Foe
by JM Coetzee
In 1718 Daniel Defoe wrote his famous novel The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe popularly thought to be based on the adventures of Alexander Selkirk, who was stranded on a small island in the Pacific Ocean for four years. But there are other possibilities about the origin of the story, and JM Coetzee ties us up in knots examining these possibilities.
The narrator is Susan Barton, a strong, but impoverished, rather tragic Englishwoman who was shipwrecked on an island with Crusoe and the mute Friday on her way back from Bahia, Brazil. They are all rescued after a while, and Crusoe dies on the way back to England where she approaches Foe (Defoe’s real name apparently) to write the story of this castaway and herself to earn some money. But Foe turns out to be her foe in that he takes part of her story, but leaves her out of it, and presumably denies her any financial reward as he is deeply in debt. At the end of Coetzee’s short novel, he abandons the Susan Barton narrator and plunges the reader into the water again where we find the drowned bodies of Susan and Friday. I must admit I was out of my depth a bit here.
Was the proto-feminist /Susan Barton character, the narrator for the most part of the book, real or Foe’s muse? Was she locked in battle with Foe who takes her story for himself and leaves her drowned corpse in the sunken ship–dead to posterity? Does Coetzee know more about Daniel Defoe the plagiarist? Interestingly his subsequent books, Moll Flanders and Roxanna, are about strong women–rather like Susan Barton in Coetzee’s novel. Was he feeling guilty about plagiarizing her story?
Coetzee’s book is touted as the post-colonial novel of all post-colonial novels–he chooses the Robinson Crusoe theme because it is meant to be the classic novel of allegory for “civilization” and European colonization. (Luckily we are spared the religion of the original story, which Coetzee must see as Defoe’s and not Ann Barton’s contribution to the novel.) The character of Friday, the archetypal African man whose tongue has been brutally cut out, looms as the larger than life, post colonial image of European ignorance of the African situation and colonial mutilation of Africa: silent, unreachable and fathomless.
One has to admire the writing of JM Coetzee – his innuendos, his easy style, that watery prose in the beginning and end, and his nightmare images of early 18th century England stay with one long after the novel has been finished. I just cant help thinking how much fun our English literature teacher at school would have had with it!
The author
J M Coetzee was born Cape Town in 1940. He was educated at the Universities of Cape Town and then Texas, after which he taught at the State University of New York in Buffalo. (Interestingly, he and Wangari Maathai–see review below–were both born in 1940 and both educated partly in the USA.) Coetzee returned to UCT from where he retired at after being “Distinguished Professor of Literature”. He also taught for periods in the USA. He emigrated to Australia in 2002, where he has an honorary position at the University of Adelaide. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.His first book was Dusklands (1974), and this was followed by several further novels including In the Heart of the Country (1977), winner of the CNA Literary Award and filmed as Dust in 1985; Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999), both winners of the Booker Prize for Fiction; and Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003). His most recent novels are Slow Man (2005) and Diary of a Bad Year (2007). He has also written White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988), which is a collection of essays, and Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (1992), a collection of essays and interviews with David Attwell. His books Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life and Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II are both fictionalized memoirs. He is also translates Dutch and Afrikaans literature.
Comment on Foe (Penguin, 1987) by Caroline
Woodlands Bookclub Rating: 4
Book no 2137 (Sue W)
