“Uma questão de despertar vozes contrárias”: ficção, história e autoria em Foe de J. M. Coetzee

This essay argues that the historical imagination of J. M. Coetzee’s novel, Foe (1987), reaches beyond the notion of historical metafiction. It shows that the nexus between the literary and the historical rests upon the fiction of a past future, situated before the publication of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (1724). It is the fiction of an open, undetermined future within the past that allows the novel to contradict the narratives that were eventually fixed by Defoe. Based upon reflections about the theory of history, I suggest that the struggle over authorship and the novel’s’ narrative presupposes the difference between historical experience and literary representation. Besides evoking and objecting to models and codes that shaped literary communication in the eighteenth century, Foe reflects about the limits of representation and the incommensurability of history.