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영어

Coetzee's Foe is a rewriting of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. This rewriting allows him to indirectly speak about national matters. Accordingly Coetzee is criticized for this approach and his work is often labelled as apolitical, ahistorical and postmodern. However, Coetzee's novels are an attempt to find a place to speak to the political on his own terms. Foe examines the process of canonization through which voices of different gender and race have been silenced. This paper examines how truth-telling and representation of the other is related to those silences. In Foe, the conditions of truth-telling or representation of the other is shown through the dispute between Susan, a female castaway and a professional author, (De)Foe. Friday is broached into their dispute as an indicator of the limits of their respective arguments. In resistance to Foe's attempt to transform her authentic story of the island into a mother-daughter story, Susan comes to realize the necessity of reading the otherness of Friday, without which her story of the island would be incomplete and in consequence she could not establish her own identity. On the other hand, Foe's reading of Friday transforms and appropriates the other, thus excluding it in the dominant discourse. The process of his reading of Susan and Friday reveals both that the social and political power of dominant discourse is the result of the silencing of marginal figures and that Friday becomes a power to make Foe's narrative incomplete and his silence as irreducible experience cannot be represented. The last narrator in Foe proposes a substitute reading of Friday. Without hesitation this narrator dives into the wreck where Friday lies and listens to Friday's sounds. In contrast to Susan and Foe, this narrator accepts Friday's language which is body and his power. Through these three readings of Friday, Foe seeks to represent the unrepresented as unrepresented. It presents not only the conditions of reading of absolute otherness but also the ethical responsibility toward the other, that is, listening to the silence of the other. Thus Foe turns into the interstitial space where a foe receives and responds to a friend and vice versa.