The Fixation on the Womb

and the Ambiguity of the Mother in Life &

Times of Michael K

Yoshiki Tajiri

Every reader of J. M. Coetzee’s fourth novel, Life & Times of Michael K

(1983), will notice the importance of the mother for the main character,
Michael K. From the start, he is unusually attached to his mother, and,
even after she dies, he tries to live as a gardener who cultivates the earth
that has absorbed her ashes and thus has become synonymous with the
mother. Accordingly, critics have discussed the symbolism of mother
nature or mother earth in this novel in various ways in relation to Voltaire’s
Candide, Wordsworth and the South African farm novel, for example
(Attwell, 1993: 95–96). However, the mother in this novel may not nec-
essarily be reduced to the symbolism of mother earth. It will be possible to
respond to the question of the mother in a more nuanced manner if we
pay attention to a different feature of the relationship between K and his
mother. This chapter is an attempt to shed new light on that relationship
by approaching the representations of the mother in the novel from a par-
ticular perspective: namely, the desire to return to the womb.
Throughout the novel, there are many suggestions of K’s fixation on
the womb: he often tries to re-create the womb-like state around him, for

Y. Tajiri (*)
Department of English, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2019 151

S. Kossew, M. Harvey (eds.), Reading Coetzee’s Women,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19777-3_9
152 Y. TAJIRI

example. He seems to be bound by the unconscious desire to return to the

condition of a foetus that is completely protected by the mother from the
world and its vicissitudes. In order to analyse this deeper layer of K’s rela-
tionship with his mother, a comparison with Samuel Beckett’s ‘The End’
and Molloy is fruitful, since Beckett thematised the fixation on the womb
in very similar ways. Also important is the psychoanalyst Otto Rank’s 1924
book The Trauma of Birth, which influenced Beckett. As I will show, many
passages in Michael K can be considered in terms of Rank’s idea of the
birth trauma. Through these connections, then, this chapter will illumi-
nate the hidden dimension in which Michael K is significantly linked to
both Beckett and Rank.
It is now established that when Coetzee started to write this novel, he
had in mind Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 novel Michael Kohlhaas, from
which the name of his protagonist directly derives (Attwell, 2015:
105–123). In Coetzee’s notebook for Michael K, in which he made notes
while writing the novel, there are also many references to other authors or
works that seem to have inspired him. They include those works whose
relevance to Michael K is evident: Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, Flaubert’s ‘Un
Coeur simple’, Kafka’s ‘The Hunger Artist’, Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby’.
But we do not find a single mention of Beckett or his works. Nor do we
find anything related to Otto Rank, though the psychoanalytic literary
critic Marthe Robert is often mentioned. This fact should not be a deter-
rent, however, from exploring the intertextual relation that Michael K has
with Beckett and Rank, as long as they can illuminate the representations
of the mother in the novel. The possibilities of reading the novel obviously
extend far beyond what those notes in Coetzee’s notebook can cover.1
In the first half of Beckett’s Molloy, the eponymous narrator is in his
mother’s room and narrates a story of how he got there after much wan-
dering. Molloy and Michael K are similar in many ways: they wander as
social outcasts and incur the suspicion of the police; they lose their posses-
sions in the course of their vagabondage; Molloy departs on a bicycle
while K starts with a self-made barrow on which his mother sits; both
Molloy and K end up in their mother’s rooms; both of them encounter
animals and at times live like animals; both of them are indifferent to sex;
the validity of storytelling is questioned in both cases. Gilbert Yeoh has
discussed the similarities between K and Molloy in terms of three general
themes: nothingness, minimalism and indeterminacy, arguing correctly
that ‘Coetzee adapts key Beckettian aesthetic and philosophical paradigms
to the South African context’ (2000: 121). But in this chapter, I want to
 THE FIXATION ON THE WOMB AND THE AMBIGUITY OF THE MOTHER… 153

focus specifically on the fixation on the womb when I compare Michael K

with Beckett’s works. In the process, I will also make clear how K diverges
from the Beckett characters in his attachment to his mother.
It is well known that Beckett was obsessed with intrauterine memories.
In his last years, recollecting the psychoanalysis he was taking with Wilfred
Bion in the mid-1930s, he recalled, ‘I certainly came up with some extraor-
dinary memories of being in the womb, intra-uterine memories. I remem-
ber feeling trapped, being imprisoned and unable to escape, of crying to
be let out, but no one could hear, no one was listening’ (Knowlson and
Knowlson, 2006: 68). While the womb is represented as a painful space in
this recollection, it is also represented as a blissful locus to aspire to in
Beckett’s early work. In his earliest novel, Dream of Fair to Middling
Women, finished in 1932, the protagonist Belacqua can achieve absolute
peace in what he calls the ‘wombtomb’ (1993: 45 et passim). When
Beckett was undergoing psychoanalysis, he studied many books of this
new discipline, one of which was Otto Rank’s The Trauma of Birth.2
Rank’s central thesis is that birth is an expulsion from the paradise called
the womb, the conditions of which we try to reproduce in every aspect of
our life including religion, art and philosophy, even by re-experiencing the
painful physical restriction to which Beckett alludes.
Beckett’s short story ‘The End’, which he wrote shortly before Molloy,
seems to be an allegory of this idea. The narrator of the story is thrown
out of some charitable institution with clothes and money, but he has a
longing ‘to be under cover again, in an empty place, close and warm’
(2009a: 41). While wandering, he indeed stays in a series of inner spaces,
most of which make him feel comfortable: a basement with a woman who
gives him food, a cave near the sea, a cabin in the mountains, a shed in a
private estate, and finally a boat inside the shed. In the boat, he feels par-
ticularly comfortable: ‘I was very snug in my box, I must say’ (2009a: 54).
While this story does not mention a mother at all, it is obvious that the
narrator’s expulsion in the beginning signifies traumatic birth and that his
sojourns in inner spaces represent repeated attempts to return to the
womb symbolically.
In the first part of Molloy, the eponymous narrator follows a similar
path. His wandering is punctuated by his stay in inner spaces: Lousse’s
house, a chapel-like space, a hole, a cave near the sea, and finally a ditch at
the end of a forest. Lousse, in particular, appears to be Molloy’s surrogate
mother and her house a symbolic womb. But the important difference is
that Molloy is, from the beginning, in his mother’s room and narrating
154 Y. TAJIRI

the story of how he came to be there. In a sense, he is already in a symbolic

womb, which is no longer a simple comfortable place as in ‘The End’ but,
rather, a space where the narrator is doomed to keep telling stories. Indeed,
many Beckettian characters after Molloy are caught up in the self-conscious
production of words and stories in an inner space suggestive of the womb.
K, in Coetzee’s novel, wanders in remarkably similar ways to these
Beckett characters, often creating and inhabiting inner spaces suggestive
of the womb, especially caves. It is also to be noted that both the Beckett
characters and K are complete social outcasts and therefore incur the sus-
picion of the authorities. While staying in the basement, the narrator of
‘The End’ is visited by a policeman who suspects him (2009a: 43). Molloy
is interrogated at a police station, but he has no papers and cannot confirm
his identity (2009b: 17–23). Similarly, K does not appear to belong to
society or the world. He always eludes policing power that tries to capture
him and put him into a camp. In the words of the medical officer in Part
Two who takes care of him in the camp, he is ‘like a stone, a pebble that,
having lain around quietly minding its business since the dawn of time, is
now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly from hand to hand’ (1998:
135), and this kind of description of K is repeated again and again through-
out the novel. Behind this unsocial and unworldly aspect of the Beckett
characters and K lies their fixation on the womb, which pulls them away
from normal engagement with the outside world.
The very first sentence of Michael K is telling: ‘The first thing the mid-
wife noticed about Michael K when she helped him out of his mother into the
world was that he had a hare lip’ (3, emphasis added). The peculiar expres-
sion ‘helped him out of his mother into the world’ seems to announce that
the transition from the womb to the world—the Rankian and Beckettian
concern precisely—will be a crucial motif in the novel. K is very much
attached to his mother, Anna. When he begins to stay with her in her flat
in Sea Point in Cape Town after she is fired as a housemaid, he thinks that
‘he had been brought into the world to look after his mother’ (7), thus
echoing the first sentence of the novel. He tries to obtain a permit to
realise her dream of going back to the farm in Prince Albert where she
spent her girlhood, but the inefficient bureaucracy and the ongoing war
oblige them to decide to depart without a permit, he carrying her on a
self-made barrow.
On the way at Stellenbosch she passes away at a hospital, and her body
is cremated without his consent. Although this point marks K’s literal sep-
aration from his mother, she will continue to haunt him and he will need
 THE FIXATION ON THE WOMB AND THE AMBIGUITY OF THE MOTHER… 155

to struggle under her spell until the very end of the novel. Besides her
suitcase, the Stellenbosch hospital simply gives him two parcels, one con-
taining a box of her ashes and the other new clothes and toiletries for him.
K is not happy at all with this treatment and asks the nurse about the sec-
ond parcel: ‘Why do you give me this?’ (33). This scene resembles the
beginning of Beckett’s story ‘The End’, in which the narrator is expelled
from a charitable institution with new clothes and money. He is puzzled
and annoyed by this treatment and does not easily accept the clothes and
money. Just as the beginning of Beckett’s story evidently suggests a trau-
matic birth into the world, K’s departure from the hospital with new
clothes and his mother’s money (now his) means a kind of birth for him
after the separation from his real mother. Now he has to wander alone in
the world like the narrator of ‘The End’, re-creating womb-like conditions
on the way.
K is soon robbed of his money by a soldier who takes him for a thief.
Then he abandons his mother’s suitcase, keeping only the box of her ashes
and her black coat. Although K loses most of his mother’s possessions in
this way, the black coat provides him with protection suggestive of the
womb: ‘He slept under an overhang wrapped in his mother’s coat with a
stick beside him’ (38). The coat will continue to function as his protective
covering throughout Part One.
K finally reaches a farm in Prince Albert, though he is uncertain if it is
the right farm that his mother remembered, and he starts to cultivate a
patch of land there. Immediately after he scatters his mother’s ashes over
a patch of field, we read, ‘This was the beginning of his life as a cultivator’
(59). He feels deep pleasure in farming and thinks, ‘It is because I am a
gardener, … because that is my nature’ (59). Thus, his first self-realisation
as a gardener is closely linked to his mother. Her ashes turn to earth, and
then K identifies with mother earth by joining its productive process as a
gardener. Even before this scene, her ashes are linked to the natural cycle
when, on his way to Prince Albert, K decides to leave the lid of the box of
ashes open ‘so that the rain could fall and the sun scorch and the insects
gnaw, if they wanted to, without hindrance’ (38). And K’s identification
with a productive mother earth is highlighted when he regards his vegeta-
bles as his ‘children’ (63; cf. also 101, 111, 118).
After K leaves the farm on the arrival of the grandson of the farm owner,
Visagie, he lives in caves in the mountains, eating insects and roots, like
animals, as if he himself has turned to nature. His life in this period is also
highly suggestive of the regression to the womb. Otto Rank writes:
156 Y. TAJIRI

There is now no doubt, according to anthropological investigations, that

just as the coffin and its primitive forerunners the tree, the earth, the dou-
bled-up burial position (embryonal posture), merely copy the womb situa-
tion, to which after death one wishes to return, so the primitive dwellings of
the living, whether caves or hollow trees, were made in instinctive remem-
brance of the warm, protecting womb, analogous to the birds building nests
for protective covering. (86–87)

Rank also suggests specifically of the mountains: ‘The mountains with

their hollows and caves, with their forest (hair), were looked upon as a
gigantic primal mother, stressing especially the protective characteristic’
(104). Living in caves in mountains, K is embraced by the protective ‘pri-
mal mother’ like a foetus in the womb. The feeling of being inside makes
him think of himself as ‘a termite boring its way through a rock’ (66). In
such a state, there is no distinction between him and surrounding nature:
‘He sat so still that it would not have startled him if birds had flown down
and perched on his shoulders’ (66). He imagines his own death in a foetal
posture: ‘If I were to die here, sitting in the mouth of my cave looking out
over the plain with my knees under my chin, I would be dried out by the
wind in a day, I would be preserved whole, like someone in the desert
drowned in sand’ (67–68). Here he seems to be coming close to the state
aimed at by ancient Indian religious practices, including Yoga. Otto
Rank says:

The aim of all these practices is Nirvana, the pleasurable Nothing, the womb
situation, to which even Schopenhauer’s half metaphysical ‘Will’ yearned
solely to return. The way to it, as in analysis, is the putting oneself into a
dreamy attitude of meditation approaching the embryonal condition, the
result of which … actually makes possible an extensive reminiscence of the
intrauterine situation. (119–120)

Indeed, K ‘wondered if he were living in what was known as bliss’ (68).

His own version of ‘Nirvana, the pleasurable Nothing’ is expressed in the
following manner: ‘Now, in front of his cave, he sometimes locked his
fingers behind his head, closed his eyes, and emptied his mind, wanting
nothing, looking forward to nothing’ (69).
At this point, we begin to realise that there are two different aspects to
K’s attachment to his mother. On the unconscious level, he is fixated on
the womb. This manifests itself as K’s tendency to re-create the womb-like
situation in the Beckettian way. On the conscious level is the identification
 THE FIXATION ON THE WOMB AND THE AMBIGUITY OF THE MOTHER… 157

with mother earth that produces new life in the form of vegetables and
fruits. This latter aspect is completely absent in Beckett. As we have seen,
K achieves self-realisation as a gardener immediately after his mother’s
ashes mingle with the earth—that is, after his mother turns into mother
earth. And then he himself becomes mother earth as he enjoys planting
seeds and harvesting crops, which he regards as his ‘children’. It is impor-
tant to highlight and examine the interrelation between these two aspects
because they produce the unique ambiguity of the representation of the
mother, the ambiguity that implicitly runs throughout the novel and
becomes particularly salient at its ending, as we will see later.
Descending from the mountains, K is caught by the police and put into
the Jakkalsdrif camp, from which he escapes to return to the Visagie farm.
The coexistence of the two aspects of K’s attachment to the mother is
repeated in his second stay at the Visagie farm. When he returns to the
farm, he thinks, ‘I want to live here, …I want to live here forever, where
my mother and my grandmother lived’ (99). His dream of gardening on
mother earth is connected more closely to the womb-like conditions re-
created with his mother’s coat: ‘Wrapped in the black coat [of his mother]
he clenched his jaw and waited for dawn, aching after the pleasures of dig-
ging and planting he had promised himself’ (99). He settles on a site in
the open that explicitly resembles the mother’s body: it is a ‘crevice’ where
‘two low hills, like plump breasts’ meet. K creates a burrow here and again
lives on insects and roots like an animal. There are many suggestions of the
womb in his life: he wonders, ‘would it not be better to bury myself in the
bowels of the earth’ (106); when he spots a band of guerrillas, he wishes
for ‘darkness [to] fall soon’ and for ‘the earth [to] swallow me up and
protect me’ (107); his life is spent more and more in sleep, which is an
imitation of womb-like conditions according to Rank (1993: 74); he is
mostly ‘living beyond the reach of calendar and clock’ (116); and he still
wraps himself in his mother’s black coat ‘with his legs swaddled in the
bag’ (118).3
On the other hand, there are suggestions of his identification with
mother earth. When the guerrillas arrive, he chooses to keep hiding in a
burrow without announcing himself to them because ‘enough men had
gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over;
whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at
least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth
would grow hard and forget her children’ (109). This confirms K’s strong
sense of identity as a gardener on the side of mother earth. It is therefore
158 Y. TAJIRI

natural that he distinctly regards himself as a mother after the guerrillas

destroy his farm and leave: ‘I am like a woman whose children have left the
house …: all that remains is to tidy up and listen to the silence’ (111).
This latter aspect of K’s attachment to his mother, however, needs care-
ful consideration because, in fact, agriculture can be interpreted as a mas-
culine enterprise. In his notebook for Michael K, Coetzee notes a similar
idea derived from Marthe Robert. Otto Rank also suggests that ‘the per-
manent establishment of the father’s power’ is aimed at ‘the discovery of
implements and weapons, all of which really directly imitate the masculine
sexual organ, which in the biological development preceding any civiliza-
tion was qualified to force its way into the yielding feminine material
(mother)’ (95, original italics). Agricultural implements must be no excep-
tion. However, it seems that the masculine quality of agricultural actions
such as digging is overshadowed by K’s strong identification with mother
earth so that the overall gender representation of the novel reinforces this
rendering of agriculture as maternal. As the epigraph from Heraclitus
(starting with ‘War is the father of all and king of all’) indicates, the war
and its related activities including incarceration in camps are distinctly
gendered as masculine and paternal. Accordingly, K’s father only signifies
disciplinary power: he thinks, ‘[M]y father was Huis Norenius. My father
was the list of rules on the door of the dormitory’ (104). Huis Norenius
is the special school for the handicapped and poor to which K was sent by
his mother. Against this paternal political power that encloses K, he tries
to secure space for his own freedom by gardening, which is given the con-
trasting maternal quality. David Attwell’s observation is helpful here:

As the mother opposes the father, gardening is the opposite of this corrosive
notion of power. From the moment K leaves Cape Town and travels into the
jaws of the war with his mother in the cart, his resistances become associated
metonymically with the mother; and when K distributes her ashes like seed
and turns them into the soil of the farm, cultivation is added to the chain of
significance. (1993: 96, original emphasis)

Forced to live in Jakkalsdrif camp by the disciplinary power of the state, K not
surprisingly feels that the camp is no different from Huis Norenius. Unlike
the Beckett characters, K can be forced into inner spaces that are nothing but
the naked manifestation of state power. On those occasions, although he is
provided with a roof over his head and food, he can never gain the pleasur-
able womb-like protection that his unconscious yearns for. The entire novel
 THE FIXATION ON THE WOMB AND THE AMBIGUITY OF THE MOTHER… 159

stages the antithesis between the state’s policing power that tries to cap-
ture and discipline a social outcast like K, and K’s regressive attachment to
his mother that manifests itself in two ways: the identification with mother
earth and the return to the womb.
At the end of Part One, K is again discovered by the police who suspect
him of helping the guerrillas, and is put back into a camp (this time a reha-
bilitation camp) at Kenilworth in Cape Town. At the farm, he eludes inter-
rogation by assuming a foetal posture ‘with his head on his knees’ (120)
or ‘with his head between his knees’ (124). Before he is taken away from
the farm, he thinks:

There will be not a grain left bearing my marks, just as my mother has now,
after her season in the earth, been washed clean, blown about, and drawn up
into the leaves of grass.
So what is it, he thought, that binds me to this spot of earth as if to a
home I cannot leave? We must all leave home, after all, we must leave our
mothers. (124)

Now that his mother has returned to nature, he himself has to leave
mother earth. His first separation from his mother occurred when she died
at the Stellenbosch hospital. Being removed from the farm and his role as
gardener is his second separation from his mother or mother earth.
Part Two is narrated by a medical officer of the Kenilworth rehabilita-
tion camp who tries hard to understand K. Soon after he meets K, he
wonders if K ‘is wholly of our world’ (130). When he calls K ‘[a]n unbear-
ing, unborn creature’ (135, emphasis added), he perceptively points to K’s
fixation on the womb. Similarly, he thinks, K ‘is someone who should
never have been born into a world like this’ (155). Although the medical
officer means well, he still imposes arbitrary meanings on K just like the
police. In his view, K has a vision of his mother with burning hair in his
dreams (130, 142). It seems that K told him so based on the vision he had
when he heard that his mother had been cremated (32). But the medical
officer begins to distort the story and make K’s mother ‘vengeful’: ‘There
is nothing we can do here to rehabilitate you from the vengeful mother
with flaming hair who comes to you in your dreams’ (149). He also writes,
‘I also think of her sitting on your shoulders, eating out your brains, glar-
ing about triumphantly, the very embodiment of great Mother Death.
And now that she is gone you are plotting to follow her’ (150). It appears
that nothing could be further from the truth because, for K, his mother
160 Y. TAJIRI

represents life that produces vegetables in the cycle of nature rather than
death. On the other hand, it could be said that the medical officer is inad-
vertently making a correct observation about the way K’s mother is weigh-
ing on his unconscious. In a sense, a return to the womb means getting
out of this world of life and entering into the timeless world of death—the
world that the young Beckett called the ‘wombtomb’. Otto Rank is
explicit about the connection between the womb and death: ‘what bio-
logically seems to us the impulse to death strives again to establish nothing
else than the already experienced condition before birth’ (196). For the
unconscious, death is synonymous with a return to the womb. Rank says,
‘How seriously the Unconscious conceives dying as a return to the womb
may be concluded from the death-rites of all nations and times’ (198).
Here emerges the ambiguity of the mother: she is a life-producing force
and a life-congealing force. The womb-like conditions that K seems to be
seeking in the mountains or in the burrow in the Visagie farm could also
be interpreted as potentially death-oriented. As we have seen, those condi-
tions can be likened to those of Nirvana, and the original Sanskrit meaning
of this word is ‘to be extinguished’. K’s increasing reluctance to eat in
those conditions, particularly during his second stay at the Visagie farm,
seems to support this interpretation. The two aspects of K’s attachment to
his mother can, in this way, be reconsidered as inherently contradictory, a
contradiction that emerges again at the end of the novel.
While the medical officer knows little about K’s pleasure in gardening,
he notices that K keeps a packet of pumpkin seeds with him—probably
those from the pumpkins he himself harvested. Earlier, in Part One, he
was carrying the box containing his mother’s ashes in a similar way. While
the ashes are relics of his real mother, the seeds are remnants of mother
earth. Despite his resolution to leave the farm at the end of Part One (‘We
must all leave home, after all, we must leave our mothers’, said he, as we
have seen), he cannot completely shake off his dream of returning to
mother earth, the dream now embodied in the minimised form of the
pumpkin seeds.
In the very brief Part Three, in which the third-person narrative of Part
One returns, we find K back in Sea Point, his starting point, after escaping
from the Kenilworth rehabilitation camp. Still holding the packet of
pumpkin seeds, he visits the house where his mother used to live and from
which they departed together. After he spends some time with vagrants,
he finally opens the door of the house and enters the very room his mother
lived in. He then thinks, ‘Now I am back’ (181). This return to his moth-
 THE FIXATION ON THE WOMB AND THE AMBIGUITY OF THE MOTHER… 161

er’s room symbolises a return to the womb, as in the first part of Molloy. It
suggests that K cannot escape from the spell of his mother, what-
ever he does.
However, on a closer look, there are hints of K’s growing independence
from the mother’s spell. K does not think concretely of his mother in this
final part, although on one occasion he mentions her when he has to tell
the vagrants about his life. Even when he is in his mother’s room, her
image never occurs to him in his memories or thoughts. This makes a
sharp contrast to the end of Part One, in which he vividly thinks and
dreams of her (116–117, 119). Meanwhile, K experiences a belated sexual
awakening as a vagrant woman performs oral sex on him. Soon after this,
on his way to his mother’s room, he sees two girls in bikinis and we read,
‘He watched their backsides ascend the steps and surprised in himself an
urge to dig his fingers into that soft flesh’ (180). As soon as he lies down
in his mother’s room, his aroused sexual desire disturbs him at a time
when he might have been remembering his mother: ‘Against his will the
memory returned of the casque of silver hair bent over his sex, and the
grunting of the girl as she laboured on him’ (181). These references to his
sexual desire are remarkable, given that K has been repeatedly represented
as detached from sex throughout the novel. In an interview, Coetzee has
said of this novel: ‘it didn’t turn out to be a book about becoming (which
might have required that K have the ability to adapt, more of what we
usually call intelligence) but a book about being, which merely entailed
that K go on being himself, despite everything’ (Coetzee and Morphet,
1987: 455, original emphasis). K’s sexual awakening in Part Three can be
regarded as an exceptional element of ‘becoming’ in this novel.
But, after all, this sexual impulse that would extract him from the moth-
er’s spell does not lead him anywhere. In his mother’s room, the memory
of the vagrant woman’s sexual service quickly triggers his general resent-
ment of charity. He thinks: ‘I have become an object of charity. Everywhere
I go there are people waiting to exercise their forms of charity on me’
(181). As has been pointed out (Yeoh, 2000: 130), this resentment echoes
Molloy’s cynical remark on charity. Molloy says:

Let me tell you this, when social workers offer you, free, gratis and for noth-
ing, something to hinder you from swooning, which with them is an obses-
sion, it is useless to recoil, they will pursue you to the ends of the earth, the
vomitory in their hands. The Salvation Army is no better. Against the chari-
table gesture there is no defence, that I know of. (Beckett, 2009b: 21)
162 Y. TAJIRI

For Molloy, charity may be no different from the authorities that pursue
and annoy him. Likewise, K is sceptical of charity: he observes that, in
exchange for charity, people around him demand stories of his life. Since
he has many experiences of disciplinary power disguised as charity, even
the maternal version of it repulses him. He thinks bitterly, ‘When my story
was finished, people would have shaken their heads and been sorry and
angry and plied me with food and drink; women would have taken me
into their beds and mothered me in the dark’ (181). Rejecting such trans-
actions, he reaches a self-realisation: ‘the truth is that I have been a gar-
dener’ (181). This scene is comparable to the similar scene in Part One,
where he discovers that he is a gardener by nature, immediately after he
scatters his mother’s ashes over a patch of land. In Part One, his self-
realisation is based on his identification with his mother who has turned to
productive nature, whereas in Part Three he is ironically separated from
mother earth, even if he still keeps pumpkin seeds. He is conscious of this
irony when he wonders, clearly evoking the womb-like conditions, ‘was it
not strange for a gardener to be sleeping in a closet within sound of the
beating of the waves of the sea?’ (182).
In the next sentences, he points to the very ambiguity I have been dis-
cussing: ‘I am more like an earthworm, he thought. Which is also a kind
of gardener. Or a mole, also a gardener, that does not tell stories because
it lives in silence’ (182). His self-image as an earthworm or a mole clearly
testifies to his fixation on the womb because those creatures living inside
the earth suggest a return to the womb (see Rank, 1993: 14). They are
also cultivators of the earth and therefore gardeners. But in K’s case, being
a gardener indicates the other aspect of his attachment to his mother,
namely the identification with mother earth that produces new life. Thus,
his self-representation here as both an earthworm (or a mole) and a
gardener highlights the fundamental duality of his relationship with
the mother.
However, he immediately returns to the irony by asking, ‘But a mole or
earthworm on a cement floor?’ (182). He is now deprived of the way to
identify with a productive mother earth and left with only the regained
womb-like conditions. Despite his insistence that he is a gardener, he is
completely powerless. All he can do is imagine and narrate a story—just
like Molloy—of his returning to the farm with an old man (an equivalent
of his own mother) on the barrow. At the very end he imagines that, even
if the pump is destroyed, he can get water by lifting it with a teaspoon:
‘and in that way, he would say, one can live’ (184). The novel ends in this
way with the word ‘live’. But, given the objective circumstances, including
 THE FIXATION ON THE WOMB AND THE AMBIGUITY OF THE MOTHER… 163

his dangerous physical conditions caused by his almost total rejection of

food, it is unlikely that K will live on and achieve his dream of returning to
the farm. Rather, we get the impression that he has now finally and defini-
tively returned to the symbolic womb and thus attained a timeless state
resembling death (Beckett’s ‘wombtomb’), which is antithetical to the
natural cycle represented by mother earth. Thus, the inherent discrepancy
between the two heterogeneous aspects of K’s attachment to her mother
emerges most saliently at the ending of the novel, causing this particular
ambiguity: striving for life but locked up in the ‘wombtomb’.
While many Beckett characters, after and including Molloy, are doomed
to think and speak endlessly in the ‘wombtomb’, as if they are unappeased
spirits wandering after death, K’s thoughts here are only brief. And in
those brief thoughts, he reaches for his ideal of once again joining a pro-
ductive mother earth that is alien in Beckett’s world. Though diminished
to the realm of imagination, this final gesture of striving for life no doubt
adds to the poignancy of the ending. When we read the final passages in
this way, we are interpreting the ambiguity more in response to the unmis-
takably positive ring in the ending.4

NOTES
1. Kafka’s ‘The Burrow’ is not mentioned in the notebook either, although the
novel obviously alludes to it when, toward the end of Part One, K lives in a
burrow for a while exactly like the protagonist of Kafka’s story.
2. For details on Beckett and Rank, see Knowlson, 1996: 176–178 and Baker,
1997: 64–72.
3. He keeps wearing the coat until the end of Part One. The last reference
occurs on page 120 (‘the sodden coat’) immediately before he is discovered
by soldiers.
4. I would like to thank Professor David Attwell and other participants of the
Coetzee symposium (25 March 2017 at the University of Tokyo) for com-
menting on an early version of this chapter. I would also like to note that this
study was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 25284058,
16H03393.

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164 Y. TAJIRI

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