EN3262 Coetzee

Resource Material for class discussion

J. M. Coetzee, Foe (1986)

From the novel (key passages for close reading):

The colonizer as South African colonial planter

13: Growing old on his island kingdom with no one to say him nay had so narrowed his horizon … that he had come to be persuaded he knew all there was to know about the world.

16: It seemed a great pity that from the wreck Cruso should have brought away no more than a knife.

33: `It would be the work of many men and many lifetimes to clear the whole island,’ he replied … `The planting is not for us,’ said he. `We have nothing to plant–that is our misfortune.’

34: `Time passed with increasing tediousness. When I had exhausted my questions to Cruso about the terraces, and the boat he would not build, and the journal he would not keep, and the tools he would not save from the wreck, and Friday’s tongue, there was nothing left to talk of save the weather.

38: His visits to the Bluff belonged to a practice of losing himself in the contemplation of the wastes of water and sky… when once I approached him, I was rebuffed with angry words, and for days afterwards he and I did not speak. To me, sea and sky remained sea and sky, vacant and tedious.

83: `On an island without seed, would you and he not have been as fruitfully occupied in watering the stones where they lay and waiting for them to sprout? If your master had truly wished to be a colonist and leave behind a colony, would he not have been better advised (dare I say this?) to plant his seed in the only womb there was?

The postmodern in the postcolonial: The compelling need to tell stories

18: The truth that makes your story yours alone, that sets you apart from the old mariner by the fireside spinning yarns of sea-monsters and mermaids, resides in a thousand touches which today may seem of no importance …

51: When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who longed to be gone: a being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso. Is that the fate of all storytellers? Yet I was as much a body as Cruso. I ate and drank, I woke and slept, I longed. The island was Cruso’s (yet by what right? By the law of islands? Is there such a law?), but I lived there too … Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr Foe: that is my entreaty.

58: That is part of the magic of words. Through the medium of words I have given Mr Foe the particulars of you and Mr Cruso and of my year on the island and the years you and Mr Cruso spent there alone, as far as I can supply them; and all these particulars Mr Foe is weaving into a story which will make us famous throughout the land, and rich too.

121-22: `You err most tellingly in failing to distinguish between my silences and the silences of a being such as Friday. 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? You will respond: he is neither cannibal nor laundryman, these are mere names, they do not touch his essence, he is a substantial body, he is himself, Friday is Friday. But that is not so. … what he is to the world is what I make of him. Therefore the silence of Friday is a helpless silence. He is the child of his silence, a child unborn, a child waiting to be born …

126: `Do you know the story of the Muse, Mr Foe? …. The Muse is both goddess and begetter. I was intended not to be the mother of my story, but to beget it. It is not I who am the intended, but you.

141: Till we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story. [cf Lyotard on the sublime: `in it pleasure derives from pain …. The sublime … takes place … when the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept…. Modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one…. The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself…’ (The Postmodern Condition, pp. 77-81).

142: It is for us to descend into the mouth (since we speak in figures). It is for us to open Friday’s mouth and hear what it holds: silence, perhaps, or a roar, like the roar of a seashell held to the ear.

142-43: Letters are the mirrors of words… our writing is the manifest of a speech spoken within ourselves to ourselves.’

`Nevertheless … Writing is not doomed to be the shadow of speech…. God’s writing stands as an instance of a writing without speech. Speech is but a means through which the word may be uttered, it is not the word itself. Friday has no speech, but he has fingers …

148: `For as long as he is dumb we can tell ourselves his desires are dark to us, and continue to use him as we wish.’

`Friday’s desires are not dark to me. He desires to be liberated, as I do too.

157: This is a place where bodies are their own signs.

Friday: the silence of the margin

23: `Perhaps they wanted to prevent him from ever telling his story … How will we ever know the truth?’

24: now I began to look on him–I could not help myself–with the horror we reserve for the mutilated. It was no comfort that his mutilation was secret, closed behind his lips (as something other mutilations are hidden by clothing).

69: Who was to say there do not exist entire tribes in Africa among whom the men are mute and speech is reserved to women?

80: You are very likely a virgin, Friday. Perhaps you are even unacquainted with the parts of generation.

85-6: Why, during all those years alone with Cruso, did you submit to his rule …. Why did you not desire me, neither you nor your master?

91: `You are father-born. You have no mother. The pain you feel is the pain of lack, not the pain of loss. What you hope to regain in my person you have in truth never had.’

111: `A woman may bear a child she does not want, and rear it without loving it, yet be ready to defend it with her life. Thus it has become, in a manner of speaking, between Friday and myself.’

151: But the man seated at the table was not Foe. It was Friday, with Foe’s robes on his back and Foe’s wig … In his hand, poised over Foe’s papers, he held a quill with a drop of black ink glistening at its tip.

154: From his mouth, without a breath, issue the sounds of the island...

Critical perspectives and Questions for seminar discussion

J. M. Coetzee, Foe (1986)

from Hélène Cixous, `The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976), rpt. New French Feminisms, ed. Eliane Marks & Isabelle de Courtivron, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981, pp. 245-64:)

I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies–for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal…. When I say `woman’, I’m speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history….I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear…. Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naiveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn’t been ashamed of her strength?…. Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself.

Question: How far, and in what ways, does Coetzee subsidize a feminist agenda?

from bell hooks, `Choosing the Margin as Space of Radical Openness’ Yearning, Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990, pp. 145-53:)

I am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as site of resistance–as location of radical openness and possibility. This site of resistance is continually formed in that segregated culture of opposition that is our critical response to domination. We come to this space through suffering and pain, through struggle. We know struggle to be that which gives pleasures, delights, and fulfils desire. We are transformed, individually, collectively, as we make radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world.

Question: Is Coetzee being merely politically correct in how he positions his narrative in relation to postcolonial discourse?

from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, `Theory in the Margin: Coetze's Foe reading Defoe's Crusoe/Roxana', in Consequences of Theory: Selected Papers of the English Institute, 1987-88, New Series, no. 14, ed. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson ( Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, pp. 154-80:)

For Marx, the character of Robinson is a form of appearance of man in nature... In his situation, of man alone in nature, producing use-values, Robinson already of `necessity’ thinks abstract labor: `He knows that ... the activity of one and the same Robinson consists of nothing but different modes of human labor ... all the relations between Robinson and the objects ... of his own creation, are here ... simple and clear ... and yet ... contain all the essential determinants of value.'’Time, rather than money, is the general equivalent that expresses this production... Just as the Jamaican white Jean Rhys's rewriting of a nineteenth-century English classic cannot accept Jane Eyre as the paradigm woman, so can the South African white’s rewriting of an eighteenth-century English classic not accept Crusoe as the normative man in nature, already committed to a constitutive chronometry... Foe’s Cruso has no interest in keeping time... Although produced by merchant capitalism, Cruso has no interest in being its agent, not even to the extent of saving tools. Coetzee’s focus is on gender and empire, rather than the story of capital... First, consider the title, Foe... In restoring this proper name, Coetzee also makes it a common name. Whose Foe is Mr. Foe? ... The narrator of Foe is an Englishwoman named Susan Barton, who wants to `father’ her story into history, with Mr. Foe’s help... This first part–the story of her discovery of Cruso and Friday, Cruso’s death on board ship on the trip back to England, and her arrival in England with Friday–is her memoirs... Coetzee’s Susan Barton is also Defoe’s Roxana, whose first name is Susan... The male marginal in the early 17^th century imagination can be the solitary contemplative Christian, earning the right to imperialist soul making even as he is framed by the dynamic narrative of mercantile capitalism elsewhere. The female marginal is the exceptional entrepreneurial woman for whom the marriage contract is an inconvenience when the man is a fool... Defoe’s heroine must be a rogue–a social marginal finally centralizing herself through marriage. In this enterprise, she uses the money held by men as aristocrats, made by men as merchants; and she uses her sexuality as labor power... Defoe cannot make his Roxana utter her passion for woman’s freedom except as a ruse for her real desire to own, control, and manage money.... None of these issues is quite relevant for Coetzee: He is involved in a historically implausible but politically provocative revision. He attempts to present the bourgeois individualist woman in early capitalism as the agent of other-directed ethics rather than as a combatant in the preferential ethics of self-interest…. It is therefore she who is involved in the construction of the marginal–both Cruso and Friday, and herself as character–as object of knowledge…. Let us decide that the problem is recast from the point of view of the feminist as agent, trying at once to rescue mothering from the European patriarchal coding and the `native’ from the colonial account….[Regarding Susan’s unwillingness to accept the woman who claims she is her lost daughter] here the book may be gesturing toward the impossibility of restoring the history of empire and recovering the lost text of mothering in the same register of language….feminism … and anticolonialism cannot occupy a continuous (narrative) space…. [Concerning Friday] Susan wants to know him, to give him speech, to learn from him, to father his story, which will also be her story … the orchestration of her desire to construct Friday as subject so that he can be her informant … Yet it is Friday rather than Susan who is the unemphatic agent of witholding in the text. For every space that is value coded by colonialism and every command of metropolitan anticolonialism for the native to yield his `voice’, there is a space of witholding, marked by a secret that may not be a secret but cannot be unlocked. `The native’ … is not only a victim, he or she is also an agent. He or she is the curious guardian at the margin…. [The end:] Perhaps that is the novel’s message: the impossible politics of overdetermination (mothering, authoring, giving voice to the native `in’ the text; a white male South African writer engaging in such inscriptions `outside’ the text) should not be regularized into a blithe continuity, where the European redoes the primitive’s project in herself…. I heard Jacques Derrida deliver an extraordinary paper on friendship. I can suppose I can say now that this Foe, in history, is the site where the line between friend and foe is undone. When one wants to be a friend to the wholly other, it withdraws its graphematic space. Foe allows that story to be told.

Question: In what sense is the novel self-reflexive? and what purchase does it give to a Marxist perspective on colonialism?