American and British Studies Annual (Dec 2009)
Arguing for that Unheard. In Search of Friday in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe
Abstract
The paper follows a famous question of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – i.e., ‘Can the Subaltern Speak? – and attempts to find an answer to it by a careful scrutiny of the John Maxwell Coetzee’s Foe which address the issue of writing the subaltern back into history – the subject to the hegemony of the Empire being Friday, the character created by Daniel Defoe in his acclaimed novel Robinson Crusoe. The emancipatory drive of postcolonial discourse, the drive to re-empower the disenfranchised, has resulted in the undertaking of the number of projects which aim at giving voice to the subaltern who had been written out of the record by conventional accounts. With the collapse of the Empire, the subaltern announced the arrival of new literature characterized by the rejection of colonial system of knowledge, imperialism’s signifying system and even the language of the invaders. The paper discusses the politics of resistance based on the deliberate denial to give voice to the subaltern, as exemplified by John Maxwell Coetzee’s Foe. A careful analysis of the novel shows the whole enterprise of giving voice to the native as unachievable and totally objectionable and argues in favour of the subaltern’s silence being perceived in terms of triumph and victory over the dialectics of power.
