In his song, Democracy, Leonard Cohen offers what I tend to think of as a time-weary elegy to western politics which includes these words:
… I love the country but I can’t stand the scene.
And I’m neither left or right I’m just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
I locate my roots in the left — with my nice middle-class suburban liberal upbringing — but lately, I’ve felt disillusioned by the left’s effete response to power’s abuses which I find indistinguishable from complicity. Growing tired of prayers for peace and living in “right relation” with one another, the world, God, or whatever, I’ve abandoned the Church. Growing equally tired of pithy one-liners scrawled on posters and mindless chants, I’ve abandoned the public protest (which isn’t that different from the Church in all its liturgical correctness). Both institutions claim single-word ideals like Love and Peace and aspire to rid the world of war and poverty and climate change. But these taste to me like the scraps from a table that was wiped bare years ago. As in Cohen’s song, I’m neither left or right. We do the world a disservice when we subject it to the reductive habits of our tiny univalent minds. I’d rather walk away from the conversation altogether.
At Thanksgiving, we North Americans find ourselves confronting one of those ambivalent spectacles which deserves more than we give it. (I meant to post this in time for the Canadian Thanksgiving, but I don’t suppose that matters.) It is impossible to give thanks with any measure of celebration without suppressing the fact that all we have comes from the daily reenactment of violence we can scarcely remember. Those who do remember answer that violence by driving their Volvos downtown and volunteering in food banks and soup kitchens. And when the day is done, they drive home feeling less burdened than in the morning.
As an alternative, why not spend Thanksgiving Day reading a novel? I recommend J.M. Coetzee‘s Booker Prize-winning Life & Times of Michael K. I read it in the same spirit as Leonard Cohen’s song, neither left or right, hating the violence of Democracy’s twin bastards, capitalism and militarism, but also eschewing the meaningless answers of a gutless left.
Why read a South African novel at Thanksgiving? After all, there is nothing of the Puritan tradition in Coetzee’s heritage. True, but like many white North Americans, Coetzee is descended from a colonizing people. He was born in Cape Town to parents of Afrikaner descent. Although he never tells us the colour of Michael K’s skin, we see clearly that Michael K belongs to the colonized. Michael K is a desperately poor young man in Cape Town who sets out to return his ill mother to her home town, and so begins a journey through an apartheid South Africa in the midst of civil war. He spends some of his time incarcerated in a camp for migrant workers. He also spends time living in a hovel on an abandoned farm, trying to grow pumpkins and melons, ultimately returning to Cape Town with a packet of pumpkin seeds in his pocket. For a more detailed account of the story, see Cynthia Ozick’s 1983 review in the New York Times.
I find it curious that both the book jacket blurb and the NYT review ascribe to Life & Times of Michael K those mushy liberal ideals one has grown to expect of vaguely conscientious Booker Prize-winning writers. Michael K is “determined to live with freedom and dignity” and it is a “life-affirming novel” and a “parable of Michael K’s freedom and resourcefulness.” Except that these descriptions are only half right, which makes them all wrong. I can’t read this as a parable at all. Parables are didactic. Their authors write them to teach the reader a lesson, to make a point, to hold a position. Coetzee seems to be after something subtler.
How is this book about freedom when, like Thanksgiving, it’s really about food? More to the point: it’s about pumpkins. The further Michael K travels, the less he eats, the thinner he gets, the less connection he has to the ground. He intuits that only when he plants seeds and eats the food he has grown from the ground will he find sustenance. He tries to eat food from tins at the abandoned farm where his mother had been a servant, but he can’t keep it down. He joins the soup line for children at the camp where he is incarcerated. This is a charitable project run by the ladies from the neighbouring town. They let Michael K join the line because he is a simpleton, as much a child as anyone else they serve. But even here, the food doesn’t nourish him. Towards the end of the novel, Michael K discovers that he has become the object of people’s charity. He concludes: “I have escaped the camps; perhaps, if I lie low, I will escape the charity too.” Those who are free afflict the world with the ideals which their freedom gives them the luxury to concoct. What Michael K needs isn’t freedom — not the kind of freedom served up by the ladies at the charitable soup line — but sustenance.
Metaphorical talk about eating the “bread of freedom” only confuses the issue. That phrase comes from a character in the novel, a minor character whose view of Michael K appears in a critical light. We can’t very well go quoting minor characters, the way our blurb writer and book reviewer do, and expect that we’ve captured something of the book’s “message.” All we have done, then, is identified with the character whose views most closely line up with our own. That can end up embarrassing us. What’s more, it does a disservice to the author by drawing attention away from the book and to our own views, just like I’m doing now by only pretending to write about Coetzee’s novel when really I’m writing about Thanksgiving.
Another of Michael K’s staples is locusts — no doubt a prophetic association — and the novel isn’t without other biblical associations (e.g. Michael K is made of dust that somebody spat on), but the prophetic association is misleading. Michael K isn’t an eater of locusts so much as he is a locust himself. Ozick rightly draws a connection between Michael K and Kafka’s entomological rhapsody [link no long exists], but the connection doesn’t have to be anything as complicated as the fact that he appears to have been born for punishment. Michael K’s insect nature is more obvious than that:
One of the soldiers picked up an arm between two fingers and dangled it. K did not pull away. The arm felt like something alien, a stick protruding from his body. ”What do you think he lives on?” the soldier asked—”Flies? Ants? Locusts?”
And again:
You are like a stick insect, Michaels, whose sole defence against a universe of predators is its bizarre shape. You are like a stick insect that has landed, God knows how, in the middle of a great wide flat bare concrete plain. You raise your slow fragile stick-legs one at a time, you inch about looking for something to merge with, and there is nothing.
We are supposed to be connected to the land. Eating is supposed to be a sacramental act. Each mouthful is supposed to remind us of our connection. More often than not, at Thanksgiving, we pick up our frozen turkeys shipped in bulk to a mega-store, spoon cranberry sauce from a tin, eat mashed potatoes mixed from a box, and offer up a thanks as bland and as formulaic as the food we eat.
It is worth noting that J.M. Coetzee refuses to eat meat.