Narrative as Anti-Spectacle: Reading J. M. Coetzee’s Foe

The present paper aims to study John Maxwell Coetzee’s novel Foe in the light of Pramod K. Nayar’s concept of “anti-spectacle.” Nayar employs the term anti-spectacle to refer to those segments of reality that are systematically and silently omitted from the content of the mainstream media representations due to the gap they create or the rupture they cause in the dominant official spectacle-making currents. In Foe, which is a rewriting of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Coetzee changes the narrative point of view and employs a circular multifaceted narration to intermingle the Robinson myth, which is the product of narrative spectacle-making, with anti-spectacles that are themselves the offspring of imperial and colonial discourses as well as of the ethics of Protestantism. He re-narrates the protagonist-oriented myth of Robinson from the perspective of European woman and non-European man, as two subaltern groups, to demonstrate the links between Daniel Defoe’s novel and the colonial discourse of the eighteenth-century Europe as well as the interrelatedness of European patriarchy and imperialism. The results show that, in his Foe, Coetzee deconstructs the conventions of Realism and realistic novel in an attempt to emphasize the inability of the colonial language in representing the experience of the other as well as to demonstrate the capacity of the postmodernist novel as a site for anti-spectacle.