Following the publication of Foe, J.M. Coetzee was confronted by some for allegedly ignoring the political reality of South African racial politics, which had reached a crucial crisis at the time. However, more benevolent critics have brought out the ethical rigour with which Coetzee addresses the role that story telling and silence play in the representation and sense of identity of those marginalized and repressed (see Spivak, Parry, Attridge, Attwell). This debate over the politics of fiction, and implicitly about the efficacy of particular formal strategies, accompanies much of Coetzee’s writing. He has been described, quite succinctly, as “a first-world novelist writing out of a South African context” (Huggan and Watson 1; on his sense of identity see also Head, Coetzee [1997] 6-7). This dual affiliation is particularly obvious in Foe since the novel almost completely avoids mention of Africa yet offers a complex critique of colonialism as well as of literature’s complicity in it. As the title already indicates, Coetzee responds to one of the most crucial texts of the eighteenth-century “rise of the novel”, the 1719 pseudo-autobiographical Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (or De Foe). Foe playfully dissects both the novel and the literary apparatus that drove early modern book culture. It is one of these self-reflexive postmodern texts “which tell both a story and the story of that story” (Bishop 55).
The formal structure of Foe further underlines Coetzee’s interest in textuality and the way that printed words represent reality. While Defoe’s original work is restricted to the first-person account of the stranded sailor, Coetzee’s rendering of that material is more multi-vocal and introduces a female character, Susan Barton. She is presented as the sole speaking survivor of the island exile: Cruso (Coetzee’s version of Defoe’s Crusoe) dies soon after being rescued and Friday cannot speak because his tongue was cut out. Part I of Foe, with paragraphs consistently marked by opening quotation marks, is the first person report that Susan Barton gives to Foe about her arrival on the desert island, her time spent there, and her final return to England. Part II consists of (initially) dated letters by Barton to Foe in which she pleads with the author to help her in publishing her report of the island experience. Part III is written as a first-person account by Barton of time spent with Friday and Foe in London. Part IV opens with the same sentence as Part III, transposed from the simple past into the present tense. Told by an unspecified first-person voice, the scene finds Barton and Foe dead, Friday sleeping. Separated by two asterisks, the text then repeats itself in different words and then has the narrator start reading a written version of Barton’s initial narrative, as rendered in Part I. He or she finally and magically falls into the very water in which Barton was swimming towards the island, in a sense becoming Barton. However, this first-person narrator dives down, heading towards the wreck of Cruso’s ship, to which Friday is chained. As the narrator forces his mouth open, it reveals “a slow stream, without breath, without interruption” (157). While not clearly identified as speech, this word-less utterance nevertheless ends Foe with Friday finally having his say, his version of his life finally making its way around the world.
Most of the novel, however, deals with Barton and her struggle to find a form for her story and to convince Foe that what she had lived through is worthy of being committed to the page. Foe’s use of the present tense in the second part of the novel is particularly revealing. Throughout, Barton addresses him in her letters without the readers getting his side of the discussion. Later, Barton suggests that Foe never even read her missives. What readers thus encounter in this clever construction is not so much somebody exerting power (though Foe does so later in the text), but rather the effect power has on those under its spell, as they are trying to yield to its force. Even without Foe responding, Barton adjusts her way of thinking to fit what she assumes would be his expectations. Foe himself, furthermore, hardly appears as a respectable person: he is portrayed throughout as a shifty character on the run from his creditors and as a scheming manipulator of words and people. Barton feels drawn into his net of language and invention as she is stalked by a young woman who claims to be her daughter and who thus uncannily evokes Barton’s initial reason for crossing the Atlantic, namely to search for a lost daughter. As a woman haunted by maternity and a muse reduced to providing (sexual) inspiration to a man of dubious literary standing, Barton increasingly fades from her own narrative and even expresses her fear that Foe will reduce her to “a story” he scripts (131). In fact, she comes to realise that once she had entered the world of narrative and writing, “all my life grows to be story and there is nothing of my own left to me” (133). What makes matters worse, the novel Foe suggests that Barton will never succeed in having her story published and that “the authority of literariness recedes infinitely before her” (Attwell 106). Already hinting at his later fiction, Coetzee here clearly addresses questions about the meaning of authorship, the legitimacy of writing, and the tenuous relationship between fiction and reality. By engaging in these debates, Foe reveals itself to be a highly metafictional comment about the state of (postmodern) literature.
The engagement with the field of literature is also more pronounced on a different level. While not made too obvious in Foe, various aspects of Barton’s story are drawn from a different text by Defoe, namely Roxana (whose protagonist shares her first name), suggesting that (De)Foe removed Barton from one narrative only to build another one around her (see Head, Introduction 63; on intertextual references to Shakespeare, see Kossew 171). By first inventing and then slowly disembodying the female author of Robinson Crusoe, Coetzee’s Foe implies that the forces of literary creation are highly contingent on questions of identity, primarily those of gender and race. In fact, the novel “does have something to say about the position of women and the politics of representation in both the fiction and the nonfiction of the eighteenth century” (Hutcheon 76). It also implicitly comments about the way that canons privilege particular kinds of stories and types of characters, leaving little room for the voices of those considered to be too marginal to have anything of value to add. But, most significantly, the novel shows quite clearly that even where such stories of the repressed are retold from somebody within the circles of the literary world (an honour that many of Defoe’s contemporaries would not have awarded to any member of Defoe’s Grub Street scene), the process of mutilation is so severe that little may remain from the original story. This aspect of writing is fully embodied in Foe by Friday. As Barton puts it herself in the third part of Foe: “Friday has no command of words and therefore no defence against being re-shaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others” (121). In the light of all the intertextual allusions included in Foe it is remarkable that Defoe’s actual source, Alexander Selkirk’s text, remains absent from Coetzee’s work (see Attridge, Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading 73), in effect providing an example of how literature silences precisely what it represents. Foe thus performs its own imperfection and defers absolute origins in an ironic gesture (see Spivak 176 and Bayer 114).
One reason why literature, according to the novel, is bound to fail is its firm incorporation into the larger system of literary and cultural discourse. With Foe, Coetzee offers a critique of the power of literary conventions in that he has Foe dismiss Barton’s description of her island experience as uninteresting. Barton herself, albeit more cautiously, plays the same game when she tries to get Friday to reveal his side of the story. By teaching him how to write, she uses Western systems of knowledge to gain an advantage. Not really interested in his view of reality (her knowledge about Africa is presented as extremely sketchy), “she wishes to make him speak her language” (Worthington 254). Friday, however, proves resistant to the logic of signs, making Barton wonder to what an extent she might ever be able to understand and communicate with somebody whose linguistic and cultural background differs substantially from her own. While the mutilated and mute figure of Afro-Caribbean Friday serves as a powerful symbol of the violent effects of European colonialism, Friday remains, for the most part, uncomfortably close to the stock figure of the simple-minded and physically over-determined ethnic other (see Watson 34). As in some of his other novels, most notably Waiting for the Barbarians and Life and Times of Michael K, Coetzee presents silence as a facet of colonialist exploitation, emphasizing the role that language plays in subjugating and controlling other people. Yet in resorting to such symbolic and formal experimentation, Coetzee comes dangerously close to effacing the political reality of South African apartheid. Whereas Foe only playfully engages in this dialogue, Coetzee’s later works are marked by a tendency to “push the limits of inventiveness to prevent politics overwhelming the literary” (Head, Introduction 76; see also Attridge, “Coetzee’s Artists”, and Attwell). It is through its implied acknowledgment of its intentional refusal to relate to one particular historical reality that Foe gains credibility as a critical, if allegorical, intervention in the contentious debates over power, language, literature, and colonialism.
Works cited
Attridge, Derek. “Coetzee’s Artists; Coetzee’s Art.” J.M. Coetzee’s Austerities. Ed. Graham Bradshaw and Michael Neill. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. 25-42.
---. J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.
Attwell, David. J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
Bayer, Gerd. “J.M. Coetzee, Foe (1986).” Teaching Contemporary Literature and Culture: Novels. Vol. 1. Trier: WVT, 2008. 109-21.
Bishop, G. Scott. “J.M. Coetzee’s Foe: A Culmination and a Solution to a Problem of White Identity.” World Literature Today 64.1 (1990): 54-57.
Coetzee, J.M. Foe. 1986. London: Penguin, 1987.
Head, Dominic. The Cambridge Introduction to J.M. Coetzee. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.
---. J.M. Coetzee. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.
Huggan, Graham, and Stephen Watson. “Introduction.” Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee. Ed. Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson. London: Macmillan, 1996. 1-10.
Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1993.
Kossew, Sue. “‘Women’s Words’: A Reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Women Narrators.” Critical Essays on J.M. Coetzee. Ed. Sue Kossew. New York: Hall, 1998. 166-79.
Parry, Benita. “Speech and Silence in the Fictions of J.M. Coetzee.” Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee. Ed. Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson. London: Macmillan, 1996. 37-65.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe/Roxana.” Consequences of Theory. Ed. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991. 154-80.
Watson, Stephen. “Colonialism and the Novels of J.M. Coetzee.” Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee. Ed. Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson. London: Macmillan, 1996. 13-36.
Worthington, Kim L. Self as Narrative: Subjectivity and Community in Contemporary Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.
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Citation: Bayer, Gerd. "Foe". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 September 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5090, accessed 09 June 2026.]
