ABSTRACT

Discussing J.M. Coetzee’s novel Foe (1986) in the context of the psychological landscapes of Holocaust postmemory implicitly compares colonialism with genocide. While Foe, set in the 1720s, would seem at fi rst glance far from the Nazi killing fi elds, it in fact offers a series of meditations on the imperial project, including the means of subjugation, the impossibility of conveying trauma, the precarious nature of witnessing, and the interrelations between human and animal central to Coetzee’s approach to the Holocaust specifi cally, and genocide generally. These meditations move through four major intertexts that work in subtle ways to illuminate the novel: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), the Paul de Man scandal, the story of Philomena and Procne from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and fi nally the many colonial narratives referred to through Coetzee’s turn to a fi ctional text, Travels in Abyssinia. Exploring these four intertexts highlights Foe’s implicit claims for a universal complicity in the suppression of witnessing.