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Rewriting the Canon: Defoe and the Colonial Imagination
To understand Coetzee’s Foe, one must first consider its relationship with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The eighteenth-century novel was not merely an adventure tale but a cultural artifact of the colonial mindset—a narrative of mastery, conquest, and rational control over the “other.” Crusoe’s taming of the island and his “civilizing” of Friday epitomize the imperial project of transforming wilderness into empire.
Coetzee’s Foe deliberately deconstructs this narrative. By introducing Susan Barton—a female narrator who is shipwrecked on Cruso’s (note the missing e) island—Coetzee signals a revision of both gender and colonial hierarchies. His Cruso is no longer the confident, industrious conqueror of Defoe’s imagination. Instead, he is an aging, weary man, indifferent to record-keeping or empire-building. He builds terraces on barren soil, a futile act that underscores the absurdity of colonial labor when detached from human meaning.
In this way, Coetzee subverts the Enlightenment ideals of reason and progress that underlie Defoe’s text. Cruso’s island becomes not a site of colonial triumph but of silence, decay, and unproductivity—a metaphor for the moral and epistemic exhaustion of empire.
Susan Barton and the Feminist Perspective
Susan Barton’s presence as the central consciousness in Foe represents one of Coetzee’s most radical departures from Robinson Crusoe. She not only reclaims the narrative from the male hero but also exposes the gendered assumptions embedded within literary tradition.
Susan’s desire to “have her story told” is continually thwarted by Mr. Foe, a fictionalized version of Daniel Defoe, who insists on reshaping her experiences into a more marketable adventure tale. He wants to include pirates, cannibals, and romance—conventional tropes of the male-authored colonial narrative. Susan, however, resists this manipulation, insisting on the authenticity of her experience and her right to self-representation.
Through this conflict, Coetzee dramatizes the silencing of women in the production of literature. As Susan tells Foe:
“It is not the story itself but the story’s being told that matters. Who tells it, and how it is told.”
This self-reflexive statement captures the novel’s feminist core. Susan’s struggle mirrors the larger historical struggle of women excluded from authorship and narrative authority. Her attempt to write herself into history—and Foe’s attempt to overwrite her—reflects the broader dynamic between patriarchal discourse and female experience.
Yet, Coetzee does not idealize Susan’s voice as pure or innocent. Her narrative authority is itself unstable. She cannot fully speak for Friday, whose silence exposes the limits of her empathy. Thus, while she resists male domination, she inadvertently replicates colonial power over the racialized other. Coetzee’s feminism, therefore, is not simplistic; it is entangled with postcolonial ethics and the politics of representation.
Friday’s Silence: The Postcolonial Core
Among all the novel’s enigmas, none is more haunting than Friday’s silence. In Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Friday is the grateful servant, a symbol of successful colonial domestication. Coetzee reverses this trope. His Friday is tongueless—his speech physically removed, his origins obscure. He embodies what Gayatri Spivak, in her famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, calls the unrepresentable subaltern—the subject whose voice is erased by the dominant discourse.
Friday’s muteness serves multiple symbolic purposes. It represents the erasure of the colonized subject from history and language. It also becomes a mirror in which Susan and Foe confront their own complicity in systems of representation. They both attempt to make Friday speak—Susan through empathy, Foe through fiction—but both fail.
Friday’s silence, therefore, is not merely absence; it is a powerful form of resistance. His refusal—or inability—to conform to the narrative expectations of his “masters” disrupts the logic of colonial storytelling. He becomes the blank space around which the entire novel revolves, the negative presence that exposes the inadequacy of language to capture otherness.
In the haunting final section of the novel, the narrator (perhaps Coetzee himself) descends into a drowned shipwreck where Friday lies underwater, from whose mouth “streams of bubbles flow.” This surreal, dreamlike image evokes the return of the silenced voice—a non-verbal, elemental utterance from the depths of history. It is as if Coetzee allows Friday to reclaim his voice beyond the reach of imperial and literary language.
Metafiction and the Problem of Authorship
Foe is not merely a rewriting of Crusoe; it is a meditation on the act of writing itself. By introducing Foe as a character, Coetzee transforms the novel into a metafictional dialogue about authorship, authority, and the production of meaning.
Foe represents the institutional power of the author—the one who shapes reality through narrative control. Susan, who experiences events firsthand, finds herself dependent on Foe to transform her story into literature. But Foe’s interventions distort the truth, turning lived experience into commodified fiction. This dynamic reflects Michel Foucault’s idea of the “author function,” where authorship becomes a site of power that governs what counts as knowledge or truth.
In this light, Susan’s letters to Foe—pleading, questioning, and asserting her story—become acts of resistance against the hegemony of textual authority. Yet her dependence on Foe also exposes the paradox of all storytelling: the need for mediation. Coetzee thus situates the novel at the intersection of power and representation, where every attempt to speak is shadowed by the structures that define what can be spoken.
Furthermore, Coetzee blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality. The novel’s title—Foe rather than Defoe—suggests both homage and antagonism. It implies that the act of rewriting the canon is itself an act of intellectual rebellion. By fictionalizing the author of Crusoe, Coetzee demystifies authorship as a historical construct rather than a divine gift.
This self-reflexive play positions Foe as part of a broader postmodern tradition that includes works like Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, both of which retell canonical myths from marginal perspectives. Like them, Coetzee’s novel reveals that rewriting is not imitation but critique—a way of exposing the ideological frameworks hidden in “original” texts.
Language, Power, and Silence
Language in Foe is both tool and trap. It is the medium through which the self seeks recognition but also the system that enforces exclusion. Susan’s struggle to “name” Friday, to translate his silence into meaning, recalls the linguistic imperialism of colonial discourse—what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o calls the “colonization of the mind.”
Coetzee repeatedly foregrounds the instability of language. Susan’s narrative, though confident, is filled with uncertainty, gaps, and contradictions. She often questions her own memory and doubts the accuracy of her words. This instability suggests that storytelling, rather than revealing truth, constructs it through selective narration.
At the same time, silence operates as a counter-language. Friday’s silence is not mere deficiency; it is a form of agency that resists incorporation into the linguistic order of the colonizer. The novel ends with the image of Friday’s mouth opening into “the slow stream of words that is not his,” suggesting that true expression lies beyond the boundaries of conventional speech.
Thus, Coetzee aligns silence not with absence but with possibility—the potential for alternative modes of being and knowing. This idea resonates with Derrida’s concept of différance, the endless deferral of meaning that makes language both productive and unstable.
Postmodern Narrative and the Fragmented Self
Coetzee’s narrative structure mirrors the themes of fragmentation and indeterminacy. The novel is divided into four parts, each destabilizing the previous one. The first three are narrated by Susan, whose reliability as a narrator is constantly questioned. The fourth part shifts into an impersonal, dreamlike perspective, dissolving the boundaries between storyteller and story.
This fragmentation reflects the postmodern distrust of unified identity and totalizing narratives. Susan’s sense of self depends on being recognized as the protagonist of her story. Yet, as Foe rewrites her experiences, her identity becomes a textual construct—mutable, unstable, and contested.
The novel thereby enacts what Linda Hutcheon calls “historiographic metafiction”: a mode of writing that simultaneously constructs and deconstructs historical truth. Foe acknowledges that the past can only be accessed through narrative, which is always partial and ideological.
Ethics of Representation
At its core, Foe is an ethical inquiry. Coetzee forces readers to confront the moral implications of representation. Can the marginalized ever be truly represented by the privileged? Can literature, built on systems of exclusion, speak for the silenced without perpetuating their silencing?
Susan’s well-intentioned efforts to tell Friday’s story ultimately reproduce the same hierarchies she seeks to undo. She wants to “give him a voice,” but in doing so, she speaks for him. Coetzee thus exposes the liberal fallacy of representation—the idea that empathy can erase structural inequality. True ethical engagement, the novel suggests, requires acknowledging the irreducibility of the other, the opacity that cannot be translated into one’s own language.
This tension between representation and responsibility situates Foe within the postcolonial ethics articulated by thinkers like Emmanuel Levinas and Spivak. Levinas’s notion of the “face of the other” as an ethical summons resonates with Friday’s silent presence, which commands attention but resists comprehension.
Conclusion
J. M. Coetzee’s Foe is not merely a postmodern experiment or a feminist revision; it is a profound meditation on storytelling as an act of power, violence, and moral ambiguity. By rewriting Robinson Crusoe, Coetzee dismantles the myth of the solitary, self-made man and replaces it with a web of interdependent voices—Susan’s partial narration, Foe’s manipulative authorship, and Friday’s inarticulate silence.
The novel’s final image—Friday’s silent speech emerging from the depths—serves as both elegy and prophecy. It suggests that beneath the surface of every canonical text lies a submerged history of silenced voices waiting to resurface. Foe thus becomes an allegory for postcolonial writing itself: the attempt to reclaim the margins of history through acts of imaginative resistance.
Ultimately, Coetzee’s Foe reminds us that literature is never innocent. Every story told excludes another; every voice heard silences another. Yet, by exposing this paradox, Coetzee transforms storytelling into an ethical act—a continual effort to listen to what cannot be said, to make visible what history has erased.
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