“Who will Dive into the Wreck?”: (R)enunciation of the Otherized Voice inJ. M. Coetzee’s Foe

While the indelible imprints of race and color mark Coetzee as the undeniable oppressor, his personal convictions firmly place him alongside the oppressed. His writing thus carries the cross of white conscience that will constantly haunt the ethical project of representing and thereby giving voice to those whose presence has been effaced from the pages of history. This project is inevitably laden with complications, for herein it is through the white man’s pen that the black man’s lost voice is to be recuperated. Against the backdrop of such a complication, I aim to construe the ways by which Coetzee realizes in Foe a place of ethical communication-in-representation between the white writer and the black other. Drawing on the common valency of Spivak’s conceptualization of darstellung and Coetzee’s positioning of the middle voice, I claim that the metafictional structure of the narrative which plays on a diegetic self-reflection enables an autocritique of a white author who writes in the literary legacy of Daniel Defoe. This paper responds to Susan’s question “who will dive into the wreck?” in order to retrieve the story Friday’s lost tongue withholds, seeking an alternative locus of the differend as a productive place between renunciating and enunciating the silenced voice. By renunciating the privileged position of the self as practicer of vertertung, we may open up grounds for listening to the enunciation of the other’s own (silenced) voice.