SOURCE: "A Storyteller without Words: J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K," in Commonwealth: Novel in English, Vol. 6, Nos. 1 and 2, Spring and Fall, 1993, pp. 121-32.

While many critics have examined J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986) for its intertextuality, treatment of women's issues, and use of fiction theory, few have examined his Life & Times Of Michael K. Those who have looked at this equally interesting novel have discussed Coetzee's use of myth and history or analyzed his use of starvation and his definition of the heroic or the mythic. While such studies help to clarify Coetzee's place in the development of the novel and in the development of the South African novel in particular, none has looked at what I believe is one of its central themes, the dilemma of the storyteller who distrusts the very words that he must use because social disintegration has resulted in semiotic systems that he neither understands nor, when he comprehends, accepts. In short, not dealing specifically with the making of fiction, Michael K examines some of the same kind of issues that Coetzee explored three years later in Foe.

In Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) Coetzee used straightforward first-person narration; he polished this sort of narration in Age of Iron (1990), where first-person narration takes the shape of a letter that Mrs. Curren, the narrator, writes over many months to her daughter in America. Waiting for the Barbarians lacks an immediate audience, the complexity of the narration arising from character portrayal, not narrative technique, but in Age of Iron Coetzee ironically understates the action, forcing the reader to explore the implied value systems of the mother and daughter in order to determine why Mrs. Curren includes certain events and to ask when Mrs. Curren has, indeed, been straight-forward and when she writes knowing that her words will be read by her daughter after her death. In the first two sections of Foe, Coetzee also used an epistolary technique although, as Gallagher has observed, the use of quotation marks seems to indicate a spoken voice, thus developing the writer-reader irony later implicit in Age of Iron, but Coetzee changed to third-person narration in the third section, giving the appearance of narrative simplicity that we find in Waiting for the Barbarians, a narrative simplicity sharply contrasted by the strange final section where he seems to have used interior monolog. Michael K, written between Barbarians and Foe, shares the latter's narrative complexity and may be read as a metafiction (Attwell) without weakening its "naturalistic" or "realistic" directness (Pinner).

Coetzee divides the narration between chapters told by an unspecified third-person narrator, who describes K with dispassionate, often clinical objectivity, and a middle chapter, related by an anonymous medical officer in Kenilworth, a rehabilitation camp. The K described by the narrator, while simple, seems to be functionally literate: for example, stuck by the news item on the Khamieskroon killer, he "stuck the page with the story on the refrigerator door" (emphasis mine). He figures how to keep the wheels of his cart from wobbling off the axle and knows to release water from the pump so that it will neither dry up the borehole nor reveal his presence to others. Scrupulously honest, this K apparently has no great difficulty either assessing the value of money when he shops or finding Prince Albert, the Visagie farm, or—on his final trip—the Côte d' Azur. This narration is not simplistic or mere "free indirect speech" (Dovey): it sometimes slips from third person to first person as if the distance between narrator and character were tenuous, and K's actions sometimes seem to originate from a much simpler person than the one suggested by the narrator's first-person accounts of his thinking.

In contrast, the K described by the medical officer is slow witted, maybe even seriously retarded, a mental condition physically symbolized by his hare-lip. As unable and, sometimes, unwilling to speak as Beckett's Watt, he frequently does not answer when directly addressed and consistently creates the appearance that he is an "idiot" or, at least, "a person of feeble mind who drifted by chance into a war zone and didn't have the sense to get out." Confronting a person free from the confusions forced on him by the war and desperate to fit him into his own preconceived categories, the medical officer finally abstracts K into an icon of the primitive innocent morally superior to the educated but corrupt bureaucrats who control South Africa. From the view of the medical officer, K is like the filthy, ignorant, and drunken Vercueil, who fascinates Mrs. Curren as she dies of cancer, or like Friday, whom Susan Barton believes might hold the secret of exactly what happened on the island before she arrived. In all three cases, the character who does not or cannot speak for himself most significantly influences the articulate narrator.

The structure of Michael K is strikingly similar to that of Beckett's Watt, a novel that Coetzee intimately knows as he has illustrated both through his dissertation and through several scholarly articles. In both novels, the first and last sections are narrated in third person by an unnamed narrator (who in Watt may be Sam) who shifts between external objectivity and a direct relation of the character's thinking. In both, the middle section is told in first person by a character who attempts to unlock the titular character's silence and to speak for him. In both, the titular character has a story to tell but is unable to articulate, and in both, the authors force the reader to harmonize, or at least to balance between, the character as described by the third-person and the first-person narrators.

The double focus builds a character who lacks spoken verbal skills but seems to have well-developed, or at least competent, internal verbal and mechanical skills. Even the medical officer's view of K suggests that his verbal deficiency may, indeed, be his hare-lip in that two different medical men claim that it can be corrected if he wants. Nonetheless, Coetzee forces on his readers the conflicting images of a thirty-year-old mentally deficient child in a man's body who seems to answer the confusion of modern life by ignoring it and a man mechanically competent but so distrustful of language that he inadvertently (and probably unconsciously) cultivates the appearance of a child. Further, K's thoughts, especially after his escape from Jakkalsdrif, seem to mature as he loses interest in his body, as if, contrary to usual physiological experience, he becomes more mentally alert as his body starves. Like Kafka's Hunger Artist, who might figure as a major subtext, K's freedom from the ordinary demands of the flesh sets him apart; however, K, who never starves himself with the conscious intent of the Hunger Artist, has found the food that he truly wants in the melons and pumpkins.

The narrator clinically describes the inner man; the medical officer passionately describes the outward appearance. The narrator, as it were, invents K, constructing a product that causes the reader occasional uneasiness when the distance between the two seems to fluctuate, the narrator sometimes seeming to know everything that K feels and thinks and other times seeming to know only the externals of K's actions. In contrast, the medical officer—and the reader who learns with him—discovers K, a shocking process that disrupts any formulate that he/she might have generated as ways of coming to terms with K and finally tries to turn him into an allegory of the unattainable in modern life. In the final part of Michael K, Coetzee brings the reader, who has already been shocked by the abrupt transition from one view point to the other, back to the third-person narration, but the medical officer's interpretation of K colors whatever the reader might think of the character. While putting K in the larger framework of social disorder, the return to the narrator's voice again shocks the reader. Now the medical officer's conclusions seem facile, a depersonalization that inadvertently obscures the real K behind his intellectually satisfying abstractions. To abstract K either as "less a human being than a spirit of ecological endurance" or as an emblem of "a poor working-man's mind and soul" seems to limit him; the attempt, like that of the medical officer, is to make him fit into a rational scheme that disregards his humanity.

In the first part of the narrator's account K is fully defined by his mother and his schooling at Huis Norenius. At Huis Norenius, the "godforsaken institution" that he thinks of as his father, he learned to be a gardener, to follow rules, and silently to endure hunger. Before his mother's death, he had someone to tell him what to do. Anna decides to go to Prince Albert and tells him to quit his job although he makes the cart, talks his mother into moving into the Buhrmann's apartment, and finally decides to leave Cape Town when the permits do not arrive.

After his mother's death, however, he becomes inarticulate, unable to understand the "code" in the language of the people at the hospital; he neither understands euphemisms for death nor knows how to act or speak when there is no familial authority to command his actions. The death of Anna is to K what the diagnosis of cancer is to Mrs. Curren in Age of Iron: in each case, the force that causes or motivates change in the main character comes outside, fully beyond the character's control. Suddenly K has no one to think for him but does not know how to respond to direct questions. For example, when one nurse gives him the parcels containing the ashes of his mother and some clothes and toiletries, he challenges her with "how do I know?" and receiving no answer opens the larger parcel and asks why they gave him the clothes. The nurse's lack of any direct answer confuses him.

While he takes his mother's ashes to Prince Albert, whoever meets him tries to limit him or to regulate him to a socially accepted niche by labeling him. K consistently refuses to fit into these limiting labels. When arrested after arriving in Prince Albert, he has no paper—in other words, no labels—and is too sick to speak to the police; therefore, the police creates labels for him: "Michael Visagie—CM—40—NFA—Unemployed," a mixture of half-truths and suppositions that seem to satisfy their need for clearly defined labels. Later, the medical officer, at first a man who needs to force his experiences into clear categories to understand them, also tries to reduce K to a series of labels:

There is a new patient in the ward, a little old man who collapsed during physical training and was brought in with a very low respiration and heartbeat. There is every evidence of prolonged malnutrition: cracks in his skin, sores on his hands and feet, bleeding gums. His joints protrude, he weighs less then forty kilos.

As the medical officer later realizes, these observations do little except fit K's physical appearance into categories that preclude his having to face with what K might represent. Even after he begins to discard such labels, he refuses to accept that the patient is named "Michael," not "Michaels," a form of the name that lets the medical officer speak about K while maintaining distance while still ignoring his actual name.

In the first and last chapters K repeatedly questions the meanings of labels and, by his actions, rejects them. Though simple, he deconstructs the semiotic systems of an oppressive society: by not understanding how the power elite uses words, he cuts through the pretenses of that world with simple-minded directness. For example, in describing K's exchange with the soldier who steals the purses that contain Anna's savings, the narrator relates the incident by first showing K's initial confusion:

K licked his lips. "That's not my money," he said thickly. "That's my mother's money, that she worked for." It was not true: his mother was dead, she had no need for money. Nevertheless. There was a silence. "What do you think the war is for?" K said. "For taking other people's money?"

"What do you think the war is for," said the soldier, parodying the movements of K's mouth. "Thief. Watch it. You could be lying in the bushes with flies all over you. Don't you tell me about war."

K's "silence" begins as a moment of philosophical confusion: if the purse is Anna's, then it is not K's; furthermore, either Anna did not clarify to him that he was to inherit the purse after her death, or he is incapable of understanding an abstract concept like "inheritance." Because he cannot resolve this philosophical dilemma, he briefly experiences semantic stutter that shifts the basis of the exchange: war should not be an excuse for oppressing civilians, i.e., taking their savings.

Unknowingly, K has cut to the core of the exchange; the soldier defends himself by mocking and then threatening, returning to the label he originally used to justify his forcing K to open the suitcase. The soldier labels him "thief" even while robbing him, thus ironically reversing the word and effectively silencing him. The exchange ends with the soldier's giving K a ten-rand note from the purse and telling him to buy himself an ice cream; in other words, obviously knowing that he is wrong and that his victim has pinpointed the nature of his crime, the soldier tries to soften its effect.

K acquiesces without further argument, but as soon as he is free, he evaluates the encounter: "It did not seem to him that he had been a coward."

In a closely following episode, the narrator shows K's measuring his own action of taking vegetables from a well-cultivated garden: "It is God's earth, he thought, I am not a thief." Having moved through the first exchange with its confusion, K reinterprets the label, making it define, not limit: because a thief takes the possessions of another person, the soldier is a thief; because K takes vegetables from a garden and gardens belong to God, K is not a thief. The simplistic logic frees K from the label, though he still fears the retribution of the gardeners; it lets K sift through the accusation and redefine the label that the soldier used to limit him.

The interrogation at Kenilworth moves through a similar pattern. Noel demands that K tell "the whole truth" about his friends from the mountains although they are not his friends and he knows nothing about their activities. Not understanding, K "crouched perceptibly, clutching the blanket about his throat," a defensive posture that indicates his confusion. The medical officer, who uses K's correct name, tries to get through to him by adding, "Come on, my friend!" That he would use the same word as Noel but with patently different connotation confuses K, who again sinks into linguistic silence until the medical officer pushes him in a new direction:

"Come on, Michaels," I said, "we haven't got all day, there's a war on!"

At last he spoke: "I am not in the war."

As with the soldier, he seems to experience a moment of semantic stuttering before he sharply changes the topic, but after the medical officer angrily replies to his response, he simply adds, "I am not clever with words." K cannot speak because he will not lie; the medical officer cannot understand him because he does not realize that his use of words is confusing and untrue.

To give the police the report that they expect, the medical officer and Noel fabricate the story that the police want to hear, using language as that K does not understand. From the untruth of concocting a story for K, however, the medical officer has learned that he cannot limit K with the usual labels; the section ends with his thinking, "No papers, no money, no friends, no sense of who you are. The obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy." As in the case of the label "thief," the condition of war makes the definer inaccurate: the medical officer, who first limits K as a "prisoner" along with the police, later redefines "prisoner" to describe himself and his situation at the rehabilitation camp.

This process of redefinition colors all three sections of Michael K. Sometimes K contrasts the received signification of words such as "freedom" and the actions of the people who use such words. At Jakkalsdrif, a work camp patrolled by the "Free Corps," he is told that he is free, but the guard tells him that, if he tries to leave at any time other than on a work party, he will be shot. After saboteurs destroy the town's cultural history museum, he does not comprehend the police captain's label that Jakkalsdrif is a "nest of criminals" and that the Free Corps guards are "monkeys" to be caged; after all, "nest" signifies something comfortable, a haven against disorder, and "Free Corps guard" signifies someone in power, not a person who needs to be caged and guarded. Other times the narrator indicates that K reflects on words by logically deducing they can have different meanings for different people; thus he determines that the police captain's label "parasite" is truthful only because he can force his opinion on others.

The "unimaginable bureaucracy" forces all its citizens into preconceived limiting definitions. Typically identifying people by impersonal labels, it places all people into the same categories that the police imposed on K—name (and family), sex, ethnic origin (place of birth, race, and place of childhood), age, political and religious affiliations, employment, moral or legal record. Thus Coetzee identifies the mainstream society of South Africa, (or, for that matter, of any modern bureaucracy) with the camps, places that identify people and mold them into socially acceptable patterns. As K clearly realizes by the end of the novel, there are camps for anyone who fails to fulfill society's image of what constitutes a good citizen. Thus Jakkalsdrif was built so that the "good" citizens of Prince Albert could not see it because they do not want to admit that the homeless and unemployed exist, and Kenilworth is to "effect a change in men's souls," turning social misfits into productive conformists. Like reflections of the greater society outside the barbed wire, the camps have rules and regulations; in Jakkalsdrif, for example, K is expected to follow these rules, but before Robert takes him under wing, no one has explained just what the rules might be. He is a non-conformist, not because he is a rebel with a mission but because he escapes other people's definition of who he is and what he should do by not resisting. If he resisted, he would become "man who resists" and thus fit into a socially limiting label. As it is, the only labels that the medical officer can finally use to identify him define or describe him such as "escape artist" or "gardener."

In the first chapter Coetzee suggests that the fictional Cape Town of the "near future" still has a functioning infrastructure. K has a job with Parks and Gardens and rides a bus to Somerset Hospital to get his mother. The bureaucracy functions however much it dehumanizes. The police quickly respond to the sniper however brutally they might attack innocent bystanders. Guards prevent looting and protect the property of those who have been displaced, however negligent they might be in overlooking K and his mother. With water and electricity K and his mother make the Burhrmanns' apartment into a comfortable hiding place. Apparently the mail is still delivered, though none comes for K.

By the last chapter, however, merely a year or so later, the infrastructure seems to have failed. Though K seems to hear the distant "tinkle of an ice-cream vendor's bell," traffic is not moving and a burned out, stripped car blocks the road. Broken glass and garbage litter lawns, and no water runs in the public lavatory. Instead of a bureaucracy, police, or soldiers, K meets derelicts. In this part of Michael K language itself has become as disorganized and empty as the war-torn city. The people whom K meets have lost the remnants of civilized behavior: the stranger and his two "sisters" sharply contrast Robert's attempt to maintain law and order for his family in Jakkalsdrif and the medical officer's original belief that somehow law and order needed to be preserved.

In his language as well as in his actions, the stranger is a man of many labels, none of them truthful. He introduces himself as having "plenty of sisters … [a] big family" though it is more probable that he is a pimp; he gets his "sister" to tell K where he lives, though he is only a squatter; he calls K "Mister Treefeller," the name on the overalls that he took from Kenilworth; and he refers to K as "brother," though he tries to rob him during the night. Even basic labels such as "thief" have no meaning: after the stranger takes K's seeds during the night, K only asks, "Can I have my packet?"

But in this social and linguistic chaos, K finally finds a label that he can apply to himself and fully accept:

It excited him, he found, to say, recklessly, the truth, the truth about me. "I am a gardener," he said again, aloud…. I am more like an earthworm, he thought. Which is also a kind of gardener. Or a mole, also a gardener, that does not tell stories because it lives in silence.

Whenever K refers to himself with an image, he uses similes. Uncertain about words either because they seem foreign to him as in the case when the nurse "sounded as if she were reading the words from a card" or because they "Would not come" to him, K avoids metaphors because they more directly infringe on his self-identity. The narrator, seemingly uncertain himself how far to push K's growing self-awareness in chapter one, also describes K in terms of similes such as "chewing quickly as a rabbit." It is as if both the narrator and K distrust the language when words that may describe can also seem to categorize or contain. Thus the reader finds that K is like "a termite boring its way through a rock" or an "ant that does not know where its hole is," but both insects hardly describe him because both are usually female identified with hives or communities (at least in the twentieth century). His later image of himself—"lam like a woman whose children have left the house"—humanizes the notion of a mother (analogous to the female insect) now separated from the home (analogous to the incest's hive). That K thinks of himself with such sexual ambiguity parallels his refusal to fall into socially acceptable labels; he does not identify the tags whereby his society can classify and thus easily dismiss him.

In contrast, the medical officer, who begins with a direct limiting description—"a little old man"—quickly discovers that usual labels are inappropriate: "Though he looks like an old man, he claims to be only thirty-two." Moving from clinical description to poetic trope, the medical officer vacillates between comfortable labels whereby he can limit K and poetic describers that give him insight without confining:

He is like a stone, a pebble, that, having lain around quietly minding its own business since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly from hand to hand. A hard little stone, barely aware of its own surroundings enveloped in itself and its interior life. He passes through these institutions and camps and hospitals and God knows what else like a stone. Through the intestines of the war. An unbearing, unborn creature.

As reluctant to use similes as the narrator is reluctant to use metaphors, the medical officers dilemma is that K's very existence makes him question himself, a process that finally makes him vulnerable to the war and to his own insignificance and inability to act.

Though the medical officer at first dismissed him as an "idiot," a "simpleton," or a "clown," Michael K is a storyteller who cannot find the right words because, in his opinion, his story is too important to muddle and because he distrusts the very medium that he must use to communicate it. When he first tries to tell his story at Jakkalsdrif, he falls into silence while he thinks, "Now I must speak about the ashes,… so as to be complete, so as to have told the whole story," but before he can translate his feelings into words, his audience has drifted away. Later, during the interrogation at Kenilworth, he has an audience, eager to hear his story, but to tell the story that the medical officer expects would be dishonest. His problem in telling his story, however, does not rest solely with his audience:

Always, when he tried to explain himself to himself, there remained a gap. a hole, a darkness before which his understanding balked, into which it was useless to put words. The words were eaten up, the gap remained. His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong.

Unwilling or unable to falsify or to accept limiting labels. K confuses himself and stammers over his words.

When the medical officer tries to get him to tell his story, he cannot initially understand K's abrupt shifts in logic and reference:

"Where is your mother now?" I asked. "She makes the plants grow," he replied, evading my eyes. "You mean she has passed away?" I said (pushing up the daisies?). He shook his head. "They burned her," he said. "Her hair was burning round her head like a halo."

He deduces that K is the pathetic result of bad education, a convenient diagnosis that with a less sensitive man might have let him dismiss the patient as an incurable. It is precisely this interpretation that he foists on Noel to justify the fabrication of a story for the Prince Albert police: "there is nothing there, no story of the slightest interest to rational people." Only after K has escaped from Kenilworth and a new shipment of prisoners threatens to overwhelm the facilities, does the medical officer come to see that "Michaels means something, and the meaning he has is not private" to him, for

if Michaels himself were no more than what he seems to be … a skin-and-bones man with a crumpled lip …, then I would have every justification for … putting a bullet through my head.

In his final imaginative pursuit of a conversation with K, he still attempts to reduce him to an object that he can understand and by understanding rationalize, even though he seems aware that his attempts to "allegorize" will ultimately fail.

Obsessed with discovering K's purpose partly because he is himself disillusioned by the war and believing that society must have rational or, at least, orderly grounds, he attempts to force K into teleological constructs that speak to his confusion; in other words, he consistently romanticizes K's story. But when he imagines "following" K, because he wants him to answer his final question, the children, who accepted K throughout the narrator's story, intercept and prevent his getting an answer. The medical officer, who has an inkling into K's nature, cannot divorce himself from his belief in his own rationality and purpose. The reader, who has briefly identified with the medical officer intellectually and verbally, is left with no certainty; there is no clue from K or the narrator to help either the medical officer or the reader categorize him.

Throughout, K thinks about telling his story. At Jakkalsdrif he tries but finds that "he could not, or could not yet." At Kenilworth he obviously talked with the medical officer, who thus knew many of the parts of his history, but Coetzee only shows K's full telling of his own story in the final section. For the stranger and his two women on Signal Hill, he sums up his life in seven "paltry" sentences:

I was three months in the camp at Kenilworth, till last night…. I was gardener once, for the Council. That was a long time ago. Then I had to leave and take my mother into the country, for her health. My mother used to work at Sea Point, she had a room there, we passed it on the way…. She dies in Stellenbosch, on the way up-country…. I didn't always get enough to eat.

As in his attempts to speak to the soldier, the people at Jakkalsdrif, or the medical officer, words confuse and silence him; the attempt to tell his story nauseates him, breaking him out in a cold sweat. The narrator adds that K either thought "his story was paltry, not worth the telling" or "he simply did not know how to tell a story, how to keep interest alive." Distrustful of language and, in his own simplicity, caught in "the self-relexive process of meaning-making which highlights the continuous deconstruction of established meaning." K is reduced to silence. Whether the narrator is, indeed, echoing K's thoughts at this moment or guessing what K actually thought, the moment quickly passes with K's leaving his story untold. In the end, he chooses silence over articulation: the telling of his story would have falsified it.

In his final analysis he reconciles himself by thinking, "I was mute and stupid in the beginning, I will be mute and stupid at the end." Unbounded by any of the camps and, therefore, free, he has escaped from all limiters. To talk about him—even for him to talk about his own history—is to force him into those labels that he has managed to evade. Words have failed him, but, at the same time, words have been his salvation, for without words he can return to Sea Point without having been categorized into a pawn for the government or into an intellectual abstraction by the medical officer. He has learned, and perhaps the narrator has learned as well, that "there is time enough for everything." Though K is apparently close to death at the end of the novel, the last word of the novel is "live," as if K will, indeed, have the time that both the medical officer and the narrator lack.

Ironically, K's story has been told. The narrator and the medical man, from their different perspectives, each of which limits K by transforming him into a verbal rather than ontological experience, have transformed him into their "stories." Like Susan Barton, only K knows the truth of his experiences; unlike Susan, he is almost as inarticulate as Friday, who literally has no tongue. Foe rewrites Susan's story, falsifying it though there is still a strange truth in the published tale of a man's survival on an island visited only by cannibals; without the narrator and the medical man, maybe "[i]t would have been better if his mother has quietly suffocated him when she saw what he was, and put him in the trash can." These storytellers save K from that oblivion though he does not tell his story himself.