Sloth and Moral Integrity: Life & Times of Michael K

Abstract

Try to be free: you will die of hunger. Society tolerates you only if you are successively servile and despotic; it is a prison without guards - but from which you do not escape without dying.1COETZEE BEGINS HIS ESSAY INTO THE DARK CHAMBER with reflections on prisons and their particular characteristics when applied to South Africa: response of South African legislators to what disturbs their white electorate is usually to order it out of sight:If people are starving, let them starve far away in bush, where their thin bodies will not be a reproach. If they have no work, if they migrate to cities, let there be roadblocks, let there be laws against vagrancy, begging, and squatting, and let offenders be locked away so that no one has to hear or see them. If black townships are in flames, let cameras be banned from them. (At which great white electorate heaves a sigh of relief: how much more bearable newscasts have become!) Is apartheid about segregation of blacks or segregation of poor? Perhaps not an important question, when blacks and poor are so nearly same. Certainly there are many lands where prisons are used as dumping-places for people who smell wrong and look unsightly and do not have decency to hide themselves away.2He concludes: South Africa law sees to it as far as it can that not only such people but also prisons in which they are held become invisible. In Life & Times ofMichael K, Coetzee sees to it that invisible is made visible. The novel, published three years before Dark Chamber, received Coetzee's first Booker Prize. It is a novel that depicts life of a victim of such social conditions, in form of protagonist's journey from Cape Town to Prince Albert. After his mother's death in Stellenbosch, Michael K is left alone and endeavours to find a spot where he can do what he likes most - gardening. The repressive segregational system seeks to keep him under control, so that K is twice locked up in a labour camp (from which he escapes both times). The narrative is structured in three parts. The first (and longest) is a third-person account of K's life, from birth until his second consignment to a labour camp. The second part is a first-person narrative that represents diary of medical officer who treats K in camp hospital. The final section returns to third-person approach and recounts Michael K's return to Cape Town, to his mother's old room.As so often happens with Coetzee's fiction, mainly because of seemingly vague references to a particular time and place, Life & Times of Michael K has been read as an allegory, or as in an unknown future, thus constituting an imaginary extension of present social and historical conditions. For Attridge, noveloccurs in a setting that is outside actual history (though in this case not outside actual geography) [...]. South Africa in an imaginary future (since 1994 we have had to read it as a future that fortunately did not happen) is therefore understood as an extension of South Africa at time of writing, that is, early 1980 s.3Renders opines that the story is in an imaginary future,4 Rosemary Jolly sees novel as set in apocalyptic time.5 Bozena Kucala observes that while place names and landscape descriptions identify setting as unmistakably South African, politico-historical circumstances remain disturbingly obscure. Acknowledging influence of political context on protagonist's life, Bozena Kucala nonetheless considers that it cannot be directly related to any specific events in twentieth-century South-African history.6Kucala's and others' view of impossibility of relating novel to South African context is rather debatable. While it is true that an actual civil war like one alluded to in novel did not take place in South-African history, there have been many cases of civil unrest and riots (such as attack on Sea Point flats of Cape Town, described at beginning of book), most notable of which occurred in 1976 and 1980. …