K의 호박 정원과 루리의 하리잔되기: 쿳시의 『 마이클 K의 삶과 시대』와 『 추락』에 나타나는 생태학적 윤리에 대해서

Abstract

J. M. Coetzee’s characters such as Michael K in Life & Times of Michael K and Lucy in Disgrace demonstrate such self-sufficient ways of producing, distributing and consuming food in nature. These pastoral food narratives and ideal images of nature—which seem to exist outside the historical time of (post-)apartheid South Africa—, however, offer readers some opportunities to critically reflect on human subject’s ways of life towards nature and non-human others. The ideal images of nature depicted in Life & Times of Michael K and Disgrace as outside and alien to human culture and society may provide only a superficial escape from the exploitative reality of (post-)apartheid South Africa. In this sense, this paper argues that Life & Times of Michael K and Disgrace not only call our attention to the possibility of ‘man and nature’ or ‘man and non-human’ (in)compatibility but also establish negative dialectical environmental aesthetics by disclosing that ideological regulation of imperialist, totalitarian, and even male-dominated South African society continuously identifies nature with consecutive images of racial, gendered and non-human others. In other words, Coetzee seems to demonstrate that any attempt to easily escape the hierarchical dualism such as ‘human and nature’, ‘human and non-human’, ‘civilization and barbarism’, and even ‘man and woman’— which is the very driving force of modernization and anthropological discourse—may eventually lead into naive naturalism, positivism or its romanticization. In this context, the animal right activism that the character such as Bev Shaw proposes in Disgrace, even when it comes from good intention, can be used to justify moral priority of human subjects against nature and animal others. Coetzee’s ethical concern for the others rather lies in the recognition of their pain and suffering, which aims not so much at expiating the crimes of the colonizer but letting us encountering the very limit of such exercises.