Grace, the Body, and the Aesthetic in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe

This essay revisits J. M. Coetzee’s representation of Friday’s body in his 1986 novel Foe in the context of his long-standing interest in the idea of grace. Through a reading of Friday’s dancing in Foe, I argue that Coetzee’s representation of Friday consistently invokes grace as a physical and aesthetic concept, rather than the theological emphasis that has prevailed in critical discussions to date. The reading is amplified by evidence from the Coetzee Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, which points towards Coetzee’s engagement in the early 1980s with the work of German writer Heinrich von Kleist and his ‘On the Puppet Theatre’. I draw on contemporary scholarship that revisits aesthetic theory, the backdrop for Kleist’s dialogue, in the context of the transatlantic slave trade in order to understand the implications of Coetzee’s use of the figure of the puppet and the significance of grace as an aesthetic concept for his novel.