For education purpose

1. Marginalization in
Coetzee's ‘Foe’

2. Prepared by Gayatri Nimavat
Roll No. :6
M.A. semester 3 Batch : 2022-24
Paper 203: Postcolonial Studies
Email id : gayatrinimavat128@gmail.com
Enrollment no. : 4069206420220019
Submitted to the Department of English, MKBU

3. Table of Content
Introduction
About Author
What is Marginalization?
Marginalization in ‘Foe’ Narrative Voice and the
Paradox of the Unspeakable
in J.M. Coetzee's "Foe" and
"Disgrace"

4. Introduction
Marginalization is the process of being excluded or pushed to the margins of society. It
can take many forms, such as social, economic, political, and cultural marginalization.
J.M. Coetzee's novel 'Foe' is set in South Africa during the colonial era, and it explores
the ways in which indigenous peoples, women, and the voiceless were marginalized
and oppressed by the European colonists.
Coetzee portrays marginalization in 'Foe' through his characterisation of Friday, Susan
Barton, and the narrative perspective. Friday is a castaway who is enslaved by Susan
Barton and forced to tell her his story. Susan Barton is a woman who is also
marginalized in colonial society because of her gender and her social status. The
narrative perspective in the novel is constantly shifting between Friday and Susan
Barton, which allows Coetzee to explore the different ways in which each character
experiences marginalization.

5. J.M. Coetzee
John Maxwell Coetzee was born in Cape Town in 1940, into a family
of what he has called “recusant Afrikaners”: They spoke English
rather than Afrikaans at home. By the 1980s his spare, stinging prose
had won international acclaim as one of literature’s strongest
responses to apartheid, though more militant South African writers
were dubious of his ambiguity and discretion. He’s now won every
literary gong available (a Nobel in 2003, two Bookers before that),
and has as good a claim as anyone to be the most significant living
author in English — a language about which he has lately grown
ambivalent.
J.M. Coetzee, has spent half a century engaged with the biggest
questions of human reason and human dignity, but his novels are not
what you’d call grand. They’re sleek, unadorned, unfailingly precise;
most top out at 200 pages or so; the sentences have been knapped to
their sharpest. Stylistically, his novels are quite brisk. Morally, they
are heavyweights. (Farago)

6. WhatisMarginalization?
Marginalization is perhaps the most dangerous form of oppression. A
whole category of people is expelled from useful participation in social
life, potentially then subject to severe material deprivation and even
extermination. The material deprivation marginalization often causes
certainly is unjust, especially in a society where others have plenty.
Contemporary advanced capitalist societies in principle have
acknowledged the injustice of material deprivation caused by
marginalization, and have taken some steps to address it by providing
welfare payments and services. The continuance of this welfare state is
by no means assured, and in most welfare state societies, especially the
United States, benefits are not sufficient to eliminate large scale
suffering and deprivation. Material deprivation is the most common
result of marginalization when looking at how unfairly material
resources (Such as food and shelter) are dispersed in society. Along with
material deprivation, marginalized individual are also excluded from
services, programs and policies. (Young)

7. Marginalization in‘Foe’
J.M. Coetzee's novel "Foe," the theme of marginalization is intricately explored through the lens of
both cultural and gender-based subaltern identities. The central character, Susan Barton, who has
been shipwrecked on an island much like Robinson Crusoe, represents the marginalized "other" in a
world dominated by men and colonialist ideologies.
This novel reopens two English texts in which the early eighteenth century tried to constitute
marginality: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Roxana (1724). In Crusoe, the white man
marginalized in the forest encounters Friday the savage in the margin. In Roxana, the individualist
female infiltrates nascent bourgeois society. In Coetzee's novel, a double gesture is performed. In
the narrative, Roxana begins her construction of the marginal where she is, but when her project
approaches fulfilment, the text steps in and reminds us that Friday is in the margin as such, the
wholly other. (Spivak)
This pairing illustrates a futility endemic to Foe that is separate from the frustration of Susan’s vain
attempt to get her book into print, though it is enhanced by that device of stagnation in the plot:
namely, that “the book may be gesturing toward the impossibility of restoring the history of empire
and recovering the lost text of mothering in the same register of language” (Jones)
That the very Nature of the Marriage-Contract was, in short, nothing but giving up Liberty, Estate,
Authority and everything to the Man, and the Woman was indeed a mere Woman ever after, that is
to say, a Slave. (Defoe; Roxana)

8. The narrator of Foe is an Englishwoman named Susan Barton, who wants to "father" her story
into history, with Mr Foe's help. Coetzee has trouble negotiating a gendered position; he and
the text strain to make the trouble noticeable. This text will not defend itself against the
undecidability and discomfort of imagining a woman.
Defoe's idea of a woman's dilemma, here thematized as Foe's problem in writing the story. At
first, Susan Barton imagines a rejection: (Spivak)
I write my letters, I seal them, I drop them in the box. One day when we are departed you
will tip them out and glance through them. "Better had there been only Cruso and Friday."
You will murmur to yourself: "Better without the woman." Yet where would you be without
woman? Could you have made up Cruso and Friday and the island think not. Many
strengths you have, but invention is not one of them. ...? (Coetzee; Foe)
When Susan meets Foe, he tries to question her on the details of the plot. It is a long series of
questions, and Foe supplies the answers himself and tells her the structure of his storying of
The Female Castaway.
'We therefore have five parts in all: The loss of the daughter; the quest for the
daughter in Brazil; abandonment of the quest, and the adventure of the island;
assumption of the quest by the daughter; and reunion of the daughter with the
mother. It is thus that we make up a book: loss, then quest, then recovery; beginning,
then middle, then end. As to novelty, this is lent by the island episode-which is
properly the second part of the middle and by the reversal in which the daughter
takes up the quest abandoned by her mother.... The island is not a story in itself,' said
Foe gently. (Coetzee; Foe)

9. Friday's tongue has been cut off-by slavers, says Robinson. Susan wants to know him, to give him
speech, to learn from him, to father his story, which will also be her story: the account of her
anguish as Friday grows dull in London; her longing for Friday's desire and her exasperation at
herself; the orchestration of her desire to construct Friday as subject so that he can be her
informant cannot be summarized. (Spivak)
Susan is at her wit's end. That too is a margin. When she "begins to turn in Friday's dance," it is
not a conversation a turning together-for "Friday is sluggishly asleep on a hurdle behind the
door". But her project remains to "give a voice" to Friday: "The story of Friday's tongue is a story
unable to be told, or unable to be told by me. That is to say, many stories can be told of Friday's
tongue, but the true story is buried within Friday, who is mute. The true story will not be heard
till by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday" (Coetzee; Foe)
Friday’s lost tongue, like his possible genital “wound,” stands for an absence. Susan’s efforts to
teach him to write result in a series of empty circles on paper, probably a symbolic sign of his
sexual and communicative lack. Susan is marginalized by virtue of her gender, while Friday is
marginalized due to his race. Elleke Boehmer argues that the violated body of the colonized
speaks: “Representing its own silence, the colonized body speaks; uttering its wounds, it negates
its muted condition” (Boehmer).Friday's body speaks despite its silence and signifies beyond
words. While attempts to give it a voice end up in appropriation of its own voice, it is normal for
such a body to signify alternatively. (Neimneh)

10. It is interesting to notice what Coetzee stages between the inside margins of the first and second days of
the writing lesson. "While Foe and I spoke, Friday filled his slate with open eyes, each set upon a human
foot: row upon row of eyes: walking eyes.... 'Give! Give me the slate, Friday!' I commanded.
Whereupon, instead of obeying me, Friday put three fingers into his mouth and wet them with spittle
and rubbed the slate clean"
Here is the guardian of the margin. Neither narrative nor text gives pride of place to it: active
marginalizing perhaps. This event changes the course of Foe's and Susan's conversation only to the extent
that Susan finally says, "How can Friday know what freedom means when he barely knows his name?"
(Coetzee; Foe)
It is the withholding that is of interest in terms of Susan Barton's narrative. The night before, Susan had
said to Foe:
"it is still in my power to guide and amend. Above all, to withhold. By such means do I still endeavour to
be father of my story" (Coetzee; Foe)
After this Foe and Susan Barton copulate for the first time.
Yet it is Friday rather than Susan who is the unemphatic agent of withholding in the text. For every
territorial space that is value-coded by colonialism and every command of metropolitan anticolonialism
for the native to yield his "voice," there is a space of withholding, marked by a secret that may not be a
secret but cannot be unlocked. "The native," whatever that might mean, is not only a victim, he or she is
also an agent. He or she is the curious guardian at the margin. (Spivak)

11. Perhaps that is the novel's message: the impossible politics of over- determination
(mothering, authoring, giving voice to the native "in" the text; a white male South African
writer engaging in such inscriptions "outside" the text) should not be regularized into a
blithe continuity, where the European redoes the primitive's project in herself. It can,
however, lead to a scrupulously differentiated politics, dependent on "where you are."
Coetzee's text can be taught as:
1. Correcting Defoe's imagination of the marginal, in comradeship
2. Reinscribing the white woman as agent, as the asymmetrical double of the author. (I think
the problems with the figure of "fathering" mark this asymmetry)
3. Situating the politics of overdetermination as aporia
4. Halting before Friday, since for him, here, now, and for Susan Barton, and for Daniel Foe,
that is the arbitrary name of the withheld limit. (Spivak)

12. Narrative Voiceandthe Paradoxofthe Unspeakable inJ.M. Coetzee's
"Foe"and"Disgrace"
Coetzee's writing in these two novels aims not to develop and introduce
subaltern voices so as to supplement or broaden a narrow humanist
universal, but instead to interrogate this universal and appeal for a
posthumanist articulation of political violence. ‘Foe’ reveals the ultimate
futility of attempting to insert new narrators within the framework of human
rights to expand the notion of the universal human. The novel suggests it is
necessary instead to question the way narrative functions within this
framework. As it encounters the limitations of the postcolonial project of
writing back to master narratives, ‘Foe’ casts doubt on the cathartic and
political potential of articulating one's experiences of oppression and
trauma. In refusing to conform to the universal humanist framework that
‘Foe’ challenges, ‘Disgrace’ demonstrates the need for a posthumanist
implementation of justice. Rather than concentrating on developing and
integrating hitherto silenced narrative voices to inflate the humanist
universal, the posthumanist approach toward which ‘Disgrace’ gestures
problematizes the application of narrative voice as a determinant of one's
right to have rights. It thereby rejects the humanist ideal of personality
development as a way to define proper subject formation. (Rickel)

13. In Disgrace David Lurie narrates his fall from a position of influence and power.26 Initially a
university professor who deploys poetry to assert and excuse his sexual domination over
women, he becomes a "dog-man"
David is outraged that Lucy is being spoken rather than speaking, because in the rapists' story
Lucy is further degraded. She is cast as having deserved that which was done to her, and each
time the story is told her violation is repeated. To David, Lucy's refusal to speak her story is an
admission of feelings of white guilt for apartheid. He argues that she must speak about her rape
because otherwise she will be indicating that she is seeking salvation through acceptance of her
account of the attack. David struggles to negotiate control over the symbolic meaning of Lucy's
rape because to him her rape is part of his fall into disgrace; he regards it as his own violation.
Lucy protests this, admonishing her father: (Rickel)
You behave as if everything I do is part of the story of your life. You are the main character, I
am a minor character who doesn't make an appearance until halfway through. Well,
contrary to what you think, people are not divided into major and minor. I am not minor. I
have a life of my own, just as important to me as yours is to you, and in my life I am the one
who makes the decisions (Coetzee; Disgrace)

14. Conclusion
In summary, "Foe" by J.M. Coetzee explores the intricacies of marginalization
through the lenses of gender and colonialism, reimagining the narratives of
colonial literature. It emphasizes the complexity of giving voice to the
marginalized and highlights the power dynamics in storytelling. Coetzee
challenges the idea of fully capturing the history of the empire and the lost voices
of the marginalized. Through Susan's quest to give voice to Friday, the novel
reveals the enduring complexity of marginalized voices. It urges us to confront
the multifaceted nature of marginality and the roles of the marginalized as both
victims and guardians at the margins of history.

15. reference
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Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. Random House UK, 2000.
Coetzee, J. M. Foe. Translated by Alejandro García Reyes, Alfaguara, 1988.
Defoe, Daniel. Roxana, The Fortunate Mistress: A 1724 Novel by Daniel Defoe. Les prairies numériques, 201
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16. Neimneh, Shadi. “(PDF) Postcolonial Feminism: Silence and Storytelling in J. M. Coetzee's Foe.”
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17. Thank You