Journal Name: Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction

Abstract:

This article renews the politics of J. M Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983) by mobilizing Hannah Arendt’s reading of Franz Kafka’s posthumous novels as bureaucratic blueprints of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In step with Arendt, I generate diagrams of apartheid South Africa based on Michael K’s displacements between resettlement and rehabilitation camps during the fictional civil war. My analysis at once stresses Kafka’s pertinence to critical projects of resisting man-made structures of oppression and restores visibility to the politics of Coetzee’s postcolonial storytelling. Following the temporal marker in its title and as guided by Gérard Genette’s poetics, I further approach the novel as a palimpsest that registers, extends, and transposes to South Africa the temporalities embedded in Kafka’s fictions. Perhaps more so than the apartheid blueprints, the time of the palimpsest accounts for the novel’s recitation of the European legacy to reimagine postcolonial worlds.