UNDER LOCAL EYES: THE SOUTH AFRICAN PUBLISHING CONTEXT OF J.M. COETZEE'S<i>FOE</i>

Zimbler, Jarad

doi:10.1080/00138390408691014

Cited by 28 publications

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“…Coetzee's Friday, Ngugi avers, "has no tongue, no voice, no language, and hardly any energy" (1993, 53). By contrast, Jarad Zimbler (2004) has emphasized the importance of reading Coetzee in the context of the specific publishing history of Foe. As Zimbler notes, the Ravan Press edition of Foe, part of a book series funded by the same Staffrider magazine whose urban Marxist outlook provided a powerful forum for young black writers to chronicle the daily experience of apartheid, placed the book squarely alongside explicitly political black South African output.…”

Section: Foe Of the Christian Heartmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…12. Zimbler (2004) draws a contrast between the Ravan Press blurb, with its Secker and Warburg British analog that made a point of comparing Coetzee to European authors such as George Orwell and Umberto Eco, and the later Penguin edition of Foe, which focused on Susan Barton's "missing" narrative as a feminist project of reclamation.…”

Section: Foe Of the Christian Heartmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Secrecy, Sacrifice, and God on the Island: Christianity and Colonialism in Coetzee’sFoeand Defoe’sRobinson Crusoe

Rajiva¹

2017

Twentieth-Century Literature

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Christianity and Colonialism in Coetzee's Foe and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe Jay Rajiva J. M. Coetzee's novel Foe begins with a shipwreck and ends with a confrontation underwater, as an unnamed, previously unvoiced narrator encounters Friday in a place "where bodies are their own signs" and each spoken word "is caught and filled with water and diffused" (Coetzee 1986, 157). 1 In this confrontation, Coetzee also withholds Friday from the reader's understanding, securing his body, as Gayatri Spivak notes, in "the real margin that has been haunting the text since its first page" (1999, 186). Thus Friday gestures only as that which will always keep its silence within the dominant colonial and historical register: we never receive any specific indication of what Friday might be, except a symbol of the breakdown of meaning. Friday is mute, intractable, mysterious, yet linked to the inexpressible "sounds of the island" (F 154). I argue that the tension in Coetzee's repetition of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe springs from the exposure of the Christian secret in both the colonial enterprises of the characters and the authorial presences of Defoe and Coetzee. My argument draws on Jacques Derrida's characterization of Christianity in The Gift of Death, which outlines how Christianity incorporates (but does not destroy) older, non-Christian elements into its own epistemic framework without acknowledging this act of incorporation. In Defoe's novel, Crusoe, the white colonial explorer, explicitly sets out to convert Friday to Christianity and succeeds in that goal through the triumph of Christian tenets: devotion to God requires the keeping of an absolute secret, a willingness to sacrifice, and prostration before the gaze of God, at whom, because God is always what exceeds one's understanding, one can never gaze back. Friday and Crusoe's discussion about the worship Twentieth-Century Literature

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Section: Foe Of the Christian Heartmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Foe Of the Christian Heartmentioning

confidence: 99%