Novel: a Forum on Fiction: &#39;Thresholds of the Novel: Realism, the Inhuman, the Ethical – J.M. Coetzee’s Foe&#39;

John S Bolin

Novel: a Forum on Fiction: 'Thresholds of the Novel: Realism, the Inhuman, the Ethical – J.M. Coetzee’s Foe'

The end of a novel is the site of particular epistemic privilege. If the form is governed by a biographical master-plot (Lukács, Watt) the ‘meaning of the life’, as Benjamin has it, is ‘revealed only in [the] death’ that is its narrative limit – and beyond this limit ‘the novelist … cannot hope to take the smallest step’. Such a limit is seemingly crossed in one of the most difficult and quite possibly the strangest of passages in J.M. Coetzee’s fiction: the ending of Foe. This book’s self-conscious re-presentation of the origins of the English novel (and Defoe’s inauguration of the genre’s biographical pattern) culminates in a surreal encounter that Coetzee’s readers have claimed limns a restorative justice or a utopic futurity. But these interpretations ignore the text’s insistence on a silence that overwhelms language, the spectre of mass death, and a summative darkness that attend upon this place. What might it mean, in fact, for Foe’s ending to cross the Novel’s thresholds only to stage a total ‘black out’ of the realist novel’s meaning-producing mechanism and the story of individual experience the genre has valorized? This article draws on Coetzee’s unpublished notebooks and the Foe ur-text to argue that the novel proposes an impossible crossing – whereby key strategies we have used to value the genre – its capacity to summon counter-voices or to invoke an ethical response to alterity – are shadowed by a radical question about the limits of our readerly attention....Read more

oldest metaphoric ﬁgure in Western literature? An apparent answer: the end of Foe, reﬂecting a model whose meaning is voiced only at its end and only through an effective death, emerges through the death of that death. Foe stages the death of the dominant narrative of modern individualism’s mechanism of the limit; that is: it stages the death of the “divinatory realization” that such a limit (death) reveals (Benjamin 100). Such an ending should lead us further into Foe’ s “maze of doubting” about the origins of the Novel, 2 not least its English models (Coetzee, Foe 135). Yet the great majority of Coetzee’s readers have met the text’s difﬁculty with pronouncements of faith. For them, Foe’ s ending is a ﬁnal assertion of agency (for the colonial subject) or the sign of a restorative justice (for the legacies of violence in South Africa and the postcolonial world more generally); part 4 is the site of “an unvoiced history which is acknowledged . . . by gesturing towards a post-colonial utopia, through the symbolic release of Friday’s ‘unending history’” (Head 126). 3 It is perhaps unsurprising that the discovery of such a meaning (familiar to us as novel readers: one that grants us, in other words, a “divinatory realization” of Friday and Friday’s experience in Foe) has requiredturning a blind eye to the strange forms of death beyond death that haunt this place—as well as to the proliferation of the nonlife that Barton calls the “abject”: “the life of a thing” (Foe 126). Why must Foe’ s closure come at the cost of both language and sight? What does it mean that Friday’s dreamlike realm beneath the corpse of Barton recalls Cruso’s death chamber (“your husband is sinking” [42]) and is as uncanny as any in the English gothic tradition? And why does this “dark and unending” current issue from a host best described as undead (157)? In what follows I will argue that Foe’ s ending does not whisper a utopian promise. If, for the Novel, “to think utopically is to imagine how that insatiable being known as the modern individual might acquire the means to perfect and gratify him- or herself” (Armstrong 137), Foe stages a confrontation with such a form’s precise obverse. That this obverse is ﬁgured as the “dark” subject of an enslaving violence suggests that, contra Toni Morrison, the English novel, too, relied on what Herman Melville called “the power of blackness” in a manner that was nothing short of fundamental to its structure and meaning (126). In Foe’ s own terminology, this means that the novel’s realist (staged historical- biographical) mode in parts 1–3 can only emerge alongside what the hero of this mode—Susan—calls the shadow, the insubstantial, and the dream. And if this is so, it 2 In this essay, I use Novel (capitalized) to designate the novel form as distinct from a particular work. 3 See, for instance, Jane Poyner’s, Laura Wright’s, and Graham Pechey’s different claims about the self-conscious resistance the novel offers to “Western-centric discourse” (the “foe” of the novel) and to the colonization of the colonial other’s body and story (Poyner 99). The ending might therefore be seen as a gesture of “deferral” to a “body politic” a ` venir: “Friday possesses the key to the closure of the narrative.... [The] ending amounts to a deferral of authority to the body of history, to the political world in which the voice of the body politic of the future resides” (Attwell 114–16). Consider also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s lyrical celebration of the ending: “In this end, the staging of the wish to invade the margin, the seaweeds seem to sigh: if only there were no texts. The end is written lovingly, and we will not give it up” (Spivak 18). BOLIN THRESHOLDS OF THE NOVEL 439 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user

Thresholds of the Novel: Realism, the Inhuman, the Ethical in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe J. S. BOLIN The only hope for this book is if it moves to a climax. That is to say, it will have to justify itself at the end. —Coetzee, Foe notebook, October 18, 1983 The ending of J. M. Coetzee’s Foe is undoubtedly what Shane Weller, writing of Samuel Beckett, termed a site of “maximum opacity”: one that coincides with a readerly desire for the experience of bafflement—or, to describe the success of its mechanism another way, that meets what Frank Kermode termed our “demand for constantly changing, constantly more subtle, relationships between a fiction and the paradigms” (Weller 193; Kermode 24). What does the word paradigms signify here? Ian Watt registered the significance of Defoe as model when he described Defoe’s turning away from “traditional plots” as the inauguration of a new tendency in fiction: a “total subordination of plot to the pattern of the autobiographical memoir,” a move which was “as defiant an assertion of the primacy of individual experience in the novel as Descartes’ cogito ergo sum was in philosophy” (Watt, Rise 15). Foe’s most apparent paradigm, then, is the novel that takes as its master plot the story of the life—a history tailored to the size of the individual and directed by the idiosyncratic desire of its protagonist. For Georg Lukács, the meaning of such a story is revealed only in death: the death that is the end of the story. “This . . . is a . . . roughly Hegelian conception of identity,” writes Michael Holquist; “Geist will know itself only at the end of its progress. It is the defining temporality of autobiography, where the last moment of a sequence is always the point of metaphysical as well as narrative privilege” (167). The story’s meaning—even its invitation to “a divinatory realization of the meaning of life”— appears only upon the termination that is also its fulfilment: “The nature of the character in a novel cannot be presented any better than is done in [the] statement which says that the ‘meaning’ of his life is revealed only in his death” (Benjamin 100, 101).1 What might this mean for Foe’s ending—an ending in which every individual dies or survives only as a decaying corpus—where the body of the text itself (the body of the protagonist, Susan Barton, and the body of her narrative) becomes insubstantial, spectral, having first undergone the annihilation of a katabasis that is death’s The author wishes to thank Nancy Armstrong for her critique of an earlier version of this article. 1 I take the above quotes from Walter Benjamin’s Lukácsian “Leskov the Storyteller,” where he claims that “[t]he novelist . . . cannot hope to take the smallest step beyond that limit at which he invites the reader to a divinatory realization of the meaning of life by writing ‘Finis’” (100). Novel: A Forum on Fiction 51:3 DOI 10.1215/00295132-7086481 Ó 2018 by Novel, Inc. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user BOLIN THRESHOLDS OF THE NOVEL 439 oldest metaphoric figure in Western literature? An apparent answer: the end of Foe, reflecting a model whose meaning is voiced only at its end and only through an effective death, emerges through the death of that death. Foe stages the death of the dominant narrative of modern individualism’s mechanism of the limit; that is: it stages the death of the “divinatory realization” that such a limit (death) reveals (Benjamin 100). Such an ending should lead us further into Foe’s “maze of doubting” about the origins of the Novel,2 not least its English models (Coetzee, Foe 135). Yet the great majority of Coetzee’s readers have met the text’s difficulty with pronouncements of faith. For them, Foe’s ending is a final assertion of agency (for the colonial subject) or the sign of a restorative justice (for the legacies of violence in South Africa and the postcolonial world more generally); part 4 is the site of “an unvoiced history which is acknowledged . . . by gesturing towards a post-colonial utopia, through the symbolic release of Friday’s ‘unending history’” (Head 126).3 It is perhaps unsurprising that the discovery of such a meaning (familiar to us as novel readers: one that grants us, in other words, a “divinatory realization” of Friday and Friday’s experience in Foe) has required turning a blind eye to the strange forms of death beyond death that haunt this place—as well as to the proliferation of the nonlife that Barton calls the “abject”: “the life of a thing” (Foe 126). Why must Foe’s closure come at the cost of both language and sight? What does it mean that Friday’s dreamlike realm beneath the corpse of Barton recalls Cruso’s death chamber (“your husband is sinking” [42]) and is as uncanny as any in the English gothic tradition? And why does this “dark and unending” current issue from a host best described as undead (157)? In what follows I will argue that Foe’s ending does not whisper a utopian promise. If, for the Novel, “to think utopically is to imagine how that insatiable being known as the modern individual might acquire the means to perfect and gratify him- or herself” (Armstrong 137), Foe stages a confrontation with such a form’s precise obverse. That this obverse is figured as the “dark” subject of an enslaving violence suggests that, contra Toni Morrison, the English novel, too, relied on what Herman Melville called “the power of blackness” in a manner that was nothing short of fundamental to its structure and meaning (126). In Foe’s own terminology, this means that the novel’s realist (staged historicalbiographical) mode in parts 1–3 can only emerge alongside what the hero of this mode—Susan—calls the shadow, the insubstantial, and the dream. And if this is so, it 2 In this essay, I use Novel (capitalized) to designate the novel form as distinct from a particular work. 3 See, for instance, Jane Poyner’s, Laura Wright’s, and Graham Pechey’s different claims about the self-conscious resistance the novel offers to “Western-centric discourse” (the “foe” of the novel) and to the colonization of the colonial other’s body and story (Poyner 99). The ending might therefore be seen as a gesture of “deferral” to a “body politic” à venir: “Friday possesses the key to the closure of the narrative. . . . [The] ending amounts to a deferral of authority to the body of history, to the political world in which the voice of the body politic of the future resides” (Attwell 114–16). Consider also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s lyrical celebration of the ending: “In this end, the staging of the wish to invade the margin, the seaweeds seem to sigh: if only there were no texts. The end is written lovingly, and we will not give it up” (Spivak 18). Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user 440 NOVEL NOVEMBER 2018 would seem that Foe cannot present true alterity, even in its ending. For if we are still within a novel in part 4, the “dream” and “darkness” to which Foe gives way here will only emerge as more of the same: “[T]he subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self” (Morrison 17). If the impossible conditions that Foe’s ending stages for its terminal face-off might yet be said to “perform an ethical work,” these conditions would thus require us to carry any such ethical thinking itself to the end: toward an encounter it seems impossible to countenance in a spirit of welcome—despite the fact that welcome is precisely what such an ethical relation requires (Gibson 1). Foe’s ending is in fact like a mirror held up to a mirror (I am thinking of Stendhal’s description of what in the English tradition we call “realism”); and rather than dialogism it presents a fundamental solipsism in the Novel’s structure and subject— the modern subject it describes, to which it gives voice and that it largely created. For novel readers, and to the extent that we are subjects of the myth of individualism the form has largely written, Foe probes the limits of our conditioned capacity to think outside the Novel itself. Crossing into the Forbidden Foe is obsessed with thresholds, boundaries, and liminal spaces. It not only returns to various refuges, homes, and shelters but insists on the cost of crossing over from one reality to the next. Formally, the novel is divided: any discussion of Foe’s multiple “endings” in part 4 must acknowledge the strange fact that these do not take place in the time and space of the novel proper—in Susan’s story (parts 1–3). “I slipped overboard . . . ”: In part 1, we are effortlessly immersed into a world purporting to occupy a specific historical reality (Foe 5). Yet whatever the merits of this “substantial” Defoean mode (which peoples the book with a world of bodies, sunlight, money, food, contracts, debts, houses—in short, “real life”), it cannot cross over into part 4: “We are all alive, we are all substantial, we are all in the same world,” claims Susan at the end of part 3, only for Foe to correct her: “You have omitted Friday” (152). Ringed with barriers, “the home of Friday” is surrounded by markers that delineate those spaces that are the inverse of the world to which Susan lays claim: the realm of the dead, the insubstantial, the solitary. These chthonic depths are haunted by monsters (the “kraken,” the “dark mass of the wreck . . . greater than the leviathan” [156]), multitudes killed in violence and buried en masse (“generations of grenadiers . . . trampled in the postures of sleep” [156]), and uncanny “guardian” figures who impede part 4’s unnamed narrator-quester-reader (156). This underworld opens on a place that is impossible from both the perspective of Foe’s preceding plot as well as its realist adherence to calendric time (here the water is not dated, like Susan’s letters, but profoundly static: “the same . . . as yesterday, as last year, as three hundred years ago” [157]). The violation of the novel’s “rules” in part 4 forces us to confront not only Foe’s nomination of place but the practice of nomination itself. For Foe’s fascination with boundaries is at one with its obsession with the name. In the first pages of a novel whose title provocatively publishes and turns the name of the writer behind his own myth, one is immediately faced with Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user BOLIN THRESHOLDS OF THE NOVEL 441 the proscribed name, the name that the novel’s very structure acknowledges lies beyond the bounds of its dominant narrative “law” in parts 1–3: “Friday.” “To proscribe: to announce publicly in writing, to record in writing, to offer for sale in writing, to ‘post’ a person as condemned to confiscation or outlawry” (“Proscribe”).4 Like Coetzee’s cleft-lipped Michael K (misnamed “Michaels,” “Mr Treefeller,” and so on), his Friday’s physical mutilation serves as a metonymic marker for the power usurped by the violence of the name; the name brands Friday as outside the realm of language, law, and custom. In entering Friday’s realm, Foe’s last diver therefore trespasses into a space forbidden—“to command [a person or persons] not to do, have, use, or indulge in [something], or not to enter [a place]” (“Forbid”)—within what part 4 reveals is “the house of Defoe.” What is this place (and what is in it) that transgresses the novel’s laws? The question leads us back to Defoe as author and authority. Foe’s dominant trope for the act of novelistic narration—that of submersion—accordingly appears in the novel’s ur-text as a figure for crossing over into a state of engulfment and struggle within Defoe’s discourse. As the Coetzee of the Foe manuscript puts it, Defoe “lives in his world, in his language, like a fish in water,” but “I [must] struggle to surface + breathe again, look about me, know where I am”; the language of Robinson Crusoe “looks so clean and simple” yet it is “in fact turgid and heavy as the sea” that will not give up its secrets (Foe manuscript no. 5, vn 4, nb 7, 55).5 It was this Coetzee (the Coetzee of the manuscript) who would initiate the acts of diving into Defoe’s/Foe’s world as a salvor, “hop[ing] to release” the “meanings” buried below its surface (no. 5, vn 4, nb 7, 1v). The novel’s repeated dramatization of writing and reading in the wake of specific narratives (those of Defoe, Foe, and, for the narrator of part 4, Foe itself) thus took shape early in the book’s origins through a metaphoric figure of descent that mapped onto the novel’s content: “This is going to be a story about drowning,” Coetzee concedes, “a continual drowning without a death” (no. 5, vn 4, nb 7, 1v). The figure stuck: what is this drowning without death or drowning through death but an intimation of the dynamics that govern the novel’s title and its closing pages? One recalls that drowning is Crusoe’s own figure for being consumed by an antagonist, a foe; to drown is to be “buried” in the “body” (the corpse/corpus) of a powerful “enemy”—and so to lose oneself and one’s vision of a distant, undiscovered shore.6 Foe co-opts this language for the self-reflexive metaphor that is rehearsed obsessively at its end: only through Barton’s reiterated submersions (“I presented myself . . . in words I knew to be my own—I slipped overboard” [133]) and the reentries of the narrator/writer/reader who enters the dwellings of Foe, Defoe, and the “house of 4 Definitions in this paragraph are taken from the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. 5 The Foe manuscript is hereafter cited with Coetzee’s own numbering system, including a draft/ attempt number, version (“vn”), notebook (“nb”), and page. All pages cited are rectos unless indicated as verso (v). 6 “[F]or I saw the sea come after me as high as a great hill, and as furious as an enemy, which I had no means or strength to contend with: my business was to hold my breath, and raise myself upon the water if I could” (Defoe 34). Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user 442 NOVEL NOVEMBER 2018 words” that is Barton’s text can we hope to descend to the forbidden (131). An early title of the novel was, in fact, Salvage.7 A Metonymy of Desire What can take place, what can be written in this space beyond Crusoe’s laws? “Without desire,” Susan avers, it is impossible to make a story (88). It is not a surprise, then, that Coetzee’s initial attempts at “salvage” were to discover the desire that might transgress the boundaries set by an authority so total that in Robinson Crusoe we are victims of a magnificent amnesia as to what the book—which contains a world—is painfully lacking: the unruly currents of erotic yearning. It seemed Foe would somehow have to explore the proscribed desire circulating beneath the Defoean story’s surface. “When I think of writing this book,” Coetzee noted, “I am struck by the fact that there is no core subject, just a technical exercise. I could write it and there would be nothing worth reading. The core would have to be provided by Friday, by Friday as Susan secretly reads him” (FN, 1 June 1983, 7). As Foe reveals, this reading must be “secret” because it is occluded from its first reader—from Susan. Put simply: the relation between Susan and Friday must be an unconscious relation because it is a relation of unconscious desire. A pattern emerges in the ur-text: each time the Friday beneath the dutiful, voiceless servant begins to surface it is resubmerged. The text circles around the notion of crossing over to Friday’s world through a continual iteration of tropes of consumption, elimination, and immersion, as if dramatizing the anxieties that beset the borders of the fragile, individual body. But we are never permitted to experience what Friday’s world is like from the inside. Most apparently, there is, for Susan, the threat of cannibalism (we are always preoccupied here, necessarily, with “for Susan”), a figure for an unspeakable dread: that of bodily incorporation, the loss of the self in an annihilating “union”—with Friday and those forces like him. When, in one of Coetzee’s early drafts, Susan intimates to Cruso (his name is still spelled with an “e” at this stage) that she hopes “the presence of a woman will not spoil the tranquillity of your existence,” her comment sets off a train of aggressive carnal jokes from her host: Cruso sniggers that Friday may not wish to eat Susan, but he might like to enjoy her body in another fashion (no. 5, vn 2, nb 2, 15). But as in the published text of Foe, this threat, insofar as it is acknowledged at all, is immediately repressed in an appeal to Friday’s fundamental impotence. Don’t worry, Cruso quickly adds, “[h]e doesn’t understand, and if he understood he wouldn’t dare, and if he dared he wouldn’t know how to” (no. 5, vn 2, nb 3, 17). In another excised episode, Susan leaves Cruso’s dwelling in anger. Sojourning in a cave, seeking an independent life on the island, she and Friday begin a new type of relationship, which he initiates by bringing Susan exotic yellow fruits. (Any doubt about Friday’s intention is removed when he violently denies his master has played any part in the gift ritual [no. 5, vn 3, nb 4, 32].) Coetzee then positions Susan as a voyeur: spying on a naked Friday where he stands fishing on a rock. Yet both 7 Foe notebook, page 78. Hereafter cited as FN. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user BOLIN THRESHOLDS OF THE NOVEL 443 attempts stall: suddenly concerned about Cruso, Susan searches him out; he is laid up with “the old fever”; sex follows between them (no. 5, vn 3, nb 5, 34). The pattern—Friday as shadow, Friday as impotent—is established when further permutations follow: Cruso and Susan develop a “coarse” relationship (no. 5, vn 3, nb 6, 46); Friday, who at this stage can still talk, tries unsuccessfully to speak to Susan in his own language (no. 5, vn 3, nb 6, 42). Yet even as Friday’s significance in the trio remains unresolved, Susan repeatedly reassures Foe/the reader that Friday was in no way concerned with the erotic aspect of her story on Cruso’s Island: “The spectacle of his master consorting with a woman caused no great disturbance in him” (no. 5, vn 3, nb 6, 48). The Coetzee of the manuscript carries out his final speculation into Friday’s desire (figured, as regards Susan, as a fundamentally erotic urge) even as he concludes that any possibility of verbal communication between Susan and Friday must be blocked (when Friday’s tongue is severed) (no. 5, vn 3, nb 2, 20). By page 21 of this version, Cruso points out that Friday’s mutilation is no loss at all: under his rule, Friday has learned to “tame his wants.” Yet in a rewriting of the scene in which Friday offers Susan fruit, Susan then notes that Friday is watching her mouth: “I noticed that he looked intently at my mouth, sticky with juice” (no. 5, vn 3, nb 4, 32). The episode closes with an atmosphere of unfulfilled charge that belies the assurances of both Susan and Cruso: when she describes Friday’s gifts, Cruso becomes enraged, and thereafter the servant no longer brings the woman the fruit she now craves. Susan then once again watches Friday fishing naked. Miming the dynamic that will dominate their relationship in the final text, she simply observes his body “crouching over the water with his spear pointed”; “I watched,” Susan relates, “waiting for the spear to descend; but it did not” (no. 5, vn 3, nb 4, 32). The symbolic force of the spear and fruit were too direct. Even as Coetzee attempted an (unacknowledged and unconsummated) “intercourse” between Susan and Friday, these metaphoric substitutions—and more complexly, the notion of watery descent—themselves underwent a series of distancing transformations. Following Susan’s bouts of voyeurism, she discovers sores in her mouth: “I would wake up in the night thinking of apples”—before acknowledging that it is not a familiar fruit that she lusts after: “I saw no more of that yellow fruit, however” (no. 5, vn 3, nb 5, 37). When Susan of the ur-text watches Friday masturbating into the ocean—the precursor to the mysterious petal-scattering act (no. 5, vn 3, nb 5, 38)— the metaphoric substitutions that appear in the Foe text coalesce: “Curious to know what he had cast on the waves,” Susan searches under Friday’s bed to find “a little cloth sack with a drawstring filled with petals from the brambles that were then flowering” (no. 5, vn 3, nb 6, 41). The metonymic relationship between Friday and the natural processes of the island that reemerges in the figure we find desiccated yet alive in part 4’s version of the historical house of Defoe surfaces here (from this Friday come “the sounds of the island” [Foe 154]). The petals strewn on the water thus once figured Friday’s (hidden) seed, the stifled charge of his desire.8 In the final text, the petals are suitably opaque, disseminated without issue. 8 This link—the connection between Friday and the natural world of the island—is prominent in Michel Tournier’s Vendredi, his own revision of Robinson Crusoe. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user 444 NOVEL NOVEMBER 2018 The narrator’s attempts to follow Friday into the water in Foe’s final pages thus arose out of a series of complex images that join the dynamics of narrative submersion, perceiving the (naked) other, and the desire (first felt by the Coetzee who composed the manuscript) to search out “the heart of the story” in the desire of the other. In an early version of this “diving” act, Susan tries to keep her gaze “fixed on the place where I judged Friday to have scattered his blossoms”—a place where there is “a frothing over the water, a line of white, as if just below the surface there were something solid” (no. 5, vn 3, nb 6, 45). But Susan’s touch will resurrect only a relic, a token of death. From the “dark fluid” that welcomed Friday she dredges a few tiny bones: the finger bones of the drowned. It is when she shows these shards to Friday—the sight disturbs him, but Susan cannot “read” his expression further— that she understands there can be no communication between them. She then recalls the “last time” she dived. In a reversal of the earlier scene, Friday is there, watching her, unconcealed. Yet Susan recalls she “took off [her] clothes and descended into the water as coolly as if [she] were alone” (no. 5, vn 3, nb 6, 48). From an object of fascination to a figure “like an animal wrapt entirely in itself” (a figure without a knowable inner being), Friday will become Susan’s “shadow”—insubstantial, spectral, without a core of desire (Foe 70, 115). Without the seed of narrative that could become a life in the Novel’s terms. * * * Foe thus began as an attempt to salvage the “secrets” belied by Defoe’s fiction: a story in which Crusoe is simply a “gentleman . . . who has set up his trading-house in Brazil” and Crusoe’s vessel “merely a sturdy sailing ship”; Coetzee would by this logic resurrect that which had remained in the story’s “hold” (no. 5, vn 4, nb 7, cover v). But as Crusoe’s secret came into focus as a person, the writer was paradoxically forced to admit that “Friday is at the centre of this story; but I seem incapable of conceiving for him any role in the story” (no. 5, vn 4, nb 7, 2v). Even as he approached the novel’s end, in March 1985, the Coetzee of the ur-text recognized that “the central image” that he had sensed at the heart of the story—“Friday in his dark room”—“remains unexplored” (FN 20 March 1985, 80). One source of resistance to raising Friday from this dark space may now be named. As Coetzee notes in number 5, version 4, begun immediately following Susan’s final aforementioned dive, “what Friday threatens to be or to do (to murder Crusoe, to rape Susan, to be revealed as tyrant of the island and King of the cannibals; . . . Or alternatively to become the male victim of colonialism) never happens. His dark presence never disappears from the background, his presence comes to carry with it an atrocious history; but further than that, further than as a jog to the conscience, he never emerges into meaning” (no. 5, vn 4, nb 7, 2v). By robbing Friday of his tongue and hinting that it is Cruso who does it (not the Coetzee who authors him), the writer prevents Friday from speaking for himself: “Because I cannot imagine how anything that Friday might say would have a place in my text” (3v). While Defoe’s Friday repeats Yes, a Coetzee living in the long shadows of colonial violence finds it impossible to find a meaningful way in which his Friday can say No. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user BOLIN THRESHOLDS OF THE NOVEL 445 This barrier is historical and, in a straightforward sense, political: “What is lacking to me is what is lacking to Africa since the death of Négritude: a vision of a future for Africa that is not a debased version of life in the West” (3v). The task of bringing the meaning of Friday to life would be to develop an alternative future, a political vision. Insofar as Coetzee positions Friday as a figure of historicalallegorical significance (a symbol of Africa’s legacies of colonial violence and of victims of Western violence more generally; as the racial and cultural other), the question of how to resolve the allegory—to resolve the history—remains, and it remains unanswerable. Yet as the foregoing sketch of the novel’s manuscript origins suggests, it is not simply “history” in this sense that is barring the way to Friday: it is the novel’s investment in a particular formal and stylistic legacy and this legacy’s relation to individual desire. As the final Foe text makes clear, the limpidity of Defoe’s style and the seamlessness of his form rely on a concealment of worlds. The danger posed by form and style are real here because narrative mode and ideology are not only the substance of our experience in the Novel but—to borrow the analogy from Georges Bataille—together they are like “water in water” (Bataille 25). Ironically, it is the drive to uncover, to “bring to light” the concealed—dramatized in Susan’s readerly desire, her attempts to follow Friday into the water—that cannot resurrect Friday’s truth. If the novel charts a passage toward the death of the narrator and the eclipsing of her desire, only in its final pages does it confirm that the twin urges entwined in Foe’s genesis could never be joined: the individual consciousness at the heart of Defoe’s mode could not raise to light the “dark” other that had always defined it. Eye Alone In parts 1–3, Foe proceeds with a complex double movement: erecting anew the Defoean narrative of individual survival even as it trains the force of a canceling negation upon this story, an obscuring of its voyeuristic drive. To comprehend the “darkness” that flits throughout the story—how the novel’s climactic moments (and in particular the ending) revolve around a thematics of visual failure, literal and metaphorical obscurity, and the (non)presence of Friday—is thus to perceive the coincidence between such themes and those passages wherein language and the narrating voice falter. One thinks of course of Susan’s speechlessness as she beholds Friday’s nudity in the “dance” (“I saw; or, I should say, my eyes were open to what was present to them” [119]); but we should also consider the cryptogram of “walking eyes” on Friday’s slate that Susan cannot read and that Friday immediately and purposefully obliterates (147), the cadavers we encounter in the houses of Foe and Defoe (“Their eyes are closed”[153]), the “pitch darkness” of Friday’s alcove (154), the dark “orbit” or dead “eye” of the story into which we descend in part 4 (140), and the abiding and “central image of Friday in his dark room” beneath the sea (FN 20 March 1985, 80). Here (but only after crawling beneath the decaying corpses of Barton and “her” captain) the narrator’s eyes are closed by darkness itself: “[S]oft and cold, dark and unending, [the current] beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face” (157; emphasis added). Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user 446 NOVEL NOVEMBER 2018 One key dimension of Foe’s ending, then, can be traced to a broad critique within a history of modern French philosophy that targets what might be termed (with equal vagueness) a realist “point of view,” “oculocentrism,” or even “Enlightenment” and whose most comprehensive summation is Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (a text known to and referenced by Coetzee). It is in this sense that narration, vision, and an urge toward mastery are inextricably linked in Foe. The text, in other words, dramatizes the interconnection of its narrative mode and what Watt calls the West’s “ideology of individual selfsufficiency” (Myths 170). Maurice Blanchot puts this fundamental linking of ideology and mode this way: “[T]he novelistic narration, that of individuality— not taking into consideration the content itself—is already marked by an ideology to the extent that it assumes that the individual, with all his particular characteristics and limits, is enough to express the world, that is to say, it assumes that the course of the world remains that of the individual” (136). The critique of novelistic realism is well-known. For Emmanuel Levinas’s followers, the Enlightenment underpinnings of this mode famously generate a narrative that is always a return to the Same; others are recognized only as they enter the protagonist’s—the narrating “I’s”—categories for apprehension: “Western philosophy coincides with the disclosure of the other where the other, in manifesting itself as being, loses its alterity” (“Trace of the Other” 346). Crusoe, whose essential solitude lies at the core of his myth, can be read in this sense as the chief exemplar of the nihilistic forces at the core of Defoe’s world and its Enlightenment project: the projection of a limpid, “rational” surface searchable and exploitable by the insatiable “I”/eye sailing its surface. These ideological underpinnings manifested in a thematics of light and dark, which, as Morrison has pointed out of American fiction specifically, not infrequently privileged the end of the novel, culminating in images of impenetrable whiteness. But Foe suggests that the argument that the sovereignty sought by the Novel’s I/ eye requires “the potent and ego-reinforcing presence” of a contrastive blackness throughout—and that the suasive power of this antithesis was sustained by the historical reality of a marginalized “dark” population—should be expanded beyond American fiction, even (despite Morrison’s argument to the contrary) to the roots of the English novel (Morrison 45). Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse indicate the complex cross-flow between the two traditions in the first half of the eighteenth century when they read Clarissa as a captivity narrative; but to state that Foe is a rewriting of Robinson Crusoe is to extend their claim that the Novel was not “first and foremost a European genre, but rather one that simultaneously recorded and recoded the colonial experience” to Defoe himself (197). To borrow from Morrison, Foe makes it all too clear that the story of individualist desire that Robinson Crusoe tells did not arise in a vacuum, for “nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery.” Here too (though in a manner different from both Clarissa and Roxana), the female writing subject gathers its cultural authority from the inscription of a single-minded wish at self-preservation that can only define itself against a barbarous other. Defoe’s novel is made to testify that all the Western cultures that generated an “invented Africa” could not persuade themselves that “knowledge could emerge outside the categories of domination” (Morrison 38, 7). Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user BOLIN THRESHOLDS OF THE NOVEL 447 Patrick Hayes has flagged the shortcomings of the many accounts that position Susan and Friday as characters who together represent historically marginalized subjects of the “foe.” Susan, argues Hayes, in fact “embodies and advocates ‘the novel’” in ways that reiterate the form’s trespasses against the colonial body of which Friday is a part (Hayes 288). This point must be taken further, for it is crucial for the way that Foe’s ending (wherein Susan cannot be our narrator, not least because she is dead) pointedly inverts the mounting of an impenetrable whiteness that we can now associate with the invocation to closure and meaning for the preceding narrative. Again, Barton reveals herself as a “foe” insofar as she is a novelistic hero; it is Susan who is Crusoe’s primary representative in the Foe text. She is the book’s chief representative of “Enlightenment thinking” and the (white) subject at the heart of a self-regarding providential story that is also a quest for sovereignty— both of which narrative patterns seem to require (and therefore generate) companionable shadows for their realization. Foe’s origins in fact map Coetzee’s move from the predictable representatives of the traits that allow Crusoe to succeed (his commitment to a notion of the dignity of labor, his fundamental egocentricity, his dedication to the rational pursuit of material self-interest, his trust in contracts and rights), along with the philosophical underpinnings that render Crusoe’s story convincing (a fidelity to empirical detail, a commitment to the logic of causality, and a notion of historical time), toward the character who focalizes Coetzee’s narrative. In this way Susan gradually becomes Foe’s representative of a narrative praxis that connects writing and labor through a circuit that transforms experience of the other into a story about the self.9 Early in the text’s composition, Cruso delivers a lecture to Susan on the idleness of “Friday’s people,” a speech that could have been lifted directly from the accounts of native listlessness cited in White Writing’s “Idleness in South Africa”; there, Coetzee outlines the Western “ideology of work” that focalized the settlers’ view of natives within a writerly economy of meaningful and useless “material” (34).10 But in Foe it is Susan who insists on the benefits of labor and the corrosive force of native indolence (“I . . . am turning Friday into a laundryman,” she confides to Foe, “for otherwise idleness will destroy him” [56]) and who disparages Cruso’s wall-building with his servant as “a foolish kind of agriculture”: building the terraces is an insufficiently rational way to better their situation (34). As the novel progresses, she quickly commits to a circular logic linking her own diaristic writing (her “letters to Foe”), the “ideology of work,” and the affirmations granted by Providence: the pattern in the writing affirms the values of the writing (which prompt the writing-self to see others in terms of the self’s economy of meaning)— values whose most overt record and practice are the writing. It is not Foe or Cruso but Susan who, when she is “cast away” (for the second time, now in England), looks 9 From the beginning, Crusoe’s journal is of course linked to the labor he performs even as it is a record of that labor: “Now it was that I began to keep a journal of every day’s employment” (Defoe 51). 10 In the manuscript of Foe, Cruso begins, “Friday’s people, whom you have not seen and I have, live lives of the most extreme torpor” (no. 5, vn 3, nb 5, 39). Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user 448 NOVEL NOVEMBER 2018 back on her work to proclaim that “there is after all design in our lives, and if we wait long enough we are bound to see that design unfolding” (103). Foe of course works to expose this logic as self-serving and myopic. The novel frequently reminds us that Susan, like Defoe’s Crusoe, is a lucky survivor, has the gift of her tongue and the power (in her case a transient and vitiated power) to tell the story of finding herself, at specific moments, at the center (like an eye impossibly looking down upon itself looking up). This monocular narrative in which the individualist reduces all others to supporting roles in what might be termed a paradoxical “ethic of the I” (one thinks of Roxana’s nameless husbands or Crusoe’s equally nameless others) reiterates the “parasitical nature of white freedom” (Morrison 57) that requires a Friday who, Susan demurely admits, “has grown to be my shadow” (Foe 115). Foe’s links with Roxana are instructive in this regard. The fact that Roxana will not “own” her daughter, even when it appears that the reasons for denying her past have largely dissipated, highlights the sticking point for her and Coetzee’s Susan Sr.: the loss of an essential freedom, the eventuality of being assigned a “role,” and the forfeiture of one’s “property” (with the word understood in the Lockean sense, in which “property” includes one’s mental attributes and capabilities) are intolerable to the individualist. For this reason, while the fundamental solitude of characters like Crusoe and Barton is figured in their narratives as a misfortune, it is in fact a structural necessity. Coetzee’s Cruso may be a hero who wins a primal victory over “the monster of solitude” (Foe 38), but a similar status is implicit in Barton’s mode of storytelling and her acts of willed self-identification within it: “My name is Susan Barton, and I am a woman alone” (10). Cruso(e)’s denial of those factors that would unsettle this vision—again, others and their desires—may appear in its most striking form in the Foe drafts when Susan casually disrobes before Cruso’s servant. But the same worldview insinuates itself through the paradox at the heart of our chief narrator’s perspective in the final text: “It is I, Susan Barton. . . . I am alone, with Friday” (113; emphasis added). The Death of the Real If the Susan of the ur-text does not feel shame when disrobing before a shadow, it is only when she confesses her fascination with Friday’s naked body (her “darkest secrets”) under the eye of the rival “author” for her story—that of Foe—that the solidity of her world begins to erode in earnest (120). In Foe’s “refuge,” Susan’s “house of words” suffers not only a loss of narrative “substance” (“Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr Foe. . . . For though my story gives the truth, it does not give the substance of the truth” [51]) but an apparent hollowing-out of the voice and the subject at the heart of that story: “Nothing is left to me but doubt. I am doubt itself. Who is speaking me?” (133; emphasis added). Put simply, parts 2–3 of Coetzee’s novel submit what Watt terms realism’s Lockean “principle of individuation” (Rise 21) to what Beckett liked to call “a principle of disintegration” (82). And by part 4 we are no longer in Susan’s story at all. In part 4’s first (re)entry, the speaker approaches the “refuge” of Foe only to trip over the body of “a woman or a girl” as we again confront the “dark and Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user BOLIN THRESHOLDS OF THE NOVEL 449 mean” staircase. “By the light of a match I make out a woman or a girl, her feet drawn up inside a long grey dress, her hands folded under her armpits; or is it that her limbs are unnaturally short, the stunted limbs of a cripple? Her face is wrapped in a grey woollen scarf. I begin to unwrap it, but the scarf is endless. Her head lolls. She weighs no more than a sack of straw” (Foe 153). Is this the paradoxical corpse of the girl Susan calls a “ghost”? Almost weightless, even in death this hauntingly present body remains “insubstantial.” A clue: the little corpse/doll staying us on this shadowy threshold recalls a pervasive trope in the English gothic tradition, invoked wherever the border between one space and another serves occluded histories and repressed desires (one thinks of Catherine scratching at the windowpane behind Lockwood, Bertha Mason moaning within her attic, or Dracula welcoming Harker). The uncanny presences that haunt such thresholds always signify a threat to the story as it has been told, and one that is entailed in crossing the boundary from the present to an insufficiently buried past, broaching a concealed reservoir of desire. These uncanny figures—for they only haunt homes—are literally or figuratively dead and incompletely human. Importantly, the “stunted,” doll-like, apparently crippled body in Foe’s doorway has no face, or none that the speaker can find. The strangeness of this section only escalates as the narrator proceeds deeper into “darkness”: first, we pass into a shadowy room where a rotting curtain gives way to “pitch darkness” in Friday’s alcove (154). Then, in the house of Defoe, it is even “darker than before” (155); but only when we enter Susan’s crumbling text do we strike out for “the dark cliffs of the island” (155) and enter the “dark mass of the wreck” undersea (where “the timbers are black, the hole even blacker that gives entry” [156]), a place where the narrator lifts the candle bound round his neck like a “talisman” “though it sheds no light” (156). The cabin here is a “black space,” and Friday’s current, as it closes our eyes, is “dark and unending” (157). These obscure spaces are haunted by other gothic traces: the remains of the once-living (our narrator and her lover transformed into “composed” and grinning corpses [153]), ghostly lights (the candle burns “with a dull blue flame” [155]), monsters (the kraken), and what appears a trampled bed of corpses (156). Like a gothic quester, we open moldering chests and finger crumbling parchments, harking to the scurrying of rodents before crawling beneath the bobbing dead. . . . But what are we to make of these uncanny traces behind Foe’s realist facade and the way that the novel’s narrative solidity itself suddenly becomes friable, like a decaying page, or porous, like a waterlogged body? And even as we pose this question, it dissolves into another: but why are these traces so evidently stripped of any force of horror—so overtly “textualized”? The reading one might deliver for a text operating more fully within a gothic mode will clearly be incomplete. Yet it also seems appropriate that the novel deploys a (diffused) version of the novelistic type dedicated to the proscribed past: the mode that, to paraphrase Armstrong, should be read as “the other side” of realism: its mutually defining dark twin (3). As Nick Groom reminds us, gothic ruins and the specters that haunt them “probe the consequences of history and the telling of secrets”—a history that is always, by definition, an “unspeakable history” (79, 112). And that there is a particular history lying behind these uncanny traces is hardly surprising. In an entry in his Foe notebook, Coetzee wrote of the imagined encounter Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user 450 NOVEL NOVEMBER 2018 between part 4’s “I” and the submerged Susan: “It is her gown that makes her fat as a pig. It rides up. Her long legs. Takes her hand. Tears in his eyes. Skin of the hand puckered by immersion. Immersion. Immersion in the times.” (FN 4 October 1985, 109). Years earlier, surveying his own times, Coetzee had written: “There is the story in the newspaper of a boy beaten to death in SWA” “photographed with a chain around his neck” (28 March 1983, 2). Does the chain on the murdered black youth become the chain on the undead, partially “buried” Friday? Such a reading—which might neatly turn the ending into a historical allegory— cannot fully satisfy our unease. It is unclear why these dead bodies are necessary to explore the novel’s “central image, Friday in his dark room” (FN 20 March 1985, 80) or why the deaths are so evidently without significance. If, as Thomas Pynchon has it, “when we speak of ‘seriousness’ in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death” (5), what is this death that is not an invitation to seriousness (in the manner of novelistic realism or its inverse mode) but rather the forceful presentation of such potential meaning’s absence? A Borderline Text Part 4’s uncanny spaces are part of a greater attitude toward death or, more precisely, the Novel’s strategy of summoning deathly meaning. As Blanchot tells it, novelistic realism was initiated through a disenchantment that instates “the real” at the cost of that construct he calls “the story”: “But the story soon becomes disenchanted. The experience of the disenchanted world introduced into literature by Don Quixote is the experience that dissipates the story by contrasting it to the banality of the real” (Blanchot 135). In parts 1–3, and then most fully in part 4, Foe disenchants the disenchantment, revealing the “real” as what it always was—another version of “the story.” To my knowledge, no reader has recognized that Susan’s substantial world emerges through a metafictional quotation: it is William Gass whom Coetzee invokes, repeatedly, to countersign Foe’s realist mode—to figure our immersion in the “real” and the opening of the novel itself—as a descent into the world of fairy tales. In “Mrs Mean,” the second narrative in Gass’s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, the narrator, an unnamed voyeur, strives to enter the life and finally the house of a woman he calls “Mrs Mean,” yearning to turn her into a “puppet” in one of his “stories.” Yet upon suddenly finding himself in Mrs Mean’s garage one evening, the narrator confesses he has overstepped a limit: “I am not myself. This is not the world. I have gone too far. It is the way fairy tales begin—with a sudden slip over the rim of reality”; “I think of Hänsel and Gretel,” he continues: “They were real and they went for a walk in a real forest but they walked too far . . . and suddenly the forest was a forest of story” (117; emphasis added). It is precisely this “slip over the rim of reality”—the move from reality and authorship to being a character in a story—that is reiterated in Coetzee’s text even as Susan retells her substantial history related according to her own desire: “With a sigh, making barely a splash, I slipped overboard” (Foe 5). Yet in the telling of that tale—the narrative that is parts 1–3 and its reiterations in the refuge of Foe—Susan undergoes the fate of Gass’s solipsist, his postmodern Crusoe: “I presented myself Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user BOLIN THRESHOLDS OF THE NOVEL 451 to you in words I knew to be my own—I slipped overboard. . . . But now all my life grows to be a story” (133). For this reason, each of the (re)entrances that are part 4’s narrative submersions— into the refuge of Foe, the dwelling of the historical Defoe, the “house of words” that is Barton’s text in 1–3—is overtly textualized: by the quotation that signals we are reentering Foe’s dwelling (“the staircase is dark and mean”), by the plaque that commemorates the home of Defoe, by the page that reiterates the beginning of Susan’s narrative and Foe itself and that here becomes like another “rotting curtain” we slip through (152). Yet it is only when the “other diver” (part 4’s narrator) reenters Foe’s hideout that Susan’s story is realized as a story: as that which is told in the past tense. Only as Susan’s text literally disintegrates—“The yellowed topmost leaf crumbles . . . under my thumb . . . I read . . . ‘Dear Mr Foe . . . ’”—are we fully immersed in the apparent immediacy of a world that would seem to dispel Foe’s “real” world as the enchantment: “With a sigh, making barely a splash, I slip overboard” (155; emphasis added). The staged disintegration of what Roland Barthes called “the unreal time of cosmogonies, myths, History and Novels”—the unreality so crucial to what he memorably terms the “security system” of belles lettres—launches us through the looking glass into Foe’s final crossing.11 What is this realm beyond the “real”? It has in fact already been named, though from a perspective that is, within part 4, totally impossible: the perspective of a corpse. For that construct we might call “the subject of the realist novel,” the one who literally presides over and even “blesses” the “home of Friday” with her dead (non)presence, this is the world of the “abject” (126). Like the world of specters and the feasts of cannibals, it elicits both fascination and the most forceful of denials. Abject is not absent from Defoe’s lexicon. But in Coetzee’s text the word surely invokes Kristeva’s reworking of Bataille’s structural analysis of the psychosocial damnation of les misérables. This is a site of traumatic indifferentiation between self and other, person and thing—a realm whose force, against those narrative laws that undergird the realist subject’s quest for sovereignty in her house of words, exposes “the fragility of the law” (Kristeva, Powers 4). The abject in this sense is precisely existence without individuality, what Susan calls the “life of a thing,” the mud of generations: it “has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I” (Kristeva, Powers 1). And it emerges in part 4 wherever dirt enters or enfolds the questor’s body (“the smell of old dust in my nostrils” [Foe 154])—that which troubles the borders of the individual even as it seeks to return this “I” to the “mass”: “I had not thought the sea could be dirty. But the sand under my hands is soft, dank, slimy, outside the circulation of the waters”; “If I am still for more than a moment I begin to sink, inch by inch” (156). 11 [The past tense/“preterite”] is the ideal instrument for every construction of a world; it is the unreal time of cosmogonies, myths, History and Novels. It presupposes a world which is constructed, elaborated, selfsufficient, reduced to significant lines. . . . Behind the preterite there always lurks a demiurge, a God or a reciter. The world is not unexplained since it is told like a story. . . . The narrative past is therefore a part of a security system for Belle-Lettres. Being the image of an order, it is one of those numerous formal pacts made between the writer and society for the justification of the former and the serenity of the latter. (Barthes 30–32) Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user 452 NOVEL NOVEMBER 2018 What is this “dirt” that is also the sea floor and the “masses” of the dead? Let us note the obvious: Foe’s “house of words” in 1–3 shares with Robinson Crusoe—that founding text of modern economic man (economicus, from oOkoB: home, dwelling)— a fixation on those physical, economic, ideological, and religious structures erected against the individualist’s uttermost fear: of being subsumed and disintegrated. The pervasive dread of cannibalism in Defoe’s tale is only the most overt version of the terror that haunts his story at every turn. And while this fear emerges in Crusoe’s dread at being swallowed alive by the earthquake or consumed by wild beasts, it reaches its apex in his encounters with the devouring sea and the figure of the cannibal: his deepest fear is of depth itself, of total submersion. And the mouth—or more specifically, the mouth of the other—is the fundamental Crusovian figure for the terror of this dissolution within the indifferentiated “dark.”12 Against such an ending Crusoe rings himself with walls and accumulates to excess. In fact, Crusoe’s dream, which is only realizable on an island of the type he luckily lands upon, is total self-enclosure. The borders, supplies, wealth, weapons, fortifications, and contracts with which he girds himself also find their correlative in his journal—which circumscribes his life-story with the retrospective finality and clarity of a tale told after-the-fact. Barthes’s phrase applies nowhere better than to the Crusovian narrative itself: it is the text that is its namesake’s most enduring psychic, spiritual, and corporeal “security system” against the abjection (slavery, consumption by cannibals, drowning, damnation) that seizes those around him. Susan too is haunted by the dread of dissolution; above all else she fears becoming—like her Friday or her Susan Jr.—a mere character in another’s story, a spectral being, “without substance” (131). So it is fitting that the liminal spaces that haunt the Foe text and reassert themselves in its ending—Friday’s mat under Cruso’s eaves, his corner beneath the ship’s transoms, the cellar in Foe’s home, the curtained-off alcove in Foe’s “refuge”—are all places of literal marginalization and impermanence. As is the bedchamber where Cruso himself subsides into the final indifferentiation whose primary figure in this text, as in Defoe’s, is the sea: “Your husband is sinking” (Foe 42). And while in part 4 we see where Cruso goes— “the mud”—by part 3’s end Susan’s substantial world has all but evaporated, invaded by the world of ghosts. This is no longer the consciousness of the realist subject but one plagued by an “extreme fragility of [her] boundaries,” specifically the “boundaries between self and other” and even the boundary between the real and the spectral (Kristeva, “Fetishizing” 18). But whether this slide into a ghostly half-world occurs through the dissolution of boundaries or through the ego’s radical fortification of same, the outcome is similar: both self and world begin to dissolve. To borrow from Kristeva again: “An ego, wounded to the point of annulment, barricaded and untouchable, cowers somewhere, nowhere, at no other place than the one that cannot be found. Where objects 12 Jacques Derrida describes what we may term Crusoe’s obsessional fear of “sinking alive to the bottom” this way: “That is the great phantasm, the fundamental phantasm or the phantasm of the fundamental: he can think only of being eaten and drunk by the other, he thinks of it as a threat but with such compulsion that one wonders if the threat is not also nurtured like a promise, and therefore a desire” (77). Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user BOLIN THRESHOLDS OF THE NOVEL 453 are concerned he delegates phantoms, ghosts. . . . But no current flows—it is a pure and simple splitting, an abyss without any possible means of conveyance between its two edges. No subject, no object: petrification on one side, falsehood on the other.” Letting current flow into such a “fortified castle” amounts to causing desire to rise (Kristeva, Powers 47). When we speak of “Susan” we are already moving at the level of form. Not unlike Kristeva’s “borderline subject”—the one locked within what she dubs a psychic “fortified castle” (isn’t this is the word Crusoe uses for his home on the island? But isn’t it also the name Kafka’s burrow creature uses for the center of his labyrinth?)—the Foe text’s borders become permeable, disintegrating like Susan’s crumbling manuscript in part 4. Yet this can occur only at a cost: that of entering into and surpassing the dread that dogs the form itself. Foe’s ending thus poses a (unanswerable) challenge to the novelistic subject: What would it mean to surrender the world of individual desire, of language, of totalizing vision that places me at the center of the narrative that I call the “real”? What would it really mean to be truly submerged in—to confront “head on,” as Coetzee put it in regard to the ending—the fundamental dark within the mouth of the other? For Barton and those like her—I here deploy Derek Attridge’s shorthand for Coetzee’s readership, those who, by and large, inhabit “the ruling culture”: “us” (13)—this question might be more simply phrased: what does it mean to be to be a corpse? Thresholds of the Human This question troubles our urge to read Foe’s end as anticipatory of a utopic future, not only because it indicates that we cannot be “present” at such a scene but in the way it reveals how such a hope reads Friday as a future version of ourselves. Yet the text is nowhere clearer than where it stresses that Friday is not and will never be an individual: Susan cannot teach him the word house: the pleasures of self-definition and egotistic accumulation remain foreign to him (145). His home is the annihilation of such a world. Just as important, if the ending stages the forceful eclipse of the novelistic individual, it tests the limits of those critiques of novelistic realism that draw on the language of alterity and, in particular, the centrality of the ethical discourse that underpins current readings of Coetzee’s fiction and major accounts of contemporary literature more generally. Here I wish only to touch on how Foe requires us to recognize the extremity, and the violence, of the Levinasian summons in particular. Conversely, the novel’s end can also be seen to challenge the limits of the presiding Levinasian figure for alterity itself: the face. The correlation between the encounter in the “home of Friday” and the Levinasian model for infinite alterity is tempting: “The face-to-face remains an ultimate situation” in Levinas’s thought, and the identification between Levinas’s imagery and the face-off that ends with Friday’s “current” washing the world’s shores might seem almost too neat (Totality 81). Isn’t this seemingly infinite force Coetzee’s (most direct) metafictional staging of Levinas’s claim that “the idea of Infinity is transcendence itself, the overflowing of an adequate idea”? (80). For, as Levinas reminds us, “It is not the insufficiency of the eye that prevents totalization, but the Infinity of Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user 454 NOVEL NOVEMBER 2018 the Other” (Totality 80). The problem with such a reading becomes clearer when we realize that Friday’s dark “current” cannot be positioned as a figure for Levinas’s model for infinity without reading against the model itself: if vision is denigrated as the figure of totalitarian thinking in Levinas, it is of course the “infinity” of language that prevails.13 “This is not a place of words” (Foe 157): Friday’s dwelling is explicitly conditioned by a negative more radical than that which presides over Levinas’s text. In Foe, language and vision are inextricably linked—to “totality”—in a manner that the Levinas of the 1960s (the Levinas of Totality and Infinity) will not permit. Yet the extreme contours of the negation that Foe invokes begin to flicker into view when they are transposed over a later Levinas (Otherwise than Being). When this occurs, Foe’s ending sounds the severest reaches of the philosopher’s vocabulary; it requires those terms invariably neglected (proscribed?) in our ethical readings of Coetzee and fiction more broadly: the language of the total “hostage,” the “sacrifice,” and the endless “purge” of the subject: the demand for an interminable selfextinction that is the origin of my singularity.14 Are these not the terms that speak to the condition of one who ends within the hold of the other, without speech or sight, overwhelmed—who is “blacked out” within the decaying remnants of individualism’s somnambulistic mastery of the illuminated “surface”? Such thoughts spur another move: reading “philosophy” through “literature,” a rapprochement with Levinas that questions the limits of his text. Foe would have us enter “a place where bodies are their own signs” (157). Yet it seems more than possible that, rather than dramatizing a call to ethical responsibility, the novel here presents an encounter with that which signals the limitation of the Levinasian figure of the face before that which is a non-face—a visage that can neither hail nor be hailed in a manner we can recognize. Is the face of our “host” in the home of Friday, in other words, really a “face” in Levinas’s sense at all: that of the “neighbor,” one who is “not necessarily my kin but who can be” (Levinas, “Ethics and Politics” 294)?15 Is this even the face of a “man,” or is it rather an encounter with “the moving threshold in which man [passes] into non-man” (Agamben 47)? “In the last corner, 13 As John Wild puts it simply, “totalitarian thinking accepts vision rather than language as its model” (15). 14 If this is so, Foe, in its essential formal doubleness (1–3/4) would recall the incommensurability of the Levinasian subject with itself. “The I, which we have seen arise in enjoyment as a separated being having apart, in itself, the center around which its existence gravitates, is confirmed in its singularity by purging itself of this gravitation, purges itself interminably, and is confirmed precisely in this incessant effort to purge itself” (Levinas, Totality 244–45). 15 We speak of Friday, so one may dare to recall Levinas’s own reservations in Difficult Freedom regarding those who are not fully admissible to this category, even to the fully human. And if one cannot grant his reservations here a philosophical weight (they seem “personal”), one cannot simply discount, either, the relevance of the apparent ethnocultural coordinates of Levinas’s comments to Defoe’s and Coetzee’s respective representatives of the cultural and racial other— that is, the other who (as Coetzee points out in White Writing) is consistently considered childlike, insufficiently human, and “underdeveloped” within the discourse of the “dominant” European culture (see “Idleness in South Africa,” White Writing 12–35). What Levinas terms the Afro-Asian “mass” would thus join Defoe’s (Asian) Friday, Coetzee’s (African) revision, with the compound world of the “dirty” sea we discover in Foe’s part 4: it is this mass that is the occasion for a certain anxiety on the part of the philosopher: “[T]he arrival on the historical scene of those Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user BOLIN THRESHOLDS OF THE NOVEL 455 under the transoms, half buried in sand, his knees drawn up, his hands between his thighs, I come to Friday. . . . He turns and turns till he lies at full length, his face to my face. The skin is tight across his bones, his lips are drawn back. I pass a fingernail across his teeth, trying to find a way in” (Foe 157). The final encounter recalls the series of uncanny confrontations with the “grin” of the flesh receding from the novel’s faces in death (so that we see the skeletons behind the faces of Barton and Foe: “They lie side by side in bed, not touching. The skin, dry as paper, is stretched tight over their bones. Their lips have receded, uncovering their teeth, so that they seem to be smiling. Their eyes are closed” [153]). Stranger still: Friday’s approach into our field of vision is governed by the same logic we find in the narrator’s confrontations with part 4’s “guardians”—experiences that unfold a perceived shift in the object from the human to the inhuman through a repeated “turning” and that terminate in a lack of recognition. As when, for example, the narrator cannot find the face of the doll/girl/cripple on the threshold: “her head lolls” (153); or when this doll’s undersea doppelgänger (“the body of a guardian wrapped in rotting fabric, turn after turn”) becomes an amorphous mass: a “dead shark” “overgrown with pulpy flowers of the sea” (156). These dissolving, inhuman remains are the waypoints the narrator must pass as he creeps toward the corpseFriday—who “turns and turns” before revealing his own (skeletal) face, which disappears within the “dark” current (154). Let us state the case all too plainly: part 4’s imagery is that of crawling through dust/mud/decay, past/under cadavers and ruins, sinking into “slime,” and lying down with an undead, half-buried, skeletal body—and insistently, forcefully, seeking to and then actually penetrating it. And if this reading rings with at least a modicum of truth, to describe this face and our encounter with it—which, to say the least, does not occasion the Levinasian “After you!”—as an ethical interpellation by the other is to invite Slavoj Žizek’s critique of the Levinasian text on our own reading: “[T]he temptation to be resisted here is the ethical ‘gentrification’ of the neighbour, the reduction of the radically ambiguous monstrosity of the NeighborThing into an Other as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates” (Ži zek 163). Rather than the face of the other, this Friday seems to present a surreal postcolonial revision of the Muselmann: the skeletal being whom Primo Levi termed faceless and who can no longer project the Levinasian “Here I am!” because he is “the complete witness” (and for that very reason is not able to bear witness) (Agamben 47). The loss of Friday’s tongue is not simply a “loss of voice,” even in the metaphoric sense that he has “lost his story.” It occasions a paradoxically fascinated “abhorrence” (Susan’s word; Foe 119) at a violence so extreme that the gesture of neighborly identification can no longer be made—not least because such a response would itself be obscene.16 Behind part 4’s final “face” (which is like nothing more than that of an inhumanly emaciated slave, discovered half-buried in the grave of underdeveloped Afro-Asiatic masses who are strangers to the Sacred History that forms the heart of the Judaic-Christian world” (Levinas, Difficult Freedom 160). 16 Consider such a “pathetic” attempt at the typical gesture of identification with the “exemplary victim” as imagined by Žizek: “We are all Muselmänner!” (161). Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user 456 NOVEL NOVEMBER 2018 his captivity) lurks the real “truth” (of monstrosity, of abjection) that the philosophical text arguably elides with the figure of the face itself. In other words, the “inhuman” mutilation that makes the other truly other—that thing Susan shudders to think lurks behind Friday’s face “like a worm cut in half contorting itself in death throes” (119). Is the confrontation with this “inhuman” alterity a call to responsibility, or is it a challenge to the limits of our notion of responsibility itself—even that of an “infinite” responsibility?17 Thresholds of the Novel Despite such darkness, the urge to discover a redemptive power in Foe’s ending remains. But if this is so, we should note that this urge is also inscribed in the text itself—at the level of its narration. Attridge has noticed the repeated words in part 4 that recall passages in The Tempest, “with their memorable blending of loss and salvation,” along with the Book of Common Prayer’s version of Psalm 45 (“which also concerns fears of shipwreck and the hope of safety” [66]). But if we can make out such “allusions” straining through the text—for they are there: ghostly ciphers in what Attridge identifies as the novel’s complex game with the canon—we must also ask: what is the force of these specters? In a novel that repeatedly dramatizes how the “substantial” and the “official version of the story”—in short, the canon—becomes ghostly, the logic of Attridge’s argument must be extended: are not these echoes the projection of the speaker’s desire, the narrator-reader who is also the closest thing to “us” in the novel? If so, just as the narrator grabbles among the disintegrating bulwarks of the sunken ship, he gropes for the “security system” of belles lettres, for a literary version of what Benedict Anderson calls “unisonance”—the evocation of an imagined community (here, the community of the canon and, more specifically, that created by the Novel’s readers) wherein fundamentally “nothing connects us all but imagined sound” (145). If it does little else, Foe puts us on our guard against the strains of a providential theme that has fully demonstrated its compromise through its reliance on darkness, silence, and abjection. We do not rise from this shipwreck. No wonder, then, that the notes of salvation that play about us here are at odds with the speaker’s experience as he descends into a world that starkly disappoints any hope for light, resurrection, and language. Even as part 4’s observing “I” lifts the useless candle borne round his neck “like a talisman,” the text reveals this impulse as what it appears to be: a form of nostalgia—from nóstoB, the return homeward, the topos of the hero’s homecoming by sea. But if this is not “our” home, part 4 is not the sea across which we might voyage toward it; and it seems necessary to Foe’s meaning that we confront “head-on” (in the submerging darkness that issues from the submerged other) its refusal of that providential meaning emergent for the reader beyond the threshold of the Novel’s “random,” calendric time—a vision we 17 One recalls here Derrida’s circling of Levinas’s discomforted response concerning this question (of the limits of an infinite responsibility, when confronted with the inhuman other)—a question to which Levinas responded with another question: “Would you say that the snake has a face?” (qtd. in Derrida 317 [“Ninth Session”]). Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user BOLIN THRESHOLDS OF THE NOVEL 457 might perceive in the same way we glimpse a pattern in stars beheld in constellation. “Susan Barton and her dead captain, fat as pigs in their white nightclothes, their limbs extending stiffly from their trunks, their hands, puckered from long immersion, held out in blessing, float like stars against the low roof” (Foe 157). But in Foe such a pattern-perceiving reader herself becomes a “star” (a dead thing), and one that, while pointedly white, is without illumination: a drifting sign displaced from its system of meaning. Its limbs are held out in “blessing”; but this is only the bloat of a corpse or its rigor mortis—in either case, a “dead gesture.” Or is it? One is forced to repeat the narrator’s unanswered question: What is this place? Our reading has led to the strange conclusion that this is one of those rare sites in a novel where we are no longer in the Novel, an experience not unfamiliar to readers of late Dostoevsky or Tolstoy: writers who fascinate Coetzee for the way they elide novelistic skepticism with the resolutions available to parable and wisdom tale. That is, two narrative types that are fundamentally ahistorical (they do not take place in specific places or times), often cyclical in pattern (for instance, as in the Parable of the Prodigal, to which Crusoe refers), and historically premodern, pre-individual. But to approach Foe’s undersea ending we must look to strategies more modern than those of parable; part 4 is, literally, too sur-real in its technique. And this term should be understood in its historical-theoretical sense, a move that might allow us to consider Coetzee’s book within the context of the kinds of postwar theory and experimental fiction on which it draws. If, as I have argued, Foe’s two-part structure gradually injects the unreal into its familiar world (parts 1–3) before finally dissolving the barrier (part 4), it retools a mechanism engineered by Beckett for his own two-part novel (Molloy) and the divided stage of his Eleutheria—works whose demolition of the “reality” of the bourgeois home (Moran’s house; Victor’s parent’s living room) in turn derive from at least two other French exemplars: Roger Vitrac’s bifurcated stage in Victor, ou les enfants au pouvoir and the seeping of “le changement” into Bouville in La Nausée. In the light of this antinovelistic, antibourgeois, and antirealist tradition, Foe’s “bringing together of two remote realities” for the ultimate disintegration of the ideologically “familiar”—that which is simply taken for granted as “real”—reaches its culmination in the drifting, dead whiteness of Susan’s nightdress in Foe’s black hold (Reverdy; my translation). The sheer uncanniness of this image can now be approached: it drives what is perhaps Coetzee’s most pointed fictional attempt to “lift the prohibition resulting from the overpowering repetition of those objects which meet our gaze daily and persuade us to reject as illusion everything that might exist beyond them” (Breton 85)—the object in question being the “substantial,” “wide-awake,” and vital nature of the individualist subject herself and the prohibition being that of the Novel’s “law” (the form’s “image of an order” and the pact it cements between the writer and society “for the justification of the former and the serenity of the latter” [Barthes 32]). Such an attempt also paradoxically indicates the Novel’s captivating power. The genre is valued for its capacity to engage with countervoices and to summon alterity. But if realism’s dark others only reveal the Novel’s meditation on the writing self (and therefore the self written by novelistic writing), Foe’s “lesson” requires a deeply felt recognition of the limits of those discourses that have conditioned and generated individual desire—and have thereby largely made us what we are. Foe, in other Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user 458 NOVEL NOVEMBER 2018 words, might bestow on us the unsettling intimation that our capacity for encountering the other may be limited especially by and within the Novel. This is why its mirror of a mirror in part 4—its dream within a dream—must pointedly refuse those narrative resolutions (utopic, ethical, historical, metaphysical) we desire from its final “blackout.” Instead, it gambles everything on the remote and unreal possibility that, to quote Octavio Paz, “we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed” (212). * * * j. s. bolin’s first book is Beckett and the Modern Novel (2013); his first novel is Three Pioneers (2017). He has recently published articles in the Review of English Studies, Modernism/modernity, and Studies in the Novel. He is senior lecturer in English at University of Exeter. Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone, 1999. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. New York: Verso, 2006. Armstrong, Nancy. How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900. New York: Columbia UP, 2006. Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse. The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Attwell, David. J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994. Bataille, Georges. Theory of Religion. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone, 1992. Beckett, Samuel. “The Essential and the Incidental.” Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. London: Calder, 2001. 82–83. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. Blanchot, Maurice. The Gaze of Orpheus. Trans. Lydia Davis. New York: Station Hill, 1981. Breton, André. “Surrealism and Painting.” Trans. Patrick Waldberg. Surrealism. By Waldberg. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997. 81–87. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user BOLIN THRESHOLDS OF THE NOVEL 459 Coetzee, J. M. Foe. London: Penguin, 1986. ———. Foe manuscript. Uncatalogued holding. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ———. Foe notebook. Uncatalogued holding. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ———. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. London: Yale UP, 1988. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Ed. Michael Shinagel. New York: Norton, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign. Vol. 2. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. “Forbid, v.” Oxford English Dictionary < http://www.oed.com > (accessed Jan. 2018). Gibson, Andrew. Postmodernity, Ethics, and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas. London: Routledge, 1999. Gass, William. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. New York: Harper and Row, 1968. Groom, Nick. The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Hayes, Patrick. “‘An Author I Have Not Read’: Coetzee’s Foe, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and the Problem of the Novel.” Review of English Studies 57.230 (2006): 273–90. Head, Dominic. J. M. Coetzee. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. Holquist, Michael. Dostoevsky and the Novel. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1986. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Kristeva, Julia. “Fetishizing the Abject.” Trans. Jeanine Herman. More and Less. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Cambridge: MIT P, 1993. 15–34. ———. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Levinas, Emmanuel. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. Seán Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. ———. “Ethics and Politics.” The Levinas Reader. Ed. Seán Hand. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. 289–97. ———. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998. ———. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. London: Nijhoff, 1979. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user 460 NOVEL NOVEMBER 2018 ———. “The Trace of the Other.” Deconstruction in Context. Ed. Mark C. Taylor. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 345–59. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Peter H. Nidditch. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969. Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: Merlin, 1971. Melville, Herman. “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” Literary World 7 (1850): 125–47. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. Trans. Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, and Rachel Phillips Belash. New York: Grove, 1985. Pechey, Graham. “The Post-Apartheid Sublime: Rediscovering the Extraordinary.” Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995. Ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 57–74. Poyner, Jane. J. M. Coetzee and the Paradox of Postcolonial Authorship. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. “Proscribe, v.” Oxford English Dictionary < http://www.oed.com > (accessed Jan. 2018). Pynchon, Thomas. Slow Learner. New York: Little, Brown, 1984. Reverdy, Pierre. “L’Image.” Nord-Sud 2.13 (1918): n. pag. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe/ Roxana.” English in Africa 17.2 (1990): 1–23. Tournier, Michel. Vendredi, ou les limbes du pacifique. Paris: Gallimard, 1967. Watt, Ian. Myths of Modern Individualism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. ———. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. London: Hogarth, 1987. Weller, Shane. Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Wild, John. Introduction. Levinas, Totality. 11–20. Wright, Laura. Writing “Out of All the Camps”: J. M. Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement. New York: Routledge, 2006. Ži zek, Slavoj. “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. 134–90. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/3/438/549484/438bolin.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF EXETER user

Log In

Novel: a Forum on Fiction: 'Thresholds of the Novel: Realism, the Inhuman, the Ethical – J.M. Coetzee’s Foe'