Recycling the Remnants of the ‘Master Narrative’: Dynamics of (Re)Making the Self and the Other in J. M. Coetzee’s “Foe”

Abstract

This paper examines marginality as a kernel of resistance to hegemonic representation as well as a site of self-fashioning in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986/1987). Conceived as a counter-narrative to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719/2007), Coetzee’s novel (re)narrativises or, in a sense, recycles the contingently scattered fragments of alterity, (under)represented as rudimentary and insignificant remnants of the original (hi)story in Defoe’s text. Coetzee’s text, alternately, opens up a dynamic space of renegotiation that shifts from monologue to dialogue; from narrow ethnocentric and androcentric mindsets that exclude the Other to an awareness of the Self of its own limitations and lack of autonomy to articulate its sameness without harbouring a productive and humanising relationship with difference. Such an ethical and existential necessity for intersubjectivity urges the Self to accommodate alterity as a central and significant agent in the construction of its own subjectivity. While Susan Barton attempts to write (about) the silenced and oppressed Friday, namely, by unfolding or deciphering his ‘true’ story, she ironically ends up rewriting herself and concurrently empowering her once repressed and spurned narrative by converting it into a site of resistance to and subversion of the dominant discourse of the Centre.