Assigment paper 203

Name Hirva Pandya

Roll No.: 10

Enrollment No.: 4069206420210022

Paper no: 203

Paper code: 22408

Paper name: Post colonial Study

Topic: Comparative Study of foe and robinson crusoe

Sem.: 3 (Batch 2021- 2023)

Introducation

J.M. Coetzee, in full John Maxwell Coetzee, (born February 9, 1940, Cape Town South Africa), South African novelist, critic, and translator noted for his novels about the effects of colonization. In 2003 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Coetzee was educated at the University of Cape Town (B.A., 1960; M.A., 1963) and the University of Texus (Ph.D., 1969). An opponent of apartheid, he nevertheless returned to live in South Africa where he taught English at the University of Cape Town, translated works from the Dutch, and wrote literary Criticism. He also held visiting professorships at a number of universities.

Coetzee continued to explore themes of the colonizer and the colonized in Foe (1986), his reworking of Daniel defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Coetzee’s female narrator comes to new conclusions about power and otherness and ultimately concludes that language can enslave as effectively as can chains. In Age of Iron (1990) Coetzee dealt directly with circumstances in contemporary South Africa, but in The Master of Petersburg (1994) he made reference to 19th-century Russia (particularly to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s work The Devils); both books treat the subject of Literature in society. In 1999, with his Novel Disgrace, Coetzee became the first writer to win the Booker Prize twice. After the novel’s publication and an outcry in South Africa, he moved to Australia, where he was granted citizenship in 2006.

The structure of Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003), a series of “lessons” (two of which had been published in an earlier volume) in which the eponymous narrator reflects on a variety of topics, puzzled many readers. One reviewer proposed that it be considered “non-nonfiction.” Costello makes a surreal reappearance in Coetzee’s Slow Man (2005), about a recent amputee’s reluctance to accept his condition. Diary of a Bad Year (2007) employs a literally split narrative technique, with the text on the page divided into Concurrent  storylines, the main story being the musings of an aging South African writer modeled on Coetzee himself.

About The Novel Foe by Coetzee

Foe is a 1986 novel by South African-born Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. Woven around the existing plot of Robinson Crusoe, Foe is written from the perspective of Susan Barton, a castaway who landed on the same island inhabited by "Cruso" and Friday as their adventures were already underway

Foe follows the aspects of a more modern vew. Even though Coetzee portrays a more feminine viewpoint through incorporating Susan Barton, her decisions and mindset raise a debate in how they relate to the life of a woman in the twentieth or even twenty-first centuries.

Comparison of Robinson Crusoe and Foe

As it is observed by the SAVANNAH MERCURE   In Daniel Defoe’s novel, Robinson Crusoe, the novel portrayed as a foundational text to early fictional writings and introduced writers as well as readers to having a narrative in an island setting. Within Defoe’s novel, one is able to get a glimpse of the stereotypical gender roles from the 17thcentury because patriarchy reigned supreme. Women were property while men were authoritarians. The novel is shown through the eyes of a middle-aged white male during colonization. Crusoe “owns” the island and instructs those living there just as if he were the “governor” or political leader-just as any British colony would be governed. By this, the reader is able to see through the eyes of Robinson Crusoe about the issues of not only gender but with race and independence. AlthoughRobinson Crusoewas written in the early 1700’s, a more recent novel by J.M. Coetzee called Foewas an artistic piece that imitated Defoe’s well-known work. Even though the two novels share many similar aspects, Coetzee framed his work to provide an updated perspective of the story Defoe had composed by adding in the presence of a woman figure, incorporating a new setting, and more modernistic viewpoint.

Although Robinson Crusoe was written hundreds of years ago, a newer look into his island life and social views was created in 1986 when J.M. Coetzee wrote the novel Foe, a pastiche to Defoe’s famous work. While Robinson Crusoe is the main character and narrates the story from a first-person perspective in Defoe’s novel, Susan Barton is the woman who narrates Foe. The way Susan Barton conveys her own story helps articulate her strengths. Her character is aiding to the lack of women from the earlier novel. Crusoe makes brief mention of his mother, during which he reviews his family history. Then only sparing but on sentence to the mention of his wife: “In the meantime, I in part settled myself here; for first of all I marry’d and that not wither to my disadvantage and dissatisfaction, and had three children, two sons and one daughter” (Defoe 219). When Barton is introduced, she is shipwrecked on the island with Crusoe and Friday. The way in which she carried herself on the island was to become the dominant figure of the group and correct or manage the Crusoe’s actions and decisions. Then she says, “I presented myself to Crusoe, in the days when he still ruled over the island, and became his second subject, the first being his manservant Friday” (Coetzee 11). Her dependence on Crusoe and Friday to do more of the manly duties allowed the reader to see her weaker side. Coetzee’s decision of adding into a woman allowed for there to be a new interpretation of the story. Crusoe’s character was altered to depict the descriptions that Susan Barton presented. In Robinson Crusoe, the reader gets authentic details of Crusoe’s identity since the male figure is the direct focus of the novel, but in Foe, Barton offers the reader individual, physical characteristics that was not depicted in the first novel.

Foe follows the aspects of a more modern view. Even though Coetzee portrays a more feminine viewpoint through incorporating Susan Barton, her decisions and mindset raise a debate in how they relate to the life of a woman in the twentieth or even twenty-first centuries. As Barton falls asleep one night, Crusoe begins to pursue her. She described that night by saying, “I pushed his hand away and made to rise, but he held me. No doubt I might have freed myself, for I was stronger than he” (Coetzee 30). Although she realizes she is stronger than him, she decides not to leave but to “let him do as he wished” (Coetzee 30). Barton’s reputation is altered from the beginning to the end of the book by reshaping her morals. For instance, all her encounters with men all include having sexual relations only excluding Friday. Barton told herself “I did him (Friday) wrong to think of him as a cannibal or worse, a devourer of the dead. But Crusoe had planted the deed in my mind, and now I could not look on Friday’s lips without calling to mind what mean must once have passed them” (Coetzee 106). At the beginning of Coetzee’s novel, the reader would argue that Barton’s character is going to remain as a strong, female character, one who is bravely sacrificing for others. As the novel goes on the reader’s opinion on Barton shift because her character is not as clear as in what she stands for. On “Crusoe’s island” she is merely the “woman washed ashore,” and in England she is haunted with the question, “What life do I live but that of Crusoe’s widow?” (Coetzee 99). In England, she searches to define her role, but end up defining it through her gender. Although the novel does allot several chapters to Barton’s writing and thoughts, she is still hesitant to proclaiming her own truth by waiting for the go ahead from the male characters to feel accepted.

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoeis used across the generations and influences writers who are separated by centuries. The novel offered the writing world the style of having island narration and displayed the seventeenth century views whether it be social, political or creative aspects. It stimulated J.M. Coetzee to write in response to that novel, Foe, which sought to offer a modernized interpretation of Defoe’s novel, and provide room for others to be able to compare these two pieces. In Coetzee’s work, it has a female protagonist Susan Barton telling how the story really was before Mr. Foe sat down to turn it into a novel of his own intention, altering and disproving it. She tells her own story in the first-person perspective, in terms of the plot even before the writer Mr. Foe would have finished his Robinson Crusoe. Through this, Coetzee generates the illusion that Ms. Barton’s account might have indeed been the forerunner of the literary classic Robinson Crusoe. Although both books carry a different plot, they have similarities in techniques and in some social aspects. Whether discussing the presence of a woman figure, incorporation of a new setting, or more modernistic viewpoint, either novel depicts different perspectives on the matter, and portrays the evolution of the island narrative. Defoe makes certain that good writing is what it says it is and provides today’s generation a definite glimpse into the past.

Coetzee's version of foe

Coetzee‟s Foe, dealing with the question and rights of authorship, serves as a critique of censorship that the authors and artists are subjected to, particularly the strong censorship rules prevalent in the then South Africa under the apartheid government. The cold war that ensues between Susan and Foe regarding the story of Cruso‟s island is a reflection of the war between the artists and the authorities bent upon muffling their free voices, Foe representing the power and authority. Defoe‟s Crusoe could tell his story as he wished after returning from his long adventure at the island – nobody intervened to question his authority to author his story, neither did anybody try to impose a more palpable version of the narrative, unlike in the case of Susan who never succeeds in getting her story published, because she doesn‟t yield to Foe‟s demands for alterations. Coetzee asserts the rights of an author upon his or her story along with highlighting the difficulties in getting one‟s true voice heard and acknowledged.

In Coetzee’s version, it is Susan—herself struggling for liberation—who would save Friday from his would-be captors and teach him to communicate. She hangs the success of her story on it: “The true story will not be heard till by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday” (118). But here Friday—whose English in the original may sound naive but who is nevertheless savvy enough to register skepticism with some of the basic tenets of Christianity—cannot speak at all, even in his own language. He can fill neither the role of the vocal savage nor the role of interpreter, both of which were legitimate parts for him in Defoe’s work. Susan speculates further that Friday’s “lost tongue might stand not only for itself but for a more atrocious mutilation,” i.e. castration (119). With these missing organs in mind, her priority is to fill the void they leave behind, making a whole man of Friday, whether by giving him a voice with which to speak his story or by giving him independence, in the emancipation papers she hangs around his neck like a replacement appendage. These strategies are so symbolically overdetermined that they seem destined for failure, and indeed Susan judges them as such.

Coetzee’s revisions both to the character of Crusoe and to the novel’s plot draw out these differences. Coetzee’s castaway is about sixty years old—which makes him older than his literary forebear Crusoe and “roughly Defoe’s age at the time when his novel was published” —nor is he at all concerned with getting off the island (Thieme 64). He is a more primitive presence, “an illustration of the futility of Empire” rather than an exultation of its strengths (Newman 96). By the time Foe begins, Cruso’s strength is sapped; shortly thereafter he makes his exit, while Friday remains physically present throughout. As Thieme argues, Foe “refuses to see the Friday–Crusoe connection as central” . But Susan’s constant reference to the hole in the narrative created by Friday’s muteness is in a certain sense of a piece with the original work, in which, at least in terms of page count, Friday’s role is not central either.

Conclusion:

The ending of Foe, which long precedes these two essays on Robinson Crusoe, remains the most ambiguous textual commentary of them all. This is in large part because in the final section the unities of the novel give way entirely. Time hurtles forward, and the narrator changes shape from Susan Barton to an unidentified and ungendered “I.” That the setting bears relation to what has transpired in the preceding narrative is established by the opening sentence, “The staircase is dark and mean”; it is the present-tense version of the sentence that opens section three of the novel, when Susan tracks down Foe in Bristol, where he has taken refuge from his creditors. This new narrator, walking through a silent house, stumbles over the body of a woman or girl that “weighs no more than a sack of straw,” then discovers two more dead bodies, a woman and a man. The house, we take it, is that of the author Foe; the first body may be that of the alleged daughter; the pair are apparently Susan Barton and Foe himself. Friday’s body, not dead but not quite living, barely registering a pulse, is also there, and “from his mouth, without a breath, issue the sounds of the island.

Work cited:

“J.M. Coetzee.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/biography/J-M-Coetzee.

Mercure, Savannah. “Comparison of Robinson Crusoe and Foe.” ENGLISH 123 Introduction to Fiction, 10 Dec. 2018, https://introtofictionf18.web.unc.edu/2018/10/comparison-of-robinson-crusoe-and-foe/.

“Https://English.illinoisstate.edu/Digitaldefoe/Archive/spring09/Features/Jones.shtml.” ENGLISH 123 Introduction to Fiction, 10 Dec. 2018, https://introtofictionf18.web.unc.edu/2018/10/comparison-of-robinson-crusoe-and-foe/.

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