How Life and Times of Michael K (1983) represents the enduring effects of colonisation in settler society. by

brownshane — 2023-12-02 04:20:28 UTC

This is going to sound dumb, but South Africa’s apartheid seemed to create a lot of boarders and boundaries – wow, really? Yes – but what J.M Coetzee seems to elicit from having a protagonist traverse these boundaries is quite insightful and worthy of inquiry. What Life and Times of Michael K (1983/2019) seems to explore is what is on the other side of these boarders? Moreover, where is one to go when the law seems to at once exclude you as well as implicate you in its jurisdiction: ‘you can’t go home but you can’t stay here’ so to speak. What Coetzee seems to investigate isn’t necessarily concerned with racism as much as its concerned with the affective qualities and affective states of wellbeing caused by segregation and the overall consequences incurred by the displacement of native peoples from their land.

brownshane — 2023-12-02 04:22:44 UTC

As the story unfurls, Michael K becomes like dust blown recklessly across the land and as K drifts through different spaces, the lines between life and death, human and non-human begin to blur; as K’s occupation of place feels like a constant limbo – there but never here. Yet as these thresholds are crossed they bear a similarity with one another: be it the cave, his darkened room in the camp, the burrow, the closet beneath the stairs – even as K is finally caught in the hospital, he burrows so deep inside himself, the story must be told from an outsider, observer’s perspective. K clearly likes the space inside a cocoon, but what does this mean?

brownshane — 2023-12-02 04:23:05 UTC

K seeks the safety of a womb, a sanctuary. This point becomes particularly pertinent as the story is centralised on K returning his Mother and himself to the Motherland – to Mother Nature. But is this of his own doing or in reaction to the everchanging cultural climate – boarders that are constantly evacuating as they are surrounding him? Catherine Mills conjectures that ‘in Michael K a gesture of hope in which turning away from history is the condition of possibility for hope for the future.’ (Mills 2006:178) Though this (I don’t think) is entirely true for it implies K lies dormant throughout the duration of the novel. Coetzee himself has stated: ‘For the writer the deeper problem is not to allow himself to be impaled on the dilemma proposed by the state…The true challenge is: how not to play the game by the rules of the state, how to establish one’s own authority’. (Attwell & Coetzee 1992: 364) With that in mind, as K traverses throughout the text, he seems to be drawn to sites acting as spaces in between; symbolic liminal zones that are scattered throughout the text, places for K to establish his own authority.

brownshane — 2023-12-02 04:24:21 UTC

brownshane — 2023-12-02 04:24:40 UTC

What I call liminal zones Michel Foucault defines as heterotopias: ‘the place of nowhere, this heterotopia without geographical markers.’ (Foucault & Miskowiec 1986:25) In relation to the text, it becomes pertinent that these spaces are born out of crisis, as Foucault surmises these sites are ‘sacred or forbidden places reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in crisis’ (Foucault & Miskowiec 1986:24).
Heterotopias wherein K inhabits either in mind, body or soul or all three at once, might be thought of as the negative spaces implied by the boundaries, both cultural and physical, predicated entirely on the suspension of life K finds himself. In this case Mills might be onto something as she quotes Agamben’s condition of abandonment as K ‘is wholly turned over to the law and simultaneously bereft of it’ creates an opportunity for a space to live ‘on condition of the law’s suspension…the possibility for future transformation develops.’(Mills 2006: 176)

brownshane — 2023-12-02 04:24:59 UTC

Coetzee constantly flirts with these liminal zones, as K who traverses them, who knows them; who goes onto charter them, staking holes in the ground and running wires, tracing them – not necessarily fencing himself out, rather, fencing himself in.
As though he were a lost sailor being pulled between the magnetism of x and y, plotting dots on some esoteric, cosmic cartesian plane. What the fuck does this speak to?
Does K not, by the novel’s end, explicitly return to this concept no sooner than rejecting it? Forgoing the fence post and wire and opting for seeds:

brownshane — 2023-12-02 04:34:11 UTC

brownshane — 2023-12-02 04:35:41 UTC

It makes sense for K to be a gardener as the liminal zones, these heterotopias, often are in the wide open spaces of veld pertaining to the natural world which exists irrespective of humans. They act as an oasis – a sacred space as Foucault so describes – where K could live as its keeper planting his seeds. His urge then is to create ‘a sort of garden that can move across space’ (Foucault & Miskowiec 1986:26) a portable heterotopia that suggests a remedy to escape the tyranny of the apartheid, of colonisation.

brownshane — 2023-12-02 04:36:12 UTC

The audience might take K’s journey, with each stop being another dot on the cartesian (veld), as a haunted train ride. K seems to act more as a vehicle taking the audience on a journey to the liminal zones rather than being a protagonist.
Even without a heterotopic function, the repetition of gardens throughout the text is symbolically loaded to say the least. In the pastoral literary tradition, the garden is charged with Edenic imagery and connotative meaning wherein the characters seek to recreate, that is, return to the idyllic Eden, one where ‘nature was not wild, but a garden’ (Gifford 2019:34). What ensues in the pursuit of Eden then becomes the cutting down of nature in order to curate a garden space to fulfil the desires of the maker; Eden comes to represent the ‘desire or need to exploit its natural resources’ (Gifford 2019:34) an enjoyed and practised pension inherent within Christian ideology. In this way the text is quite ecocritical, and notices how the figuration of identity, particularly geopolitical and socio-cultural, signals ‘the ways in which we have conceived of ourselves and our relationship with the environment have contributed to our destructive impact on the planet’ (Marland 2013:847). This echoes what an Ecofeminist might regard as the rapacious domination of Mother Nature by the patriarchy – manifested in this case by the apartheid state. Foucault even identifies that the heterotopia is almost always sought by ‘the colonies in search of the most precious treasure they conceal in their gardens’ (Foucault & Miskowiec 1986:27).
What Coetzee wishes the audience to see (from our vessel K) is the kind of fuckery that not only emerges from the materialisation of a colonial state but also the pastoral urge to plunder an Eden out of the non-human world, and that these values seemingly begin with the figurations of identity (race) and the subsequent treatment of one another.

So what is it that K seeks? I think our observer at the hospital hones in on not ‘what’ but ‘where’ K is searching for:

brownshane — 2023-12-02 04:39:41 UTC

brownshane — 2023-12-02 04:42:15 UTC

Once more we have the conceptualised space of the ‘alluring garden’, a sanctuary albeit one outside of cartography, one which spatially operates outside of the temporal dimensions of human interference. This must be the place. This is the place K must venture in order to escape the enduring effects of colonisation; but to get there he must eat but go hungry, he must sleep during the day and wake by night, he must not live and he must not die – he must sip from that wellspring one teaspoon at a time.

Does this mean K himself is guilty of creating an Edenic garden? I don’t think so, for his conceptualised garden is not one of destruction but of reparation. Let’s end this by considering the following:

brownshane — 2023-12-02 04:44:37 UTC

References

brownshane — 2023-12-02 06:38:17 UTC

Attwell, D., & Coetzee, J.M. (1992). Doubling the point : essays and interviews. Harvard University Press.

Coetzee, J.M. (2019). Life and Times of Michael K. Text Publishing Australia.

Foucault, M., & Miskowiec, J. (1986). Of other spaces. Diacritics, 16(1), 22–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648

Gifford, T. (2019). Pastoral. Taylor & Francis Group. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/deakin/detail.action?docID=5945635

Mills, C. (2006). Life beyond law: Biopolitics, law and futurity in Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K. 176-178. Griffith Law Review. Routledge. doi: 10.1080/10383441.2006.10854570