Burrow Time: Allegorical Thought and the Apartheid Mind

Abstract: Does the allegorical frame of an early Coetzee novel like Life & Times of Michael K take the reader on a different course than the struggles against apartheid? Or is it the reader’s ethical responsibility to the text to suspend allegorical demands in favor of the “singularity of the event” of reading? This essay reconsiders these positions on the status of allegory in Coetzee’s fiction. It argues that the issues concerning allegory in this novel are a consequence of a gap between two modalities of time (i.e., “event time” and “historical time”). The function of this temporal gap in the realm of the fictive is further explored to determine how it propels a metonymic force that subverts the symbolic totality sought by the apartheid mind.