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Following his discovery by soldiers and transportation to a rehabilitation camp, the inscrutable Michael of J.M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K draws the attention of an unnamed medical officer charged with his care. Michael's silences and impassive rejections of food initially fascinate but quicky frustrate, then infuriate, the doctor who becomes increasingly convinced Michael is starving himself to death whilst only he can rescue the misunderstood soul from perishing. In a particular episode, the doctor steals onto the ward at night to try to ‘save’ Michael, shaking him awake in bed to plead with him to eat. The doctor will arrange whatever food he wants—if he will only state what that is. But Michael simply smiles enigmatically, shakes his head and rolls back over to go to sleep again.
Coetzee's encounter between Michael and the doctor dramatizes a constellation of psychosocial dynamics, the survey and exploration of which are at the heart of Chris Scanlon and John Adlam's ethically urgent and politically invested new book.
The contrast between the doctor's insistence on Michael's compliance and Michael's unyielding refusal draw attention to a series of reversals undergirding the scene. On the one hand, the figure of the articulate doctor, the personification of (supposed) rational medical expertise and bearer of a (supposedly) benevolent social power that confers, concerned only with doing ‘whatever it takes’ for the sake of his patient. On the other hand, the figure of the emaciated, semi-aphasic patient, the personification of (an assumed) social powerlessness, obstinately and irrationally resisting what is in his ‘best interests’. But it is, of course, Michael who emerges from the scene as a vital model of ethical selfhood and principled commitment, whilst the doctor and the system of care and knowledge he embodies transpires as a moral coward and agent of an irrational and impotent systemic violence. Or are things as straightforward as such a reading