This article argues for a radical reassessment of J.M. Coetzee's novel Foe, claiming that the novel's current critical oeuvre duplicates rather than critiques universalizing discursive practices. In particular, it suggests that the critical assumption that Friday lacks a tongue results from a too-ready recourse to the established critical templates of postcolonial (and, to a lesser extent, feminist) discourse. These templates make it difficult to entertain ideas outside of their own methodologies and assumptions. The article recognizes that Friday may well have a tongue, and offers a provisional re-reading of Friday's silence as an act of wilful restraint and defiance rather than as the straightforward result of an act of physical mutilation.

"Do We of Necessity Become Puppets in a Story?" or Narrating the World: On Speech, Silence, and Discourse in J. M. Coetzee's Foe

La tesis parte de un enfoque general de las diferentes etapas del colonialismo (desde el Renacimiento hasta la Descolonizacion), prestando especial atencion a las vertientes culturales del fenomeno. Sucesivamente se han escogido varias obras literarias que relatan una historia de naufragio, al tiempo que plantean la toma de contacto entre el la civilizacion occidental colonizadora y la cultura extraeuropea que sufre el colonialismo. A traves de textos que abarcan desde las cronicas de la Conquista, pasando por "Robinson Crusoe", "Tarzan de los monos", hasta llegar a las obras de Michel Tournier, Aime Cesaire y J.M. Coetzee, se desplega la evolucion de como las tradiciones literarias occidentales han representado la relacion entre los colonizadores y los colonizados. Se ha elegido el motivo del naufragio en tanto que esta situacion narrativa representa un virtual punto de partida para que la civilizacion europea se relacione con la del ?Otro?. El blanco que naufraga se encuentra lejos de su mundo cultural, por tanto se ha querido observar como este se relaciona con una naturaleza y una humanidad ajenas a la suya.

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Naufragios literarios: colonialismo, poscolonialismo y encuentro entre culturas

In Macherey’s words, Defoe ‘initiates – in all senses of the word, dynamic, ludic, publicising – the theme of the man on an island’. Crusoe’s island is ‘a genuine anticipation, an early form of what is not yet an actuality … the meditation on origins’.1 Walcott refers to Robinson Crusoe in a seventies poem as ‘our profane Genesis’2, both applying a local meaning to Defoe’s text (Crusoe’s island being traditionally identified with Tobago) and relating it to Biblical myth: Crusoe as the New World’s Adam. But Macherey’s privileging of Defoe’s text as origin, while it is undoubtedly appropriate in one sense, also masks a continuity, a mythic tradition of which Crusoe is the heir. The figure of Crusoe is both essentially modern – post-renaissance and post-reformation and proleptically pre-existential – and an ancient archetype, modern scion of a race of personae stretching back at least to Ulysses, whose myth was already ancient when it was incorporated into Homer’s texts.

Paula Burnett

Papers

The Ulyssean Crusoe and the Quest for Redemption in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and Derek Walcott’s Omeros