Four—
Writing in "the cauldron of history":
Life and Times of Michael K and Foe

In his later fiction J. M. Coetzee turns to the situation of writing itself. This is a logical development given that Waiting for the Barbarians is concerned with the discursive underpinnings of Empire. As I have shown, Barbarians responds to a particular moment in the elaboration of apartheid discourse; similarly, Life and Times of Michael K was written partly—with the emphasis on partly—in response to a particular political and constitutional debate in South Africa in the early 1980s, when the nation seemed to enter a cycle of insurrection and repression whose outcome threatened to be bloody. Despite the similarity of reference, in the later fiction (both Michael K and Foe) Coetzee takes a sharper turn toward discursivity, finding still fewer ready connections between history and representation than he had before. In Barbarians, narration follows the course of history into the end of Empire; in the later fiction, by contrast, narration more clearly establishes its own points of departure.

This increased sense of independence goes hand-in-hand with an ability to register even more acutely the scope and limitations of novelistic discourse within a culture obviously in crisis. On this paradox the later fiction turns. Although the scenario of civil war set out in Michael K predicts the consequences of current state policies, at a deeper level Coetzee has freed himself from the burden of having to unravel the meaning of the last stage of colonialism, which consensus takes to be immanent in the events of the day. Indeed, a new subject has begun to

take over and shape the fiction, namely, the nature of, and the conditions governing, the power to narrate, a power that appears to Coetzee to be more palpable than ever. It is true, of course, that Coetzee has always displayed and questioned novelistic conventions; at this point, though, the possibilities for writing novels within a highly politicized culture, a culture dominated by claims and counterclaims about the meaning of living on a historical cusp, have shifted to center stage. If we follow Coetzee down this path, we might understand the political improbabilities of Michael K, a novel about a subject who, miraculously, lives through the trauma of South Africa in a state of civil war without being touched by it; we might also appreciate the contextual sensitivities of Foe, a novel that, while apparently rich in postmodern play, is also a skeptical, indeed scrupulous, interrogation of the authority of white South African authorship.

The Time of Politics

Coetzee has said that Life and Times of Michael K is "about a time when it is too late for politics" ("Too Late for Politics?" 6). Politics, in this sense, is what comes before and after the revolution; what happens during the revolution is the violent release of forces that politics under "normal" circumstances tries either to marshal or to oppose. In Gramscian terms, the wars of movement and position have given way to underground warfare (Gramsci 229). There is literally only one sentence in which politics, in this sense, is "remembered" in the entire text of Michael K. It is given to Major Noël van Rensburg, commander of the Kenilworth rehabilitation camp, during the Medical Officer's narration in part 2:

"Also," I said, "can you remind me why we are fighting this war? I was told once, but that was long ago and I seem to have forgotten."
"We are fighting this war," Noël said, "so that minorities will have a say in their destinies."
We exchanged empty looks. Whatever my mood was, I could not get him to share it. (215)

The reason for the Medical Officer's bemusement is that the novel is indeed about a different time, a time when the exigencies of the war itself have superseded the issues that precipitated it. No doubt the Medical Officer's attitude corresponds to a certain weary incredulity on Coetzee's own part regarding the policies and practices of the National

party in the early 1980s, but against this ironic note it is important to say that the novel's scenario of militarism and civil attrition challenges the politics of the "destiny of minorities" in south Africa, a politics that was taking itself very seriously at the time. In other words, the social panorama of Michael K is presented against the grain of official policy formulation. Of course, opposing the National party is unexceptional, but it is important to note Coetzee's starting point, for the novel's metafictional dimensions could be misconstrued if the element of social critique is not properly acknowledged at the outset. Let me now turn to the context in which this critique is developed.

Life and Times of Michael K was published in 1983. Between the elections of 1981 and 1984, white South African politics was dominated by a debate about "multinationalism." These years included a referendum called to approve the National party's new constitutional proposals, perhaps the most important feature of its movement toward limited reform. Under the bonapartist leadership of P. W. Botha, the government undertook the unlikely task of "broadening the base of democracy" without jeopardizing the white minority's authority and interests. Its emphasis on multinationalism was calculated to legitimize this process. Some of the key aspects of this thinking had been adumbrated in Botha's "twelve point plan" of 1979, which began with the assertion that there had to be an "acknowledgment and acceptance of multinationalism and minorities in South Africa" (South African Institute of Race Relations 10). The new constitution, inaugurated in 1984, replaced a single white parliament with a tricameral system of three houses for whites, "coloreds," and Indians, theoretically bringing the "minorities" into an alliance in matters of common interest. Needless to say, the black majority was excluded from the system altogether, since its interests were supposedly taken care of in the policy of national independence for the bantustans.

For the present purposes, the most remarkable aspect of this development was the government's apparent belief that it could create and impose a constitution aimed at achieving greater legitimacy without taking into account the objections of black leaders of almost every constituency, including not only the ANC and its internal affiliates but also homeland leaders and party representatives of the very "colored" and Indian groups the system was designed to co-opt. The whole project became a charade, undertaken, as Alf Stadler comments. "in the absence of any effort to address the key issues in South Africa's current crisis: the

absence of common political rights at the national level, the racial basis of existing rights, and the authoritarian controls over political organization and action" (171). Stadler's point goes to the heart of the sense of arbitrariness that the idea of politics accrues in Michael K: the novel exploits the unreality of the state's efforts at constitutional reform; this is the force of the Medical Officer's confusion in the foregoing quotation.

More grimly, though, in its projections of civil war Michael K: shows the consequences of the state's spectacular failure to address the essentials of the crisis it was facing. The scenario is not strictly apocalyptic; rather, it anticipates accelerated militarization in response to sporadic but growing insurrection and guerrilla activity. Coetzee's South Africa of the near future is a society of nightly curfews; restrictions on movement between districts; labor, resettlement, rehabilitation, and internment camps (with reclassification up the scale as the situation worsens); squatting by the destitute and demolition of abandoned buildings by the state; armored patrols and protected civilian convoys; widespread lawlessness, including looting by the poor and corruption on the part of the rich; failing economic markets replaced by production quotas; and, last, a dual currency, with one currency passing into obsolescence. In sociopolitical terms, it is a finely drawn and sophisticated picture. And although one acknowledges that prediction per se is not the primary concern of future projection—as Stephen Clingman puts it, the point of this kind of fiction is rather to analyze the hidden propensities of the present from the perspective of an imagined future (Novels of Nadine Gordimer) —after the States of Emergency of 1985–1990, with their mass mobilization campaigns, repression, and deep economic crises, it is hard to resist the observation that Life and Times of Michael K stands as perhaps the most accurate of several attempts in South African fiction of the period at giving concrete shape to an imagined future.^[1]

The Politics of Elusion

"To my ear," says Coetzee, "'The Life' implies that the life is over, whereas 'Life' does not commit itself" ("Two Interviews" 454). We traduce the purposes of Life and Times of Michael K if we make claims for either its political percipience or its predictive power without substantially refining the argument. Its intensity lies not in social representation but in the creation of a protagonist of extraordinary symbolic

power who becomes, in turn, the focus of a struggle for control over the resources of fictionality itself. Although it would be eminently possible to find his analogue in Cape Town, in a sector of the ragged, homeless, and largely apolitical underclass of the streets, Michael K is not a historical being at all. In this respect, Coetzee carries something over from the first two novels: as he points out in an interview with Stephen Watson, Jacobus Coetzee is and is not an eighteenth-century frontiers-man; Magda is and is not a nineteenth-century colonial spinster (Coetzee, "Speaking"). As the Medical Officer says, Michael K is "the obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy" (195). It is because he is prodigious that a metafictional contest is staged over what K means. To the last, however, K remains his own person: in refusing to be imprisoned in any way, either in the literal camps or in the nets of meaning cast by those who follow after him, he becomes—in the socially symbolic field of the novel's engagement with South Africa, that is, in the field of reading and interpretation—a principle of limited, provisional freedom, a freedom located in the act of writing. However, before consolidating my own hermeneutic capture of Michael K, I must take account of what is at stake in this contest—for the novel does inscribe interpretation as a contest and an exercise in power.

On publication, Michael K aroused a fair amount of controversy, some of which appeared in the pages of the African Communist in a review entitled "Much Ado about Nobody," which appeared shortly after the announcement that the novel had won the Booker-McConnell Prize. The reviewer (identified only as "Z. N.") passes through degrees of irrigation before finally dismissing Coetzee's novel: "The absence of any meaningful relationship between Michael K and anybody else… means that in fact we are dealing not with a human spirit but an amoeba, from whose life we can draw neither example nor warning because it is too far removed from the norm, unnatural, almost inhuman, Certainly those interested in understanding or transforming South African society can learn little from the life and times of Michael K" (103. Nadine Gordimer's review in the New York Review of Books is less dismissive, but the criticism is much the same: a "revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions rises with the insistence of the song of cicadas to the climax of this novel." She adds that although "what human beings do to fellow human beings" is fully depicted in Michael K — "could not be better said"—nevertheless Coetzee "does not recognize what the victims, seeing themselves as victims no

longer, have done, are doing, and believe they must do for themselves" ("Idea of Gardening" 6).

Stephen Clingman, in an essay that contrasts Michael K with Gordimer's July's People and Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood, comments on what he calls the novel's "outright rejections," asking, "Are they not fundamentally evasive and conservative?" ("Revolution and Reality" 48). Clingman cautiously proposes several "defences" of Coetzee, however. One defense relies on Fernand Braudel in suggesting that Coetzee might be taken to support the notion of "the long durée of a history of frames of consciousness"; another argues that Coetzee might be advocating a "principled 'negative' dialectic" that rejects both the colonial power, as the dominant term, and its antithesis, thus keeping open the possibilities for some as yet unimaginable future moment (49). These hypotheses are intriguing; I certainly share Clingman's sense that Coetzee would prefer not to assume too much about the course of history. What is striking, however, about all three of these positions is their common, undeclared assumption that the limits of fictionality lie in representation. Insofar as Gordimer and Clingman, independently of one another, are prepared to accept that the novel works outside the conventions of realism, they do so to suggest how Coetzee is making political choices through a medium of allegory; what kind of allegory this might be, however, is largely left unexplored. None of these criticisms of Michael K ventures a word on the novel's structure or heterodiegetic narration—that is, on the work's metafictional features.

The charge of elusion in Michael K, whether stated or implied, is therefore premature. It declines the challenge of the novel's own selfreflection on questions of power and interpretation and exempts itself, moreover, from the force of this questioning. When Coetzee chooses not to represent mass resistance or project, however tentatively, a utopian future, it would be appropriate—because we are dealing with fiction that has always placed the speaking subject in question—to ask whether this decision might not be attributable to Coetzee's sensitivity to the problem of authority within the fractured and unequal context of South African nationhood (in which this and every other South African narrative resides). Waiting for the Barbarians does not presume to speak from a position outside the colonial episteme; similarly, the narrator of the first and third sections of Michael K chooses to speak from the same position, and as I have argued before, this degree of caution, even sobriety, about historical knowledge is more responsive to history than is sometimes recognized.

Father and Mother

Life and Times of Michael K presents us both with the story of K and with a struggle for control over the meaning of that story. The story has an elemental simplicity that lends itself to conventional allegorical reading, although this is not exclusively a political allegory. Michael K, a municipal gardener who spent his childhood in a children's home, undertakes an improbable journey in the middle of a civil war, wheeling his mother in a makeshift cart from Cape Town to Prince Albert in the Karoo. He intends to return her to the farm where she spent part of her youth in a family of servants; she dies en route, but he continues the journey and scatters her ashes at what seems to be the farm. There he discovers the meaning of his vocation as a gardener and plants seeds. Soon debilitated by hunger and exhaustion, he is found and taken to Jakkalsdrif labor camp; he escapes, returns to the farm, replants, and spends a few blessed weeks tending his pumpkins and melons. Guerrillas pass through, but K decides not to join them; he is then captured, accused of supplying the enemy, taken back to Cape Town, and placed in a rehabilitation camp. He escapes again, however, and spends his last days as a vagrant in Sea Point, where his mother had worked as a domestic servant before they left.

Two features of the story appear to carry allegorical weight: K's embrace of the role of gardener and his elusiveness. The two aspects are connected. For example, in the first of the periods spent at the farm, K senses a growing resilience within himself, which he describes in terms of the differences of soil and climate between Wynberg Park in Cape Town and the Karoo: "It is no longer the green and the brown that I want but the yellow and the red; not the wet but the dry; not the dark but the light; not the soft but the hard. I am becoming a different kind of man … I am becoming smaller and harder and drier every day" (92). In other words, the discovery that being a gardener is his "nature" contributes directly to K's developing sense of inviolability. But why should gardening be given such significance? The answer has to do with the poles of symbolic possibility that K negotiates throughout his journey, a binary opposition between the principles of Father and Mother. K's biological father is scarcely known; the father here is the political father, with its roots in psychoanalysis.^[2] It is the father of the camps, of order, and of institutions: "my father was Huis Norenius," he says; he was "the list of rules on the door of the dormitory" (143). The novel's

epigraph, drawn from Heraclitus's Cosmic Fragments, presents the war, too, as belonging to the domain of the father:

War is the father of all and king of all.
Some he shows as gods, others as men.
Some he makes slaves, and others free.

The idea that war can produce order through strife (Heraclitus, Fragments; T. M. Robinson, "Commentary," in Heraclitus 118) is curiously close to the Foucauldian notion of power as a force dispersed through every level of social relations, including the production of subjectivity. In Power/Knowledge Foucault reverses Clausewitz's definition of war as the continuation of politics by other means. If politics, in terms of this reversal, is the continuation of war by other means, then we are concerned with violent conflict as a pervasive and, indeed, constitutive element in, as Foucault puts it, "social institutions, in economic inequalities, in language, in the bodies themselves of each and everyone of us" (90). Michael K is close to the Foucauldian theme but with this important difference: in Foucault, power is not only pervasive but also productive; by contrast, in the novel, although power penetrates through the layered relations of the social and the subjective, it is also much more corrosive. There is much perfunctory violence in Michael K, and motifs of appropriation stand out sharply. This quality is especially apparent in Coetzee's repeated use of a metaphor of parasitism to describe fundamental relations: the towns and the camps, the war and those who live through it, are figured frequently in terms of parasite and host. "The state rides on the backs of earth-grubbers like Michaels," says the Medical Officer; "it devours the products of their toil and shits on them in return" (221). In another example, K thinks, "Perhaps in truth whether the camp was declared a parasite on the town or the town a parasite on the camp depended on no more than who made his voice heard loudest" (160).^[3]

As the mother opposes the father, gardening is the opposite of this corrosive notion of power. From the moment K leaves Cape Town and travels into the jaws of the war with his mother in the cart, his resistances become associated metonymically with the mother; and when K distributes her ashes like seed and turns them into the soil of the farm, cultivation is added to the chain of significance. Simply put, Coetzee exploits the symbolism of mother earth. Critics and reviewers have extended themselves on this symbolism, partly, I am sure, because its very simplicity makes it seem either implausible or suggestive of ever

more alluring depths. Stephen Clingman wonders whether Coetzee is reading the South African situation in the light of Voltaire's dictum Il faut cultiver notre jardin in Candide ("Revolution and Reality" 57n). Derek Wright sees something Wordsworthian in the earth symbolism, the Wordsworth of the Leech-Gatherer and the Old Cumberland Beggar (116). Gordimer is more direct: "Beyond all creeds and moralities, this work of art asserts, there is only one: to keep the earth alive, and only one salvation, the survival that comes from her" ("Idea of Gardening" 6). (A feminist objection might be registered to the association of earth and mother offered in a straightforward symbolic reading.)

In Countries of the Mind Dick Penner also allows the symbolism its full allegorical weight, to the extent of reading the work as an adaptation of the South African farm novel and plaasroman (as well as an exemplum of the American genre of agrarian protest fiction); this is an intriguing possibility in the light of Coetzee's interest in the genre and in colonial pastoralism and landscape description more generally, evident in several of the essays collected in White Writing. However, these discourses are discussed in White Writing as part of the ideological equipment of the colonists in their efforts to establish relationships with the land based on property and the maintenance of existing social relations. K is a different kind of creature from the historical subjects who invest the soil with this kind of significance. This difference is clearly illustrated in his decision to avoid setting up a "rival line" to the Visagie's after the return to the farm of the Visagie heir, now a deserter from the army. The novel therefore projects landed property, and the ideological configurations ratifying it under colonialism, as belonging to the domain of the father, not the mother. Hence Coetzee can argue in White Writing, "If the pastoral writer mythologizes the earth as a mother, it is more often than not as a harsh, dry mother without curves or hollows, infertile, unwilling to welcome her children back even when they ask to be buried in her, or as a mother cowed by the blows of the cruel sun-father" (9).

I resist the symbolic reading because, as with the treatment of the seasons in Waiting for the Barbarians, there is something explicitly conventional in the metaphor, as if, while allowing a certain scope to the symbolism (and I shall return to this point), Coetzee were also offering gardening as merely the convenient, structural opposite of power. The structuralist notion that binaries are "machines" for the production of discourse is a basic part of Coetzee's intellectual equipment. As Susan Barton puts it—with some irony—in Foe: "it seems necessary only to

establish the poles, the here and the there, the now and the then—after that the words of themselves do the journeying. I had not guessed it was so easy to be an author" (93). If K lives in a "pocket outside time" (82), if he is "not in the war" (189), then "gardening" merely defines his preferred habitat, and his temporal universe becomes the seasonal cycle. As Coetzee says, K "can't hope to keep the garden because, finally, the whole surface of South Africa has been surveyed and mapped and disposed of. So, despite K's desires, the opposition that the garden provides to the camps is at most at a conceptual level" ("Two Interviews" 456).

Beyond its structural uses, however, the idea of gardening as cultivation does accumulate a certain ethical significance. Thinking of his first seeds, which he has to abandon just as they begin to sprout, K says: "There was a cord of tenderness that stretched from him to the patch of earth beside the dam and must be cut. It seemed to him that one could cut a cord like that only so many times before it would not grow again" (90). K's pumpkins and melons become his family, his brothers and sisters, suggesting, in attenuated form, the possibility of community. It will be recalled that Barbarians carries a similar muted theme in its representations of children. Michael K responds to the distress of the children in the Jakkalsdrif camp by forming a "protective circle" for one of them with his arms (124). Protectiveness, nurturing, cultivation: this thread involves an attempt, I suggest, to project a posthumanist, reconstructed ethics; certainly, the Magistrate's halting steps in this direction in Barbarians become elaborated more fully in Michael K. But the condition for such ethical reconstruction is a recognition of the pervasive intrusiveness of totalitarian violence.

Let the Book Go to War

The story of Michael K, as I have presented it, is told in parts 1 and 3 by an omniscient narrator in style indirect libre. The metafictional element is introduced in part 2, which presents the Medical Officer's first-person reflection on the meaning of K's story. The metaphor of parasitism finds another application here, for K becomes host to the Medical Officer, who figures as the hermeneutic parasite. However, Coetzee alerts his reader to the appropriating function of interpretation well before the Medical Officer begins his memoir. In Jakkalsdrif camp, in part 1, while observing the silence of a young mother whose child has died, K wonders whether the image of her stoicism is part of his "education," for the

scenes being enacted before him appear to cohere: "He had a presentiment of a single meaning upon which they were converging or threatening to converge, though he did not know yet what that might be" (122). Gradually, it becomes apparent to K that there is a relationship between the way significances are distributed and the war itself; consequently, he develops a set of reflexes that involve avoiding or circumventing stated significances, even when they appear correct or to serve his own interests. For example, Robert acts as a "critical consciousness" in Jakkalsdrif, making sound judgments that expose the corruption of those in authority and show the guilty side of charity in Prince Albert. K responds, "I don't know … I don't know." Robert becomes angry: "You've been asleep all your life. It's time to wake up" (121). Later, K imagines the townspeople forcing the inmates to dig a hole deep enough to bury themselves in so they might be properly forgotten, but then he adds: "It seemed more like Robert than like him, as he knew himself, to think like that" (130).

The idea of "knowing himself," however, is also problematic. This is illustrated in what is perhaps the most politically sensitive point in the novel, when K contemplates leaving the farm and his pumpkins to join the rebels. Deciding not to go, he tells himself, "Enough men had gone off to the war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening" (150). But K's rationale—which seems plausible enough in the light of the metaphoric patterns previously established—is immediately undermined: "Always, when he tried to explain himself to himself, there remained a gap, a hole, a darkness before which his understanding baulked, into which it was useless to pour words. The words were eaten up, the gap remained. His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong" (150–51).

Before solid-seeming explanations, including this apparently crucial one about his vocation and its role in the war, K typically feels anxious and stupid. Even as a child such feelings would overwhelm him: in the classroom at Huis Norenius he would sit staring at mathematical problems, waiting for words like quotient to unravel their mystery (150). However, because K is never his own narrator, there is a sense in which the narrator interpolates in this moment in such a way as to dramatize narration's own limitations, that is, its own willed limitations. It is an image of aporia, or stalled meaning. This image takes us into the philosophical terrain of the Nietzschean "will to ignorance," standing as the alternative to the devouring "will to truth," which, in this context, is

contiguous with the war. We are also entering the terrain, of course, of early Derridean deconstruction: K's meaning will never arrive, for his story is constituted in the play of identity and difference that defines textuality. We can therefore mention another implication in K's gardening at this point, namely the notion of dissemination: K's is "the seed that neither inseminates nor is recovered by the father, but is scattered abroad" (Spivak, "Translator's Preface" xi). There is a moment, to which I must now turn, when something closely resembling the Derridean concept of the trace is given a socially nuanced meaning.

In response to K's silence and refusal to be treated, the Medical Officer progresses from being K's nurturing protector to "persecutor, madman, bloodhound, policeman" (229). K's obduracy both fascinates and infuriates him: "He passes through these institutions and camps and hospitals and God knows what else like a stone. Through the intestines of the war" (185). Coetzee has described K as a figure of being rather than of becoming ("Two Interviews" 455); similarly, to the Medical Officer he is a "soul blessedly untouched by doctrine" (207). But the insertion of the Medical Officer's narration involves something other than Sartrean thematics (although this element is carried over, to some extent, from the first two novels), for it is the Medical Officer's pursuit of K that is finally at issue. The memoir turns into a letter addressed directly to K; then the Medical Officer imagines himself literally chasing K, desperately shouting his account and appealing for the wave of a hand in confirmation while K disappears into the thickets ahead. The Medical Officer himself has become an agent of the war. His interpretation of K is quite correct; indeed, it is the novel's most direct statement of what K represents: "Your stay in the camp was merely an allegory, if you know that word. It was an allegory—speaking at the highest level—of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence within a system without becoming a term in it" (228).

It is not the interpretation itself that ultimately matters, however; what is presented here is the capacity of the novel to "get behind" itself and displace the power of interpretation in such a way that K is left uncontained at the point of closure. This is how one might speak of K as the narratological figure of the Derridean trace. Coetzee's metafictional frame produces the deconstructive gesture of erasure. K's "essence" is allowed to slip back into the open-endedness of textuality from which it comes and to which it returns. Again, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak provides the appropriate terminology for this move in her elucidation of Derrida's Nietzsche: "When the outlines of the 'subject' are loosened,

the concepts of figuration or metaphoricity—related to meaning-fulness—are subsumed under the broader categories of appropriation and the play of resistant forces" ("Translator's Preface" xxiv).

If the metafictional frame shifts the ground away from the nominal to something else, to something like the grammatological, then in terms of the logic of metafictionality itself, we are obliged to ask further questions about the implications of this shift, about the limits of a movement that could, hypothetically, involve deconstruction's process of infinite deferral. Coetzee himself instructs us to treat this question skeptically in his own criticism when he inquires into Nabokov's reliance on the ironic limitlessness of metafictional framing in Pale Fire. He argues that in Nabokov there is a defiant (and, by implication, post-Romantic) attempt merely to assert the "primacy of art" over the power of history—in this instance, "history-as-interpretation" ("Nabokov's Pale Fire " 1–7). As Coetzee points out, history is a metamyth that promptly reappropriates such defiance by historicizing it. How do we interpret a move on Coetzee's part that is similar to, though possibly less ingenuous than, Nabokov's, accepting, in turn, that even as we ask this question we, too, have entered a realm that Coetzee has refigured in the novel literally as a battlefield?

Spivak's phrase "resistant forces" is apt. Something close to Gordimer's critical position on Michael K has been put to Coetzee directly. Asked how he would reply to the charge of "furthering the liberal fantasy of the politics of innocence and so obstructing progressive action," Coetzee replied: "I have no wish to enter the lists as a defender of Michael K. If war is the father of all things, let the objection you voice go to war with the book, which has now had its say, and let us see who wins" (Coetzee, "Two Interviews" 459). This war is a dangerous one for writers and writing, though it grows out of the larger and, of course, more cruel one. In a frenzied culture such as South Africa's (though, of course, this turn has occurred elsewhere) every sign, no matter how innocent, becomes a signifier at another level, pointing to the larger conflict. Within such a context there is no such thing as an irreducible element. This is the context that makes the phenomenon of K—to use the Medical Officer's terminology—"scandalous" and "outrageous." K is not a representative figure who models certain forms of behavior or capacities for change; rather, he is an idea floated into a discursive environment that is unprepared to receive it. The fact that questions about the evasiveness of Michael K are put to Coetzee in interviews and repeatedly raised in reviews and criticism merely confirms the conditions

that the novel itself enacts. The novel anticipates such probing, in fact, incorporating it into its own fabric in the image of its very obsessiveness. This tension informs Life and Times of Michael K, read as a document of South African culture.

The novel stages a conflict, then, over the symbolic value of narrating in order to sustain its own form of discourse in what it calls "the cauldron of history" (207). When we read the Medical Officer's realization—achieved through K's example—that he has been wasting his life "by living from day to day in a state of waiting," that he had "in effect given myself up as a prisoner to this war" (216), it is difficult to avoid the implication this realization has for the activity of fiction writing, particularly after the sense of directionlessness and indecision that pervades the conclusion to Waiting for the Barbarians. Projecting beyond the moment of the "end" involves not only a redefinition of the relations of power but also a relocation or repositioning of the authorial voice. It is not that social conviction is lacking in Michael K —its scenario of the future pays its respects to that requirement—but that the novel dramatizes the risks involved in finding a place from which to speak. This is its politics of agency. When Coetzee argues in his Weekly Mail Book Week address of 1987 for the right of fiction to establish its own rules as against the rules governing the production of historical discourse, he does so with the achievement of Michael K behind him, a fiction that works this principle into its own formal design. On the question of design, however, let me turn, by way of concluding these remarks on Michael K, to Coetzee's debt to Kafka.

The Kafka Connection

The transfiguration of the elements of fiction to the field of writing is a developmental feature of Coetzee's novels, reinforced by the fictionalization of certain features of deconstruction, but it is in Kafka that this movement is clinched. There are obvious links between the state of civil anomie through which South Africa is passing in Michael K and the nightmarish world of The Trial and The Castle. Doubtless, "K" is a nod to these works; The Castle seems particularly relevant with its concern with the authority of the document, in the form of the letter, and the way texts and stories circulate.^[4] However, the pertinence of Kafka is more specific: we find it focused in the stories, particularly "The Burrow."

In 1981, two years before the publication of Michael K, Coetzee published an essay in Modern Language Notes entitled "Time, Tense,

and Aspect in Kafka's 'The Burrow.'" It examines how Kafka attempts to do away with the distance separating the time of the events narrated (utterance) from the time of narration (enunciation); such a project, Coetzee argues, is syntactically and logically impossible, but its impetus comes from Kafka's concern with the notion of a breakdown in the experience of time, where things continually collapse or threaten to collapse into a timeless, iterative present. All Coetzee's novels share to some extent Kafka's concern with the relation between narrative and the experience of time. The essay ends, however, by contrasting "historical" and "eschatological" conceptions of temporality. The eschatological is an "everlasting present" in which narration itself, the voice of enunciation, resides:

Now that the narrator has failed time and again to domesticate time using strategies of narrative (i.e., strategies belonging to historical time), his structures of sequence, of cause and effect, collapsing each time at the "decisive moment" of rupture when the past fails to run smoothly into the present, that is, now that the construct of narrative time has collapsed, there is only the time of narration left, the shifting now within which his narrative takes place, leaving behind it a wake (a text) of failure, fantasy, sterile speculation: the ramifications of a burrow whose fatal precariousness is signalled by the whistling that comes from its point(s) of rupture. (579)

Kafka seems to offer to Coetzee a powerful image of a narrating subject confronting its own limits of possibility, indeed, its own death. It is fitting that Foucault, in his essay "Language to Infinity," should refer to "The Burrow" when addressing the question of speaking to avoid death: it is "quite likely," Foucault argues, "that the approach of death—its sovereign gesture, its prominence within human memory—hollows out in the present and in existence the void toward which and from which we speak" (53). The reflexive moment in narrative, Foucault goes on to say, is a kind of "wound," for the process of doubling back is really an attempt on the part of writing to postpone death, to "conceal, that is, betray the relationship that language establishes with death—with this limit to which language addresses itself and against which it is poised" (57). Coetzee's muted affirmation of textual freedom, his attempt to produce the narratological equivalent of deconstruction's gesture of erasure, gains force from this description because we are able to see it in its sociocultural light. Kafka's creature in "The Burrow" is sustained by a similar urgency: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's description of Kafka as producing a "minor" literature, which involves writing in German, in Prague, and as a Jew, clarifies the connection: Kafka's

narrative drive, in which "expression precedes content" (41), is a form of defense and resistance to entrapment.^[5]

The closing lines of Michael K neatly illustrate these observations. Seeing himself returning to the farm, and finding the water pump blown up by the army, K imagines obtaining water:

He, Michael K, would produce a teaspoon from his pocket, a teaspoon and a long roll of string. He would clear the rubble from the mouth of the shaft, he would bend the handle of the teaspoon in a loop and tie the string to it, he would lower it down the shaft deep into the earth, and when he brought it up there would be water in the bowl of the spoon; and in that way, he would say, one can live. (250)

Michael K presents us, finally, with an image of resistance in the open-endedness of writing, and it chooses as its field of operation not the transcendental framework of the making or unmaking of history but the social exchange of literature within a particular cultural context. The marginal freedom—what Foucault calls the "virtual space" ("Language to Infinity" 55)—of textuality, a freedom that can be celebrated only in proportion as it is seen to be historically constrained, is held up and circulated by the novel within a heavily politicized culture as a quality deserving more than casual acknowledgment.

Figures of Authority

It is not surprising that Coetzee, having explored the social meaning of textuality, should subject the authority of textualization to such careful scrutiny in his next novel, Foe (1986). The later work represents a withdrawal from the achievement of Michael K to examine the historical and discursive conditions under which white South African authorship must operate—a typically cautious gesture of qualification on Coetzee's part. It might be said that this very skepticism, and the fictional forms that Coetzee finds to elaborate it in Foe, serve only to reinforce the freedom of textualization embodied in Michael K. There would be some truth in this observation; however, it seems more appropriate simply to ask whether Coetzee is able to balance the claim of freedom with an equally rigorous acknowledgment of constraint. I read Foe with this question in mind: How does Coetzee define the limits of whatever textual authority he is able to achieve?

Coetzee positions Foe in the discursive field of postcoloniality, but he does so in peculiarly South African terms. Based on a revision of

Robinson Crusoe, the novel develops a characterology of the relations of power between the metropolitan center and the settler-colonial and native sectors of colonial society. Returning from Bahia, where she has been searching for a lost daughter, Susan Barton is put off the ship after a mutiny; she is accompanied only by the dead body of the captain, whose mistress she had been. She swims ashore and finds herself on the island with Cruso and Friday. Friday has been mutilated: he has no tongue. Who did this, when or how it happened, we are never told. After their rescue by a passing merchantman, Cruso dies aboard ship and Susan and Friday are left to make their way in England.

After she arrives in England, Susan drafts a memoir, "The Female Castaway," and seeks out the author, Foe, to have her story told. Coetzee's novel comprises four parts: beginning with Susan's memoir, it continues in a series of letters addressed to Foe, letters that do not reach him because he is evading his creditors; it proceeds to an account of Susan's relationship with Foe and her struggle to retain control over her story and its meaning; and it ends with a sequence spoken by an unnamed narrator (possibly standing for Coetzee himself) who revises the history as we know it and dissolves the narration in an act of authorial renunciation. Throughout the novel, Friday's silent and enigmatic presence gains in power until it overwhelms the narrator at the end. As Ina Gräbe succinctly puts it, in paying more attention to the telling of the story than the story itself, the novel clearly participates in postmodernism's favoring of the signifier over the signified (147–48).

Although I support Gräbe's view, I also intend to show that in this case the signifier itself is localized in allusive ways in order to make this story of storytelling responsive to the conditions that writers like Coetzee are forced to confront. To appreciate the scope of Coetzee's allegory—and this novel seems more consistently allegorical than the preceding ones—we might invoke the legacy of Olive Schreiner. As Stephen Gray has shown in his classic description of the liberal-realist tradition, Schreiner's Story of an African Farm (1883) is written in a genre of antipastoralism that leaves to later writers a particularly focused account of the intransigence of the interior landscape, the stultifying effects of colonial culture, and the futility of attempts to live meaningfully in South Africa (Gray 150–54). Transcendence of these conditions is impossible, and death comes as a final defeat. Such is the fate of Lyndall, the novel's hero; in Waldo, Schreiner creates a figure of Emersonian wishfulness whose dying moments simultaneously confirm the prevailing conditions and surmount them in a rare moment of lyrical

absorption into Nature. Schreiner's novel offers an interesting pairing partly because of the intriguing possibility that Michael K is Coetzee's Waldo: although Waldo perishes and K survives, they are both little men of the earth who do not fully inhabit their history. More important, though, I turn to Schreiner because in Foe Coetzee finds the means to fictionalize the watchful presence that can be seen—from a symptomatic perspective—standing behind such limited affirmations as there are in the tradition. Consider Schreiner, preparing for Waldo's ambiguous death:

Waldo was at work in the wagon-house again. He was making a kitchentable for Em. As the long curls gathered in heaps before his plane, he paused for an instant now and again to throw one down to a small naked nigger, who had crept from its mother, who stood churning in the sunshine, and had crawled into the wagon-house. From time to time the little animal lifted its fat hand as it expected a fresh shower of curls; till Doss, jealous of his master's noticing any other small creature but himself, would catch the curl in his mouth and roll the little Kaffir over in the sawdust, much to that small animal's contentment… Waldo, as he worked, glanced down at them now and then, and smiled; but he never looked out across the plain. He was conscious without looking of that broad green earth; it made his work pleasant to him. Near the shadow at the gable the mother of the little nigger stood churning. Slowly she raised and let fall the stick in her hands, murmuring to herself a sleepy chant such as her people love; it sounded like the humming of far-off bees. (273)

By the end of the century, of course, Schreiner was to confront the question of race directly, notably in her indictment of colonial violence in Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, but this moment in African Farm defines the structural limitations that white writers have had to deal with from Schreiner on. The mother's chant, blending into the circumambient lyricism of the landscape "like the humming of far-off bees," will, in Coetzee, become the silence of Friday, which "passesthrough the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth"(Foe 157).

Schreiner is taken to represent a turning away from a colonial literature of exploration and adventure to a critical acceptance of the South African locale (Gray 136). In the famous preface to the second edition, she herself enjoins her reader to see African Farm in this light: "Should one sit down to paint the scenes among which he has grown, he will find that the facts creep in upon him" (24). Although Magda, in In the Heart

of the Country, has prepared the way in Coetzee's own oeuvre, Susan Barton's arrival on Cruso's island can be taken to represent Schreiner's moment: it implies the division of a previously monolithic colonizing subject and the emergence of a dialogic structure within what is now settler-colonial culture. Like Schreiner, Susan resists making an adventure out of the story of the island (Foe 67). Through Schreiner, moreover, this transition in South African literary history was gendered; indeed, one can argue that gender made it possible. Susan Barton's narrative replicates this feminist self-affirmation, specifically by taking the island conditions of Robinson Crusoe and overlaying them with the narrative of Defoe's Roxana, whose picaresque feminine hero's real name is, of course, Susan.

The image of a beleaguered, hopeful Susan Barton—in her struggle to get her story told and in her relationship with Foe, author and agent of authorization—is strongly reminiscent of Schreiner's situation in London in 1881–82, when she was looking for a publisher for African Farm. This resemblance is especially strong in Schreiner's account of walking in the rain in Regent Street, feeling that "everyone could know that what was stuck under my cloak was a rejected ms." (Rive 8). One of the paradoxes that Schreiner lived out was that, although she had made her break with the colonial adventure, it was nevertheless in the metropolis that she had to seek publication. Her situation with respect to the metropolis was one of both distance and proximity. Such is Susan Barton's lot, too: she protects her version of the island but needs Foe to authorize it, to provide access to tradition and the institution of letters.

For Susan, however, the relationship with Foe is such that the authority of literariness recedes infinitely before her, confirming her marginality and lack of completion; the novel's title therefore gives prominence to Susan's anxiety about having her reality, what she frequently calls her "substantiality," confirmed in narrative discourse. Foe is her watchful confessor, imaged more than once as a dark spider (48, 120). Teresa Dovey's thesis concerning the Lacanian associations of Coetzee's fiction seems to have a particular relevance here; but as Dovey has also shown, Foe dramatizes the Foucauldian notion of the "author-function" as a regulatory principle (Novels of J. M. Coetzee 333–34). Coetzee exploits the concept of the "fathering" of prose narrative through a parody of one of its "founders," Daniel Defoe. Annamaria Carusi has taken this process further in a materialist-psychoanalytic analysis of the novel as an allegory of narrative as a form of commodity in which a chain of association is created between notions of truth, the body, and story, to

be installed and circulated as Law ("Foe " 137–39). The changes Coetzee makes to the original patronyms would seem to confirm the direction of these readings: Defoe's historical name was, of course, Foe before he gentrified it (Dottin 65); similarly, Coetzee reverts to "Cruso,"the name of Defoe's long-standing friend Timothy Cruso, a dissenting minister who seems to have provided the name of Defoe's adventurer (T. Wright 243). In both instances Coetzee sheds a "preliterary" light on his protagonists in order to place the transformations of the "literary" in question.

Coetzee's Cruso is unmoved by Susan's desire for authorization. In fact, in his taciturn resistance and self-absorption, his refusal to keep a journal, his reluctance to do anything to save himself, he is quite unlike his model (being closer, if anything, to Defoe's model, Alexander Selkirk).^[6] Susan reflects: "Cruso rescued will be a deep disappointment to the world; the idea of a Cruso on his island is a better thing than the true Cruso tight-lipped and sullen in an alien England" (35). Coetzee's differentiation of Defoe's narrative according to South African conditions really begins here, rather than with Susan, for Afrikaners began turning their backs on Europe at approximately the time Defoe was writing, entering the interior of the Western Cape as pastoralists in unequal competition with the Khoisan, against the wishes of the Dutch East India Company. The second narrrative of Dusklands tells this story in terms of violence, but it is equally possible to tell it as a story of entrapment: not only is there a spatial entrapment for which an island in the Atlantic might serve as a suitable metaphor, but there is also a temporal and cultural entrapment in a time before the Enlightenment.

Coetzee brings these threads together in an image of seemingly futile labor: Cruso's terraces are enigmatic, but their principal function is that they provide work for Cruso and the enslaved Friday. Two cultural injunctions from the colonial past are invoked here. The first is Calvinism, which enjoins its adherents to labor on the road to perfection; an echo of Calvinism is found in Cruso's comment "I ask you to remember, not every man who bears the mark of the castaway is a castaway at heart" (33). The second injunction is linked to pastoralism, in which the land "is humanized when inscribed by hand and plough" (White Writing 7). This is a pastoralism of settlement rather than ownership. As Cruso says: "The planting is reserved for those who come after us and have the foresight to bring seed. I only clear the ground for them. Clearing ground and piling stones is little enough, but it is better than sitting in idleness" (33). Finally, Cruso's love of emptiness in the seascape and his irritation at being disturbed from his reverie (38) parallel

Coetzee's description in his Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech of the "failure of love" in South Africa, that is, the settler's love of the land and landscape at the expense of the polity ("Apartheid" 124).

Friday's differentiation within the South African situation is equally specific. As Coetzee himself has noted, in Robinson Crusoe "Friday is a handsome Carib youth with near-European features. In Foe he is an African" ("Two Interviews" 463). "The man squatted down beside me," says Susan, "He was black: a Negro with a head of fuzzy wool, naked save for a pair of rough drawers. I lifted myself and studied the flat face, the small dull eyes, the broad nose, the thick lips, the skin not black but dark grey, dry as if coated with dust" (5–6). Friday's contextualization is most clearly rendered, however, in his mutilation and lack of speech. This seems to be Coetzee's unique, and uniquely South African, contribution to the tradition of Robinsonades spawned by Defoe.^[7] In his review of the novel Neville Alexander, a theorist of the national question and a linguist who spent many years on Robben Island, argues that the pertinence of Friday to black history is not in question: "The apparent inaccessibility of Friday's world to the Europeans in this story is an artist's devastating judgement of the crippling anti-humanist consequences of colonialism and racism on the self-confident white world" (38).

Collectively, therefore, Coetzee's protagonists represent the ambiguous condition of postcoloniality that South Africa inhabits. What distinguishes white South African literature from other "postcolonizing" literatures is not only that white South African literature is linguistically diverse but that the territorial capture underpinning it was always less complete; the consequence is a form of postcoloniality that, to the extent that it is critical, stands under an ethical and political injunction always to defer to the authority of an emergent nationalist resistance that will inaugurate the age of postcoloniality proper. When such a moment will arrive, and, indeed, whether such a moment will "arrive," what political form it might take, and whether there is a unitary voice that can be taken to model the nationalist alternative—these are all valid questions. Coetzee's approach to such issues, however, in the figure of Friday, is cautious: preferring not to presume too much, Coetzee allows the representation of Friday to be shaped by the obvious political and epistemological limitations of colonial discourse, a position from which even the critical, self-consciously marginal, and feminist colonial discourse represented by Susan cannot entirely escape. In other words, in Friday's silence Coetzee acknowledges where he stands while simultaneously

fictionalizing the transformative power that threatens, or promises, to eclipse the voices of what we might call, for want of a better term, colonial postcolonialism.

Let me turn to Foe in more detail to demonstrate how its elements are set in motion. Susan's quest to get her story told begins as a desire for substantiality: "Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr Foe: that is my entreaty" (51). At this stage, her conception of Foe's power is that he can provide sufficient realistic detail to give her story the density of "truth." She tells herself that the word "story" means "a storing-place of memories" (59) and that language creates a "correspondence between things as they are and the pictures we have of them in our minds" (65). As she deepens herself in composing letters to Foe, however, she begins to find this version of truth to be unworkable. For one thing, her story lacks adventure, though she is also unwilling to invent episodes that did not happen. More seriously, she realizes that she does not know how to account for Friday's mutilation: "What we accept in life we cannot accept in history. To tell my story and be silent on Friday's tongue is no better than offering a book for sale with pages in it quietly left empty. Yet the only tongue that can tell Friday's secret is the tongue he has lost!" (67).

Later she reflects directly on the difficulties of writing stories, comparing it to Cruso's and Friday's labor on the terraces and speaking of it as requiring the power of divination, a power she lacks (87). She lists what she calls the "mysteries" of the island, a series of unresolved questions: What was the meaning of the terraces? How did Friday lose his tongue? Why did Friday submit to Cruso? Why did neither Cruso nor Friday desire her? What was the meaning of Friday's act of scattering petals on the water near the site where she imagines they were shipwrecked? Such questions remain unanswered. What we are witnessing in this sequence is Susan's increasing engrossment in language as resistant material; needless to say, even at this early stage of the process much of the intractability Susan feels can be ascribed to Friday's enigmatic presence.

But the appearance of a girl claiming to be Susan's daughter taxes her patience more than Friday at this point, and it is here that Coetzee introduces Roxana. Defoe's novel is the confessional narrative of a woman who achieves prosperity by living as a courtesan or, as she prefers to call herself, a "free woman"—a term that Susan Barton uses as well. Toward the end of the novel Defoe introduces the daughter, named Susan after her mother (whose identity as "Roxana" is thereby

undermined), as a reminder of the children Roxana deserted when her first husband left her and she set off on her path to fortune and independence. Roxana refuses to acknowledge the daughter, who is subsequently murdered in a misguided act of service by the servant, Amy. She repudiates Amy but lives on in torment, the condition that generates the confession. With the return of the daughter, therefore, as John J. Richetti points out, "the center of the narrative shifts from the controlled external world of financial and sexual relationships, from clothes, rich furniture, investments and titles, to the controlling internal world of memory and guilt" (118). Control is the key here: Roxana's desire to remain author of her life is superseded by her past catching up with her, which turns her story into a morally ironic drama of psychological destiny. Her identity as the girl's mother is the essential ingredient in this transition: in a phrase suggestive of Coetzee's concerns, Roxana calls it "the grand reserved article of all" (Roxana 319).

In Foe, Susan Barton's desire to control her destiny is sustained in her repudiation of the daughter as Foe's own invention. Unlike Roxana, the embrace of the mother and daughter produces no memorable bonding. The daughter figures as the point of dispute between Susan and Foe in their different versions of Susan's narrative and of the role of the island in it: to Foe, once Susan returns to England, the daughter successfully takes up the quest abandoned by the mother, thus producing a neatly resolved plot; this resolution traduces Susan's account, which preserves the centrality of the island and leaves the daughter forever lost. Which of these versions is ultimately the "truth" is unimportant; what matters is that a struggle for control over the narrative is staged between Foe and Susan and that Susan does not succumb. In fact, it is possible to measure Susan's success in several ways. When she explains to the "daughter" that she actually has no mother, that she is "father-born" (91), she is responding to Foe's imposition, asserting her will at the same level as Foe's, that is, at the level of invention or plot construction. When she and Foe couple, she mounts him as the Muse, both "goddess and begetter" of her story (126). That she manages to effect a reversal of gender roles on Foe is clear when, not long thereafter, Foe imagines himself as Susan's "old whore" and Susan savors the thought of having turned Foe into her "mistress" and, finally, her "wife" (152). (This moment recalls the transvestism of The Story of an African Farm, when Gregory Rose dresses as a woman in order to attend to Lyndall on her deathbed [252–65]; perhaps gender reversal represents a pattern of

limited victory in the colonial feminist's desire for authorization in South Africa.)

The question arises of whether Susan's assertions are enough to bring her the substantiality she longs for; in this respect, her very determination gives the game away. On the journey to Bristol, during the fruitless attempt to manumit Friday and return him to Africa, she discovers a dead baby in a ditch and asks, "Who was the child but I, in another life?" (105), as if at the core of her desire for self-representation she senses a lack that will always leave her incomplete, inchoate. She nevertheless pursues her project to the point of despair: "Now all my life grows to be story," she says to Foe, speaking of the daughter figure, "and there is nothing of my own left to me. I thought I was myself and this girl a creature from another order speaking words you made up for her. But now I am full of doubt. I am doubt itself" (133).

Critics have responded to the uncertainties in Susan's quest in interesting ways, two of which I shall mention here. When Susan asserts a counterstory to Foe's, she places the year on the island at the center. The problem, however, is that Friday cannot be incorporated into this story: his mutilation, his ritual of scattering petals on the water at the site where Susan assumes he was shipwrecked, his subjectivity—all are simply inaccessible to Susan. She says to Foe, "If the story seems stupid, that is only because it so doggedly holds its silence. The shadow whose lack you feel is there: it is the loss of Friday's tongue" (117). Dovey discusses this inconsistency in terms of the intersection between feminist and postcolonial discourses ("postcolonial" implying, in this case, anticolonial nationalism), arguing that Coetzee's purpose is to show how the more prominent forms of Western feminism have appropriated the colonized subject to their own ends, using the native Other as a convenient figure for feminine difference (Novels of J. M. Coetzee 356–66). Spivak notices not only that the gendered position is strained but that the novel strains to make it appear so; she then suggests, more positively, that Coetzee wishes to demonstrate "the impossibility of restoring the history of empire and recovering the lost text of mothering in the same register of language " ("Theory in the Margin" 162–65). (It seems possible, incidentally, to read Schreiner's life and career as partly an attempt to reconcile these differences.)

To these arguments one must add that the feminism Coetzee constructs through Susan carries additional allegorical burdens that have little to do with gender. In the allegory of white South African author-

ship, Susan's womanhood suggests the relative cultural power of the province as opposed to the metropolis and of unauthorized as opposed to authorized speech; gender therefore serves as the sign of the position of semimarginality that I have called colonial postcolonialism. In terms of the politics of agency, this is the position with which Coetzee identifies, and in an interview he has proved to be protective of this selfpositioning. When asked whether Foe's reflection on the book trade implied a critical retreat from the notion of being a "successful author," Coetzee responded with some asperity that the question was barbed, for it associated him with Foe whereas his sympathies in the novel were clearly with "Foe's foe, the un successful author—worse, authoress—Susan Barton" ("Two Interviews" 462). This comment can be taken as a measure of how gender is complicated through Susan, as the representative of a marginality that has more generalized implications.

Friday, History, Closure

Friday's inaccessibility, the "hole" in Susan's narrative (121), is the primary cause of her uncertainty, but this inaccessibility does not explain Friday's power. In the third and final sections of the novel Friday gains in stature as the site of a shimmering, indeterminate potency that has the power to overwhelm and cancel Susan's narrative and, finally, Coetzee's novel itself. How is this power achieved? The explanation seems related to the fact that Susan's story is partly confessional and that, as Coetzee argues in "Confession and Double Thoughts: Rousseau, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky" (1984), the problem repeatedly thrown up by confession is the problem of closure. Friday possesses the key to the closure of the narrative. The economy of confession, Coetzee argues in the essay, is such that its self-examination is potentially endless; the self-directed skepticism of confession produces a questioning of the confessant's own motives, so that resolutions to confession that rely solely on the achievement of "truth" through the confessant's own self-scrutiny, without the intervention of grace that brings renunciation, can be taken only as disingenuous. The confessant does not have the power to end the discourse but merely to abandon it. The problem is illustrated in Foe's account of the woman in Newgate prison who kept confessing and throwing doubt on her confession until the chaplain simply pronounced her shriven, despite her protestations, and left her. Foe's moral is that "there comes a time when we must give reckoning of ourselves to the world, and then forever hold our peace," but Susan's

deduction, which is nearer the mark, is that "he has the last word who disposes over the greatest force" (124). Susan's story is one of sheer will, of insistence, which is forever locked in a struggle with the Foe of its own authorization, a story of endless elaboration; its few little victories are temporary, for the struggle must continually reconstitute itself. It is not, therefore, a story with an end; furthermore, it is a story in which Friday will always remain the silent, subverting Other. Foe shrewdly suggests to Susan that "as it was a slaver's stratagem to rob Friday of his tongue, may it not be a slaver's stratagem to hold him in subjection while we cavil over words in a dispute we know to be endless?" (150).

There are important connections between Friday and closure, notably Friday's dancing and the question of castration. In Roxana the daughter remembers her mother's moment of triumph, dancing alone for the amusement of guests in what is passed off as a Turkish performance. Recalling the event, the daughter destroys the mother's carefully preserved identity because it proves the daughter's identity and thereby Roxana's as well; thus, through the twist in the narrative the dance is first a means of securing Roxana's self-representation as Other, affirming her sexuality and social ascendancy, and then, as it is recalled by the daughter, the means of her undoing. In Foe Friday dances in Foe's scarlet robe, whirling around so that Susan can satisfy her curiosity about whether, in his mutilation, he was also castrated. What Susan sees, however, we do not know:

In the dance nothing was still and everything was still. The whirling robe was a scarlet bell settled upon Friday's shoulders and enclosing him; Friday was the dark pillar at its centre. What had been hidden from me was revealed. I saw; or, should I say, my eyes were open to what was present to them.

I saw and believed I had seen, though afterwards I remembered Thomas, who also saw, but could not be brought to believe till he had put his hand in the wound. (119–20)

Defoe grants Roxana Otherness to construct her gendered difference and then takes it away in an act of unveiling; Coetzee does not allow Susan to assume this authority. Whatever the condition might be of Friday's body, the state of his potency, Susan is not able to tell us, for she does not dispose over this power. More strictly, neither Susan's discourse nor the novel's can appropriate the image: "I do not know how these matters can be written of in a book," says Susan immediately afterwards, "unless they are covered up again in figures" (120). One might ask, what discourse could adequately represent Friday? The an-

swer Susan and Foe give, of course, is Friday's own discourse: "We must make Friday's silence speak, as well as the silence surrounding Friday," says Foe (142). Only in this way will they see into the "eye" of the island, the eye lying below the surface of the water at the site of the imagined wreck, and the eye, indeed, that watches over Susan and Foe as the silent guardian of the story. Because Friday is mute, they try teaching him to write, beginning with words that would seem to evoke the data of his own history and experience: "house," "ship," "Africa." (This incident has the additional effect of questioning the self-confident practice of transcribing oral histories.)

When Friday makes his own marks on the slate, however, he produces "eyes, open eyes, each set upon a human foot; row upon row of eyes upon feet: walking eyes" (147). Friday's writing inscribes his own watchfulness over Susan and Foe: it produces tokens of his position as the "wholly Other" (Spivak, "Theory in the Margin" 157). The foot is Friday's trademark, of course; it is the footprint of Robinson Crusoe and every Robinsonade; in this case, however, the body of Friday and Friday's silent gaze are conjoined.

Shortly afterward, Friday installs himself at Foe's desk, assuming the position of authorship. As he sits poised with a quill, Susan intervenes: "He will foul your papers," she protests, to which Foe replies, "My papers are foul enough, he can make them no worse" (151). What Friday writes are "rows and rows of the letter o tightly packed together. A second page lay at his elbow, fully written over, and it was the same." "It is a beginning," says Foe; "Tomorrow you must teach him a " (152). Friday is writing o, omega, the sign of the end, whereas Foe desires that he produce the assimilable story of himself, starting at the beginning with a, alpha.^[8] This scene follows Susan's acknowledgment that "we are all alive, we are all substantial, we are all in the same world," an observation that excluded Friday. In other words, Friday's power to close the discourse overrides even Susan's final, resigned acceptance that despite the incompleteness of her story, she shares with the daughter and with Foe a specific, historical materiality.

At this point we need to shift to the metafictional level. If Coetzee is able to dramatize Friday's power to override both Susan's desire for authorization and Foe's ability to grant it, is he not assuming control over such power, that is, appropriating it toward the goal of skeptical self-cancelling, of the self-representation of the consciously marginal writer? How does the ending of Foe deal with the possibility that the

novel itself might represent merely another attempt to make Friday speak in the name of interests that are not his own?

Such a conclusion would be feasible were it not for Foe's brief final section, part 4, a metafictional excursus that takes this problem into account. The question turns on appropriation, once again, as it did in Michael K: Coetzee's problem is to find a suitable reflexive vehicle for distancing himself from the appropriative gesture. The narrative structure thus far consists of four sections arranged in such a way that gradually Susan speaks "in her own voice." Beginning with "The Female Castaway" (part 1), cited as a communication to Foe, the novel becomes explicitly epistolary with Susan continuing to write to Foe about her story (part 2); in part 3 there are no quotation marks because Susan has taken up her own narrative, turning it into an account of the relationship with Foe. In part 4 an unnamed narrator appears whose addressee is not specified: in other words, we are now in the realm of narration per se, and the addressee is simply the reader, the one who holds the book. This moment represents the last phase of the gradual process of "getting behind" the voice of narration that is staged from beginning to end.

The unnamed narrator enters Foe's house twice, producing two encounters with the scene of authorship. In the first sequence he passes the daughter on the landing; Susan and Foe lie side by side in bed; all three are dead. He finds Friday alive, feels a faint pulse, parts the teeth, and listens: he hears "the faintest faraway roar," "like the roar of waves in a seashell." "From his mouth, without a breath, issue the sounds of the island" (154). The history that Susan was unable to tell is there; the story of the island is still Friday's possession. Coetzee is careful, therefore, not to disqualify Friday from having a history, even though the emphasis falls on the silence that Friday keeps within the context of those authorized to speak. This does not mean, obviously, that the novel can represent Friday's history; it simply means that Friday is acknowledged to have one.

In the second sequence the narrator sees a plaque on the wall declaring unambiguously, "Daniel Defoe, Author. " We are now in the realm of the literary history we knew before the appearance of Foe. What does the narrator find? He finds the three protagonists, again dead, though on this occasion Susan and Foe lie in a casual embrace—signifying, perhaps, the de facto, unspoken collusion of the male tradition with its unauthorized female counterpart, as seen from this, the colonial-

postcolonial perspective. The fact that Friday now has a scar on his neck, "like a necklace, left by a rope or chain" (155), unobserved before in the novel, would seem to confirm this reading. The narrator finds the dispatch box into which Susan has been depositing her writings, opens it, reads the documents, and enters the "The Female Castaway" where Susan had begun: "With a sigh, barely making a splash, I slip overboard" (155). This time, however, he goes straight to the "eye" of the story, the site of mysterious power in the sea over which Friday scattered his petals. (Susan spoke of storytelling as divination: here the narrator proposes to divine the source of Friday's power.) Pulling himself down underwater on trunks of seaweed, he locates the wreck and moves through it, finding on the way the remains of unfinished stories by Defoe, remains like the mud of Flanders, "in which generations of grenadiers now lie dead, trampled in the postures of sleep" (156). Eventually he finds Susan and, not Foe, but the ship's captain, "fat as pigs in their white nightclothes," floating against the roof (157). Susan's narrative and all that develops from it lie buried here: the story of Susan, Cruso, and Friday has never been written. The narrator continues searching and finds Friday, the symptomatic presence of all colonial narratives, seemingly dead but in fact not dead, outliving the stories that might or might not include him:

I tug his woolly hair, finger the chain about his throat. "Friday," I say, I try to say, kneeling over him, sinking hands and knees into the ooze, "what is this ship?"

But this is not a place for words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday. (157)

Friday's home is the body: his existence is a facticity that simply asserts its own priorities. The trials of marginal authorship are irrelevant to Friday. This ending amounts to a deferral of authority to the body of history, to the political world in which the voice of the body politic of the future resides. The final image is an act of renunciation before the overwhelming authority, the force, of the body politic now emergent in history:

His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and

cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face. (157)

To be true to its purposes, and to its carefully positioned political deference, Foe cannot name this force as "nationalism," as "anticolonial" rather than "colonial" postcolonialism, or provide any such formulation; strictly speaking, the novel must end with an act that Annamaria Carusi correctly calls "neutralization." Carusi explains: "Where a body has no possibility of splitting off into a representation…where there is no possibility…of grasping it within a subjectobject relation, and therefore of signifying it by means of a signifying and signified unit…that body is totally outside of our intelligibility: it is for us, nothing other than the void of death" ("Foe " 142). Foe ends, in other words, with an image in which the absolute limits of its own powers of authorization and signification are defined.