FOE (1987)
QUOTES:
“In Foe, Friday is an African, already dehumanised by Defoe. To give speech to Friday would be to colonise him and deny him what remains of his integrity” (Per Wästberg).
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Foe is one more of Coetzee’s stories which embraces various themes. The retelling of Daniel Defoe’s story by the writer Daniel Foe unfolds a very interesting themes of power and subjectivity, language, post-colonialism that still bears the power relations of the colonizer/ oppressor and colonized/ oppressed. This is a story of voice and identity which can be taken and also “given” to the oppressed. First of all, Daniel Defoe’s story of Robinson Crusoe is being retold with a new character, Susan Barton. Secondly, Susan’s adventure story is told by Foe, who alters what she perceives important, and makes it a different-fictional story. Hence, since it is the narrator who usually preserves the voice and the authority over the story, with the change of the narrator the authority and the voice are lost. Thus, taking over the story determines taking over the voice. However, what is more interesting is that Susan Barton, who loses her voice in her own story telling, is attempting to give voice to Friday, who is also voiceless due to the loss of his tongue.
However, the importance of voice/ language, identity, and power/ruler, that seems to be the central theme of the novel, reminded me of Jacques Lacan’s Symbolic Order, which is ruled by the rule of father (the power holder/oppressor) and sign system operation (language). According to Lacan language gives identity, and it is in the Symbolic Order when language assigns “I,” before which there is no sense of self. Thus, the unified self positioned by object relations before the Symbolic Order is an illusion. So, it is the over determination of drives, desire for self, the unconscious, and the Symbolic Order of our culture, social language that identifies us and lends/gives us identity. Hence, the language, as well as culture, race, class, and gender make human beings subjects, and there is never a full autonomous identity. The identity is given from outside-exactly as portrayed in Coetzee’s Foe.
~KY
Works Cited
Lacan, Jacques . “The Mirror Stage as Formative Function of the I.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan 2nd ed. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Print. 441-446.
Elucidating Coetzee's World and Works 
From Rolando R.,
Very good work on Coetzee’s Foe and Lacan in regards to identity. I have to be honest- my experience with Lacan as plentiful as I would like it to be, but I know enough to gather and discuss in regards to Foe. When you mention Lacan’s understanding of identity construction, language is a very important factor, and makes so much sense to apply to Foe. When I observe how Lacan places language as a determining role for identity, Friday comes to mind- is language what his holding him back from having his identity constructed or is it possible that Friday, very much like colonized people, has his own ways of coming into language and education and the diplomatic thing to do is to let him come into his own way of learning without us interfering? I struggle with this question since I have sympathize with the colonized but do not know how or even if I can come into the role of the “educator”. Does trying to educate Friday make Susan the “colonizer”? I don’t really know. How cathartic.