SO FAR, THE INTEREST OF THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS HAS been mainly on physical disability. Whenever I have turned to a discussion of mental and psychological states, as was the case with Molloy and Consolata, it was to re-situate their physical impairments within the parameters provided by their highly elaborated states of consciousness. I want to turn now to cognitive as opposed to physical disability, with a special focus on the representation of the autistic spectrum in literary writing. But in turning in this direction I will also be raising certain theoretical questions regarding narrative itself. Whereas in chapter 1 I suggested that disability may be taken as providing structurally constitutive points for narratives of social deformation in general, I now want to supplement that proposition with a more subtle and complex one, namely, that the nature of the representation of cognitive disorders such as autism allows us to see the acute contradiction that is established within narrative between an implied interlocutor—shown here as a surrogate for the wider social domain—and the silent or inarticulate character who seems to opt for silence in negotiating the vicissitudes of social existence. The autistic character provides us with a template for seeing the relationship between speech and silence, and between the domain of cognitive disorder and that of social relations, where everyone is arguably spoken for within a social semiotic that cannot tolerate anomaly (much less silence). In placing the implied interlocutor in a dialogical relationship to Coetzee’s autistic Michael K, I will be bringing to the foreground a thematic thread that has run through the previous chapters, particularly in the discussion of Molloy, Hamm and Clov, the Mendicants, and, to a lesser degree, Consolata and Baby Suggs.
Benita Parry (1996) offers some useful insights about the relationship between speech and silence in Coetzee’s work. Essentially, her argument is that inarticulateness is distributed in his work in such a way as to imply a hierarchy among various Others, and that this implied hierarchy rehearses the ways in which the power to (self-)represent is dispersed within the colonial archive. Even though white women are less powerful than white men in this discursive arrangement, they are at an advantage over racial others. Parry suggests that Coetzee goes as far as imitating women’s writing in his elaboration of recalcitrant women who seize the center of the narrative and unravel patriarchal codes of writing (Magda, Curren, Susan Burton); on the other hand, he aligns the racial other’s inarticulacy or silence to implications of the ineffability of noncanonical knowledges (Michael K, the Barbarian Girl, Friday). Her conclusion is that despite troubling the generic features of white South African writing (the pastoral fable, the novel of liberal humanist crisis, etc.), Coetzee inadvertently replicates the same system of hierarchies that have bolstered the white colonial archive.
Parry’s reading is based first on a structuralist interpretation of the relationship between silence and speech. This assumes that the silenced are to be understood primarily in relational terms and that such relationality defines a series of repeated active/passive positions that are productively understood when all Coetzee’s apparently marginal figures are read together. Second, she outlines the ground of the formal features of speech and silence as being ultimately related to the specific history of South Africa and to Coetzee’s place, as a white man, in it. The relationship between elements in his texts is then a refraction of larger discursive relations within South African history, so that his is both a subversive account of such a history and a replication of its construction of race hierarchies. Her critique is highly suggestive both for its particular insights and for the process by which she aligns literary interpretation to a materialist analysis. One thing that Parry does not note in her account of speech and silence in Coetzee’s work, however, is that there is also a coincidence between inarticulacy, racialization, and disability in the writing. All the inarticulate “other” characters he gives us carry physical and cognitive impairments of various sorts. These impairments cannot be separated from their role as inarticulate and spoken for. The question posed in Coetzee’s work more generally about who has the power to narrate, though clearly connected to the ambivalent interrogation of the colonial archive, is ultimately also inseparable from bodily questions. Furthermore, these inarticulate racial others also represent the convergence of disabling physical and social conditions, even if Coetzee is careful to foreground only the physical ones. Thus Michael K has a harelip but is inarticulate also because he is an underclass colored person in apartheid South Africa, Friday was possibly once a slave and is certainly mutilated and without a tongue, and the Barbarian Girl is tortured into blindness by the Empire’s security agents for the mere reason of being a “barbarian.” In all these instances, the inarticulacy and disability of his nonwhite characters performs an insistent invitation to interpret while frustrating the possibility for interpretation at various levels, thus generating what we noted in chapter 2 as a form of hermeneutical impasse. This dialectic of invitation and frustration is demonstrated most strongly in Life and Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Foe, though it can also be seen in operation disconnected from the characterization of disability in In the Heart of the Country and The Age of Iron.1
To speak of silence in a literary text seems somewhat tautological, since the words we read are always evoking ideas in our own minds. The words thus “make a noise” despite the presumed silence of the inarticulate characters. Furthermore, there are many types of silence that make the issue of inarticulacy both variegated and suggestive. Leslie Kane (1984) enumerates the following typology of silence:
The dumb silence of apathy, the sober silence of solemnity, the fertile silence of awareness, the active silence of perception, the baffled silence of confusion, the uneasy silence of impasse, the muzzled silence of outrage, the expectant silence of waiting, the reproachful silence of censure, the tacit silence of approval, the vituperative silence of accusation, the eloquent silence of awe, the unnerving silence of menace, the peaceful silence of communion, and the irrevocable silence of death.
(Kane 1984, 14–15)
More significantly, as she goes on to point out, “non-participation in the speech act symbolizes withdrawal from temporal, spatial or social reality” (19). Thus silence is of variant signification and may have quite startling implications.
The inarticulate character is silent only within the context of the specific representational domain in which they are found; otherwise “silence” is practically impossible. This uneasy fit between a character’s elective silence and the rupturing of silence that the text insinuates on their behalf and around them may also be glossed more fully if to Parry’s structuralist and materialist analysis we add two other terms by which to understand the nature of speech and silence in Coetzee’s writing, namely autism and dialogism. Autism seems to me particularly relevant to a discussion of characters such as Michael K, the Barbarian Girl, and Foe not because they illustrate broad aspects of an autistic spectrum, but because of the scrupulous silence they enjoin upon themselves, which carries a hint of their extreme discomfort with extant forms of social communication. All these characters carry physical marks of “formal particularity,” to turn to Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s felicitous term, which I have referred to more than once over the course of this study. Physical marks of formal particularity signal the disability of the characters and may be read in physical, cognitive, and ultimately social terms (Thomson 1997, 119). In the particular case of Michael K, as we shall see later, it is impossible to escape the impression that his silence is part of a wider autistic spectrum.
Focusing on the literary representation of autism allows us to raise the question of silence in a particularly productive way because, in reading silence as connected to cognitive and physical conditions, we are obliged to attend to all that remains unstated and merely suggested. Furthermore, the autist’s silence generates a multiplicity of significations that cannot be encompassed solely within a reading of content or theme. Silence/autism and dialogism have to be seen as related and indeed dialectical pairs rather than as separate terms, for in the representation of inarticulacy an implied interlocutor is invoked whose role is to provide an ethos of continual dialogism and thus to maintain the process by which the silent character’s nonsocial musings are inflected in a manifestly socially significant way. But the role of the implied interlocutor is much more exacerbated in a text dealing with a person with autism, since the elective silence of the autist is constantly balanced against the intrusions of sociality concealed within the discursive template of the implied interlocutor. Indeed, I would like to suggest that the status of autistic silence is to be read within individual texts as more variegated in the ways in which the relationships between character(s), narrator, author-function, and implied external sociopolitical contexts are displayed and negotiated. For even though it can be argued that all literary characters, whether disabled, autistic, or not, in the end interact with an implied interlocutor, the point I am making here is that for the disabled, that interlocutor may be an aggregation of attitudes of Garland Thomson’s “normate” such that the structure of interlocution in such texts may be sharply differentiated from representations that are not focused on disability. I will have more to say about this later in the discussion.
Of Autism and Dialogism
But first, what is autism? In filmic representations of persons with autism, a composite definition of autism is deployed that includes features such as extreme discomfort with the unfamiliar, echolalic and monotonic speech, difficulty understanding social cues, unusual preoccupations, pronounced lack of affect, and auditory hypersensitivity.2 However, in real life autism has a broader symptomatology and is diagnosed on the basis of abnormalities in the areas of social, adaptive, and communicative development and imagination, together with marked repetitive or obsessive behavior or unusual narrow interests. Autism is determined both by neurological features and by observable behavioral symptoms. People with autism may have an IQ at any level. As a rule, if a person with autism has an IQ in the normal range or above, they are said to have “high-functioning autism.” If, on the other hand, a person meets all of the criteria for high-functioning autism except for communicative abnormality/history of language delay, they are said to have Asperger’s syndrome. An individual with lower functioning autism is likely to be classified as severely disabled, since they would necessarily exhibit acute forms of cognitive and sometimes even physical retardation. Children and adults with high-functioning autism (HFA) and Asperger’s syndrome may show the following features:
1. Greater involvement with objects and physical systems than with people;
2. Lower tendency to communicate than other children;
3. Tendency to follow their own desires and beliefs rather than paying attention to, or being easily influenced by, others’ desires and beliefs;
4. Showing relatively little interest in what the social group is doing, or being a part of it;
5. Showing strong, persistent interests, sometimes stretching for months only to be switched to new, equally intense interests;
6. High degree of accuracy in perceiving details of information in addition to higher rates of recall than others;
7. View of what is relevant and important in a situation may not coincide with others’ views;
8. Fascination with patterned material, be it visual (shapes), numeric (dates, timetables), alphanumeric (license plates), or lists (of cars, songs, etc.);
9. Fascination with systems, be they simple (light switches, water taps), a little bit more complex (weather fronts), or abstract (mathematics);
10. Exhibiting a strong drive to collect categories of objects (e.g., bottle tops, train maps) or categories of information (types of lizard, types of rock, types of fabric, etc.);
11. Preference for experiences that are controllable rather than unpredictable;
12. And finally, whereas in lower functioning autism the autist understands almost no metaphors, so everything is taken literally, in Asperger’s syndrome they learn the meanings of idioms one at a time, almost as if they are compiling a database of nonliteral sentences and their meanings, which makes them seem more able to cope with figurative language. This is still subtly different from how non-AS people use language.3
Since autism is made up of both physically discernible behavioral features and aspects of mental responses, the project of identifying autism in writing that does not explicitly set out to present itself as dealing with that condition is an elusive and fraught process. My application of an interpretative framework drawn from an understanding of autism is designed to highlight specific features of texts that seem pertinent to literary representations of the condition, whether the writers explicitly set out to represent an autistic condition or not. The framework provides a way for illuminating details that normally get ignored or assimilated to other categories of interpretation. In fact, once we begin to think of such silent characters as illustrating aspects of the autistic spectrum, we begin to see how widespread autism features in literary writing.4 I want it to be noted that in the discussion that follows, I do not mean to imply that the autistic condition is by any means uniform and generalizable across the board. For ease of reference, I shall be using the terms autism and autistic spectrum interchangeably, not in order to sidestep the task of isolating each specific example for analysis in its own right, but to suggest the main parameters of an analytical category that will hopefully be picked up and further elaborated by the community of disability scholars and others.
Dialogism in novelistic discourse raises a different set of issues that I want to suggest are pertinent to the understanding of how autism is situated in literature generally and more specifically in relation to Coetzee’s writing. Commenting on the polyphonic nature of the opening passage of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Bakhtin (1984, 61) states that “the dialogized interior monolog…is a brilliant model of the microdialog: every word in it is double-voiced, every word contains a conflict of voices.” As always with Bakhtin, when he uses the term “word” he is really referring to utterance as it pertains to a communicative environment. The word/utterance is first and foremost social. As he states later: “The other person’s word is not reproduced, it is merely implied, but the entire structure of the speech would be completely different if this reaction to the implied word were not present” (162). In Bakhtinian thought, every word implies the residue and echo of an anticipated response, such that the word/utterance is inescapably dialogized within itself. As extrapolated from his comments on Dostoevsky, even first-person novelistic accounts proceed on the basis of the incorporation of an interlocutor. This interlocutor is sometimes an unstable interlocutor, such as the implied addressee of a diary, journal, or report, who is in turns sympathetic or antagonistic to the writer. Thus, in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics Bakhtin explores in detail the various ways in which the interlocutor, whether polemical or otherwise, is incorporated into the structures of novelistic discourse, helping to shape the narration of the character’s consciousness by always implying an addressee to even the most mundane and silent hopes, fears, desires, and vague ideas.
As will be recalled from previous chapters, the invocation of a skeptical or polemical implied interlocutor for the disabled characters proves highly productive in stipulating their addressees and how these addressees lead to various types of symbolic relationships in terms, for example, of the attempts at evasion of normality (Molloy), the illustration of the impulse to control the narrativization of the past (Hamm), the modulation of the consequences of the split between divine and erotic templates for the task of self-understanding (Consolata), or the design and dissemination of the effects of a systemic uncanny (Soyinka’s mendicants). However, all these disabled characters form a collectively distinct class from the autist by virtue of the fact that they are all far from inarticulate or silent. No one would associate Hamm, for example, with inarticulacy. As we shall soon see, the same cannot be said for Coetzee’s Michael K. Michael K’s implied interlocutor is produced by his silence even if there is also the insinuation of a form of social rupture to that silence.
We are obliged to make a number of qualifications then in transferring the Bakhtinian model for an exploration of the representation of the autistic spectrum in Coetzee. As we noted a moment ago, in Bakhtin the “word” is always split between an addresser and an addressee, both of whom are by implication human subjects. This is so even when Bakhtin is writing about all the elements within the communicative nexus (word/ addresser, addressee/social context, and the overall inflections of communication) in generic terms and without specific characters in mind. But what if the addressee/interlocutor is not a human character at all, but rather a structure of societal and cultural expectations not attributable to any single source? What if the interlocutor within the dialogized word is not an individual but an effect generated by the specific discursive structure of dialogism contained in the text itself? These questions and what they imply are directly pertinent to exploring the relation between speech, silence, autism, and dialogism. We have to note first of all that whereas the concept of the dialogized interior monologue may be generally applied to most modernist and postmodernist novels, in the case of the representation of the autistic spectrum the point of interest is not so much that the thoughts of the autist are dialogized and oriented toward an addressee, but that this orientation is performed against the autist’s desire for absolute social silence and separation from social intercourse. For there is ample evidence in novelistic discourse that even when characters are silent they talk to themselves in their own minds and often actively anticipate direct and not-so-direct social responses. They may even from time to time cultivate solitude as a conduit for getting deeper access into their own sense of themselves prior to reemerging into social interaction. The main difference between an autist and another character that chooses to cultivate their solitude-in-silence is that the autist elects silence as a way of completely disavowing or at the very least sharply attenuating social interaction. The autist’s orientation to social silence is also augmented by the intense attention they bring to bear on objects, abstract patterns, and systems; these may all be perceived in their separateness and distinctiveness from the realm of human interaction. Furthermore, the autist develops gestures and precise ritualistic and repetitive physical movements as a means of sharply indicating their withdrawal from the domain of ordinary human interaction. Thus the central clues to whether a character depicted in a piece of writing illustrates aspects of the autistic spectrum or not is the degree to which they (a) elect silence as a natural and organic part of their being-in-the-world; (b) display an insistent focus on objects, patterns, and abstract systems; and (c) develop repetitive gestures, actions, or motions that represent a ritual of partial withdrawal from the social realm. As we noted earlier, in literary texts the autist’s silence, though elective, is concomitantly riddled by the contradictory pressures of the dialogized novelistic discourse. This seems to go against their wish to remain undisturbed within their silence. I want to recommend that the intrinsic reading of silence as a characterological choice set against the interruptions necessarily instituted by the structures of narrative be seen as taking place primarily from the assumed perspective of the autistic character. Such a reading takes the autist’s implicit orientation toward silence as a starting point from which to grasp the significance of all the levels of narrative discourse within which the autistic spectrum takes shape. My argument here is that the autist’s silence must be taken as having an effect on the entire domain of the narrative discourse while also being produced and sustained by it.
Autism Versus Metaphor
Another dimension that complicates the literary representation of autism is the degree to which metaphorical discourse, or indeed metaphor itself, undermines the assumed verisimilitude of representations of the condition. The nature of this problem may be gleaned from Matthew Belmonte’s (2005) fine argument regarding the relationship between autism and literary representation. Arguing that certain neurobiological features of persons with autism bear direct comparison with the impairment of associative processes that are central to narrative thought, Belmonte suggests that the autist’s essentially inventorial cognitive predisposition (listings, patterns, a focus on mechanical or other deterministic systems, etc.) is directed toward nonsocial phenomena as a protection against disorder. The autist’s efforts at meaning-making are essentially related to a narrative problematic: “In autism, when failures of neural connectivity impede narrative linkage, when each element of a scene or a story exists in isolation, the surrounding world can seem threatening and intractable. Autistic withdrawal into repetitive behaviours and scripted interactions can be read as an effort to gain control over such arbitrariness and unpredictability” (Belmonte 2005, 11). In Belmonte’s highly suggestive account, the impulses behind the person with autism’s repetitive behavior is the same as the impulse governing the narrative drive in the first place. Both have to do with the desire to organize reality so that it may be epistemologically ordered and understood, even if, as in postmodernist writing, this understanding depends upon a preparedness to surrender the comforts of predictability. As Belmonte concludes, persons with autism may be described as “human, but more so.”
It must be noted, however, that metaphor and metaphorical discourse raise a peculiar problem for taking autistic processes as analogous to narrative impulses as such. As has been pointed out by many scholars of the condition, those on the lower-functioning end of the autistic spectrum tend to have difficulties with interpreting metaphor. Metaphorical discourse hides too much while revealing a labile surface in little. The discourse’s elusive surface produces various levels of meaning, such that the person with autism is no longer able to entirely predict the precise significance of the language that they are confronted by. The problem of metaphor and metaphorical discourse for the person with autism is raised quite forcefully in Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, where Christopher states an explicit preference for simile as opposed to metaphor. To his mind, metaphor is untruthful. At one point, however, he seems to inadvertently succumb to the allure of metaphor. This comes in his description of the policeman at the station: “He also had a very hairy nose. It looked as if there were two very small mice hiding in his nostrils” (22). This is arguably a metaphor (nostrils as mouseholes and vice versa), and Christopher’s attempt to deconstruct it and to show that the figure of speech he has just used is not metaphor but simile because it “really did look like there were two very small mice hiding in his nostrils” (22) fails to persuade. Had he seen two real mice nestling in the nostrils of the policeman, he is not likely to have described it so calmly. He would have found the sight expressly odd and unsettling and, given what we had already seen about him, would have raised some serious questions about it to the policeman himself (rather than just thinking about it in his own mind). In other words, even the decidedly autistic Christopher cannot entirely escape the reach of metaphor. But it is inescapable not because Christopher is a person with autism, but because his condition is being represented from within the domain of literary discourse itself. A real person with autism may be able to conduct their social relationships without any recourse to metaphor, but it would be hard to find a literary text without any metaphor whatsoever. This point can be pressed even further when we interpret the dead dog that triggers the investigative action of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time not as an ordinary dog but as a literary device suggestive of the ritual scapegoat we encountered in the previous chapter. We are told on page 4 of the novel that the dog was leaking blood from its forkhole wounds. Thus as soon as Christopher hugs the dog to his body he takes on the ritual aspect of the dead animal and becomes its walking surrogate within the text. And it is evident on reading further that Christopher is indeed the ritual pharmakon for various familial and social disorders in the text. These are encapsulated in the reportedly strained relations between his parents, the low-intensity violence of his father deriving from his frustration and anger, the unsociability of the neighborhood, and, finally, the economic decay of an impoverished Swindon.5 It is Christopher’s pursuit of who killed the dog that progressively reveals all these levels of social disorder. By acting as a detective, he inadvertently becomes both the key to unearthing familial and social contradictions and the direct sacrificial carrier of the effects of these contradictions. The text thus metaphorizes him even while trying to produce the entire narrative in scrupulously realist terms (that is, eschewing any explicit metaphorization of people, events, and environmental details). Thus we can say that whereas Belmonte points out that autism shares similar impulses with the narrative drive, it is also clear that narrative as such undermines the possibility of a pure articulation of the autistic spectrum.
As will be recalled from our discussion in chapter 1, a close reading of disability requires that it be situated within the totality of representation and not treated as a discrete and isolated element within the literary discourse. The autist’s dispositions tend to raise implications for the entire narrative text in all its dimensions. In cases where the autist is a central character, this is even more significant. There is no way of demarcating between the autistic “zone” and the nonautistic “zones” of such texts. Every zone is mutually constitutive and implicated. And in such a literary interpretation we find that metaphor sets the limit to what we might wish to attribute to the temperament of the autistic character as opposed to the representation in its entirety.
The Structures of Dialogism in Coetzee’s Earlier Work
In a similar way to Beckett, on whom he based his doctoral dissertation, Coetzee illustrates the variable incorporation of a skeptical interlocutor into the processes of thought of his central characters and how their orientation to this interlocutor dialogizes their consciousness. A brief discussion of these will clear the way for seeing how the technique applies to Life and Times of Michael K. There is a fascinating similitude in Coetzee’s work between characters such as Magda (In the Heart of the Country), David Lurie (Disgrace), and Paul Rayment (Slow Man) in the ways in which they constantly interrupt themselves to qualify their thoughts and feelings. For Magda, these interruptions emanate from an insistent sense of narrativity, that is, both the incitement to narrate and the fact of being narrated through her diaries. They also come from the elusive place of representation in the face of the violations of the female self discernible within the South African pastoral tradition in general.6 For David Lurie, the self-interruptions derive, among other things, from his faulty understanding of what pertains to an epic Romantic action, seen in his case in the refusal to sign the apology recommended by his university authorities after accusations of raping a student have been brought against him. Lurie’s dialogized self-interruptions also come from his fraught perception of what it is to be a white man living in a postapartheid era with concerns about the necessity of reparations for the past.7 It is not a context that he either fully understands or indeed endorses. Magda and David Lurie are both characters that are fundamentally afflicted by “second thoughts.” Contrastively, in the case of Paul Rayment, who has had his leg amputated after a car runs into him while he is riding his bicycle, the regular process of internal dialogism that we see in relation to Coetzee’s nondisabled characters is redirected into a secondary and quite unexpected path that serves to illustrate a degree of aesthetic nervousness.
Paul has had to suffer the ignominy of being looked after by various caregivers, most of who treat him like a child. This is until he is sent Marijana, a Croatian immigrant who has come to Australia with her husband and three children. Her expertise and robustness in caring for both him and his house begins to stir feelings first of admiration and then attraction in the otherwise cautious Paul, until he can take it no more and declares his love for her. After his declaration there is an awkward pause after which Marijana leaves abruptly with the little daughter she normally brings along to the house with her. We are left in suspense as to what will happen next. This is the close of chapter 12. At the beginning of chapter 13, something quite strange happens: Elizabeth Costello enters the text! Readers of Coetzee will recall her from The Life of Animals (2002) and Elizabeth Costello (2003). She is not a pleasant character. What is she doing in Slow Man? Beyond the obvious postmodern trick of the intertextual hemorrhaging of characters from one text to another and the attendant problematization of the ontological status of the characterization that this implies, Elizabeth Costello represents something much more complicated with respect to the structures of dialogical interlocution that may be discerned in Coetzee’s writing. For not only does she insist that Paul Rayment is a figment of her own writing (that is, that she wrote him into being), but she comes to act as his conscience in the same way that the structure of dialogical interlocution we have seen operating in his own mind produces the work of conscience earlier in the narrative.
Within Paul’s mind, his approach to almost everything, whether it be his amputated leg, his not having had children, the history of Croatia, his memories of the affair he had after separating from his first wife, and so on, are always without exception hedged round by clichés and stereotypes. He is a “slow” man not just because of his amputation, but because he has always been a fastidious man careful to “maintain the decencies.” He is utterly unadventurous. Thus we are told:
All in all, not a man of passion. He is not sure he has ever liked passion, or approved of it. Passion: foreign territory; a comical but unavoidable affliction like mumps, that one hopes to undergo while still young, in one of its milder, less ruinous varieties, so as not to catch it more seriously later on. Dogs in the grip of passion coupling, hapless grins on their faces, their tongues hanging out.
(45–46)
Note the references to foreign territory, illness, and animals in trying to establish the parameters of passion, almost as if by such stereotypes to distance himself from it. With regard to Marijana and her family, he can think only in terms of stereotypical characteristics, even when he has known the various family members over a period of time and has had the opportunity to assemble a more complex idea of their “normality”:
The ease between the two of them [Marijana and Miroslav, her husband] tells all—that and Marijana’s laughter and the freedom of her fingers in his hair. Not an estranged couple at all. On the contrary, intimate. An intimate relationship with a row every now and again, Balkan style, to add a dash of spice: accusations, recriminations, plates smashed, doors slammed. Followed by remorse and tears, followed by heated lovemaking.
(253; italics added)
Paul regularly uses such unexamined clichés to describe Marijana and other members of her family in his own mind (34, 42, 51, 64, etc.). In thinking about the trick that Elizabeth Costello has played on him to get him to sleep with the blind Marianna, he reflects: “Blindness is a handicap pure and simple. A man without sight is a lesser man, as a man without a leg is a lesser man, not a new man. This poor woman she has sent him is a lesser woman too, less than she must have been before. Two lesser beings, handicapped, diminished: how could she have imagined a spark of the divine would be struck between them, or any spark at all?” (113). Paul Rayment’s shocking attitude to disability derives from his normate response to impairments in general, revealing how difficult it is for him to accept his current condition. But it is also of a piece with the many clichés and stereotypes he falls back on regularly in his encounters with what is strange and unusual within his social environment.
When Elizabeth Costello enters the text and chastises him for expressing his attraction to Marijana and in her place suggests the blind Marianna instead, we see her role as actualizing the set of cautionary clichéd dispositions that have already been amply evident in the mind of Paul himself. Costello expresses her irritation at his sentimental excess thus:
But who are you to preach second thoughts to me? If you had only been true to your tortoise character, if you had waited for the coming of second thoughts, if you had not so foolishly and irrevocably declared your passion to your cleaning lady, we would not be in our present pickle, you and I. You could be happily set up in your flat, waiting for visits from the lady with the dark glasses, and I could be back in Melbourne. But it is too late for that now. Nothing left for us but to hold on tight and see where the black horse takes us.
(228)
In other words, she is reminding him of how far he has strayed from his “natural” characteristic of caution. And notice the “us” she smuggles in, invoking not complicity but the fact that they are supposed to be of the same mind and disposition, in this case quite literally since, as I have been arguing, she springs up full-bodied from his mind and vice versa. This is a sure sign of the aesthetic nervousness in the terms I have been suggesting in this study. For why does Coetzee need to deploy this post-modern trick to ensure that Paul has the mirror image of his own fastidiousness in the form of a character from another novel? And why is this particular corrective required for what are completely normal feelings and desires? Why are the desires of the disabled man coded as illicit at this point, when he could very well have been left to struggle with his emergent desires and negotiate their meanings with the object of his attention like many other nondisabled characters in such a situation would be allowed to do? Since Costello steps into this novel from another one, it is almost as if the text is anxious that we do not make the mistake of misinterpreting the status of the intervention. She imports a range of implications derived from her characterization in the previous Coetzee novels in which she has featured. Thus she introduces an already formed template of possibilities via which her character and the relationship established with Paul Rayment and with any others in the text might be interpreted. Seeing that she emerges in the text when Paul, the disabled man, has just declared his amorous attraction to a nondisabled and married woman, there is the suggestion that Elizabeth Costello enters to “rescue” him from a transgression. Her role, in brief, is to intensify the structure of skeptical interlocution available in Rayment’s mind in order that the free play of his emergent sexual desires is stemmed and arrested.8
If the structure of dialogical interlocution is seen to be central to Coetzee’s writing to the point where a postmodern trick is used to produce the skeptical interlocutor as an intrusive character within Slow Man itself, a focus on his representation of the autistic spectrum shows the dialogical interlocution in a more subtle and complex light. As we noted earlier, in literary representations of persons with autism since the autist is noticeably reluctant to communicate with others unless this is absolutely inescapable, the implied interlocutor and indeed the rest of the text is always also assimilated to different pressures on silence. The implied interlocutor becomes both a product of the autist’s silence and its archenemy, since the interlocutor is also entangled with the dialogized social domain that the autist desires to disavow through his or her silence. And since the autist’s silent thoughts generate symbolic “noise” within both the wider representation and in our own readerly minds, a fundamental epistemological problem is raised regarding how we assess the status of the literary character with autism. Are they really silent, or is this silence the residue that remains from the interactions of the various discursive levels of the text? For there is no doubt that in the process of reading we align ourselves with different parts of what we read—character, narrator, spatial dynamic and temporal flows, and so on—as products of the modulations of the narrative, and that our shifting perspectival alignments are what generate the meanings that we take to be significant in what we read. One of such meanings is silence. Thus we find that in the literary text illustrating aspects of the autistic spectrum there is an unbridgeable gap between the represented inarticulacy of the character and the echoes that are raised by the other discursive dimensions of the text.
Autism and the Discriminations of Silence in Life and Times of Michael K
Three difficulties immediately make themselves manifest once we turn our attention to Life and Times of Michael K and attempt to read it as a literary representation of a person with autism. First, though he is depicted as generally of a quiet and withdrawn disposition, Michael K begins to show autistic tendencies only after his mother dies. This is about a third of the way into the text. Second, his internal monologue is nothing if not filled with various figures of speech of both a metaphorical and other nature, thus distinguishing him in a significant way from real-life persons with autism. And third, because of the ways in which aspects and images of his internal monologue coincide with the perspectives of the third-person narrator, he is made directly amenable to various metaphorical interpretations both by other characters within the text and by readers of the novel. He becomes an archetype of contrastive metaphorical and indeed ethical interpretations.9 It is mainly around his extreme silence that the autistic spectrum in the text is built, and it is the silence that we need to focus upon in evaluating his location on the spectrum and what implications this raises for the novel in general.
On the second page of the novel, we are told that Michael K’s job as a gardener had given him a measure of solitariness but that “down in the lavatories he had been oppressed by the brilliant neon light that shone off the white tiles and created a space without shadows” (4). The “oppression” seems to be simultaneously a form of attraction, thus providing the mildest hint of an autistic tendency. However, it is not until the death of his mother several pages later that he begins to display clear signs of social withdrawal pertinent to an autistic condition. On his mother’s death at the hospital, there is an odd contradiction between the frigid emotional response in his own mind and the many repetitive enactments of infantilization and bewilderment that he exhibits toward the people and events around him. This contradiction is captured most succinctly in the contrast between the gesture of pinning a black strip on his arm and the thought about his mother that accompanies this ostensible sign of mourning: “He tore a black strip from the lining of his mother’s coat and pinned it around his arm. But he did not miss her, he found, except insofar as he had missed her all his life” (34). A bit earlier, we are told that while wandering about in the hospital with no clear purpose the day after her death, he climbs into a great wire cage containing soiled linen and sleeps there “curled up like a cat” (32). As we shall see later, this is the first of many references to sleep that we find in the novel. Coinciding also with his mother’s death is the depiction of his struggles to interpret the codes behind what people say to him. Thus:
“Your mother passed away during the night,” the woman doctor told him. “We did what we could to keep her, but she was very weak. We wanted to contact you but you didn’t leave a number.”
He sat down on a chair in the corner.
“Do you want to make a phone call?” said the doctor.
This was evidently a code for something, he did not know what. He shook his head.
His attempts to gauge what response people want when they speak to him is reminiscent of the depiction of Christopher Boone’s similar struggles in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
It is Michael K’s endemic silence then that provides the most significant clues to the ways in which he might be taken as an illustration of the autistic spectrum. There are a number of interrelated dimensions to this silence that form a coherent pattern. We are told early in the novel that after his birth and the initial shock of the sight of his harelip, his mother kept him away from other children and took him to work with her. He sat on a blanket year after year watching his mother carrying out her chores and “learning to be quiet” (4). Silence is also inculcated in him by the ethos of Huis Norenius, a school for “variously afflicted and unfortunate children.” Significantly, Michael K’s father is never referred to directly in the entire novel. In his mind, the father-function is taken up by the twenty-one rules on the door of the dormitory at Huis Norenius, the first one of which is “There will be silence in dormitories at all times” (105). The implicit parental attributes given to the rules at Huis Norenius means that the institution joins his mother in creating silence for him as familial and normative. He is begotten in silence (absented father) and brought up in silence by his birth mother and his surrogate, institutional father. Even though from this early account it would seem that silence was imposed upon him as a parental and educational injunction to good behavior, it is also evident that the injunction to silence is further assimilated to his own desire to avoid social interaction of all sorts. The fact that the institutional father is a system of rules that have to be obeyed at all times means that there is a suggestive assimilation of Michael K’s sense of self to a system of predictable codes of social behavior. The Huis Norenius rules, underpinned by the obligatory and foundational code of silence, form the deictic basis of the relationship of his personal sense of self and its relationship to the selves of others. Since the deixis of self and other is also played out within his dialogized internal monologue, the place attributed to the implied interlocutor is also the place where his elective silence is constructed as well as undermined. Read differently, the rules of the school may also be seen as the assimilation of the space of absence to the Law of the Father. This Law is partly responsible for generating the dialogized interlocutor to whose implicit perspective Michael K’s thoughts bear an orientation. Thus the implied interlocutor of Michael K’s thought is both the generalized system of socializing rules of behavior first invoked by Huis Norenius and the code of an implicit and unacknowledged masculinity. This implicit code of masculinity is revealed in the novel incrementally.
Silence is so natural to Michael K that at points in the narrative it even permeates the ontological foreground of the representation itself. His response to persistent questioning from the doctor at the Kenilworth camp is silence, but one so absolute that it becomes objectified to the doctor as a pure sound associated with death: “There was a silence so dense that I heard it as a ringing in my ears, a silence the kind one experiences in mine shafts, cellars, bomb shelters, airless places” (140). Three of the elements in this list invoke places of the potential negation of life, whether this negation is due to economic exploitation (mine shafts), war (bomb shelters), or an environmentally threatening location (airless places), so that Michael K’s silence becomes evocative of the unheimlich, of homelessness and the uncanny. Earlier in the novel, this unheimlich silence manifests itself as a narrative problematic. In warding off the robbers that attempt to steal from him and his mother at a point on their journey to Prince Albert, the event as it is narrated has a peculiar soundtrack that does not really match his menacing gestures. We get a multiple focalization of sound and silence:
They were accosted by a pair of passers-by who, coming upon a man of meagre build and an old woman in a lonely place, concluded that they might strip them of their possessions with impunity. As a sign of this intention one of the strangers displayed to K (allowing the blade to slip from his sleeve into his palm) a carving knife, while the other laid hands on the suitcase. In an instant of the flash of the blade, K saw before him the prospect of being humiliated again while his mother watched, of sitting on the floormat with his hands over his ears enduring day after day the burden of her silence. He reached into the cart and brought out his sole weapon, the fifteen-inch length he had sawn from the axlerod. Brandishing this, lifting his arm to guard his face, he advanced on the youth with the knife, who circled away from him towards his companion while Anna K filled the air with shrieks. The strangers backed off. Wordlessly, still glaring, still menacing with the bar, K recovered the case and helped his quaking mother into the cart with the robbers hovering not twenty paces away.
(25–26)
In the flash of the blade, he has a flashback to an earlier cycle of humiliation and waiting that starts from the beginning of their journey when they were turned back at a military checkpoint. Significantly, the flashback also calls up an attempt to block out the accusatory loudness of his mother’s silence. The only sound in the entire described sequence with the robbers is of his mother’s shrieks. Anna K’s shrieks act as a metaphor for the accusatory loudness of the remembered silence and a metonymic displacement of the sounds he should have been making in warding off the robbers. There is thus the foregrounding of a silent reel of ritual menace and repulsion for the narrated actions set against the background of what is essentially a bifurcated soundtrack, one from the memory of the loudness of his mother’s accusatory silence and the other from her present shrieks. But why does K not say anything or make any sound whatsoever, even as a means of registering his obviously strong emotions in warding off their attackers?
The silence here registers a larger narrative problem, which has to do with the way in which Michael K has assimilated an interlocutor—the Law of the (Absent) Father—into his consciousness. This interlocutor does not have the same status as the skeptical interlocutor of Slow Man, who, as we saw a moment ago, is materialized in the person of Elizabeth Costello to mirror back to the central character the essential lineaments of his own thought. Michael K’s interlocutor in these sections is also markedly different from what we find with Magda, David Lurie, or even with Susan Barton in Foe. In each of the earlier Coetzee novels, the characters’ internal monologues are oriented toward specific social and cultural templates by which they evaluate their senses of self. In contrast, the significance of Michael K’s implied interlocutor lies in the fact that it is the voice of a Judgment or Opinion that comes from the subliminal trace of a social memory (the school rules) and is also simultaneously derived from an implicit judgment of masculinity (the Law of the Father). There are thus sediments and bifurcations to his interlocutor that nonetheless seem to be effaced because he imagines himself existing determinedly outside of social discourse. As an autistic character, his silence may be elective, yet his implied interlocutor is multiply socialized and assimilated to a familial template whose effect is to naturalize the place of the interlocutor and render him unobtrusive and thus even more effective.
An inkling of the masculinist character of K’s implied interlocutor is provided in the flashback to humiliation and the cycle of waiting that we encountered a moment ago. It is essentially the flashback to a judgment, but it is a judgment that, given the highly attenuated mode by which Michael K expresses his own masculinity, is left truncated and incomplete. Why should he feel humiliated again before his mother if not because he thinks that he is failing in the view of this implied interlocutor? When later on in the novel he thinks of a family on the run with their property in a barrow such as theirs, the image that he calls to mind is of a man, a woman, and two children, thus implying a normative familial setup (106). The figure of dependable masculinity is never too far from the surface of K’s mind. Tellingly, this dependability is tied to notions of courage, something that at one point he seems interested in claiming, even if obliquely and indirectly. After his mother’s death, a soldier at a checkpoint stops him and relieves him of his mother’s purses. With a mixture of threats and mockery, the soldier takes out the money from the purses and puts it into his pocket. He peels off a ten rand note and flicks it in Michael K’s direction. It is meant as a “tip.” The narrative continues:
K came back and picked up the note. Then he set off again. In a minute or two the soldier had receded into the mist.
It did not seem to him that he had been a coward. Nevertheless, a little further on it struck him that there was no point in keeping the suitcase now.
(38)
Why did it not seem to him that he had been a coward? We recall that apart from his mother’s ashes, K has shown no attachment to any of their paltry itinerant possessions. The basis of his thought after his encounter with the soldier is that of an Opinion that does not seem to derive its authority from any evident source. The thought about not being a coward is followed up not by a reflection on what cowardice might or might not constitute in him, but by the practical gesture of shedding the paraphernalia that might in the future expose him to attack. The deictics of the interaction with the implied interlocutor—his I in a dialogical relationship with the Interlocutor’s You—leads him to modify his action without a return to the interlocutor for verification or validation. The often repeated pattern in K’s mind is thus of an apparently stray thought that is also a Judgment or Opinion and is indistinguishable from his own views. This Judgment or Opinion then triggers a sequence of further thoughts or actions without recourse back to that implied interlocutor. What then is this interlocutor but the voice of the Law of the (Absented) Father, which in this text has been assimilated to rules and regulations governing acceptable (masculine) behavior? Michael K’s many rebellions against the system can then be interpreted as emerging out of the interactions between his thoughts and the Judgments and Opinions of this internalized implied interlocutor. The central effect of these interactions is the production of a particular form of subjectivity that is both subversive of the dominant and yet also acquiescent in certain codes of masculinity. Admittedly, this code stands in sharp contrast to the mindless military codes that dominate the war system depicted in the novel. But it is a code of unacknowledged masculinity all the same.
At one point, Michael K self-reflexively observes a thought emerging in his own mind and renounces responsibility for it, blurring the distinction between himself as character, the third-person narrator, and the author-function governing the narrative. It has to do with the extermination of unwanted beings at the Jakkalsdrif camp:
If these people wanted to be rid of us, he thought (curiously he watched the thought begin to unfold itself in his head, like a plant growing), if they really wanted to forget us forever, they would have to give us picks and spades and command us to dig; then, when we had exhausted ourselves digging, and had dug a great hole in the middle of the camp, they would have to order us to climb in and lay ourselves down; and when we were lying there, all of us, they would have to break down the huts and tents as well as every last thing we had owned upon us, and cover us with earth, and flatten the earth….
It seemed more like Robert than like him, as he knew himself, to think like that. Would he have to say that the thought was Robert’s and had merely found a home in him, or could he say that though the seed had come from Robert, the thought, having grown up inside him, was now his own? He did not know.
(94–95)
The idea of the mass grave invokes the Nazi camps in which Jews were exterminated (Dachau is mentioned elsewhere in the novel). When he renounces the thought as not his own but Robert’s, it is also partially the renunciation of the mediating role of the narrator. Since the knowledge suggested here is qualitatively different from any such referents in the novel and ties the narrated events to a well-known historical register of annihilations, the moment also invokes the narrator as a historically knowing subject, perhaps even proximate, at least at this point, to the real Author behind the text. The background of war in a South African context is represented in the novel as being more allegorical than real, since historically such a war was waged against racial others and their supporters, whereas in this novel active insurgency seems to be disconnected from race. Making the reference to mass graves is directly evocative of a specific historical context beyond South Africa and is a piece of knowledge that lies well out of the reach of Michael K as we have come to understand him thus far. Not concluding the thought either way signals a retreat from closure, leaving the implications of ownership hanging. Are the thoughts his, Robert’s, or the narrator’s?11 Coupled to K’s elective silence, then, the partialness and inconclusiveness of the dialogized interlocutor at such points also suggests the discursive entanglements between the character and the narrator within the novel. In each such entanglement, the elective silence of the autistic character is undermined by the structures of dialogism, even if, as we have come to see, the dialogism is scrupulously assimilated to the mind of the character himself and naturalized as a dimension of his own consciousness.
Several times in the novel, Michael K is depicted sleeping.12 K thinks of himself “not as something heavy that left tracks behind it, but if anything as a speck upon the surface of an earth too deeply asleep to notice the scratch of ant-feet, the rasp of butterfly teeth, the tumbling of dust” (97). The desire not to leave a trace also informs his decision to erect only a makeshift abode on his return to the Visagies farm; he desires something that would not “tug at the heartstrings” (101). Yet this desire to leave no trace is undermined by the persistent attempts on the part of others to assimilate his story to a larger semiotic context. His autistic silence gathers meaning in spite of itself from the domain of war and violence that provides the superscript for the broader social context of his existence. The semiotic excess of his silence is partly driven by the ease with which he is made amenable to metaphorical interpretations. In such instances, the “traces” that he invokes are manifestly those of fable and parable. Significantly, these parabolic and fabular associations appear regularly as descriptions by the narrator of Michael K, as K’s own self-description, and, most crucially in part 2, in the first-person journal narration of the camp doctor. For the camp doctor, for instance, Michael K represents the opportunity for a spiritual epiphany:
You ask why you are important, Michaels. The answer is that you are not important. But that does not mean you are forgotten. No, not forgotten. Remember the sparrows. Five sparrows are sold for a farthing, and even they are not forgotten.
(136)
Did you eat locusts? Your papers said you were an opgaarder, a storage man, but they do not say what it was you stored. Was it manna? Did manna fall from the sky for you, and did you store it away in the underground bins for your friends to come and eat in the night? Is that why you will not eat camp food—because you have been spoiled forever by the taste of manna?
(150–151)
Your stay in the camp was merely an allegory, if you know that word. It was an allegory—speaking at the highest level—of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it. Did you not notice how, whenever I tried to pin you down, you slipped away? I noticed.
(166)
Sparrows, locusts, and manna all reference biblical stories.13 K’s potential for allegorization means he oscillates between an inside and an outside of material significations. The doctor sees this as “scandalous,” by which we can assume that the elusiveness of K’s potential meanings is a worry for the war semiotic that dominates the narrative. More important, it also means that the war semiotic that seeks to name adversaries and to convert the mundane into a self-other structure of antagonism is superseded by a mode of signification that is spiritual and not limited to any particular historical context. It is in K’s amenability to fabular and parabolic interpretation that he becomes “scandalous.”
The standard critical view of Michael K’s silence is that he is a spiritual being and by that status poses a challenge to the status quo of war. Two difficulties with this interpretation are that (1) even while thinking of himself through associations with insects and animals, he never actually assents in his mind to any form of spirituality, and (2) he shows a remarkable knack for violence toward animals. At the start of his stay on the Visagies farm, he brutally drowns a goat in the hope of getting food to quell his raving hunger. The effort is exhausting and he is not certain whether it was worth the trouble. However, the event presents him not with an occasion to reflect on the lives of animals, but only to learn the lesson not to kill animals of that size: “The lesson, if there was a lesson, if there were lessons embedded in events, seemed to be not to kill such large animals. He cut himself a Y-shaped stick and, with the tongue of an old shoe and strips of rubber from an inner tube, made himself a catapult with which to knock birds out of the trees. He buried the remains of the goat” (57). K seems to be essentially a predator killing animals, insects, and birds for survival; at no point does he surrender to any form of sentimentality in relation to these creatures. And at no time do they trigger a spiritual impulse within his own consciousness. This implies a form of splitting around his person. On the one hand, he performs all the predatory instincts of a carnivore without any sentimentality. Yet on the other, the silence and frailty of his person allows others to interpret him as bearing a resemblance to the lives of animals and therefore of carrying an excess of religious connotations. Like animals, insects, and birds, he is not of the human world. Thus the various points at which he is described as being asleep are supposed to mark his otherness from the world and proximity to that of animals. And yet this association with animals also means he is subhuman; the fog of stupidity that he refers to at least twice over the course of the novel references his animalhood yet registers his recoil from that ontological state.
If we go back to our earlier discussion of masculinity in the novel and rethink it in the context of the semiotic of war, we see that Michael K evades the masculine code of war yet transposes its more violent dimensions onto his relations with animals. His attitude to animals and birds and the fact that he refuses the influx of sentimentality toward them means that they are treated in his mind as serviceable objects without significance beyond their objecthood. It is almost as if the text is suggesting that the evasion of the antagonistic semiotic of war leads to the erection of an agonistic relation to animals. This is never fully conscious and at any rate is somewhat attenuated by the fact that he frequently refers to himself as a small animal or insect. It is, however, the threatened similitude between the violence imposed by war and the violence he visits upon animals that unsettles the disparity between him and the dominant semiotic order. Yet similitude is not the same as symmetry. For the brutal effects of war as represented in the text (the creation of prison and labor camps, the mindless violence inflicted on the citizenry, the effects of itinerancy and sexual predatoriness as seen in the last part of the novel) are not of the same order as K’s violence against animals. For one thing, the war machine is aimed at reconstituting social relations as such. Coetzee is careful not to make explicit what these social relations might look like, but written in a South African context it is clear that the effects of state violence are aimed at propping up a dastardly system of racial segregation. Contrastively, K’s violence against animals is depicted as being necessitated strictly by the needs of survival. The real problem raised by his violence in my view is the contradiction that it institutes between his violent instincts as a person and the animal metaphors that cluster around him and that render him amenable to allegorical interpretation. In other words, the contradiction is between his historicity as a hungry man and the possibility of his dehistoricization and dissolution into the form of fable, parable, and allegory.
In fact, the implications of the contradiction between allegory and historicity may also be discerned in the degree to which the text blurs the social conditions that are really generative of Michael K’s disability and in its place foregrounds an intense focus on the character’s consciousness. For Michael K is a working-class colored man and one of apartheid’s dispossessed. The fact that his mother had to work as a cleaner and carry him with her on her rounds is revealing of their class background. Historically, the internal militarized struggles during apartheid were conducted by the ruling white regime against people of color and their supporters. Yet at no point in Michael K’s internal monologue does he think in color or class terms. There is not the vaguest whiff of any such thoughts. Furthermore, society—in terms of full-fledged social relations marked by the tensions of hierarchy and attenuated by the codes of civility or other-wise—does not exist in the text. In Life and Times of Michael K, the social microcosm is represented either through the unit of the family (K and his mother), on the farm (K and the Visagei boy), or in the work camps. In all these instances, the image of society is miniaturized and truncated. Each unit of sociality within the novel could be taken out of context and interpreted as presenting a discrete and self-sustaining symbolic nexus of signification. Society as such is abrogated. To add to this, Michael K is political only in a broadly allegorical sense of standing outside of the dominant patterns of signification. He has no Fanonian anger or angst and no racialized double consciousness, despite being victimized at various points by a war machine that he wants none of. To all intents and purposes, his situation could conveniently be interpreted as the allegorical template of an existential inarticulate condition under a regime of violence. Race and class could be left out of the account without any distortion of the interpretation.
The particular narrative disposition of the contradiction between history and allegory and the individual and society is one that applies to a reading of all of Coetzee’s texts, as Derek Attridge (2004) and others have adroitly shown. But for the particular focus of this study, the contradiction is also relevant from the view of the representation of disability, in this case, autism. For if the autist is so easily assimilable to an allegorical reading, in what ways does this repeat the very well-known social practice of interpreting people with disability as ciphers of a metaphysical or transcendental meaning? In other words, how does the potential for immediate allegorization of the disabled character in literary writing frustrate the process by which they might be properly viewed as illuminating the social contradictions that circulate around people with impairments? I will attempt to provide a set of provisional answers to these questions in my conclusion. For now, let us continue in the South African context, but this time turning to the history of Robben Island and the intersections between corporeal difference, disability, and the ideologies that underpinned colonialism and apartheid in that country.