Summary:
A civil war rages inexorably in J. M. Coetzee’s
novel, Life & Times of Michael K.
Details of the war are vague, but the fighting will determine whether “minorities
will have a say in their destinies” (Coetzee 157). Riots splinter communities,
peoples are displaced, the military patrols and slaughters, and prison camps
are erected. The novel’s first half introduces an unlikely protagonist at the
center of the bloody tumult: Michael K, a municipal gardener—a gentle “simpleton”
with a harelip “curled like a snail’s foot”—who cares for his ailing mother in
Cape Town (3). Sick and unable to work, K’s mother resolves to return to her
birthplace and girlhood home, Prince Albert, a far-flung cluster of homesteads
in the Karoo, where she hopes to convalesce peacefully. Their migration
permits, however, never arrive, likely lost in the abyss of State bureaucracy.
Gathering his mother and their few possessions in a makeshift wheelbarrow, K
attempts the arduous journey anyway but the passage is thwarted by a government
checkpoint. As his mother’s condition deteriorates, she is hospitalized and
dies, her body cremated before K gives hospital officials consent.
The novel’s lulling elliptical cycle pushes K
along the currents of departure and circumvention, to capture and escape.
Pressing on to Prince Albert where he will deliver his mother’s remains, K is
arrested and incarcerated in a railcar where he and other prisoners remove
landslide rubble from a remote part of the rail line. Released after finishing
the labor, K arrives to Prince Albert where he settles on the property of the
ramshackle homestead and begins contentedly scavenging. Far from the tremors of
war, he hunts birds, nibbles roots and bulbs, turns over rocks for grubs, drinks
from streams, and, in a fit of wild hunger, drowns and slaughters a wild goat. All
the while he finds a package of pumpkin and melon seeds that for the rest of
his time on the property he will sedulously plant and water— “[t]his was the
beginning of his life as a cultivator” (59). Immersed in this blanched world,
at the center of its arid winds and mineral expanses, K devotedly coaxes his
mean crop to life. But the war encroaches on K’s hiding place and he absconds
to a mountain cave where he hides, and nearly starves.
The stillness, silence, and sunlight of the
Karoo seep into K’s bones: “If I were cut, he thought, holding his wrists out,
looking at his wrists, the blood would no longer gush from me but seep, and
after a little seeping dry and heal. I am becoming smaller and harder and drier
every day” (67). Imperceptibly, K becomes the ephemeral ‘stuff’ of this harsh
land: “He thought of himself not as something heavy that left tracks behind it,
but if anything as a speck upon the surface on an earth too deeply asleep to
notice the scratch of ant-feet, the rasp of butterfly teeth, the tumbling of
dust” (97). K is shortly captured by the military and forced into a
resettlement camp. Through the elliptical current of the novel, he escapes and returns
to the Prince Albert homestead, where he finds his crop trampled. He nourishes
the vines back to life and, in a moment of lonely exaltation, grills pumpkin
flesh: “All that remains is to be a tender of the soil. […] He chewed with
tears of joy in his eyes” (113). What K seeks, or what is seeking him, is a life
of solitude, remote from peril and unrest, living in quiet reciprocity with the
earth, exercising simple cultivation—a skill conspicuously anachronistic (but
universally essential) in an age marked by the depravities of war.
Wringing nourishment from veld-grown pumpkins,
however, leaves K famished, and winds and squalls gut his makeshift shanty. Soon
K is picked up, again, by a military patrol (he is suspected of abetting rebels
camping in the mountains) that consigns him to a government hospital. The
novel’s latter half is narrated by the hospital’s medical officer, a caring man
who, doubtful of the war’s objectives, takes special interest in K’s recovery.
By now, severely malnourished, K resembles “someone out of Dachau” (146). The
medical officer is baffled by K, not for his uncooperative responses nor
refusal to eat hospital food, but because of his status as a kind of ahistorical
oddity in a time of modern warfare: “a human soul above and beneath
classification, a soul blessedly untouched by doctrine, untouched by history, a
soul stirring its wings within that stiff sarcophagus […] a creature left over
from an earlier age, like a coelacanth or the last man to speak Yaqui” (151).
The medical officer realizes K’s condition lies beyond simple diagnosis; rather,
K’s body craves “a different kind of food, food that no camp could supply”
(163). Sometime in the night, K vanishes from the hospital with his packet of
pumpkin seeds, moving toward another remote patch of earth to cultivate.
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