Universität Wien, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
PS Literature: Introductory Seminar (304)
The Post-Modern Condition
Summer Semester 2006

Metafiction in J.M. Coetzee′s ′Foe′

by: Verena Schörkhuber

Table of contents

1. INTRODUCTION

2. COETZEE’S PLACE IN CONTEMPORARY WRITING

2.1. THE POSITION OF COETZEE AND HIS TEXTS
2.2. THE INTERSECTION OF POSTCOLONIALISM AND POSTMODERNISM

3. METAFICTION

3.1. ORIGINS OF THE TERM AND ITS FUNCTION TODAY
3.2. DEFINITION(S) AND FORMS OF METAFICTION

4. METAFICTION AND THE DISCOURSE OF POWER IN FOE

4.1. AN OVERVIEW
4.2. PART I
4.3. PARTS II AND III
4.4. PART IV

5. CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRPAHY

1. Introduction

The main aim of this paper is to discuss metafiction in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986)¹, which is a rewriting of Daniel Defoe’s literary classic Robinson Crusoe (1719)². As a fiction about the origins of Crusoe, Coetzee’s Foe addresses the problematic issues in Crusoe, in particular the absence of female characters and Friday’s inefficacy to represent an independent personality, by ‘exposing the silences in the original and giving them voice’ (James, 6). Defoe, obscured behind the persona of the narrator in Crusoe, is ‘[forced] […] out into the open and [exposed] […] for what he is, the “foe”, Mr Foe, the giver of false witness’ (Burnett, 244).³

As a discussion of Foe inevitably raises questions of how far Coetzee was using Crusoe to explore the South African context, I shall deal not only with the position of Coetzee and his texts as discussed by various critics, but also with the intersection of postcolonialism and postmodernism in his works and suggest that even though there might be a perception of the ‘marginalisation of ethical discourse […] [as] a result of the rise of poststructuralist theory’ (Yeoh, 1), Coetzee has made a counter-argument, ‘[insisting] on the inescapability of ethics’ (Yeoh, 2) despite his privileging of textuality. Subsequently this paper shall give (a) definition(s) of a dominant subject of postmodern fiction, namely metafiction, and consider the origins of this term and its general functions.⁴ On the basis of my personal reading of Foe and several secondary sources drawn upon, I will finally take a rather detailed look at metafiction and, related to this, the discourse of power in Coetzee’s deconstruction of the Crusoe myth.

2. Coetzee’s place in contemporary writing

2.1 The position of Coetzee and his texts

As a white South African, Coetzee writes from the position of a member of the dominant group and has thus access to a power which is denied to the majority of Native Americans. While some critics argue that his fiction evades its responsibility towards South Africa by eliding its immediate political reality during and in the wake of apartheid, others read his texts as allegories of the contemporary South African situation, dramatising ‘the complicity of colonial settler narratives with exploitative politico-historical processes’ (Wright, 118, quoted Egerer, 95). Others of a more deconstructive interest see Coetzee’s main concern in language, with his writing being one that ‘interrogates, challenges, casts into doubt’ (Olsen, 47, quoted in Egerer, 95). Yet another group of critics reconcile self-reflexive elements with a contextual reading, arguing that while texts like Foe can be read as an ‘allegory of the creative process’ (Splendore, 58), they also ‘[lay] bare the ambiguity of the social drama’ (Splendore, 60). What emerges from these critical perspectives is that within a materialist agenda, Coetzee’s writing is seen as ‘marginal’ in the sense of not taking an explicit stand against South-African socio-historical conditions; seen as South-African postmodern writing, it is also ‘marginal’ to the tradition of postmodernism insofar as the majority of postmodern texts are associated with South- and Anglo-America.⁵ Reading Attwell’s comments in Coetzee’s Doubling the Point confirms once more the impossibility of (self-)positioning. Distancing himself from a mode of thinking which constructs a new opposition between ‘exhausted metropolis and vigorous periphery’ (202), Coetzee rejects these classifications, privileging instead the tensions resulting from ‘a will to remain in crisis’ (337).

2.2 The intersection of postcolonialism and postmodernism

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1 All references to Foe (henceforth abbreviated as F) are to the Penguin edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987)

2 Due to the limitations of a paper like this, ‘intertextuality’ can unfortunately not be addressed.

3 By uncovering Defoe to be Foe, Coetzee reminds the reader that Daniel Defoe adopted the prefix ‘de’ in his middle age, obscuring his name’s signification in English. Cf. Burnett, 245.

4 As a detailed discussion of these and various other aspects would go beyond the scope of a paper like this, the aim of the section entitled ‘Metafiction’ will be merely to provide an introduction to and outline of metafiction.

5 Cf. Egerer, 96