Hell Hath No Fury

 

Just 20% of people believe in hell. Still, early Christian ideas about the underworld — and who is punished there — echo in society today, religious studies scholar Meghan Henning writes in her new book, Hell Hath No Fury.
 
“What’s important about hell is that it does not just describe punishment, it decides and prescribes who is culpable,” Henning said. “When we look at Christian texts about the afterlife, hell is not an equal opportunity punisher. Women are often tortured for crimes like adultery while their male counterparts are noticeably absent.”
 
Henning’s findings, in what is described as the first major book to examine ancient Christian literature on hell through the lenses of gender and disability studies, draw from relatively obscure texts that offered “tours of hell.” Popular among early Christians for their specific depictions of how people would be punished for sins — details lacking in the New Testament. In these texts, a saint or apostle, even the Virgin Mary, is guided through hell by someone who explains the sins and tortures they see.
 
“The punishments are meant to ‘fit the crimes,’” said Henning, associate professor of Christian origins. “Slanderers, for example, chew their tongues. Yet, we find clear double standards. In his most famous sermon, Jesus preached that men should avoid hell by plucking out their eyes rather than looking lustfully upon a woman. So it’s pretty remarkable that later Christian hells see chastity as the purview of women and women alone.”
 
Henning said that while the tortures in these tours of hell are imaginary, the depictions had a real impact by reinforcing the idea that people in authority have the right to make rules and decisions about women’s bodies.
 
“This is one of the first places that we see women’s bodies become communal and public property,” Henning said. “That legacy is still felt in modern society and decision making. Even a cursory glance at school dress codes remind us that we are not so far removed from a world in which women’s bodies are hypersexualized and policed. So while we might want to congratulate ourselves on how far we have come from these scenes of fiery torture that disproportionally affect women, the gendered stereotypes are not as remote as we might imagine.”
 
Hell Hath No Fury: New book examines early Christian ideas of afterlife. University of Dayton News, September  27, 2021.

 Yale University Press

In the opening of Netflix’s popular new show “My Unorthodox Life,” fashion mogul Julia Haart explains that she grew up thinking that dressing provocatively had eternal consequences:
 
“It was your mother’s responsibility to teach you modesty. … If any of your body parts were uncovered, there’s a very special form of hell that is reserved for both you and your mother. In this hell, your mother would dip your clothes in acid, put them on your body, and so throughout the day your body would decompose from the acid. And then the next morning it would start all over again, for thousands of years, or however many years hell lasts. When you learn this as a child, and everyone around you believes it, you believe it.”
 
Haart grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community she describes as “fundamentalist,” though critics have questioned how the show portrays it. In both Christianity and Judaism, views on the afterlife are diverse – and most Jews in the U.S. today put less emphasis on what happens after death than what happens now.
 
As a scholar of early Christianity whose work focuses on depictions of hell, I see this education as rooted in two millennia of ideas about gender, bodies, sin and punishment that influence our society today – particularly for women.
 
Some ancient Jewish and Christian depictions of the afterlife provide graphic depictions of sinners and their punishments. Many of these punishments are seen as “fitting” for the sin committed: They follow the ancient legal standard of “measure for measure” punishment, known as lex talionis.
 
Punishments for women, like the one that Haart describes, follow the norms of the ancient and medieval cultures that first created them, including drastically different expectations for men and women. In these texts, the “immoral” clothes that brought women to hell become the instruments of their own torment – threatening images used to keep them in their place.
 
‘Fitting’ the crime
 
Clothing is only the beginning. Women in hell hang by their breasts in several medieval Jewish texts known as the Isaiah fragments because they uncovered their hair, tore their veil or nursed their children in the marketplace “in order to attract the gaze of men.” In the Gedulat Moshe, a Jewish text written sometime around the 13th century that describes Moses visiting hell, he sees women who uncovered themselves hanged by their breasts and their hair.
 
These frightening visions were drawn from attitudes toward real women and were used to control them, as well. In a third-century rabbinic legal text, the Mishnah Sotah, a woman who has committed adultery is sentenced to have her breasts and hair uncovered. The public humiliation is considered “fitting,” because her body led to her sin.
 
But this idea of justice or retribution did not originate with the rabbis and is certainly not exclusive to Judaism. The punishments in these Jewish texts closely mirror the second-century Apocalypse of Peter, a Christian text that describes women hanging by their hair and neck because their intricate hairstyles seduced married men.
 
It is difficult to say whether it was Jews or Christians who first brought these gendered ideas about the body into their images of hell. But the earlier Christian visions of hell certainly elaborate on them more than medieval Jewish ones do. For example, only young women were punished for being unchaste in early Christian depictions of hell – even those like the Apocalypse of Paul, in which male and female sinners were punished equally for other sins.
 
In the earliest Christian descriptions of hell, women and men were both held accountable for parenting-related sins, such as abortion or abandoning an infant. After a few centuries, however, women alone were held responsible for having children and nurturing them. In one medieval account of hell, the Latin Vision of Ezra, women were not only responsible for parenting their own children but punished for failing to nurse orphaned infants. Their punishment? Hanging in fire while serpents suck their breasts.
 
These sins and punishments reflect several different but interwoven ancient ideas about the body: that women’s hair was a sexual organ, that female grooming is tied to adultery, that women’s main role is child rearing and that their bodies should not be seen in public.
 
Double standards today
 
Although these ideas were not included in the Jewish or Christian Bible, societies often used them to define religious crimes and control their bodies.
 
It is easy to look at these ancient hellscapes and dismiss them as long-ago. But ideas about women’s bodies being problematic and in need of control persist, with or without religion. And in “My Unorthodox Life,” Haart invites the audience to look at gender double standards in the fashion world up close.

 
Haart, who has left her Orthodox community, calls herself “very proud to be a Jew” and determined “to show people that there are all sorts of Jews.” Now CEO of Elite World Group, the parent company of a major modeling agency, she draws viewers’ attention to the industry’s sexual abuse, unequal standards for men and women, and its tendency to cater to male desire. She describes her mission as “cleaning up” modeling and “rooting out” its sexual abuse – a vow a former supermodel has recently called on her to uphold.
 
Though “My Unorthodox Life” has been mocked for its soap opera style, I believe it carries a serious message: Ideas about objectifying and controlling women’s bodies shape our society more than we’d like to admit – with or without religion.
 
How threats of hellfire helped keep ‘immodest’ women in their place – from the ancient world to ‘My Unorthodox Life’. By Meghan Henning. The Conversation, September 8, 2021. 

On Wednesday, a Texas law banning most abortions once cardiac activity can be detected in the embryo (in most cases at six weeks) went into effect. The law is highly controversial and means that Texas now joins Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Ohio as one of a growing number of states with “heartbeat” laws. Texas is the only state, however, whose legislation has not been delayed by legal challenges. Part of the reason for this is that the new legislation bars state officials from enforcing it. Instead, it deputizes private citizens who can sue anyone who performs or “aids and abets” the performance of a termination. Uninterested civilians can win legal costs plus up to $10,000 if they win. The legislation has elicited strong reactions from those who support abortions rights and a women’s right to choose.
 
There are, additionally, legal observers concerned about the unusual manner in which abortion will be targeted. Texas Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, has set up a “whistleblower” website where people can submit tips about those they believe have violated the legislation. A spokesperson for Texas Right to life told NPR that “These lawsuits are not against the women…[they]would be against the individuals making money off of the abortion, the abortion industry itself.” While many would contest whether or not the legislation is about women, it is striking that accountability is being assigned to third parties: doctors, nurses, volunteers, and even Uber drivers.
 
This is not the first time in history that culpability for abortion has shifted. Around the turn of the Common Era the Roman Emperor Augustus introduced moral legislation designed, among other things, to encourage marriage and childbearing among Roman elites. The legislation required citizens to marry and prohibited cross-class marriage. The descendants of senators were prohibited from marrying freedwomen (formerly enslaved women), dancers, actors, gladiators or sex workers. Those who were married were provided with incentives to procreate (exemptions from certain arduous duties) and adultery now became a public crime punishable by exile and fines. While none of this legislation targeted abortion or infant exposure, it created a context in which what we might call household or familial crimes could be legislated by the state. Moreover, these laws disproportionately affected women. An elite woman who had sex with anyone other than her husband could be punished for adultery.
 
An elite man was only guilty of adultery if he had sex with an elite woman to whom he wasn’t married; sex workers, enslaved and formerly enslaved people did not leave them open to this charge. Abortion was something of a non-issue. It only became problematic, medical historian Rebecca Flemming has written, when a woman used it “to obstruct a man’s acquisition of legitimate heirs.” In the same way, responsibility for procreation was women’s work. The first divorce, Dionysius of Halicarnassus notes, was performed on the grounds of infertility. If a couple could not get pregnant it was assumed to be the woman’s fault. When the Roman writer Juvenal speaks of “foul pools” where women went to acquire exposed babies to pass off as their husbands’, he may be offering us a glimpse of the desperate situation that faced women who could not get pregnant. In the first two centuries of the Common Era, Christianity followed suit. The earliest statements about abortion appear in the second century in a suite of texts about ethics and Christian lifestyle.
 
The Epistle of Barnabas 19.5 prohibits its audience from procuring an abortion or destroying a child after its birth (through infanticide or, potentially, infant exposure) but the addressees of the statement are everyone. Another second century text, the Didache, includes abortion in a genderless list similar to the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt do no murder; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not commit sodomy; thou shalt not commit fornication; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not use magic; thou shalt not use love potions; thou shalt not procure abortion, nor commit infanticide; thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods.” Once again, the list does not specify any one person as responsible for these sins. In her just published book Hell Hath No Fury (full disclosure, I endorsed this book), Dr. Meghan Henning charts the ways that culpability for sins shifted and changed course in the first millennium. The earliest descriptions of Christians being punished for household crimes, Henning shows, depicts both parents being punished for infant exposure. In the Apocalypse of Paul, she told me, both men and women are punished for procuring abortions. In the late second-century Apocalypse of Peter, however, only women are condemned for seeking terminations. The women whose children had been aborted are described as seated in a place of excrement and filth where a lake of putrid matter had filled and covered them up to their necks. Here, Henning says, we see the beginning of the gendering of household crimes as female. The distinction stuck. Over the next few centuries, the notion that women were exclusively responsible for adultery and abortion was further cemented in a variety of ancient sin catalogues and apocalypses. Henning told me that women’s responsibilities were even expanded such that they could be responsible for broader “childrearing” crimes.
 
Then medieval Latin Vision of Ezra not only condemns those who killed their children but also those who “did not give their breasts to orphans.” This radically reshapes the moral obligations of women to include caring for parentless children. Given that most ancient wet nurses were enslaved this text adds a layer of religious violence to the injustice already inflicted upon them those who had been trafficked. Now the exploitation and violation of women’s bodies was refashioned as a kind of moral duty. All women were obligated to allow their bodies to be used in this way, regardless of their lack of choice, autonomy, or health. The recent legislation in Texas aims to target abortion providers. It thus expands culpability for abortion to include medical doctors and anyone else involved in providing terminations. In religious contexts this has happened before. In 2009 a Brazilian doctor was excommunicated for performing an abortion on a 9-year-old rape victim who was pregnant with twins. The girl’s mother and the medical team were also excommunicated. It is worth noting that the child herself was not. Given the religious and legal history governing the family, we might wonder why fathers are no longer a part of the religious or legal conversation. One imagines that a biological father might be liable to prosecution if he drove his partner to an abortion clinic but, otherwise, they are in the clear. Henning told me that our culture “continues to place the lion’s share of responsibility for procreation and parenthood on women.” This is one of the few places in society that men are invisible. “Ironically,” said Henning “the ancient Christian documents that hold everyone responsible for abortion also held the whole Christian community responsible for all imaginable for sin.” The biggest targets are the wealthy, who face damnation if they don’t share their resources.
 
A return to Christian morality, said Henning, implicates everyone: “Selectively reanimating ancient teachings about abortion in order to condemn women, is not a return to authentic Christian ethics, it is a misrepresentation of ancient teachings about collective responsibility and the common good.”
 
**This was first published in the Daily Beast on September 6th.
 
This is not the first time in history that culpability for abortion has shifted. By Candida Moss, University of Birmingham, September 2021.

Why are we obsessed with the reimagining of hell? And what influences our notions of the landscapes, geography, and bodies within the fiery inferno? A new book takes readers to the origins of hell and back.

 This year numerous reflections on the work of Dante Alighieri have marked the 700th anniversary of the author’s death, on September 14, 1321. Hell was already a hot topic within the zeitgeist. From shows like The Good Place and Lucifer to Kanye West’s new track “Heaven and Hell” and Lil Nas X’s “Montero,” popular media is just as fixated on hellscapes as Dante’s 14th-century audiences. But where did the visual and visceral design of hell that is embedded in the Western imagination even come from?
 
Its origins are the focus of a new work by religion scholar Meghan Henning. The book, Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature, dissects the genesis of the early Christian idea of hell within the period of the late Roman Empire and then traces its impact over centuries to arrive at how we visualize it today. 
 
It is not as if the underworld were a novel invention of Christianity. Ancient Near Eastern cultures developed ideas of heroic trips to the underworld glimpsed at in the Epic of Gilgamesh. In Book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey, the bard describes Odysseus’s descent into the underworld. And descriptions of the underworld were not just available via oral poetry. Ancient visualizations are mentioned in the form of a mid-5th-century BCE painter named Polygnotus. The artist took it upon himself to mix variant mythical traditions of the space in his commission to envision Hades on the wall of a building at the sacred Greek site of Delphi in a work called the “Nekyia.” Virgil — who later served as the guide to Dante — famously has Aeneas travel to the underworld in Book 6 of the Aeneid. Mythic journeys by Orpheus, Heracles, and others to the underworld were a favorite motif among Greek and Etruscan ceramicists and later could be found in Roman mosaics.
 
 Henning is our Virgil on this tour to discover how hell went from the Greek underworld to a space for punishment pursuant to the Christian notion of sin. As she directs us to, we must inspect early Christian writings in order to trace intellectual and religious models for the Inferno, many of which would go on to influence perceptions today. “The Apocalypse of Paul,” a Greek text written for a Christian audience between 388 to 416 CE, is noted by Dante. Later translated into Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian, and Slavonic, it was a source of inspiration for many of the basic components later incorporated into the Divine Comedy. It is a part of a genre of literary apocalypses, like the “Book of Daniel” or the “Book of Revelation”. Apocalyptic literature was popular within earlier Jewish writing as well. In the short work, the apostle Paul is a tourist led by a young angel through the levels of heaven. The particular sinners and their punishments distributed throughout the variant levels are explained in didactic detail to the apostle — to chilling effect for the reader. 
 
Apocalypses like that of Paul and of another called the “Apocalypse of Peter” were often read aloud in early Christian churches within the late Roman Empire, as on Good Friday. While these texts were outside the biblical canon, they were still read and spoken about, in large part because they addressed a gaping void within the New Testament. They created a literary and didactic hellscape not provided by the likes of Matthew, Luke, or any of the other writings in the gospels. In filling in these lacunae, Henning notes, it is possible to see how these apocalypses were influenced by and sometimes justified legal punishments used in the Roman Mediterranean. Laws such as the Roman lex talionis — a law of retribution akin to an eye-for-an-eye —or punishments such as being punished by being thrown “ad bestias” (toward the beasts) in the amphitheater. Early Christians existed within a particular Roman socio-legal structure of slavery, misogyny, and retributive justice they often projected or mapped onto their notions of treatment in the afterlife.

 
The most potent parts of Hell Hath No Fury address ancient prejudices tied to the body and to gender. Henning points to how imagined bodies within hell connect directly to perceptions of real bodies in the present world — and their marginalization. Roman law and society were often cruel to non-normative bodies. The historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus notes that from Rome’s founding by Romulus in 753 BCE, all priests were required to be “without any bodily defects,” and other Roman authors noted the Vestal virgins similarly had to be physically pristine, in particular they could not have a speech impediment, be hearing impaired, or unable to speak. Those with mental health issues, called furiosi, and many other disabled persons in antiquity had limited legal redress and were often assigned legal guardians. The origins of the conservatorship imposed on Britney Spears, for instance, goes back to the misogyny and ableism of Roman law.
 
In early Christian visions of hell, the binary of righteous versus unrighteous persons is demonstrated through treatment of the body. Corporal treatment also reveals cultural constructions of masculinity and the ways in which bodies were policed in the Roman Mediterranean. It is from this cultural context that early Christian communities emerged: 
 
“The punishments themselves rely upon ancient notions of bodily difference in order to negatively mark the bodies of the unrighteous. The bodies of the damned are blind, mute, bloody, lacerated, or spewing forth worms …. In the tours of hell, I argue, the damned inhabit disabled, female, imprisoned bodies for all of eternity. Using bodily normativity as a way to depict eternal torment relies upon familiar imagery of the body to depict the afterlife.”
 
Scholars of early Christian martyrdom texts and saintly hagiographies have long seen the body as a central site for crafting identity. In early Christian visions of hell, the body is again the location for revealing the ostensibly “true” nature of an individual — but in the process lays bare the systems of slavery, patriarchy, and ableism that provided the scaffolding for early Christian doctrine.

 
Hell Hath No Fury provides fundamental clues as to why it seems that we cannot escape reincarnations of hell in either Dante or on Netflix. “We have a propensity to make hell on earth,” Henning notes. “Imaginary spaces and otherworldly beings are precisely what gives apocalyptic literature the ability to critique and transform real social spaces and figures in the contemporary world.” Early Christian descriptors of hell have cast a long shadow from antiquity to today. Henning retraces how the shades of this oft-overlooked literature pervade our contemporary notion of the afterlife. She also underscores how it has permeated our sensibilities surrounding notions of retribution and justice.
 
Scholars of the early 20th century largely ignored early Christian apocalyptic literature, writing it off as banal pop culture from the ancient world. Generations from now, scholars may want to reflect on this sidelining of apocalyptic texts when contextualizing the backlash surrounding Lil Nas X’s Montero album or seeking to explain people binge watching American Horror Story in the midst of a global pandemic. The present tension between the traditional, early Christian vision of hell and the inversion of this deeply flawed model in recent popular media is a product of a polarized society. But this questioning of the historical casting of “deviant bodies” within constructions of hell is an important way to interrogate how and why we continue to marginalize non-normative bodies today. Studies of hellscapes can be a valuable tool for recognizing and critiquing the inequity, ableism, and misogyny of the past and the present.
 
While only 56% of Americans now believe in hell, it remains a threat still invoked by preachers and adherents to Christianity. Recently there has been an uptick in those fundamentalists who believe even small sins deserve eternal damnation and who invoke early Christian hellscapes as a way of justifying and legitimizing their homophobia or attitudes towards premarital sex. This struggle over conceptions of hell unveils what studies of early Christian apocalyptic literature have long demonstrated: Our imagined hellscapes say more about the biases of the culture that constructs them than the actuality of an eternal inferno.
 
Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature by Meghan Henning is published by Yale University Press and is available via Bookshop.
 
Why the Hell We Are Obsessed with Hell. By Sarah E. Bond. Hyperallergic, October 6, 2021.

 

Professor Meghan Henning has found her niche studying stories about the one place no one wants

 

Across the pop culture landscape, eternal perdition is having a moment. Hadestown raked in eight Tony Awards including best musical, and The Good Place is NBC’s highest-rated comedy series. Meanwhile, over on Netflix, Lucifer is solving crime while running a nightclub in Los Angeles that looks pretty spectacular, if salacious opulence is your thing. Hell is hot right now.

 Honestly, it has never really cooled off. Satan, hell and the temptations that doom the damned are baked into our collective cultural consciousness through centuries of story, song and image. Meghan Henning, an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton, sometimes asks her students for their versions of what hell might look like in today’s contemporary world. “One of the students depicted hell as never being able to log off their phone and always seeing their friends doing things without them but never being able to message or communicate with them,” she said. “I thought it was really interesting, especially on a campus that emphasizes community and connection to one another.” Henning teaches her students — and us — that the details of our stories about hell have changed over the centuries, reflecting evolving anxieties and fears. Our explanations for how a soul gets condemned to hell are even more important, she said. Each what-not-to-do catalog is a rhetorical mirror that reflects how we think about what it means to live a moral life and how the meaning of morality has changed through time. Hell, in other words, teaches us what it means to be good.

  We tell and retell stories about hell and damnation a lot. Take, for example, how we speak to our desires with stories about the trade in souls. In a wellknown 1936 Stephen Vincent Benét story, attorney Daniel Webster fights the devil in a court battle on behalf of a New Hampshire farmer who sold his soul in exchange for seven years of good crop yields. In a Benétparodying 1993 episode of The Simpsons, Homer sues to undo a deal in which he swapped his soul for a doughnut. According to legend, Satan got Robert Johnson’s soul at a Mississippi crossroads in exchange for music talent, but the bargaining didn’t go as well when the devil went down to Georgia looking for a soul to steal, or so says the Charlie Daniels Band in its 1979 No. 1 country hit.

 Satan’s offers are always alluring. He cuts a charmingly roguish figure and has for centuries. Only the best-looking actors play him and his minions. He’s by far the most interesting figure in John Milton’s epic 17th-century poem Paradise Lost, giving us delicious lines that read freshly today, like “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” This is a guy who’s fun to hang around with.

 Milton declares at the outset of Paradise Lost that he is writing about Satan and hell to “justify the ways of God to men.” This is the kind of statement of intent that deeply interests UD’s Henning, who studies what people, particularly early Christians, are trying to accomplish when they talk about hell. She loves talking about hell. She once told a podcast host that she could talk about hell all day.

 Henning is the author of a study of early Christian writings about hell. When people find out what she does, the first question they usually ask her is whether she thinks hell exists.

 Catholic theology is clear that it does. “The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity,” reads the English version of the catechism available on the Vatican’s website. “Immediately after death, the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, ‘eternal fire.’ The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God.”

 Recently, the Vatican’s communication’s office was forced to respond to comments attributed to Pope Francis last year by Eugenio Scalfari, the atheist founder of the Italian newspaper la Repubblica. He reported that the Pope told him that those who die in a state of mortal sin “are not punished. Those who repent obtain God’s forgiveness and take their place among the ranks of those who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot be forgiven disappear. A hell doesn’t exist; the disappearance of sinning souls exists.” The Vatican described the quote as an inaccurate transcription of the Holy Father’s comments, and Vox noted that Scalfari boasts he neither records nor takes notes during interviews, instead reconstructing conversations from memory, when it reported on the incident.

 Henning, however, is a religious studies professor at a Catholic university rather than a Catholic theologian. Whether hell exists is not a question that concerns her in her academic work. To understand the questions she asks about hell, it helps to understand how she got interested in hell in the first place.

 Henning grew up as part of what she calls “an active faith community” in Ohio. When she was in high school, her grandfather developed terminal lung cancer, and her grandmother did “what all Italian grandmothers would do in this situation, which is make lots of food and not sleep,” she said.

 The not-sleeping caught up with her when she made a 4 a.m. grocery run, nodded off at the wheel on the way home and ran into a telephone pole. She lost a leg and was still in a coma when Henning’s grandfather died.

 Friends reached out to the family, but even as a teenager, Henning sensed that words offered to comfort sometimes had the opposite effect.

 “People would say to my mom things like, ‘Well, you know, when my mother was sick and in the hospital, I prayed for her and she got better, so maybe we just need to pray harder for your mom,’” she said. “These people were trying to help. They didn’t really think about the fact that they were implying to my family that what was happening to us was because we were not praying hard enough or we were not faithful enough.”

 For Henning, that was the beginning of thinking about how people can read the same religious texts yet understand radically different things. The hell piece entered later, in graduate school when her mind wandered in class one day and her eyes fell on a footnote. It said, in so many words, that parts of the New Testament that dealt with hell didn’t have much to do with the testament’s overarching theological message of grace, an interpretation that struck her as a bit too modern.

 “So that little daydream that I had in that seminar really got me down the path of thinking about, ‘OK, well, if I’m thinking about this from an ancient perspective, what would an ancient reader who hears this text that describes hell imagine?’’

 That question led to a dissertation at Emory University that became a book, Educating Early Christians Through the Rhetoric of Hell. As the title implies, her research doesn’t contemplate hell as a place but as a tool. For her, hell is a rhetorical hammer, and she wants to know what nail it’s hitting and why. To answer those questions, she reconstructed how early Christians would have understood their own writings.

 To understand hell like an early Christian reader, you have to forget everything you know about it as a modern one. There’s never been a Dante with his nine intricately catalogued circles of hell, never been a sermon like Jonathan Edward’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” detailing the horrifying anguish that awaits unconverted souls. In the cultural landscape occupied by early Christians, hell is a place more like Bourbon Street in New Orleans in the dying hours of Mardi Gras — a menacing yet curiosityarousing place to visit, but not anywhere you’d want to stay. The people you come across are worn-out and have nowhere else to go, and some of them are paying dearly for their earlier choices. If you can get away unscathed, you’ll have stories to tell.

 Early Christians got this idea from the culture around them, which was Roman with a heavy dose of nostalgia for ancient Greece. Stories about heroes descending into Hades were as normal as will-they-or-won’t-they plotlines in today’s romantic comedies. The ancient archetype we know today occurs in Homer’s The Odyssey, the Bronze Age epic that tells the story of Odysseus’ 10-year struggle to get home after the Trojan War.

 The Hades that Homer describes would have been more recognizable to early Christians than many of our modern conceptions of hell. When Odysseus gets to the land of the dead, he sees all kinds of people, including many well-known ones. There’s his mother, Anticleia, and an unburied former crew member named Elpenorn. The blind prophet Tiresias drops by to give advice. Warriors’ wives and daughters stop to chat, as do Achilles, Agamemnon and the mother of Oedipus, Epicaste. Odysseus also spots Tantalus being tortured by thirst as he stands in a pool of unreachable water, Sisyphus heedlessly pushing his rock uphill, and others enduring eternal torment for various offenses against the gods.
 
The elements of Homer’s telling — the descent, the encounters with wellknown characters, the suffering — were familiar structures for early Christians, according to Henning.
 
“The myth of the descent into Hades was popular and widely referenced,” she said. “When an ancient person would hear someone say, ‘You know, I went on this journey to the underworld,’ or ‘I went on a trip to Hades,’ the idea of such a thing would be familiar enough that, instead of asking ‘Really? Is that a real place?’ or ‘What was there?’ the person would ask instead, ‘Well, who did you see?’”
 
One reason for the saturation of these stories in the culture of antiquity is that they were widely used to help teach morality. What one saw and who one met in an underworld had “an ethical orientation, aimed at providing instructions for how people ought to conduct themselves in their mortal lives,” Henning writes in her book.
 
Afterlife stories about punishment, in particular, were commonly used to teach students about the rhetorical concept of ekphrasis, or the use of visual imagery conveyed with words to move an audience, so students throughout antiquity were familiar with the form. In Plato’s Republic, the visual descriptions of suffering underscore the importance of living a life of moderation. Roman satirist Lucian flips social hierarchy in his underworld, with kings and governors “either selling salt fish on account of their neediness or teaching the alphabet, and getting abused and hit over the head by all comers,” Henning notes in a footnote.
 
That highly visual language — “selling salt fish,” “getting abused and hit over the head” — creates vivid descriptions with a moral purpose: to warn to the rich and powerful about how they ought to be living their lives. Plutarch, in another of Henning’s examples, details the colors of the wounds of those suffering in the afterlife and attributes them to particular sins. “Drab brown … comes of meanness and greed,” for example, “while if spite and envy are present, they give out this livid green.”

 
Homer. Plato. Lucian. Plutarch. These storytellers have a sort of “All Along the Watchtower” effect going on. The original version of the song comes from Bob Dylan, but then Jimi Hendrix took it and made it his own. Decades later, U2 gave it a shot on their album Rattle and Hum, and plenty more have continued reworking it. Likewise, when the early Christians write about hell, they’re riffing on something already out there, not coming up with something completely new.
 
These examples from Homer and the rest offer a sense of the rhetorical practices in which early Christians are participating when they write their gospels, epistles and other texts. Homer is Dylan, Plato is Hendrix and, as the New Testament writers dip their reeds in ink, they are U2’s lead singer Bono clearing his throat. They’ve got a structure for how to think about the afterlife and what awaits the damned. Now’s their turn to rock the hell story in a way that explains how they believe Jesus has called them to live.
 
Though Henning offers examples from throughout the New Testament of how they do this, she devotes an entire chapter of her book to Matthew’s Gospel. It is rife with imagery of punishments — eternal fire, weeping and gnashing of teeth, outer darkness and more — that illustrate what awaits those who do not follow the path to righteousness laid out by Jesus.
 
“In Matthew, the vivid depictions of ‘hell’ functioned in much the same way that it did for the Greek readers of The Odyssey, as a tool for broad ethical and cultural education,” Henning writes.
 
On the flip side, the virtues on which Matthew focuses prove to be exceptionally influential on early Christians, particularly his account of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, which begins “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” commands love of one’s enemy, warns against piety and wealth-seeking, and gives us the “Do unto others” golden rule.
 
As more early Christians wrote new texts, including the epistles of the New Testament and works such as the Apocalypse of Peter and the Latin Vision of Ezra, they picked up on and elaborated Matthew’s themes. They used the “tried and true [hell] rhetoric of empire” to present “their own distinctive values,” Henning writes, often describing “the punishment of those who do not care for ‘the other’” and using new hell stories to “[draw] upon the Sermon of the Mount as an ethical core that could bring cohesion to early Christian communities.” This theme emerged at a critical time for early Christians, when they were still in the early stages of identity formation and deciding which texts and messages would be their exemplars.

 Two thousand or so years later, we’re still talking about hell. But Henning will tell you we’re creating hell stories not only in different ways today, but for different reasons.

 “Unfortunately, what I think has happened is that we’ve picked up on the rhetoric — which is really kind of a trick from the Greco-Roman world — and we have not brought with it any of the ethical content,” she said. “The real focus of hell in the New Testament and early Christian texts is really on care for the other and love of the neighbor. But when we depict hell in modern media, we’ve actually pivoted away from that and have focused more on the rhetoric itself and the violent imagery.’’

 This turn away from using hell depictions to focus an audience on virtues is not just secular. Henning cites the example of so-called “hell houses,” a phenomenon of evangelical Christianity in America whose purpose is straight out of Jonathan Edward’s 1741 sermon to encourage religious conversion. These houses feature depictions of gruesome punishments linked to sins that “usu- ally include abortion, homosexuality, consumption of alcohol and recreational drugs, suicide, pre-marital sex, and other sins that are of primary concern to evangelical Christians.” In this catalog of transgressions, “the early Christian emphasis on the virtues presented in the Sermon on the Mount is all but lost.”

 Although Henning’s study of hell is driven by academic curiosity rather than the religious concerns of a theologian, she laments the loss of what she calls the “pedagogical savvy” of the early Christians as they created vivid hells in service of a broader message of concern with the marginalized in our world.

 Henning works to reclaim their teachings in The Road to Hell, a course she and communication professor Joseph Valenzano III designed and teach together.

 Henning said that when they start teaching hell, their students “want to quickly go to the entertainment value,” she said. This impulse reflects their experience with depictions of hell in popular culture, including ultra-violent ones such as the Saw horror movie franchise, which, she said, “uses the same kind of measure-for-measure punishment stuff that early Christian depictions of hell do, but intensifies it. … It’s even grosser than you could imagine.”

 When Henning assigns her students to analyze modern depictions of hell, they typically will train their critical lenses on comparatively less disturbing depictions of the afterlife, such as in Stranger Things or American Horror Story — even Harry Potter.

“The image when Harry dies for a short period of time and he’s in this void — students actually compare that to different ancient depictions of a kind of neutral afterlife, like Greek and Roman depictions of Hades that don’t have punishment or Hebrew Bible notions of Sheol,” she said.

 Henning really likes NBC’s The Good Place, which she describes as an especially nuanced exception to the violence that pervades contemporary hell depictions. In it, Eleanor Shellstrop (played by Kristen Bell) believes she is in heaven by mistake. But — spoiler alert — her crippling doubts are a form of psychological torture being inflicted on her in a ver- sion of hell constructed by a demon architect (played by Ted Danson) who is trying to freshen up the whole agony paradigm. The show creates a world in which these and other characters are forced to reflect on what is just, what is unjust and how justice should be restored. Somewhere, sometime soon, if it isn’t already happening, a graduate student ought to be typing up a dissertation on The Good Place as an embodiment of 21st-century American anxiety about unearned privilege.

 We don’t need to rely on hell stories for communicating about what it means to live virtuously, Henning points out.

 “I think that we have a lot more rhetorical tools at our disposal than ancient Chris Christians did,” she said. “I think the question is, ‘What are the best rhetorical tools in our world, and how can we maximally use them to do that good work in the world?’”

 Social media, for all its faults, offers a good example. Henning — who also has a strong interest in disability studies, which she attributes to seeing her grandmother cope with the loss of her leg after her car accident — has watched as disability activists use social media campaigns to create new ethical boundaries for how media companies serve customers who need, for example, closed captioning services. Activists no longer require hellinspired storytelling to get the public to pay attention or change its ways.

 Early Christians might easily recognize the rhetorical point we’re making in one specific way we talk about hell today. Type a Google search for recent news that includes the word “hell,” and you’ll turn up the usual stories about airline “travel hell” or “the neighbor from hell.” But sprinkled among the usual suspects will be stories that describe one circumstance or another as “hell on Earth.” It might be the fate of a community victimized by war, the last days of an abused child, a pocket of indescribably deep poverty in a distant country or nearby place, or some other dire, desperate situation.

 No matter the lamentable particulars, one shared element defines these stories as hellscapes: the undeserved torment of blameless innocents. Here, the usual hell story is turned inside-out. These are not hells where the wicked are being punished. These are hells that confront us with the moral urgency of caring for the most marginalized and vulnerable who suffer among us today. In these stories at least, hell still calls us to follow the early Christians’ message about how we ought to live.

 The Lesson from Hell. By Matthew Dewald.  University of Dayton Magazine, Autumn 2019. 

It’s that time of the year when hell is used as a common theme for entertainment and hell-themed haunted houses and horror movies pop up all over the country.
 
Although many of us now associate hell with Christianity, the idea of an afterlife existed much earlier. Greeks and Romans, for example, used the concept of Hades, an underworld where the dead lived, both as a way of understanding death and as a moral tool.
 
However, in the present times, the use of this rhetoric has radically changed.
 
Rhetoric in ancient Greece and Rome
 
The earliest Greek and Roman depictions of Hades in the epics did not focus on punishment, but described a dark shadowy place of dead people.
 
In Book 11 of the Greek epic the “Odyssey,” Odysseus travels to the realm of the dead, encountering countless familiar faces, including his own mother.
 
Near the end of Odysseus’ tour, he encounters a few souls being punished for their misdeeds, including Tantalus, who was sentenced eternally to have food and drink just out of reach. It is this punishment from which the word “tantalize” originated.
 
Hundreds of years later, the Roman poet Virgil, in his epic poem “Aeneid,” describes a similar journey of a Trojan, Aeneas, to an underworld, where many individuals receive rewards and punishments.
 
This ancient curriculum was used for teaching everything from politics to economics to virtue, to students across the Roman empire, for hundreds of years.
 
In later literature, these early traditions around punishment persuaded readers to behave ethically in life so that they could avoid punishment after death. For example, Plato describes the journey of a man named Er, who watches as souls ascend to a place of reward, and descend to a place of punishment. Lucian, an ancient second century A.D. satirist takes this one step further in depicting Hades as a place where the rich turned into donkeys and had to bear the burdens of the poor on their backs for 250 years.
 
For Lucian this comedic depiction of the rich in hell was a way to critique excess and economic inequality in his own world.
 
Early Christians
 
By the time the New Testament gospels were written in the first century A.D., Jews and early Christians were moving away from the idea that all of the dead go to the same place.
 
In the Gospel of Matthew, the story of Jesus is told with frequent mentions of “the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.” As I describe in my book, many of the images of judgment and punishment that Matthew uses represent the early development of a Christian notion of hell.
 
The Gospel of Luke does not discuss final judgment as frequently, but it does contain a memorable representation of hell. The Gospel describes Lazarus, a poor man who had lived his life hungry and covered with sores, at the gate of a rich man, who disregards his pleas. After death, however, the poor man is taken to heaven. Meanwhile, it is the turn of the rich man to be in agony as he suffers in the flames of hell and cries out for Lazarus to give him some water.
For the marginalized other
 
Matthew and Luke are not simply offering audiences a fright fest. Like Plato and later Lucian, these New Testament authors recognized that images of damnation would capture the attention of their audience and persuade them to behave according to the ethical norms of each gospel.
 
Later Christian reflections on hell picked up and expanded this emphasis. Examples can be seen in the later apocalypses of Peter and Paul – stories that use strange imagery to depict future times and otherworldly spaces. These apocalypses included punishments for those who did not prepare meals for others, care for the poor or care for the widows in their midst.
 
Although these stories about hell were not ultimately included in the Bible, they were extremely popular in the ancient church, and were used regularly in worship.
 
A major idea in Matthew was that love for one’s neighbor was central to following Jesus. Later depictions of hell built upon this emphasis, inspiring people to care for the “least of these” in their community.
 
Damnation then and now
 
In the contemporary world, the notion of hell is used to scare people into becoming Christians, with an emphasis on personal sins rather than a failure to care for the poor or hungry.
 
In the United States, as religion scholar Katherine Gin Lum has argued, the threat of hell was a powerful tool in the age of nation-building. In the early Republic, as she explains, “fear of the sovereign could be replaced by fear of God.”
 
As the ideology of republicanism developed, with its emphasis on individual rights and political choice, the way that the rhetoric of hell worked also shifted. Instead of motivating people to choose behaviors that promoted social cohesion, hell was used by evangelical preachers to get individuals to repent for their sins.
 
Even though people still read Matthew and Luke, it is this individualistic emphasis, I argue, that continues to inform our modern understanding of hell. It is evident in the hell-themed Halloween attractions with their focus on gore and personal shortcomings.
 
These depictions are unlikely to portray the consequences for people who have neglected to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, cloth the naked, care for the sick or visit those in prison.
 
The fears around hell, in the current times, play only on the ancient rhetoric of eternal punishment.
 
 
Why the Christian idea of hell no longer persuades people to care for the poor. By Meghan Henning. The Conversation, October 23, 2018.
 

JM Coetzee : The Jesus Trilogy, Growing Up with The Children's Encyclopedia, Photographs from Boyhood

Men and their desires. Do we really need more on the subject? It is ground that has been plowed so often, by Roth, Updike, and others who came of age during the sexual revolution and its aftermath. These writers practically exhausted the English language exploring every aspect of their desire: David Foster Wallace, back in 1997, famously described Updike as “a penis with a thesaurus.” Yet our understanding of male desire has changed since the heyday of the Great Male Narcissists, as Wallace called them. It is something more malevolent than we once thought and hence more mysterious, too—lying at the root of Harvey Weinstein’s crimes, to name a specific example, and of “toxic masculinity” more broadly. The pernicious influence of desire is now understood to be so widespread that Wallace himself has entered the pantheon of Great Male Narcissists.

Since the publication in 1999 of his novel Disgrace, desire has been an abiding preoccupation of the South African Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee. Disgrace combines Coetzee’s earlier focus on apartheid, often filtered through the lens of dystopian allegory, with the story of a middle-aged professor in Cape Town who is shunned for preying on one of his students. The novels that followed increasingly revolved around a recurring figure: a reserved, pedantic man who is also full of hidden passion; a philosopher enslaved by his emotions. Sometimes the figure is purely fictional: The main character in Slow Man (2006) is an amputee who develops an “unsuitable passion” for his physical therapist, a married mother of three. Other times the figure is based on Coetzee himself: Youth (2002), the second in Coetzee’s trilogy of autobiographical novels, features a young Coetzee in search of the muse who will unleash the torrent of feelings dammed up within him; Summertime (2009), the third in the trilogy, is partly told from the fictionalized perspectives of the former objects of Coetzee’s desire, who return his affections by describing him as a “cold fish,” a “eunuch,” a “célibataire.”

Now in his late career, the 80-year-old Coetzee has completed another trilogy: The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), and the newly released The Death of Jesus. These elliptical, ruminative novels follow the adventures, such as they are, of a boy named David and his middle-aged caretaker, Simón, “a placid man, placid to a fault,” whose soul nevertheless secretly “aches with longing for it knows not what.” Over the course of three books, Simón mulls the great existential questions—about life and death, truth and fiction, right and wrong—but it is desire that is his intellectual lodestone, the riddle that might explain his restlessness, his unhappiness, his condition.

It might also offer him redemption. As the titles of these books suggest, Coetzee is working within a more spiritual dimension, concerned less with temporal matters than the judgment we might levy on our lives. In Coetzee’s moral matrix, desire is of a piece with our fallen nature, equal parts good and evil. It is the source from which so many of our instincts spring: to have and to hold; to love and to cherish; to wound, to dominate, to destroy.

The world in which the Jesus trilogy is set is a hazy, dreamlike version of our own. Its inhabitants arrive there by boat, across a sea that washes the past clean. The borders of this foreign country are unclear, its landscape arid. There are cities, but they feel etiolated, empty. There is a language (Spanish), but no overarching culture. There is a bureaucracy, too—fresh off the boat, David and Simón register with a relocation center in the city of Novilla—but where its authority comes from is a mystery. David and Simón have no memories of life before the crossing. The boy, who is only five, has lost his mother, about whom he recalls nothing. Simón has agreed to help him find her.

Is this the afterlife? A parallel universe? The future? The precise nature of this world is ambiguous, as is the identity of the two main characters. They are refugees of a kind, having left behind, as all emigrants do, the people they were in the old country. They also resemble survivors of some obliterating trauma, among the chosen few who have made the arduous journey to the promised land. Or they might be reincarnated souls, nagged by the feeling, as tantalizing as a phantom itch, that they were someone else in a previous life.

Though Novilla is a bleak and barren place, it is not inhospitable to these new arrivals. They find lodging in an apartment complex called the Blocks. Simón quickly finds work as a stevedore, hauling sacks of grain. The food is cheap and plentiful, even if it is bland, monotonous, mostly bread. The people are helpful and kind, even if they are a bit dull, a bit bloodless. No one goes hungry, no one lacks for shelter, no refugee is ever rejected, but something is missing, a certain spark. Is this a utopia or a dystopia? Coetzee appears to be suggesting that there is a fine line between the two.

The principal difference between this new world and the old, Simón learns, is that the people in Novilla have lost their interest in sex. “I don’t like it,” one woman tells Simón. “I don’t have an appetite for it.” Simón, who still carries the ways of the old world with him, is baffled. He still feels himself to be a man, with a man’s desires. “What are our appetites for if not to tell us what we need?” he asks. “If we had no appetites, no desires, how would we live?”

The thematic premise of the Jesus trilogy is actually outlined in a previous Coetzee book. Paul Rayment, the character in Slow Man who has lost a leg, has a reverie while lamenting the diminishment of his manhood: “A phrase from catechism class a half-century ago floats into his mind: There shall be no more man and woman, but … But what—what shall we be when we are beyond man and woman?” In the Christian afterlife, Rayment remembers, love will be pure, unblemished by sin. Is this a love we would recognize? Is this a love we would admire, a love that is shorn of earthly desire, that finds its expression in the beatific smile of the blessed?

Something like love plays a decisive role in Simón’s quest to find David’s mother. Like the other episodes in The Childhood of Jesus, the discovery of the mother happens suddenly and improbably; the narrative, like a bad dream, is composed of a string of non sequiturs. They see her on a tennis court, all dressed in white. Simón feels that she is dimly familiar, that he has met her before. She is Inés, a “thirty-year-old virgin.” Simón tells Inés that she is David’s mother. Though mother and child do not recognize each other, she agrees to take care of him. One of Simón’s neighbors in the Blocks is appalled that he would entrust David to a stranger’s care. “The moment I saw Inés, I knew,” Simón says, defending himself. “If we don’t trust the voice that speaks inside us, saying, This is the one! then there is nothing left to trust.”

This is the type of delusional thinking, his neighbor retorts, that results in “calamitous love affairs.… She is just a random woman on whom you have projected some private obsession of yours.” Whether our feelings are delusions or the sacred location where truth resides is a question that runs throughout these novels. David’s favorite book is a children’s version of Don Quixote, featuring the knight of the doleful countenance fighting the windmills he believes are giants. As Simón explains to David, Don Quixote “presents the world to us through two pairs of eyes”: the addled perspective of the knight and the sober perspective of his sidekick, Sancho Panza. Through this juxtaposition, we know that the old knight is crazy. Yet is Don Quixote any less noble, any less courageous, any less a knight, for being a fool? Love is like that: a hallucination that is overwhelmingly real.

Whatever feelings Simón might have for Inés, they are not reciprocated. (“What is the one theme that keeps recurring from book to book?” asks one of the women in Summertime. “It is that the woman doesn’t fall in love with the man.”) She is regally aloof, quick to irritation, and jealous of her son’s affections.

But the three of them end up becoming a family of sorts. There are heavy-handed hints that David is different from the other children, that he is special. He makes cryptic statements—“Yo soy la verdad, I am the truth”—that suggest he is indeed a Jesus-like figure, perhaps even the reincarnation of the savior himself. He is also, at times, utterly ordinary: a willful, dictatorial brat. The hope that one’s child is destined for greatness, the regular reminders that he is a child like any other—this dynamic is the alpha and omega of parenting. In David’s case, his willfulness gets him in trouble at school, and the authorities insist that he be transferred to an institution for wayward children. To rescue David from this awful fate, Inés and Simón abscond with the boy to another city, Estrella, the setting for the second book, The Schooldays of Jesus.

It is here that we witness the dark side of desire. David is enrolled in a school headed by a husband-and-wife team who teach their students the “dance of the universe,” a kind of numerological philosophy. The wife, Ana Magdalena, is beautiful, so beautiful that she inspires worship, as if she were a goddess. Simón admits that “he could spend hours gazing at her, rapt in admiration at the perfection she represents of a certain kind of creaturely form.” Yet it is not Simón’s role to play the lovesick suitor; that falls to Dmitri, a poor, disheveled man who hangs around the school. When the perfect body of Ana Magdalena is found strangled to death, it turns out that Dmitri was the killer—and also that he had been Ana Magdalena’s secret lover.

Unlike the other people in this universe, Dmitri and Ana Magdalena had a passion for each other. The murder is a crime of passion, a malignant outgrowth of Dmitri’s desire. “It came from his heart, where it had been lurking for a long time, waiting to strike like a snake,” Simón tells David. For his part, Dmitri says he was motivated by an impulse to “Show her who is master. Show her what love is really like.” He is contrite about the crime he has committed, but he is also unyielding in his belief in the truth of his emotions: “When it comes to life’s greatest choices, I follow my heart,” he says. “Why? Because the heart is always right and the head is always wrong.”

Simón is presented as Dmitri’s foil: cool to the point of coldness; rational to the point of sterility. He shares an affinity with Bolívar, the family’s aging dog: “Certainly he is in the latter phase of his life, the phase of decline. He has begun to put on weight; though he is an intact male, he seems to have lost interest in bitches.” Simón is horrified by Dmitri’s behavior but is also in awe of the depth of his feeling; in awe, too, of his openness to love and its life-upending torments. Dmitri says, “There is no escaping it, is there, Simón? No escaping the thunderbolt.” Simón doesn’t know how to respond: “When was he last hit by a thunderbolt? Not in this life.”

Dmitri returns to torture Simón further in The Death of Jesus, in which David, now 10 years old, comes down with a mysterious illness that confines him to a hospital bed. Dmitri says he is a reformed man, a Paul-like figure who has had his own road-to-Damascus conversion. He now claims to be David’s disciple, the leader of a group of acolytes who develop a cult around David and spread rumors of the supposed miracles he has performed. But Dmitri still preaches the gospel of passion, which Simón imagines going something like this: “Blessed be the passionate, for the record of their crimes shall be wiped clean.”

Lest we forget the nature of those crimes, there is one disturbing incident involving Bolívar that reveals the grisly consequences of a life ruled solely by animal desire. David insists that his parents bring him a pet lamb from the school to keep him company in the hospital. Bolívar wants to eat it, but David’s will prevails and the lamb is allowed to stay in a cage. While watching David, Inés falls asleep, and that’s when Bolívar strikes: “When she awakes at first light the cage is lying on its side and nothing is left of the lamb save its head and a bloody tangle of hide and limbs on the once clean floor.” (The idea that Simón and Bolívar are connected is strengthened by the fact that their names, put together, invoke the Simón Bolívar who liberated much of Latin America from the Spanish empire. Compared to their namesake, Coetzee’s Simón and Bolívar are rather apathetic, the point perhaps being that history in this nonhistorical world repeats itself as farce.)

Yet the passionless life, though safer, offers only a different, slower kind of death. As David deteriorates, Simón and Inés grow closer, but they remain fundamentally estranged:

‘’There are no easy words for what their relation has been: certainly not man and wife, nor brother and sister. Compañeros may come closest: as if, from their common purpose and common labour, there had grown up between the two of them a bond not of love but of duty and habit.’’

Simón, who has been careful not to let the flames of passion leap too high, ends the book alone: no child, no partner, not even the dog.

Where Coetzee comes down on the divide between passion and reason is difficult to say. He is both a roiling cauldron of emotion and the analytical, unblinking eye trained upon it. One senses a deep shame on his part, almost a revulsion at the way desire betrays what is exalted within us. In his conception, desire entails men behaving disgracefully, sometimes monstrously. And even when its effect is more benign, it involves a humiliating loss of autonomy. As one of the women in Summertime says, “Well, that is what you risk when you fall in love. You risk losing your dignity.”

But desire has a dignity of its own. It is our natural response to beauty, a beauty that is often invisible to the outside world. Who other people choose to love often surprises us: What does she see in him? we ask. Desire is not just a vehicle for lust but for tenderness, gratitude, and admiration. Simón is not in search of anything so crass as a liaison but a vessel “to pour whatever it is that pours out of me, sometimes as mere talk, sometimes as tears, sometimes in the form that I persist in calling loving care.” It is a moving thought, that we might have such a lot of care to give.

Perhaps, Coetzee suggests, desire is really the expression of some original lack, a bedrock dissatisfaction with the world. “Something is missing,” Simón says. “I know it should not be so, but it is. The life I have is not enough for me.” It is no coincidence that Simón and David are migrants, condemned to wander the earth forever as foreigners. What is missing from their lives, as well as from our own, was lost at some point in the passage to the present moment. “This place wrenches my heart,” says the Coetzee of Summertime, looking out as the sun sets over the karoo, an arid, desertlike region in South Africa. “It wrenched my heart when I was a child, and I have never been right since.”

Can another person fill the hole in our lives? In the books of J.M. Coetzee, as in the real world, desire usually leads to complications, disasters. There are few happy endings and a lot of pain, loneliness, frustration. If there is solace to be had, it lies in higher pursuits—in writing, for example, in the sublimating act that lifts even the lowest desires into the rarefied echelon of art. But what would we have to write about were it not for feelings like desire? Coetzee’s early work was so immersed in the political, but in the dusk of his career he has reoriented himself toward a more elemental subject: the longing for happiness, for wholeness, for life itself. Desire is the proof that we are alive; that we are, in both the best and worst senses of the word, human.

The Unsuitable Passions of J.M. Coetzee. By Ryu Spaeth.  The New Republic,   May 18, 2020

During a 1992 interview with Nobel Prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee, critic Richard Begam surfaced the well-worn issue of the death of the novel, positing that literature had “fallen into a debilitating narcissism” which produces works “of interest only to the academic” before asking after Coetzee’s thoughts. Notoriously taciturn in public and thoughtful in interviews, Coetzee suggested that the tightening bond between writers and the academy has indeed led to more esoteric forms of the novel, and with regard to himself: “Yes, I may indeed be cutting myself off, at least from today’s readers; nevertheless, what I am engaged in doing is more important than maintaining that contact.” Since the 1990s, it is tempting to see a correlation between increased academic interest in Coetzee’s works and his decreasing engagement with, and from, the public. Coetzee’s Nobel Prize in 2003 largely recognized him as the preeminent writer of the South African experience, for example, as we see in the powerful apartheid allegory Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). Disgrace (1999) grappled with the country’s uneasy transition to a post-apartheid state by reflecting on the career and disgrace of a middle-aged academic. The truth, however, is that by 2003 South Africa had receded into the rearview mirror and Coetzee’s new work, Elizabeth Costello, was positioned firmly on academic soil. This philosophical novel, featuring an eponymous academic protagonist touring the world delivering lectures on topics such as animal rights and renaissance humanism, set the tone for Coetzee’s writings in the 2000s, including the Jesus trilogy and its culminating installment, The Death of Jesus.

Elizabeth Costello anticipates the theological themes of the Jesus trilogy, especially in its final section, which features a quasi-allegorical (Elizabeth finds it “Kafkaesque”) rendition of purgatory, outside of recognizable time and space. Several of Coetzee’s later works insist on this engagement with the theological, especially as an antithesis to the rational ordering of life definitive of Enlightenment modernity (an ordering that Coetzee suggests cannot help but be exclusionary—of the animal, of the colonized, of the other). The Jesus novels perpetuate this theme but, even more so than the earlier works, resist the inclination to explain themselves. For instance, they never explain why the young Jesus figure is in fact called David. Critics have speculated that the trilogy is loosely based on the apocryphal gospels and their account of a reckless and petulant God-king in his nascent years, yet Coetzee’s abstraction fails to deliver a key that would unlock them. Indeed, if Elizabeth Costello was more explicitly a roman-à-clef—with the middle-aged Australian Elizabeth serving as avatar for the recently relocated Coetzee (who now resides in Adelaide)—the Jesus novels also play with the ideas of allegories and keys.

The trilogy takes place in a fictionalized Latin America where everyone speaks Spanish. In the first novel, The Childhood of Jesus, David arrives via boat at this purgatorial landscape with his adopted father, Simon. Simon, whose perspective is welded to the third-person narrator (we are constantly reminded of this in the second and third novels by the formulation “he, Simon,” which prevents the reader from being lured in by the neutral, omniscient voice), arranges their accommodation and registration in their new home Novilla (No-town). When asking for access to his room he makes the mistake, in Spanish (which fits incongruently into the English prose, breaking the illusion that what we are reading is a transliteration of the Spanish the characters must themselves be speaking), of asking for a llave universal, a universal key, instead of a Llave maestra. The benign but bemused bureaucrat responds: “Llave maestra. There is no such thing as a llave universal. If we had a llave universal all our troubles would be over.”

These troubles continue through the subsequent novels, which take place in Estrella (Star). From the range of critical responses to the The Death of Jesus, it seems fair to suggest that many had hoped for more by the time of this final installment, and Coetzee’s continued withholding of meaning right to the end has provoked a sense that this new novel of ideas might be lacking in novel ideas. By the time of The Death of Jesus, David is ten, and an accomplished dancer. At the start of the novel, we meet the forthright Dr. Julio Fabricante, the head of a local orphanage, who is keen to recruit David onto his football team. This sparks a continued engagement with the figure of the orphan (an oblique reference to David’s virgin birth, perhaps), a figure that fascinates the young boy’s adventurous and romantic imagination (his hero is that great adventurer/illusionist, Don Quixote). Whereas Simon “lives in the present like an ox,” the precocious David increasingly becomes prophet-like, drawing hordes of young acolytes to hear him tell stories. He tells of the adventures of Don Quixote, which feature enticing allusions, such as an episode with a burning bush that speaks to the Don. “Things don’t have to be true to be true,” David blurts out at one point.

Like The Childhood of Jesus’s universal key, David feels himself to be a “universal exception,” despite Simon’s protestations. “A universal exception is a contradiction in terms,” Simon asserts. “It makes no sense.” When David flees his adopted parents to join Fabricante’s troop of orphaned boys, a wider theme of exceptionality emerges: the figure of the orphan as precisely that of a universal exception in society (and, located outside the town, the orphanage as a site of exception). David takes on a sense of duty toward the orphans, marking another parallel with Coetzee’s interest in lost causes and forgotten others (the dying dogs in Disgrace are a prime example, and at a certain point David refuses to continue to eat meat). David’s illness is also exceptional, and it is never made clear precisely what ails him. While in the hospital, he is reacquainted with his devout follower, Dmitri, a convicted murderer who in the previous novel—The Schooldays of Jesus—committed the crime passionnel of killing Ana Magdalena, David’s lead instructor at the Academy of Dance. Simon is mortified but can do nothing. Dmitri assumes charge over the boy’s body when he dies, and purports to be the bearer of David’s final “message.” Toward the end, he writes to Simon: “I am sure you are aware how unimportant names are. I could just as well have been named Simon, you could just as well have been named Dmitri. And as for David, who cares now what his real name was.” Instead of nominative determinism Dmitri proposes a numerical determinism: “Number rules the universe—that, I can now divulge, was part of David’s message (but only part).” An orphan is thus one without a number, and indeed Simon takes pains to make sure David is not registered on the state census. This makes David exceptional, atypical because he is uncounted. But for Dmitri (and David himself) numbers are not circumscribed by the laws of logical sequence. On the one hand, David is uncounted, on the other hand, David is uncountable. All three novels are delicately poised on the pivot point between these two propositions.

Naming and numbering—and more broadly David’s education as a whole—trickle intricately in the form of the novel itself. The Death of Jesus is the shortest book in the trilogy, and the economy and simplicity of the overall plot (there are few turning points, denouements, and significant events) is incongruously juxtaposed by a precision at the level of the sentence. This is most marked by Simon’s occasional over-weighty parenting. Despite David’s peevishness, Simon’s corrections appear needlessly pedantic (a bit like David Lurie’s obsession with grammatical tense in Disgrace). As with the previous novels, there is something peculiarly moving about the affectless or neutral presentation of the lengthy dialogue scenes. By exploring the ontology of the question Coetzee invites a slow approach to reading:

      “But I don’t want to be this boy, Simon! In the next life I want to be me but I don’t want to be this boy. Can I do that?”

     “The rule says you do not have a choice. The rule says you have to be the one you are and no one else. But you have never obeyed rules, have you? So in the next life I am sure you will manage to be who you want to be. You just have to be strong and decisive about it. Who exactly is this boy whom you do not want to be?”

     “This boy.” He gestures toward his body, with its wasted legs.

By resisting excessive description and remaining at an arm’s length from his characters, Coetzee’s Kafka-like narration remains compelling; its failure to solicit a conventional emotional response that we associate with the novel genre is part of the drive. This distance not only fosters the philosophical tone of the dialogue but is key to the ideas and themes in the work—indeed, to the overall meaning of the novel itself. How seriously are we to take the seriousness Coetzee affords to his craft, the seriousness he affords to words, when these words never quite deliver? By refusing to add up to some take-home “message,” or some isolatable truth, the novels perform the very question that animates them: What does life add up to, in the end? What is the value of an individual life? And how do we measure it?

The two answers the trilogy presents lie in the difference between Simon and David, who, taken together, constitute the twin sides of Coetzee’s own authorship. Simon is coolly rational, recalling Coetzee’s origins as a computer programmer. David is an arch anti-rationalist following in the spirit of Elizabeth Costello and Coetzee’s many protagonists who choose the heart over the head. David represents that side of the author for whom reason is a self-enclosed system whose outputs merely imitate those biased and all-too-human inputs that determine any calculation. In The Death of Jesus, the work’s content, the story itself, seems to favor this latter model: We too ought to embrace David’s philosophy of life and disdain for arithmetic. The novel’s form, however, holds back and swaddles this option in a blanket of irony. “True reading,” Simon tells David, “means hearing what the book has to say and pondering it,” not merely turning printed signs into sounds and making up fantasies as we like. But what does this dialogical account of reading mean for us; that we ought to look beyond the referential, the literal, or that, as Simon asserts, we ought to register “the world as it really is”? Toward the end, Simon is gathering David’s things and finds the boy’s copy of Don Quixote, which contains a library slip in its back cover. The slip is addressed to the book’s young readers (but also to us, Coetzee’s readers), and asks: “What is the message of this book? What will you most of all remember of it?” David’s handwriting is absent from the list of responses. The novel hereby closes, leaving the choice between Simon’s reality and David’s fantasy held in abeyance.

All three Jesus novels are concerned with the life after death, but none more so than this final work. This life is one’s legacy, and it feels that by posing the problem of how to value, how to read, an individual’s life, Coetzee is also allegorizing once again the author’s life and the legacy that a writer, a storyteller, may leave behind. David ultimately fails to transcend the world, but the Jesus fictions maintain the idea that transcendence need not be a flight away from reality but something more like an uncountable, or unreadable, change within reality. After the boy’s death Simon poignantly tells Ines, David’s adopted mother: “The world may be as it was before, but it is also different. We must hold tight to that difference, you and I.” Holding tight to the difference is perhaps what Coetzee means by doing something more important than maintaining contact with “today’s readers.” Far from offering consolation or meaning, these works constitute a powerful allegory of a world bereft of meaning; of a world in mourning. This world is ours. One is reminded of Georges Bataille’s comment on the mendacity of the world: “Moreover, it is time in any case to oppose this mendacious world with the resources of an irony, a shrewdness, a serenity without illusions. If the world insists on blowing up, we may be the only ones to grant it the right to do so, while giving ourselves the right to have spoken in vain.” If the Jesus novels are vain, then they are triumphantly and defiantly so.

In some respects Coetzee’s Jesus enterprise is like the particle-spinning Large Hadron Collider. The novels are the product of a supreme intelligence, located far away from civilization and unencumbered by the petite histoires of life in the twenty-first century. They are made of elements whose genius remains invisible to the naked eye and whose conjunctions and combinations yield cosmic results. They open on to a black hole of meaning that will defy the academic critics who will now pour in to pigeonhole these works in terms of biopolitics or postsecularism or animal studies or affect theory. In a positivist age, these philosophical novels don’t quite fit, just as David never really fits. Yet like David they burn brightly across the sky, never quite entering the celestial sphere while holding tight to the possibility of a minimal difference in our own. Far from fleeing the world in the name of an intellectual-fictional experiment, Coetzee makes the world, and the banality of its tragedies, inescapable. Unlike, for example, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which uses the figure of the child to embody the moral conscience of a fallen world, David functions as a looking glass for a world whose moral conscience seems bereft, platitudinous, and vapid. The novel both mocks our clumsy association of childhood and innocence as well as celebrates it; David’s ethical virtue is to present a challenge to virtue’s inevitable ossification in the form of cliché. So what does this book teach us? The importance of compassion, the power of fantasy, the illusion of neat origins and firm endings. Probably all this and more, but Coetzee’s art is in the probably.

J.M. Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus. By Marc Farrant.  Music and Literature , May 5, 2020.

The Death of Jesus, the third of JM Coetzee’s ‘Jesus’ books, continues the story of David, or at least, Simón’s story of David, some years after the second volume ends. Like its antecedents, the novel pursues various questions of ethics, life and death, the role of education and socialisation, and the purpose and consequence of storytelling.

In the first book, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), Coetzee relates the story of how a middle-aged man cares for a young boy and tries to find his mother. Simón, the man, meets David, the boy, on a ship transporting passengers from one life to another. The new life in which the pair find themselves is expressed in Spanish, which they must learn upon their arrival. The first book explores the quest for a mother for David, whom they find in Inés, a woman who is at first ambivalent about mothering the boy, but then becomes fiercely protective of him when she disagrees with the measures the bureaucratic authorities of Novilla insist on imposing on David’s education.

In The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), the elective family have relocated from Novilla to Estrella, and the question of young David’s education becomes even more central than in the first book. His exceptionalism is constantly remarked upon by the various adults who encounter the child, from the stevedores on the docks of Novilla, through the three sisters who own the farm outside Estrella, where Simón and Inés have taken refuge from government scrutiny, and even to the Arroyos, in whose academy David becomes a pupil.

The Death of Jesus (2019) picks up the story of Simón, David and Inés four years after the tragic events at the Arroyos’ academy of dance, in which one of David’s teachers was killed and he suffered the trauma of discovering her body. Now aged ten, David has become an adept player of amateur football, and because of his skill, moves from the reconstituted Arroyo academy to an institution for orphans run by an ‘Educador’, Dr Julio Fabricante.

As the title makes clear, this book tells the story of the end of David’s life in the Spanish world in which he seemed not only extraordinary, but thoroughly alien. At one point Simón reminds the boy, ‘Your mother and I have indulged you as no normal child is indulged, because we recognise that you are exceptional’, and it is perhaps this very treatment inside the elective family that may explain David’s odd behaviour. As Alyosha, the teaching assistant from the Arroyo academy, puts it, David is ‘a child with strange ideas and fantastic stories, a child who has never been schooled, never been tamed, who is afraid of no one, certainly not his teachers, who is as beautiful as a girl yet has a flair for football’. And as a cypher, with an odd, atypical relationship to numbers and language, to human relations and to the world, David becomes the focus of various hopes and aspirations among those around him.

But the reasons the various adults think David exceptional vary and are often at odds with one another. Dr Fabricante recognises David’s exceptional talent at football and, we are led to believe, wants to protect him from what he sees as abuse suffered at the hands of the people David insists are not his parents. Dmitri, the museum attendant who killed David’s dance teacher Ana Magdalena in the second book, and who has ‘come back now like a malign spirit to haunt the child’, wants some sort of spiritual connection with David to satisfy his complex scheme of punishment and forgiveness. He, Dmitri, believes ‘young David is not like us. He comes from another world, maybe even another star.’

Amid this muddle of beliefs about his exceptionality, David himself confronts those around him with profound questions, often relying on the why-regress to interrogate the insecure foundations on which the world relies for certainty in the face of questions about existence and ethics. Simón’s antagonist Dmitri expresses it best when he suggests ‘your son is not asking you to parse sentences. He is asking why he is here. For what purpose. To what end. He is demanding an answer to the great mystery that confronts us all, down to the humblest microbe.’ And, as he suggests, David ‘learned long ago that you don’t have answers to anything.’

David draws comfort from the copy of Don Quixote Simón procured from the Novilla public library, which he has brought with him to Estrella, and through all three of the ‘Jesus’ books. But now, instead of using it ‘to practise his Spanish reading, because like all of us, he had to master his Spanish ABC’, Simón tells the adults and children gathered at David’s hospital bed, ‘He read the book so many times that it sank into his memory. Don Quixote became part of him. Through his voice the book began to speak itself.’ Simón’s understanding of how the Cervantes novel has influenced David reflects the ways in which all the ‘Jesus’ books are concerned with intertextuality and storytelling.

The life of David shares resemblances with the life and death of Jesus, which echoes and mirroring Coetzee teases his readers into exploring. Are Simón and Inés in some senses like Joseph and Mary? Is Dmitri like Saul become Paul? Or are those the very sorts of projections that David himself becomes enthralled to when he conflates Quixote and Cervantes, when he struggles to separate the real from the fictional, the world from how it is imagined? There are no easy answers in The Death of Jesus, but the exploration is part of the book’s compelling beauty.

These questions are not new territory for Coetzee, who has confronted philosophical questions through his novels and across his entire body of work by exploring the relationship between fiction and philosophy. In a conversation between Simón and David in the heart of The Death of Jesus, the relationship between thought and imagination is explored explicitly when the man tells the boy: ‘Philosophy tells us when there is nothing more to say. Philosophy tells us when to sit with our mind still and our mouths shut. No more questions, no more answers.’ But of course, into that silence comes story: ‘Don Quixote is allowed to cross the seas and come here, but he has to do so in a book […] He cannot appear to us as flesh and blood.’

The prose, as always with Coetzee, is masterful, spare and beautiful, and The Death of Jesus can be read as an example of what Edward Said termed ‘late style’: work that has ‘the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them’. In this book Coetzee returns not only to the motifs and thematic concerns of the earlier ‘Jesus’ books, but to matters that have concerned his practice as a writer and thinker for four decades. The idea of expressing an alternate world in Spanish first occurs in In the Heart of the Country (1977). The complex relations of fatherhood and loss are touchingly and intimately examined in The Master of Petersburg (1994). Confrontations with illness, age and death will be familiar for readers of Age of Iron (1990), and how desire complicates such confrontations were explored in Slow Man (2005). Questions of guilt, complicity, implication and suffering were there in Dusklands (1974) and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). And Coetzee’s interrogation of the nature and function, as well as the consequences, of storytelling in making sense of the world became explicit in Foe (1986) and Diary of a Bad Year (2007).

David, like his predecessor in Life & Times of Michael K (1983), is the cypher through which we are encouraged to confront ourselves with questions of ethics and morality, while simultaneously being lost in the power of story. As David himself is swept up in his reading and misreading of Don Quixote (or at least the children’s edition of Cervantes’s novel to which he has access), so we are swept up in the adventures and misadventures of Simón and Inés and David. What Simón promises David on his sick-bed—

‘’I will simply tell your story, as far as I know it, without trying to understand it, from the day I met you. I will tell about the boat that brought us here, and how you and I went looking for Inés and found her. I will tell how you went to school in Novilla, and how you were transferred to the school for delinquent children, and how you escaped, and how we all then came to Estrella. I will tell how you went to señor Arroyo’s academy and were the best of all dancers.’’

—becomes the novels in the ‘Jesus’ cycle we have read. And just as Simón suggests to David that ‘when you danced you opened people’s eyes to things they had not seen before. So your dancing qualifies as a good deed’, so Coetzee’s novels have opened our eyes, and therefore qualify as his good deed.

The Death of Jesus is a fine addition to Coetzee’s oeuvre, stimulating and beautifully written, for as Dmitri writes to Simón, ‘What we hunger for is not bread […] but the word, the fiery word that will reveal why we are here.’ In reading this book, we are reminded again of the importance of asking this question and others like it, of ourselves, and of one another.

JM Coetzee’s ‘late style’—Angelo Fick reviews The Death of Jesus, the ‘masterful, spare and beautiful’ final book of the Jesus trilogy. The Johannesburg Review of Books, April 20, 2020. 

J. M. Coetzee, one of the most critically acclaimed authors of his era, will visit the University of Chicago for an Oct. 9 talk—the former faculty member’s first return to campus since receiving the Nobel Prize in 2003.

Previously a professor in UChicago’s Committee on Social Thought, Coetzee will speak at 5 p.m. at Regenstein Library as part of a lecture series organized by the Neubauer Collegium. Coetzee will read a selection of his unpublished work during the lecture and discussion, which will be webcast live.

“I think when John was here, he found the intellectual life of this university special,” said Prof. Jonathan Lear, the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought. “I think he was glad to be here while he was here. I do think it’s right to think of him as coming back to a place that, for a while, worked as his intellectual home.”

Added Coetzee, who taught at UChicago from 1996 to 2003: “The Committee seemed to me, at its best, to be an ideal intellectual community. During my years on the Committee, I made a number of deep and lasting friendships.”

Lear and Coetzee grew close at UChicago, where they co-taught classes on subjects such as Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Plato’s Phaedrus. The two had dinner the night before Coetzee won the Nobel, and still plan a weeklong trip together almost every summer. Last year, Coetzee was invited to a lecture series for the Neubauer Collegium, which Lear leads as the Roman Family Director.

The event represents a rare public appearance in the United States by the famously private Coetzee, a South African native who now resides in Australia.

The 78-year-old Coetzee, who was the first two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize, may be best known for the novels Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999). When it awarded Coetzee the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy lauded him as “a scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of Western civilization.”

“My own view is that he’s the greatest living writer of English prose,” said Robert Pippin, the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought. “He’s an intensely serious thinker and writer. Some people, I think, are surprised that there is such a quiet intensity about him.”

Pippin was responsible for bringing the author to the University more than two decades ago. As chair of the Committee on Social Thought, Pippin invited Coetzee to give a lecture before eventually convincing him to become a visiting professor in 1996. Coetzee was later named a distinguished service professor and was part of the UChicago faculty until 2003.

That partnership, Pippin said, was a fruitful one for both Coetzee and the University. Coetzee brought unique credentials not only as a writer and essayist, but also as a scholar well-versed in literature across numerous languages.

Lear remembered Coetzee as a dedicated teacher who was always diligent in providing feedback and evaluations to his students: “He wanted to talk with them about ideas and books and how writing works.”

Of Coetzee’s upcoming visit, Lear said: “We have the opportunity to share the company of one of the great thinkers, writers, novelists of our time. What I’m interested in is: Can we give John a format in which to express himself? One that will provoke others in our community to think and to engage in conversation with him?”

Nobel-winning author J. M. Coetzee to give talk at UChicago. By Jack Chan.  UChicago News, October 5, 2018.

Nobel Prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee, who served as a faculty member at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought from 1998 to 2003, returned to campus to deliver a Neubauer Collegium Director's Lecture on "Growing Up with The Children's Encyclopedia."

The University of Chicago, 

October 31, 2018.

On January 11, on a sweltering summer afternoon in Cape Town, J.M. Coetzee gave a rare public reading in the home town he left, somewhat precipitously, fifteen years ago to take up an academic post in Adelaide, South Australia. The reading took place at the Irma Stern Museum in the city’s southern suburbs, currently hosting an exhibition of arresting Coetzee juvenilia: “Photographs from Boyhood,” a recently discovered trove that the author took in the mid-Fifties when he was a schoolboy growing up in these suburbs. In his wry and unsparing way, Coetzee projected a series of these images onto a screen and read related extracts from his 1997 fictionalized memoir Boyhood (he calls the genre “autre-biography,” because it always involves making an artifact of one’s life for an “other”).

In Boyhood and its sequels, Youth and Summertime, Coetzee uses family photographs as aides-memoire but makes no mention of his own adolescent passion for taking them. How fascinating it was, then, to see the images made in boyhood in dialogue with the words of an older man looking back, and to imagine the way the ethics and aesthetics of the former might have forged the latter; also, to consider what the image reveals that the word cannot, and vice-versa.

The author himself was no help. “It’s not my job to join up the dots,” he says, at the conclusion of an interview published on the occasion of the exhibition, which is curated by Hermann Wittenberg and Farzanah Badsha. He ended his presentation at the Irma Stern Museum at precisely thirty minutes, leaving no room for questions and an audience hankering—as happens with Coetzee—for more.

Before J.M. Coetzee was the writer who would go on to win the Booker and Nobel Prizes, he was an avid photographer: the home darkroom he set up is reconstructed in the exhibition, with its original machinery and empty canisters, and some records from his school photography club are on display. These reveal that although his entries placed second and third in a competition, he scored poorly for “neatness and general work”: eight out of twenty-five and four out of twenty-five, respectively, for his two entries. This is no surprise to anyone acquainted with the talented, disaffected anti-hero of Boyhood.

Coetzee was the owner, first, of a mail-order “spy camera” and then of a 35 mm Wega, an Italian Leica knockoff. He snuck shots of his mother sleeping and the cassocked masters at his Catholic school; he photographed hijinks in the classroom and events on the sportsfield, the people and the landscapes of his adolescence. He liked to document his own working process—as a reader, as a photographer, as a thinker, as a cricketer even—and one of the exhibition’s gifts is an itemized photograph of the library that the sixteen-year-old Coetzee created with his pocket money. “Some of these books left a mark on me,” he writes in the caption. “Eliot’s poems, War and Peace. Others I never succeeded in wading through: The Imitation of Christ. Self-improvement via Everyman’s Library and the Penguin Classics.”

Like the protagonist of Boyhood, the boy-photographer is self-conscious and earnest, although the tentative smile in one of a quartet of proto-selfies (taken with a timer or a clicker) suggests a willingness to please that is absent from the book or the author’s later public image. “Who is this person?” the adult Coetzee asks of these images of his younger self, in the accompanying caption. “First steps towards surprising and uncovering his soul.” It is as if the adult author is giving us a clue to his creativity: that his work ever since has been an endeavor to “surprise” and to “uncover” his soul.

What does it mean to surprise a soul? Most of the images are unplanned and spontaneous, in the manner of Cartier-Bresson, whom Coetzee imitated, as he says, in his attempt to be “present at the moment when truth revealed itself, a moment which one half discovered but also half created.” The young photographer is trying to surprise his subjects by catching them unawares, but also, one senses, to surprise himself with a fearlessness that is lacking in the written account of his boyhood. He was attracted to photography because it carried “considerable cultural cachet” in the Fifties, but also, he says, because it was “a manly activity, in contrast to such effeminate activities as composing poetry or playing the piano.”

Interestingly, the other photographer in Coetzee’s family—there is an image of her with her own box-brownie—was his mother, Vera, whose excessive solicitousness he describes with cool contempt in Boyhood. His feckless father, Jack, is captured being hectored by his mother’s Aunt Annie, and Coetzee gives us a passage from Boyhood as the caption: “He has never worked out the position of his father in the household. In fact, it is not obvious to him by what right his father is there at all.”

In Boyhood, he is similarly cool about his younger brother David, who is “at most a nervous, wishy-washy imitation” of the book’s protagonist. But one of the most beautiful images in the exhibition is of David riding a bicycle, very much à la Cartier-Bresson. The image was a technical experiment in low angles and shutter speed, but it seems to capture both a moment of the younger brother’s childish joy and an older brother’s capacity for empathy, despite the author of Boyhood’s later protestations to the contrary. Perhaps this is fanciful. And I wonder whether we, the viewers, are not projecting our need to humanize one of the world’s greatest authors if we find such empathy in the many images of his mother, stout in middle age by the time her son took up the camera, vulnerable rather than doughty.

In an early essay of his titled “Photographs of South Africa,” Coetzee warns us not to read old photographs this way, and he questions whether “looks have the power to communicate feelings,” chiding the white editors of a book of nineteenth-century South African photographs for interpreting the look of a black girl selling brooms as “wistful.” He concedes that “this is by no means to argue that all faces from the past must be as inscrutable as the faces of Martians,” but anyone who has read Coetzee’s fiction will know the stock he puts in inscrutability—his own and that of his characters. It is precisely in his refusal of easy empathy that he has forged the counter-intuitive ethic of his work, and we might find the roots of this in the true marvel of the exhibition: the few images he made of black South Africans, which have a sense of drama, of “surprise” and of “uncovering,” that is absent elsewhere in his photographs.

In some respects, these images suggest the path that Coetzee might have taken—in a venerable South African tradition—as a social documentarian like, for example, David Goldblatt. The quick image Coetzee captures of a policeman stopping black workers on a suburban “Paradise Road” finds its punctum in the quiet resistance of a uniformed maid’s folded arms. And there are fluid, free-wheeling images of the workers on the beloved Coetzee family farm, deep in the hinterland, which he visited every Christmas. When one looks at the image of a white child weaving easily between farmhands aiming guns and cleaning offal, one is struck by how a photograph can suggest correspondences and relationships in a manner quite different from the written word.

The critic Maya Jaggi noted in the Financial Times that “the unexpected intimacy” of these images “appears to flout the spirit of rules that came to my mind from Boyhood”: the protagonist averting his eyes when passing a “colored” maid in the passage; his mother contemplating smashing a teacup after a “colored” man has drunk from it. (In South Africa, “colored” was the apartheid designation for people of mixed race, or descendants of the Khoisan people.) Coetzee’s photographs of these people—in service to him and his family, to be sure—suggest the way the rigid lines of racial separation can be crossed with a camera; or the way, perhaps, that the camera can expose the arbitrariness of such boundaries.

But the camera is also a tool of immense power, particularly in southern Africa, where photographs were used to classify people in colonial times and then to control them: your passbook photo was a ticket to work, or to jail, depending on whether it had been endorsed. By day, the protagonist of Boyhood must avert his eyes when passing the maid in the passage, but at night, the photographer of “Photographs from Boyhood” can watch her, freely, as she dances the “tiekiedraai” (an Afrikaans folkdance) on New Year’s Eve. The Wega in his hand not only gives him permission: it renders visible the power his society actually vests in him. He can choose whether to look, or not, with or without the consent of the people he is looking at. In a white world so blinkered by apartheid, though, the wonder of these images is that this particular young man chose to look at all.

And yet, Coetzee tells us in his exhibition interview, such a project was not to his liking. He gave up photography, he says, because of a lack of empathy and curiosity: “I was never open enough to the world, particularly to other people’s experience. I was too wrapped up in myself. Which is not unusual at that age.”

In what measure was it adolescence that stifled his curiosity, and in what measure was it apartheid? At the Irma Stern Museum, while projecting a photograph of two of the farm laborers, Coetzee read the following passage about the men from Boyhood:

He burns with curiosity about the lives they live. Do they wear vests and underpants like white people? Do they each have a bed? Do they sleep naked or in their work clothes or do they have pyjamas? Do they eat proper meals, sitting at table with knives and forks?

He has no way of answering these questions, for he is discouraged from visiting their houses. It would be rude, he is told—rude because Ros and Freek would find it embarrassing.

The young photographer does not transgress this boundary with his camera, he tells us in Boyhood, because this was a limit to which he also adhered. But one must take Coetzee’s protestations of a later lack of curiosity with a pinch of salt, for one senses, looking at some these images, that he came to understand the way storytelling was driven by not being allowed across a threshold, by turning in on oneself and imagining what might lurk beyond it.

And so, in “Photographs from Boyhood” he gives us Ros and Freek, in an arresting sequence “on Strandfontein beach—their first ever sight of the sea.” The images conjure Waiting for Godot (which Coetzee would not yet, by then, have read), a Giacometti sculpture, a Steinbeck story. Here we have, at last, Coetzee the novelist rather than the documentarian, and there is glory in the way these images make fiction: the uneasy presence of two dark beings etched into the blanched landscape of sand and sea; the questions that cannot be answered. Ros and Freek lived and worked on a farm in the Karoo region, hundreds of miles away. How did they get to Cape Town, to the sea, these two middle-aged men in their ill-fitting Sunday suits, trying to light their pipes in a south-easterly gale? And what was Coetzee doing there, with them? His caption: “What they thought of it, I will never know.”

Coetzee’s Boyhood Photographs. By  Mark Gevisser.  The New York Review of Books ,  January 19, 2018.