for emily mitchell

JM Coetzee is a terrifying writer. The most terrible thing to contemplate is man's complete reduction to a state of nature. More terrible still is the idea that human beings create the very conditions by which the only honorable thing to do is to cancel oneself, to crawl back into nature, to reduce everything to animal rhythms in the face of barbarism. Coetzee's novel, Life And Times of Michael K is about just such a reduction. The background is of war and the dissolution of human institutions. The foreground is Michael K, who strives for something so utterly simple in the face of these dissolutions that he ultimately strives to become a wraith, a thing that is barely noticed in the comings and goings of things.

Czeslaw Milosz once wrote that:

I am thus frankly pessimistic in appraising life, for it is chiefly composed of pain and the fear of death, and it seems to me that a man who has succeeded in living a day without physical suffering should consider himself pretty happy.

If there is an epigram for Coetzee's Michael K., that would be it. Michael K decides to take his mother back to her rural homeland in South Africa. There is a war. He modifies a wheel barrow to carry her. She's sick. She dies in the wheel barrow. Michael K loses all his things. He finds the rural area his mother was from. There is nothing there. He reduces himself to nothing as compensation. Coetzee writes,

The days passes and nothing happened. The sun shone, the birds skipped from bush to bush, the great silence reverberated from horizon to horizon, and K's confidence came back. He spent a whole day lying under cover watching the farmhouse, while the sun moved in an arc from left to right and the shadows moved across the stoep from right to left. . . . All was silence.

It is hard not to relate Coetzee's Michael K. to Kafka's K. Actually, they are the same man, or at least different species of the same genus. But whereas Kafka's K. drifts through a world of institutions whose meaning and purport is no longer in contact with actual human lives, Coetzee's K. is in flight from the human altogether.

In the second section of Life and Times of Michael K, Michael K ends up in a hospital where a doctor struggles to understand his situation. The impenetrability of K. haunts him, tortures his understanding. The doctor says,

This sense of gathering meaning is not something like a ray that I project to bathe this or that bed, or a robe in which I wrap this or that patient according to whim. Michaels means something and the meaning he has is not private to me. If I were, if the origin of this meaning were, no more than a lack in myself, a lack, say, of something to believe in, since we all know how difficult it is to satisfy a hunger for belief with the vision of times to come that the war, to say nothing of the camps, presents us with, if it were a mere craving for meaning that sent me to Michaels and his story, 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 retiring to the toilets behind the jockey's changing-rooms and locking myself into the last cubicle and putting a bullet in my head.

As the doctor speaks these thoughts to himself, he imagines Michael K simply running away, running as fast as he can with nothing to say. The Doctor, in his imagination, yells after Michael K as he runs. He yells, "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 a residence in a system without becoming a term in it."

It's a ballsy thing to do but Coetzee is making fun of meaning here. He has the audacity to scoff in the face of meaning. Look at how inadequate it is, he says, how pitiful. The origin of meaning maybe is simply a lack and a projection he seems to say. It doesn't match up to the simple reality of Michael K and his skin-and-bones and crumpled lip. It never will.

The sentences immediately following those quoted above from Milosz read thusly:

The Prince of This World is also the Prince of Lies and the Prince of Darkness. The old Iranian myths about the struggle of Darkness with Life, Ahriman against Ormazd, suit me perfectly. What, then, is light? The divine in man turning against the natural in him--in other words, intelligence dissenting from 'meaninglessness', searching for meaning, grafted onto darkness like a noble shoot onto a wild tree, growing greater and stronger only in and through man.

Michael K's response to this is devastating to the degree in which it simply slips away from the question altogether. It runs away from Milosz and the light. This is the last paragraph from Coetzee's book.

And if the old man climbed out of the cart and stretched himself (things were gathering pace now) and looked where the pump had been that the soldiers had blown up so that nothing should be left standing, and complained, saying, 'What are we going to do about 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.

- posted by morgan @ 4:37 PM

 
Ever since Herodotus and Thucydides there has been debate about the nature of historical writing. Herodotus gets credit as the Father of History, but also as the Father of Lies. The problem is one of methodology and science. For Herodotus, the distinction between tales and true accounts was a loose one. He was less interested, often, in verifying fact and removing fiction than he was in getting stories. Still, he attempted to weave those stories together in the name of understanding, understanding of people and the way they behave and have behaved in the past.

Thucydides, by contrast, was much more interested in the difference between fact and fiction. He was more concerned to establish something of a methodology for historical writing. Near the beginning of his History of The Peloponnesian War, he writes:

The absence of an element of romance in my account of what happened, may well make it less attractive to hear, but all who want to attain a clear point of view of the past, and also of like or nearly like events which, human nature being what is, will probably occur in the future-- if these people consider my work useful, I shall be content. It is written to be a possession of lasting value, not a work competing for an immediate hearing.

All of this is to preface the fact that I've been reading Robert Caro's multi-volume history of Lyndon Johnson. It is an extraordinary work and I've been trying to make some sense of why it is so good. It is, of course, roundly recognized as a masterpiece, as is Caro's earlier biography of Robert Moses. Caro's painstaking scholarship has been noted. Years, decades, go into producing each book. He becomes an absolute master of the material at hand. Indeed, he has given his life to these brilliant books. Finishing the Johnson biography is, literally, killing him.

That is what I would call the Thucydidean side of Caro's labors. He is desperate to get it right. The lengths in which he went in order to find out the details of Johnson's stolen election against Coke Stevenson, for instance, are of a man possessed with having more facts at his disposal than anyone else. These labors cannot be explained except as those of man who carries with him an exacting sense of truth. There is no question that Caro believes that history and truth are deeply related. He believes that history gives us access to truth and that the quest for truth must guide historical writing.

But that is also exactly the place where a Herodotean impulse creeps into Caro's historical venture. Like any good historian, Thucydides included, Caro understands that historical writing is some important part art. There is a kind of historical art that takes up and transforms facts and research. It is not just good writing, it isn't simply a feel for narrative. It is hard to know exactly what it is. It's a practice.

At certain points in Caro's biography you believe that you understand something about being an American that you didn't understand before. And they aren't simple things, they are as complicated as the career of Johnson himself; an idealist, pragmatist, monster, and genius all in one. But you get hold of those whisps of American identity as the story unfolds. They move out of the abstract and they become as real as the Hill country that spat Lyndon Johnson out into the world. When Caro writes about the electrification program Johnson oversaw you want to cry it is so real a transformation of human lives. When Johnson betrays Sam Rayburn you want to crawl away and die, because you know that American (human) greatness and American (human) smallness are being written and replayed here and that the consequences are our very own lives.

Anyway, it is a truly great accomplishment. And in a strange way, reading it is both an act of pleasure and an act of citizenship, as I think reading Herodotus and Thucydides were, and still are.
- posted by morgan @ 8:19 PM