ABSTRACT
David Attwell’s chapter re-reads J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K in a dialogue with Timothy Bewes’s The Event of Postcolonial Shame, in which Bewes argues that ‘when shame is communicated, what is communicated has no positive referent.’ Instead, shame is a governing condition of the writing (Bewes argues) rather than its content; it therefore exists as ‘a gap, an absence, an impossibility.’ These reflections remind one of Michael K who, when trying to conceptualise the meaning of his existence, is confronted by a gap, an absence; and when the medical officer treating him tries to articulate the enigma of his being untouched by the corrosive war taking place around him, he can only conclude that K is an ‘allegory of how a meaning can take up residence in a system without being part of it.’ From its first paragraph, Life & Times of Michael K is a novel in which shame is central, not only as theme but as governing condition, in Bewes’s sense. Unlike Bewes, however, Attwell argues that Coetzee deploys fictional and metafictional resources to reprise both the historical situation and the cultural condition of pervasive shaming to which it alludes and in which it is written. The novel’s aesthetic resourcefulness brings it closer to the analysis given by Bernard Williams in Shame and Necessity, which argues from Greek tragedy to show how shame necessitates creative and ethical agency rather than overwhelming it.
