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Manuel Vrizzi Cl. VC 27/09/2007
1st CLASSTEST
1st TERM
1) From reading the title we notice they have got different aims. The architect's title has got the function of drawing the attention of the reader who sees the book for the first time, I imagine a person seeing the book and reading "The life and the strange surprising adventure of Robinson Crusoe" maybe associated with a cover representing a shipwreck: in this way the reader buys the book to know which adventures Robinson Crusoe might have experienced, just for curiosity. Instead Coetzee did something totally different, he chose a title full of ambiguities: "Foe". First of all not English people know what "Foe" means, more over it can draw the attention only of an elite of readers, those who can make hypothesis form reading a title: the intelligent reader will surely understand that there may be a possible relation with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, but the common reader would not be attracted by anything, the title has got nothing special (apparently) and it is not accompanied by an interesting book-cover. So we understand that both novelists chose the title with different intentions and for different kind of readers. We can make a lot of hypothesis on Coetzee's title but I'll finish the lesson only talking about it so I want go deeper. As far as the structure it is very different, Defoe made chapter day by day describing every single thing; Coetzee divided the novel into four chapters necessary to change the setting of the novel and narrative techniques: in the first chapter he makes Susan speak and it is a sort of dialogue with the reader in which she recounts her story (then in the end of the chapter we know that it is the same story she told the captain of the ship that saved her), in the second chapter we found the "diary", in the third dialogues between different characters and in the fourth narration. We understand the Defoe needs only diary to make the novel seem real. Coetzee wanted to say something like "This is the way of writing", he did a writing lesson with this book, he used a book that everyone know to make a psychological journey in the human's mind, and in the mean while he wants to teach how to write: he's a genius!
Defoe wrote the book to sell a lot of copies and so he did it more accessible to people (that in the eighteenth century wasn't so well-read) and his novel hadn't got a precise message (or maybe I didn't remember it), instead Coetzee wanted the readers to think about lots of things, from society to their own mind, something so important for the twentieth century that will affect the way of perceive reality and the way of writing a book.
2) In Coetzee's vision of past and present wanted to underline that nothing is actually to be seen as the past, every great author did something like stealing or re-writing some great books of the past. To read a book and steal the better ideas is not to denigrate or copy the author, it is to exalt the author by writing something diverse and maybe better than the original one.