Abstract
Lois Wolfe
Desperately Seeking Susan: Presence and Absence in Coetzee's Foe
J. M. Coetzee's Foe launches its story from the shore of Daniel Defoe's classic adventure chronicle of a castaway on a model desert island. Coetzee centers the narrative on an adjunct female castaway named Susan Barton and creates a bleak, wind-whipped I-land and a metafictional journey for the reader on the art and absence of human utterance. The paper analyzes the hybrid mode of modernism and postmodernism in Foe and establishes that the novel dynamically contextualizes the modernist desire to see what is hidden, the postmodern drive to marquee the marks of representation, and the postcolonial mission to engage the ethics of power. The locus of this theoretical hybridity is the meticulous layering of narrative self-consciousness manifested by Susan Barton as Foe 's protagonist, narrator, and metanarrator. The paper suggests that the novel aesthetically unifies an ontological presence and absence through Susan. Presence and absence are understood as the mimetic space of ontological simultaneity in which seeing/not seeing, being /not being, are privileged values, or affect, in the text. Mimesis in literary representation is understood not as a flat, Aristotelian mirror of nature but as synchronic, emotive understanding of human experience in the embodied mind, as Storey, Lakoff, Johnson, Turner, Langer and others have suggested. The paper examines three major moments of simultaneity of presence and absence in Foe , relayed through the narrative body of Susan. One involves her inability to see the mutilated stump of Friday's tongue though she has the capacity to see his sexual mutilation when he dances. The second involves her capacity to “see” the reader, speak to us, when the putative audience of her diary chronicle, Foe, is present in the moment, and active. The third involves the conflation of Susan as meta-narrator (seeing all) and meta-character (seeing nothing) in the fragmented, surreal dream sequence which ends the novel. Use of ambivalence, a condition of intense, constrained struggle between opposing desires, emerges as a key indicator of ethical presence in narrative content.
The paper suggests that Coetzee manifests a cognitive aesthetic that enacts hybridity as generative chain of aesthetic and ethical energy linking modernism, postmodernism and postcolonialism. In brief, Coetzee's novel forms a theoretical demonstration of the “clause of non-closure” posed by Derrida. In the “Afterword” interview in Limited Inc ., Derrida explains that the frame of a context has a limit and it “always entails a clause of nonclosure. The outside penetrates and determines the inside” (152). He has called his big concept – deconstruction – the effort toward “an incessant movement of recontextualization” (136). This characterization of deconstruction is generative, iterative and connective. It supports the search for ethical presence in postmodernism with more cognitive realism and intratextual connectedness than more popular applications of deconstruction which depend on analytic strategies of division: divide hierarchical oppositions in a disembodied/closed text and ethically insert the marginal in fractional space. That tendency to power play with text, a postcolonial sensitivity might suggest, coerces with good intent but with unreal, imperceptible, ultimately non-ethical effect. Coetzee's approach incessantly recontextualizes loci and foci of inside/outside. In doing so, he mimics the ontological presence in cognitive processes and accepts the “clause of nonclosure” which admits ethical determination of text.