6 - The maze of doubting: Foe

Summary

If the ambivalences of Michael K finally point, unavoidably, to the South African context, the same gestural bridge is built in Foe (1986), with a sense of still greater poignancy. Here, underlying Coetzee's preoccupation with textuality and the function of literature, is the problem of the silencing and mutilation of the colonial Other.

Foe is Coetzee's most obviously metafictional text, a postcolonial reworking of Robinson Crusoe (which also contains allusions to other works by Defoe). The manner in which this unavoidable self-consciousness unfolds makes the book amenable to contemporary academic concerns. However, there is no sense of this novel being ‘unavailable’ to a general readership, even if its literariness is still more pronounced than in the earlier novels: there is no impediment to the narrative as story, or disengagement from the possibilities of intervention.

Foe exemplifies Helen Tiffin's conception of postcolonial literatures in which the principle of decolonization is ‘process, not arrival’, involving ‘an ongoing dialectic between hegemonic centrist systems and peripheral subversion of them’. This hybridity is productive where space is available for ‘counter-discursive strategies’, but the question of balance in these hybridized cultural models is delicate: ‘unless their stress is on counter-discursive fields of activity, such models run the risk of becoming colonisers in their turn’. For Tiffin, Foe succeeds in ‘writing back’, not just ‘to an English canonical text, but to the whole of the discursive field within which such a text operated and continues to operate in post-colonial worlds’:

Robinson Crusoe was part of the process of ‘fixing’ relations between Europe and its ‘others’, of establishing patterns of reading alterity at the same time as it inscribed the ‘fixity’ of that alterity, naturalizing ’difference’ within its own cognitive codes. […]