An Examination of the ‘camps’ and the ‘pumpkins’ in The Life and Times of Michael K
As a post-colonial literary text, The Life and Times of Michael K problematize the concepts of freedom, oppression, and power through the narration of the fate of an outcast protagonist in times of civil war and apartheid. In his examination of colonialization and the experience of the colonized, Coetzee integrates the concepts of “pumpkins” and “camps” to the narration as symbolical elements pointing to two certain modes of existence: liberation and oppression. Significantly, by not giving an exact historical and political setting Coetzee is at pains to enable a more extensive reading of the story that is not limited to K’s individuality (Magdum). Hence, arguably it is not the specific times or the life of K that is of utmost importance, but rather the underlying characteristic of his times- the colonizing, exploiting, subjugating mindset, and the experience of the oppressed individual in the face of these. Within the framework of the novel, the act of colonizing can be simply defined as “all exercises of power by the powerful over the powerless”(Parla). Given this context, Coetzee demonstrates the “life” and the “self” of the innocent individual to be constantly interrupted by the forces of war.
At its core, says Cynthia Ozick, the novel’s theme is the “wild and merciless power of inanity ” and indeed, the various forces that exercise hegemony over K- whether it is the soldiers who crush his garden, the bandits who destroy the crops, a group of vagrants who “help” him- all boil down to one thing, reducing K to a state of an “object” (Coetzee, 151) through oppression, charity or injustice, and by establishing a sovereign self [1]. Within this context, Coetzee suggests the cultivation of the pumpkins as an act of free will that stands against the confining and enslaving work system of the camps, a word almost used as a metonym for the war itself in the novel. Hence, these two modes of existence, liberation and oppression are characterized by two acts, significantly both being related to earth: gardening and colonizing.
In the novel, pumpkins are remarkable in being a wholesome positive image within the tyrannical setting of the colonial war, in that it is an outcome of a process that is entirely free: while on the one hand, the earth on which K cultivates exists “nowhere and everywhere except in the camps” (141) and are, in K’s words, belong to God and therefore to no one and everyone simultaneously; and on the other, the act of cultivation is done by and for himself only. The fruit of this process is, therefore, the “bread of freedom” (116) -both a result of a free act and a creator of the freedom [2]. The pumpkins are what provide K the things he lacked throughout his life: both the physical and the spiritual nourishment that his mother failed to give him (since, just as he couldn’t suck her breast milk, he also couldn’t get her love and compassion as a disfigured child), as well as the autonomy and subjectivity that was taken from him.
Within the textuality of the novel, the camps, with wired fences and guards, are the representatives of the merciless power of the powerful, extensions of the tyrannical control mechanisms that made K “committed to protection” (7) starting from his childhood in Huis Norenius, and where all the “nuisances” are united in a totalization and rendered useful to the very system that oppresses them- the narrator voices this exploitation: “Eat, build up your strength so that you can exhaust it again obeying us” (130). Significantly, K links the camps with the orphanage “it is like going back to childhood […] it is like a nightmare” (63) and sees the orphanage as his father, that asserts discipline “my father was Huis Norenius. My father was the list of rules on the door of the dormitory, the twenty-one rules” (84) and thus views them in continuation as places that control his existence and demand obedience. Accordingly, against this paternal world of the oppressors, K puts nature that is compassionate and maternal. Just like he returns his mother to earth, he too returns to mother earth. That’s why the relationship that K establishes with the pumpkins is one that is described in terms of maternal love: he sees himself connected to earth with “a cord of tenderness” (55), he “miscarries” the first pumpkins on the farm in Prince Albert, cares them as his “children” (90) and with the “firstborn” (91) of them he feels an immense gratification and hope, which is most remarkably reflected by the poetic language of Coetzee. In contrast to the dehumanization and marginalization ideology of the camps, the pumpkins, as symbols of freedom, generate humane values. When the soldiers take his pumpkins, K remarks: “What grows is for all of us. We are all the children of the earth” (110). K refuses to be a part of the colonial history of the powerful (this finds expression in the constant calls of the actors of the paternal system to Michael: “Why can’t you co-operate?” (116), “I need your co-operation” (54), “You must co-operate.” (110)) and among the cruelty of the camps and the systems of oppression that it perpetuates, among the curfews, papers, permits, barb wires, police, and guns Michael tries to be a “tender of the soil” (91), to live by his own labor and simply remarks: “I am not in the war” (177).
Coetzee highlights how the “life” and “times” of K are interrelated but yet come to be separate phenomenons. By immersing himself in his garden that K is able to live almost in another dimension of reality: not only he forgets the hardships and turmoils caused by war but even the perception of time changes completely. Instead of adhering to the time of humans who cause war, of history, he exists within the harmonious and cyclic time of nature “he was living beyond the reach of calendar and clock in a blessedly neglected corner, half awake, half asleep” (93, italics mine). He does not belong to the camps, to which is constantly pulled back. Indeed, the narrator remarks that Michael’s stay in the camp to be an “allegory […] of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it” (132). Similarly, quite often the figures of authority force K to speak and to give himself “substance” through talking (111), and this is exactly what K avoids doing. With Michael’s silence, Coetzee underscores that there can only be a dialogue between equals. Remarkably, it is only through gardening that K is able to ascribe identity and subjectivity to himself, and importantly, make sense of himself. His “substance” comes from his pumpkin patch: “the truth, the truth about me. ‘I am a gardener” he says, “its in my nature ” (143). The garden that gives the “food of life” (132), then, also produces meaning and a sense of self, which is in contrast to the senseless and alienating toil of the camps, as works of slavery. Therefore, as the only constructive and productive act that can be seen in the novel, pumpkins begets hope, love, and life “he permitted the hope to grow up again in his breast that all would be well” (91). Synecdochically, they stand for a mode of existence that is in opposition to that imposed by colonialism and signify, in excess of themselves, the need for salvation from the forms of social oppression.
Furthermore, it is not only from the viewpoint of the colonized that Coetzee problematizes the inanity of oppression but also from the perspective of a character who is a part of this colonizing system. The epiphanic writings of the anonymous rehabilitation camp doctor demonstrate his disillusionment in his times and his role within it after knowing K: bitterly, he realizes that he wasted his life by waiting for the war to end (quite ironically, by also being a part of that very war that he waits for its ending) and that he gave himself up a “prisoner” to history (125). This mode of existence, the narrator explains, is a state of suspension, of being “alive but not alive” (126). And indeed, this is also the voice of the writer, who set out to show that K, who left the city to escape the totalitarianism, who kept quiet in order to be ignored by the oppressors, and who wrapped himself in the process of his garden manages to live, but truly live, while the ones that are part of the war, part of the camps did not, as they made themselves turned into nothing but gears of the “Grand Design” (126) and thus survived, but not lived, within the “time of waiting, camp time, war time” (126) at the expense of their individual time, that is, their life. But K, the narrator says is “another of those too busy, too stupid, too absorbed to listen to the wheels of history” (126), who, rather immersed himself in his pumpkin patch.
Towards the end of the novel, the doctor-narrator’s remark ‘Let me tell you the meaning of the sacred and alluring garden that blooms in the heart of the desert and produces the food of life. The garden for which you are presently heading is nowhere and everywhere except in the camps” (132) is perhaps key to the relationship of the camps and the pumpkins. With this remark, the significance and the meaning of the pumpkin patch enlarge and come to signify, arguably, any type of existence that begets freedom and hope and that opposes forms of subjugation and exploitation. The “garden” that gave K freedom, is in fact what exists beyond the rules and laws of oppression and is indeed presented as an attempt of an answer to the plight of the colonized, within a larger context.
Lastly, Coetzee, by voicing such humanistic ideals through the simple-minded and the slowwitted protagonist, suggests these values to be inherent and fundamental to human existence and thus exposes the means by which the powerful subjugate the other, in a quite striking way. Ozick writes “to the outcast, the stray, the simpleton, the unsuspecting — to the innocent — the ideologies that order society are inane, incomprehensible. To the innocent, comprehension comes unaccoutered, stripped, uninstructed ”. Similarly, to Michael K, the laws and logic of society are inherently inconceivable “Why have I got to work here?” (37), “Why have I been sent here?’, ‘How long do I have to stay?’ (62) he asks in the camps he’s been sent to. As a simpleton, K “merely knows what he knows” (Ozick) and that in times like this it is “better to bury [onself] in the bowels of the earth than become a creature of theirs” (86).
[1] The repeated simile used for K, “stone” or “pebble”, is thus supportive of this reduction in that it points to his state as being “tossed randomly from hand to hand” (107). But the insightful likening of K to stone is remarkable for another quality of it, its hardness. Because among these “hands” K is able to exist and pass them untouched. K accomplishes this for the most part by negation, but also, and more importantly, by exercising free will to construct his identity and life outside of historical and social forces through gardening.
[2] Gardening is the only act that K does by and for himself. And it is only by growing and eating the food of 5 his own labor that he feels free. “He was not a prisoner or a castaway, his life by the dam was not a sentence that he had to serve out.” (92).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bidre, Magdum. “A Postcolonial Analysis of J. M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K”. International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts. 3 March 2021. https://www.ijcrt.org/papers/ IJCRT2103718.pdf
Coetzee, J. M. The Life and Times of Michael K. Penguin Books. New York, 1985.
Ozick, Cynthia. “A Tale of Heroic Anonymity”. The New York Times. https://archive.nytimes.com/ www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/coetzee-michael.html
Parla, Jale. Lecture Notes. “Typologies of the Novel II: 20th Century”. Bilgi University. 2021.
