Nature(s): environments we live by in literary and cultural discourses

(1)

(2)

(3)

Environments We Live By

in Literary and Cultural Discourses

(4)

(5)

Nature(s):

Environments We Live By

in Literary and Cultural Discourses

Edited by

Jacek Mydla , Agata Wilczek and Tomasz Gnat

Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego

·

Katowice 2014

(6)

Magdalena Wandzioch

Referee

Joanna Kokot

(7)

Introduction

Part One

Literary Representations of Nature(s)

Karolina Błeszyńska

Mapping the Colonial Territory: The Wild Gardens of South Africa in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Life and Times of Michael K

Ewa Borkowska

Ted Hughes and the Poetry of the Four Seasons Sonia Front

“The smell of the basket of the magic journeys” – Natural and Mechanical Time in Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps (1953)

Jakub Gajda

Faulkner’s Dream of a Bear Hunt Sławomir Konkol

Assuming We Can Give Some Meaning to the Word “Nature”:

Graham Swift via Jacques Lacan Jacek Mydla

Weird Tales – Weird Worlds Justyna Jajszczok

The Beetle, or the Revenge of Coleopteron Ewa Mazur-Wyganowska

Patrick Kavanagh – A (Non) Romantic Poet

7

117 105 91 74 63 47 33 15

(8)

Part Two

Nature(s) in Cultural and Theoretical Discourses

Nina Augustynowicz

The Good, the Healthy and the Natural: Charlotte Brontë and the 19th- Century Health Reformers

Anna Malinowska

For Nature with Love. Fuck For Forest – an “Unromantic” Perspective Sławomir Masłoń

The Passion of Antichrist, or How to Educate Your Therapist A. Andreas Wansbrough

Post-Enlightenment as Pre-Enlightenment in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist:

A Response and Reply to Sławomir Masłoń Marta Oracz

William Gilpin and Nature Tomasz Porwit

The Desire to Wipe the Slate Green, or Why the World Is in Need of a Hard Reset

Bartosz Stopel

The Naturalist/Reductionist Fallacy

137 148 162

176 188

205 214

(9)

Academia does not find it easy to use the word “nature” nowadays, although in common parlance we could not do without it. Even postmodern scholars of notable esteem, such as Lawrence Buell or Kate Rigby, who focus specifically on the study of Nature in the cultural context, often find the term problematic. If they decide to use it, they follow it with an explanation of what they actually have in mind to prevent misunderstanding or quarrel. Many theoreticians would go so far as to posit nature as a social construct, but it is not possible to deny that

“nature” often disguises itself as the opposite of “society” or “culture.”

There is a palpable anxiety among academics; the human sciences in particular may be pervaded by the fear of environments prowled by unknown beasts, ones in which fine-looking flowerbeds are a cover for quagmires of abuse, violence, and oppression.

Romanticism saw Nature as sublime. Turbulent Nature encouraged in the romantics a reflection on the human condition. Marxism, on the other hand, has made us believe that labour alters Nature, which becomes the “inorganic body” of Man.¹ The converging paths of literature, critical theory, and ecological issues have found their expression in eco-criticism, which has studied the environment both as “natural” and “man-made,”

and brought to attention the ultimate precedence of Nature over culture.

Some thinkers, however, have moved beyond constructing Nature and have focused on the reasons behind that process. Postcolonial theory as well as gender and minority studies have shown that beneath the ostensibly innocuous “natural order(s)” of sexuality or race may lurk coercion, authoritarianism, and subjugation. Construing certain aspects of culture

1 Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour,” in: Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.

<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm>.

(10)

or human identity as natural and others as unnatural has authorised the mistreatment of those who apparently did not fit the prescribed order.

In this volume, scholars with different academic interests are making excursions into Nature as represented in texts and cultural phenomena.

While some of them reopen old or familiar issues, such as environmental concerns, others walk less frequented paths. The reader may expect shifts of perspective and a variety of interpretive methods. Some of the articles address Nature as a literary, perhaps even textual, entity, appearing for instance in the form of landscapes. Others are studies of para-literary and non-literary activities and phenomena which are infused by the idea of Nature and the natural (as well as their opposites). The source materials that our contributors have chosen for analysis are representative of the scope of the penetration of literature and culture by Nature: science fiction books, Victorian novellas, poetry, art, cinematography, and social movements.

A Nature-focused interpretation, be it literary or otherwise, may adhere to a given physical, biological or geographical sense of the word, but its meaning may be less tangible. The title of the book and especially the way in which it suggests a plurality of meanings expresses this condition of Nature’s semantic elusiveness. Some of the more general questions addressed in this volume are: Is Nature a monolith and a generalization of the idea of the environment? Is it perhaps a sum of processes that take place outside culture? But if we assume that the idea of Nature is a cultural construct, then what are the processes responsible for its formation? What meanings, insights, interests, and archetypes is this idea made of? A collection of this kind cannot avoid being eclectic; indeed, perhaps it should not attempt to be otherwise. Moreover, some of the texts published here show that choosing Nature as an object of analysis means addressing a range of other themes, some of them conventionally associated with Nature (e.g. gardening, hunting, sexuality), others not necessarily so (narrative art).

The book is divided into two sections. The first section is devoted to environments and ecosystems as they are represented in literary works.

Karolina Błeszyńska invites us to visit a South African farm visualised as a garden. Analysing the works of J. M. Coetzee, the author looks at two characters who seem to bridge the gap between nature and culture, between the colonizer and the colony. As a result of their endeavours, the land itself becomes a garden which offers autonomy and anonymity. Ewa Borkowska analyses the changing image of Nature on the basis of Ted Hughes’s poetry. Borkowska pays particular attention to the shift away from sublimity and the mystery of the natural environment, characteristic of Romanticism, and towards the (post)romantic perception of Nature as

(11)

a vicious element that needs to be subjugated. Sonia Front in her article focuses on the dissimilarity between natural time and mechanical time in Alejo Carpentier’s novel The Lost Steps. As she points out, time is a construct and the boundary between natural and social time is not fixed. Jakub Gajda examines Faulkner’s short story “The Bear.” The story is related to the actual events of deforestation and restoration of the Mississippi forest, but it is also haunted by a sense of unease and longing, as well as troubled by harbingers of transitions in Southern identity, presaging the future Americanization of the region. Justyna Jajszczok’s article changes the perspective, and instead of a large-scale issue is concerned with the minute and apparently banal, to which, however, a discourse may attach a major role. Jajszczok’s analysis focuses on the motif of the beetle in Victorian science and fiction. According to the author, such a seemingly insignificant insect may be interpreted as both a symbol of our illusory power over Nature and an instrument of Nature’s revenge, namely in Her desire to punish our hubristic desire for control. Exploring Graham Swift’s early novels, Sławomir Konkol observes that the author frequently falls back on Romantic notions of the unity of nature and the individual. In the end, however, these notions are questioned, which parallels Lacan’s three orders, denying us the perception of nature as a consistent, comprehensive system. Ewa Mazur-Wyganowska explores the romantic features of Patrick Kavanagh’s poetry. She comments upon his dissatisfaction with reason, logic, and science, which caused the poet to turn to imagination, spirituality, and mysticism in order to fill life with meaning. The essay aims to describe this mental quest and identify its sources. Jacek Mydla focuses on two subjects in his essay. The first one is a “natural” tendency of narrativity to take an anthropocentric and anthropomorphic bearing, and second – the inversion of that predisposition in works belonging to the genre of the weird tale.

The second section of the book contains articles which address the subject of Nature in relation to chosen – sometimes baffling and controversial – phenomena, uses, and conceptualisations of Nature that the researchers have been faced with in culture and theory. Examining the chosen works of Charlotte Brontë, one of the quintessential Victorian authors, Nina Augustynowicz focuses on the aspect of Nature closest to us – the human body. Augustynowicz investigates the body as a cultural phenomenon, whose signs and signals may denote not only a biological phenomenon, but also reflect ethical or aesthetic issues. The initiative known by its wonderfully succinct alliterative name, Fuck For Forest (an environmental group whose fundraising schemes include selling self- made pornography), is under investigation in a text by Anna Malinowska.

(12)

The issues that, according to Malinowska, the phenomenon raises go beyond the immediate shock value and include the formation of cultural identities as well as a culturally-conditioned understanding of the natural.

In his exploration of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, Sławomir Masłoń emphasizes the dichotomy that exists on the planes of the alleged natural state of womanhood and the actual image of the woman (particularly the trope of the self-sacrificing woman). Investigating the reactions of the audience and the critics towards the visceral visual layer of the movie, the author emphasises what he considers the unquestionable achievement of the film – the trauma caused by the questioning and violating of the patriarchal ideal. In a response to Masłoń’s interpretation of Antichrist, Andreas Wansbrough argues that the film, in rejecting rationalisation, is an attack on the ideas fundamental to the Enlightenment, those of reason, Nature, femininity, and humanity. Visual representations of Nature, albeit treated from a very different set of assumptions, are under scrutiny in another article: Marta Oracz focuses on the possibility of a marriage between art and Nature. Investigating the idea of William Gilpin, an 18th-century writer, painter, and art theoretician, Oracz looks specifically at the notion of the picturesque and the idea of picturesque travel; she relates them to Gilpin’s efforts to establish an aesthetic theory that would link art to Nature. Tomasz Porwit examines the notions of purity and idealism as promising a return to a pre-industrial state of existence; these notions evidently play a key role in the discourses of eco-poetics and eco- politics. Reading Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Porwit observes that the thus-defined trend has similarities to fictitious apocalyptic scenarios that are fuelled by the binary Nature/culture opposition. Finally, the approach changes once more and now the subject is examined from the perspective of metadiscourse. Bartosz Stopel invites us to a meeting with Literary Darwinists – a school of literary criticism that seems to have gathered as great a number of detractors as Darwin did in his time. The author asserts that the program of the Literary Darwinists has certain merits, but claims the problems within their discourse are difficult – perhaps impossible – to overcome.

The range of issues raised by the contribution to this volume may indeed seem overwhelming, yet when we stand before Nature, we cannot but feel astonished by its conceptual dimensions and capacity. From bugs and bears, through human identities, to time and space, the different shapes, sizes, and manifestations of Nature supply our mental view with an enthralling image. Without a sense of this breadth and depth, we would feel robbed of the richness that Nature-related discourses generate.

Like the natural resources of the planet Earth, the resourcefulness of the human imagination as far as things natural are concerned seems

(13)

inexhaustible. The efforts of the contributors are recommended to the attention of the reader, and yet both the authors and the readers – after their labours – must be left with a keen realisation of how much has been left unexplored. As editors, we do not call this publication a comprehensive guide to Nature, but rather a collection of tales told by mental travellers, each offering a glimpse of the wonders and terrors they have seen, and inviting their readers to embark on their own journey of adventure.

The Editors

(14)

(15)

Literary Representations of Nature(s)

(16)

(17)

Mapping the Colonial Territory:

The Wild Gardens of South Africa in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Life and Times of Michael K

South Africa was perceived by the colonizers as a wild garden. This unknown interior had to be penetrated, mapped and finally colonized.

A South African farm represents such a precisely marked colonial territory. From that perspective, the parallel between the South African territory and the notion of a farm considered a garden can be drawn. As a consequence, the symbolism of the garden, as a place of self-entity and everlasting economic prosperity, becomes crucial in the further discussion of the colonial gardens of South Africa. In order to understand the pre- viously mentioned symbolism of a wild garden, the issue of the topos of the garden needs to be introduced; therefore, we pose the question about the origins and about the main ideas encapsulated in the notion of a colonial garden. J. M. Coetzee describes the topos of the garden as,

“the enclosed world entire to itself, that is more extensive than the Judeo- Christian myth of Eden. In its isolation from the great world, walled in by oceans and an unexplored northern wilderness, the colony of Hope was a kind of garden.”¹

Such a territory viewed as a garden of wilderness, must have been marked and tamed and therefore the establishment of a farm as a colonial unity may be considered as the pioneer colonial attempt to domesticate the South African land(scape). The bewildering and mysterious South African interiors were finally marked and limited by the imperial social and cultural frontiers imposed on the land and on the minds of its inhabitants.

As Sally-Ann Murray writes: “I position ‘indigenous’ gardening within the ambit of postcolonialism as among erratically ‘sub’ (-versive, -terranean, -cultural) practices of colonialism which Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin as

1 J. M. Coetzee, White Writing. On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven

& London: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 3.

(18)

influential precursors – from within the settler culture – of what is usually envisaged as postcolonialism.”²

Analogously to numerous visions and myths about the South African land, the notion of a garden can be interpreted from two perspectives:

as sublime South African wilderness viewed as a biblical Eden and as a territorial colonial unit which was gradually transformed into a farm.

(Farm)land becomes thus a symbol of a South African land(scape), conquered, marked and tamed by the colonizer, however, possessing hidden powers of nature, dormant, yet, ready to awake and rebel, manifesting its majesty. Coetzee defines the farm as: “nature parceled and possessed.”³ The image of the South African farm(land) as instance of colonial attempts to domesticate the land and to exist on its territory is discussed in this essay from numerous perspectives. The colonizer in the person of a farmer is viewed as a “destroyer of the wilderness”⁴ and therefore they may state: “I move through the land cutting a devouring path from horizon to horizon.”⁵

However, the presence of the colonizer overlaps with numerous hardships connected with living in the interior and this aspect is taken into consideration, as well. The concept of a farm as a South African garden is presented first. Sally-Ann Murray points at the concept of

“a colonial settler culture”⁶ that, consequently, encapsulates the notion of a synonymous relation between garden/gardening and farm/farming.

A garden may be thus considered as a prerequisite for a farm, as its foundation stone and as the first colonial attempt to tame and mark the sublime wilderness. Each white colonizer becomes a gardener and the master of the territory. Marking and naming it, they create a new colonial garden, next the (farm) reality which, simultaneously, becomes their own (home)land. A garden becomes thus a prerequisite for a farm; yet, both creations of the colonizer are founded on the South African soil which, similarly to Camoes’ Adamastor,⁷ gathers all the forces to resist the process of the colonization of the land and enslavement of the natives. Existing on a South African land, each colonizer acquires “a network of disidentificatory traditions”⁸ which transforms into a new form of the colonial identity.

2 Sally-Ann Murray, “The Idea of Gardening: Plants, Bewilderment and Indigenous Identity in South Africa,” in: English in South Africa, vol. 33, no. 2 (October 2006), p. 45.

3 Coetzee, White Writing, p. 175.

4 Coetzee, Dusklands (New York: The Penguin Group, 1996), p. 79.

5 Coetzee, Dusklands, p. 79.

6 Murray, “The Idea of Gardening,” p. 45.

7 Luiz Vaz de Camoes, The Lusiads (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

8 Stephen Slemon, “Modernism’s Last Post,” in: Cultural History in Australia, ed. Adam Tiffin Teo and Richard Whites (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 2003), p. 3.

(19)

A colonizer is not only the conqueror of the land but also the creator of a new settler narrative of both the self and the surroundings.

In Disgrace,⁹ Coetzee presents the portrayal of a South African garden and depicts a white female colonizer – Lucy – as a gardener and creator of a South African wild garden within the framework of colonial perspectives and ideology. She masters and shapes the landscape of her inner self and, simultaneously, the landscape of the outer territory. The protagonist experiences hostility and is symbolically punished as the representative of the colonial order. “The garden helped to domesticate the vast unknown into a habituated place, this entailed challenging, often unpredictable shifts between containment and extension, volition and happenstance.”¹⁰ The (farm)land becomes for the main protagonist a kind of Arcadia. South African land, that is to say, what is distant and inaccessible for the others, is close and tamed by her. “Now here she is, flowered dress, bare feet and all, in a house full of the smell of baking, no longer a child playing a farming but a solid countrywoman, a boervrou.”¹¹ She (re)writes the traditional vision of the garden and creates her own “topos of the garden, the enclosed world entire to itself.”¹²

Lucy establishes her own idyllic place of existence, “her green belt topography,”¹³ the garden of freedom which not only becomes the in- separable yet colonized part of the farm but also may be considered as the Arcadian element of the landscape of the South African territory. As Katie Holmes observes: “the garden was her monument to a different world. It mediated the harshness of the surrounding landscape, providing a retreat from the unnaturalness of that barren land.”¹⁴ Murray adds:

Similarly, the garden for those who became white South Africans, was a place in which were nurtured the seeds of “proper”

garden plants, generally herbaceous border and bedding species traditional to Anglo-European cultivation, plants whose beauty was celebrated. […] Whatever grew in “the veld” and “the bush”

may have been lovely, or curious, or intimidating, or useful, or attractive as borrowed landscape, but it was not initially imagined to be suitable, in terms of either tasteful property of successful

9 Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000).

11 Coetzee, Disgrace, p. 60

14 Katie Holmes, “In Spite of It All, The Garden Still Stands: Gardens, Landscape and Cultural History,” in: Cultural History in Australia, p. 175.

(20)

propagation, for transplanting the cultivated environs of the domestic garden.¹⁵

The garden co-exists thus with the remaining naturalistic and untamed territory of the (farm)land. “The front boundary is marked by a wire fence and clumps of nasturtiums and geraniunms, the rest of the front is dust and gravel.”¹⁶

The protagonist debunks the myth of the the infertility of the South African farmland and of the hardships of the colonizer who makes the attempt to transform the unknown and therefore bewildering landscape of South Africa into the colonially-subordinated land of beauty and economic prosperity. “The garden: flowerbeds and winter vegetables – cauliflowers, potatoes, beetroot, chard, onions. Rains for the past two years have been good, the water table has risen. She easily talks about these matters. A frontier farmer of the new breed. In the old days, cattle and maze. Today, dogs and daffodils.”¹⁷ Lucy’s Arcadia does exist and simultaneously it becomes her garden of freedom which in the words of Nelson Mandela is the territory which one can control. It gives the small but important satisfaction of planting the seed, watching it grow, watering it and then harvesting it. It is a small taste of freedom. The garden is thus as our life and one as its leader is obliged to look after it, plant seeds and then watch, cultivate and harvest the results.¹⁸

Lucy’s garden, which constitutes the Arcadian landscape of the farm (territory), becomes the symbol of colonial power and dominance over the South African land; however, it also offers her harvests which enable her to survive. Lucy is capable of maintaining a dialogue with the South African land and nature, benefiting from its seeds. Due to the fact that Lucy does not make an attempt to tame and alter the land into a territorial unit which provides the capital on the basis of the politics of exploitation, she can be described as a female colonizer. Her life on a farm becomes less problematic and it symbolizes the possibility of assimilation and of existence in accordance with nature and oneself. She is a colonizer, yet she respects the land and therefore a symbolic cooperation between man and the land can exist. “‘Do you still have your stall at the market?’ ‘Yes, on Saturday mornings. I take you along.’ This is how she

16 Coetzee, Disgrace, p. 59.

18 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (New York: Back Bay Books, Little, Brown and Company, 1995).

(21)

makes a living: from the kennels, and from selling flowers and garden produce. Nothing could be more simple.”¹⁹

The institution of the market symbolizes human interaction and mutual cooperation between nature and people; however, the element of economic politics, where the idea was to dispose of crops with a reasonable profit, can be observed, as well. Participating in the symbolic process of the exchange of goods between the earth and its cultivators seems to blur the colonial reality and Lucy’s burden as a colonizer.

A South African garden becomes Lucy’s asylum and sense of living. She respects both the land and the natives. The market becomes neutral ground, a territory where both colonizer’s and native’s realities face each other and, moreover, can function next to each other. It is a place where the native and colonial economics of survival encounter each other. Lucy as a female colonial farmer/gardener becomes the link, the overlapping element between South African nature and colonial imperatives. The market symbolizes the mosaic of socio-cultural and territorial differences, however, it is common ground, a place where people share their respect for nature and manifest the results of their attitudes. Nature, in this case, mediates between two realities, the colonial and the South African. As Maria Lopez observes:

Disgrace shows that interracial conflict is just one among the many others at work in South African society: the novel is pervaded by acts of violent intrusion and that highlight the hostility and lack of understanding not only between blacks and whites, but also between different social groups such as landowners and tenants, country people and people from the city, men and women, parents and children, the old and the young, […]. Simultaneously, we encounter the acts of friendly visitation and hospitality that, on a more optimistic note, point to the possibility of creating a new community on the land in South Africa. Since unequal power relations in South Africa have been very much dependent on unfair distribution and zealous possession of the land, Disgrace also suggests that the right relation to the land is that of the person who, instead of creating bonds of rooted attachment with it, adopts the stance of the visitor or guest.²⁰

Lucy confirms the thesis that one can exist in accordance with nature, with harmony and in peaceful cooperation with one’s surroundings. The

20 Maria Lopez, “Can We Be Friends Here? Visitation and Hospitality in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 36, no. 4 (December 2010), p. 923.

(22)

protagonist benefits from the fertility of the land, however, she maintains a dialogue with its people, as well.

On their left are three African women with milk, masa, butter to sell; also, from a bucket with a wet cloth over it, soup-bones.

On their right are an old Afrikaner couple whom Lucy greets as Tante Miems and Oom Koos, and a little assistant in a balaclava cap who cannot be more than ten. Like Lucy, they have potatoes and onions to sell but also bottled jams, preserves, dried fruit, packets of buch tea, honeybush tea, herbs.²¹

The protagonist’s specific approach to life within the territory of a South African farm is revealed during her father’s, David Lurie’s, visit to her isolated smallholding. “A cool winter’s day, the sun already dipping over red hills dotted with sparse, bleached grass.”²² David comments on his daughter’s place of living: “Poor land, poor soil, he thinks.”²³ However, due to Lucy’s attitude towards the land and her love of the garden, his perception of the surroundings gradually alters. “So: a new adventure.

His daughter, whom once upon a time he used to drive to school and ballet class, to the circus and the skating rink, is taking him on an outing, showing him life, showing him this other, unfamiliar world.”²⁴ Lucy’s life on the South African territory is peaceful. She cultivates the land, yet she does not precisely mark its frontiers. Moreover, she allows nature to become a part of her colonial reality. “It takes a while to adjust to the pace of country life, that’s all. Once you find things to do you won’t be so bored.”²⁵ The dialogue between a colonizer and the land becomes thus feasible and necessary in order to exist in agreement with her inner self and with the laws of the South African territory.

The other interpretation of the image of a garden as a place of habitation and of the colonizer as a gardener is encountered in another of Coetzee’s novels: Life and Times of Michael K,²⁶ where the author introduces the element of politics as the unavoidable consequence of the colonial act of gardening and farming manifesting, simultaneously, that the protagonist, despite being a white colonialist, can avoid political issues and power relations. As T. Kai Norris states: “His fiction

26 J. M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K (London: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1985).

(23)

has crossed boundaries, twisting and bending South Africa’s literary frontiers.”²⁷ Coetzee criticizes “colonial and apartheid mythologies of land and settlement, possession and ownership”²⁸ and polemicizes the issue of a real South African garden as synonymous to wilderness and with the artificial one, presenting the mechanisms of power and politics operating within the process of colonization. However, his vision is criticized by writers who do not share his viewpoints. Such a critical approach is presented by Murray, who quotes Nadine Gordimer commenting on Coetzee’s writing:

Nadine Gordimer’s review of J. M. Coetzee’s novel Life and Times of Michael K, […], takes no issue with that part of Coetzee’s narrative in which the author establishes Michael K’s beginnings in De Waal Park as a municipal gardener who develops preferences for black, rich loamy soil. Gordimer can also grant the symbolic value of having K bury his mother and affirm an earthy, a nurturing attachment to the soil which holds her. She rejects Coetzee’s decision to have his character turn from politics, […], and his belief in himself as a gardener. Raising her eyebrows in skeptical interrogation, Gordimer asserts: “Is it better to live on your knees, planting something?”²⁹

Gordimer criticizes Coetzee’s preferences to present Michael K as a gardener who cultivates and appreciates rich South African soil, thus such a one-dimensional vision does not reflect the real conditions and hardships of existence on a South African farm, which is frequently infertile and wild when first encountered by a colonizer. Consequently, Gordimer’s critique raises another question: “Does her conditioned belief in gardening in South Africa as an avoidance of politics – even the subsistence gardening to which Michael K is driven by a desperate will to survive – will not led her to miss the crucial aspect of Coetzee’s project?”³⁰ Coetzee depicts Michael K as “an out-of-work-gardener in Africa, in order to situate gardening, or at least the idea of gardening, as a social problematic, with all the attended hopes, self-interestedness and limitations as it may involve.”³¹ As the protagonist states: “The truth is

27 T. Kai Norris Easton, “Text and Hinterland: J. M. Coetzee and the South African Novel,” Journal of South African Studies, vol. 21, no. 4 (December 1995), p. 585.

28 Norris, “Text and Hinterland: J. M. Coetzee and the South African Novel,” p. 585.

31 Murray, “The Idea of Gardening,” p. l46.

(24)

that I have been a gardener, first for the Council, later to myself, and the gardeners spent their times with their noses to the ground.”³²

Michael K, whose symbolic one letter of a surname makes him both anonymous and comparable to Walt Whitman’s Everyman,³³ is an individual who represents every South African. As Reingard Nethersole states: “The garden in its manifold forms denotes a piece of specific territorialization in which a part of the landscape has been set aside as a particular space different from other areas such as fields, forests, mountains, seas, etc.”³⁴ The garden thus provides Michael K a piece of the South African wilderness as a territorial unit, which offers him the pleasure of shaping nature and admiring his deeds. The garden also possesses a symbolic dimension. As Nethershole continues:

Furthermore, the depictions of the garden or park or any other limited “natural” space (as opposed to the city) in literature and in visual arts are imbued with symbolic meanings from the aesthetic to the cognitive, psychological, moral, and social. The garden in the life-world (reality) as well as the garden rendered in literature and painting thus becomes a site upon which changing relations between man and nature as well as changing functions of symbolic and cognitive systems cross each other and intermesh.³⁵

Under such circumstances, Michael K may also be presented as a colonial gardener who, analogously to Lucy, evades political issues and accepts the politics of the native inhabitants of South Africa and of the land. He exists within his own garden reality and respects the fertile land and therefore he desires to create “the ‘real’ gardens as opposed to their supposedly ‘fictional’ counterparts.”³⁶ The fertility of the land may be thus interpreted as the symbolic gesture of the land which offers its fertility and crops in exchange for respect of its creation and for the attempts to hear the polyphonic voices of its native people.

“The garden was a medium through which literature reflected the problem of relating cultural values to a social structure in transition.”³⁷

32 Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, p. 20.

33 Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in: Leaves of Grass (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1994).

34 Reingard Nethersole, “Enchanted Gardens: Landscape Imaginary in the Works of Hofmannstahl and Klimt,” Modern Austrian Literature, vol. 22, no. 3/4 (1989), p. 109.

35 Nethersole, “Enchanted Gardens,” p. 109.

37 Charles E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 280.

(25)

For Charles E. Schorske the image of the garden is seen as a “mirror of paradise,” by means of which a Western man makes an attempt to measure his “temporal state.”³⁸ Schorske alludes to the Biblical presentation of the Garden of Eden as paradise, as the utopian territory located outside time and space, which was frequently described by and through literature, yet its literary portrayal has undergone numerous transformations.³⁹ Coetzee locates his garden and gardener on the territory of South Africa.

Presenting his vision of the garden as a particular Arcadia for nature he, simultaneously, deprives Michael K’s life of any idealistic elements.

The garden is his oasis. However, for the society, he is unvaryingly the outsider. According to Schorske:

By structural changes I mean the differing styles in which the image is presented together with its localization as a space referring to the changing relations of the spatial/temporal ordering of the world in general. In that sense paradise appears as the utopic space, a place where human existence and action surmount the limits of earthly life as in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. All images of the garden border to a greater or lesser extent on this utopic space. But opposed to this are heterotopic and paratopic spaces, those places which either lie behind the topic space, the garden, or which imply other arenas where competencies are acquired. Thus the garden demarcates the special place which functions as a particular space or site which depends upon the relations to other territories.⁴⁰

Coetzee, however, undermines Schorske’s utopian vision of the garden and space, and (re)writes the garden myth, incorporating in it the human and the natural element which are not only dystopian but also can overlap in many respects. The author presents “literary landscapes which are constantly in move.”⁴¹ The psychological landscapes of action and the geographical ones gradually alter and transform into images representing both the aspects of psychological and territorial (dis)location.

“The garden seems to provide a perfect place in which the inner psychic life as opposed to the outer reality of social life can be made visible.”⁴² Furthermore, the novel can be interpreted from yet another perspective presented by Anthony Vital in his essay: “Toward an African Ecocriticism:

38 Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, p. 280.

41 Norris, “Text and Hinterland: J. M. Coetzee and the South African Novel,” p. 586.

(26)

Postcolonialism, Ecology and Life and Times of Michael K,”⁴³ where

“J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K is presented as a novel that has been explored as an exemplar of postcolonial ecological thinking. He argues that while Michael K may indeed be shaped by attitudes typical of postcolonial thinking at its inception, it is not a novel with much interest in ecology.”⁴⁴ There are numerous approaches encapsulated in the notion of ecocriticism, yet all of them tend to meet in the crucial assumption that nature and wilderness are the elements which are inscribed and closely related with issues connected with such a critical theory which combines the colonial element with the natural.

The idea of postcolonial ecocriticism may be considered as an approach aiming to present and study representation(s) of both nature and environment in dialogue with postcolonial theories and viewpoints which are adapted as “environmental discourses.”⁴⁵ Vital introduces the notion of ecocriticism “as a form of literary and cultural critique which, […], engages in debating what a society’s assigning of significance of nature reveals about its both present and past.”⁴⁶ Natural factors overlap thus overtaking the historical and social ones. He states that nature should be considered as the factor which shapes and meaningfully influences social history and existence in South Africa. While Anthony Vital in his essay advocates “reading for nature with an awareness of colonial history,”⁴⁷ Dominic Head in the article “(Im)possibility of Ecocriticism,”⁴⁸ concludes:

“Postcolonial thinking would of course question the claim of any “we”

to “know nature”⁴⁹ and therefore “ecocriticism is (im)possible.”⁵⁰ This statement introduces an element of deliberate textual and interpretative ambiguity and, simultaneously, indicates many layers of significance and strata of ecocriticism as a critical approach incorporated in the reading of (post)colonial texts. “Head reads Michael K as a novel that illustrates his solution for negotiating this ‘(im)possibility,’ a solution that proposes grasping the textuality of literature while simultaneously

43 Anthony Vital, “Toward an African Ecocriticism: Postcolonialism, Ecology and Life and Times of Michael K,” Research in African Literatures, vol. 39, no. 1 (Winter 2008), pp. 87–106.

44 Vital, “Toward an African Ecocriticism,” p. 87.

45 Graham Huggan, Helen Tiffin, Postcolonil Ecocriticism. Literature, Animals, Environment (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 15.

48 Dominic Head, “(Im)possibility of Ecocriticism,” in: Writing the Environment:

Ecocriticism and Literature, eds. Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells (New York: Zed, 1998), pp. 27–39.

49 Head, “(Im)possibility of Ecocriticism,” p. 38.

50 Head, “(Im)possibility of Ecocriticism,” p. 38.

(27)

‘pursu(ing) ecological issues’ – which deal, by definition, with what is extratextual.”⁵¹

Head’s attitude to the idea of ecocentrism, presented with reference to Coetzee’s novel, is thus related with the attempt to alleviate the dichotomy between man and nature, to interact with the man and with the land, by means of the textual devices, as well. Both Vital’s and Head’s methodology overlaps in the statement that: “For an African ecocriticism a consideration of the role these various discourses of nature play in a region’s social processes would enable focus on the flows of power that give ecology its social value.”⁵² Language becomes a link between the man and the land and, moreover, is not only the carrier of meaning but also of culture, history and the past. As Graham Huggan states:

It is not enough, however, to acknowledge that all understandings of the world are delivered through language, but necessary to qualify this assumption with the recognition that different languages […], permit varieties of understanding that are both historically determined and socially/culturally formed. The task of postcolonial criticism, in this context, is to explore how different cultural understandings of society and nature – understandings necessarily inflected by ongoing experiences of colonialism.⁵³ Vital, drawing a parallel with Head, states that language is a necessary factor for approaching and understanding such strata as nature, history, politics and culture, between which a common denominator should exist.

It becomes a particular medium between man and nature, that is to say, between gardener and land(scape), as well. As Vital notes: “K’s gardening which Head interprets as signifying, as the ‘idea of the literal,’ belongs, in this way of reading, to a code, that of the narrative’s dominant code.”⁵⁴ Through the same code the main protagonist – Michael K – can be deciphered. Derek Wright, in his essay “Black Earth, White Myth: A Note on Coetzee’s Michael K,”⁵⁵ interprets him as “less a man than a spirit of ecological endurance.”⁵⁶ Wright points to the issue of the “ecological implications”⁵⁷ of Coetzee’s novel. He suggests that “these are luxury

53 Huggan and Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, p. 15.

55 Derek Wright, “Black Earth, White Myth: A Note on Coetzee’s Michael K,” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 38, no. 2 (1992), pp. 435–443.

56 Wright, “Black Earth, White Myth: A Note on Coetzee’s Michael K,” p. 435.

57 Paul Franssen, “Fleeing from the Burning City: Michael K, Vagrancy and Empire,”

English Studies, vol. 5 (2003), p. 456.

(28)

problems that worry affluent Western societies.”⁵⁸ Wright raises the following idea: “And since Michael K is, in fact, less man than a spirit of ecological endurance, a Gaian ideograph, it remains to ask wherein lies his relevance, whether to the contemporary political situations of South Africa or to the ecological one of the African continent at large.”⁵⁹

In White Writing, Coetzee presents the viewpoint that the white South African literary landscape is composed of two contradictory

“dream topographies.”⁶⁰ One landscape was described as “a network of boundaries crisscrossing the surface of the land, marking off thousands of farms, each a separate kingdom ruled over by a benign patriarch.”⁶¹ The other one portrayed South Africa as “a vast, empty, silent space.”⁶² These realities, overlapping in many socio-geographical, cultural and political issues, are present in Coetzee’s novels. Michael K is an individual who is rejected by society due to his social otherness and disability, and is made to maintain the dialogue with nature and, consequently, appreciate and cultivate the South African land. His linguistic disability to speak fluently, that is to say to stammer, locates him on the margins of the social hierarchy. He is ostracized and not classified as a white South African by the surroundings. Such a social rejection transforms him into a gardener, a cultivator of the ground, and an advocate of the land which he respects for its fertility and for its gift of yielding good crops. Sally- Ann Murray writes:

The growing tendency in South African indigenous gardening has been to efface the hands of culture and politics, and to rehabilitate the domesticated garden through both indigenous plant content and planting style, as a simulation of the unauthored, pre- nation state of “natural wilderness.” For the white South African gardener, the desire to shape, plant and grow an indigenous garden embodies a paradox, for at least one aspect of the motivating desire is to erase the tracks of a residually European self, hence the culture in which most South Africans, at least until now, have been nurtured, however, insidiously. So in one sense, the turn to indigenous plants in the historically “exotic” suburban garden.⁶³

58 Franssen, “Fleeing from the Burning City: Michael K, Vagrancy and Empire,”

p. 456.

59 Wright, “Black Earth, White Myth,” p. 439.

(29)

Furthermore, in the words of Murray, gardening “marks the settlers’

reconciliation with the place and increasing national identification with the land.”⁶⁴ The gardener becomes responsible for their creation and therefore the respect of both the land and its crops becomes the crucial element of gardening. The mutual cooperation between man and the land results in harvests which are necessary for existence. Michael K’s relationship with the land and nature is one of worship and affinity.

Appreciating and respecting wilderness, he tends to be “lodged within the landscape.”⁶⁵ Coetzee presents another aspect of existence on a piece of South African land. He locates his protagonist – Michael K – on “a remote frontier ‘oasis’ of Empire.”⁶⁶ Coetzee invents his “imperial landscape”⁶⁷ and therefore his individual vision of South Africa may be contrasted with Leon Whiteson’s. Easton writes: “Whiteson’s idea of a novel involves a geography as superficial as that marked by settler colonialism: a geography of sameness rather than variety, of the identical rather than the diverse.

Coetzee’s fiction puts this uniform space into question. His maps do not duplicate what is already there, but neither are they so patchy as Whiteson seems to indicate.”⁶⁸ To quote Rosemary Jane Jolly: “The geography of his fiction may not correspond to an identifiable geographical political entity, but its depiction is both detailed and comprehensible.”⁶⁹

In Life and Times of Michael K, Coetzee emphasizes that the interaction between the colonized land and the colonizer who, simultaneously, becomes the gardener of the South African land(scape) is not only possible but also necessary. Michael K transforms from a gardener of the city into a gardener of the land, a farmer whose responsibility is to cultivate the land and cooperate with nature. “He will continue the journey to Prince Albert and occupy himself in a new garden, beginning with the cultivation, […].”⁷⁰ He sacrifices his mother’s ashes to the ground. Such a gesture manifests Michael K’s journey from Cape Town to the place of his childhood, a rural house in Karoo can be considered as a symbolic and final union with nature. The parallel between Michael K’s life journey, his return to a childhood farm, memories and the cycle of both nature and life can be drawn. The circle closes as the protagonist finally and for the second time reaches his destination, a place of rural peacefulness which

66 Easton, “Text and Hinterland,” p. 590.

69 Rosemary Jane Jolly, “Territorial Metaphor in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians,”

Ariel, vol. 20, no. 2 (1989), pp. 69–79.

(30)

becomes his Arcadia, both geographical and psychological. He concludes,

“Now I am here, he thought. Or at least I am somewhere.”⁷¹

Michael K becomes thus a mediator between the land and the colonizer.

He does not belong to the colonial reality, rejecting, simultaneously, both power relations and political involvement in the issues of the country. Such a function is, however, maintained at the price of further social rejection and connected with an avoidance of political issues; consequently, power relations are connected with the policy of colonization. Michael K states:

“enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over, whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening.”⁷² He creates his own hierarchy of values and decides to cultivate the first garden next to the (farm)land. “The garden is thus the site of resistance, for K is defining his own role. He is not a fighter, but a cultivator.”⁷³ As a consequence, he transforms “the rockery garden in which nothing was growing”⁷⁴ into a proper and beneficial farm. He makes “the deserted farm bloom.”⁷⁵ His role as a gardener gradually alters, from a gardener for the city into a gardener for himself. There is a difference between the garden he cultivated in Cape Town and the one which he creates in the Karoo.

“[…], he was no longer sure that he would choose green lawns and oak- trees to live along. […]. It is no longer the green and the brown that I want but the yellow and red […].”⁷⁶

The protagonist desires to leave the socio-geographical reality of the city and to liberate himself and the garden, which no longer is limited by socio-political regulations. Michael K aims to abandon the colonial laws of marking and mapping the territory which operates as a location to be seen by the colonial eye, and creates his own garden anti-politically, yet in many respects, it is a colonial reality. Consequently, the image of the garden may be interpreted in opposition to the camp, as Coetzee replies to Tony Morphet in an interview. He claims that “if there is a structural opposition between ‘camp’ and ‘garden,’ it is at most at a conceptual level.”⁷⁷ Under such circumstances Easton’s observation that: “Coetzee’s

75 Stephen Clingman, “Revolution and Reality: South African Fiction in the 1980s,”

in: Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture, ed. M. Trump (Johannesburg: Ravan & Athens: Ohio, 1990), p. 53.

77 Tony Morphet, “Two Interviews with J. M. Coetzee, 1983 and 1987,” Tri-Quarterly, vol. 69 (Spring/Summer, 1987), p. 460.

(31)

answer is based on the ephemeral nature of K’s garden existence, but perhaps K’s own dream topography, which closes the novel, closes down the camp sites,”⁷⁸ is worth consideration, as well. Michael K from a gardener of the city transforms into the gardener of his own piece of land, of the farm in Karoo. The journey to Karoo becomes the quest towards finding his place and unifying the defragmented identity of a rejected and ostracized member of society.

Such a journey into the interior of the country may be considered as a symbolic quest into the depths of the protagonist’s psyche, as his symbolic rebirth as a gardener/farmer and as consolidation with the natural surroundings of Anna K’s childhood moments of bliss and happiness. In the words of Paul Frassen:

Vagrancy is usually associated with marginalization and lack of power. […].Vagrancy may constitute the necessary preparatory stage for the establishment of empire. In such myths, […], it is through hardships encountered while roaming a desert, a wilderness, the seas, or even the depths of space, that a new race is forged that will finally reach a promised land, settle there, and become a leading power. Prosperity in a new land is seen as divine compensation for the years of vagrancy.⁷⁹

It is the land and nature of the Karoo which becomes for Michael divine compensation for all the misfortunes and socio-cultural and linguistic obstacles related to life in the city. Finally, Michael makes an attempt to cultivate his own farm and becomes a gardener of the South African landscape. He respects both the land and its crops. The protagonist’s farming of the land and gardening of the landscape may be considered as “the incarnations of this myth of empire through vagrancy.”⁸⁰ The farm offers Michael K solitude, privacy and the possibility of maintaining a dialogue with the South African land(scape). As T. Kai Norris Easton writes: “K has never been the entrepreneur, never the proprietor.”⁸¹ Furthermore, “he could not imagine himself spending his life driving stakes into the ground, erecting fences, dividing up the land.”⁸² Drawing a parallel with Coetzee’s novel In the Heart of the Country, one can quote Easton: “Fence posts, barbed wire and national roads dot the landscape;

within these enclosures are the farms captured by settlers. The fences

79 Franssen, “Fleeing from the Burning City,” p. 453.

80 Franssen, “Fleeing from the Burning City,” p. 453.

(32)

both exclude and isolate, and his protagonist – Magda – with too much land, is skeptical about her inheritance.”⁸³

The protagonist’s solitude and existence on a South African farm makes her pose the question: “But how real is our possession? […] The land knows nothing of fences, the stones will be here when we crumble away.”⁸⁴ Such a statement corresponds to Coetzee’s literary landscapes, which are “landscapes in making, where boundaries are renegotiated, erased, or ever-shifting.”⁸⁵ An observation made by Michael K during his journey to Prince Albert strongly emphasizes such vastness of the land. “From horizon to horizon the landscape was empty.”⁸⁶ Similarly to Coetzee, his protagonist – Michael K – “wondered whether there were not forgotten corners and angles and corridors between the fences, land that belonged to no one yet.”⁸⁷

Consequently, both Lucy and Michael K create colonial frontiers of both the mind and the land, yet they are deeply symbolic and therefore invisible and incomprehensible for the colonial order. Quoting Coetzee:

“He could understand that people should have retreated here and fenced themselves in with miles and miles of silence; he could understand that they should have wanted to bequeath the privilege of so much silence to their children and grandchildren in perpetuity, (through by what right he was not sure).”⁸⁸ Moreover, the protagonists’ act of farm(ing) may be compared to the act of gardening, delicate, patient and based on a respectful attitude towards the land(scape). In White Writing, Coetzee defines the farm as “nature parceled and possessed,”⁸⁹ yet for Michael K the South African farm(land) possesses only symbolic fences. He respects the laws of land and nature. Michael K perceives the farm as a particular garden and, therefore, his idea of farming may be considered as equal to the idea(l) of gardening. His years, similarly to Doris Lessing’s autobiographical confession, are “spent in solitary communing with nature, rather than with people, an isolation which left its mark in an intense, lifelong preoccupation with personal fulfillment, and almost overwhelming sense of being an outsider.”⁹⁰

84 Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country, p. 58.

87 Dick Penner, Countries of the Mind. Fiction of J. M. Coetzee (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1989), p. 94.

90 Dennis Walder, “Alone in the Landscape: Remembering Doris Lessing’s Africa,”

in: Postcolonial Nostalgias. Writing, Representation and Memory (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 72.

(33)

Coetzee thus portrays his protagonists as the mediators between man and the South African land, perceived as the wild garden. Neither Lucy nor Michael K desire profit from the land they cultivate. They perceive their existence on the (farm)land as a symbolic gesture towards nature, which they respect and regard as a necessary element in colonial life and presence on the South African territory. They are neither native inhabitants of South Africa and its gardens nor colonizers deprived of a respect and admiration for wilderness areas. These two characters stand in-between these two social realities. They are rejected and marginalized; however, this location within socio-cultural and historical frames, which does not classify them as members of any social reality but as the mediators, offers them the possibility of maintaining a dialogue with both the natives and colonizers. Furthermore, such a location enables them to experience life in South African colonial gardens. The farm becomes for both Lucy and Michael K, classified as the socio-cultural Others, the link between the man and wilderness. A farm(land) embodies thus a South African garden which offers them colonial freedom and anonymity.

Karolina Błeszyńska

Kreśląc mapy kolonialnego terenu

Dzikie ogrody Południowej Afryki w Hańbie i Życiu i czasach Michaela K. J. M. Coetzeego

Streszczenie

Niniejszy esej przedstawia wizję południowoafrykańskiej farmy jako dzikiego ogro- du. Południowoafrykańskie terytorium postrzegane jest jako swego rodzaju niebezpieczna głębia, która musi zostać zbadana, określona geograficznie, naniesiona na mapę i w konsekwencji ulec procesowi kolonizacji. Jednak proces oznaczania terytorium na mapie, nazwania go i ujarzmiania jego natury nie musi być równoznaczny z niszczeniem lub eks- ploatacją południowoafrykańskiej przyrody. Mimo że południowoafrykańska kolonialna farma uosabia właśnie takie precyzyjnie zarysowane terytorium, J. M. Coetzee zarówno w Hańbie, jak i w Życiu i czasach Michaela K. ukazuje, że istnieje możliwość nawiązania kolonialnego dialogu z rodzimymi mieszkańcami Południowej Afryki oraz z dziką przy- rodą tego obszaru. W konsekwencji podobieństwo między wizją krajobrazu Południowej Afryki a farmą, przedstawioną przez Coetzeego jako kolonialny dziki ogród Południo- wej Afryki, staje się motywem przewodnim eseju. Ogród symbolizuje bowiem miejsce dostatku i samowystarczalności. Coetzee przedstawia swoje postacie jako mediatorów pomiędzy ludźmi a południowoafrykańską naturą, postrzeganą właśnie jako dziki ogród.

Ani Lucy, ani Michael K. nie chcą czerpać ekonomicznych korzyści z ziemi, którą upra- wiają. Ponadto pojęcie kapitalizmu jest dla nich abstrakcyjne i odległe. Swoją obecność i życie na kolonialnej farmie postrzegają raczej jako symboliczny gest w kierunku przyrody, którą szanują i rozumieją jako konieczny element warunkujący ich egzystencję na kolonialnym, lecz nadal południowoafrykańskim terytorium. Lucy i Michael K. nie są ani

(34)

rdzennymi mieszkańcami kontynentu i jego dzikich ogrodów, ani typowymi kolonizato- rami pozbawionymi szacunku dla ziemi i podziwu dla przyrody. Bohaterowie J. M. Coe- tzeego stoją pomiędzy dwoma światami: kolonialnym i południowoafrykańskim, jednak to właśnie ich kolonialna farma, przeobrażająca się w dziki ogród Południowej Afryki, oferuje im indywidualną wolność i społeczną anonimowość zarazem. Południowoafry- kańska kolonialna farma staje się więc dzikim ogrodem.

Karolina Błeszyńska

Die Landkarten des Kolonialgebietes zeichnend

Wilde südafrikanische Gärten in J. M. Coetzees Werken Schande und Leben und Zeit des Michael K.

Zusammenfassung

Das Essay schildert die Vorstellung von einer südafrikanischen Farm als eines wilden Gartens. Das Gebiet Südafrikas ist als eine Art gefährliche Tiefe wahrgenommen, die erforscht, geografisch bestimmt, an eine Landkarte eingetragen und infolgedessen ko- lonisiert werden muss. Doch der Prozess, ein Gebiet an einer Landkarte zu markieren, zu bezeichnen und seine Natur zu bändigen, muss aber die Zerstörung oder den Anbau von der südafrikanischen Natur nicht bedeuten. Obwohl die südafrikanische kolonia- le Farm gerade ein solches Gebiet verkörpert, zeigt Coetzee sowohl in der Schande, als auch in Leben und Zeit des Michael K., dass es möglich ist, in einen kolonialen Dialog mit Ureinwohnern Südafrikas und mit wilder Natur des Gebietes zu treten. So wird die Ähnlichkeit zwischen der Vorstellung von der südafrikanischen Landschaft und der von Coetzee als ein kolonialer wilder Garten dargestellten Farm zum Hauptmotiv des Essays.

Der Garten symbolisiert zwar einen wohlhabenden und autarken Ort. Coetzees Figuren sind Vermittler zwischen den Menschen und der südafrikanischen Natur. Sowohl Lucy wie auch Michael K. wollen aus der von sich angebauten Erde keine Vorteile ziehen und der Begriff „Kapitalismus“ ist ihnen ganz fremd. Ihr Leben in der kolonialen Farm ist ihre symbolische Geste zur Natur, die von ihnen geschont und als ein Faktor betrachtet wird, der ihr Leben auf dem kolonialen, aber doch immer noch südafrikanischen Territorium bestimmt. Lucy und Michael sind weder Autochthonen noch typische Kolonisatoren, die das Erde nicht achten und die Natur nicht bewundern. Coetzees Helden schweben zwischen den zwei Welten: der kolonialen und der südafrikanischen, doch eine individuelle Freiheit und eine soziale Anonymität zugleich bietet ihnen ihre koloniale Farm an. Die südafrikanische koloniale Farm wird also zu einem wilden Garten.