As I had raised in my previous entry, the Terdiman reading had struck me as rather applicable to Coetzee's Foe. After hearing more about object-referent in the spiel on Roland Barthes yesterday, I had more thoughts on this.
I think that Diderot's novel La Religieuse is a very appropriate text for comparison with Foe. La Religieuse is written in the second half of the 18th century; DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe was also written in the 18th century, 1719, to be exact, and has often been hailed as the first novel in English.
The situation of both these texts in the 18th century is significant. As Terdiman remarks, "Enlightenment thinking in the second half of the eighteenth century... (was concerned with) what a fiction is and what it does." (20)
"The period's concern with narrative arose because its culture confronted thinkers and writers with some new and unsettling story patterns--patterns that simultaneously put the making of fictions on the agenda and raised troubling questions about their meaning and their use." (20)
What I questioned in the previous blog entry seems to be answered in Terdiman: "In particular the performative implications and potentialities of a fictional text are distinct from those of a text whose referent is intended and accepted as real." (37) That means that fiction and autobiographical fiction, such as Robinson Crusoe, is different, where the referent is real.
However, in such fiction, where the referent is real, the making of fiction is problemtised. As we discussed in yesterday's class, in the verbal arts the sign/referent binary is more fluid, with room for interpretation and sharply distinct from the sign/referent binary in photography. But in La Religieuse and Robinson Crusoe both of these are mixed:
"The novel brings the sign/referent antimony that many today have claimed severs these two entities from each other into an experimental situation in which their divorce can't happen. The letters are fake; Croismare is real. They shouldn't meet up anywhere. But they do." (33)
Terdiman also sums up beautifully, what is happening in these two texts, which is what Coetzee questions and brings to light in Foe:
"But what happens when real people are treated like characters in a fiction?...That the world of texts and the world of reality are separable seems clear enough. But texts can make them intersect. Then something like an ontological category mistake arises--and because of it, an unsettling ethical and practical conundrum." (33)
Indeed, that is why Susan Barton, in all her real, living corporeality, is suspended in limbo because of DeFoe's treatment, albeit proscratinated, of her in fiction:
"More is at stake in the history you write, I will admit, for it must not only tell the truth about us but please its readers too. Will you not bear it in mind, however, that my life is drearily suspended till your writing is done?" (63)
posted by sarah @ 10:16 AM
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