TY - JOUR
AU - Broggi, Alicia
AB - Abstract From fresh archival evidence we know that J. M. Coetzee was reading works by Rudolf Bultmann, a German New Testament scholar and theologian, while writing Life & Times of Michael K. In these texts Bultmann had developed a conception of the ‘meaning’ of the Gospel of John, in particular, as inseparable from the reading experience it stages. Notably, he claimed that the Gospel aims to stage a dialectical reading experience: it encourages reliance on mythological language and formal features (thesis), which it then undermines (antithesis), in order to invite potential encounters with the divine, as that which exceeds even the best mythological description (synthesis). Drawing on Coetzee’s archived notes, I show how Michael K diffusely reorients this dialectical strategy. Instead of deploying mythological language to invite encounters with the divine, Coetzee relies upon, but also undermines, biographical conventions to cultivate conditions that might expand readers’ awareness of the limitations of this narrative before the life it purportedly represents. By tracing a religious register, my reading also foregrounds episodes in which characters undergo encounters that exercise a claim over them, which they cannot quite articulate. Indeed, by attending to Coetzee’s readings of Bultmann, I show how this fiction depicts the very phenomenon it stages. For there is good reason to believe that Michael K was specifically crafted with a view toward cultivating attentiveness to ways in which life persistently exceeds representational specificity. Moreover, this was a particularly politically freighted endeavour for an author grappling with life under the apartheid narrative. It is by now well known that in the early 1980s Nadine Gordimer gave voice to a developing conviction that the role of ‘the writer in South Africa [was] as interpreter, both to South Africans and to the world, of a society in struggle’.1 Indeed, this conviction became prominently inscribed in critical memory through the controversial early reception of J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983) in South Africa.2 Yet the benefits of historical distance and previously inaccessible archival evidence reveal a fresh fecundity in revisiting Gordimer’s claim: it has become increasingly clear that Coetzee specifically resisted the role of ‘interpreter’, and the assumption that such a concept makes about the writer’s capacity to see truths about society to which others are blind. Following in the tracks of Coetzee’s previously unexplored readings of the German existentialist theologian and New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), during the time of writing Michael K, sheds new light on how this fiction resists representing truths or a moral vision, in a process aimed instead at cultivating readers’ attentiveness to narrative limitations before—what I will provisionally call—the fullness of embodied life. In Gordimer’s review, ‘The Idea of Gardening’ (1984), she famously decried Michael K’s failure to represent the progress made by black South Africans against apartheid. Informed by her readings of Georg Lukács’s The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1963), Gordimer claimed that Coetzee’s aesthetic and thematic accomplishments had come at the expense of political engagement. Drawing on a religiously inflected logic supplied by Lukács, Gordimer deemed the story of Michael K as ‘loosened by time’ from its contemporary moment, relying instead on the ‘ancient sources of myth, magic, and morality’ to convey private or transcendent truths.3 Yet whereas Lukács had used the term ‘transcendence’ to describe ‘the negation of any meaning immanent in the world or the life of man’, I will show that Coetzee specifically reoriented theological concepts and narrative strategies toward life itself.4 David Attwell and Derek Attridge’s seminal examinations of Michael K have been particularly influential over the increasingly wide acceptance that Gordimer’s terms misconstrued the significance of this fiction. In J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (1993), Attwell countered Gordimer’s ‘charge of elusion’ on metafictional grounds, claiming that it ‘declines the challenge of the novel’s own self-reflection on questions of power and interpretation and exempts itself, moreover, from the force of this questioning’.5 In J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (2004), Attridge argued for the ethical import of literary particularity itself. Whereas Gordimer had relegated the narrative of Michael K to socially detached ‘allegory’, Attridge argued that something more was at stake: ‘Allegory, one might say, deals with the already known, whereas literature opens a space for the other. Allegory announces a moral code, literature invites an ethical response’.6 By illuminating these distinctively reflexive and literary qualities, Attwell and Attridge prominently opened up the conceptual space for further examining the story’s ethical and political valences: the very space that Gordimer’s reading had foreclosed. Within that conceptual space, works such as those by Patrick Hayes and John Bolin have specifically developed Attwell’s observation that ‘K is not a representational figure who models certain forms of behavior or capacities for change’.7 In J.M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics After Beckett (2010), Hayes conducted a careful study of focalization, arguing that Michael K invites fresh ways of conceptualizing truth and value itself. Using the term ‘referential equivocation’, he described a recurring movement between elevated registers and irony or bathos throughout this story, which fosters a ‘special anxiety’ in readers surrounding the possibility of finding exemplary models or certain truths.8 By contrast, in ‘Modernism, Idiocy, and the Work of Culture: J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K’ (2015), Bolin questioned whether this story provides any positive counter-representations of heroism at all.9 Describing it as an ‘anti-Bildung narrative’, Bolin claimed that K actually ‘undergoes a social devolution’.10 In turning to Coetzee’s readings of Bultmann, I will take a slightly different tack to this conception of Michael K as an ‘anti-Bildung’ narrative, by approaching the teleology of K’s life as never directly or reliably available for evaluation, and focusing instead on the particularity of the narrative purportedly mediating his life, and the reading experience it cultivates. * Amongst the fresh archival materials unveiled in the Coetzee Papers collection at University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center in 2013 was a notebook of Coetzee’s writing ideas from 1972 to 1982, with notes from his readings of Bultmann that were made while writing Michael K.11 Although it is not clear how Coetzee initially came across Bultmann, it is also not entirely surprising that he had: Bultmann is a key figure of twentieth-century liberal theology, who gained particular prominence for endeavouring to demythologize the New Testament, in favour of an existential approach to biblical texts. That Coetzee had a familiarity with Bultmann was already evident from his translation and commentary, ‘Achterberg’s “Ballade van de Gasfitter”: The Mystery of I and You’ (1977), which cites Bultmann’s lecture, ‘What Does It Mean to Speak of God?’ (1925). That Coetzee’s interest in Bultmann was not merely a passing phase is what became evident through the discovery of notes on three of Bultmann’s books, found on unnumbered pages at the back of Coetzee’s notebook of writing ideas for this book.12 These notes focus on History and Eschatology (1957), Theology of the New Testament, Vol II (1955), and The Gospel of John: A Commentary (1964). It was especially in the final two of these texts that Bultmann had worked out a dialectical hermeneutic identifying the revelation of the Gospels not with truth claims or historical insights, but with the reading experience it stages; this is what proves most illuminating for Michael K.13 One of Bultmann’s most striking claims was that the language of the Gospels had become archaic, inhibiting modern readers from experiencing the authentic encounter it was intended to stage. To remedy this problem, he had developed a reading strategy for interpreting, and thereby restaging, that encounter. As a cursory overview, his approach to the Gospels entailed: (1) identifying what kinds of language are used, and how they function; (2) demonstrating that the Gospels also include negations of the very language upon which they rely, in order to point readers beyond the narrative; and (3) identifying the synthesis of these first two movements, not as their resolution, but as the creation of a dissonant condition in which readers might encounter the divine, which exceeds narration, and in so doing, gain a greater awareness of their own existential condition. These three movements will structure my reading of the three-part narrative of Michael K in order to demonstrate certain noteworthy similarities in how it invites potential encounters, not with the divine, but with what I am provisionally calling the inarticulable fullness of life—conscious that, in naming this way, I am inevitably also misnaming. It is not evident how much biographical information Coetzee had about Bultmann, but Bultmann’s theology (and its identification of the ‘meaning’ of the Gospels as located beyond the remit of language) is closely connected with his staunch resistance to the rise of National Socialism in Germany. James. F. Kay, Professor of Homiletics and Liturgics at Princeton Theological Seminary, describes the relation between Bultmann’s approach to theology and his political activities by saying, ‘as early as May of 1933, amid the full flush of Nazi enthusiasm, Bultmann had lectured to his classes that no nation is so “pure and clean” that its will can be equated with that of God’. Rather than producing nationalistic theology, Bultmann had ‘called for theology to serve the nation by exercising prophetic criticism’. Moreover, he had enacted this vision of prophetic criticism as Professor of New Testament Studies at the University of Marburg by drafting a declaration on behalf of the faculty of theology in opposition to ‘any extension of the new Nazi laws that would have excluded non-Aryans from church office’.14 In 1934, Bultmann joined in establishing the Confessing Church, a movement that condemned the Reichskirche and opposed Nazi ecclesial control. That same year he staked his position as an editor for a ‘prestigious academic series’ on the publication of a dissertation by his student Hans Jonas—a dissertation which would become ‘one of the few [books] by Jews published in Germany during the Nazi period’.15 Bultmann’s commitment to resisting conflations between the dominant nationalist narrative and the will of God informed his hermeneutics, and it is also suggestive of the political import of the claims I will make about Michael K, as being a fiction crafted to resist presuppositions of any narrative’s authority over life. Such presuppositions were clearly at play in the Afrikaner nationalist application of the apartheid narrative to structure society; however they were also, albeit in a very different way, shared by prominent oppositional positions in South Africa during the early 1980s. Indeed, we can now recognize three related presuppositions in Gordimer’s review, ‘The Idea of Gardening’, which also limited her reading. The first presupposition was that, in the apartheid context, a social imperative bound writers to produce a moral vision for readers. Gordimer had specifically determined that, in Michael K, Coetzee had failed that imperative by failing to depict ‘the energy of the will to resist evil’, and thereby took up a ‘questionable position for a writer … in South Africa’.16 In an interview for Doubling the Point, published nine years after Michael K, Coetzee would tentatively suggest an alternative conception of a writer’s responsibility, raising the possibility of responding to a ‘transcendental imperative’, or the ‘awareness of an idea of justice, somewhere, that transcends laws and lawmaking’.17 By reading Michael K alongside Coetzee’s engagement with Bultmann, we can see something Gordimer could not: namely, that this fiction cultivates readers’ attentiveness to precisely such a transcendental imperative, not through direct representation, but through staging narrative failures before the world it initially appears to ‘represent’. A second, related presupposition of Gordimer’s review was that writers have a special capacity to see and represent a moral vision, and to recognize its defining qualities, such as justice and freedom. In the aforementioned Doubling the Point interview, Coetzee addressed this presupposition by invoking Plato’s cave metaphor. He described his own writing self in decidedly unexceptional terms, ‘as someone who has intimations of freedom (as every chained prisoner has) and constructs representations—which are shadows themselves—of people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light’. I aim to show that Michael K specifically resists the presumption of authority—and the risk of cliché or literary staleness—implicit in representing freedom or justice as such. Instead, it represents characters (inconsistently) straining at ‘their chains’, perhaps even ‘slipping’ them, in brief moments of encounter whose interpretive possibilities and potential significance extend beyond the purview of laws and lawmaking. To stage what it represents, the story creates literary conditions in which readers too might, even fleetingly, gain an expanded awareness of these fictional lives, and this fictional world, as holding together more interpretive possibilities than the narrative upon which we rely to make sense of them can specify. It is in such moments of expanded awareness, which are not quite articulable, that readers might encounter something like ‘freedom’, which Coetzee, following Kant, has claimed, ‘is another name for the unimaginable’.18 However, elevated discussions of ‘freedom’ as ‘the unimaginable’ risk ringing hollow as we return to Gordimer’s emphasis on acute political concerns, to identify a third limiting presupposition of her review. This is the presupposition that Michael K is—or should be—the kind of novel that has a hero. Not only was Gordimer generally distressed that, ‘Coetzee’s heroes are those who ignore history, not make it’, but she specifically lamented, ‘No one in this novel has any sense of taking part in determining [the course of history]; no one is shown to believe he knows what that course should be’.19 Detectable in Gordimer’s desire for an exemplary figure is a sensibility Ralph Pite describes as a ‘Romantic account of the self’, which shaped ‘a tradition of heroic biography’ with an impulse toward sacralizing the individual in a mode reminiscent of hagiography.20 For Gordimer was not lamenting the absence of just any kind of hero, but specifically the kind of hero one would expect from the Lives of biographical tradition: a socially distinctive moral exemplar and source of revelation.21 In her focus on the absence of heroic representation, Gordimer was unable to appreciate that the narrative of Michael K is precisely populated with the people, affections, and places eschewed as ‘excess’ by the apartheid narrative. The main character K is a vagrant who encounters thieves, prostitutes, a pimp, and state agents who secretly desire forbidden pleasures and freedoms; he inhabits liminal spaces, from highways and byways to the hidden places of labour camps and a looted building in Cape Town, even spending time squatting on an abandoned farm. Not only did such characters, desires, and places not fit in the nationalist apartheid narrative, but they would have also been minimized through the focus on heroic black freedom fighters that Gordimer sought. Yet by turning to read Michael K alongside the three movements in Bultmann’s dialectical hermeneutics, we can see how, instead of providing authoritative moral or historical revelation into South Africa’s interregnum period, this story sets out the literary conditions in which readers might cultivate their own attentiveness to the liminalities and excesses that failed to fit with the apartheid narrative, and that fail to fit with the conceptual configurations we necessarily rely upon to navigate the life of K. I. INVOCATIONS OF BIOGRAPHICAL EXPECTATION It may be less than coincidental that in the years leading up to the publication of his ‘Life & Times’ narrative Coetzee was reading Bultmann, whose works respond to a nineteenth-century liberal tradition of German theology marked by biographical pursuits. After the publication of David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1835), ‘lives of Jesus’ narratives had proliferated, attempting to distil the true life of Jesus from mythological language in the Gospels. Notably, these narratives had provided readers with the very characteristics Gordimer sought in Michael K, depicting Jesus as a moral exemplar, whose life-story offered insights into the progress of history. Bultmann, however, had become disenchanted with this theological tradition. What he had come to realize, according to James F. Kay, was that ‘the liberal “lives” of Jesus, biographies written to inspire faith, had been rendered untenable by scholarly research that squarely placed the Gospel into the context of the myths and cult-dramas known to the Graeco-Roman world’.22 Any project of distinguishing historical language from the mythological was, to his mind, wrong-headed: there was no historical language in the Gospels. He believed instead, as James M. Byrne has pointed out, that what was ‘necessary’ was ‘to delineate the conceptual framework and categories with which one is working’.23 Elaborating on this approach in his commentary on The Gospel of John, Bultmann would claim, ‘exegesis has as its first task to discover what possible forms of expression were open to the author; the possibilities being those he has inherited with the tradition in which he stands’.24 Whereas the ‘Lives of Jesus’ narratives had sought to distinguish mythological language from a historical message, Bultmann claimed the Gospel of John was entirely comprised of mythological language, and that attending to language as a culturally relative phenomenon was in fact essential to the reading event. He thus sought to identify the elements of Gnostic mythology in John’s account, and how that mythos created a certain idiom through which this representation functioned. From the earliest paratext that readers encounter, Michael K suggests an alignment with the biographical tradition. Not only might the title readily evoke the ‘Lives of Jesus’ tradition, but also a larger tradition of Great Men biographies extending back to Plutarch’s first century Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. On the heels of this title, the epigraph, taken from G. S. Kirk’s translation of Heraclitus’ The Cosmic Fragments, might suggest initial confirmation that this will be a book about a hero, a man of mythic proportions, verging on the divine. Its words, ‘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’, may readily inspire expectations that the ensuing story will portray a life of distinction. Readers are thus primed to anticipate a story focusing on a character of significance, whether good or bad, god or man, slave or free. Lest these suggestions seem too grandiose to inspire emulation, the narrative immediately signals that K’s humanity cuts deep, by beginning with a description of the harelip that marks him from birth. Throughout Part I, narrative features continue to encourage biographical expectations. A third person, past tense narration of actions, words, and what appears to be the interior life of K encourages expectations of objectivity, perhaps even invoking the assumption that the unnamed narrator is an authoritative biographer. When K carts his mother away from Cape Town (amid rampant violence, chaos, and a strong army presence), it may initially appear that he embarks on a quest of filial piety, not least because they travel toward the Karoo, which could be interpreted as signifying a distant pastoral promise of peace. Journeying toward what may have been the childhood home of his mother, Anna, the plot structure invokes sensibilities familiar from the Great Trek mythology, in which heroic Afrikaner forefathers were said to have fled urban degradation and the constraints of colonial rule in pursuit of a pastoral idyll. Allusions to heroic motifs proliferate, inviting a reading of K’s journey as a form of quest. Challenges multiply as an opaque bureaucracy hinders his start; police curtail his initial attempts at reaching Prince Albert; K and his mother are accosted by thieves; his mother dies; and he is repeatedly incarcerated in labour camps, despite leading an apparently harmless existence. Such plot elements may readily suggest that the world is conspiring against K, invoking a well-established biographical paradigm in which the protagonist attains heroic stature by overcoming formidable obstacles. In addition to all this, a distinctly religious register is threaded throughout the story, potentially suggesting a providential or cosmological significance to the life of K. Certain phrases specifically invoke the divine: ‘It is God’s earth’, ‘God knows why’, ‘God knows what’, and ‘God knows how’ (53, 182, 185, 204). Repeatedly, descriptions of K recall figures from scripture. On the Visagie farm, K’s gardening practices are evocative of Adam, steward of the Garden, father of humanity, Man before the Fall. K’s wanderings, alone and at times in the wilderness, alongside his development of an apparently ascetic habit of vegetarian consumption, may even recall the Old Testament prophets. Indeed, within the critical reception of Michael K much ink has been spilled on these elevated biographical features. Most prominently, Gordimer’s review identified the meaning of this fiction with its representation of K as a gardener, saying, ‘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’.25 Despite the complexity of criticism surveyed at this essay’s start, other arguments have developed that perpetuate depictions of this fiction as providing examples for how to live, as well as providing historical insight.26 Yet by turning to consider the second movement of Bultmann’s dialectic, a more ironizing movement is also illuminated in this story, one which undercuts the biographical representations throughout this story is illuminated. II. NEGATING BIOGRAPHICAL EXPECTATIONS Bultmann described the antithesis of his dialectical hermeneutics in his commentary on The Gospel of John by saying that through the use of ‘Gnostic form[,] a pointed anti-Gnostic theology is expressed’.27 He claimed that, alongside its use of a Gnostic lexicon, John specifically included contradictory language and ideas in order to create the possibility for encounters with the divine: an experience facilitated through reading, that necessarily exceeds the specificity of narrative. Drawing attention to ways in which the beginning of John’s Gospel negates the very Gnostic language and concepts it deploys, Bultmann went so far as to say, ‘this is precisely [John’s] intention: not to teach anything about the origin of the world, but to designate the Logos in a manner that takes him away from the sphere of the world. This designation is in the first instance wholly negative’.28 In Bultmann’s account, this use of negation was vital not for representing a higher order truth per se, but for pointing readers beyond the narrative. As Bultmann explains, ‘The truth to be expressed lies between the alternating and apparently contradictory ways in which the Logos is defined: for [the Logos] cannot be adequately expounded in the language of the myth; it has rather to be grasped from the succession of contradictory propositions’.29 This understanding also illuminates certain ‘alternating and apparently contradictory ways’ in which Michael K negates the very biographical conventions upon which it relies, to draw readers’ attention toward life as that which exceeds comprehensive narrative representation. We can see from two excerpts in Coetzee’s notebook of writing ideas that the negative movement in Michael K is by no means incidental. In the first, Coetzee considers having K overtly identify his own silence as resistance to meaning-making paradigms: ‘K articulates: It takes cunning and doggedness to work through a whole life-story without a meaning, without laying yourself open to people who could say, “Yes, you mean such-and-such”’.30 In the second excerpt, Coetzee identifies a connection between the meaning-making paradigms of genre and their constraining effects on the lives they mediate: One of K’s complaints is in fact against the system: he obsessively feels that a paradigm is being fitted over his life (the paradigm of history and historical representativeness in the novel), and rebels against the dominance of this paradigm: other people can live according to ‘history’ if they wish, but he wants to live according to ? . The crunch is of course that while he appears to concede that we must all live according to paradigms—a relativist position—he in fact wants to live according to none—he wants to live a life of meaning-in-itself or meaning-to-itself.31 By specifically juxtaposing ‘the system’ with ‘the paradigms of history and historical representativeness in the novel’, Coetzee imbues this reflection with a politicized aspect, suggesting that narrative paradigms impose and administer bureaucratizing constraints over the very lives they represent. This politicized tension between narrative paradigms and life is most prominently dramatized in Part II of the story, which takes the form of a medical officer’s diary entries, his recording of thought, confession, life-writing. Moreover, if the ‘crunch’ is indeed, as Coetzee noted above, that K desires an impossible mode of life, beyond all narrative paradigms, as ‘meaning-in-itself or meaning-to-itself’, we will later consider episodes in which he is represented as (potentially) experiencing fleeting moments of something that just might be authentic existence, perhaps reminiscent of Sartre’s being-in-itself. To convey this possibility, Michael K relies upon a negative movement that draws attention to the constraints of the narrative paradigms that mediate K’s life. * Part II begins with an unexplained change in narration. An abrupt transition to the medical officer’s first person, present tense narration sweeps readers’ attention from the life-story we have been reading, onto the very process in which we have been involved: the process of making sense of K’s life. Now shorn of the objectivity implied by Part I’s unidentified third person narration, and the authoritative perspective suggested by its use of the past tense, Part II confronts readers with one character’s naked attempts at creating meaning for himself by identifying it in another. Yet the inclusion of dissonant details, such as the narrator’s persistent misappellation of Michael K as ‘Michaels’, soon undercuts any presupposed confidence in his capacity to identify, no less assess, the meaning of K’s life. The very form of diary entries creates a sense of stylistic discord with the medical officer’s insistence that the meaning he identifies in K is not merely subjective: ‘Michaels means something, the meaning he has is not private to me’ (226). Tainted by the limitations of the personal, the personality, the medical officer’s account of K not only troubles expectations of biographical authority and distance, but potentially also raises questions about the reader’s own motivations in assessing this story’s meaning. Indeed, the narrative itself repeatedly draws attention to the self-interest behind the medical officer’s attempts at identifying meaning in K. By the end of Part II, K has escaped from the camp where the medical officer works, and the change in his physical location corresponds with a shift in the medical officer’s writing: biographical descriptions of the (present) K, using the third person personal pronoun ‘he’, become confessions directed at the (absent) K, with the second person personal pronoun ‘you’. By the end of Part II, the medical officer is no longer confiding in a diary, but confessing to K himself. Shimmering through this increasingly pietistic mode, however, is evidence of a distinctly less savoury desire to master K through narration, and in so doing, to fix both characters’ meaning. Consider how the following doxological proclamation of K’s ‘truth’ gives way to an undercurrent of anxiety surrounding self-identity: ‘as I watched you day after day I slowly began to understand the truth: that you were crying secretly, unknown to your conscious self (forgive the term), for a different kind of food, food that no camp could supply … I was the only one who saw that you were more than you seemed to be’ (224–5). Prior to the ellipsis, the phrasing suggests the discovery of a truth of messianic proportions, evoking the words of Jesus, ‘My meat [i.e. food] is to do the will of Him that sent me’.32 K is no mere mortal; as his very sustenance is of a different order, so too must be his significance. By the excerpt’s end, the truth-claim erodes into blatant self-affirmation: ‘I was the only one who saw that you were more than you seemed to be’. The medical officer’s identification of K’s meaning is further undermined by wider textual evidence that K does not refuse food with the consistency this claim suggests. This dissonance between the medical officer’s coherent, meaningful narrative of K’s refusal of food and the wider textual evidence of the ‘reality’ he claims to represent raises a further question of why the medical officer requires K’s life to have a meaning at all. As the medical officer’s own thoughts double back to precisely this question, he offers the rather vivid explanation: ‘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 jockeys’ changing-rooms and locking myself into the last cubicle and putting a bullet through my head’ (226). Michaels is—and must be—meaningful because the medical officer requires a particular kind of meaning to sustain his own existence, to keep despair at bay. If the medical officer is a character exercising the paradigm of history, of biography, this may prompt readers to wonder whether similar self-preserving motivations might not also lurk behind the third person, past tense biographical narrative of Parts I and III, no less behind one’s own critical endeavours. In the medical officer’s attempts to identify K’s hidden truths, the reader is repeatedly confronted with textual evidence suggesting occlusions of the real skin-and-bones man before him. When K offers no verbal mediation of his own existence, in moments of intractable silence, the medical officer can hardly refrain from supplying his own interpretations. At the start of Part II, he identifies K’s silence as a sign that he is ‘a person of feeble mind’ (179). Yet this explanation soon seems somehow insufficient, as the medical officer tries out alternative explanations, identifying K as ‘a figure of fun, a clown, a wooden man’, and even ‘in touch with things you and I don’t understand’ (204, 212). Each new attempt to account for K’s silence also functions to draw readers’ attention to this narrative’s failure to encapsulate the life of K. There is an element of absurdity to the medical officer’s flailing attempts to ascribe meanings to K: how ridiculous to watch one minor character attempting to authoritatively explain the meaning of another, from within a shared narrative. Yet just as this awareness tempts the reader to dismiss the medical officer’s confession, it may also raise an uncomfortable recognition of the reader’s even more limited, contingent relationship to K’s life-story. The reader might develop an expanded awareness of the limited, contingent nature of her own interpretive position in relation to this text, as well as to the larger narratives she inhabits, which mediate the existentially charged encounters that, for inexplicable reasons, command her attention and elicit her speech. * Crucially, the negative movement emphasized in Part II also draws readers’ attention to contradictions and gaps occluded in my initial biographical reading of Part I. So why did I begin with a reading that clearly fails to represent the fullness of the text? My hope is to convey a sense of how the reading experience persistently raises expectations and then erodes them, for this process is what (potentially) expands readers’ attentiveness to limitations in any position for interpreting life. Doubling back, gaps and contradictions overlooked by my initial biographical reading become more immediately apparent. Even the title holds open a certain kind of ambivalence. What might the implications be of that omitted definite article before Life & Times of Michael K? In 1984, Tony Morphet posed this question to Coetzee, eliciting the response: ‘To my ear, “THE LIFE” implies that the life is over, whereas “LIFE” does not commit itself’.33 By omitting the definite article, this title may provoke readers’ expectations of an authoritative, complete life-story, while also drawing readers’ attention to these expectations themselves. These expectations are further frustrated by a lack of certain knowledge surrounding how this life-story ends, which also undermines confidence in the narrative as either authoritative or complete. Moreover, although grammatical convention suggests that both ‘life’ and ‘times’ are possessed by Michael K (that we will read about his life and his times), might we not alternatively read the title as referring to life and times in a more general sense, and Michael K as the object of possession: as a manifestation of life, in particular times? Another stylistic element of the title, the niggling presence of the ampersand, might also expand awareness of the varied interpretive possibilities it holds open. A historical awareness of shifts in convention eliding this symbol from its once common place at the end of the alphabet, as a veritable twenty-seventh letter, may infuse its titular presence with the added significance of being a typographical figuration of excess.34 Moreover, the ampersand has not always only functioned as a conjunction. As the historian of typography and founder of Merrymount Press, Daniel Berkeley Updike explains that this symbol initially developed as ‘a corruption of “& per se=and,” meaning the character & by itself’.35 If this archaic possibility were kept alive in the title, our ampersand might indeed function to prioritize the term life, more than to clarify the relation between that concept and the times of Michael K. These interpretive possibilities made available through considered attention to the niggling presence of the ampersand may expand a reader’s awareness of her own reliance on historically shaped conventions for holding together this title’s potentially disparate parts in a meaningful whole, while also drawing her attention to the persistent presence of possibilities foreclosed in the meaning-making process. We need only cast our eyes to the source of the epigraph for further evidence contradicting the biographical expectations this fiction raises. The epigraph that might initially inspire expectations of a narrative in which War (‘the father of all and king of all’) will determine the parts of K’s life within a meaningful and coherent teleological trajectory is troubled by even brief attention to Heraclitus’ The Cosmic Fragments. For varied, at times contradictory, fragments on life as cosmic flux surround this excerpt. As the Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge G. S. Kirk explains, in his critical study Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (1954), these fragments have often been misconstrued in a reception that worshipfully prioritizes some, without adequately accounting for their relationship to others. Already this might be suggestive of the reading experience staged by Michael K, which makes available a variety of interpretive possibilities, some of which have been repeatedly prioritized by critics, with little attention to contradictory others. For example, although Part I includes a bounty of evidence from which K’s journey might be read as a heroic quest; accompanying evidence also contradicts that reading. Instead of the valiant vision one might expect from a hero on a quest, this journey is inspired by K’s mother, and her ‘fear of what might happen to her if she lost her room’, after he mentions layoffs at work (9). An inexact conception of their destination further undermines readings of this journey as a directed pursuit of anything, no less truth or ethical action. Moreover, suggestions that K’s life-story is providentially ordered are destabilized by reconsidering previously identified references to the divine. In Afrikaner nationalist mythology, the term ‘God’ referred to that Supreme Being who predetermines the heroes of life (the elect, the Afrikaners) and the course of their history (bringing the Kingdom of God to South Africa), which makes it especially worth noting how the term is subtly untethered from those referents within this text. Each phrase where the term ‘God’ is used in fact functions as a colloquialism, a dead metaphor, no longer signifying the concept of a singularly powerful divinity, but interchangeable with the words ‘no one’. Replacing the word ‘God’ with ‘no one’ reveals a negation latent in each: Michael K can take fruit from an orchard because it is ‘no one’s earth’ (italicized words mine, 53). The medical officer explains that a boy ‘has taken a dislike to [Michael K], no one knows why’; that ‘[K] passes through these institutions and camps and hospitals and no one knows what else’; and that K is ‘like a stick insect that has landed, no one knows how, in the middle of a great wide flat bare concrete plain’ (italicized words mine, 182, 185, 204). In these examples, while the use of the term God may initially inspire presuppositions of divine agency and control, closer examination reveals its subtle negation. Notably, thirty years after the publication of this book, Coetzee would attribute to a character called Simón a description of ‘God knows’ as ‘an expression … a way of saying no one knows’ in The Childhood of Jesus (2013).36 The possibility of a thematic return to a reoriented religious engagement is not only signalled by the express use of the name Jesus in Coetzee’s most recent publications, but also in the return to a titular formula initially introduced in the notebook of writing ideas for Michael K, where Coetzee considers whether this might become, ‘A book called “The Childhood of Josef K”’.37 Indeed, by carefully engaging the particularity of this single narrative, it is possible to illuminate more pervasive religious aspects in Coetzee’s fictions that have tended to go overlooked. Repeatedly, depictions of K are resonant with a significance of biblical proportions, which they also undermine. While descriptions of K cultivating pumpkin plants on the deserted Visagie farm certainly invoke that original gardener, Adam, they also contradict this image. In the Torah, Adam’s role as steward of the Garden of Eden distinguished him from the other creatures. Signalling this distinction was his task of supplying narrative categories (names) to the animals, whereas of K we are told, ‘Though he knew no names he could tell one bush from another by the smell of their leaves’ (158). No longer is the gardener distinguished from the animals by his capacity to apply narrative categories to life, now K’s own animality is emphasized: ‘he seemed to know the difference between a benign bitterness and a malign one, as though he had once been an animal and the knowledge of good and bad plants had not died in his soul’ (140). These Adamic allusions undermine the very associations they conjure of an authoritative creature, whose position as divinely set apart is evidenced through narrative capacities. Whereas the lone man K, wandering in the wilderness and abiding by apparently ascetic eating habits, at times evokes the prophetic tradition, this evocation also includes its negation. That negation is cast into relief by juxtaposing one key episode with the Old Testament story resonant therein. In the following episode, K attempts to perform a ritual of burying his mother’s ashes: He fetched the box of ashes from the house, set it in the middle of the rectangle, and sat down to wait. He did not know what he expected; whatever it was, it did not happen. A beetle scurried across the ground. The wind blew. There was a cardboard box standing in the sunlight on a patch of baked mud, nothing more … He closed his eyes and concentrated, hoping that a voice would speak reassuring him that what he was doing was right … But no voice came. (79, 80) As K waits ‘on the hillside behind the farmhouse’ for audible instructions that never arrive, features of the world that surrounds him are instead recounted: a beetle, wind, a cardboard box, and sunlight (79). In the resonant biblical account, it is the wandering prophet Elijah who waits in a cave on a hill for a voice to speak to him: ‘a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice’.38 In this account, each recorded aspect of nature seems overwhelmed by the repeated emphasis on the absence, and then finally presence, of the divine voice. By contrast, for K, no authoritative voice arrives with revelation about how to live or how to make sense of life. The effect is an inversion of emphasis onto the existential features of something that might be named ‘bare life’: a register of experience overwhelmed in the biblical attention to the absence, and then presence, of the divine. If K is positioned with prophetic potential in this story, it is not through special election, but through his unexceptional dependence on bare life. Even the narrative voice of Part I, which may have initially suggested authorial distance and objectivity, is now more readily recognized as obscuring a necessarily perspectival nature. After encountering the unreliability of the medical officer’s often apparently well-intentioned narrative, readers are more likely to wonder about the unidentified narrator of Parts I and III. Is this narrator truly as sympathetic to K as it often seems? What is the narrator’s relationship to K? How did she or he obtain the stories we read? By what authority does the narrator disclose these stories? Is it even the same narrator in Part I as in Part III? The unanswerable nature of these questions may in turn confront the reader with a growing awareness of the contingency of her own position. Moreover, the narrative persistently draws attention to the reader’s own involvement in ascribing meanings to this fictional world. Moment-by-moment descriptions, without phrases identifying the relationship between them, frequently create logical gaps that readers readily fill. In the process, this story also creates the potential for readers to cultivate their attentiveness to that which one’s own logical connections occlude. Ideally, sustained exposure to the difficulty of identifying ‘the truth’ about this fictional world, with certainty, might habituate readers to fresh interpretive postures for reading life beyond the book. This is a key aspect of the ethical import of this book. Attridge has claimed, ‘We can derive no ethical lesson from K’s condition’, but rather that the potential ethical benefits this story makes available are found in the opportunity to ‘return from living through it in a reading to the world of obligation, to that “other time” which is ours, with a changed sense of its status’.39 ‘What Gordimer's reading’ -- ‘Yet by returning to Gordimer's reading we can see that this result is by no means guaranteed.’ As, Hayes has argued that uncertainty is precisely part of the point in this text that ‘playfully reorients the established truths of what counts as the properly heroic,’ with serious, political implications.40 Notably, the uncertainties of this fictional world are not entirely dissimilar to those intensified in South Africa during the 1980s, as prominent, foundational paradigms of the apartheid narrative were increasingly exposed as untrue, unnatural, and in-authoritative means of interpreting life. Perhaps like the uncertainties in Michael K, these uncertainties placed heightened demands on readers of life to exercise the interpretive freedom and responsibility that comes from a lack of authoritative guidance, for good or for ill. III. INVITING ENCOUNTERS WITH EXCESS In his notebook of writing ideas, Coetzee recorded and emphatically underlined the following quotation from Bultmann: ‘Jesus the Revealer “does not communicate anything, but calls men to himself”’.41 He was clearly interested in the fact that Bultmann did not locate the importance of Jesus with truths taught or ethics modelled, but with the encounters invited in the Gospels. The crucial term for understanding Bultmann’s conception of the Gospels is kerygma, which describes a proclamation that enacts what it proclaims. So, one common example of kerygma is a law that comes into effect through public proclamation by a herald. As I will shortly explain, for Bultmann, the Gospel account is intended to be kerygmatic, creating that which it proclaims, in the reading event. A second quotation in Coetzee’s notebook, from Theology of the New Testament, emphasizes Bultmann’s resistance to identifying the significance of Jesus with his historical identity: ‘The Revealer is nothing but a definite historical man, Jesus of Nazareth. Why this specific man? That is a question that must not, may not, be answered’. Instead of attempting to anchor the significance of the Gospels to a historical account of Jesus, Bultmann emphasizes the Gnostic phrase ‘The Revealer’ to locate his significance in the social function of myth. In ‘New Testament and Mythology’ (1941), Bultmann claimed, ‘The real point of myth is not to give an objective world picture; what is expressed in it, rather, is how we human beings understand ourselves in our world’.42 Bultmann believed that though Gnostic language had been historically and culturally available when John was writing his Gospel, mythological language had lost its viability for conveying how we ‘understand ourselves in our world’. To revivify the Gospel of John as kerygma, Bultmann translated what he identified as its mythological language into existentialist language and concepts from Heidegger. So in the language of Christ’s death and resurrection, Bultmann identified mythological means for staging encounters with particular modes of being. In the death of Jesus, he claimed readers are invited to encounter an awareness of their own life as marked by ‘transience and death’.43 Readers might gain an awareness of their own existential death as the condition of ‘anxiety in which we each seek to hold on to ourselves and what is ours in the secret feeling that everything, including our own life, is slipping away from us’.44 With consideration to Michael K, one might think of the medical officer’s compulsion to fix a meaning onto K’s life, and indirectly his own. With regards to the apartheid context in which this fiction was first published, one might think of the Afrikaner nationalist ‘life-story’ in which the minority government anxiously attempted to assert its enduring value, in the face of displacement from native European lands, wars with British colonial powers, and the looming threat of a majority population discontented with violent subjugation to peripheral positions. This condition of existential death, however, is only half of what Bultmann claimed that readers might experience in encountering the divine through Jesus the Revealer. In the language of resurrection, Bultmann identified a potential for experiencing existential resurrection. To his mind, the story of the resurrection of Jesus invited readers to encounter ‘genuine human life … one in which we lived out of what is invisible and nondisposable and, therefore, surrendered all self-contrived security’. This experience of existential resurrection, or genuine life, would entail the overcoming of anxiety in the face of transience and death ‘through trust that precisely what is invisible, unfamiliar, and nondisposable encounters us as love, gives us our future, means life for us and not death’.45 While Bultmann would explicate this experience, in ‘What Does it Mean to Speak of God?’, as inevitably fleeting (neither obtained nor retained at will), he saw it as the job of theology to revitalize the conditions for the possibility of experiencing it: genuine life, to his mind, precisely resulted from faith in the divine as ‘the reality determining all else’.46 As Bultmann put it in ‘New Testament and Mythology’, translating the mythological language of the Gospels into existential language was an effort at revivifying the Gospels to cultivate ‘the attitude of faith, of being delivered from the world’, and this was not without social implications: it ‘also makes us open for our fellow human beings’.47 In Michael K, Coetzee reimagined Bultmann’s approach to the Gospels to stage and represent encounters with (what I am provisionally calling) the unnarratable fullness of life itself, holding open the possibility of encountering our fellow human beings in fresh ways. By Part III, the reader is primed to notice how elements of style and content fail to fit with comprehensive assertions of biographical or historical meaning. The third-person narration resumes immediately after the medical officer’s narrative in Part II, by which point readers have accumulated an armoury of reasons to hesitate over narrated claims about K as a moral exemplar or source of revelation. Attentive to gaps and contradictions, a reader may more readily pause over the moment-by-moment passage of narrative time and events. In those pauses, she might experience a measure of anxiety before this world’s resistance to its narrative, perhaps followed by a grateful sense of her own dependence on that narrative, and on a much wider web of narrative resources. Repeated encounters with textual evidence that invoke, but also undermine, biographical expectations have (potentially) prepared the reader to question biographical accounts of K within the text, which now appear from K himself. Although still mediated by an unknown narrator, in Part III we are made privy to what appear to be K’s own autobiographical reflections, that mode of discourse so prized in the biographical tradition as a source of authentic truth. Yet by the time K provides his insight, ‘the truth is that I have been a gardener … It excited him, he found, to say, recklessly, the truth, the truth about me.I am a gardener, he said again aloud’, the reader has been primed to temper her own excitement at this self-revelation (247–8). For accompanying questions now readily arise: Are these really K’s words (a bizarre question to entertain, perhaps, about a fiction)? And what aspects of the narrative might this self-designation of ‘gardener’ occlude—is not K also a traveller, a son, a burrower, even a hunger artist? Reading with an attentiveness to that which exceeds K’s autobiographical claim is soon rewarded as K’s thoughts redouble: ‘On the other hand, was it not strange for a gardener to be sleeping in a closet within sound of the beating of the waves of the sea?’ (248) By now, the narrative has habituated its readers to look beyond even K’s self-classification, toward what might be elided by the categories on which he too relies. Moreover, K’s ascriptions of autobiographical meaning do not stop here. He continues by raising the heroic possibility, ‘Perhaps the truth is that it is enough to be out of the camps, out of all the camps at the same time’ (248–9). By this point, however, the reader is more likely to recognize the dissonance within what seems to be a compelling, even true claim. Having been submerged in the conditions created by this narrative for hour upon hour, perhaps even days, the reader is more likely to see that in asserting this ‘truth’, K also undermines his claim: in the act of categorically identifying the truth about himself, K (metaphorically) imprisons himself in yet another (conceptual) camp. Nevertheless, the self-ascription of meaning continues, mounting to what readers are primed to recognize as rather ridiculous heights when K identifies ‘the moral of the whole story’. This moral is placed within parentheses, perhaps signalling its biographically treasured location in K’s interior-life: ‘(Is that the moral of it all, he thought, the moral of the whole story: that there is time enough for everything?)’ (249). Yet the reader is now (potentially) well-aware that a single moral lesson deduced from K’s life misses the point, namely: the staging of moment-by-moment, often contradictory encounters, which exert different claims at different times over readers and characters alike. Through observing K’s resistance to the medical officer’s narrative, the reader has been prepared to wonder why K is now concerned with identifying a moral for his life-story. After so doggedly resisting the medical officer’s assertions of meaning, this seems inconsistent, perhaps even suspect. The text forcefully undermines the very sense of autobiographical authority it encourages; as Bolin puts it, ‘LTMK does not allow us to accept K’s own readings of himself with anything like certainty: his story is “always wrong,” it always has a “hole” in it’.48 In the process, however, the story does more than merely confront readers with the limitations of the very narrative paradigms and perspectives mediating K’s life. * Although directly describing that which exceeds narration is inherently paradoxical, impossible, Coetzee nevertheless depicts characters responding to encounters that compel their speech, but which they cannot quite find the language to describe. The most prominent example of this is the medical officer’s encounters with K, and his grappling to account for K’s significance to him. Not only does the medical officer’s confession evince the urgency of responding to a claim over him, but its iterative failures also suggest the inadequacy of his narrative resources before that claim. And this is by no means the only such example. K himself is depicted as responding to an encounter, the meaning and affective force of which he cannot quite articulate, when roasting the first fruit of his pumpkin patch. A register of religious sacrifice inflects the event of roasting with a potentially sacred significance: ‘The fragrance of the burning flesh rose into the sky’. Although this fragrance rises to the sky, the religious register becomes re-oriented toward the earth in an expression of grateful dependence: ‘Speaking the words he had been taught, directing them no longer upward but to the earth on which he knelt, he prayed: “For what we are about to receive make us truly thankful”’ (155). If the religious register reflects a sacred aspect to his eating experience, it is notably intertwined with a sensuous register, locating the site of anything sacred in K’s bodily senses and the roasted, ripened pumpkin. Even K’s expression of grateful dependence appears rather thin beside the narrative’s descriptions of his verbal, physical, and emotional response to the pumpkin. K’s rapture in eating is poignantly conveyed: ‘[he] felt his heart suddenly flow over with thankfulness. It was exactly as they had described it, like a gush of water … He chewed with tears of joy in his eyes … The aftertaste of the first slice left his mouth aching with sensual delight’ (156). The focus on K’s affective and somatic response points readers toward an empathetic delight in the eating experience, which seems to elicit, but also exceed, this description. Yet the narrative mood soon shifts from grateful dependence to assertions of control, subtly conveying the fleeting nature of this encounter. As K reflects, ‘All that remains is to live here quietly for the rest of my life, eating the food that my own labour has made the earth to yield … such pumpkin I could eat every day of my life and never want for anything else’ (my emphasis, 156). A note of self-reliance creeps into his reflection, as it is now his labour that made the earth to yield. Gratitude for his existential dependence gives way to anxiety as K schemes to ensure that he never wants for anything. This anxiety in turn yields more yearning—more wanting—which undermines the very sense of control K attempts to assert: ‘And what perfection it would be with a pinch of salt—with a pinch of salt, and a dab of butter, and a sprinkling of sugar, and a little cinnamon’ (156). In representing what it also stages, the shifts in narrative encourage the reader to hesitate before her own assertions of insight, in a potentially fleeting awareness of her own criticism as a mode of responding to the claims that this fiction exercises over her. IV. BEYOND THE TEXT In the throes of apartheid, Gordimer had questioned the value of Michael K for not representing pressing political truths about its historical moment. This critique resounds in her description of the character K, after the death of his mother, as seeking ‘a purpose for his apparently unnecessary continued existence’. Yet my reading shows this fiction was aimed, instead, at inviting readers to experience a very different posture toward history, toward life: a posture from which it is untenable to make authoritative claims about any form of existence as ‘unnecessary’. In this book, the term ‘parasite’ introduces a reflection on categories of people and desires that the apartheid state had deemed ‘unnecessary’. K observes, ‘Parasite was the word the police captain had used: the camp at Jakkalsdrif, a nest of parasites hanging from the neat sunlit town, eating its substance, giving no nourishment back’. He then asks, ‘What if the hosts were far outnumbered by the parasites, the parasites of idleness and the other secret parasites in the army and the police force and the schools and factories and offices, the parasites of the heart? Could the parasites then still be called parasites?’ (my emphasis, 159) These questions echo with those raised by the medical officer’s attempts at identifying the meaning of K’s life: from what ‘privileged’ position does any character or institution assign value to different moments or other characters in this life-story, this story of life? As Coetzee’s notebook of writing ideas explains, ‘The host – parasite idea comes from the essay by J. Hillis Miller in Deconstruction + Criticism’.49 Miller’s essay, ‘Critic as Host’ (1977), depicts the complex interdependence of critic and text, saying that in literature, ‘the parasite is always already present within the host, the enemy always already within the house’.50 When brought to bear on the politicized discussion of parasites in Michael K, this intersubjective logic suggests that the ‘unnecessary’ people hidden in camps and the ‘unnecessary’ desires hidden in hearts were always already integral to the ‘host’ lives of the South African white electorate obliquely critiqued herein. On the one hand, this intersubjective logic suggests that expunging unwanted people and unwanted desires from the national biography under apartheid was impossible: the binary was false, ‘the [perceived] enemy [is] always already within the house’. On the other hand, it suggests that by hiding away certain people and aspects of life as ‘unnecessary’, the apartheid state reduced the life of all its inhabitants. What is crucial to both observations is the integrality of what might easily be elided as ‘excess’, which demands a more circumspect, even tentative approach to interpretive judgments. For, by attending to Coetzee’s easily overlooked readings of Bultmann, we can better appreciate the weight of moment-by-moment depictions and intertwined lives across this reading event, as well as the possibility that this event might itself contribute in unexpected ways to the reformation of reading habits by encouraging an expanded awareness of the fullness of life and times that always already exceed any singular possession or comprehensive narrative. This research was made possible by a Clarendon Scholarship from the University of Oxford, an Annual Fund grant from Brasenose College, and a Dissertation Fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center. Footnotes 1 This essay was based on her James Lecture for the New York Institute for the Humanities in 1982. Nadine Gordimer, ‘Living in the Interregnum’, The New York Review of Books, 29 (20 January 1983), 24. 2 J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K (Harmondsworth, 1985). 3 Nadine Gordimer, ‘The Idea of Gardening’, The New York Review of Books, 31 (2 February 1984), 6. 4 Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, tr. John and Necke Mander (London, 1963), 40. 5 David Attwell, J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley, CA, 1993), 93. 6 Derek Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago, IL, 2004), 64. 7 Attwell, J. M. Coetzee, 100. 8 Patrick Hayes, J.M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics after Beckett (Oxford, 2010), 90, 73. 9 John Bolin, ‘Modernism/modernity, Idiocy, and the Work of Culture: J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K’, 22 (2015), 343–364. 10 Bolin, ‘Modernism’, 346. 11 As the collection’s Finding Aid explains, only the materials in Folders 1–32 were previously available at Harvard’s Houghton Library, which excludes this notebook of writing ideas. ‘Long works: Life and Times of Michael K., gray notebook, 1983’, Austin, Harry Ransom Center, MS Coetzee Papers 33.5. 12 My attention was initially drawn to these materials by David Attwell’s lecture, ‘The Life of Writing in J. M. Coetzee: Autobiography into Fiction’, at the ‘Coetzee’s Lives’ Colloquium, University of Oxford, 13 June 2014. 13 ‘Bultmann, Rudolf’, in F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd edn (Oxford, 2005), 252. 14 James F. Kay, ‘Rudolf Bultmann’, in Adrian Hastings, Alistair Mason, and Hugh Pyper (eds), The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (Oxford, 2000), 83. 15 Kay, ‘Rudolf Bultmann’, 83. 16 Gordimer, ‘The Idea of Gardening’, 6. 17 J. M. Coetzee and David Attwell, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 340. 18 Coetzee, Doubling the Point, 341. 19 Gordimer, ‘The Idea of Gardening’, 3, 6. 20 Ralph Pite, ‘Writing Biography that is not Romantic’, in A. Bradley and A. Rawes (eds), Romantic Biography (New York, NY, 2003), 168–185. 21 It is certainly in line with my argument to note that the naming of a ‘biographical tradition’ is a useful conceptual tool that also limits the variety and difference it aims to represent. For more on the development and proliferation of life-writing see Zachary Leader (ed), On Life-Writing (Oxford, 2015). 22 Kay, ‘Rudolf Bultmann’, 83. 23 James M. Byrne, ‘Bultmann and Tillich’, in Gareth Jones (ed), The Blackwell Companion to Modern Theology (Oxford, 2004), 376. 24 Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, tr. G. R. Beasley-Murray, ed. R. W. N. Hoare and J. K. Riches (Oxford, 1971), 20. 25 Gordimer, ‘The Idea of Gardening’, 4. 26 For further examples: Ayobami Kehinde claims that K’s ‘vulnerability’, ‘compensated for by his strong sense of responsibility and virtues’, distinguishes him as ‘the eponymous hero of the story’ in ‘Ability in Disability: J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K and the Empowerment of the Disabled’, Southern African Journal of English Studies, 27 (2010), 64. Eric Paul Meljac argues for K’s exemplary relationship with the land in ‘The Poetics of Dwelling: A Consideration of Heidegger, Kafka, and Michael K’, Journal of Modern Literature, 32 (2008), 60–72. Tamlyn Monson proffers that in Part I, ‘K moves toward an ethical relation to the Other’, in ‘An Infinite Question: The Paradox of Representation in Life & Times of Michael K’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 38 (2003), 87–106. Shadi Neimneh and Fatima Muhaidat present K as fulfilling a near-prophetic role, saying, ‘Coetzee voices through K a political statement in the form of a critique of our neglect of nature, which is as bad as instrumentalizing it’, in ‘The Ecological Thought of J.M. Coetzee: The Case of Life and Times of Michael K’, Studies in Literature and Language, 4 (2012), 1–8. 27 Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 9. 28 Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 32. 29 Bultmann, The Gospel of John, 34. 30 ‘[G]ray notebook’, MS Coetzee Papers 33.5, 82. 31 ‘[G]ray notebook’, MS Coetzee Papers 33.5, 52. 32 John 4:34. All biblical references are to The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, introd. and notes by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford, 1998). 33 Tony Morphet, ‘An Interview with J.M. Coetzee’ Social Dynamics 10.1 (1984): 62–65. 34 For example, Ronald B. McKerrow includes ‘&’ without explanation after ‘z’ in his explication of common Elizabethan handwriting for miniscules in An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (Oxford, 1927), 350. 35 Daniel Berkeley Updike, Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use: A Study in Survivals Vol 1 (London, 1937), 19. 36 J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (London, 2013), 218. 37 ‘[G]ray notebook’, MS Coetzee Papers 33.5, unnumbered page. 38 I Kings 19:11b–12. 39 Attridge, J. M. Coetzee, 56. 40 Hayes, J. M. Coetzee and the Novel, 85. 41 Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament Vol II, tr. Kendrick Grobel (London, 1952), 41. 42 Rudolf Bultmann, ‘New Testament and Mythology’, New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings, tr. and ed. Schubert M. Ogden (Philadelphia, PA, 1984), 9. 43 Bultmann, ‘New Testament and Mythology’, 16. 44 Bultmann, ‘New Testament and Mythology’, 17. 45 Bultmann, ‘New Testament and Mythology’, 17. 46 Rudolf Bultmann, ‘What Does It Mean to Speak of God?’, Faith and Understanding I, tr. Louise Pettibone Smith, ed. Robert W. Funk (London, 1969), 53. 47 Bultmann, ‘What Does It Mean to Speak of God?’, 20. 48 Bolin, ‘Modernism’, 349. 49 ‘[G]ray notebook’, MS Coetzee Papers 33.5, 47. 50 J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Critic as Host’, Critical Inquiry, 3 (1977), 439–447. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press 2017; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)
TI - What Does it Mean to Speak of –––? Rudolf Bultmann, Biography, and J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983)
JO - The Review of English Studies
DO - 10.1093/res/hgx128
DA - 2018-04-01
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VL - 69
IS - 289
DP - DeepDyve
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