7 - Foe (1986)

Summary

When J. M. Coetzee Was Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, his acceptance speech, entitled “He and His Man,” should have come as no surprise to those familiar with his oeuvre. He had cast his autobiographical works Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, Youth, and Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life in the third-person voice, and had long engaged in what we may refer to as ficto-criticism. Elizabeth Costello contains substantial sections of critical and philosophical discourse (lectures, essays), and Diary of a Bad Year includes a narrative “thread” of critical and philosophical commentary, while characters in such earlier novels as Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, and The Master of Petersburg offer sustained passages of reflection on writing, and on the politics and aesthetics of authority and authorship as these pertain to historical and literary worlds. However, “He and His Man” bears the closest relation to his 1986 novel Foe, where the similar ficto-critical concerns share an intertextual affiliation with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

Coetzee’s ficto-critical speech is ultimately a reflection on the hybrid ontogeny of the literary work. It asks: What is a character, what is a story, and what is an author? How do reading and writing together comprise the work? What does (the report of) the world bring to art and what does art bring to the world? And does the author create character and story, or do these create the author? “He and His Man” reveals the work, and literary creativity, as the product not so much of the merging of these vital constituents but as issuing from a “middle” or hybrid “third” space between them, authority ultimately and undecidably dispersed across them in the creative act.

How are they to be figured, this man and he? As master and slave? As brothers, twin brothers? As comrades in arms? Or as enemies, foes? What name shall he give this nameless fellow with whom he shares his evenings and sometimes his nights, too, who is absent only in the daytime, when he, Robin, walks the quays inspecting the new arrivals and his man gallops about the kingdom making his inspections? (HHM, 18–19)

He and his man are not the same, but if one is master and one is slave, which is which?