Foe

Susan’s Island

Coetzee’s Foe begins with a displacement: the island belongs to Cruso, not Crusoe, and it is different from the island we know. Cruso keeps no journal—he does not see his life as a story worth recording. He has built no improvements, constructed no inventions, exhibited none of the entrepreneurial energy that makes Defoe’s hero a figure of Protestant capitalism. He has built only terraces—long, low terraces of earth whose purpose he either does not know or will not explain. He is old, damaged, content to wait.

Friday is also different. His tongue has been cut out—by whom and why, Cruso will not say—and he is therefore silent in a way that Defoe’s Friday is not. Defoe’s Friday learns English, converts, becomes the novel’s figure for the grateful colonial subject who embraces his own colonization. Coetzee’s Friday cannot speak, and this silence is the novel’s central absence and its central statement.

Susan Barton, the novel’s narrator, arrives on the island as a castaway and observes this situation with the honest discomfort of someone who recognizes it as strange without being able to say exactly what is wrong with it. She forms a relationship with Cruso—functional, without romance—and watches Friday with a mixture of sympathy and incomprehension. When a ship eventually rescues them, Cruso dies on the voyage back and Susan returns to England with Friday, holding a story she cannot tell because she does not understand it.

Seeking Foe

In England, Susan seeks out Daniel Foe—the real name of Daniel Defoe—to help her turn her experience into literature. She writes him long letters; she visits him; she argues with him about the story. The novel’s second section is this negotiation between the person who lived the story and the writer who is supposed to tell it, and it raises with great precision the questions Coetzee is interested in: who has the authority to tell a story, what does telling it mean, and what happens to the truth of experience when it is shaped into narrative by someone other than its subject.

Foe keeps trying to write a different story than the one Susan lived. He wants adventure, drama, significance—the shapes that make stories marketable and memorable. Susan wants the truth of her experience, which is quieter, stranger, and centered on an absence: Friday, who cannot speak, whose experience is the most important thing on the island and the one thing no one can access. The negotiation between them is Coetzee’s most explicit treatment of the politics of literary representation: the writer’s desire for a story and the story’s right to its own shape.

The question Susan most urgently wants to ask—what would Friday say if he could speak?—is the question the novel is built around. She cannot answer it. Foe cannot answer it. Coetzee cannot answer it. The novel does not pretend to answer it.

Friday’s Silence

The unresolvable question at the novel’s heart is both a historical and a philosophical one. Historically, it is the question of what the colonized people of Defoe’s era would have said about their own colonization if they had been given the means and the freedom to speak—a question that cannot be answered because they were systematically denied those means and that freedom. Philosophically, it is the question of whether any external account can represent an interior experience without replacing it.

Coetzee’s answer is implicit in the form of his novel: Foe does not give Friday a voice. In the novel’s extraordinary final section, a narrator who may or may not be Coetzee approaches Friday’s open mouth in an underwater dreamspace and finds not language but a stream that has no words, a darkness that has no voice. This is not evasion—it is the most honest representation available. Friday’s silence is not a problem to be solved by a better, more sensitive writer. It is the colonial text’s constitutive feature: the thing that makes the text possible is the silencing of the person it claims to speak for.

Coetzee’s Nobel Prize in 2003 recognized a body of work that returns, from different angles, to the same question: what does it mean to speak for someone who cannot speak for themselves, and is such speaking possible without appropriation? Foe is the purest and most compressed statement of that question in his fiction.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Coetzee’s most elegant and precise intertextual novel, and the most concentrated expression of his concern with colonial voice and silence. Essential.