Michael K resumes his journey to the farm half-heartedly. Being on his own, he discovers himself in new ways. One aspect of his new self is his capacity for sleep:
With nothing to do, he slept more and more. He discovered that he could sleep anywhere, at any time, in any position: on the sidewalk at noon, with people stepping over his body; standing against a wall, with the suitcase between his legs. Sleep settled inside his head like a benign fog; for he had no will to resist it. He did not dream of anyone or anything. (34)
88 The goodwill displayed here will be explored on a greater scale in Coetzee to date latest novel The Childhoood of Jesus (2013).
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Sleep becomes ubiquitous, a “benign fog.” In my discussion of Waiting for the Barbarians I had suggested that sleep might open avenues to the subconscious levels of the Magistrate, reflecting his inner journey. This does not seem to be the case with Michael K. Throughout the narrative there are hardly any signs of deeper layers of consciousness, no markers of internal struggles. The self-reflection of the protagonist shared with the reader is anchored mainly in the experience of his physical being. And his physical body proves to be strong and persevering, even under dire conditions: “He carried the suitcase on a stick over his shoulder. He had not eaten for two days; however, there seemed no limit to his endurance.” (35) On his way through the countryside – after choosing to avoid the roads – he feeds like an animal from a trough he comes across, from which he scoops “crushed mealies and bonemeal,” coming to the premature conclusion: “At last I am living off the land.” (46). He climbs a hill and rests, thinking:
I could live here forever, he thought, or till I die. Nothing would happen, every day would be the same as the day before, there would be nothing to say. The anxiety that belonged to the time on the road began to leave him. Sometimes, as he walked, he did not know whether he was awake or asleep. […] he wondered whether there were not forgotten corners and angles and corridors between the fences, land that belonged to no one yet. Perhaps if one flew high enough, he thought, one would be able to see. (46-47)
Again the reader is reminded of Michael K’s sense of time as a permanently present moment, an eternal now with a fleeting consciousness oscillating between wakefulness and sleep. This state also characterizes the way in which he remembers past incidents, such as getting a lift by a farmer, of whom he remembers only minute fragments: “His memories all seemed to be of parts, not of wholes.” (49)89 He finally arrives at Prince Albert: “K sat down on the stoep with his back to the mesh and closed his eyes against the sun. Now I am here, he thought. Finally.” (50) Added to the immediacy of his experience of time as an ever-present now, his sense of space becomes an ever-present here.
Having reached the abandoned farmhouse of the Visagies (who might or might not be the people his mother referred to), he thinks: “Now I am here, he thought. Or at least I am somewhere. He went to sleep.” (52) In his first night on the farm, his sleep brings him dreams of the children’s home where he grew up, Huis Norenius. The dream transports him back in time and space, disrupting his present time and space. This dream and other recollections of his traumatizing childhood are the only psychological introspections granted to the reader. At
89 This is one of several occasions where the contrast between narrated events and Michael K’s experience of them becomes apparent. The encounter is narrated together with some dialogue, but without any descriptive details. After this, one sentence moves the narrative on to his hiding place at night, immediately followed by his recollection of the encounter: “Remembering the farmer afterwards, he could recall only the gabardine hat and the stubby fingers that beckoned him. On each joint of each finger was a little feather of bronze hair.” (49)
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other times, sleep remains simply a drifting away of consciousness: “His eyelids grew heavy. I am falling, he thought.” (56)90
After the return of the young Visagie, who is on the run, and the danger of being imposed on by the returned owner of the farm, Michael K elopes to the nearby mountains and finds a cave. There he sits or lies in stupor at the mouth of the cave, too tired to move or perhaps too lackadaisical. He sleeps through whole afternoons, wondering if he is living in what was known as bliss. (68) The episode in the cave raises Michael K’s sleepfulness to the level of meditation: “Now, in front of his cave, he sometimes locked his fingers behind his head, closed his eyes, and emptied his mind, wanting nothing, looking forward to nothing.” (69)
Later Michael K is taken to a detainment camp, where something like a friendship develops with a man named Robert, who comments: “‘I have never seen anyone as asleep as you,’ Robert said. ‘Yes,’ replied K, struck that Robert too had seen it.” (84) It is one of the rare moments when we get a sense of empathy building up between two characters. It remains for us, as readers, to inhabit the perspective of Michael K and develop our empathy for him through the use of our sympathetic imagination while sharing his experiences, narrated to us in the third person, which allows the necessary distance to avoid identification but yet feel close to him. Another scene in the camp illustrates how children treating his body indifferently signal a particular form of acceptance:
He lay so still that the smaller children, having first kept their distance, next tried to rouse him, and, when he would not be roused, incorporated his body into their game. They clambered over him and fell upon him as if he were part of the earth. Still hiding his face, he rolled over and found that he could doze even with little bodies riding on his back. He found unexpected pleasure in these games. It felt to him that he was drawing health from the children’s touch […] (84)
Imagine the reader as one of these children, at first keeping a distance, then urged to rouse him, and finally incorporating his body into the game of reading. Michael K’s light sleep allows him to accept this proximity, a mode of acceptance on the physical level that strongly contrasts with the repeated mentioning of the attention his harelip receives. The pleasure experienced by him and the feeling of drawing health from it are both signs of a functional mode of acceptance, both on the side of the children and the reader, as well as on the side of Michael K himself.
90 The sense of falling in connection with sleep will return more prominently in The Master of Petersburg, where it is linked to Dostoevsky’s epileptic fits.
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Killing Animals and Planting Pumpkins
As Michael K leaves the city of Cape Town behind and enters the countryside, the veld, he is faced with having to provide himself with food. At first he attempts an Hobbesian approach of killing animals for sustenance: “In the fading light he was lucky enough to bring down a turtle-dove with a stone as it came to roost in a thorntree. He twisted its neck, cleaned it, roasted it on a skewer of wire, and ate it with the last can of beans.” (46)91 Michael K crosses the threshold between urban living and nature, entering the animal kingdom and leaving his urban self behind. The matter-of-factness of the killing shows two things: 1) His aptitude 2) His non-empathetic relation to animals. Ato Quayson comments on Michael K’s adaptation to animal nature, relating it to his silence and to his sleep:
On the one hand, he performs all the predatory instincts of a carnivore without any sentimentality. Yet on the other, the silence and frailty of his person allows others to interpret him as bearing a resemblance to the lives of animals and therefore of carrying an excess of religious connotations. Like animals, insects, and birds, he is not of the human world. Thus the various points at which he is described as being asleep are supposed to mark his otherness from the world and proximity to that of animals. And yet this association with animals also means he is subhuman; the fog of stupidity that he refers to at least twice over the course of the novel references his animalhood yet registers his recoil from that ontological state. (Quayson 2007: 171)
The turtle dove remains a minor incident in the narrative. The bird receives almost no attention and is devoured within the second sentence. At the farm Michael K makes an experience which makes a strong impression on him, and possibly also on the reader. He chases the goats roaming the farm, finally managing to catch one in the water at the dam. Unlike the dove, which was brought down by a lucky throw with a stone and had its neck twisted in the next moment, the goat puts up a hard struggle, described in all the details of an embodied one-on-one fight:
K hurled the whole weight of his body upon it. I must be hard, the thought came to him, I must press through to the end, I must not relent. He could feel the goat’s hindquarters heaving beneath him; it bleated again and again in terror; its body jerked in spasms. K straddled it, clenched his hands around its neck, and bore down upon with all his strength, pressing the head under the surface of the water and into the thick ooze below. The hindquarters thrashed, but his knees were gripping the body like a vice. There was a moment when the kicking began to weaken and he almost let up. But the impulse passed. Long after the last snort and tremor he continued to press the goat’s head under the mud. Only when the cold of the water had begun to numb his limbs did he rise and drag himself out. (53-54)
Michael K’s act of killing is shown as a hard struggle, in its lack of premeditation seemingly savage, but certainly recognizable as agony on the side of the ewe, a struggle Elizabeth Costello would have appreciated as bringing across the terror of death in an animal, showing
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its “electric being” in its final struggle. Michael K returns to the farmhouse without the dead ewe, wet, cold, and exhausted. The next day he returns to the dam and retrieves the dead body, only to sense that what had driven him the previous day (hunger?) was now leaving him at the sight of the dead body and the distorted mien of the goat:
The urgency of the hunger that had possessed him yesterday was gone. […] He found it hard to believe that he had spent a day chasing after them like a madman with a knife. He had a vision of himself riding the ewe to death under the mud by the light of the moon, and shuddered. He would have liked to bury the ewe somewhere and forget the episode; or else, best of all, to slap the creature on its haunch and see it scramble to its feet and trot off. (55)
The “vision of himself” marks a minor shift of perspective; it is one of the seldom moments where Michael K gains a reflective perspective on himself that is not rooted in his past, but instead provides a nocturnal vision of madness, an act of the imagination. The wish to revive the dead body summons the frogs of Dulgannon and their resurrection after months of hiding in the caked mud of a dry river, as Elizabeth Costello points out to the jury in “At the Gate.” (EC 216f.)
Notwithstanding his feelings of guilt or disgust, Michael K cleans the animal, removes guts and organs, and fries a haunch over an open fire. Afterwards he feels a little sick, thinking he might have caught a cold, and goes to fetch water at the dam. He takes a moment to sit down:
Sitting in the bare veld with his head between his knees he allowed himself to imagine lying in a clean bed between crisp white sheets. He coughed, and gave a little hoot like an owl, and heard the sound depart from him without the trace of an echo. Though his throat hurt, he made the sound again. It was the first time he had heard his own voice since Prince Albert. He thought: Here I can make any sound I like. (56)
The opposition of “crisp white sheets” and “a little hoot like an owl” shows his progressive return to a state of nature, where his own voice happens to sound like a bird of the night. After he recovers from his cold, he realizes that the goat will not provide him with food for long: “The goat in the pantry was stinking. The lesson, if there was a lesson, if there were lessons embedded in events, seemed to be not to kill such large animals.” (57)
He checks the perimeter of the farm and continues to sleep in the house, even though he was “not at ease there. Roaming from one empty room to another he felt as insubstantial as air. He sang to himself and heard his voice echo from wall and ceilings.” (58) Michael K finds joy in expression, before in hooting like an owl (with no echo), and now singing to himself (with an echo). He remains attached to his former way of living, but already senses that the house is not the right place for him. Later in the narrative he will build a burrow for himself and enjoy the reunion with earth (similar to the Friday in Michel Tournier’s rewriting of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique, 1968).
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Michael K buries the ashes of his mother in the soil of the farm, and Coetzee lets the reader know, in the aggrandizing tone of an epic: “This was the beginning of his life as a cultivator.” (59) Followed closely by: “I am a gardener, he thought, because that is my nature.” (59) While waiting for the pumpkins he plants to grow, Michael K lives on a diet of birds, which he kills with a catapult. (59) We read about a man attempting to live on his own terms, without interference by others, “in a pocket outside time.” (60) We see Michael K direct his attention to the earth and the pumpkins he nourishes as if they were his children.