Discuss Linda Hutcheon motto "hail to the edges" in Foe by J.M. Coetzee and The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Linda Hutcheon's "hail to the edges" motto highlights the pluralistic, ex-centric, composite nature of postmodernist fiction. Both Foe and The French Lieutenant's Woman are what Hutcheon calls historiographic metafiction.
Metafiction, of course, openly highlights the fictitious quality of its storyline. Historiographic metafiction then is an attempt at combining history with metafiction. As historiographic metafiction, both novels explore the margins of a centralized narrative. In doing so, the authors draw attention to the ex-centric, a position from where the prevailing racial, gender, or language framework can be analyzed and critiqued.
In Foe, Friday's tongue has been cut out. This means that he cannot tell his story, let alone the history of his people. His identity, ideology, and background is lost to the world because he cannot speak. Foe tells Barton that she should teach Friday how to write; Foe believes that this is the only way the world can hear Friday's voice. Meanwhile, Barton tries to communicate with Friday through sign and body language.
The experience is unsettling to Barton, however. In the final lines of the novel, Friday is given a sort of mythic, transcendent voice. In life, he was voiceless, but through Friday's surrealistic death throes, the narrator captures the marginalized, ex-centric proclamations of the disenfranchised man. Hutcheon's "hail to the edges" motto is encapsulated in this final scene with Friday, leading us to question historical records that are predicated on colonialist interpretations of the subaltern experience.
In The French Lieutenant's Woman, Fowles explores the ex-centric by drawing attention to gender and relationship issues. The narrator (in true metafiction fashion) provides us with two possible endings for the novel. There is a strong indication of Charles and Sarah reuniting in one but not in the other.
By "interfering" in the lives of his characters, the narrator questions Victorian values from the vantage point of his modern consciousness. He highlights the Victorian novelist's obsession with "clean," definitive endings, where the fate of all characters is decided by a capable narrator, and questions their relevance to the postmodern mind. In this, Fowles embodies the "hail to the edges" mindset (championed by Hutcheon) that embraces multiplicity and hybridity.
 
Sources:
1) Rethinking Borders, edited by John C. Welchman
2) A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction by Linda Hutcheon, Professor Department of English and of the Center for Comparative Literature
http://classprojects.kenyon.edu/engl/exeter/Kenyon%20Web%20Site/Richard/Fowles%20as%20Postmodernist.html