A Goatseye View of the Stone Desert 2 ¹ Life & Times of Michael K

HE DESIRE FOR TRANSCENDENCE so evident in the earlier novels gains a structural dimension in Life & Times of Michael T K, , and Age of Iron. The principal feature of these three novels is the opposition they inscribe between the realm of history and a setting that putatively transcends this realm. In Life & Times of Michael K, this setting is the insular Karoo farm, in Foe, the island, and, in Age of Iron, Mrs Curren’s dilapidated old house. By staging a forfeiture of sub- ject-centred consciousness, these utopian settings suggest the possibility of a relational mode that is wholly different from what has shaped the realm of history that they apparently transcend, and, in the process, pro- vide an image of that whose absence has enabled the colonial history of . The occurrence of these utopian settings in Coetzee’s fiction of the late-apartheid period cannot but be related to the aforementioned desire of this writer to write fiction that “rivals” rather than “supplements” the con- flictual relations out of which South Africa’s history has “erected itself.”1 While I do explore this self-reflexive dimension of Coetzee’s depiction of Michael K’s utopian existence on the farm in my reading of Life & Times of Michael K, my ultimate argument is that the purpose of this portrayal is not simply to project a relational mode that is non-existent in history, but to affect the reader in such a way that his or her reading of this novel enacts the very relationship of which s/he reads. Importantly, in Life & Times of Michael K, the farm is not initially shown as an “autonomous place”;2 it only becomes so after Michael K undergoes a Bildung of sorts. On first visiting the farm, this character

1 Coetzee, “The Novel Today,” 2–3. 2 “The Novel Today,” 3. 38 SECRETARY OF THE INVISIBLE º dominates nature, as is evident in the following description of his hunting of the goats:

Almost under his feet one slipped and slid, kicking like a fish in the mud to regain its footing. K hurled the whole weight of his body upon it. [...] He could feel the goat’s hindquarters heaving beneath him; it bleated again and again in terror; its body jerked in spasms. K strad- dled it, clenched his hands around its neck, and bore down 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 grip- ping the body like a vice.3

The emphasis in this passage falls squarely on K’s physical mastery of the goat. Quite clearly, he is here represented as being a part of the nature- dominating rational world rather than of nature itself. So, while Attwell contends that K is a “different kind of creature from the coloniser,”4 I believe that he, by virtue of cultural location rather than design, is initially a “tamer of the wild” and “Destroyer of the wilderness,”5 and therefore has something in common with Jacobus Coetzee, a fact already implicit in the seemingly innocuous detail that he was once employed as a gardener in Wynberg Park, Cape Town.6 Tellingly, too, K’s killing of the goats al- ludes to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, in which the protagonist’s possession and settlement of the island on which he has been cast away includes the domestication of the goats that he finds there. Among Coetzee’s many other allusions to Defoe’s novel, which in- clude the arrival of Visagie, the grandson of the erstwhile owners of the

3 Life & Times of Michael K (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1983): 73–74. Unless otherwise indicated, further page references are in the main text. 4 Attwell, J.M. Coetzee, 96. 5 Coetzee, , 82, 84. 6 While most readers of the novel assert such an opposition between K and colo- nizer, some do detect a change in K’s relation with the earth. Karin van Lierop, for instance, argues for a “reversed process of initiation”: i.e. for an “entry into nature rather than culture,” and for a regression from adulthood to infancy (“A Mythical Inter- pretation of J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K,” Commonwealth: Essays & Studies 9.1 [1986]: 47). Derek Wright makes a similar point (“Black Earth, White Myth: Coetzee’s Michael K,” Modern Fiction Studies 38.2 [1992]: 438–39). See also Stefan Helgesson’s contribution to this discussion (Writing in Crisis: Ethics and His- tory in Gordimer, Ndebele and Coetzee [Scottsville: U of KwaZulu–Natal P, 2004]: 208–10).