Coetzee’s Foe and Borges: An Intertextual Reading

Abstract

Foe (1986) is one of the most ambiguous and controversial novels written by J.M. Coetzee, and has been discussed extensively by criticism from a great variety of theoretical positions. This essay purports to contribute another intertextual reading of the novel, trying to elucidate some of its dark points, particularly section IV, which has been so much debated and for whose ambiguity no wholly satisfactory explanation has so far been produced. Our main contention is that, in addition to Borges’s narratives “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (in Fictions, 1944) and “Borges and I” (in The Maker, 1960), Coetzee’s novel can benefit from a parallel reading of other Borgesian tales, particularly “Brodie’s Report” (1970) and “The Writing of the God” (1949), among others. Borges’s gnosticism is clearly followed by Coetzee, who has explicitly acknowledged his interest in the ethical and esthetic motivations that lie in some of Borges’s most mysterious stories.