2010

HARVARD-YENCHING
DECONSTRUCTING DEFOE :
INSTITUTE WORKING
THE THREE NARRATIVE LAYERS IN FOE
PAPER SERIES

LIANG Chongyi | Peking University

Paper presented at the HYI symposium Culture at Intersection, May 1, 2010
 Deconstructing Defoe : the Three Narrative Layers in Foe

Chongyi Liang IWL, Peking University

Abstract: My paper focuses on Foe, which is often considered as one of Nobel Prize

winner J. M. Coetzee’s representative works. I will analyze its narrative structure. In this

novel Coetzee plays with Daniel Defoe’s text Robinson Crusoe, devising three narrative

layers of drifting on the desolate island, making an enemy of Foe and the dream of the

wreck. This intertextuality serves to dispel the colonial imply, the original’s androcentric

tendencies, and the validity of patriarchal writing and literary classics, finally to arrive at

the purpose of questioning the creditability of literary narration.

Key words: Defoe Robinson Crusoe deconstruction

Preface

Foe can be regarded as one of J.M. Coetzee’s most significant pieces of postmodern

writing. The Chinese translator Wang Jinghui is somewhat exaggerated in his remark that

‘this novel has a profound allegorical meaning. If readers have understood the content of

this book, they can also deeply understand the meaning of abstract postmodernism and

postcolonialism without reading works by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Habermas,

Liotta, Gadamer and Jameson.’ 1In my opinion, the sentence should include ‘feminism’

as well. Coetzee addresses nearly all the pioneering theories of the latter half of the 20th

century in a short novel of less than 200 pages. And the spirit of deconstructionism, as the

essence of postmodernism, is the most obvious characteristic of the book. Relying on this

1
王敬慧： “《福》与《鲁滨逊漂流记》的互文性”
，《福》
，J. M. 库切著，王敬慧译，杭州：浙江文艺出版社，
2007 年，第 148 页。
metafictional text, Coetzee targets Daniel Defoe, who is a major figure in English and

European fiction, and his distinguished piece ‘Robinson Crusoe’ , dispelling the colonial

imply, androcentric tendencies as well as the validity of patriarchal writing and literary

classics, finally to arrive at the purpose of questioning the creditability of literary

narration. This all reflects Coetzee’s experimental spirit, his stance as a moral skeptic.

Looking through the history of world literature, there are quite a few works which take

Robinson Crusoe as their starting point. Caribbean writer Samuel Selvon writes a story

named The Lonely Londoners about Moses and his fellows as they set off to London from

Caribbean along the same route Robinson took. Similarly, in Vendredi ou les limbes du

Pacifique written by the French writer Michel Tournier, the ship which Robinson took

struck on a rock in a Pacific storm and Robinson found his way to a desolate island. He

named the island as Island of Hope and constructed the new homeland with Friday. When

a British boat came to rescue him, Robinson had contemplated the various of

shortcomings of civilized society and was determined to stay on the island with a child,

who had escaped from the boat and was named Sunday by Robinson. Compared to this

piece, Foe goes further in terms of its deconstruction of the Defoe story. The title Foe is

the result of ridding of the aristocratic honor of Defoe as well as the original meaning of

‘foe’ : enemy, which implies the hostile relationship between Susan and Mr. Foe. Coetzee

carefully devised three narrative layers so as to deconstruct Defoe and his Robinson

Crusoe, as I will elaborate later in this essay.

1. Drifting on the desolate island: rebelling against colonialism and androcentrism.

The first chapter of this novel uses the first-person pronoun ‘I’ in order to narrate the
story. In the process of looking for her daughter, Susan Barton is exiled by the traitorous

sailors to a desolate island, where she encounters the main protagonist of Robinson

Crusoe and Friday. The three people maintain a strange relationship, working and living

together. This story forms the first narrative layer of Foe. From the beginning to the

ending of the first chapter, it can be read as a separate female adventure tale on a desolate

island based on Robinson Crusoe. Readers familiar with Defoe’ s original work can

quickly discover the changes that have been made to Defoe’s text.

Change 1: increasing the presence of the white female heroine Susan Barton

It is well-known that Robinson Crusoe is a novel without women. The central character is

Robinson Crusoe, whom Engels calls‘the first real capitalist image’. By narrating

Robinson and Friday’s path-breaking achievements on the desolate island, the novel

conveys the humane spirit of the 18th century when the capitalism economy was booming.

However, the book contains no female characters. Coetzee deliberately introduces Susan

Barton, a white woman as a heroine in first person so as to make up for this missing voice

in the original piece. That is because women have a special place in colonial society. On

one hand, they are oppressed by white men; on the other, they are colonists of the

coloured people. Thus white women are like outsiders. Their voice has been suppressed

in fierce racial conflicts. Nevertheless, it is also the status of outsider that offers them a

unique point of view, which allows them to get another version of history. Susan is left to

guess the inner worlds of Cruso and Friday in the novel since she has just met them for

the first time, and is constructing a cultural imagination of her own. She has a strange

relationship with both of them. She seems to be Cruso’ s wife (they have sex) and dictates
to him as if she is the master or the mother of Friday. Susan’s identity can be taken as an

embodiment of the white female perspective. And when they are rescued and leave the

island, Cruso quickly dies. Now Susan gets the possibility to speak. Susan’ s experience

operates like a reflection of the status of women in the colonial society, and due to the

death of the hero, she establishes her right to rebel against the androcentrism of Defoe’s

text.

Change2: reconstructing the images of Cruso and Friday.

In Foe, Susan does not call Robinson Crusoe as Robinson but as Cruso, his family name.

Coetzee’s Cruso is quite different from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Defoe’s Robinson is an

aggressive and optimistic hero. He conquers nature and creates his own civilized life on

the desolate island with his wisdom, industry, strong will and limitless vigour. But

Coetzee’s Cruso is silent and hermit-like. He detests the society of his homeland and

prefers being in the wilderness. He does not grow plants and raise animals like Robinson,

but uses huge rocks on the island to build terraces in which crops cannot grow. He loves

to overlook the sea, not out of a desire to be rescued but as a sort of meditation practice.

In fact, when he is lifted to the ship by his rescuers he struggles against them and dies

shortly afterwards. However, odd as he is, Cruso is still able to dominate over Susan and

Friday and maintain his hegemonic discourse. Susan encourages him to keep diary but he

refuses saying:‘Nothing I have forgotten is worth the remembering.’ 2But the memory

stays with Cruso, such as the haunting of cannibals, or the fact that Friday’ s tongue was

cut by slavers. These are questioned by Susan. She doubts Cruso, believing them to be

fabrications. Whether to speak or what to say according his needs, this is Cruso’s
2
J. M. Coetzee, Foe. New York: Penguin Books, 1987, p. 17.
privilege, which neither Susan nor Friday can contend.

As for Friday, he is an aborigine under the rule of the cannibals in Robinson Crusoe. In

Foe , however, he is mysterious. Cruso arbitrarily arranges his identity as a black slave or

a cannibal. And the biggest difference between the Friday of Robinson Cruso is that his

tongue has been removed. No tongue means no words. Friday is dumb, yet wise. It

symbolizes the cruel reality that the ruled people as a group are always oppressed and

lose their discourse power. Their experiences cannot be restored; their benefits cannot be

secured and their requests cannot be heard. They can only keep silent instead of resisting,

and must use imagination instead of telling the truth.

In conclusion, Coetzee is successful in his construction of an intertextual text,

manipulating Robinson Crusoe in his own desolate island story. The introduction of

Susan as a female narrator in the novel establishes her own, and a wider female,

perspective. According to Krisdiwa’s theory of intertextuality, the text has a kind of

productivity and operates in the nexus of a relationship of destruction-construction with

the language in which it lies. People can use logical methods to decipher texts better than

using the linguistic ones. The appearance of Susan is an example of this kind of

destruction and reconstruction and it works to overthrow Defoe’s androcentrism.

However, Coetzee allows Cruso enjoy his dominant discourse power in the first chapter

and keeps Friday in complete silence in order to reflect the true status of women and

ruled people in colonial society. Coetzee does not turn Susan into the master of the

desolate island because he is not an idealistic writer filled with rebellious emotion but just

reveals the problems without the desire to find the solutions for himself.
2. The mutual confrontation between Susan and Mr Foe: questioning patriarchal

writing and literary classics.

Before readers discover the exit of the labyrinth of Chapter 1, a series of Susan’s letters in

Chapter 2 bring about the big narrative shift. Mr Foe appears in the text and is set against

Susan in Chapter 3 by virtue of their differing intentions in writing. Susan establishes her

image as a rebel and therefore forms the second narrative layer of the novel, that is, the

relationship between Susan and Mr Foe and the contrast between their writing. This

narrative layer makes the former narrative on the desolate island a text in another text. By

Susan’s words the two texts become a hoop-linked chain. This points to the question of

the validity of patriarchal writing and literary classics.

For Susan, who returns from the desolate island, she wants to note everything she

experienced on the island. But due to the lack of the education women received in the

18th century, she realizes she is unable to write a complete story freely. Thus she turns to

Foe, a writer in debt. He takes Susan and Friday into his room and promises he can write

a book which conveys her voice. Mr Foe in the novel is Daniel Defoe. Susan persuades

Daniel Foe to turn her account of life on the island into a popular and interesting book of

adventure. Susan tries to write the story as ‘The Female Castaway’, however, Foe is not

much interested in Cruso and Friday. He calls their island a monotonous and boring place

and he is interested in the two years Susan spent in Bahia. Susan declares: ‘I choose

rather to tell the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there: for I

am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own

desire.’ 3From this we can see Susan as a woman rebelling against patriarchal writing and

attempts to achieve discourse power in order to free herself from the shackles that men
3
J. M. Coetzee, Foe. New York: Penguin Books, 1987, p. 131.
put upon women.

Coetzee arranges an interlude in this narration. Mr Foe abets a girl to pretend to be

Susan’s daughter and fabricates Susan’s experience before arrived on the desolate island.

He writes that she married a brewer and after he died, Susan, her daughter and maid

depended on each other for survival. This dramatic story, as an outcome of Foe’s male

imagination, is aimed to satisfy the readers’ expectations. Therefore Susan tells the girl,

‘You are father-born. You have no mother.’4 Just as she is searching for her daughter, this

sentence is also a metaphor of her criticism of the patriarchal writing system which is

distorting her own story and voice.

Apart from the attack on patriarchal writing, another significant theme can be seen in the

conflicts between Susan and Mr Foe, namely a questioning of literary classics. Relying

on Tong Qingbin’s analysis of the component elements of literary classics, what forms a

literary classic lies in: 1) the literary value; 2) the space for literary illumination; 3) the

variation of ideology and cultural power; 4) the value orientation of literary theory and

criticism; 5) the readers’ expectations within specific periods; 6) the discover (sponsor).

Robinson Crusoe has become a classic, partly because of its intrinsic literary value and

more importantly, because it agrees with the expectations of 18th century readers’ when

the capitalism was booming, and the text reflects the patriarchal ideological discourse

dominant in this enlightenment society. Nevertheless, with the passage of time, does a

classic in today’s context retain its literary value? Coetzee has issued a bold heckling. In

Foe he attempts to address the problems of female narration, placing Susan’s writing in

opposition to that of Defoe, and deconstructs this classic writing according to the

4
J. M. Coetzee, Foe. New York: Penguin Books, 1987, p. 91.
traditions of patriarchal writing and the continuing value of the original piece as a classic.

3. The dream of the wreck: dispelling the creditability of literary narration.

The ending of the novel (chapter 4) is magical. It can be read in two ways. On the one

hand it can be read as one of Susan’s dreams, or on the other hand, it can be understood

to be the emergence of another first-person narrator in the fictional world of this novel. In

any case, ‘I’ tells readers that ‘I’ find several corpses. They should be Susan, Foe, the

little girl who pretends to be Susan’ s daughter and Friday. ‘I’ appears in this chapter at

different times. For the first time ‘I’ sees the fresh corpses and later ‘I’ discovers a plaque

saying ‘Daniel Defoe, Author’ (Coetzee hints that they are carved with the fragment of

Robinson Crusoe) and Friday who has scars on his neck. The last time in the wreck ‘I’

encounters Susan whose body has swelled up by the sea water, Foe and Friday half

buried in sand. The third narrative layer consists of the relationship between Susan,

Friday, Foe and ‘me’. ‘I’ is actually a separate narrative entity to examine their fate from

an outsider’ s point of view. This endows Foe with the outmost shell and the narrative

structure of the whole text can be shown in the following way:

1 Drifting on the desolate island: Susan VS. Cruso VS. Friday

2 Making an enemy of Foe: Foe VS. Susan(Friday)

3 The dream of the wreck: ‘I’ VS. Susan, Foe, Friday

The last part points to the dispelling of the creditability of literary narration. In these

scenes, Friday is still alive. At the end of the story ‘I’ passes a fingernail across his teeth.

‘His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream……it runs northward and

southward to the ends of the earth.’ 5 This metaphor implies that the truth cannot be

expressed by words but is like a silent stream. Once spoken, the experience can be

distorted and repressed. In fact the theme of the repression of discourse runs through the

whole novel. Foe represses Susan, Friday and Robinson’s real experiences; however,

when Susan wants to tell Friday’ s story, she finds her narration inevitably represses

Friday’s experience. Foe gives a clue that all the literary narration has a repressive

relationship with reality and it is impossible to reflect reality completely. Literary

narration is just constructive narration and not a real reflection of reality.

Conclusion

J. M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. He is the fourth African Nobel

winner after Wole Soyinka in 1986, Naguib Mahfouz in 1988 and Nadine Gordimer in

1991. The policy of racial segregation, with its values and behaviour is a major theme in

Coetzee’s writing. His works reflect on the living conditions of South Africa before and

after the racial segregation. From Coetzee’s point of view, this policy could potentially be

established everywhere, so his works usually do not have a specific time or place, and

always adopt a form of fable to point to the abuse of the colonial society. Although Foe

has nothing to do with the racial segregation, the text reflects the problems of oppression

and power which characterize Coetzee’ s work. He discusses the relationship between

5
J. M. Coetzee, Foe. New York: Penguin Books, 1987, p. 157.
discourse and power through his intertextual manipulation of Robinson Crusoe.

Coetzee suggests, just as Michel Foucault, the great post-structuralist of the 20th century

argues, the essential element of effecting and controlling discourse is power. The two

cannot be separated. Power realizes itself by means of discourse while discourse is one

form of power. In Foe, Coetzee uses three narrative layers in order to deconstruct the

colonial imply, the androcentric and patriarchal writing system which underlies Robinson

Crusoe, showing his profound doubts about narrative authority. Foe enlightens us that the

literary narration is just an embodiment of the division of power, which is far from truth

and actual experience. Texts can be spoken out while truth cannot. The truth of history is

like the slow stream coming from Friday’ s mouth. It flows in silence, from the past to the

future.
References:

1. J. M. Coetzee, Foe. New York: Penguin Books, 1987.

2. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company,

1994.

3. J. M. 库切著，王敬慧译：《福》，杭州：浙江文艺出版社，2007 年。

4. 童庆炳、陶东风主编：《文学经典的建构、解构和重构》，北京：北京大学出版社，

2007 年。

5. 张京媛主编：《当代女性主义文学批评》，北京：北京大学出版社，1994 年。

6. 黄华：《权力，身体与自我：福柯与女性主义文学批评》，北京：北京大学出版社，

2005 年。