Foe: Metafiction and the Discourse of Power

Abstract

As its title would suggest, J. M. Coetzee’s Foe is a novel about enemies. It is, of course, not solely about enmity, but it is difficult to envisage a reading of this text which does not at some stage take into account the fact that the novel foregrounds oppositional forces and antagonistic relationships. Susan Barton is not simply a female castaway, she is also a representative of her sex who has suffered at the hands of men and who struggles to assert herself in a male-dominated society. Friday, the archetypal slave/prisoner, is at one and the same time the prize to be won and the price to be paid in the other struggle whose shadow hangs over the whole novel: that of colonial conquest and the relationships it engenders. Cruso and Foe, who are complementary rather than oppositional figures, are, as white males, portrayed as the natural repositories of power, to be wooed or challenged according to circumstances. Viewed in this perspective, Foe can be seen as deriving its impetus from the same sources as Coetzee’s earlier fiction. It is a novel to be placed fairly and squarely in a post-colonial line of reflection, a text haunted, if not obsessed, with notions of power, authority and ownership.