In Foe, Coetzee reinvented (some would say "rewrote" but I disagree) Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. But in Foe, adventurous Crusoe becomes weak-minded Cruso (without an "e"), civilized Friday from a Caribbean descent becomes a negro whose tongue was cut off and unable to speak. Coetzee also introduces a female castaway Susan Barton, the key character, and a writer Daniel Foe, possibly a hybrid of Defoe and Coetzee himself.The Penguin edition is of only 157 pages. The story moves fairly quickly. You basically finish the book without realizing it, and my first response was "Eh?" Two million of questions left unanswered.Then I re-read the last section. Well, I still didn't even know who the narrator of the last section is! Why were there "Susan Barton and her dead captain" and in what "black space"? Is Friday still alive at the end? What is the relationship between Susan and Mr. Foe? is Mr. Foe the narrator "I" in the last section?Coetzee deliberately blurred the line that separates "fictional reality" and "fictional fictionality." According to some scholars, he was writing Foe as a "metafiction" that very self-consciously draws readers attention to the writing itself and the relation between writers and readers. One professor (I forgot who) said the pile of unanswered questions is exactly what Coetzee wanted to achieve at the outset, that writing is NOT to answer questions. It's also very daring of him to challenge readers what NOT to expect from writers! Very postmodern.Some critics were annoyed by the book though, saying it failed to achieve nobly as a metafiction. Just like what these people said about Paul Auster's Travels in the Scriptorium (another book that I really like). Guess I am already positively-biased toward Coetzee (given he is the ONLY person who won the Man Booker Prize twice), the "aftertaste of being hung high and dry" doesn't annoy me. It actually reminded me David Lynch's movie The Mulholland Drive, something that had stayed in me for a long while.Apart from being a metafiction, Foe is also about how impossible it is to try to give a voice to the silenced, just like Friday whose was shut up by someone else. There is basically no way to connect the inside of Friday with the rest of the world, since Susan couldn't even "pass a fingernail across his teeth". In the very last paragraph of the novel, Friday finally had a chance to "communicate", but through "a slow stream, without breath, without interruption," a communication neither the narrator nor the reader can interpret.Without meaning, language is just signs. And it's always the authority, or the powerful, who assigns meaning to signs. In Foe, the writer Mr. Foe kept changing Susan's stories, supplanting with details that didn't take place, or deleting moments which Susan thought was crucial but were dull to him."Friday has no command of words and therefore no defence against being re-shaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others. I say he is a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal; I say he is a laundryman and he becomes a laundryman. What is the truth of Friday? No matter what he is to himself, what he is to the world is what I make of him." -- Foe, Part 3.Sometimes we have unconsciously become Mr. Foe. Christians believe that they have the highest moral standards. Journalists believe they have the most informed world-view. Anything different from us is wrong. We try to educate people and change their opinions. We pursue until our opposition budges. It is barbarism in a civilized form. Beware!Coetzee also writes: "We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable."Sure many of you would disagree. Democracy demands a responsible citizen to be vocal about their rights. They should push and never give up what they think are just.It's all true. Society wouldn't advance if we all succumb to the authority. But how many of us manage to fight through their 80s? I of course admire those people and their fighting spirit. They deserve to be our leaders. We do count on them. But to the ordinary herd, like myself, such "calling" is just too much.There are too many things about the society we wish to be changed. Too much injustices. But how many of us would end up being another Nelson Mandela? or Mother Teresa? They are still remembered, or even "worshiped", for a reason -- that they accomplished something that ordinary will power don't.So, for the sake of psychological self-preservation, leading an easy life is not all bad. I'm not saying one should withdraw from all fighting, but understanding the world is not perfect and we are just a "pilgrim" in this world does help one stay sane.This novel has so many levels, especially under the structuralism approach. It really keeps you thinking for days. That's what a classic should be.
Foe reminds me more of Robert Coover's multilayered, metafictional Spanking the Maid than of Robinson Crusoe. That book was about spanking, and this book is about getting ravished. But what's it really about, you ask, and I'm like ugh, isn't "multilayered and metafictional" enough? Fine, god. I'll mark serious spoilers but we'll discuss general plot points, so heads up.On the first layer: Susan Barton is marooned on an island already inhabited by two other castaways. When she is rescued, she tries to sell her story. There are mysteries: one of the other castaways is mute. Supposedly his tongue was cut out, but she fails to verify this. Who cut out his tongue? Or did anyone? And who is the woman who shows up claiming to be her long-lost daughter? Below that, it's about Daniel Defoe's 1719 classic Robinson Crusoe: the other two castaways are Cruso [sic] and Friday. The author she attempts to sell her story to is Foe [sic] himself. So this is metafiction, and here's another mystery: why didn't Barton herself make it into Foe's novel? And below that, it's about the process of storytelling: whose stories are heard and whose are silenced and which truth gets told. Coetzee pretends that [De]foe wrote his books from life, but changed them to make them more entertaining. The version he eventually published has virtually nothing to do with its inspiration. (Several of Defoe's other characters also show up here to help make the point. And it's true, actually, although not in the way Coetzee presents it: Defoe was inspired by the story of castaway Alexander Selkirk.)Coetzee is South African, and he wrote Foe in the 80s, at the height of the controversy over a soon-to-die apartheid. When he presents Friday as mysteriously mute - the only character unable to tell his own story - he's talking about his country. He said that "South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less than fully human literature." That's what Friday represents, this less than fully human literature.So the third level answers the questions of the first two. (view spoiler)[Friday is mute because the storyteller has muted him. And Barton isn't really a character: she's the Muse. She tells you so herself, during an explicit sex scene. (All that ravishing represents the process of creation - sorry, I know that's cliched, blame Coetzee. Barton begins the story moments after being gang-raped by mutineers, so there's a metaphor for you.) And the mystery daughter is the story itself - unrecognizable to the Muse by the time it arrives, twisted and yet presented hopefully by the storyteller. "Did I get it right?" And the Muse is like ugh, no, that's terrible. (hide spoiler)]
What do You think about Foe (1988)?
In Foe, Susan Barton is set adrift in a rowboat after a mutiny on a ship sailing from South America to Lisbon. She lands on an island where Cruso and Friday had been cast away years ago. In Coetzee's retelling of the Robinson Crusoe tale, Cruso is content with his simple life on the island. Friday has been transformed from a Caribbean to a black African whose tongue had been cut out by slave owners. The three castaways are rescued after Susan has spent one year on the island, but Cruso dies on his way back to Europe. Susan wants to write their story so she contacts the author Daniel Foe to turn her narration into a book. But Foe wants to tell a different story about Susan than the one she thinks is important. Susan is also disturbed about Friday's lack of a voice. Although Friday has been liberated from slavery, he cannot ever really be free with no voice. The theme seems to be that the oppressed and disadvantaged have been silenced, and lost the authorship of their own stories.J.M. Coetzee was writing in 1986 in South Africa where communication problems and cultural differences existed between the black Africans and white colonialists. The original Crusoe story was a fictional autobiography and adventure story with 17th Century ideas about colonialism, gender, and slavery. Coetzee has updated the tale by adding a woman narrator, an African servant, and a 20th Century outlook.
—Connie
I have been wanting to read Foe for a while. For a couple of years in actual fact, and long before I found this site. I forgot all about it until I stumbled across it in a charity shop in York, and paid the princely sum of £2.99; a sort of treasure finders fee. I got it back to the hotel and did a bit of checking on here, to find that it received an average of 3.5. I can see why that might be the case, as on reading it, it is a very literary piece of fiction. It's not populist, it doesn't have much in the way of a structured plot, and it can be very difficult to follow the thread of what's going on. If you can get past these things though, you'll find something really very profound.Foe isn't so much a narrative of fiction, so much as a narrative on fiction itself. Coetzee asks the reader some deep and searching questions about what actually constitutes fiction here, and what makes fiction fictional. There are some genuinely deep discussions on a range of issues, and some really memorable sections of prose. There are discussions on the meaning of memory as it pertains to storytelling, gender and the struggle for a woman to be seen as more than either possession or whore, an argument on what truth really means, and the differentiation between your own truth and someone else's, there are discussions on morality and law, the isolation of the human condition, slavery and race and the disenfranchisement of ethnic minorities, as well as a range of other subjects, and Coetzee has crammed all of this in to a mere 157 pages, in such eloquent and powerful style.The novella is decided in to three sections. The first is the narrative of Susan Barton's marooning on a desert island, where she stumbles across Cruso and Friday; it forms a sort of retelling of Robinson Crusoe, but with a twist and is fascinating in it's own right as a short story. The second part consists of an internal debate, in the form of letters written to Foe by the protagonist of this retold story, and her machinations on what actually makes her story real. Can she tell her story as it actually happened? Will it get told as it happened? Is there loss in adding in fantastical elements to draw the reader in? What of Friday and his place in a world of words in which he cannot speak? The third segment is altogether a little odd, and forms an argument about the meaning of words and their use, their power and their form. This section seems to be an argument as to what constitutes creation; are authors gods in their own right? Their characters never truly speak, like puppets on a string, and so can never truly be 'real', but the words they are given and the roles that they play, make them real in the eye of the beholder. It is truly fascinating stuff all the way through.I gave this a four, as I love the intricacy of this sort of thing, and have studied literary criticsm, so it's right up my proverbial street. That said, the strange structure of the narrative, and the fact very little really happens, may mean that it doesn't appeal to everyone. Give it a go, and see how you get on.
—Roy Elmer
I don't think this is quite Coetzee's best book (I'd probably say Waiting for the Barbarians for that), but it's a stunningly good reimagining of the story of Robinson Crusoe through the eyes of a female castaway, Susan Barton, who ends up on the island with 'Cruso' and Friday and then tries to tell their (and her) story to the acclaimed writer Mr Daniel (De)Foe. Very little of this slender novel takes place on the island, and the events there show little promise of an exciting narrative (and little resemblance to the novel we know). Most of it consists of unanswered correspondence from Susan to Foe, who has disappeared in an attempt to escape his creditors. It's an examination of the (gendered) nature of storytelling and how we come to terms with the attempt to narrate our lives and turn them into stories. It's reminiscent of Jean Rhys's take on Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea and just as much a classic as that earlier postcolonial retelling.
—Blair
