The Postcolonial Studies
The postcolonial studies
Paper no : 203
∆ Personal Information:
Name : Maya Batiya
Roll no : 18
Enrollment no :5108230003
Course : M.A.sem-3
Paper no :203
Paper code :22408
Paper name : The postcolonial studies
Topic :"Reimagining Voice and Power: Analyzing Authority, Identity, and Narrative in J.M. Coetzee's Foe"
Submitted : Smt.S.B.Gardi, Department of English MKBU.
Email: mayajbatiya2003@gmail.com
Q. "Reimagining Voice and Power: Analyzing Authority, Identity, and Narrative in J.M. Coetzee's Foe"
Ans :
∆∆ Introduction :
∆ About J. M. Coetzee :
J.M. Coetzee (born February 9, 1940, Cape Town, South Africa) is a South African novelist, critic, and translator noted for his novels about the effects of colonization. In 2003 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Coetzee was educated at the University of Cape Town (B.A., 1960; M.A., 1963) and the University of Texas (Ph.D., 1969). An opponent of apartheid, he nevertheless returned to live in South Africa, where he taught English at the University of Cape Town, translated works from the Dutch, and wrote literary criticism. He also held visiting professorships at a number of universities.
∆ Foe
J. M Coetzee’s Foe is considered as the intertext of Robinson Crusoe, the eighteenth century classic text by the master craftsman Daniel Defoe. In Foe the Crusoe story is just an episode in the narrative of Susan Barton, a woman castaway who shares the island experience along with Cruso and his man servant Friday. Foe raises the question of identity and subjectivity in a postcolonial entity. Foe exemplifies all the narrative and stylistic features of Coetzean creativity. From his eponymous status in the patriarchal narrative, Cruso just gets reduced into a character in a section of Susan’s story. Foe challenges the institution of patriarchy and colonialism from the text’s overtly postcolonial and feminist positions and also offers a textual revision of the entire ideological world of Defoean fictional realm.
Foe as an intertext of Robinson Crusoe problematizes the issue of women in all its diverse forms. But the finale of the novel suggests a “maze of doubting” (Foe 135) where the world of the feminine and the feminist conflate with the world of the postcolonial whose voices have been appropriated and manipulated by the same power structures albeit various ways. The contention here is that Foe celebrates the Other, the half colonized Other and the genuine Other and when their submerged voices emerge from the wreck or the abyss where the two discourses conflate in a rare but pertinent manner, it is the colonialist or the patriarch who takes a back stage, losing their dominant discourses among the uncertain infinity of ‘O’mega. If Friday is the figure of postcolonial resistance, Susan Barton undoubtedly offers the feminist saga of the text.Her mode of resistance is more conspicuous than that of her postcolonial counterpart. The subtle resistance and the challenge of Friday sometimes submerge the violent upheaval of Susan’sdiscourse. Feminist concern is underplayed and sometimes used in complicity with the colonial design to thwart the cause of postcolonial silence in Foe. The problematization of the postcolonial is shouldered by the feminist and the feminist discourse loses its cutting edge on the way.
2. Narrative Authority and Control of the Story
J.M. Coetzee's Foe (1986) returns to the premise of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe contained in the story of one man's heroic ability to master himself and his environment in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Coetzee challenges Defoe's portrayal of spatial adaptation and identity transformation from a postmodern and postcolonial perspective by exploring the role of the storyteller or narrator in order to reveal the power of the author to silence, exclude and omit certain events and people on the basis of gender, class and race. In light of this context, the central question this chapter will aim to address is concerned with how narratological strategies in particular intertextuality, allegory and irony - dissolve textual boundaries. Related to this question, this chapter will also examine how and to what extent Coetzee's novel confirms generic transformations of the 20th century castaway novel. With regard to Foe, textual boundaries refer to the margins that separate history from fiction, author from character, author from reader and thereby also fiction from reality. The aim of this chapter in relation to my central thesis is to situate Foe as an exemplar of generic transformation of the castaway novel as Coetzee continually challenges the authorial function in order to examine the nature of textual boundaries, particularly with regard to there relationship between narrator and author. Coetzee's use of intertextuality, allegory and irony examines and completely re-writes imperialist constructions of identity and spatiality to show how they not only define Robinson Crusoe, but also the castaway genre as a whole.
3. Voice and Silencing: The Character of Friday
The silence of Friday plays a significant role in the novel, carrying profound implications and aiding in guiding our exploration of the core issues that follow. Friday’s silence is more than just a passive acceptance of conquest; it is a form of resistance. He chooses to remain silent, refusing to employ the language and frameworks of the colonizers to express himself, thus preserving his identity and agency. This silence reflects the power imbalance experienced by the colonized under colonial rule and how they maintain their dignity and independence when excluded from power structures. Friday’s silence represents not only an individual’s choice but also symbolizes the collective resistance of oppressed groups in resisting external pressures and influences. Therefore, delving into the silence of Friday is crucial for understanding the power dynamics, identity, and voice expression within the novel.
4. The Power Dynamics Between Susan Barton and Mr. Foe
This study identifies a research gap in the analysis of Susan’s discourse over Friday. While substantial research has been conducted on various aspects of “Foe”, there remains a relatively underexplored area in the examination of the specific power dynamics between Susan and Friday from a post-colonial perspective. This study aims to fill this gap by conducting a more in-depth examination of their relationship within the context of post-colonialism. The significance of this study lies in its contribution to the broader understanding of how post-colonial literature operates, how it challenges established power structures, and how it amplifies the voices of the marginalized. Through the analysis of Barton’s ambivalent attitude towards Friday, this thesis aims to explore Susan’s expressions and Friday’s silence from the perspective of post-colonialism in Foe.
5. Coetzee’s Use of Meta-Narrative
The meta-narrative text The Master of Petersburg, a novel by Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, which has the figure of the author at the centre of its narrative structure. In his fictions, Coetzee is not shy of dislodging what Roland Barthes calls ‘reality effect’ in order to critically assert the role of the authorial figure; this is also to be seen in the novel Slow Man where Coetzee ruptures the realist texture of the narrative by introducing the figure of Elizabeth Costello who enters the text, as well as the life of Paul Rayment an amputee, as the author figure who is responsible for her creation i.e. Paul Rayment himself. At the same time Coetzee in order to explore the issues of writing at its ethical dimension, transforms some realist tropes at his disposal. For instance, in Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee with a brilliant manoeuvre plays on the trope of epistolary novels and presents the novel in a form of a series of lectures delivered by Elizabeth Costello, an Australian author of international fame. But in a brilliant ironical move, Coetzee through the performance of the authorial voice breaks the realist structure of the Novel. The paper will, however, primarily focus on the novel The Master of Petersburg (1994), which is a meta-narrative in which Coetzee actively interrogates the ethics of writing as in this novel he places the fictively re-imagined figure of Dostoevsky in Petersburg in late 1868, after the murder of his step-son Pavel. In this novel like his earlier novel Foe(1986), Coetzee examines the process of artistic creation and ethics involved in the event of writing, as Coetzee in his novel evokes a mix of historical factors and fictive characteristics which inspired and featured in Dostoevsky’s novel The Devils. Through a close examination of the interstitial spaces between the two novels, this paper explores the figure of the author and its performance in postmodern fiction. The author as the figure has caused much debate in the postmodern fiction and narrative theory. Post Roland Barthes’s declaration ‘author is dead’ many deconstructionist and narrative theories have debated the relevance of author figure in fiction, and the meta-narrative and self-referential nature of postmodern literature make these debates even more potent. This paper seeks to explore the debate concerning the author figure from Bakhtin, Barthes, Bennet and Foucault and try to understand the implications which the author figure has in a postmodern text through a close examination of Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg.
∆ Conclusion :
With the assistance of Beauvoir’s existential feminism, this thesis attempts to explore Susan’s de-marginalization in novel Foe through analyzing the crescendo of Susan’s voice and Susan’s quest for authorship.
By examining the crescendo of Susan’s voice, the study finds that Susan’s voice changes from silence to cry-out illustrating her transformation from holding back to having the courage to face patriarchy, which means Susan transcends femininity constructed by patriarchy society and voices for her true self. Besides, the process of Susan’s quest for authorship shows Susan’s transformation from “the Other” to “the Self”.
Susan’s gradual loud voice from silence to cry-out and the process of Susan’s quest for authorship illustrate that the process of her de-marginalization in patriarchal society is successful because of the awakening of her feminine consciousness and her transformation from “the Other” to “the Self” during the process. In addition, this paper can provide a new perspective on women’s de-marginalization in literature.
References :
Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. (2024c, October 12). J.M. Coetzee. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/J-M-Coetzee
"Foe." Scribd, accessed November 19, 2024. https://www.scribd.com/document/451095419/Foe.
Wannan wand . (n.d.). "Title of the Paper." Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP). Retrieved November 19, 2024, from https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=127689.
"Metafiction." Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, accessed November 19, 2024. https://rupkatha.com/tag/metafiction/.
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