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JM Coetzee's Foe Writing Back to Canonical İstanbul Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Batı Dilleri ve Edebiyatları Anabilim Dalı İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bilim Dalı Doktora Tezi J. M. Coetzee’s Foe Writing Back To Canonical Pre-Texts Şenay Kara 2502990141 Tez Danışmanı: Prof. Dr. Zeynep Ergun İstanbul, 2007 ÖZ Bu çalışma, J. M. Coetzee’nin Foe adlı romanının, bu romanın metinlerarası düzlemde ilişkili olduğu öbür bazı yazın yapıtları ile karşılaştırmalı olarak incelenmesinden oluşmaktadır. Coetzee’nin romanı bir yandan Daniel Defoe’nun Robinson Crusoe ve Roxana adlı romanlarının, sömürgecilik sonrası, feminist, yapısökücü ve postmodern kuramlar bağlamında gerçekleştirilmiş bir yeniden yorumlanmasıdır; öbür yandan da, bu iki on sekizinci yüzyıl romanı ile kurduğu belirgin metinlerarası ilişkiye ek olarak, birçok başka metne de, daha dolaylı olmasına karşın süreklilik gösteren göndermeler yapmaktadır. Coetzee yapıtında hem, yeniden yorumladığı bu metinlerden yola çıkarak, her türlü (ırksal, cinsiyete ilişkin, sınıfsal, vb.) ayrımı, eşitsizliği, baskı ve şiddeti eleştirel bir gözle açığa vurmakta; hem de, sürekli olarak kendisinin (ya da tüm metinlerin) işleyiş süreçlerine dikkat çeken üst-metin/kurmaca özelliğiyle, tüm bu olumsuz yaklaşımların bir aracı, bir tür işbirlikçisi olarak işlev gören dil, söylem, anlatma, yazma ve yorumlama eylemlerinin işleyiş biçimini ve gücünü açığa çıkaran ve tartışan bir tarzda ortaya koymaktadır yapıtını. Bu çalışmada, Foe’da ortaya koyulan bu karşı-söylem etkinliği karşılaştırmalı bir incelemeye konu olmaktadır. ABSTRACT This study consists of a comparative analysis of J. M. Coetzee’s Foe in relation to some other literary works that it is intertextuality related with. Coetzee’s novel is, on the one hand, a postcolonial, feminist, deconstructive, and postmodern revision of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Roxana; and on the other hand, in addition to its overt intertextual relations with those two eighteenth-century novels, it also makes more indirect yet constant allusions to many other texts. Coetzee, taking the themes of those texts that it reinterprets as a starting point for his arguments, critically discloses and negotiates not only all sorts of (racial, gender, class, etc.) discrimination, inequality, oppression, and violence but also, through its self-reflexivity and meta- textuality/fictionality that constantly draws attention to its own (or any) text’s workings, the mechanisms and power of language, discourse, narration, writing, and interpretation which function as instruments of or accomplices with those violating attitudes. The study presents a comparative analysis of this act of counter-discourse that is presented in Foe. iii PREFACE J. M. Coetzee’s Foe presents a discussion of the crucial subjects of oppression and violence, inequality and injustice in all its forms (racial, gender, class) within the actively dialogic framework of its intertextual relations and meta-textual/fictional methods. With its underlined consciousness of the role of discursive practices in the construction and perpetuation of these forms of violation as well as in (potential) acts of deconstructing and invalidating them, the novel interweaves those main themes with self-reflexive discussions of contemporary theoretical/critical discourses (like postcolonialism, feminism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism), while it also shows a cautious and self-questioning attitude about these discussions as exemplified in the words of the author character in the novel (regarding his and Barton’s intensive discussions of the possibilities of giving the subaltern a voice/speech): “as it was a slaver’s stratagem to rob Friday of his tongue, may it not be a slaver’s stratagem to hold him in subjection while we cavil over words in a dispute we know to be endless?” (Foe, p.150). The intellectual, theoretical questionings are problematized in relation to concepts like human (free) will and responsibility. To work on these themes and issues was especially important for me since they have gained increasing significance in the world and times of global capitalism that we inhabit, in which social, cultural, economic, political injustice, oppression and violence that are underpinned immensely by (deceptive) discursive strategies blurring the very realities of these violations, threaten not only the (individual) inhabitants of the world but their very environment, the Planet Earth itself irrevocably. I would like to thank everybody – my supervisor, the thesis jury, and other colleagues – who have read and commented on this study. I also would like to give my special thanks to The Tinçel Foundation for Culture for the international research grant that they provided me with and Graham Huggan of the Institute of Colonial and Postcolonial Studies-University of Leeds, for generously providing me with a prolific research period in the institute, which have consolidated my interest and encouraged my studies in the field of postcolonial studies. And I would like to express my deepest love and gratitude to my family, to my friends, to all my loved ones for, in fact, much, much more than their support of my studies; for their constant love and solidarity, for being so considerate, humane, just, and good, for being in my world and making it so meaninful and valuable. iv Contents Öz/Abstract........................................................................................................iii Preface...............................................................................................................iv Contents..............................................................................................................v Introduction : Writing Back to Canonical Pre-texts .......................................1 Chapter 1 : Writing Back to Robinson Crusoe: Deconstructing the Optimistic Story of the Mythical Castaway...........................11 Chapter 2 : Writing Back to Roxana: The Story of a Woman Who “Begs to Disagree” ...............................................................51 Chapter 3 : Stories Told by Narrators-in-Between: J.M. Coetzee’s Foe and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness......................86 Chapter 4 : Once “There was a ship”: Confessional Stories of Two Insistent storytellers – Crime as an ontological concept as analysed in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”..................123 Conclusion : “Diving into the Wreck”.......................................................146 Works cited ....................................................................................................166 Özgeçmiş/Curriculum Vitae...........................................................................175 v Introduction: Writing Back To Canonical Pre-texts Starting directly, without any preamble, with the vital struggle for survival of a narrator swimming towards a “strange island”, even the first couple of pages of J. M. Coetzee’s Foe make it clear that we are presented with another version of the mythical desert island story of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. However, those first pages also reveal that Coetzee’s novel has another significant intertextual relationship, the first indications of which appear in the opening lines with the fact that the narrator (of the whole novel with the exception of only the short final section) is someone with “long hair” and who is wearing a “petticoat”, who is a woman, and whose identity is only gradually exposed as another one of Defoe’s protagonists: the eponymous heroine of Roxana. Moreover, taking into consideration the various other literary allusions made throughout Foe (some of which are more indirect and sporadic while some are more constant and obvious), we understand that Coetzee’s novel is not only an attempt to produce a new version of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe delivered this time through the mouth of the protagonist of Roxana but the presentation an act of “writing back”1 to the themes and issues that comprise the major focal points of those works alluded to, that is, a whole history of hidden or overt oppression in terms of race, class, and gender, as well as a whole tradition of writing/representing it. Foe, through its intensive intertextuality, which, in Graham Allen’s words, is “a kind of language which, because of its embodiment of otherness, is against, beyond and resistant to (mono)logic”2, depicts and negotiates the “other(s)” in the works it revises. These depictions and negotiations in the novel are tightly interwoven with also a concern to disclose the power of language/discourse as an instrument of marginalization, of, in 1 Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, London & New York, Routledge, 2002 (first pub. 2001), p.102. 2 Graham Allen, Intertextuality, London and New York, Routledge, 2000, p.45. 1 other words, creating those “others”, while, by doing this, the novel also exemplifies the kind of language/discourse employed to disclose its own power. As Susan VanZanten Gallagher states regarding the main concerns in Coetzee’s oeuvre, “The word can entrap, but it can also free. Coetzee’s novels ultimately affirm the value of speaking and storytelling, as long as such discourse is done in a self-conscious and non-authoritative way”3. Foe, in Teresa Dovey’s words, rather than being a straightforward rewriting of Robinson Crusoe, is, in fact, a novel “about the narrator, Susan Barton, and her attempt to re-write Defoe’s novel”4, or, perhaps, about her resultant failure to do so, “her inability to tell the story she wants to tell”5, in Rosemary
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