Foe

CONTESTING BOUNDARIES IN THE CASTAWAY NOVEL: J.M.
COETZEE’S
FOE
4.1 Contextualization
J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) returns to the premise of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
contained in the story of one man’s heroic ability to master himself and his environment in
the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Coetzee challenges Defoe’s portrayal of spatial
adaptation and identity transformation from a postmodern and postcolonial perspective by
exploring the role of the storyteller or narrator in order to reveal the power of the author to
silence, exclude and omit certain events and people on the basis of gender, class and race. In
light of this context, the central question this chapter will aim to address is concerned with
how narratological strategies - in particular intertextuality, allegory and irony – dissolve
textual boundaries. Related to this question, this chapter will also examine how and to what
extent Coetzee’s novel confirms generic transformations of the 20th century castaway novel.
With regard to Foe, textual boundaries refer to the margins that separate history from fiction,
author from character, author from reader and thereby also fiction from reality.
The aim of this chapter in relation to my central thesis is to situate Foe as an exemplar of
generic transformation of the castaway novel as Coetzee continually challenges the authorial
function in order to examine the nature of textual boundaries, particularly with regard to the
relationship between narrator and author. Coetzee’s use of intertextuality, allegory and irony
examines and completely re-writes imperialist constructions of identity and spatiality to show
how they not only define Robinson Crusoe, but also the castaway genre as a whole. This
chapter therefore contextualizes Foe as an intertext between Eco’s The Island of the Day
Before and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, as Coetzee’s novel stands as a midpoint of the evolution
of the castaway novel genre in the sense that it relates Eco’s intertextual citations of the past
in the present to the problems of narrative authority and ideology. In addition, Foe articulates
the castaway novel’s central generic motif of social disconnection, or being ‘cast away’,
through Susan Barton’s existential isolation, a condition that is exemplified by her struggle to
have her story told. She longs to have her “substance” (51) returned to her in the sense that
she wants her past to be authenticated through Daniel Foe’s writing.
From a postcolonial perspective, Coetzee contests the concept of
boundaries imposed by colonization by transgressing the traditional parameters of genre,
namely author, narrator, space (setting) and identity (character). Foe reconfigures these
traditional parameters through an exploration of the limitations of realist literature that are
manifested in Coetzee’s attempt to re-write Robinson Crusoe. This revision illustrates the
possibility of other voices and alternative versions by engaging with the notion of storytelling
and the overlapping roles of author and narrator. Postmodernism contends that both history
and fiction are “narrative discourses … both constitute systems of signification by which we
make sense of the past” (Hutcheon, 2003:89). Coetzee examines the similarities between
history and fiction in order to show that historical representation and fictional representation
are mediated through similar processes of ordering, selection and omission. As textual
representations of the ‘real’ world, history and fiction are equally subjective, and as such,
flawed. Both are made up of many stories, none of which can allege to be the only truth.
Coetzee’s revision places fact and fiction, story and history, on an equal ontological footing
with regard to their influence on the reader. By transferring history to the realm of fiction,
Foe challenges history’s claim to veracity and incontestability.
In Foe, various textual boundaries - most notably the boundary between history and fiction -
are gradually dissolved, thereby altering the shape and form of the castaway novel. Coetzee
achieves this result by inserting and foregrounding the stories of characters Defoe either
omitted or suppressed in his definitive castaway text, namely a female castaway Susan
Barton, and the mute, morose slave Friday. Susan’s story stands central and subverts Defoe’s
narrative by offering an alternate perspective to life on the island that reflects subversively on
Crusoe’s Enlightenment ideals of a progressive and rational existence. This is achieved, for
example, through the respective novels’ treatment of time and the relation thereof to the
notion of individual progress. In this regard, Susan recounts the dreariness and loneliness
that typified daily life on the island:
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. (34)
Time on the island is unstructured and undifferentiated, and the tedium with which time
passes suggests that, at an existential level, life on the island does not evolve. Moreover,
Susan describes Cruso as a bad-tempered and uncommunicative old man who “has too little
desire to escape, too little desire for a new life” (88). The fact that Cruso makes no effort to
keep a journal or notes of his life on the island suggests that he has no interest in keeping
track of time and as such, no interest in tracing his progress in terms of the ways he improves
his life or transforms the island-space.
In comparison, Robinson Crusoe’s days are filled with various tasks that structure the passing
of time on the island and enable its transformation:
I was very seldom idle; but having regularly divided my time, according to the
several daily employments that were before me, such as, first, my duty to God, and
the reading of the scriptures…secondly, the going abroad with my gun for food which
generally took me up three hours in every morning, when it did not rain; thirdly, the
ordering, curing, preserving, and cooking what, I had killed or catched for my supply;
these took up great part of the day… (Defoe, 1985:126)
As this passage suggests, Crusoe’s existence is structured according to an overtly linear-time
scheme that reflects his obsession with precise and detailed timekeeping. In a view that
corresponds with my assertion that there is a relation between the narrative’s linear
structuring of time and Crusoe’s obsession with keeping track of time, Parker (2011:19)
suggests that this linear time-scheme reinforces an important colonialist assumption that
relates the forward progression of time to progress and accomplishment. As such, the
overall inefficiency that Susan ascribes to Cruso in her narrative can be related to his inability
and unwillingness to keep time. This inverts Defoe’s linear time scheme, specifically with
regard to his idealistic assumptions regarding work ethic and individual progress, thereby
suggesting the futility of the whole colonial venture. Like the narrative of Robinson Crusoe,
historical writing also tends to follow a linear time-scheme. Coetzee’s inversion of the linear
time scheme is therefore one of the ways in which his revision manages to contest history’s
master status, as represented by Defoe’s narrative, in order to expose its inherent ideologies,
such as its authoritarian claims to truthfulness and accuracy.
Foe places the problem of stories and their telling at the centre of the text, the narrative
emphasizes the dialectic between history and fiction. In this regard, intertextual references,
such as those in Part I where Susan recounts her time on the island with fellow castaways
Cruso and his slave Friday, show history and its representation to be inseparable from its
ideological context. This is illustrated, for example, by the social structure on the island, as
Susan immediately assumes that Cruso rules over the island, with herself as “his second
subject, the first being his manservant Friday” (11). Clearly, the social hierarchy is
determined by an 18th century ideology based on white male hegemony. Daniel Foe’s
intention of reworking Susan’s story into a tale of heroic conquest reflects the beliefs, values
and cultural trends of his time. Therefore, Coetzee’s breakdown of traditional power
structures determined by nationality, race, gender and class reveals representations of space,
boundaries and identity in Robinson Crusoe to be ideologically constructed and even invalid.

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CONTESTING BOUNDARIES IN THE CASTAWAY NOVEL: J.M.

Time passed with increasing tediousness. When I had exhausted my questions to

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