The Idea of Mother and the Act of Mothering

It is crucial to deal with the whole to understand a part when you are trying to analyze something as organic as human psyche. Therefore, exploring mother fixation in ‘Life and Times of Michael K’   becomes making a psychological analysis of the text. Psychological analysis of a text can include understanding and examining psyche of characters and how wishes and fantasies of writers get expressed unconsciously. Besides, many critics examine the ways in which writers write so that it appeals to repressed desires of the reader, which has led psychoanalytic criticism into the study of complicated relationship between reader and the text. D.W.Winnicott, a critic has suggested the term ‘potential space’ for the space where reader interacts with text and derives meaning. He sees this space as a parallel to the space entered by psychoanalyst and a patient, a space where binary terms like real and illusory cease to exist. The focus of my analysis, however, is the text, not writer. My analysis of the text is primarily based on Freudian concept of oedipal complex, exploring K’s relationship with his personal mother, and  on Carl Jung’s explanation of the Mother archetype and collective unconscious which helps in analyzing K’s connection with nature and earth. Besides, it relies on Lacanian understanding of language and authority to conceive Michael K’s response to and relation with the society and also deals with the subversion of mother-child dichotomy.

To begin with, Michael K has a birth-deformity –a hare lip, which wouldn’t allow him to suck milk from his mother’s breasts. The oral frustration of the child in the very beginning of its life (and that of the narrative) is  symbolic of the frustrations and series of humiliations he will have to suffer. K was denied the pleasure (oral) and the desired object (mother’s breasts) which he deserves from the very beginning. Hunger, caused initially by the inability to feed, is a recurring motif in the novel, dealt differently at different points in the narrative. Along with his disfigurement, K had difficulty in articulation, either caused biologically by the hare lip and ‘lizard tongue’ or imposed by the society he lived in. It is interesting that he was ‘learning to be quiet’ (while his mother polishes others’ floors, and) when every other child learns to speak.  Besides, in HuisNorenius, the state sponsored orphanage where K was brought up, it was a rule to keep silence in the dormitories at all times.

The problem with language has other implications, too. Firstly, language serves as a substitute for action; by its help an affect can be abreacted.(Abreaction is the cathartic emotional discharge which relieves one from affect of an event.) Absence of language skills denotes the psychological vulnerability and social inappropriateness of Michael K. Secondly it is symbolic of the fact that Michael K’s relation with his mother is partly pre-oedipal. Lacan says that the pre-oedipal stage, in which child does not even recognize its independence from mother is also the pre-verbal stage, in which child communicates without medium of language or using a language which is only literal, lacking in symbols and metaphors. Michael K accepts that he is ‘not clever with words’ in response to questioning in hospital. The doctor expresses our own concerns as readers when he shouts at K , “you want to live, don’t you?, well then talk.”

Language is the medium for everything, a tool to get your things done, your desires fulfilled and to ‘get along’. Michael  K was deprived of this essential tool. His silence is also dealt by some critics as a mode of passive resistance and this aspect may be discussed later.

Michael K spent his early life in the orphanage, removed from his mother, his only relation, root of his identity and object of desire, who visited him only occasionally. When he started working in Parks and gardens, he started visiting her in Sunday afternoons .K was still leading the solitary life, when his mother got sick. Unable to walk and shocked at the torturous experience at hospital, Anna K needed her son to ‘escape from the purgatory’ and to look after her. Michael’s desire for maternal liking and his ‘need to be needed’ was aroused. He started visiting her every evening, doing all the necessary tasks, ensuring her comfort in his eagerness to please. This eagerness and the tension with which he deals with intimacy suggests to the reader very early about K’s oedipal desires. He admits that ‘(he) did not like physical intimacy between them’ and tells Anna later that she can have ‘a chance to sleep on her own’, when they move to apartment of Buhrmanns. In his desire to please mother, K cleans Buhrmanns’ place and even accepts her plan to move to Prince Albert without question. He also attempts to strengthen bond with his mother by walking across Beach road, wheeling his mother around and trying to relive olden days when she visited HuisNorenius and walked with him.

 Through this wheeling around, K found expression for his desire to control his mother and the tension with which ‘the child’ establishes its independence. Evidence of this desire could easily be discovered in the pleasure with which he later constructs the wheel barrow. The smile of achievement he sees in Khamieskroon killer’s photograph is only a displacement of his own sense of achievement in the construction of a device to control his mother. When the first hand cart gets broken, he makes another with great effort and convinces mother into travelling to Prince Albert in the barrow. The small size of the cart restricted her movement and made his control more explicit. Her complaints ‘ceased’ some time later.

K is subjugated to a series of humiliations and he is all the more affected, on road, because of the presence of mother. Once, when approached by two thieves in the bush, he acts out as if to fight, not out of courage, but because it was a prospect of humiliation in front of mother. It is mother’s admission to hospital and death which makes the plot interesting. As conscious readers, we feel absence of explicit sadness in Michael K. But, his inability in communication must be considered. His newly found freedom and absence of control traumatizes him to the extent that he refuses mother’s death and challenges, ‘How do I know?’ He finds usual things strange and mind blank. It is from this point that mother assumes an immortal stature and extends even greater control over K’s psyche. His complicated relationship with mother starts growing into a relationship with the mother archetype which includes and manifests as Mother Earth, Nature and Death in later sections of the novel.

Mother lives through Michael as a repressed desire and through his subconscious activities. She visits him in dreams either with burning hair or in the form of wheel barrow he constructed for her to reside. Once, she also visits him as her own younger beautiful self, the original object of K’s oedipal desire. For K’s subconscious, there is always a possibility of mother rising back to life. Also, in some sense, she lives as earth where “mother is buried and not yet risen” Her death becomes reinstated later when the patch of earth where her ashes are buried is blown off by military with mines. It is only then that Michael K’s possibility to ‘hide’ in his mother’s lap ends. (or does it end even then?)

Mother fixation of   K, as stated before is not entirely oedipal, but also oral and pre-oedipal. An evidence for this is the repeated motif of hunger in the novel. In his dream, K sees mother bringing a parcel of food to HuisNorenius. Food is something K connects mother with and something he was denied (breast milk).This is why K also derives a lot of pleasure in spending ‘mother’s money’ to get food. When money is lost to a soldier, he starts acquiring food from (mother) nature. He becomes almost a savage who kills and eats birds and animals (goat). In an earlier part of text, K finds, when shuffling through pictures of beautiful women and food, that ‘food absorbed’ him more.

After burying mother’s ashes in Earth, his intentions change. In some sense, he restores and keep mother alive in his psyche through this act.Immediately after the act, his ‘life as a cultivator’ begins. His attempt to cultivate is, thus an attempt to obtain food from ‘Mother Earth’. But simultaneously, it’s also an attempt to express his sexual potency. In the act of planting ‘his’ seeds in Mother Earth, he derives oedipal pleasure through displacement of desires towards earth. His life gets ‘bound to the patch of earth he had begun to cultivate’. His wish to restore water in earth is also metaphorical, denoting his desire to see mother ‘alive’ and sexually active (menstrual ‘flow’). Though he leaves the farm for mountains after arrival of Visagie boy, he deeply regrets it. He thinks he is connected by some ‘tender cord’ to the farm earth. This symbolically represents the umbilical cord between K and mother which is not severed in the complete sense of it. This connection pulls him back down mountains and he gets caught by police and admitted to a hospital, where he becomes ‘a servant to hunger’. It is only when he escapes the camp and returns to farm, he finds peace.

This time, he finds connection to earth doubly strengthened such as he leaves the house and becomes a burrower. He makes his burrow at a spot three hundred feet from dam where two hills ‘like plump breasts’ of mother earth curved into each other. He is actually returning to mother, deeply in need of her, like when he returns to mother’s room when some tumult happens in cape. There are repeated references to Michael K as a burrower in the text. The doctor refers to him as a mouse. He himself considers him as an earthworm or a mole, though he prefers the term ‘gardener’ and not burrower. All these are textual evidences, deeply set for the subconscious reading of K’s relation with Mother Earth. His burrowing reflects his immense desire to reside inside mother, mother’s womb where he, who is treated everywhere as a ‘baby’ can re-discover the warmth, affection and protection.

Then, hunger, which is intricately entwined with sensual desire in the case of Michael K, was a feeling barely remembered. He didn’t like taste of any food other than the ‘true food’ which he believed came from the earth. “When food comes out of this earth, he told himself, I will recover my appetite.”

 In his desire to be needed, he assumes that he is needed to save the garden and protect the plants he planted in the farm. He assumes himself as father of these plants and personifies them, treating pumpkins as ‘brothers’ and melons as ‘sisters’. His repressed desire to father comes out consciously as an absence of it. “How fortunate that I have no desire to father, he thought.”After assuming role of the ‘tender of soil’, he finds immense pleasure and sensual delight in eating the pumpkin he grew, pumpkin symbolically representing his potency. He wonders how much of the sweetness ‘came from earth’. In this sense, he is also fulfilling his oedipal desires by ‘tasting’ and ‘chewing’ earth.

 Though he is captured again and put to hospital, he retrieves the pumpkin seeds which represent his maleness and potency. In the hospital, he refuses to eat anything other than pumpkins and the sympathetic medical officer brings him the ‘true food’, mistaking his desire to cultivate(father) as a protest for freedom. Much later, even after confronting sexuality of other women, he seeks water(which comes from earth) when he is offered wine and milk. Even when he drinks tap water, he craves for stream water. This is symbolic of the purity he attaches with (mother) earth and water. After the sexual relation with the nomadic woman, he is affected by a Madonna-whore complex. For him, other women are like whores, impure and intoxicating like wine. On the other hand mother or mothers or the archetypal mother figure is the figure to return, the womb to which every human has to turn back to, the lap to which they return to die. “..none of us can leave, but has to come back here to die here with our heads upon our mother’s laps, I upon hers, she upon her mother’s.” Extremely important is the figure of grandmother being constructed, whom he hasn’t even seen. “He searched for a second woman, a woman from whom his mother had come to the world” For Jung, grandmother is a mystic character who nourishes and forms an important part of the Great mother, though not as looming an influence as the personal mother.

Discussion regarding Oedipal complex includes not only the oedipal desire towards mother but also recognition and rivalry towards father. It is in the mirror stage a child identifies itself as ‘self’ and distinguishes himself from the ‘other’. In this stage, it conceives the difference from mother with whom it earlier felt  inseparable. Then, he conceives the presence of elder males and understands his desire for mother as something which could only be repressed or channeled through substitution. This is the point where his rivalry and resistance towards ‘Father’ begins. In the case of Michael K, he expressed his oedipal rivalry through the mode of passive resistance, because he identified ‘father’ with the patriarchal system itself. He didn’t have a personal father to relate and recognize. All he came to contact with were institutions, with the sets of rules which run them.

  “.. and my father was HuisNorenius. My father was the list of rules on the door of the                                               dormitory, the twenty one rules of which the first was ‘There will be silence in dormitories at all times’ and the woodwork teacher with the missing fingers who twisted my ear ……… to be forgiven. They were my father, and my mother is buried and not risen yet” (J.M.Coetzee,‘Life and Times of Michael K’, p. 105)

It is notable the way K connects all the institutions with HuisNorenius, the state sponsored orphanage. He compares the camp and the hospitals with the ‘godforsaken place’ where he lived his childhood. Father, for every child is a set of rules, a means of control and cause of fear, especially for males who sees the rival and competitor in him. For K, HuisNorenius acted as all these and also as a symbol of ‘the state’ who is his sponsor. It is in this sense state assumes the position of ‘father’ .The police officer Oosthuizen re-establishes this fact in the camp when he tells everyone clearly that state looks after them , like a father. K’s status as an escape artist, continually escaping camps, institutions and charity even when offered by individuals has to be seen as a refusal to conform to this idea of being looked after and controlled by ‘father’.

   Michael K’s childhood was a nightmarish experience for him, as is evident from the nightmare he sees in which his repressed fears about the place comes out in a symbolic way. In the nightmare, he dreams that he wet his bed and slept in urine because of the fear of waking others. This is symbolic of the fear of castration by the ‘father’ or the authorities who represent ‘father’. This oedipal fear of castration can be connected with the social ostracization he was subjugated to. The state and all institutions subjugate and attempt to control K. The police and the military also represent the state, which provides for, takes care of and therefore possesses the right to punish all. The society and the different camps in it are all patriarchal symbols which subjugate Michael K and are rejected by him. It is here that we enter the maze of contradictions regarding K’s inability to articulate. Though the medical officer is an individual, Michael identifies him as a representative of the hospital or the state, and refuses to tell his story to the doctor. Or is it mere inability to articulate?  Doctor opines that K could ‘get along’ if he could use language well. So, is the disability imposed on him?

Language is both a means of communication and a means of control. It is through language, and in particular, through names and ‘system of naming’ a child confronts gender differentiation. This is why father’s physical presence is not required for the initiation of oedipal rivalry. It is interesting  to note , as Jacques Lacan points out,  that the term nom du  pére(name of the father) in French  sounds very much like non du pére(nothing of the father).  As Lacan has theorized, language is intricately linked with gender and psyche. It is a tool to realize one’s gender for the child and a tool to control the child for the ‘father’. The child is ‘told’ to do certain things.

The rules are ‘written’ on the door of dormitory of orphanage where K lived. Besides, it is always ‘voices’ that control him, be it his own voice, or the voices of ‘others’ or the mystic authoritative masculine voice of the ‘Prince Albert’.( Prince Albert, though only a place, is the ‘father’ name Michael K connects his mother with. Prince Albert is where she wants to return.)Michael K in some sense is protesting against this means of control through ‘written’ rules and ‘voices’, through mere silence, rejection of the patriarchal tool which is language. His inability in articulation is no disability, but an unconscious reaction towards the rival, the institutions.

Michael K’s passive resistance is channeled not only through silence and rejection of language, but also through his entire body. Though he appears timid and submits himself to orders without complaining, his body always fails to obey. It appears too weak and demands sympathy, but is actually rebelling from within. His insistence not to eat any food other than ‘true food’ in the hospital perfectly exemplifies this. His was a “body that was going to die rather than change its nature”. Anthropologists see the body as a symbol, ubiquitous and carrying immense relevance. In ‘Techniques of the body’, Marcel Mauss describes the ways in which body is trained. Training the body is a kind of social control, especially observed in ‘total institutions’ like mental, military and penal establishments or even hospitals and boarding schools. The ways of behavior of Michael K’s body, therefore is an anarchist statement, which along with the rejection of language offer an ‘originality of resistance’. In the psychological sense, this resistance is seen as the offshoot of oedipal rivalry.

A text is not an island. So, it is useful to see the text in connection with other texts.  An inter-textual reading of this text immediately brings Hamlet, the prototype of modernist heroes and a prime example for the unconscious expression of oedipal complex to attention. Michael K’s paralytic consciousness which makes him think that he is watched more than he is, shows his being a modernist hero. But, he also iterates and distances himself from the prototype of modernist hero through the rejection of language. Modernist heroes are able speakers who cannot make sense, who makes a lot of ‘sound and fury’ in a meaningless fashion. Their inability in articulation is confined to the inability in speaking a ‘language of desire’. On the other hand, K rejects the system of language itself and uses his inability as a passive way of resistance. He keeps out of ‘camps’ through the ‘disability’ of his tongue and his body. When the rebels come to his farm, he thinks about helping them, but his inability with language and dislike for conversation disallows him to help them. This is not because of indecision, but because of his refusal to join any side.

Like modernist heroes, his ego is embedded in a welter of temporary refuges and disguises (gardener, burrower, camp resident, mountain ascetic, rebel, fencer, etc.) but the tussle between sense of responsibility (super ego) and desires is complicated because they bleed into each other and forms a complex because, the expression of responsibility also becomes desired in that it pleases and helps control mother, thus satisfying his oedipal urge. His desire surfaces or disguises itself as a responsibility.

                            A return to the contradictions in the text itself is crucial because the influence of post structural notions is very noticeable in the novel. J.M.Coetzee subverts certain important notions which are central to our understanding. For example, he subverts the idea of a host and a parasite and throws the question whether the town (host) is dependent on the camp (parasite) or otherwise. More importantly regarding the discussion of mother fixation, the text subverts the Mother-child dichotomy itself (Mother is also a host in one sense, carrying the child and nourishing it). Michael K is repeatedly referred to as a ‘baby’ He is treated by most people with the concern and sympathy a child deserves. In the camp, he is allowed to clean soup bucket for children. The sympathetic medical officer also treats him like a baby and gives him ‘baby food’. Robert also tells K that he is as simple and harmless as a child. Even symbolic representation of his anger in the text happens through crying of a child in the camp. But, he also obtains the status of a ‘mother’ or nourisher in various parts of text. It is K who looks after mother when she is sick with the care and attention of a mother. Mother, then becomes a child who has to be pushed around in a hand cart. His act of mothering gets elaborate expression when he starts farming. Though he is the ‘father’ of the plants since he planted their ‘seeds’, he is the mother too, since he nourishes, waters and takes care of them. In the camp, during the chaos, K takes charge of two children and offers them protection in a very interesting manner. Even in his relation with Visagie boy, it could be observed that he is possessed in some sense with maternal affection for the boy from which he later forcefully breaks away and escapes.

There is a verbal play in the text between the terms ‘gardening’ and burrowing. While burrowing is an act of depending on Mother Earth, gardening is an act of reshaping, maintaining, controlling and looking after it. This exemplifies the fact that K is sometimes child and sometimes mother, or probably both at all times, seeking expression and conflicting.

The repeated association of sleep and hunger with K is also important here. These two are the only basic needs of a child, unlike an adult who needs sexual pleasure and clothing and other culturally required objects. But, we also observe that K has sexual needs, often directed towards women who are mothers, first in the case of mother of a dead child in camp and later on meeting the nomads. In the first case, it is sublimated as love or a sympathetic relation while in the latter the sexual meanings are obvious and easily derived. He consciously represses the desire for milk of the woman when he sees her breast feeding the child. Michael K, is therefore a child and not so, and a mother and not so, which would be a more deconstructive understanding than psychological. What is relevant for the discussion of mother fixation here is that the act of mothering and its affect are as crucial to understanding his psyche, as the mother, personal and archetypal, and her interaction as an object of desire with Michael K are.

It is in the light of this understanding, we should attempt to analyze the transformation (or the apparent lack of it) in Michael K. K is aroused and gets into a sexual relation with a nomadic woman in the last section of the novel. Though his sexual response is quite passive, we observe a change in his approach towards ‘other’ women (other than mother) after the incident. He watches two girls ascending stairs and has this desire to ‘dig his fingers into their soft flesh’.

It is extremely important here the way he connects sexual activity with ‘mother’. ‘Digging’ is an action associated with earth and therefore mother. He also thinks that “women would have taken me into their beds and mothered me in the dark”. Again, he is interlinking and mixing up the idea of mother and the act of ‘mothering’ with sexual activity and desires. His return to mother’s room (note the echo of ‘womb’) is therefore only a predictable and most natural resolution (or the lack of it). His act of smelling the blanket of mother clearly indicates the oedipal urge and sexual desire. Simultaneously, the identity of Michael K as a gardener gets established. This identity is intertwined with the archetypal mother earth. His return to gardening with ‘plenty of seeds’ denotes his newly found confidence in his sexual potency.

Besides, K imagines an old man living in mother’s old place and of helping that man, taking care of him and bringing him to the farm. This tells us that his return was not only towards ‘mother’, but also towards the act of mothering. Thus, the novel takes an absurdist turn and takes us back to the beginning, the road to farm. It also shows how much K needs company, even if he denies it. He needs a companion, if possible an inferior one (a child or an old person) whom he could carry in a barrow, control, protect and look after- someone he could mother. Thus, the apparent disunity and contradictions contribute to some unity, which is not a closure, but nevertheless, a new beginning.  The act of mothering (or gardening) bleeds into the ‘idea of mother’  and becomes one complicated whole in Michael K, enveloping his psyche through the symbolic ‘garden’, which is ‘nowhere and everywhere’, where he could lower his spoon into the earth (mother)  and get water, metaphorically representing continued sexuality and life.