{"id":2095,"date":"2009-08-14T00:01:44","date_gmt":"2009-08-14T04:01:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=2095"},"modified":"2018-05-26T00:01:23","modified_gmt":"2018-05-26T04:01:23","slug":"j-m-coetzees-foe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2009\/08\/14\/j-m-coetzees-foe\/","title":{"rendered":"J.M. Coetzee: Foe<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Foe<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\nby J.M. Coetzee (1986)<\/span>
\nPenguin (1988)<\/span>
\n157 pp<\/span><\/p>\n

[\/fusion_title][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” class=”” id=””]<\/p>\n

\"J.M.<\/p>\n

[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]B[\/fusion_dropcap]efore this, I’d read three other books by J.M. Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians<\/em>, Life and Times of Michael K<\/em>, and Disgrace<\/em>.\u00a0I enjoyed all three — very much. His style is so wonderfully simple and yet precise and still poetic.\u00a0Despite never having read Robinson Crusoe<\/em>, for some time\u00a0I have been looking forward to reading Coetzee’s\u00a0Foe<\/em>, his next book after winning the Booker for Life and Times of Michael K<\/em>. When\u00a0Foe <\/em>was released Coetzee was criticized because it\u00a0did not appear to be a politically relevant\u00a0book like his others. While I agree that it is not overtly political, its portrayal of language and how language can build power is acute and politically important in a less obvious way.\u00a0My problem with it was that I found it a bit boring and not as well tailored as his other books.<\/p>\n

The book is a sly reworking of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe<\/em>. Like Crusoe <\/em>(I said I’d never read it, not that I’d never read about it :) ),\u00a0Foe <\/em>is a story within a larger frame.\u00a0The book begins with quotation marks as Susan Barton begins her dramatic monologue.\u00a0We come to know that she is telling a writer,\u00a0Mr. Foe, about\u00a0her arrival on Cruso’s island, a wind-blown and rather barren island somewhere out from Brazil. Through snippets in this monologue, we find out that she had been in\u00a0Bahia, Brazil,\u00a0searching for her lost daughter, to no avail.\u00a0On her return to England, the ship on which Barton was sailing suffered a mutiny.\u00a0Barton, who had been cozy with the now-dead captain, was placed in a small boat with the captain’s body and castaway.\u00a0Eventually, dying of thirst with hands hurting from incessant rowing against the current, she throws herself into the ocean, eventually to be washed up on an island. On the shore she is found by Friday, Cruso’s black servant and fellow castaway.\u00a0For the next year Barton learns to cope with the wind and the waste on the island, constantly hoping for salvation.\u00a0 This is Part I.<\/p>\n

In Part I, there are some beautiful lines that introduce the major theme of the novel.<\/p>\n

But who, accustomed to the fullness of human speech, can be content with caws and chirps and screeches, and the barking of seals, and the moan of the wind?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Speech — the ability to make sound, to be heard, to be listened to, to communicate, to create a history\u00a0— is the novel’s main theme, particularly as applied to those without power.\u00a0We soon find out that Friday’s tongue has been removed by someone.\u00a0Slave merchants?\u00a0Cruso himself?\u00a0We don’t really know.\u00a0While on the island, Barton wants to teach Friday the ability to communicate, but Cruso says Friday knows what’s needed. Also, Barton wants Cruso to find a way to write his story so that it can be shared with others, but he has no interest. We never\u00a0find out how Cruso came to the island.\u00a0Despite the lack of communication, in some way these three diverse individuals manage to form a slight sense of being while trapped together on the island, and their connections don’t seem to rely on words.\u00a0Barton wonders:<\/p>\n

What had held Friday back all these years from beating in his master’s head with a stone while he slept, so bringing slavehood to an end and inaugurating a reign of idleness?\u00a0And what held Cruso back from tying Friday to a post every night, like a dog, to sleep the more secure, or from blinding him, as they blind asses in Brazil? It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in small; and if, in despite of what was possible, we lived at peace one with another, surely this was proof that certain laws unknown to us held sway, or else that we had been following the promptings of our hearts all this time, and our hearts had not betrayed us.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When salvation comes\u00a0Barton is certain it will lead to a better life. However, Cruso does not survive the journey home.\u00a0Barton and Friday find themselves lost and destitute\u00a0in England.\u00a0With no money but with hope, Barton goes to Mr. Foe, hoping he’ll put her\u00a0island adventure —\u00a0what we’ve just read —\u00a0into print.\u00a0She’s certain she lacks the skill to do it\u00a0(“Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr Foe: that is my entreaty.\u00a0For though my story gives the truth, it does not give the substance of the truth (I see that clearly, we need not pretend otherwise).”).\u00a0Thus we find out why Part I of the book is in quotations: it is Barton’s recounting of the\u00a0events on the island.<\/p>\n

When Part II begins, Foe has abandoned his home to creditors, and Barton has no idea how to find him.\u00a0Her only hope for herself and Friday is unresponsive.\u00a0This Part contains Barton’s letters imploring Foe to continue writing her story (“For surely, with every day that passes, our memories grow less certain, as even a statute in marble is worn away by rain, till at last we can no longer tell what shape the sculptor’s hand gave it.”).\u00a0She and Friday are in worse circumstances than they were on the island.\u00a0When\u00a0the creditors finally leave Foe’s home,\u00a0Barton and Friday move in.<\/p>\n

Part II is where the book started to lose my intense interest. At times it was still fascinating: there is an encounter with a girl claiming to be Barton’s daughter (it’s vague but vital to the story — the girl is a symbol); there is evidence Foe sent the girl; there is\u00a0further evidence the girl is being genuine. There\u00a0are multiple observations of Friday and what appears to be his complete oblivion. Still, I found myself just wanting the book to move forward and end. Coetzee’s own narrative becomes surreal as Barton’s reality becomes uncertain and characters enter and leave the story like ghosts through walls.\u00a0I’m sure I didn’t give it the time it deserved, but I was getting impatient before the narrative started falling apart, and it’s hard to get back on track when it’s going to take even more patience.<\/p>\n

All of this builds up to a more pleasing, though still abstract,\u00a0Part III when Foe finally speaks for himself.\u00a0Turns out he has been giving Barton’s story a lot of thought, but he doesn’t like her way of telling it. He tells her the story should be about her search for her daughter, something merely tangential, almost incidental, in Barton’s account and in her letters.<\/p>\n

‘. . . It is thus that we make up a book: loss, then quest, then recovery; beginning, then middle, then end.\u00a0 As to novelty, this is lent by the island episode — which is properly the second part of the middle — and by the reversal in which the daughter takes up the quest abandoned by her mother.’<\/span><\/p>\n

All the joy I had felt in finding my way to Foe fled me.\u00a0I sat heavy-limbed.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The book has much more to it than I was able to put down here, and for that reason it is worth reading. I don’t think it is Coetzee’s best work by a long shot, but in hindsight (after getting through the undergrowth) I very much liked the layers built upon this phrase: “. . . what it is to speak into a void, day after day, without answer.”<\/p>\n

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