The Secret Life of Stories

by Bérubé, Michael;

  This is not merely a technical question, a puzzle for narrative strategy. It informs every aspect of the life and times of Michael K, and Life and Times of Michael K. There are moments when Michael adopts what Blakey Vermeule calls “strategic mindblindness,” hoping that if he looks “very stupid” (40), he will be exempted from scrutiny at the checkpoints; there are moments when his appearance becomes the basis for charity, as when “the Vrouevereniging ladies, perhaps because he was so thin, perhaps because they had decided he was simple, regularly allowed him to clean the soup-bucket: three time a week this made up his meal” (84), and when the doctor in part 2 decides to try to protect him from the worst of what the camps entail. Only when the doctor takes over the narrative do we learn that Michael’s harelip produces a noticeable speech defect, that “he would find it easier to get along if he could talk like everyone else” (131); until then, we are invited to assume that his appearance alone is the basis for how other characters interact with him. “See if he’s got a tongue,” says one officer (no doubt anticipating the central enigma of Coetzee’s next novel, Foe, which I will discuss in chapter 3); “see if he is such an idiot as he looks” (122). For every other character in the book, Michael K simply is his facial appearance—“how could I forget a face like that?” asks Captain Oosthuizen of Jakkalsdrif—and his facial appearance signifies intellectual disability. There is nothing else one needs to know, and even when the narrative gives us access to what interiority Michael K may be said to possess, we find that his mind is a blank: “There is nothing there, I’m telling you,” says the doctor to Noël, the camp director, “and if you handed him over to the police they would come to the same conclusion: there is nothing there, no story of the slightest interest to rational people” (142).

  It is worth asking, then, why we are bothering to read about the life and times of Michael K in the first place. If indeed his existence is summed up by his disability, then we could have stopped after the first four or five paragraphs: after we learn that his mind is not quick, we proceed to learn that his mind is often a blank. That is not a story. And yet Michael’s storylessness is itself narratable, and that dynamic, too, has implications both for narrative technique and for plot. Michael is a challenge for a novelist who wants to employ free indirect discourse or any other device for revealing a character’s interiority, as the novel openly acknowledges: “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” (110). That gap structures the text, beginning with the gap that defines Michael’s facial features and extending to the gap that is part 2, the hole in Michael’s story that is filled by the doctor’s narrative of Michael K.15 But he is also a challenge to the authorities who apprehend him (in at least two senses of “apprehend”): because he cannot tell a coherent story of his own, one will be supplied to him, and (with one exception) this will never be a benevolent exercise. “Tell me your story,” demands the officer who apprehends him in his garden at the Visagie house (122), and this is not an invitation for Michael to sit for a spell and relate his life and times. This is an order, issued by someone who is convinced that Michael K is aiding and abetting an insurrection. At various points in the novel Michael is assigned identities to supplement the baseline assumption that he is an idiot: he is a drunk, he is a vagrant, he is a terrorist. His attempts to evade the camps, then, to evade the authorities, amount to attempts to evade being assigned those narratives, attempts to evade narrative altogether.

  Those who cannot represent themselves must be represented: this is an imperative that runs from the political conundrum of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire to the ethical demands attendant on any attempt to administer intellectual disability, and it is the key, as well, to Quayson’s sense of disability as hermeneutical impasse. Once we understand that Michael K’s desire is to avoid the camps, we have a story to tell; once we understand that Michael K also desires to avoid being narrated, we have a more problematic story to tell. For one thing, this realization should caution us away from the reading of Michael K as Homo sacer supercrip, the Man Who Escaped the Camps, precisely because this is the reading offered intratextually by the doctor himself, at the close of part 2 when he addresses a hypothetical Michael K, standing in for the Michael who has escaped: “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 in a system without becoming a term in it. Did you not notice how, whenever I tried to pin you down, you slipped away?” (166). It should not escape notice that this utterance, too, constitutes an attempt to pin Michael down after he has slipped away, albeit a meta-attempt to assign him not an identity (drunk, vagrant, terrorist, idiot) but a narrative function, that of a meaning that does not become a term. (And the meta-attempt is admirably opaque: we may be familiar with terms that do not become meanings; but how does a meaning fail to become a term?) Again, it is very tempting to take this passage as the definitive statement of What Michael K Means, just as it is tempting to read the closing “camps” passage as What Michael K Means. And again, there is nothing wrong with such a reading: it is plausible enough, as readings of people (or texts) go, and it is benevolent in a way no other “apprehension” of Michael is, insofar as it is the basis for the doctor’s kindness. But it is still an apprehension, and it is still an apprehension whose condition of possibility is Michael’s incarceration.

  This is not to say that whoever “reads” Michael K thereby jails him, or is complicit with people who do. Things are just not that simple—or that allegorical. It is to say that our apprehension of Michael K, and of Michael K, entails interpretive protocols and dilemmas that go well beyond the obvious—intellectual disability as hermeneutical impasse (what does Michael K mean?), intellectual disability as null set and/or moral test (how should Michael K be treated?). Those dynamics are at work in any engagement with Michael K and Michael K, to be sure. But Michael K’s disabled relation to narrative also has implications for narrative itself, as the closing ironic turn of one of the doctor’s readings of Michael suggests:

  We have all tumbled over the lip into the cauldron of history: only you, following your idiot light, biding your time in an orphanage (who would have thought of that as a hiding-place?), evading the peace and the war, skulking in the open where no one dreamed of looking, have managed to live in the old way, drifting through time, observing the seasons, no more trying to change the course of history than a grain of sand does. We ought to value you and celebrate you, we ought to put your clothes on a maquette in a museum, your clothes and your packet of pumpkin seeds too, with a label; there ought to be a plaque nailed to the racetrack wall commemorating your stay here. But that is not the way it is going to be. The truth is that you are going to perish in obscurity and be buried in a nameless hole in a corner of the racecourse, transport to the acres of Woltemade being out of the question nowadays, and no one is going to remember you but me, unless you yield and at last open your mouth. I appeal to you, Michaels: yield! (151–52)

  This is unquestionably a more benevolent demand for Michael’s story than that of any arresting officer (though the doctor takes the name “Michaels” from the account filed by the arresting officer, who reports that Michael K, whom he calls Michaels, is an “arsonist” [131]). But it is still a demand: no one will remember you unless you open your mouth. And yet what the doctor does not know—cannot know, without breaking the frame of reference of the narrative he inhabits—is that Michael K will not be forgotten, any more than the exploits of Don Quixote will (although, as we will see, Don Quixote establishes a relation between narrative and intellectual disability that does depend on the breaking of the fictional frame): his life and times are being narrated, conveyed in a book called Life and Times of Michael K. In other words,
Michael K has managed to elude all forms of representation except for those of the narrative he inhabits, the one in which we read of his elusiveness and unrepresentability. His intellectual disability thus becomes the impetus not only for the narrative of his life, and of every character’s interaction with him, but also for all interpretive procedures brought to bear on him; and Coetzee cannily, disturbingly, insistently suggests that such procedures include those of the novel itself. Life and Times of Michael K thereby stands not merely as a representation or thematization of intellectual disability but rather as a virtuoso examination of intellectual disability as motive, a rendering of intellectual disability as the condition of possibility for the text and its apprehension by readers. In the following chapter, we will see how this narrative strategy becomes a vehicle for literary techniques that open onto radical forms of alterity, by way of radical experiments with the fabric of time.

  Chapter two

  Time

  The first section of The Sound and the Fury is not hard to read. No, really. I invite you, dear reader, as I once invited my son Nick, to take a crack at it:

  Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass. (3)

  There isn’t a single complex sentence in that memorable opening paragraph, or in the section as a whole; there are no punctuation marks other than commas and periods (certainly no semicolons or parentheses, as here).1 Neither the syntax nor the vocabulary would strain any reader proficient at the third-grade reading level. So what, precisely, is all the fuss about? Why do college students howl with dismay (as mine have, every time I have dared to assign the novel in an American literature survey) when they are asked to read the section without the help of textual aids? Compare that simple paragraph to this one, which is written in precisely the same mode:

  Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack: the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see. (Joyce 37)

  This is rough going for a couple of reasons. The word “diaphane,” the allusion to Dante in the original (and how did you know it was Dante? be honest, now), and the (implicit) reference to Aristotle as “he” in the fifth sentence: a reader has to know a great deal in order to make her way through the thicket of Stephen Dedalus’s narrative, and has to learn how to navigate its idiosyncratic syntax, incomplete sentences, and cognitive leaps. As a result, very few and far between are the brave souls who attempt to read Ulysses without the assistance of a good reader’s guide (my own was Harry Blamires’s Bloomsday Book).

  It would appear that I’ve stacked the deck at the outset of this chapter, by contrasting the stream of consciousness of an adult with a significant intellectual disability with that of one of the most aggressively hyperintellectual characters in the history of literature. Clearly, the transcription of Benjy Compson’s mental events, as he watches the golfers play in what used to be “his” pasture, is easier to read than Stephen Dedalus’s ruminations on sight because Benjy’s mental capacity is so much more limited than Stephen’s. And yet Benjy’s narrative as a whole is not easy to read, even though, sentence by sentence, it’s a breeze. Why? Is it because Benjy does not know enough to use the words most people familiar with golf would have used, such as green, tee (for “table”), or putting (for “hitting”)? Benjy’s lack of familiarity with golf doesn’t help matters, but the task of figuring out what’s going on in that paragraph isn’t a significant burden compared to the demands made by the section as a whole. The real problem, as is evident to everyone who picks up the book, is that Benjy Compson has a sense of time that does not make sense to us. His narrative thus lacks some of the necessary connective tissue that makes narrative intelligible as narrative.

  Benjy’s narrative is not incoherent, it is not unintelligible; after only a few pages, even the most befuddled reader can get the sense that Benjy is relaying a sequence of episodes from his life, though that sequence is far from clear. But his narrative itself is disabled, in the sense I have employed in calling the narrative of the film Memento “disabled” (Bérubé 2005b): some of (what we take to be) the ordinary functions of narrative are here inoperative. In the case of Memento, I argue that there is no way to reconcile fabula and szujet, no way to reconstruct a straightforward narrative progression even after one “compensates” for the fact that the latter is relayed backward in time and focalized through a person with no short-term memory.2 Benjy’s chapter is not quite so radical, inasmuch as it is ultimately possible to piece together a coherent fabula from the unfolding of the szujet—though as we will see, this involves some significant interpretive assumptions along the way (most significantly in the “bluegum chillen” passage). I could say the same, mutatis mutandis, about the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses: it is a tour de force, one of the most extraordinary things written in English, but it is not a narrative. It is what happens, according to Joyce, when narrative falls asleep and some other logic takes over. It does not contain any characters with intellectual disabilities, so the issues raised by its experimental form are not quite what they are in Benjy’s chapter; but when the narrative in question is conveyed by a character with an intellectual disability, then one question becomes paramount: what does his or her disability tell us about the functions of time and narrative in general? That is, what do we learn about the ways narrative time works by reading narratives in which some of the functions of time in narrative do not appear to work as we expect?

  There is another question lurking here, but I want to postpone it for the following chapter, when it can be discussed in (what I hope will be) the more fruitful context of textual self-awareness. Because Faulkner’s brilliant formal experiment is attributed to the workings of an individual character’s subjectivity (obviously, it did not need to be framed this way; Joyce’s “Circe” chapter is not tethered in this way), we are implicitly asked to try to determine the extent to which the character with an intellectual disability has the capacity to understand the narrative he or she inhabits. We know, for example, that Benjy does not understand why he has been “gelded,” and that he knows nothing about the administration of disability in his world, in the era of institutionalization and involuntary sterilization. We think we know that Benjy experiences his loss as loss, and that he connects it to other losses, as in this juxtaposition between the scene of Damuddy’s death and the scene in which Benjy sees his castrated body, a juxtaposition enabled by the associations that accompany undressing:

  Quentin and Versh came in. Quentin had his face turned away. “What are you crying for.” Caddy said.

  “Hush.” Dilsey said. “You all get undressed, now. You can go on home, Versh.”

  I got undressed and I looked at myself, and I began to cry. Hush, Luster said. Looking for them aint going to do no good. They’re gone. You keep on like this, and we aint going have you no more birthday. He put my gown on. (73–74)

  Faulkner’s appendix to the novel, notoriously, will challenge even this minimalist reading of Benjy’s degree of self-awareness, denying that he has any substantial sense of what his losses entail: “He could not remember his sister but only the loss of her” (340), we are told, and “As w
ith his sister, he remembered not the pasture but only its loss” (341). But there are good reasons, both theoretical and practical, to resist Faulkner’s characterization of the character he created.3

  To take the theoretical objection first: as Faulkner himself suggested when he declared that his appendix was “the key to the whole book,” the document presents readers with the overwhelming temptation to take it as The Instructor’s Edition, the explanatory device that clarifies all ambiguities and fleshes out all backstories (including those of characters who never appear in the book). The appendix thus invites us to read it as The Fabula Newsletter, smoothing out temporal and hermeneutical impasses and giving us the straight story from start to finish. It is an invitation best resisted, unless we want (and I hope you will not) to invoke the figure of the author in Foucauldian terms, that is, as “the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning” (118), the device that gets hauled out to determine which interpretations can be said to be properly “authorized.” The practical objection leads us back to the text of Benjy’s section in such a way that the question, Mr. Faulkner, did you actually read your book? is not altogether impudent. I do not understand how any reader of the opening scene of the novel can claim that Benjy does not remember his pasture; his moaning and his mourning are occasioned precisely by his proximity to the pasture, and both are intensified by the sound of golfers calling for their caddies. The fact that Luster understands the homophone only in order to torment Benjy further—“‘You want something to beller about. All right, then. Caddy.’ he whispered. ‘Caddy. Beller now. Caddy’” (55)—is surely not to be referred to the limitations associated with Benjy’s form of intellectual disability, but to the other characters’ failures of sympathetic imagination.4