III. Silence and Starvation: Caring for Michael K.
Aside from Friday, Coetzee also explores silence and ethical responsibility with his character Michael in The Life & Times of Michael K. Like the mutilation of Friday, Michael also has his own “disfigurement” that creates sympathy and stands him apart from others (Michael 4). Furthermore, Michael deformity, like Friday’s, involves the mouth and speaking. Michael’s deformity comes in the form of a “hare lip” that causes him difficulty with eating and speaking (Michael 4). Although his speech impairment isn’t as severe as Friday’s, it still exists. Moreover, Michael’s deformity is visible and not hidden like Friday’s. However, the silence that is explored with Michael comes not from his harelip but his lack of desire to speak (or eat) while at the medical center in the second part of the novel.
From first moment Michael meets the medical officer in the second part of the novel, ethical responsibility comes into question. Unlike Susan, the medical officer is immediately identified as the caretaker of Michael. The medical officer doesn’t choose to take care of him, but it is his job. However, his job only requires him to heal Michael and get him back to work (Michael 131). Instead, the medical officer becomes drawn to Michael and feels unique concern for him because of his frail condition and deformity. Moreover, the medical officer finds Michael’s harelip a significant disability holding him back. Because of his harelip, Michael stands out from other patients. The medical officer displays his worries about Michael fitting in with the others when he tells Noel that Michael would “find it easier to get along if he could talk like everyone else” (Michael 131). Additionally, these lines show the tension between speech and power apparent in the novel. Michael's helplessness is based on his inability to speak properly.
When asked to quickly treat and release Michael, the medical officer responds “I cannot treat and release [him] faster” (Michael 131). He feels Michael desperately needs special care and that it is his responsibility as his caretaker to ensure Michael does gets better. Duncan Chesney, in Toward an Ethics of Silence: Michael K, argues that “responsibility…demands… an accounting, a general answering-for-oneself with respect to the general” (Chesney 313). The medical officer supports this idea when he states Noel’s “responsibility is to his programm” and his are “to [his] patients” (Michael 131). He asserts his obligation to the general welfare of his patients as a medical officer. This statement also reflects the ethical responsibility he feels toward his patients. He cannot rush the healing process and throw the patients back to work because he feels morally accountable for what happens to them.
However, aside from his general responsibility to his patients, the medical officer also feels a particular obligation to Michael. The medical officer feels tied to Michael because, like Friday, Michael’s frailty and helplessness demands the special care of the medical officer. Like Susan, the medical officer sees Michael as an inferior being that requires his help. This is seen in the medical officer's refusal to view Michael “as a man” (Michael 135). Although Michael "is older than" him, the medical officer considers him a child because of his weak condition and simple mind (Michael 135). Like Friday, Michael is viewed and treated like a child by the person who takes care of him.
Eventually, Michael notices this special treatment and bluntly asks, “Why do you fuss over me, why am I so important?” (Michael 135). Michael doesn’t understand the ethical power he has over the medical officer. Just like Friday, he may not be in a position of political power, but nevertheless, his condition and silence has a moral authority that the medical officer cannot ignore. The medical officer goes beyond what is required from him as ethical “responsibility is responsibility to and for the singular other” (Chesney 313). Michael’s disfigurement and frail condition sets him apart and requires specific attention and care. He cannot be regarded with the general way the medical officer treats his other patients. Like Friday, he resists being reduced to the known.
Michael is “so important” because the medical officer views him as too weak and sick to care for himself and thus treats him differently (Michael 135). This is similar to the way Susan feels when she requests that Friday be rescued from the island. The medical officer feels like it is his duty to make sure Michael is properly treated. He describes this duty to Michael as “we do for you what we have to do” (Michael 136). He cares for Michael because Michael's appearance causes him worry and pity. He feels the need to make sure Michael is cared for, and takes responsibility of his life. He would feel guilty should Michael die under his care.
Also like Susan, the medical officer becomes obsessed with the story of the other. By the time Michael is requested to tell his story, he is very weak and has lots the urge to speak. He isn’t as willing to tell his story as he was earlier in the novel. Before arriving to the medical center, Michael sometimes would tell people his tragic story when they asked him what he was carrying (his mother’s ashes). Now at the medical center and in a weaker condition, Michael refuses to answer questions. Instead he briefly comments on the wrongs done he feel were done to him and his mother. In response, the medical officer replies “I am sure you have not told the full story” (Michael 136). Like Susan, the medical officer feels like there are important parts of the story not being told. It is those parts he wants to know.
The medical officer’s situation, in a way, is more frustrating than Susan’s because, unlike Friday, Michael has the tools to speak (i.e. a tongue) but refuses to do so. Whether because of disability or choice, Michael’s refusal to speak upsets the medical officer. Michael resists every attempt the medical officer makes to makes him speak. Chesney suggests that Michael can “not easily be subsumed within anyone’s simple narrative” because he is “an aporetic figure that will not be simplified” (Chesney 316). Like Friday, the idea of Michael’s irreducibility prevents him from being understood and dominated. As long as he remains frail and silent, he generates pity and demands care.
Like Susan, the medical officer cannot let give up in his quest to find the truth. He suspects that Michael did not do any of things he is accused of. However, without Michael’s confirmation there is no way of proving it. Even if there is only a very small possibility Michael committed those crimes, they still remain a possibility as long as Michael remains silent. That’s why the medical officer cannot confirm his beliefs of his physical and mental incapacity without him telling his story. He demands Michael to “just tell [them] what [they] want to know” (Michael 138). Noel and the medical officer question him incessantly, but Michael refuses to answer properly, if at all. The medical officer declares, “We bought you here to talk…we give you a nice bed and lots of food…but we expect something in return” (Michael 140). Therefore, his generosity comes with an expectation for something in return. Just like Susan, for all his hard work, the medical officer is yearning for communication with the other.
When he cannot get Michael to cooperate, the medical officer tries to deny the hold Michael has on him. This mirrors Susan’s attempts to suggest that Friday’s silence has no power over her. He continues to argue with Noel and Michael that he is just doing his job. However, like Susan, he eventually acknowledges his obsession. After Michael confronts the medical officer once more about his special treatment of him, the medical officer admits, “Nevertheless he is right: I do indeed pay too much attention to him” (Michael 136). He may be unsure as to why he feels tied to Michael, but he recognizes that his obsession with Michael goes beyond his job. The responsibility the medical officer feels for Michael must be that of ethical responsibility. Michael “represents a limit case of the ethical obligation at the basis of this conception of community” (Chesney 316). Although being part of the community, Michael also stands out because of how his helplessness creates “obvious professional and human concern” (Chesney 313).
Furthermore, like the suffixation Susan feels from Friday’s silence, Michael's silence also has physical effects on the medical officer. After failing to get Michael to speak, the medical officer claims, “There was a silence so dense that I heard it as a ringing in my ears” (Michael 140). Not only is Michael’s silence mentally straining, but the medical officer feels like it also physically affects him. He must continue to tell himself that Michael is “a poor helpless soul” to feel motivated to continue to help him (Michael 141). Michael’s frailty just can not be ignored.
As a way to express this burden, and like Susan's use of the Sinbad allusion, the medical officer makes an illusion of his own. He compares Michael to the albatross around the sailor’s neck in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” He says,“You have never asked for anything, yet you have become an albatross around my neck. Your bony arms are knotted behind my head, I walk bowed under the weight of you (Michael 146). Both metaphors place the burden of the other upon the shoulders of the Orient. Although the albatross is tied around the neck of the medical officer in this metaphor, the weight would still come down on the shoulders. Furthermore, like the old man, the seemingly nonthreatening albatross caused more problems than expected. The mariner, like Sinbad, realizes too late the effects of his decision. The fact that the medical officer admits that Michael never asked to be taken care of and yet is a burden to him emphasizes the sense of ethical responsibility.
Interestingly, although the medical officer feels responsible for Michael, he refuses to keep Michael alive if he does not wish to live. However, the medical officer does “all he can short of force-feeding K, to keep him alive” (Chesney 316). He doesn‘t want “to see [Michael] starve [him]self to death” but he can’t violate his will to live or die (Michael 148). However, the medical officer also refuses to help Michael kill himself. This ties to Levinas claim that the other’s “exceptional presence is inscribed in the ethical impossibility of killing him” (Levinas 87). His moral conscience will not allow him to aid in killing Michael because he “cannot take on that responsibility while there is still a chance he might change his mind” (Michael 153). He would not be able to live with the guilt of causing Michael's death and he hopes that Michael still can be saved.
While Michael lies slowly dying in his bed, the medical officer revisits his wish “to know [Michael's] story” (Michael 149). He cannot not accept the fact that Michael is “going to die”; and moreover, that his “story is going to die too” (Michael 151). This obsession doesn’t end after Michael escapes. He still feels tied to him and hope s that Michael's will be found, “despite the embarrassment it would cause [him]” (Michael 158). It is in Michael’s escape that the medical officer is able to reflect on Michael’s time at the hospital. He addresses the fact that he saw him as “more than another patient” (Michael 164). He also recognizes that he had a “craving for the meaning [of] Michaels and his story” (Michael 165). This craving to understand Michael causes the medical officer to even daydream about his escape and how he “would have to run after” him (Michael 166). In his daydream Michael gets away but he still sees himself obsessed with understanding Michael as he shouts his final words, “Am I right?... Have I understood you? If I am right, hold up your right hand; if I am wrong, hold up your left!” (Michael 167). This emphasizes how their relationship was build on the medical officers yearning for truth and knowledge of the other. Because to understand to other is to have control ove the other.
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