versions of self and other in Robinson Crusoe, Foe and Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (original) (raw)
Related papers
His-Story and Her-Story: A Comparative Study of Robinson Crusoe and Foe
Journal of foreign languages, 2020
History is often said to be his-story owing to it being exclusively written by men about men. It consists of heroic as well as tragic tales of men, heroic and tragic both terms being exploited by Aristotle in the context of men again. Literature of any nation or language is also History per se as it reflects the ethos of the time in which it is created, and can also be called His-story because of dominant presence of male voices on the literary horizon for centuries. It is only after the surge of movements and theories like Feminism and Postcolonialism, that Her-story started to surface up in literary works. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (first published in 1719) and Foe by J. M. Coetzee (rewriting of Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1986) are the two works showcasing this transition in focus from His-story to Her-story. Whereas one tells the story of a male castaway Robinson Crusoe who turns out to be a powerful, colonial patriarch, completely avoiding the existence of woman; the other tells the story of Susan Barton, a female castaway introduced by Coetzee into the world of Crusoe (Cruso here). Coetzee has not altogether done away, however, with the centuries long suppression of female voice as he introduces the fictional character of Foe (modelled on the writer Daniel Defoe) whom Susan wants to pen the story of her stay on "Cruso"s island". Novel for a major part revolves around Susan"s efforts to get her story written and published the way she wants it to, with Foe insisting on giving it a new direction and plot disregarding Susan"s concern for the story of Friday (Cruso"s black manservant on the island whom Susan brings with her to the mainland, Cruso having died on the ship). Susan wants to tell the (hi)story of Friday"s silencing (his tongue having cut off) and thus make a place for herself in the history, but for Foe, the story is not attractive enough as the truth is too boring to be told nakedly. This paper, thus attempts a comparative analysis of both the works, focusing on how difficult it is to get Her-story told without it being influenced by his-story or his opinions, thereby drawing our attention to the fact that no voice or no story is entirely original and thus reliable.
NOVEL ORIGINS- NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES AND STORYTELLING IN FOE AND ROBINSON CRUSOE
Novels emerged as a genre in the 18 th century, and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) is widely regarded as the genesis of the form; the catalyst for new narrative techniques to emerge. Robinson Crusoe has maintained immense popularity and staying power, not only birthing a genre but its own classification of literature-robinsonades, "any novels written in imitation of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe that deals with the problem of the castaway's survival" (Britannica, 2007). A prime example is Foe by J.M. Coetzee, published in 1986; a robinsonade that transforms the original by operating from a different point of view. Though the discourse generated by each novel differs, taken together, both are representative of origins: of the novel itself in Robinson Crusoe and of the author in Foe. A surface-level reading could view Foe as a feminist reimagining of Robinson Crusoe, as it's told by a female castaway, Susan Barton. But, through further analysis, there is a depth of meaning found in the subtle narrative techniques employed by Coetzee. I will argue that this depth reveals a greater interest in storytelling, the Friday-shaped "hole of the narrative" , and authorship (Foe, 121). Further, Coetzee's subversions are meant to challenge the representation of colonialism intrinsic to Robinson Crusoe, given the time of publication. In this essay, I will attempt to illuminate the subtleties of Coetzee's writing technique. I will explore the deliberate intertextual relationship between Foe and Robinson Crusoe to show how he uses many of the same conventions to create discourse with the original while subverting the way they shape the narrative and engage us as readers. We will see that much of Coetzee's disruption is aimed at unsettling the bond between a story and an author. His counter-narrative speaks to the subjectivity of truth and shows how it alters from individual to individual.
Review of G. Currie, _Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories_ (with C. Fox)
Narratives aren't merely representations, for a painting might represent without being a narrative. Nor is a narrative a mere series of representations: a series of paintings, such as one might pass in a museum, need not constitute a narrative. Assuming, then, that our notion of a narrative is coherent and reasonably unified, we might wonder what features bind some series of representations into a narrative. Further, in principle narrative can be not only visual, but also exploit other sensory modalities. A glass of wine may provide a narrative, from its look, nose, and beginning taste through its finish. A satisfying philosophy of narratives will incorporate and explain these phenomena, as well as show how some narratives are more successful than others. It will shed light on why we find narratives valuable. Even more, it will allow us to catalogue and explain narrative's cognitive and affective dimensions. Gregory Currie's Narratives and Narrators treats narratives as intentionalcommunicative artefacts -artefacts whose function is the communication of a story. The maker of the narrative, which for Currie is almost always identified with the narrator, imbues it with this function. So a minimally successful narrative enables its audience to grasp its artefactual function -the story it was crafted to tell. For Currie, narrative is the vehicle for telling a story -of characters and their doings. So narratives have story contents, but are not stories. We may look to the stories conveyed -to the characters and their doings -to grasp a narrative. But doing so, which may be termed the 'internal perspective', is only one of the two perspectives required to understand narratives. We also need the 'external perspective' -a look at the narrative's artefactual status replete with authorial intentions. For Currie, however, the concept of narrative is not where our interests lie. Shaggy dog stories invite little interest. We are interested in things high in narrativity. A representation may be high in narrativity by virtue of how it represents particulars and their temporal and causal relations. And an examination of story content revealing these features (or their absence) aids us in situating a work on the spectrum of things with varying degrees of narrativity. But considering whether works reflect particular thematic unity -'a focus on some common thread in the activity of particulars' -also helps us situate works on the spectrum (39). Works having these unifying themes will ceteris paribus be ranked higher on the spectrum than works without. Such themes may be manifested without explicit representations of particular time or cause. Such themes are best understood as emanating from the authors, rather than being parts of the story content. Currie explains that authors produce narrative frameworks -preferred sets of cognitive, evaluative, and emotional responses to stories (86) -by expressing points of view. Narratives manifest, for readers, images of personas with points of view. Such
Fears, Apprehensions and Conjectures: Suspense in Robinson Crusoe
English Literature, 2017
The importance of Robinson Crusoe in the origins of the novel depends not only on its progressive plot and empirical style, but also on its pioneering narrative devices. Defoe's work is characterised, in particular, by a new approach to the creation of suspense, considered by narratologists as one of the universals of narrative. This approach is based on a consistent, highly diversified use of hypothetical thinking. Crusoe's emotionally charged previsions have the function of presenting possible plot developments, staging, and causing, the oscillation between fear and hope that is characteristic of suspense. Defoe's work with suspense shows that epistemological change, in particular the rise of the modern notion of probability, had relevant implications also at the level of narrative discourse.
Confronting Authority: JM Coetzee's Foe and the Remaking of Robinson Crusoe
International Fiction Review, 1991
The process of remaking Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe continues as each successive generation since 1719 has taken the Crusoe myth, reconsidered it, reshaped it, repudiated it-and still we have not finished with this strange man, his island, and his Friday. In this century alone, writers the likes of H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Rose Macauley, Muriel Spark, E.L. Doctorow, William Golding, and Richard Hughes (to name only a few) have grappled with Defoe's creation in an attempt to silence his presence once and for all. As Martin Green has suggested in his recent study, The Robinson Crusoe Story, Crusoe is a towering figure in literature: his tale has been hailed as the first English novel, the first story of psychological realism, the first adventure narrative, and the most compelling myth of Empire. 1 Indeed, so powerful is this father of literature, an entire genre, the Robinsonnade, has been named in his honor. And as this name suggests-Robinsonnade-Crusoe exists in each of these remaking-a trace, a shadow, a subtext. He is always there, in the margins.
Author and Character: Of Fathers, Foes, and Figurations
J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Narrative Transgression, 2017
Author and character are commonly assumed to exist on different ontological levels-the author exists on the extratextual level in our everyday world, while their characters exist on the intratextual level, in a storyworld. One usually assumes that an author creates a character and is in a position of unalloyed power over this character. The relation between author and character is, however, much more complicated. Metaleptic narrative strategies and plot constructions have in recent years increasingly drawn attention to this. In metaleptic texts, we find author surrogates who interfere in their novels and interact with their characters, or characters who address their authors and seek them out. Metaleptic texts frequently draw attention to the boundary between world and storyworld, creating uncertainty about what is real and what narrative artifice. This chapter traces the function of metalepsis in two of Coetzee's novels-Foe (1986) and Slow Man (2005)-and in his Nobel Prize lecture "He and His Man," delivered in December 2003. In Foe, metalepsis turns Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe-but also Foe itself-into sites of negotiation between author and reader. Foe responds to the socio-political situation in 1980s South Africa, especially to demands made on white writers and to attempts by black writers at self-representation. The narrative strategy of metalepsis makes it possible to approach the impossibility of giving Friday, the muted colonized other, voice, without appropriating his voice through the discourse of the white writer. Metalepsis emphasizes ambiguity, and, in so doing, opens a space for retelling. Foe depends on a reader who challenges its retelling of Defoe's
Avant, 2021
While Robinson Crusoe is credited with having introduced the desert island and castaway tropes into English literature, it also foregrounds and firmly establishes narratological concepts such as the frame narrative and the inclusion of an author figure. The story of Robinson Crusoe comes to us in the guise of a first-person narrative based in part on a diary. This is where the writer Robinson Crusoe takes the vagaries of his life and shapes them into a coherent exemplary story of individual salvation. 20 th-century novels have picked up on this metafictional aspect of the Robinsonade but usually to ends very different than is the case in Defoe's original. One pertinent example can be found in Muriel Spark's 1958 novel Robinson, which uses its author figure to convey anything but certainty. The essay compares authorial agency and control in Spark's Robinson and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to then move on to the example of J.G. Ballard's Concrete Island (1974). This urban Robinsonade forgoes the convention of having a first-person narrator generating its text, offering instead a third-person narration. My essay argues that the 20 th-century Robinsonade virtually by default participates in discourse around the question of authorship and textual authority, even where an author figure is omitted.