Coetzee’s Foe and Borges: An Intertextual Reading

ABSTRACT

Foe (1986) is one of the most ambiguous and controversial novels written by J.M. Coetzee, and has been discussed extensively by criticism from a great variety of theoretical positions. This essay purports to contribute another intertextual reading of the novel, trying to elucidate some of its dark points, particularly section IV, which has been so much debated and for whose ambiguity no wholly satisfactory explanation has so far been produced. Our main contention is that, in addition to Borges’s narratives “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (in Fictions, 1944) and “Borges and I” (in The Maker, 1960), Coetzee’s novel can benefit from a parallel reading of other Borgesian tales, particularly “Brodie’s Report” (1970) and “The Writing of the God” (1949), among others. Borges’s gnosticism is clearly followed by Coetzee, who has explicitly acknowledged his interest in the ethical and esthetic motivations that lie in some of Borges’s most mysterious stories.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For the sake of stylistic consistency, works by Borges will be cited in English, particularly from Andrew Hurley’s translation in the 1998 Penguin edition of Collected Fictions. In the case of the title of The Maker, which is an accurate translation of the original Spanish (El hacedor), it is necessary to point out that the first translation of the book (1964) was entitled Dreamtigers.

2. Chris Prentice mentions other critics who have echoed Rich’s allusion to “diving into the wreck”, such as Barbara Eckstein, Manuel Almagro Jiménez, Judie Newman, and Laura Wright, but concludes that “the question of who has made this descent, who narrates Section IV, is not clearly resolved” (Prentice, 109, n. 18).

3. Other interesting poststructuralist contributions are the Derridean and Lacanian reading of the novel by Brian Macaskill and Jeanne Colleran, especially pp. 439–42; Christopher Peterson’s analysis of the meaning of silence and speech; and Jay Rajiva’s Derridean exploration of the role played by Christianity and colonialism. Worth noticing are also Holly Flint’s paper, which draws on Spivak’s discussion and examines Foe in the context of white writing and the pastoral and anti-pastoral genres; and María José Chivite de León’s book, in which she examines the specular structure of the novel (47–72), as well as the issues concerned with authorship, representation, writing, and alterity (72–115).

4. Nevertheless, Chris Bongie interprets – in a somewhat convoluted manner – that the anonymous narrator is Friday himself, “one who has been initiated into the realm of writing, and who is now in a position to reflect back upon himself, to plumb the depths of a self to which he no longer has true access” (279). In a similar line of thought, Lewis MacLeod, has questioned the alleged tonguelessness attributed to Friday, making an absolutely different (and interesting) reading of his silences. For further comments on Friday’s silence and his writing, see Dominic Head (120–6).

5. The first English translation (by Norman Thomas di Giovanni), entitled Dr. Brodie’s Report, was published in New York in 1972 (and in London in 1974), so it is very likely that Coetzee knew Borges’s Brodie’s Report long before he started writing Foe. Coetzee’s deep familiarity with Borges’s oeuvre and his translations into English is demonstrated in the review of Borges’s Collected Fictions (translated by Andrew Hurley) he published in the New York Review of Books in 1998 (now included in his collection Stranger Shores. Literary Essays, pp. 139–50).

6. Fiddian discusses in his book the interest of reading Borges’s story in relation not only to Gulliver’s Travels, but also to other intertexts, such as Bartolomé de las Casas’s A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, a tale by Rudyard Kipling (“Lispeth”, from his collection Plain Tales), and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s influential Tristes tropiques, which widen the reading of Borges within the current postcolonial debates (Fiddian 141–54).

7. The same reference to President Sarmiento’s stance between civilization and barbarism has been recalled by Lynda Ng and Paul Sheehan in their discussion of Coetzee’s novel The Childhood of Jesus (2013). These two critics, in their essay on The Childhood of Jesus, which is set in an unknown South American country, allude to Sarmiento’s project, among other aspects of the presence of Borges’s oeuvre in Coetzee’s work (Ng & Sheehan 93).

8. This scar is interpreted by Chris Bongie as the trace left on Friday’s neck by Barton’s deed of freedom, thus associating that scar with writing: “Friday’s scattering of petals is a form of writing (and as such intimately related to his captivity, his Lacanian ‘captation’: it is not only Barton’s deed of freedom that will leave the scar around his neck that the anonymous narrator discovers at the very end of the novel; in arming himself with the tools of writing, Friday has also contributed to his own scarification)” (271).

9. The presence of ghosts in Foe has been noticed before, notably by Dominic Head, with his reference to Daniel Defoe’s intertext “A True Revelation of the Apparition of One Mrs Veal” (117–9). Hena Maes-Jelinek, in a different vein, has alluded to the centrality in the novel of “the haunting question of the true nature of reality, of the distinction between ghost and substance”, adding that Susan “keeps claiming substantiality, though she also says that she is a ghost haunted by ghosts” (239). In view of the way Susan faces her own ghosts (Foe 132, 134) it is also worth considering the indirect presence of another tale by Borges, “The Other” (in The Book of Sand, 1975)Collected Fictions 411–7.

10. “The Aleph” was translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni (in collaboration with Borges) and included in the volume The Aleph and Other Stories 1933–1969 (1971), pp. 15–29; “The Zahir” and “The Writing of the God” were published in the first miscellaneous collection published in English, Labyrinths (1962). However, in this early collection of writings, the story later translated as “The Writing of God” appeared under the title “The God’s Script” (pp. 189–97 and 203–7 respectively in the Penguin edition). But, for the sake of consistency, all quotations will be made from Andrew Hurley’s edition of Collected Fictions (250-4).

11. That the reader is a writer is a well-known fundamental concept of poststructuralism, but also a basic tenet of Borges’s oeuvre, as he defended vigorously in many of his writings, notably in “Pierre Menard”. As Michael Wood has written in relation to Barthes and Borges, “what really connects Borges and Barthes, makes them ‘precursors’ of each other, so to speak, is the sense not that the author is hidden or ghostly or inaccessible or not needed but that the reader creates the author. This proposition is familiar to us now in various nuanced forms, but in Borges and Barthes it rings with a strong sense of discovery” (37).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Enrique Galvan-Alvarez

Fernando Galván is Professor of English at the Universityof Alcalá, Madrid (Spain). He has written extensively on contemporary fiction, and recently authored two other essays on Coetzee and Borges.

Fernando Galván

Enrique Galvan-Alvarez is a lecturer at the all-online Universidad Internacional de la Rioja and Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University (UK). His work is concerned with postcolonial and diaspora identity-making in a number of different literary and nonliterary contexts.