’s formulation of Susan as a man’s woman. 

Susan is a sensual woman, and as the only female character in both Defoe’s novel as well as Coetzee’s novel, she is represented through her sexuality. Susan’s sexuality is first displayed in the beginning of the novel when she is on the island and Cruso is alive. As she falls asleep one night, Cruso begins to make advances toward her. She describes the event by saying, 

“I pushed his hand away and made to rise, but he held me. No doubt I might have freed myself, for I was stronger than he” 

The presence of a female main character, Susan Barton, in Coetzee’s Foe critiques Defoe’s original imagination of Robinson Crusoe by showing the marginalized role of women in the seventeenth century. Susan is very much a man’s woman, a sensual woman represented through her sexuality. In his portrayal of Susan, Defoe is critiquing the traditional male attitude towards women.