Wet and Dry Hinterlands: Pluviality and Drought in J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K

Abstract

Conditions of pluviality and dryness are crucial to registers of extraction, abandonment, and care in J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K. The analysis reads for these conditions across the looped hinterlands from the port city of Cape Town into the uplands of the Karoo. Water, specifically rain or the lack of it, shapes K’s capacity to (even minimally) redefine abandonment as a form of small abundance. Unloosed from the terms of his involuntary labor in service to capitalism-colonialism, he works a wind pump and a borehole, mostly by cover of moonlight. In the now “disastrously dry” hills above Prince Albert, where much of the novel is set, K’s project of temporary freedom and surreptitious subsistence would no longer be remotely possible.