Hosting the Critic

I. Para-cite

In September 1979, J. M. Coetzee returned from the United States to find that his home in Cape Town had been burgled. This incident led him to thoughts of a novel that would, after a number of false starts, slowly become Life & Times of Michael K. In October of that year, Coetzee began a notebook in which he entered his first sketch for a novel modeled on Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas: after his home has been robbed, a writer of supposedly liberal disposition uncovers in himself a deep resentment and inclination towards violence that had been masked by his professed politics.1 The proposed book would move towards an act of violence—shooting at an intruder, Coetzee suggested as one possibility—that results in the writer abjuring the false liberalism that he now understands to have been authorized by the protective power of the police insulating him from the oppressed classes. It seems that the burglary sparked in Coetzee’s mind the desire to create a character utterly different from himself whose realization would be mediated by Michael Kohlhaas. Coetzee worked on various drafts that drifted considerably from his original conception but found that he was unable to draw his reworking into late apartheid South Africa. What emerges through the course of the notebook, as well as the many drafts, is the way in which a book provoked by a burglary and a desire to replicate the swift pace of Kohlhaas becomes replaced, with Kafka as the more enduring influence, by the gradual and obscure narrative of Michael K, who sets out to return his ailing mother to her place of birth and comes to find his purpose (albeit blocked) as a gardener and cultivator of the earth. What began with a robbery ends with the elusive “escape artist” Michael K in the text as we have it today.

In his J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, David Attwell draws on the Coetzee archive to admirably chronicle part of the composition of Michael K. However, the notebook and multiple drafts still have considerably more to tell of the story of Coetzee’s striving to find the voice, form, and plot, as well as his struggle to determine what the novel ultimately means. We should of course be wary of believing that Coetzee’s archive offers us an unmediated access to the meaning of his novels. The drafts and notes are after all texts in themselves that are open to an array of interpretations and occasionally pose more hermeneutic problems than they resolve. However, the archive makes compelling reading for those concerned with looking into Coetzee’s compositional process, his commentary on his own writing, his sources, and the often-cryptic way that these sources are woven into his novels. It is with regard to one particular source, and Coetzee’s cryptic use of this source, that I will focus my comparative analysis. On September 19, 1981, Coetzee made this notebook entry: “I seem to have found something interesting to say, as a manifesto. The host-parasite idea comes from the essay by J. Hillis Miller in Deconstruction + Criticism.”2 By this point, many of the elements of the novel had emerged, though Coetzee still had a considerable distance to go especially with regard to ending the book and establishing for himself what it all meant. Numerous revisions were still to come but the host-parasite motif remained and became an important theme in the discourse of the novel as we have it now. This brief note to which he returns in his notebook does, however, provoke a host of questions: Has Coetzee found something to say, or has he found something for Michael K to say? How is the host–parasite theme that he derives from Miller’s essay deployed in his novel? The word “manifesto” is especially curious as Geoffrey Hartman begins his preface to Deconstruction and Criticism with the claim that: “This is neither a polemical book nor a manifesto in the ordinary sense” (vii). What, then, might Coetzee’s use of the word “manifesto” signify with regard to his drawing on Deconstruction and Criticism, which was published in 1979, the same year that he began writing Michael K? Attwell has briefly commented on Coetzee’s use of Miller’s host-parasite theme and I shall return to this later in my analysis.3

It is, however, just as pertinent to ask what the significance of Coetzee embedding the theme of host-parasite in Michael K has for “The Critic as Host,” and this pertinence derives not simply out of my desire for a dialogical examination of the relation between Coetzee’s novel and Miller’s essay, but because “The Critic as Host” already raises profound questions about the nature of citation, and the medium in which it circulates. Readers will recall that Miller’s essay begins with a citation of a citation, in which M. H. Abrams, quoting Wayne Booth, proclaims that the “‘deconstructionist’ reading of a given work ‘is plainly and simply parasitical’ on ‘the obvious or univocal reading’” (217). Miller’s citation of this citation provides him, as he says, with a fine example of a chain of citation that he sets out to scrutinize in a series of probing questions:

What happens when a critical essay extracts a “passage” and “cites” it? Is this different from a citation, echo, or allusion within a poem? Is a citation an alien parasite within the body of the main text, or is the interpretive text the parasite which surrounds and strangles the citation which is its host? The host feeds the parasite and makes its life possible, but at the same time is killed by it, as criticism is often said to kill literature. Or can host and parasite live happily together, in the domicile of the same text, feeding each other or sharing the food? (217)

Miller raises these questions regarding the act of citation in criticism and literature in an intricate essay that interrogates the unexamined notion of the “obvious or univocal reading” itself. Is this reading truly what it is claimed to be, he asks, or is it something stealthier that dissembles its equivocality by hiding it in plain sight—by staying so close to the text that it gets itself accepted as obvious? Is this univocal reading, then, perhaps also most cunningly parasitical? Taking up his questions, Miller begins with a virtuosic etymological analysis of the word “parasite,” which, he points out, is defined only in relation to its counterpart. Not only does “parasite” immediately invoke its host but it is also divided within itself. Miller goes on to show how words with the prefix “para” never settle as univocal but glimmer with an array of antithetical meanings. This antithetical relation that attends the language of host-parasite is also manifest in actual hosts and parasites as Miller remarks:

A curious system of thought, or of language, or of social organization . . . is implicit in the word parasite. There is no parasite without a host. The host and the somewhat sinister or subversive parasites are fellow guests beside the food, sharing it. On the other hand, the host is himself the food, his substance consumed without recompense, as when one says, “He is eating me out of house and home.” The host may then become host in another sense, not etymologically connected. The word “host” is of course the name for the consecrated bread or wafer of the Eucharist, from Middle English oste, from Latin hostia, sacrifice, victim. (220)

This shifting antithetical relation extends as well to the way in which the host may host a guest both in the sense of a good visitor and a dangerous intruder, leading Miller to consider the virus as a special case of the invading parasite that poses the danger of reprogramming the host so as to destroy it. Indeed, for some critics, this virus proves an apposite analogy for deconstruction itself and the way it infects a metaphysical text of “obvious or univocal meaning,” reprogramming this host text to have it issue the very effects that deconstructive analysis sought in the first place. Miller’s rejoinder, however, is to turn this notion on its head by questioning if “metaphysics, the obvious or univocal meaning, is the parasitical virus which has for millennia been passed for generation to generation in Western culture in its languages and in the privileged texts of those languages?” (222)

What Miller’s analysis demonstrates is that, despite itself, the claim that a deconstructive reading is plainly “parasitical” on the “obvious or univocal reading” is itself already invaded by the ramifying effects of parasitism. Miller’s essay further shows how his analysis of a fragment of criticism opens to the boundless context of history and world. He writes:

To get so far or so much out of a little piece of language, context after context widening out from these few phrases to include as their necessary milieux all the family of Indo-European languages, all the literature and conceptual thought within those languages, and all the permutations of our social structures of household economy, gift-giving and gift-receiving—this is an argument for the value of recognizing the equivocal richness of apparently obvious or univocal language, even of the language of criticism. Criticism is in this respect, if no other, continuous with the language of literature. (223)

When Coetzee draws Miller’s essay into his novel—when he cites Miller’s host-parasite theme—he engages in a performative response or reversal in which his novel now hosts the critical essay that is itself concerned with questions of citationality, of the host-parasite, in criticism versus literature. What is the effect, then, of this citational mise en abyme on each of these texts? This question is partly conditioned by the deconstructive move of displacing the traditionally secondary or functional status ascribed to criticism, of claiming, as Hartman puts it, that “Criticism is part of the world of letters, and has its own mixed philosophical and literary, reflective and figural strength” (vii). Indeed, given the shifting relation between parasite and host that Miller intricately unfolds, which is properly the host and which the parasite is an open contextual question, especially since the novel slightly postdates the essay on which it draws for some of its substance. In what follows, I shall examine this citational interrelation and the significance it has for both texts not only with regard to their compositional contexts but “context after context widening,” anachronistically, also in relation to the effect this has on their future receptions.4

II. Politics and Parasites

It is after the guerrillas have passed through the farm and K has failed to join them and after he has, in one of the rare exuberant moments in the novel, literally tasted the fruit (or more precisely the vegetable) of his labor that K finds himself becoming more and more a creature of his burrow, more and more a creature of the underground, living outside clock time, “half awake, half asleep. Like a parasite dozing in the gut, he thought; like a lizard under a stone” (116). It might appear somewhat odd that at this moment in his burrow K would first think of himself as a parasite dozing in the gut and then qualify this with his more apt metaphor of a lizard under a stone. After all, this metaphor is more in keeping with the description of his becoming a creature of the earth: “naked as a mole in daylight” (105) or “like a worm he began to slither towards his hole” (107). However, we find out in the very next paragraph that the word “parasite,” which appears here for the first time in the novel, is not simply K’s free description of himself but is motivated, or implanted, by an earlier incident in the camp. Furthermore, what is adumbrated here, I shall later show, is a subtle linkage between parasite and stone.

Here is the moment when the host-parasite theme finds its exposition in the novel:

Parasite was the word the police captain had used: the camp at Jakkalsdrif, a nest of parasites hanging from the neat sunlit town, eating its substance, giving no nourishment back. Yet to K lying idle in his bed, thinking without passion (What is it to me, after all? he thought), it was no longer obvious which was host and which was parasite, camp or town. If the worm devoured the sheep, why did the sheep swallow the worm? What if there were millions, more millions than anyone knew, living in camps, living on alms, living off the land, living by guile, creeping away in corners to escape the times . . . ? What if the hosts were far outnumbered by the parasites, the parasites of idleness and the other secret parasites in the army and the police force and the schools and factories and offices, the parasites of the heart? Parasites too had flesh and substance; parasites too could be preyed upon. Perhaps in truth whether the camp was declared a parasite on the town or the town a parasite on the camp depended on no more than on who made his voice heard loudest. (116)5

What we notice first in looking back over the scene of the police raid for saboteurs in the labor camp in which K is held is that the police captain’s use of the word “parasite” is not recorded in the text. In other words, we are not given the captain’s use of this word that appears to have become lodged in K’s mind and that months later he brings out and ruminates upon. However, we notice too how K revises the captain’s shouted words: “A nest of criminals! Criminals and saboteurs and idlers!” (91) into the phrase “a nest of parasites” (116). It is because he has become idle that K, internalizing the captain’s words, thinks of himself as a parasite, a word he has either heard or derived from the captain’s speech at the camp. Linked to the guerrilla attack on the town and the captain’s accusation of the camp harboring a nest of saboteurs, the word “parasite” is given a strongly political and active force. K, however, gives the parasite-host theme a more subtle and passive political power. K begins, though he does not know it, like Miller, by destabilizing the host-parasite hierarchy in claiming that it is not at all obvious “which was host and which parasite, camp or town,” and he does this, moreover, by means of embodiment. K’s notion of the host-parasite is a fleshy one. Is the worm to blame, he asks, for devouring the sheep, given that it was the sheep that first consumed the worm? It is then that K moves from thinking of himself as a parasite dozing in the gut to one of those secret embodied parasites living in hidden corners off the land or in the camp. K is, at this moment in his burrow, one of those “parasites of idleness,” and thus in some distant respect might even be thought of as part of that covert community (without community), that has infiltrated schools and factories, and even the army and police force. These “parasites of the heart” would constitute that hidden passive political body that in some measure deactivates power. But, K understands too that this body is vulnerable, that “parasites too had flesh and substance; parasites too could be preyed on” (116). These thoughts come to him idly, as it were, without the passion of a political manifesto, but he concludes with a canny grasp that the host-parasite relation is founded on the power of voice, that it is a relation partly founded in rhetorical force.6

K’s thought of the power of voice leads us to the question of how K himself comes to find this inner articulated critical voice, and, as we shall see in a moment, K’s inner voice—in which he expresses his critique of the power of voice—is itself bound-up in the host-parasite relation. One of the extraordinary aspects of Michael K is the way in which the novel begins with a seemingly unknowing and inarticulate character who gradually comes to voice moments of political (and other) consciousness, and furthermore does so by trying to determine how such a consciousness is born in him. One example of this is K’s musing on Robert’s (one of the inmates’) notions that sanitary conditions are provided in the camp not out of any genuine concern for the inmates but because the sight of sick and ghastly people impinges on the camp masters’ feeling of their own well-being. K finds himself expounding on Robert’s words:

Even people who died of starvation left bodies behind. Dead bodies could be as offensive as living bodies. . . . If these people really 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 cover us with earth. . . . Then, perhaps, they might begin to forget about us. But who could dig a hole as big as that? Not thirty men, even with women and children and old people to help, not in our present state, with nothing but picks and spades, here in the stone-hard veld. (94–95)

Learning from Robert, K digs deeper into the real politics of the camp. These unflinching thoughts are far more deeply knowing and discomposing than would have been available to K’s inner conscience as we have him presented early in the novel. Perhaps this, along with K’s thoughts about being out of all the camps that he expresses by the end of the novel, is the manifesto that Coetzee has found for K to say. It is apt too that K would see this thought, now taken root, as unfurling like a plant in his mind, thus linking his being as a gardener to his growing awareness of the politics of bare life.

Early in the novel, K encounters the kindness of a stranger, which leads him to question if he would help people who might trespass upon the land: “He might help people, he might not help them, he did not know beforehand, anything was possible. He did not seem to have a belief, or did not seem to have a belief regarding help. Perhaps I am the stony ground, he thought” (48). We observe in the difference between these two citations how much K’s ethical and political consciousness has developed, and we might regard the ironic distance between the inchoate K who wonders if he is the stony ground on which belief will not grow, and the K who believes that it is only the stone-hard earth that saves the people of the camp from their extinction. Yet even as this thought comes to him, K wonders at its origin, and reflects further: “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” (95). Not only does K figure his growing thought in terms of seeds and plants, but in considering its origin, he also thinks in terms of something like the host-parasite relation: Is he merely the host to the parasite of Robert’s thought, or is he now the host to his own thought? K cannot yet determine this but his musing on the host-parasite relation to the origins of his own thought is a precursor to his impending thought on the host-parasite relation itself. This, then, is one sense behind my title: “Hosting the Critic,” in which the novel plays host to K as critic—that is, to K as critical consciousness, to K as political critique.

But my title also refers, of course, to Miller as the critic whose essay is hosted by Coetzee’s novel. How, then, might we analyze Coetzee’s incorporation of Miller’s essay into his novel? In citing Miller’s essay, Coetzee re-cites some of the problems with which Miller began. Had Coetzee’s notebook been public at the time of the publication of Michael K in 1983, I believe critics would have been divided on how they would read this incorporation. Some might well have asserted that in imbuing K with thoughts that have their source in “The Critic as Host,” Coetzee revises the essay, giving it a doubly embodied political dimension—doubly embodied in that K thinks of himself (and is thought of) as a parasite who also muses on the submerged body (if not quite body politic) of parasites that nest hidden in the corners of society and that subtly disrupt the oppressive socio-political apparatus. Through the figure of K, they might have argued, Coetzee critiques this essay, and with it deconstruction, for being insufficiently politically engaged in the materiality of the world and its oppressive political forces. Such critics might have claimed that even as it voices its strong critique of an insistence on the univocal plain text and predominant metaphysical tradition that it upholds, the essay becomes entangled in its own ramifying linguistic and textual maze in which etymology and textuality too much take the place of the political world. In this sense, they might claim, the novel provides a good political host. On the other hand, other critics might equally assert that in making K a character of pure evasiveness, in figuring him, as the medical officer does, as an “allegory . . . of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it” (166), Coetzee makes him too much a figure of the deconstructive trace (or a figure, as K says of himself, who wishes to move without leaving a trace). In making K a figure of such deconstructive slipperiness, whose meaning cannot be pinned down, in Coetzee’s drawing, that is, on such texts as “The Critic as Host,” these critics might assert that K is hollowed out and deprived of any real powers of political engagement, especially in the terribly fraught space of apartheid South Africa. Such detractors may well have seen deconstruction as the parasite eating out the substance of what ought to have been the politically engaged character of Michael K.

My own view is that both of these critiques substantially miss their mark, and, at any rate, the fierce debates on politics, history, and deconstruction as practiced in that moment have receded. However, before examining the interrelation of the essay and novel from our contemporary perspective, I will delve further into the correlation between these texts from the perspective of the compositional context of Michael K. Coetzee does not, I believe, simply abstract the host-parasite theme from Miller’s essay and then give it a political embodiment. “The Critic as Host” also inheres more subtly and extensively in the novel. Again, the host-parasite is not only one content of K’s thought but also one of the mechanisms by which he comes to witness himself thinking, or indeed perhaps comes to think with a larger and more politically incisive consciousness. K’s thought on the camp and parasite, however, does not only unfold like a plant, but plants, and more specifically crops, come to take on a social and political function. We remember that although K ultimately resists joining the guerrillas, he does very much wish to provide them with food from his crop. Readers will also recall that Miller examines the origin of the word “parasite” and the way in which it is bound up with crops or food: “Parasite comes from the Greek parasitos, ‘beside the grain,’ para, beside . . . plus sitos, grain, food. . . . A parasite was originally something positive, a fellow guest, someone sharing the food with you, there beside the grain” (220). It is just as such guests or visitors that K envisages the fighters. He thinks of them passing again through the farm and says to himself: “Be sure to come back to the dam next time, and I will feed you. I will have pumpkins and squashes and melons by then . . . you will lack nothing. And they would come next time on their way to the mountains . . . and I would feed them and afterwards sit with them around the fire drinking their words” (109). Far from being a parasite dozing in the gut, K envisions himself as a host to his guerrilla guests; he will share with them the new bounty of his crop, and sitting beside the grain, he will, like a host plant, “drink” in the substance of their stories. In time, the parasite also came to take on the more modern meaning of one who takes from another without offering anything in return. As such Miller tells us, “The host and the somewhat sinister or subversive parasite are fellow guests beside the food” (220). In a rather different sense, the guerrillas would indeed prove to be “subversive” guests beside the food.

Overcome by the chance visit of the guerrillas, K fantasizes about giving his crops a socio-political significance, but he also has a profoundly solitary, intimate, and anthropomorphized relation to them. Indeed, as they were growing in the earth K thinks of his crops as his children: “Among the seeds he had sown had been a melon seed. Now two pale green melons were growing. . . . It seemed to him that he loved these two, which he thought of as two sisters, even more than the pumpkins, which he thought of as a band of brothers. Under the melons he placed pads of grass so the skins should not bruise” (113). In a strange sense, K considers himself host to these children he has cultivated—they are, in effect, his family. The melons are gendered as sisters (we shall come to the significance of this) and the pumpkins a band of brothers that would also feed the band of brothers, which K considers the guerrillas to be. But his children are also hosts in the sense of something consecrated, and consumed. As he prepares his strips of pumpkin over the glowing fire, we are told, “The fragrance of the burning flesh rose into the sky” (113). K, however, prays not upwards to the heavens but kneeling towards the ground, and he eats his “firstborn” fruit, his first flesh, as sacred host.

If K is host to his family of crops, and if the flesh of his pumpkin is eaten as a host, his crops also turn out to be parasites. No host without parasite, as Miller says. K finds the ripening pumpkins become so visible as to leave him vulnerable to discovery and thus he becomes tethered to the vines. When he piles his thirty pumpkins near his burrow, they look to him like a beacon; even as he mottles them with mud and hides them along the river-bed, K still lives with the risk of exposure. Sick, K eats his ripened melons: “He ate those two children on successive days, praying that they would make him well” (118). However, burrowed in his burrow, tied to the farm and his crops, K seems to enter semi-hibernation, a state of starvation, or death drive. The pumpkin vine is not quite the ivy or “clinging vine, able to live in no other way but by drawing the life sap of its host, cutting of its light and air” (Miller 218), but K’s pumpkins, which he finds he now cannot eat, prove to become parasites by paradoxically hollowing out the substance of its host. K’s children become then not only parasites but parricides, almost killing off their father, reminiscent of Miller’s claim of the parasite as parricide: “The parasite is destroying the host. The alien has invaded the house, perhaps to kill the father of the family in an act which does not look like parricide, but is” (218).

Towards the end of Coetzee’s novel, K faces another trap that is bound up with the host-parasite, host-guest chain: the trap of the gift. After he is given the gift of the prostitute, we are informed that “two girls passed him, averting their gaze and, he suspected, holding their breath. He watched their backsides ascend the steps and surprised in himself an urge to dig his fingers into that soft flesh” (180). We grasp that the poisoned gift has awakened sexual urges in K, the backsides of the two women into whose flesh K desires to dig now take the place of his digging in soil, and the flesh of two sister melons that he consumes.

“The poem, in my figure,” Miller tells us, “is that ambiguous gift, food, host in the sense of victim, sacrifice” (225). I have shown how these elements play out in Coetzee’s novel. The host-parasite theme, however, also governs the relation between K and the novel that hosts him; even as K emerges through the course of the novel, there is another K that runs alongside this K, a para-K, or, K as parasite to the host of the novel. For K cannot emerge without the help of the narrator who is uncannily both within the mind of K and an exterior presence sustaining and forming the narrative of his life and times. The narrator is thus the host who feeds K the words on which he lives, but K is also the parasite that eats away at those words, refusing them the plenitude of meaning that does not slip away. Moreover, it is also as the novel’s protagonist that the host-parasite relation conditions K in that he would be host to a story he cannot quite tell. We recall, for example, the moment when K decides not to join the guerrillas, he says: “Always, when he tried to explain himself to himself, there remained a gap, a hole, a darkness before which his understanding baulked, into which it was useless to pour words. The words were eaten up, the gap remained. His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong” (110). K’s story, then, is a parasitical story in a number of senses. It is the story of himself as a parasite; it is his story alone, but it is also a parasitical story in that it eats up the words that would host it. It is the story that runs alongside him but never fully allows itself to be manifest, a parasitical story that eats away his understanding of himself, leaving a hole in the substance of its host.

This host-parasite mechanism inhabits the very relation between the novel and its protagonist (or antagonist) but by means of this comparative analysis I hope to have demonstrated Miller’s assertion that “The critical text and the literary text are each parasite and host for the other, each feeding on the other and feeding it, destroying and being destroyed by it” (249). To my mind, however, the conjunction of these two texts is also mutually creative. If Coetzee draws on Miller’s essay for some of the substance of his novel, his novel also has the effect of drawing a story out of Miller’s essay; or, to put this another way, the themes and imagined small scenes in the essay of the host as eater and eaten, the gift, the parasite vine, or the subversive guest beside the food find one of their strange embodiments in Michael K.

III. Irony and Reception

We have seen how K’s thoughts on the host-parasite have a source in Miller’s essay and how elements of this essay are manifest in Coetzee’s novel, but the notebook also reveals that “The Critic as Host” played a discursive role in Coetzee’s own political relationship to the novel that he was writing. It is this aspect that Attwell focuses on, pointing out that K’s failure to join the guerrillas and the justification of this choice was a thorny problem that Coetzee had to work through. Once he chose to swerve from Kohlhaas and keep K a gardener rather than guerrilla, Coetzee knew he would be vulnerable to charges of failing the struggle, to charges of political evasiveness. Although K could hardly be mistaken for Coetzee, in his sidestepping of violence, he is politically closer to Coetzee himself than the Kohlhaas-inflected character that Coetzee first conceived as the antagonist of his novel. Coetzee confirms this in a self-reflective notebook entry in which he asserts, K’s “not going off with the guerrillas is thematized as a lacuna in his story. It is a lacuna in the logic of his political progression, a lacuna in my own position. It is an unbridgeable gap (and must be so with all comfortable liberal whites), and the best one can do is not to leave it out but to represent it as a gap.”7 Coetzee is not, of course, conflating himself with K, but he does draw a correlation of a political lacuna in both their positions, in both their stories. They are paradoxically bound by this unbridgeable gap. K’s struggle to justify his not joining the guerrillas is inextricably linked to Coetzee’s problem of justifying the emergence of Michael K as a figure of evasion. One of the solutions that Coetzee pondered was to make a trial defense of K also a defense of the novel. Coetzee did not choose this solution but held to a K who eludes his accusers, and it is here that Attwell reads Coetzee as deploying Miller’s essay in his defense:

Coetzee therefore solves the problem of the novel’s political nakedness by turning the accusation on his own potential accusers. The metaphor that enabled him to effect this reversal was that of the host and parasite, which he borrowed from an essay by J. Hillis Miller . . . Accused of being the parasite, K turns out to be a host, not only of the predatory authorities in his own universe, but also of those readers and critics who would accuse his author, Coetzee, of spinelessness. Coetzee was gambling on the dynamics of the story protecting both K and himself. (120)

For Attwell, this is what Coetzee would have meant in deploying the host and parasite metaphor as a manifesto. But if Coetzee was indeed gambling on the protective dynamics of the story, he would also surely have known that he was bound, in part, to lose his gamble. In refusing finally to commandeer K, even paradoxically in the sense of allowing K to assume his own revolutionary powers, Coetzee knew that he would leave himself open to charges of insufficient and ineffectual political engagement. As could be foreseen, this did indeed occur, most notably in Nadine Gordimer’s appraisal of the novel. Although she holds the novel in high regard, she focuses her critique on Coetzee’s “revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions” and asserts: “If Michael K is shown to see himself ‘like a parasite dozing in the gut,’ he can never develop the metaphor by becoming the internal underground rebel who destroys the body of the enemy society he inhabits.” Even as Gordimer sharply critiques Coetzee for his refusal to affirm revolutionary solutions, she finds his engagement with the conditions of apartheid South Africa deeply compelling:

The abstraction of allegory and symbol will not give access to what is most important in this magnificent novel, however. Neither will seeing it as a vision of the future. If it is set ahead in time at all, then this is done as a way of looking, as if it had come to the surface, at what lies under the surface of the present. The harried homelessness of Michael K and his mother is the experience, in 1984, of hundreds of thousands of black people in South African squatter towns and “resettlement” camps.

What Gordimer affirms in Coetzee’s novel is that part of anachronistic reading that situates the work in the historical moment of its production and reception, but what she disavows, probably because of the then-urgent and consuming struggle against the brutality of apartheid, is that other pole of anachronistic reading: the way the novel holds itself open, to a future reading to come, indeed also to the way in which Michael K solicits that future reading, and takes on the aspect of an anticipatory allegory. Still, Gordimer acknowledges the irreducible claim on us of the idea of gardening and the desecration of the earth—“the presence of the threat not only of mutual destruction of whites and blacks in South Africa, but of killing, everywhere, by scorching, polluting, neglecting, charging with radioactivity, the dirt beneath our feet.”

In addressing through the strange figure of K his fears for the desolation of the earth, Coetzee was looking squarely at the present-time of the novel, as well as the impending future, but the sheer acceleration of catastrophic climate change has now conferred on his text something of the same ethical and political urgency (though for a different cause) that Gordimer perceived the novel as lacking. “Beyond all creeds and moralities this work of art asserts,” she concludes, “there is only one: to keep the earth alive, and only one salvation, the survival that comes from her. Michael K is a gardener ‘because that is my nature’: the nature of civilized man, versus the hunter, the nomad. Hope is a seed. That’s all. That’s everything. It’s better to live on your knees, planting something?” (6). It is a little difficult to catch the nuances of Gordimer’s tone here. K does not quite strike me as the representative of “civilized man”; he does at the end, I suspect, give up hunting, but his final vision is of a kind of nomadic gardening. Even as she acknowledges the irreducible demand of the idea of gardening, Gordimer seems to be saying there is also something wanting, something supplicatory, about only living on your knees and planting, given the actual politics on the South African ground. But, if K cannot become the underground rebel, he does become, and aspires to remain, an underground gardener, and perhaps as an allegory for our time this has come to mean a great deal, perhaps almost everything.

Gordimer’s political critique, then, is of the insufficiency of K’s idle parasites that work to disable power in favor of active resistance, of “what the victims, seeing themselves as victims no longer, have done, are doing, and believe they must do for themselves”—that is, of “the will to resist evil” (6). Regarding Gordimer’s charge, Attwell remarks, “Two decades later Coetzee still felt the smart of this criticism . . . noting in the draft of Diary of a Bad Year that Gordimer had accused him of lacking political courage. This sad outcome is made sadder, in retrospect, by the fact that Coetzee had anticipated just such a reaction and had tried to head it off as he wrote.”8 The reception of Michael K at the time of its publication in apartheid South Africa is part of literary history, but reading Coetzee’s archive now reveals just how much he was meditating on and writing in relation to his anticipation of the way in which his text would be received, and how Miller’s essay was bound up with the double bind he knew he would face in that forthcoming reception.

If Coetzee did indeed deploy “The Critic as Host” as something of an apotropaic, as a critical text to ward off critics, he was too canny a reader of the essay not to be aware of its double edge, not to be aware that he was also hosting or inviting his critics, and that the host-parasite mechanism would leave him vulnerable to its inevitable oscillation in which he would be seen as parasitical on the powers of the victims of apartheid to take action. But there is a way too in which Coetzee also cunningly deploys that other edge, for in hosting K, he is inevitably placed in the position of the passive parasite (or charged with writing a parasitic novel). Moreover, it is also K who destabilizes the host-parasite priority and makes some claim for the power of these passive parasites, and thus what subtly accrues to Coetzee and his novel in the face of this accusation is K’s invocation of the political powers of the parasite. By this means, Coetzee’s novel partakes of another aspect of the host-parasite mechanism that Miller illustrates, in that it disrupts the boundary between inside and outside, and, furthermore, between one text and another. That “The Critic as Host” inheres in Coetzee’s novel speaks to the way in which a text is comprised of a tissue of past texts but also to the less expected way in which the reception of this past text is conditioned by its future host-text.

It is befitting then that the “Critic as Host,” which, after all, also has as one of its themes an irreducible openness to future interpretations, would surprise its author. Remarking in a recent interview on the unexpected fate of his text, Miller tells us:

I’ve been surprised that “The Critic as Host” took hold the way it did, genuinely surprised. Because I didn’t think of it when I wrote it as a kind of position piece that would be anthologized and read all over the world. . . . It shows the domination of theoretical discourse over readings during the last twenty or thirty years. If somebody asked me, “Which of your essays do you think everybody ought to read?,” my answer would likely be some essay that was actually a reading of a work of literature. The fact that that has not happened—what everybody reads by me is a polemical, theoretical piece that belongs to a specific moment in American academic history—has surprised me, but I’ve learned something from that. I’m happy to have people read “The Critic as Host.” I don’t disown it, but it does need to be put back in context, which was a very overdetermined moment. (Fest 133)

The unexpected reception of “The Critic as Host” might be seen as the text enacting its own theme of eluding interpretative closure, or even an unconscious preprogramming; however this also leads to an irony to which Miller points. The irony is that it is a theoretical, polemical piece that has emerged as Miller’s most famous text—one that has come to host the critic—rather than a more representative piece that would primarily be a reading of a work of literature. So along with surprise, irony is also at work in his text, but with the difference that irony is, in part, intended. Miller remarks,

I consider irony important in my work, including “The Critic as Host.” There’s a kind of irony in saying, “Abrams, you use this word parasite, were you at all aware of what lies behind that word? I don’t think so . . .” So the essay is an ironic attack on Abrams. He casually used this everyday idiom, borrowed from Booth, but it has more implications than he thought. And that’s irony. (Fest 138)

The irony of this irony is that Miller’s essay has more implications for him and his critical destiny than he would have anticipated.

If the moment is overdetermined in this sense, it is also overdetermined in terms of historical context (as was the reception of Coetzee’s novel) and this goes some way to explaining the essay’s critical success and fame. This was a moment, after all, in which deconstruction was at a highpoint and Deconstruction and Criticism, if not a manifesto, was still a programmatic volume, and the essay benefited by being hosted in it. While this context goes some way in accounting for this essay’s prominence, and while anachronistic reading situates the text in its moment, it contends too that the text also plays a considerable role in programming or soliciting its future reading. In this regard, “The Critic as Host” partakes of another oscillation or dialectic and that is between its functioning as a programming text with a drive to power to hosting its future context, and a radical openness to the still-undecided and unknowable way in which that future context will inflect or condition its reading. In the final section, I look further into how this dialectic plays forward, and the way in which the critical interrelation between “The Critic as Host” and Michael K both compels and is compelled by an ineluctable anachronistic reading that now confronts it.

IV. The Crypt-keeper

In his notebook Coetzee records a moment in his struggle to determine what the book he was writing ultimately meant. “So what is it all about?” he writes, “It’s just an evasion of social relations, past and future, by past relations dead and refusing future relations. I’m postponing all the justifications to the end, and I don’t know how to make them” (HRC CP 33.5: 7-29-81). We now know that Coetzee would end the novel with K back in his cell-like basement lying on a cement floor self-consciously musing on the state of his existence, the meaning of his being, and a fantasy with regard to what might be termed his possible-impossible future. K thinks of how the story that others would compel him to tell of his time in cages or prisons is conspicuously itself a prison. He thinks too of his accomplishment of having escaped all the camps. But we also recall a moment in the camp when the medical officer tells K “You are like a stick insect that has landed . . . in the middle of a great wide flat bare concrete plain” (149), which ironically foreshadows K’s discovering the truth of his being as a gardener: “I am more like an earthworm. . . . which is also a kind of gardener. Or a mole, also a gardener, that does not tell stories because it lives in silence. But a mole or an earthworm on a cement floor?” (182).

It is from this bleak, restricted position that K fantasizes about returning to the farm with the unknown visitor. This visitor, whom K imagines as an old man, sometimes came to sleep on this floor. When the old man asks how they would obtain water on the farm, K imagines that he would “clear the rubble from the mouth of the shaft” of the pump that had been blown up (184). Parting the stone and cement, he would sink his bent teaspoon deep into the ground, drawing up water in its tiny bowl and “in that way, he would say, one can live” (184). The novel ends with K on the cement floor, but a K who also imagines a second chance, a second future life drawn out of the ruins of the farm (an ironic revision of the camp commander’s telling him, “So you are getting a second chance” [138]). The figment of the old man, a father figure possibly, represents K’s desire for a future relationship, perhaps even with another gardener as K’s imagination of the old man seems conditioned by the old man with the cart of manure who earlier gives K a ride. So, as evasive and solitary as K is, he does not, in his hopes at least, refuse all future relations. Lying on the concrete floor he imagines uncovering a hole in the rubble, revealing the “mouth” of the shaft. The teaspoon from which they might drink takes us back to the beginning of the novel and the teaspoon with which K was fed through his hare lip that “curled like a snail’s foot” round the “tiny bud of a mouth” (3). K’s being as a gardener is literally foretold by his mouth; the novel begins with a hole in K’s mouth and ends with a hole in the mouth of concrete and stone. It is possible that K is deceived, and that the novel colludes with him in this, when he thinks that it is “not impossible” that the old man will want to accompany him. The teaspoon that did indeed once feed K is now only a tiny symbol of hope. But if the novel ends with the bleakness of K the gardener on the concrete floor, it does not seem to me to close off all hope. For K’s fantasy of clearing the rubble is also a fantasy of clearing a hole in the concrete floor through which the mole or earthworm might again make their way back to the earth—a fantasy, then, of how one can still live in the ruined world as a gardener.

Coetzee’s novel, which ends by literally leaving open a crack of hope for an imagined future of gardening, provokes the question of how we might read it now in relation to our moment of climate catastrophe. Furthermore, the question arises as to how we might anachronistically read the host-parasite interrelation between Michael K and “The Critic as Host.” I would like to begin answering these questions by turning to Miller’s analysis of the parasite in Shelley’s poetry. We recall that it was Shelley who famously says of the poet: “For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and fruit of latest time.” Shelley does not see poetry as a prophecy in the strict, or, as he says, “gross sense of the word”; poetry for him is not subsumed by present time but already contains within it a future because great poetry partakes of the eternal. In my conception of anachronistic reading, it is not because poetry partakes of the eternal that it beholds the future in the present, but rather because a text remains open to a future interpretation that it also in some sense already solicits. Still, Shelley’s claim resonates with anachronistic analysis, and his assertion that artists’ “thoughts are the germ of the flower and fruit of latest time” unfolds with uncanny and untimely resonance into my reading of Miller’s and Coetzee’s texts. Indeed, Miller’s analysis focuses on the “parasite flowers” that run through Shelley’s poetry. “Parasites for Shelley,” Miller tells us, “are always parasite flowers,” which operate in his poetry with an oscillating undecidable structure and paradoxical temporality (237). Shelley’s poetry is motivated by a desire to demolish the block between sign and signified in what Miller terms “an apocalypse of immediacy” that brings an end to poetry and its work of figuration (236). This will to pure presence ceaselessly fails as “words, however, always remain, there on the page, as the unconsumed traces of each unsuccessful attempt to use words to end words” (237). Thus “the word ‘parasite,’ for Shelley, names the bridge, wall, or connecting membrane which at once makes this apocalyptic union possible, abolishing difference, and at the same time always remains as a barrier forbidding it” (237).

One pertinent example of this process is revealed at the scene of the stone tower in Epipsychidion, from which the “antique and learned imagery” has been erased and replaced by “volumes” of ivy and parasite flowers (239). The poet intends to bring his lover to this ancient tower and thereby renew a time of perfect union. Miller comments, however, that this can never be attained: “It remains at the end of Epipsychidion a proleptic hope which is forbidden by the words which express it. It can never be performed because in fact this union never existed in the past. It is only a projection backward from the present. It is a ‘seeming’ created by reading the signs or remnants still present in the present” (241). Furthermore, the “volumes” of ivy and wild vine that pattern their hieroglyphs on the stone floor take the place of those old inscriptions on stone and of the “antique and learnèd imagery” that has been erased. These natural parasites display themselves in the form of writing but never a legible one, and as Miller points out, this pattern “remains ‘in place of’ the erased human language” (242). Paradoxically, this “in place of” comes to signify the impossibility of primal unity and signifies instead “realms separated by language itself and by the dependence of language on figure, on the ‘in place of’ of metaphor or allegorical substitution” (242). This example proves particularly apt because it draws together the parasite, stone, writing, and prolepsis.

If Shelley invokes an illusory “proleptic hope” and backwards projection from the present to an unfallen primal nature, there does not seem to be anything illusory about Coetzee’s novel being proleptic of the catastrophe befalling us. Might we read this novel in a way that offers something more than an illusory “proleptic hope” of engaging this catastrophe, or would this reading, at this moment, already be only a backwards projection and illusory “proleptic hope” for an irreparable world? To work through this question, let us return to K lying in his burrow just a moment before he thinks of himself as a parasite dozing in the gut. At this moment, K finds himself floating through a kind of liquefaction of time:

He could lie all afternoon with his eyes open, staring at the corrugations in the roof-iron and the tracings of rust; his mind would not wander, he would see nothing but the iron, the lines would not transform themselves into pattern or fantasy; he was himself, lying in his own house, the rust was merely rust, all that was moving was time, bearing him onward in its flow. (115)

Here K contrasts strongly with the poet who sees in the shadows cast by parasite vines the patterns and signs of writing. In this liquid flow of time things are merely what they are and do not stand for anything else. It is while he feels himself floating in time and secreted in his stone burrow that K regards himself: “Like a parasite dozing in the gut . . . like a lizard under a stone” (116).9 It is immediately after this that K engages in his thoughts on politics and the parasite. But in drawing this parallel, K also links the parasite and stone; or, more precisely, the parasite and creature under the stone or earth.10

We recall that the medical officer draws an explicit relation to K as a parasite made of clay, likening him to a rudimentary man formed of spit and dust, a “genuine little man of earth, the kind of little man one sees in peasant art emerging into the world from between the squat thighs of its mother-host . . . bent for a life of burrowing, a creature that spends its waking life stooped over the soil” (161). K emerges into the world, then, not just from his mother as he did at the beginning of the novel but from his “mother-host.” The compound word “mother-host” is carefully chosen and establishes K as a parasite that is born a gardener in the double sense in which K thinks of himself—both as a cultivator of the soil and as a burrowing creature.

K’s primal relation to earth portends his purpose to “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). We have approached the moment; indeed we may have passed it already, when that cord is being broken. The metaphor of the cord being broken is the novel’s presentiment of the tipping point on which we are now poised, of that irreparable moment beyond which there is no going back. Catastrophic climate change is conferring an apocalyptic reception on the novel, but there are ways too in which K presages this reception. If K evaded the war that would end apartheid, if he were one of those men who stayed behind, he was also prescient in looking ahead. In the camp, K has presentiments of scenes of life “threatening to converge” on a single meaning (89), but it is also when he first becomes a cultivator on the farm, when the “impulse to plant had been reawoken in him” and he brings the deserted farm back to life that “would sometimes come a sense of pain that was obscurely connected with the future” (59). And when the house on the farm is blown up, it is followed by a “cloud of grey and orange, not mist but dust, as if a whirlwind were carrying the house away” (125), which echoes the biblical whirlwind and its association with apocalypse, a whirlwind apocalypse that hangs over K. My anachronistic interpretation of the novel in relation to a contemporary understanding of climate change, then, is not simply one of retrospective imposition, but already forecast by the text itself. K’s not joining the guerrillas leaves an unbridgeable gap in his story but his assertion that gardening or the idea of gardening must be kept alive opens up to a crucial political and ecological importance for us now. If K is not quite a mole, or old mole, in Marx’s revolutionary sense, his work of gardening would prove no less crucial for the future of our earth.11

Lying in his constricted concrete cell, K ponders the failure of his planting:

The mistake I made . . . was not to have plenty of seeds . . . [M]y mistake was to plant all my seeds together in one patch. I should have planted them one at a time spread out over miles of veld in patches of soil no larger than my hand, and drawn a map . . . so that every night I could make a tour of the sites to water them. Because if there was one thing I discovered out in the country, it was that there is time enough for everything. (Is that the moral of it all, he thought, the moral of the whole story: that there is time enough for everything? Is that how morals come, unbidden, in the course of events, when you least expect them?) (182–183)

In response to his failure, K imagines a nomadic form of gardening in which he plants his seeds not in striated furrows—K comes to think of these as a “mistake” (111)—or even in the field of a farm, but in small, undisclosed patches spread over miles of earth. The map represents something of a limit to his nomadic gardening but it represents too his role as gardener who waters by his hand those patches of soil no larger than his hand. It is disquieting that K’s thoughts of saving at least some of his crop by spreading it out over more earth seems hardly less vulnerable in our moment of ecological catastrophe. Even more disquieting is his thought of the one thing he discovers in the country, that “there was time enough for everything” (183) because it is clear that we are running out of time and, in some respects, that we have already run out of time. What is poignantly ironic for us about the moral that comes to K, then, is that this is indeed how morals come—unbidden, in the course of events, when you least expect them, but with the twist that what is unexpected is that there is not time enough for everything, and that time is running out for us even out in the country. It is as if the moral that hosts the moral has become its parasite. This thought of morals coming unbidden or unexpectedly like the approach of a stranger to the host is not simply K’s notion, I believe, but also Coetzee’s pointing to the principle of the unconditional structure of morals. The double irony is that this timeless unconditional principle is conditioned in practice by a running out of time that itself reveals and confirms the unconditional structure of the arrival of morals. It is clear then that the reception of Coetzee’s novel is, and will be, deeply imbricated with catastrophic climate change, and as I have focused on textual parasites and hosts, I would like to conclude by addressing the fate of actual parasites and hosts.

According to the first major scientific study (2017) modeling the impact of global climate change on parasite habitat loss, as many as one in three parasite species may face extinction in the coming decades (Carlson). This loss would in turn have a devastating effect on the planet’s ecosystems because parasites are a crucial part of food webs, constitute a large part of the biomass in some ecosystems, and help regulate the immune systems of animals, thus preventing disease. While global warming will weaken parasite species in one location it will allow for an irruption in another, thus wreaking “more havoc—and not just on animal hosts. . . . if parasites are keeping disease down in wildlife, they might also be indirectly keeping them down in humans” (Zimmer). Slowing down climate change might impact extinction rates but researchers have concluded that a great dying of parasites species and their hosts will inevitably be part of the planetary future and “make a significant contribution to the sixth mass extinction” (Carlson).

Anthropogenic climate change undoubtedly makes us parasites on the planet that hosts us; but ironically the process of climate change might also aptly be considered by analogy with parasites that transform their hosts into zombies. These diabolical parasites hijack their hosts by taking over their bodies or minds, forcing them to both destroy themselves and help propagate the invading species. One particularly macabre example is the recently discovered crypt-keeper wasp, Euderus set (Weinersmith). So ghoulishly manipulative is the crypt-keeper that it was named after the Egyptian god of chaos and evil. Set, we remember, tricked his brother Osiris into entering a casket that fit him perfectly, after which he murdered him and dismembered his corpse. Set was also considered to have the power of manipulating other evil entities, but the crypt-keeper, E. set (Figure 1), does its namesake one better (or one worse).

The crypt-keeper is a hyperparasite—that is, a parasite whose host is also itself a parasite—which begins its work of hypermanipulation, or manipulation of another manipulative parasite, by laying its eggs in the miniature chambers that are carved into oak trees by a different parasitic wasp, the gall. After hatching, the crypt-keeper larva penetrates the gall wasp, subverting its mind and forcing it to begin boring a hole through the tree to its surface. It is here that the crypt-keeper outdoes its namesake, for while Set fashioned a crypt that fit Osiris perfectly, the crypt-keeper manipulates the gall wasp to bore a hole that is too small for it to pass through. With the gall wasp now, gallingly, stuck in its crypt, the crypt-keeper eats its host from the inside and bursts through the gall wasp’s head, making its escape into the world. This hyperparasitism, or oscillation of parasite and host, marks a rather extraordinary literalization of the “double antithetical” (220) relation of host and guest, of host and parasite, that Miller displays in “The Critic as Host.”

My analogy of the zombie-making parasite may not exactly hold for humans with regard to the biochemical mechanisms by which these parasites program their hosts and the role zombie-hosts play in propagating the parasite species. However, anthropogenic global climate change will strongly affect the survival and distribution of different species; moreover, as the example of the crypt in the tree shows, these parasites manipulate minds to also manipulate environments. My analogy does then hold in the very real sense that it is as if we have become that zombie-host captured by the parasitic chemical process of catastrophic climate change that we ourselves have induced and perpetuated. How much of the fate of the zombie-host we suffer depends on how much we are able to release ourselves from the ruinous parasite-zombie-host process we have unleashed.

The effects of climate change on vast host-parasite populations confer an ecologically urgent reception on the intertextual host-parasite theme in “The Critic as Host” and Michael K at this critical moment. Towards the end of his essay, Miller remarks, “The momentary always tends to generate a narrative, even if it is the narrative of the impossibility of narrative, the impossibility of getting from here to there by means of language. The tension between dialectic and undecidability is another way in which this form of criticism remains open, in the ceaseless movement of an “in place of” without resting place” (250). Miller is referring to the ceaseless work of rhetorical analysis and interpretation without closure, but this passage is shadowed now by the threat of different and darkly ominous interpretation brought on by the Anthropocene. Carried to its utmost, the narrative of our “momentary”—the narrative, that is, of cascading climate crisis—does indeed portend “the impossibility of narrative, the impossibility of getting from here to there by means of language” since at its implacable worst the Anthropocene threatens our future archive and language itself. However, Miller also tells us: “By ‘linguistic moment’ I mean the moment in a work of literature when its own medium is put in question. This moment allows the critic to take what remains from the clashing of scepticism and idealism as a new starting place, for example by the recognition of a performative function of language which has entered into my discussion of Shelley” (250). If part of the function of Shelley’s performative language is a backwards projection of “proleptic hope which is forbidden by the words which express it” (241), what of the forward “proleptic hope” offered by Coetzee’s novel of keeping gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening in the age of the Anthropocene?

Coetzee is certainly one of those writers who puts the medium of his own novels in formal, linguistic, and philosophical question, but the Anthropocene also puts the medium of Michael K into question in a further sense. The irony of reading Coetzee’s novel in the age of the Anthropocene is that the Anthropocene now bestows on it an urgent ethical and political responsibility, and thereby also confers a “proleptic hope” on the novel. But the possibility of this “proleptic hope” being actualized also lies, so to speak, in the hands of the Anthropocene itself—that is, in what is left of our capacity to intervene in what we have activated or brought about. To what degree this moment “allows the critic to take what remains of a clashing skepticism and idealism as a new starting place” will depend on the sheer extent of our climate catastrophe and our powers of interruption. Indeed, there is already a clashing of skepticism and idealism as to how much this still lies in human hands. The paradox of the Anthropocene is that it is induced by humans but takes on a machinal momentum that carries it beyond the human. In this, it is very much like one of the forces that programs the future reception of a text. Perhaps, however, there still remains the chance of this crucial difference. For all its drive to power over its future reception, a text also remains necessarily unpredictable and radically open to the future that awaits and conditions it, and also contains within it a resistance to that drive. Reading both texts and their interrelation at this critical juncture brings us face to face with a question to which we do not know the answer: What chance will “The Critic as Host” and Michael K yet have to host their future critics?