La route en mode mineur. Life and Times of Michael K de J.M. Coetzee face au paradigme du road novel

Abstract

John Michael Coetzee, Nobel Prize for Literature (2003), cannot be called a minor writer—he is one of the most read and studied South African authors. But, when he establishes an intertextuality with Franz Kafka in almost all his texts, he drifts towards what Deleuze and Guattari called “minor literature” (1975). A White Afrikaner descending from Boer settlers, Coetzee writes from a major position in South Africa, in a major language — and strives to make room in his writing for minor voices. Sometimes, it leads his texts to silence: in Foe (1986), Friday will not tell his story to Mr. Foe, as if his story could not be told within the frame of major novel Robinson Crusoe (Defoe, 1719), which Coetzee both rewrites and does not rewrite.

Life and Times of Michael K stages this same struggle between a major narrative and a minor story. The novel retraces Michael K’s road trip through South Africa, from Cape Town to Prince Albert, Karoo, and back. This journey echoes with the Afrikaner mythology of the Great Trek, the plaasroman (farm novel), pioneer narratives and tales of the Frontier ; associated with an omnipresent road chronotope, this intertextuality invites to read Michael K as a road novel. The road novel as a model is yet both enabling the travel narrative and blocking it. Coloured, simple-minded, almost mute K has nothing of the pioneer ; he does not belong in the mythic Karoo ; nor does he belong in the mountains like an adventurer ; nor even on the road, like American hobos symbolizing pure freedom.

It seems like Western, White, major narratives are both the only models to tell K’s journey and inadequate, racialized models that do not fit K. K’s become a minor travel, a malfunction within the framework of the road novel—a stutter.