FACTORES DE RIESGO

Michael K is in a similar position to that of the barbarian girl’s. He lives in a hostile world, ravaged by a war in which he does not want to participate, and he spends most of his days searching for a place where he could separate himself from the ongoing hostilities. After a long and strenuous search, interrupted by the death of his mother, Anna K, Michael finally settles on a deserted estate, the Visagie farm, where he sets up his own garden. Unwilling to inhabit the household, he decides to occupy a nearby dugout. Despite initial difficulties, he manages to cultivate barren soil and grow a few vegetables. He hopes it will allow him to survive without suffering hunger. He seems comfortable in the solitude of the farm;

when he dedicates himself to physical work, it does not matter that he is harelipped and orphaned, and his mental deficiencies become irrelevant. He feels safe living outside society, and nearly everything else that communal life entails, including custom, politics and interpersonal relations. In a way, he epitomizes the ideal of a “noble savage,”

introduced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), a Swiss Enlightenment philosopher and a political thinker, who propagated a return to “the state of nature,”⁵⁶ deeming it as the

56 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, ed. and trans. by Maurice Cranston (1755; London:

only remedy against the West’s corruption of morals. Accordingly, Michael K visualizes himself as a natural creature, a mole or an earthworm, to which the detachment of the farm is the most suitable habitat.

Following Rousseau, Coetzee presents Western institutions as burdensome to Michael K. As in Waiting for the Barbarians, the oppression comes from the prescriptions of law and order, state administration, institutions of public service, police, and army. Another source of K’s misery are the emanations of Western reason; they involve politics, linear conception of time, conceptual language, and the emphasis on being active. K seeks the farm because its solitude offers a relief from them; he is not constrained by obligations to the state, he can live along the circle of seasons and there is no need of verbal language.

However, while K is “not clever with words,”⁵⁷ he is still “full [of stories], but the words would not come.”⁵⁸ Admittedly, K prefers to stay silent not because he has nothing to say but rather because the language within which he functions lacks proper means to convey his meanings without trivializing them. David Attwell, a University of York scholar, argues that K finds language oppressive, therefore, he refrains from it.⁵⁹

Similarly to the barbarian girl, K suffers from being forced into predetermined categories which he does not fit into and which put him in a position of inferiority.

Because of the classifications demarcated by Western reason, he is perceived through his mental handicap, and consequently he is treated as a simpleton, if not entirely as a fool.

One of the main charges against him is his unwillingness to participate in the political life of his country. Almost all the people he encounters convince him to take a stand on the ongoing war and engage in actions deemed meaningful within the Western frame of reference. Depending on the context, he is persuaded to work or to learn; the guerrilla

Penguin Classics, 1984), 78.

57 John Maxwell Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K (1983; London: Vintage Books, 2004), 48.

58 Ibid.

59 David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 1993), 88-99.

fighters he meets in the mountains ask him to pick up guns and fight. During the meeting on a beach, when he is introduced to a group of prostitutes, he is encouraged to indulge in hedonistic pleasures, including alcohol and physical love. At all times, however, K feels discomforted. The cause of the discomfort is the precept of Western reason to classify people basing on what they do. K’s behavior does not comply with the classifications, hence he feels oppressed whenever he is pressed to assign himself to any of them. The persuasion means violence to K because it forces him into categories that infringe upon his sense of freedom and right to self-constitution.

The symbol of the classifications imposed on K are the disciplinary institutions he is forced into. In his young age, K is sent to a special school for “afflicted and unfortunate children”⁶⁰; then he works as as gardener, and later as a night attendant at public lavatories.

After the breakout of the civil war, he is detained in police custody; he is sent to the Jakkalsdrif labor camp, but he soon escapes it, and when he is captured again, he is assigned to the Kenilworth internment camp. Accordingly, education, hospitals, army, and other instruments of state control could be interpreted as materialistic representations of the limitations generated by Western reason. They are inflections of reason’s dictate of utilitarian logic, systemic order, and paradigm of depersonalized discipline. Coetzee criticizes reason by exposing the oppressiveness of its regulations.

It is noteworthy that Coetzee’s critique of reason draws upon the Foucauldian criticism of socialization through subordination to state institutions.⁶¹ The novelist evokes a link between reason’s orderliness and apartheid’s preoccupation with segregation. The setting of Life and Times of Michael K refers to the 1980s riots in South Africa provoked by the repressions introduced by the Afrikaner Nationalist Party to reinforce apartheid.

The novel can thus be read as a story of an escape from the abuses of reason materialized

60 Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, 4.

61 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 128.

in the form of apartheid. Accordingly, by connoting apartheid with the Western emphasis on classification, Coetzee exposes the oppressiveness of instrumentalist rationalism and, to use the Lyotardian terminology, the associated hostility of analytical reason to paralogical modes of thinking. According to Anton Leist (b. 1947), a University of Zurich scholar, in The Life and Times... “[t]here are, in essence, two worlds coming into view: our everyday world of separation and time, words and power, and instrumental ends and means, and an alternative world, however vague, of amalgamation and presence, bodies and trance, self-forgetfulness and nondirected joy.”⁶² Similarly to Coetzee's other characters, in particular the barbarian girl and Elizabeth Costello, Michael K flees the rationalistic world of “ends and means,” while embodying the paralogical world of “amalgamation and presence.”

K suffers misrepresentation also by real-life people. Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014), a Nobel laureate in literature and an acclaimed literary critic, in her 1984 review of Life and Times of Michael K, “The Idea of Gardening,” argued that the titular protagonist is Coetzee’s artistic mistake due to his idleness and ignorance of the history happening around him. Although she finds Coetzee’s novel “a marvelous work that leaves nothing unsaid […] about what human beings do to other human beings,”⁶³ she still refers to Michael K as a failed character “who denies the energy of the will to resist violence.”⁶⁴ In this way, Gordimer disregards that the essence of Michael K’s passivity is resistance to the Western emphasis on activity. As already argued, K avoids Western categorizations because he finds them limiting; therefore, when Gordimer criticizes him for inactivity, little minding his otherness, she unwittingly confirms his misgivings about Western modes of thinking. It could be claimed that Gordimer’s attitude is oppressive because it relegates K to a non-negotiable subordination to the order that he refuses to comply with.

62 Anton Leist, “Against Society, Against History, Against Reason,” in J. M. Coetzee and Ethics:

Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, ed. Anton Leist and Peter Singer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 217-218.

63 Nadine Gordimer, “The Idea of Gardening,” New York Review of Books (February 2, 1984): 5, accessed April 22, 2016, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1984/02/02/the-idea-of-gardening/.

64 Ibid., 4.

By condemning K for his passivity, Gordimer evinces the type of violence that Köhler was guilty of, that is, the difficulty to approach otherness without subduing it to the predetermined categories of Western reason. A similar attitude is evinced by the medical officer of the Kenilworth camp in which Michael K is hospitalized. By referring to him as clown, “a wooden man,”⁶⁵ or a museum exhibit, the medical officer subjects K to the Western system of culturally significant classifications. And although he eventually sympathizes with Michael, his view of K along the camp nomenclature can still be compared with Gordimer’s criticism of K's lack of political engagement.⁶⁶

Gordimer’s criticism of K’s insolence has a substantial colonial reference. As can be inferred from Jodocus. H. Hondius's 1652 study, A Clear Description of the Cape of Good Hope, in order to justify their conquest of South Africa, the ancestors of today Afrikaners presented themselves as better users of the land than its native inhabitants, whom they frequently perceived as “dumb cattle […] handicapped in their speech, clucking like turkey-cocks […] who sleep in the savannah, men together with women. […] A number of them will sleep together in the veld, making no difference between men and women. […]

They all stink fiercely, as can be noticed at a distance of more than twelve feet against the wind, and they also give the appearance of never having washed.”⁶⁷ There are similar references to the laziness of natives authored by other incoming European colonizers. In Raven-Hart’s collection of the descriptions of the first fifty years of the Cape Colony, there are a plenty of disparaging references to the aborigines’ indolence; they are often compared to animals, some of the explorers question their intelligence. There are also testimonies describing the natives’ tolerance of physical discomfort, negligence of hygiene and basic dietary needs.⁶⁸ In their 1785 report, A Voyage to The Cape of Good Hope...

65 Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, 149.

66 Cf. Heister, “The Sympathetic Imagination in the Novels of J. M. Coetzee,” 112.

67 Jodocus. H. Hondius, A Clear Description of the Cape of Good Hope, trans. L. C. van Oordt (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Festival Book Exhibition Committee, 1952), 26-28.

68 Rowland Raven-Hart, Cape Good Hope 1652 – 1702: The First Fifty Years of Dutch Colonisation as Seen by the Callers (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1971), 1:22; 2:269, 432.

1772 – 1776, Anders Sparrman and Georg Forster describe natives as useless and unfamiliar with organized work. They are presented as helpless and self-destructive in their prolonged laziness.⁶⁹ In 1801, Christian F. Damberger describes Hottentots as

“perhaps the laziest nation upon earth. [However] the women are very industrious in household affairs.”⁷⁰ Accordingly, colonialism in South Africa was justified with a condemnation of the native’s indolence, resulting from the Western praise for activity, protestant work ethics and the Enlightenment drive for development and expansion. In White Writing (1988), Coetzee deems such imperatives as the origin of the West’s propensity to combative conquest, epitomized throughout colonialism. Michael K evades the propensity by avoiding the power play of the anti-apartheid resistance. If he fought, as Gordimer would urge, he would follow the militant solutions used by the regime, thus indirectly supporting its hostile politics. Accordingly, when Michael K says that he is not

“in the war,”⁷¹ not only does he avoid warfare, but he predominantly absents himself from the discourse of war. K’s idleness is in this respect not mere laziness; it rather means dissent from the oppressiveness of Western reason.

A symptom of the dissent is K’s attachment to the quietness of the farm. Taking care only of the garden, he realizes Rousseau’s ideal of coming back to nature, and at the same time he avoids the capitalistic imperative of mass production. He cares only about his own subsistence. When he does not cultivate his garden, he sleeps most of the time, he barely moves, and he is little concerned with the outside world. He retreats to a burrow dug next to the farmhouse to avoid interference from the surroundings, and also to protect himself from anyone who could force him to speak and talk about himself. K prefers silence

69 Anders Sparrman, A Voyage to The Cape of Good Hope... 1772 – 1776, ed. V. S. Forbes, trans. rev. J and I. Rudner (1785; Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1975), 209,

https://archive.org/stream/voyagetocapeofgo00spar#page/n5/mode/2up.

70 Christian F. Damberger, Travels in the Interior of Africa from the Cape Good Hope to Morocco, from the Years 1781 to 1797.… (London: T.N. Longman and O. Rees, 1801), 57-58,

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951002325015q;view=1up;seq=85.

71 Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, 138.