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.
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."
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.”
