FoeJohn Coetzee

Brander NataliaGuzmán María Ramos JimenaLiterary Studies IFRV – UTNSeptember 8 th 2012

Author´s biographyPolitical Context: South Africa 1986PlotCharactersThemesLiterary Criticism

Coetzee´s Biography

African novelist, essayist, linguist and translator.

1940 He was born in Cape Town, South Africa

1957 He entered the University of Cape Town and he graduated in English and Mathematics.

1962-1965 He was in England working as a computer programmer.

1965 He entered the graduate school of the University of Texas at Austin.

1968 He graduated with a PhD in English, linguists and Germanic languages.

1969 He began writing fiction: Dusklands (1974), In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life & Times of Michel K (1983) Foe (1986), Age of Iron (1990), etc.

1971 An applicant for permanent residence in the USA was denied.

1972-2000 he worked at the University of Cape Town

1984-2002 He taught in the USA

2002 He retired and travelled to Australia

2003 he won a Nobel Prize in Literature

Context: South Africa

Apartheid system: racial policies and oppression of civil rights.

Disventment of holdings.Anti-apartheid activists: strikes, marches,

protests, and sabotage by bombing and other means.

The African National Congress (ANC) was a major resistance movement.

Novel’s Plot

Susan Barton is on a quest to find her kidnapped daughter whom she knows has been taken to the New World. She is set adrift during a mutiny on a ship to Lisbon. When she comes ashore, she finds Friday and a Cruso who has grown complacent, content to forget his past and live his life on the island with Friday—tongueless by what Cruso claims to have been the act of former slave owners—in attendance. Arriving near the end of their residence, Barton is only on the island for a year before the trio is rescued, but the homesick Cruso does not survive the voyage to England. In England with Friday, Barton attempts to set her adventures on the island to paper, but she feels her efforts lack popular appeal. She tries to convince novelist Daniel Foe to help with her manuscript, but he does not agree on which of her adventures is interesting. Foe would prefer to write about her time in Bahia looking for her daughter, and when he does write on the story she wishes, fabulates about Cruso's adventures rather than relating her facts. Frustrating Barton's efforts further, Foe, who becomes her lover, is preoccupied with debt and has little time or energy to write about anything. Barton's story takes a twist with the return of someone claiming to be her missing daughter.

Characters

Friday: is a tongueless Negro, who is the manservant of Cruso. Both live in an island due to a shipwreck. After being rescued, and his master’s death on board, Susan takes care of him in England. Friday cannot express himself in any way other than a few discordant notes on the flute and a crazy dance. This silence may represent the oppression of the voice of the black

majority in South Africa.

Robinson Cruso: is the master, the real king, of the island where he and Friday have been castaway for fifteen years. Cruso is a past middle aged man who enjoys solitude and silence. He works in the project of building terraces but with no hope of agriculture, only for the future comers. Cruso, being seriously ill, does not survive the voyage to England.

Susan Barton: is the young castaway woman who landed on the same island already inhabited by Friday and Cruso. This character is complex since she exemplifies both: strength and weakness. Susan is the female voice in the story and may represents her genre. She also struggles to assert herself in a male dominated society. Susan attempts to set her adventures to paper.

Daniel Foe: is a novelist who is in serious economic problems, bailiffs have taken his house. Foe is asked to help Susan write her story about the island and turn it into a popular book of adventure. However, he seems to be interested in recounting another version of the story, different from the one Susan wants, since, according to him, it lacks motivation.

Literary Criticism

Linda Hutcheon: Parody

Brian McHale: Ontological Dominant

Signify and Signifier

Roland Barthes: “The Death of the Author”

Themes

The Linkage Between Language and Patriarchal Power

The Linkage Between language and Identity

The Quest for Truth (substance)

Linda Hutcheon: Parody

A parody according to Linda Hutcheon is an: "imitation characterized by ironic inversion", or "repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity“(p.6)

Examples

Foe (title)"We have a roof over our heads, made

without saw or axe. We sleep, we eat, we live. We have no need of tools” (p.9).

“The simple truth was, Cruso would brook no change on his island”(p.27)

Brian McHale: Ontological Dominant

Typical postmodernist questions:What is a world? Which world is this? What is to be done in it?What kinds of world are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?Does it have a “real” existence outside my construction of reality?Is my construction any more real than anyone else’s?

Examples

“The world is more various than we ever give it credit for—that is one of the lessons I was taught by Bahia” (p.69)

“What are we doing here, you and I, among the sober burgesses of Newington, waiting for a man who will never come back?” (p.70)

“How can we live if we do not believe we know who we are, and who we have been?” (p.130)

“Who am I and who indeed are you?” “To what order do I belong?” (p.133)

“I am full of doubt. Nothing is left to me but doubt. I am doubt itself. Who is speaking me? Am I a phantom too? To what order do I belong? And you: who are you?” (p.133)

“We are accustomed to believe that our world was created by God speaking the Word, but I ask, may it not raher be that he wrote it, wrote a Word so long we have yet to come to the end of it? May it not be that God continually write Foe(p.143)

“Which of us can say what freedom truly is?” (149)

McHale

Signify and signifier.McHale points out that “they are discursive

constructs rather than real-world objects, it is possible to construct them in a variaty of ways, making it necessary for us to discriminate among, say, the various constructions of romanticism….we can discriminate among constructions of postmodernism, none of them any less true or less fictional than the others, since all of them are finally fictions” (p. 4)

Example: “On the slate I drew a house with a door and

windows and a chimney, and beneath it wrote the letters h-o-u-s.´This is the picture´,I said, pointing to the picture, “and this is the word”, I made the sound of the word hous one by one….”now do it alone, Friday”, I said and Friday wrote the four letters h-o-u-s, or four shapes passably like them: whether they were truly the four letters, and stood truly for the word house, and the picture I had drawn, and the thing itself, only he knew.” (p.145)

“I drew a ship in full sail, and made him write ship, and then began to teach him Africa. Africa I represented as a row of palm trees with a lion roaming among them, was my Africa the Africa whose memory Friday bore within him?I doubted it. Nevertheless, I wrote A-f-r-i-c-a and guided him in forming the letters” (p.146)

Barthes:“The Death of the Author”

Barthes states that “once the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on the text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing…. the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the author beneath the work: when the author is found, the text is explained…” (p.122)

Example: Chapter 4

Works Cited

Coetzee, John M. Foe. Great Britain: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1986. Print.

Hutcheon, Linda. A theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York and London: Methuen,1985. Print.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. Great Britain: Methuen, 1987. Print.

Barthes,Roland “The Death of the Author” in Image-Music-Text. Stephen Heath London,1977.