Foe (Methuen Modern Plays)

by J.M. Coetzee

With the same electrical intensity of language and insight that he brought to Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee reinvents the story of Robinson Crusoe—and in so doing, directs our attention to the seduction and tyranny of storytelling itself.

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. 

In 1720 the eminent man of letters Daniel Foe is approached by Susan Barton, lately a castaway on a desert island. She wants him to tell her story, and that of the enigmatic man who has become her rescuer, companion, master and sometimes lover: Cruso. Cruso is dead, and his manservant, Friday, is incapable of speech. As she tries to relate the truth about him, the ambitious Barton cannot help turning Cruso into her invention. For as narrated by Foe—as by Coetzee himself—the stories we thought we knew acquire depths that are at once treacherous, elegant, and unexpectedly moving.

• ISBN13: 9782020476935
• Publish Date: 6 May 2003 (first published 26 February 1987)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: FR
• Imprint: Editions du Seuil
• Format: Paperback
• Language: French

Reviews

[clementine]

I like the impulse to problematize the narrative of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and certainly this book was an interesting exploration of authorship and whose voice gets prioritized. Though this is postcolonial fiction written during the Apartheid era by a (white) South African, I'm not entirely convinced that it does quite enough work to move away from patronizing colonialist attitudes. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak famously asked "Can the subaltern speak?", and in this retelling of Defoe's novel, the tongueless Friday literally cannot speak. Susan's anxieties about Foe accurately representing her story are echoed in her frantic and obsessive quest to find out Friday's truth, which ends in her constructing many a narrative about his life and experiences. The inevitable conclusion of Coetzee's literary rumination is that Friday's voice must give way to Susan's, and that Susan's authorial ownership comes at the expense of Friday's. Lots of interesting stuff going on here, and well-written, but ultimately it doesn't quite hit the mark for me.