Social mind as author(ity) in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe

Abstract

Using Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), we examine J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) to explain how the conceptual metaphor “ARGUMENT IS WAR” is central to the novel’s thematics and to the fictional “staging” of debates concerning authorial emplotment through the workings of the “social mind”-here the prospective readership. We focus on the inter-character discourse staged during the civilized confrontation between Susan Barton (the character attempting to be an author) and Daniel Foe (the author) in an attempt to have their intended stories told. Thus the socially aware minds of both parties involved greatly contribute to the formation of the well-known plot of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). As a result of this argumentative path (ARGUMENT IS WAR), Susan and her framing narrative lose ground to the impositions by Foe and the exigencies of the social mind. A reading of the novel in terms of social mind with a focus on CMT reveals the cognitive complexity of the functioning of the social mind as a controlling medium in Foe. © 2020, Indiana University. All rights reserved.