Grand Hotel Abyss

Today I finished J. M. Coetzee’s 1983 novel Life & Times of Michael K. This is the second Coetzee novel I’ve read, the first being the harrowing, controversial Disgrace. I’ve also browsed around a lot in his later criticism, that collected in Stranger Shores and Inner Workings.

I would say anecdotally that he is a major figure for my generation of writers and intellectuals. Why? Ezra Pound in his ABC of Reading wrote of those authors whose works the ephebe was safe in reading an hour before he or she took up the pen. Coetzee is such a writer. His style is one, in Joyce’s phrase, of scrupulous meanness. The scrupulousness, not the meanness, makes him an essential figure in an age of cant and bombast. Whatever his other virtues and vices, the knowledge of the value of words for which he praised Defoe in one of his essays makes him appealing after an orgy of the vatic/phatic in international novels and high theory.

In Life & Times of Michael K, Coetzee describes the journey of a hare-lipped Coloured man from Cape Town to the country and—after passing through several labor and re-education camps—back again during a civil war in South Africa. The first and longest part of the novel gives K’s journey, first with his mother and then with her ashes, up through his sojourn in the re-education camp in attentive, descriptive, quiet prose through K’s eyes. This section reaches its climax when, after escaping a labor camp back to the abandoned farm where his mother may or may not have been born, he grows his own pumpkins by dark of night while hiding out by day in a burrow. In these pages, Coetzee recalls Defoe in his careful descriptions of tools and labor, and attains an unanticipatedly high register in his evocation of K’s attunement to the earth and its cycles.

Eventually, he is captured by the army, who suspect him of guarding supplies for rebels. They send him to the second camp, and his stay there occupies the novel’s second section, narrated this time by the doctor in the camp, an educated white man of liberal sympathies. The imprisoned, starving K refuses to eat, telling the doctor that after the pumpkins he has grown, no other food tastes good. The doctor’s confrontation with this refusal, and with K’s seeming freedom from all teleologies, prompts him to what amounts to an eloquent paraphrase of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” and Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (AKA “Theses on the Philosophy of History”). It’s hard to say whether we’re meant to sympathize with the doctor’s reading of K’s life as an allegory for how meaning can erupt into a system without being claimed by the system’s terms. He wants so badly to be K, but can only describe him—largely in the terms of other systems, which perhaps lends more aesthetic credibility to the echoes of Kafka and Benjamin. It reminds me a bit of Lewis Carroll’s parodies of Wordsworth, in which the latter’s “egotistical sublime” was reduced, justly or unjustly, to sheer moral obtuseness.

In the brief final section, K returns to Capetown and meets up with some shady characters: a man demonic in his sense of fun, accompanied by his sisters, who may or may not be merely his whores. One of them gives K a blowjob, an experience that brings him shame, before he returns to his mother’s small room to rest, fantasizing about finding company on his journey to freedom from all the “camps” springing up to claim human beings.

This aspect of the novel famously disturbed Nadine Gordimer’s admiration for it back in the mid-’80s. She found K’s near-anarchism and political quietism to be a slight against the liberation struggle of black South Africans and an unfortunate derogation of the intellectual’s duty to aid such struggles. She censured him in terms derived from Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, saying that he had failed to provide in his novel the integration of the hero’s destiny with the destiny of his society, which is the primary task of the novel form in an age when the social totality is not immanent. Whether Gordimer still thinks this way, I don’t know. She’s not wrong: Coetzee in this novel is more Heidegger than Lukács (philosophically, I mean, not politically). Now that the particular struggle of South African blacks has ended, Gordimer’s criticism seems off the mark or irrelevant. This discloses a law of literary transmission about which we ought to be ambivalent: posterity doesn’t care whether you served or deserted.