He reads too much and speaks too little. And she regrets the times when he does speak. It is in rapture over books and ideas and music where he loses all control and balance and propriety, or self righteous indignation against one thing or the other, or inappropriate jokes and songs on the strangest of occasions.
He tries hard to look like an intellectual but has no idea of how and why people act and think the way they do. He tries to make his naivette sound like idealism, and manages to fool some of the people some of the times.
He claims to be lost in thought when he choses to disregard the unavoidable work, and makes reminding him to do important things a specially ordained task for everybody else.
He considers the floor of the bathroom as a washing machine where his dirty undergarments can be dropped at will, and the footwear of everybody else in the house as his personal property.
He considers himself to be liberal-minded and open to criticism, but becomes Mr. Sensitivity when probed even slightly on his pet theories and ridiculous habits.
At first, she thought he is a little different, thats all. Now, she believes him to be completely mad, thats it.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Friday, September 23, 2011
Physical distance
In his classic sociological work on a South Indian village and subtle changes brought in its social life by Independence, Andre Beteille comments that "physical distance can be seen as a function of structural distance". This comes in the context of people living with their caste/communities as next door neighbours. The contours of the Indian village life may have changed in many places from the earlier strict associations between caste and class post independence. However, like most things Indian, changes are fifty-fifty only, and perhaps it is mostly power that has been reconfigured and redistributed with different sets of castes and communities, particularly in North India, while we continue to live together separately.
It is perhaps this physical distance and conformity that one loses immediately as one moves from a small village or town to a big metro. And which gives rise to the desire of many to live in a ghetto, and for those in more financially secure positions, to establish "purity" in a profane environment where people are not sure of their "places". Our reaction to modernity, as to urbanization here, remains ambiguous in all places.
While this perhaps helps us retain our senses, without thinking of our own, in an age and customs that we do not understand fully, it also maintains our conspicuous lack of ability to live and think as individuals in cities. And to look at others as individuals, not just as members of another religion, caste, region or community. We rather prefer to continue with our traditional prejudices that makes our cruelty internal and so difficult to be even aware of.
It is perhaps this physical distance and conformity that one loses immediately as one moves from a small village or town to a big metro. And which gives rise to the desire of many to live in a ghetto, and for those in more financially secure positions, to establish "purity" in a profane environment where people are not sure of their "places". Our reaction to modernity, as to urbanization here, remains ambiguous in all places.
While this perhaps helps us retain our senses, without thinking of our own, in an age and customs that we do not understand fully, it also maintains our conspicuous lack of ability to live and think as individuals in cities. And to look at others as individuals, not just as members of another religion, caste, region or community. We rather prefer to continue with our traditional prejudices that makes our cruelty internal and so difficult to be even aware of.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Proust's Lost Time: First Impressions...
You can be possessed so completely by a single emotion at a particular period of time, say, happiness, love, longing, that it is impossible to think of the other states, anger, anxiety, fear, that may possess you as completely at other times in the same day. Time, thus, gets divided not by the hours through which it passes, but by the feelings and moods and emotions that are ephemeral and that are evoked by different states of your own nature and your environment.
A terrific insight, which, as with all great isights, one feels one always knew but had never found the words to express or recognize it clearly within one's own experience. To me, nobody had quite expressed this so clearly and so beautifully until I read Proust.
A terrific insight, which, as with all great isights, one feels one always knew but had never found the words to express or recognize it clearly within one's own experience. To me, nobody had quite expressed this so clearly and so beautifully until I read Proust.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Marx on Religion
"Religion is the opium of the masses".
This is amongst the more popular of Marx's quotes, that usually finds approval from non-Marxist atheists as well. Also the one that is used often to illustrate the invisible chains and false hopes that binds people to God. Marx, though himself an atheist, was more sympathetic to faith than what the above comment and latter day Marxists would have us believe. The above quotation has a context and is more fully rendered as:-
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
Marx thus saw religion as the balm that soothed despoiled people and their conditions. He also advocated atheism vigorously, but envisioning a future in which the soulless conditions of bondage and exploitation would be removed by a more equitable distribution. It is nobody's argument that such conditions have ceased to exist or likely to go away any soon. One can argue, on the other hand, that transient and fragmented life in the modern cities has only served to strengthen Religion, of the more militant kind very often. It provides the much needed moorings that many believe they are in danger of losing when they move away from their native places. One can empathize with such need for a primordial connection, even when it sometimes burns the seekers further rather then heal them.
This is amongst the more popular of Marx's quotes, that usually finds approval from non-Marxist atheists as well. Also the one that is used often to illustrate the invisible chains and false hopes that binds people to God. Marx, though himself an atheist, was more sympathetic to faith than what the above comment and latter day Marxists would have us believe. The above quotation has a context and is more fully rendered as:-
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
Marx thus saw religion as the balm that soothed despoiled people and their conditions. He also advocated atheism vigorously, but envisioning a future in which the soulless conditions of bondage and exploitation would be removed by a more equitable distribution. It is nobody's argument that such conditions have ceased to exist or likely to go away any soon. One can argue, on the other hand, that transient and fragmented life in the modern cities has only served to strengthen Religion, of the more militant kind very often. It provides the much needed moorings that many believe they are in danger of losing when they move away from their native places. One can empathize with such need for a primordial connection, even when it sometimes burns the seekers further rather then heal them.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Inner life, Outer life
Naipaul, in India: A Wounded Civilization, analyzed MK Gandhi's obsession with himself and observed caustically that there were just two or three descriptions of landscape in his autobiography. Whether in England or South Africa, Gandhi was so immersed in the duel with his self that he failed to observe what went on outside him.
Naipaul could not have made this observation about the other great, modern Indian, Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru wrote his remarkable and voluminous autobiography, running to 600 odd pages, within a short, uninterrupted, and largely undisturbed period of eight or nine months that he spent in the Naini Jail from June 1934 to February 1935. It is a story in which Nehru resorts to the plural "we" to include the collective involvement of his less articulate colleagues in the nationalist struggle. And a story in which amidst the confusion, uncertainty and chaos of the times, he could be lyrical, longing for things he misses or things he observes anew -
"Once I remember being struck by a new want. I was in the Lucknow district gaol, and I realized suddenly that I had not heard a dog bark for seven or eight months."
Nehru imagined and longed to see the trees and mountains beyond his confinement, described the cool breeze he felt on his face while being moved from one jail to another, and retains his good humor even while recollecting the first lathi-charge he faced as an activist. More than its considerable literary worth, Nehru understands and describes the contemporary nationalist currents better than any history book. There is intellectual rigor and a sense of historical purpose in him. He analyzes the political situation in India before the advent of Gandhi and how it changed after him. In fact, Nehru gives us better insights into the "Political Gandhi", and his magical hold over the masses, than Gandhi himself. Nehru frankly looked at his vanity, arrogance, and his susceptibility to compromise his strong beliefs to move forward, to be his key weaknesses.
MK Gandhi’s autobiography, on the other hand, is at the other end, and reveals a primary, child-like, instinctual mind at work. Gandhi’s subject is no doubt Gandhi himself, and describes his most personal events in meticulous detail. Whether it is his lapses from vegetarianism or petty thievery in childhood, or struggle with his sexual passion, Gandhi remains convinced about their impact on his inner life and conscience development, even while it may make the reader uncomfortable or even bored at times.
However, as Ramachandra Guha has pointed out, in spite of his seeming idiosyncrasies, Gandhi's memory has been treated more kindly by his countrymen, even as his ideals lay tattered. The more militant of our middle classes may look at his frailty and seeming physical weakness with derision, his sexual struggle as hypocrisy and his concessions to Muslims as treason. But, by and large, his reputation as a great apostle of peace, tolerance and non-violence remains unchallenged while his ideas on ecology and sustainable development have received delayed interest.
Nehru, on the other hand, in spite of irregular, obsequious gestures from the ruling Congress party, is mostly an object of ridicule, derision, anger and hatred today. The more sympathetic consider his idealistic approach "naive", while the more vocal and hostile consider him responsible for every ill facing India from bad roads to dynastic politics.
However, in spite of their obvious differences in thought and approach to nation building, Gandhi and Nehru were united in their fundamental quest for a moral and ethical life. Gandhi contested, in his own unique way, the "maleness" of the western colonialism in greed, power and violence. How endless consumption can minimize life, making it nothing more than acquisition and ownership of stuff valued by others. How centralization of power begets corruptibility, and how violence begets violence. He centralized the importance of means over ends.
Nehru's aspiration of morality and ethics extended to the kind of state he envisioned India to be. This is of course at odds with the view expressed by most of our rationalist commentators today, who consider the nations not to have any morality, but only “self-interest”. This view also perhaps governs pillorying of Nehru for all his supposed mistakes, whether on Kashmir, Organized Development, Hindu Code Bill, pragmatic socialism, Non-Aligned Movement, UNSC Permanent Seat, or Panchsheela.
In this revisionist narrative, real history of India begins with the liberalization in 1990s when India unshackled the license-permit-raj of “Nehru’s” legacy. It is perhaps true that last twenty years have opened doors to entrepreneurship and innovation, enabled upward movement of lower-middle and middle classes, and created a situation of plenty for an enthusiastic, consumerist class. But twenty years is also perhaps also a good time to take a hard look at what an unbridled quest for “self-interest” has resulted in.
A corrupt polity. An intricate, compromising nexus of political establishment, corporate czars and fourth estate. A moneyed culture where heroes are judged solely for their ability to make money regardless of morality. Celebrity-obsession. A stressful, spiritually vacant life mushrooming with spurious Godmen, astrologers and soothsayers. A booming industry of self-serving, bad books on self-help and management. A reputation for being a bully with most neighbours.
A nation at war with its own people. A nation ravaging itself to satisfy its consumption needs.
Is it that while we have been busy making money, we have lost something of the way of a soul or an inner life? We perhaps need to re-posit a few questions to ourselves.
What is a nation, if not a community of individuals united by common territory and sense of purpose? And, if that is true, what remains, if that nation is drained of morality and ethics?
Perhaps, we still need Gandhi and Nehru, if not for anything else, then to be our super-ego. Nehru’s idea of an inclusive, egalitarian, industrially developed, socially conscious and morally alive nation, tempered with Gandhi’s ideas of personal virtue, sustainability, devolution of power, and compassion towards the underdog, remains enticing and an ideal to remake ourselves and our nation.
Naipaul could not have made this observation about the other great, modern Indian, Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru wrote his remarkable and voluminous autobiography, running to 600 odd pages, within a short, uninterrupted, and largely undisturbed period of eight or nine months that he spent in the Naini Jail from June 1934 to February 1935. It is a story in which Nehru resorts to the plural "we" to include the collective involvement of his less articulate colleagues in the nationalist struggle. And a story in which amidst the confusion, uncertainty and chaos of the times, he could be lyrical, longing for things he misses or things he observes anew -
"Once I remember being struck by a new want. I was in the Lucknow district gaol, and I realized suddenly that I had not heard a dog bark for seven or eight months."
Nehru imagined and longed to see the trees and mountains beyond his confinement, described the cool breeze he felt on his face while being moved from one jail to another, and retains his good humor even while recollecting the first lathi-charge he faced as an activist. More than its considerable literary worth, Nehru understands and describes the contemporary nationalist currents better than any history book. There is intellectual rigor and a sense of historical purpose in him. He analyzes the political situation in India before the advent of Gandhi and how it changed after him. In fact, Nehru gives us better insights into the "Political Gandhi", and his magical hold over the masses, than Gandhi himself. Nehru frankly looked at his vanity, arrogance, and his susceptibility to compromise his strong beliefs to move forward, to be his key weaknesses.
MK Gandhi’s autobiography, on the other hand, is at the other end, and reveals a primary, child-like, instinctual mind at work. Gandhi’s subject is no doubt Gandhi himself, and describes his most personal events in meticulous detail. Whether it is his lapses from vegetarianism or petty thievery in childhood, or struggle with his sexual passion, Gandhi remains convinced about their impact on his inner life and conscience development, even while it may make the reader uncomfortable or even bored at times.
However, as Ramachandra Guha has pointed out, in spite of his seeming idiosyncrasies, Gandhi's memory has been treated more kindly by his countrymen, even as his ideals lay tattered. The more militant of our middle classes may look at his frailty and seeming physical weakness with derision, his sexual struggle as hypocrisy and his concessions to Muslims as treason. But, by and large, his reputation as a great apostle of peace, tolerance and non-violence remains unchallenged while his ideas on ecology and sustainable development have received delayed interest.
Nehru, on the other hand, in spite of irregular, obsequious gestures from the ruling Congress party, is mostly an object of ridicule, derision, anger and hatred today. The more sympathetic consider his idealistic approach "naive", while the more vocal and hostile consider him responsible for every ill facing India from bad roads to dynastic politics.
However, in spite of their obvious differences in thought and approach to nation building, Gandhi and Nehru were united in their fundamental quest for a moral and ethical life. Gandhi contested, in his own unique way, the "maleness" of the western colonialism in greed, power and violence. How endless consumption can minimize life, making it nothing more than acquisition and ownership of stuff valued by others. How centralization of power begets corruptibility, and how violence begets violence. He centralized the importance of means over ends.
Nehru's aspiration of morality and ethics extended to the kind of state he envisioned India to be. This is of course at odds with the view expressed by most of our rationalist commentators today, who consider the nations not to have any morality, but only “self-interest”. This view also perhaps governs pillorying of Nehru for all his supposed mistakes, whether on Kashmir, Organized Development, Hindu Code Bill, pragmatic socialism, Non-Aligned Movement, UNSC Permanent Seat, or Panchsheela.
In this revisionist narrative, real history of India begins with the liberalization in 1990s when India unshackled the license-permit-raj of “Nehru’s” legacy. It is perhaps true that last twenty years have opened doors to entrepreneurship and innovation, enabled upward movement of lower-middle and middle classes, and created a situation of plenty for an enthusiastic, consumerist class. But twenty years is also perhaps also a good time to take a hard look at what an unbridled quest for “self-interest” has resulted in.
A corrupt polity. An intricate, compromising nexus of political establishment, corporate czars and fourth estate. A moneyed culture where heroes are judged solely for their ability to make money regardless of morality. Celebrity-obsession. A stressful, spiritually vacant life mushrooming with spurious Godmen, astrologers and soothsayers. A booming industry of self-serving, bad books on self-help and management. A reputation for being a bully with most neighbours.
A nation at war with its own people. A nation ravaging itself to satisfy its consumption needs.
Is it that while we have been busy making money, we have lost something of the way of a soul or an inner life? We perhaps need to re-posit a few questions to ourselves.
What is a nation, if not a community of individuals united by common territory and sense of purpose? And, if that is true, what remains, if that nation is drained of morality and ethics?
Perhaps, we still need Gandhi and Nehru, if not for anything else, then to be our super-ego. Nehru’s idea of an inclusive, egalitarian, industrially developed, socially conscious and morally alive nation, tempered with Gandhi’s ideas of personal virtue, sustainability, devolution of power, and compassion towards the underdog, remains enticing and an ideal to remake ourselves and our nation.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
The Losers: The First Story
It is early evening in one of the villages in Delhi. Sun is there in full force, but they are sitting in a Buddha Jayanti park like park, an old favorite of repressed lovers, under the ample shades of trees. Rahul is sitting tensed with his head down, full of that nervous energy that indicates coming of a climactic event, and asks hesitantly, so, who is the boy, you love. She smiles, says, the boy is so stupid, does not even know she loves him, walks to a nearby tree and starts carving a name on it. Rahul gets up, sees his name printed as a solid proof, and a new lightness comes into his being.
A commonplace event that happens to countless commonplace couples every day. But it still moves you when brought to the screen with bare honesty by Dibakar Banerjee. It is truly disconcerting to realize the banality of our "most precious" experiences. But then, the experience, for all its' cliched nature, is still unique to us. And capturing it with honesty is perhaps also what lends it the special poignance of the sense of it being shared with others.
There are three stories in Banerjee's Love, Sex Aur Dhokha. Each told with his quirky, earthy sense of humour, connected very tenuously and perhaps having separate lives of their own. In all three stories, he plays off the intense sexual tension between couples, whose love hovers in a rapidly changing, uncertain world between the old and the new.
The first story is that of an artist, whose dream fails him. He is a lower middle class boy, who lives with his single mother, and nourished by bollywood love stories and a scholarship that allows him to pursue his film studies. Considering "Adi Sir" his Guru, he is paying homage to the iconic 90s mainstream love story, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge in his own humble way. With Shahid Qureshi, whose father has a big shop in the Atta Market, as his Raj, and Shruti Dahiya, daughter of a big Jat businessman cum robber baron, as his Simran. Shruti is his muse, his Simran, with whom he falls in love irresistabily. The boy is dreamy, shifty looking, lies easily, and knows how to curry favor with the big men of the village. You look at him with suspicion, and may even have some sympathy with the big father, who looks hideous but honest. This is a story of puppy love, where bollywood logic is inverted with uncompromising failure and a denoument that is as horrific as it is unexpected.
While it is a great indictment of the tremendous damage which a movie like DDLJ may have brought to popular culture, it also left me dissatisfied. It seemed to play on the mythical rich vs. poor conflict of bollywood love stories. From anecdotal experience, the real conflict in Indian love stories is social - caste, region, religion - most often caste, in mofussil towns, with class usually playing a subservient role. This unsettling aspect of the closeness of the killers and the killed is what perhaps brings in the pathos, apart from just anger.
In "Maps for Lost Lovers", Pakistani writer Nadeem Aslam's telling of an honor killing in a small, sleepy British town, the killers are not some invisible henchmen of an impossibly rich businessmen. They are friends and brothers of the killed couple, who were apparently "living in sin" before marriage. You see the parents of the killers returning from jail after visiting their sons. Sons have been beaten up, racially abused and taunted not only about their crimes, but their origins. Their parents are unable to understand why their sons have to go through all this, when they probably did what was right. You also see the sister-in-law of the killed man, who loved him like a brother. She is grief-stricken, but has very ambivalent feelings about what he was doing and perhaps even considers his killing as a just retribution from the lordly powers up there. And this ambivalence is all around, unlike the screaming media headlines. You constantly feel something churning inside you, burning you, making you feel not just angry but deeply uncomfortable about yourself, your family and your society.
This ambivalence and duality of the situation is lost in LSD. We go back to the nostalgic images of the lost couple to reflect on what could have been, with anger towards the perpetrators, but never really to examine aspects of our selves that are part of both the killers and the killed.
A commonplace event that happens to countless commonplace couples every day. But it still moves you when brought to the screen with bare honesty by Dibakar Banerjee. It is truly disconcerting to realize the banality of our "most precious" experiences. But then, the experience, for all its' cliched nature, is still unique to us. And capturing it with honesty is perhaps also what lends it the special poignance of the sense of it being shared with others.
There are three stories in Banerjee's Love, Sex Aur Dhokha. Each told with his quirky, earthy sense of humour, connected very tenuously and perhaps having separate lives of their own. In all three stories, he plays off the intense sexual tension between couples, whose love hovers in a rapidly changing, uncertain world between the old and the new.
The first story is that of an artist, whose dream fails him. He is a lower middle class boy, who lives with his single mother, and nourished by bollywood love stories and a scholarship that allows him to pursue his film studies. Considering "Adi Sir" his Guru, he is paying homage to the iconic 90s mainstream love story, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge in his own humble way. With Shahid Qureshi, whose father has a big shop in the Atta Market, as his Raj, and Shruti Dahiya, daughter of a big Jat businessman cum robber baron, as his Simran. Shruti is his muse, his Simran, with whom he falls in love irresistabily. The boy is dreamy, shifty looking, lies easily, and knows how to curry favor with the big men of the village. You look at him with suspicion, and may even have some sympathy with the big father, who looks hideous but honest. This is a story of puppy love, where bollywood logic is inverted with uncompromising failure and a denoument that is as horrific as it is unexpected.
While it is a great indictment of the tremendous damage which a movie like DDLJ may have brought to popular culture, it also left me dissatisfied. It seemed to play on the mythical rich vs. poor conflict of bollywood love stories. From anecdotal experience, the real conflict in Indian love stories is social - caste, region, religion - most often caste, in mofussil towns, with class usually playing a subservient role. This unsettling aspect of the closeness of the killers and the killed is what perhaps brings in the pathos, apart from just anger.
In "Maps for Lost Lovers", Pakistani writer Nadeem Aslam's telling of an honor killing in a small, sleepy British town, the killers are not some invisible henchmen of an impossibly rich businessmen. They are friends and brothers of the killed couple, who were apparently "living in sin" before marriage. You see the parents of the killers returning from jail after visiting their sons. Sons have been beaten up, racially abused and taunted not only about their crimes, but their origins. Their parents are unable to understand why their sons have to go through all this, when they probably did what was right. You also see the sister-in-law of the killed man, who loved him like a brother. She is grief-stricken, but has very ambivalent feelings about what he was doing and perhaps even considers his killing as a just retribution from the lordly powers up there. And this ambivalence is all around, unlike the screaming media headlines. You constantly feel something churning inside you, burning you, making you feel not just angry but deeply uncomfortable about yourself, your family and your society.
This ambivalence and duality of the situation is lost in LSD. We go back to the nostalgic images of the lost couple to reflect on what could have been, with anger towards the perpetrators, but never really to examine aspects of our selves that are part of both the killers and the killed.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
The insubstantial life
Michael was born slightly disfigured. His mother, poor, single, looked at him as a burden, with his unlovely face and slow mind. Unwanted and unloved, he spent his childhood in a special institution, Huis Norenius. Most of us remember childhood fondly, suppressing the many cruelties that accompany innocence with the magic wand of selective memory. Michael is bereft even of that imagination, and Huis Norenius hangs on his head like a cloud that keeps on growing but never bursts. Derision of others, real and imagined, sits on him tightly, and he lives alone without friends or any companion.
In the thirty first year of his unobserved, unreflected life as a Gardener Grade B in Cape Town municipality, he discovers his sick mother, and with her, the meaning of his life.
"The problem that had exercised him years ago behind the bicycle shed at Huis Norenius, namely why he had been brought into the world, had received its answer: he had been brought into the world to look after his mother."
Michael resolves to fulfill her stated desire to leave the city to go back to her native village by building a makeshift barrow for her when they don't get a permit to leave the city. At that point, one may sense the onset of a new, redemptive, journey for the unfortunate man. Reader's hopes are to be belied of course. JM Coetzee does not provide easy journeys or easy answers to the mess of modern life. Particularly one that takes place in a war-torn, race-torn, country.
Quite charactertistically, his mother dies on the way cutting his life's meaning in the middle, and Michael's lonely journey takes unexpected turns subsequently. There is no great action that ever happens in his life, and his physical condition gets worse with struggle and malnutrition. There is complete absence of any romantic interest, and one charitable sexual encounter. Once, while locked in a camp of unemployed refugees, Michale is struck by a woman, who had lost her new-born recemtly. Michael feels compelled to wait and watch as she comes out of her room every evening, silent, tearless. He feels he may be falling in love finally. But then, one day, the woman, who remains unnamed, grows out of her meloncholia and merges with the crowd. Michael never notices her again. Coetzee describes life like this. As it unfolds pitilessly in a humdrum, but still unique way.
You are also struck by the pictures he draws of loneliness. Intense, deeply evocative, they remind you of Dosteyvsky and his embitterd, lonely, men. Men carrying deep grievances in their hearts, and running away from people. Men watching life pass by, without entering into it, without engaging with it. But the greatness in Coetzee is that he also makes one realize that, in a deeply rooted way, these are also the men who recognize, most acutely, the futility of struggle and existence.
The nature of Michael's rebellion also dawns slowly to you. He leads an insubstantial life, yes, but this inarticulate man also stands outside the ravages of history, refusing to join a camp, refusing to become a slave. He is attached elementally to very few things - his mother who refuses to leave his mind, a small farm he creates in wilderness. When he had to leave that "patch of earth", he felt that a "cord of tenderness" was being cut. Very affectingly, "it seemed to him that one could cut a cord like that only so many times before it would not grow again."
The exterior world is always like a shadow to Michael. As Robert, one of his camp mates, who was growing closer to him, comments, "I have never seen a man so asleep". And Michael instantly recognizes the truth in that. It is solely his interior life that feeds him and also cuts him. Even when his physical self dwindles to a skeletal figure with sustained malnutrition, there is still life in him that thrives and seeks to be free.
"Life & Times of Michael K" is a luminous novel, even if not Coetzee's best, that raises important questions on the notion of social progress and individual rebellion, of the supposedly irresistable march of history, and what it does to the people sitting at the margins. I have read only three novels of JM Coetzee, but can perhaps say this for him more than any other writer that reading him makes living worthwhile.
In the thirty first year of his unobserved, unreflected life as a Gardener Grade B in Cape Town municipality, he discovers his sick mother, and with her, the meaning of his life.
"The problem that had exercised him years ago behind the bicycle shed at Huis Norenius, namely why he had been brought into the world, had received its answer: he had been brought into the world to look after his mother."
Michael resolves to fulfill her stated desire to leave the city to go back to her native village by building a makeshift barrow for her when they don't get a permit to leave the city. At that point, one may sense the onset of a new, redemptive, journey for the unfortunate man. Reader's hopes are to be belied of course. JM Coetzee does not provide easy journeys or easy answers to the mess of modern life. Particularly one that takes place in a war-torn, race-torn, country.
Quite charactertistically, his mother dies on the way cutting his life's meaning in the middle, and Michael's lonely journey takes unexpected turns subsequently. There is no great action that ever happens in his life, and his physical condition gets worse with struggle and malnutrition. There is complete absence of any romantic interest, and one charitable sexual encounter. Once, while locked in a camp of unemployed refugees, Michale is struck by a woman, who had lost her new-born recemtly. Michael feels compelled to wait and watch as she comes out of her room every evening, silent, tearless. He feels he may be falling in love finally. But then, one day, the woman, who remains unnamed, grows out of her meloncholia and merges with the crowd. Michael never notices her again. Coetzee describes life like this. As it unfolds pitilessly in a humdrum, but still unique way.
You are also struck by the pictures he draws of loneliness. Intense, deeply evocative, they remind you of Dosteyvsky and his embitterd, lonely, men. Men carrying deep grievances in their hearts, and running away from people. Men watching life pass by, without entering into it, without engaging with it. But the greatness in Coetzee is that he also makes one realize that, in a deeply rooted way, these are also the men who recognize, most acutely, the futility of struggle and existence.
The nature of Michael's rebellion also dawns slowly to you. He leads an insubstantial life, yes, but this inarticulate man also stands outside the ravages of history, refusing to join a camp, refusing to become a slave. He is attached elementally to very few things - his mother who refuses to leave his mind, a small farm he creates in wilderness. When he had to leave that "patch of earth", he felt that a "cord of tenderness" was being cut. Very affectingly, "it seemed to him that one could cut a cord like that only so many times before it would not grow again."
The exterior world is always like a shadow to Michael. As Robert, one of his camp mates, who was growing closer to him, comments, "I have never seen a man so asleep". And Michael instantly recognizes the truth in that. It is solely his interior life that feeds him and also cuts him. Even when his physical self dwindles to a skeletal figure with sustained malnutrition, there is still life in him that thrives and seeks to be free.
"Life & Times of Michael K" is a luminous novel, even if not Coetzee's best, that raises important questions on the notion of social progress and individual rebellion, of the supposedly irresistable march of history, and what it does to the people sitting at the margins. I have read only three novels of JM Coetzee, but can perhaps say this for him more than any other writer that reading him makes living worthwhile.
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