J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus: The Ethics of Ideas and Things 9781501318627, 9781501318658, 9781501318641

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J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus

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J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus The Ethics of Ideas and Things

Edited by Jennifer Rutherford and Anthony Uhlmann

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Jennifer Rutherford, Anthony Uhlmann and Contributors, 2017 From THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS: A NOVEL by J. M. Coetzee, copyright © 2013 by J. M. Coetzee. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Uhlmann, Anthony, editor. | Rutherford, Jennifer, editor. Title: J. M. Coetzee’s The childhood of Jesus : the ethics of ideas and things / edited by Anthony Uhlmann, Jennifer Rutherford. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016026674 (print) | LCCN 2016047903 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501318627 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501318641 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501318634 (ePUB) Subjects: LCSH: Coetzee, J. M., 1940- Childhood of Jesus. | Ethics in literature. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / General. Classification: LCC PR9369.3.C58 C4556 2017 (print) | LCC PR9369.3.C58 (ebook) | DDC 823/.914--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026674 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-1862-7 ePub: 978-1-5013-1863-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-1864-1 Cover design: Hugh Cowling Cover image © Lauren Mancke Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Contents Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements

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Introduction 1 Jennifer Rutherford and Anthony Uhlmann Section I  Philological and Philosophical Concerns 1 What does J. M. Coetzee’s Novel, The Childhood of Jesus have to do with the Childhood of Jesus? Robert B. Pippin

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2 Pathos of the Future: Writing and Hospitality in The Childhood of Jesus Jean-Michel Rabaté

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Section II  Sociopolitical Concerns 3 Thinking Through Shit in The Childhood of Jesus Jennifer Rutherford 4 Coetzee’s Republic: Plato, Borges and Migrant Memory in The Childhood of Jesus Lynda Ng and Paul Sheehan

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Section III  Intertextual Concerns 5 Creative Intuition: Coetzee, Plato, Bergson and Murnane Anthony Uhlmann 6 The Name of the Number: Transfinite Mathematics in The Childhood of Jesus Baylee Brits

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Section IV  Ethical and Stylistic Concerns 7 J. M. Coetzee and the Parental Punctum Sue Kossew

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8 Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus and the Moral Image of the World 165 Tim Mehigan 9 Beyond the Literary Theme Park: J. M. Coetzee’s Late Style in The Childhood of Jesus Yoshiki Tajiri

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Index

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Notes on Contributors Baylee Brits holds a doctorate in English Literature from the University of New South Wales. She teaches in English and Media Studies at the Australian Catholic University and at the University of New South Wales. She is currently working on two monograph projects. The first, ‘Literary Infinities: Number and Narrative in Modern Literature’, looks at the relevance of Cantor’s transfinite numbers to twentieth-century narrative. The second considers J. M. Coetzee’s work in terms of religion and world literature. Sue Kossew is Chair of English and Literary Studies at Monash University. Her research is in contemporary postcolonial literatures, particularly on the work of J. M. Coetzee and on contemporary women writers. Her books include Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J. M. Coetzee and André Brink (1996), Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee (ed. 1998), Re-Imagining Africa: New Critical Perspectives (ed. with Dianne Schwerdt, 2001) and Writing Woman, Writing Place: Australian and South African Fiction (2004). She has edited Lighting Dark Places: Essays on Kate Grenville (2010) and co-edited (with Chris Danta and Julian Murphet) Strong Opinions: J. M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction (2011). In 2014, she co-edited, with Dorothy Driver, a special issue of Life Writing entitled ‘Reframing South African Life Narratives’. She is currently working on a research project funded by the Australian Research Council entitled ‘Rethinking the Victim: Gendered Violence in Australian Women’s Writing’ with Anne Brewster (University of New South Wales). Tim Mehigan is widely published on German literature and thought. His scholarship was recognized with the award of the Humboldt Foundation’s Research Prize in 2013. He is the author of, among other things, Heinrich von Kleist: Writing After Kant (2011), editor of A Companion to the Works of J. M. Coetzee and Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity (2011) and translator of K. L. Reinhold: Essay on a New Theory of the Human Capacity for Representation

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Notes on Contributors

(2011). Another edited volume The Intellectual Landscape in the Works of J. M. Coetzee is soon to appear with Camden House.  Tim is Professor of German and Professorial Associate in the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. He was elected to the Australian Academy of Humanities in 2003. Lynda Ng is an Adjunct Fellow at Western Sydney University. From 2012 to 2014 she was the Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in English Literature at the University of Oxford, working on a project that examined Chinese diasporic and exilic literature. She has published essays on censorship and literary value, nationalism, cosmopolitanism and Aboriginal literature, and is currently collaborating on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project entitled ‘Transnational Coetzee’. Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on modern German philosophy, including Kant’s Theory of Form, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, and Modernism as a Philosophical Problem; a book on philosophy and literature, Henry James and Modern Moral Life; and two books on film. His last two books are After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism and Interanimations: Receiving Modern German Philosophy. He is a past winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. Jean-Michel Rabaté has been a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania since 1992. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a co-founder of the Slought Foundation, he is the author of thirty-five books and collections on modernism, philosophy and psychoanalysis. Jennifer Rutherford is Director of the J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide and a research professor in sociology



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and literature. She creates interdisciplinary work that fuses the humanities and social sciences and that experiments with writing and visual representation. Her books include The Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan and The White Australian Imaginary, Halfway House: The Poetics of Australian Spaces (with Barbara Holloway) and Zombies. Melancholy Migrations: Travelling with the Negative is forthcoming in 2016 (with novelist Brian Castro). She is the director of the acclaimed documentary, Ordinary People on Pauline Hanson’s One Nation movement. Paul Sheehan is an Associate Professor at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of ‘The Uses of Anachronism’, a special issue of Textual Practice (2012). Most recently he has published essays on Cormac McCarthy, Virginia Woolf, and posthuman bodies, as well as several pieces on J. M. Coetzee. Yoshiki Tajiri is Professor of English at the University of Tokyo, Japan. He has written extensively on Samuel Beckett and twentieth-century English literature. He is the author of Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and co-editor of Samuel Beckett and Pain (Rodopi, 2012). He has also edited The World of J. M. Coetzee (in Japanese, 2006) and translated a selection of J. M. Coetzee’s critical essays into Japanese (2015). Anthony Uhlmann is the director of the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. He is the author of three monographs: Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov (Bloomsbury, 2011). He was editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies from 2008–13. He is currently working on an Australian Research Council funded project on J. M. Coetzee’s fiction and is completing a monograph related to Coetzee’s work.

Acknowledgements A number of the essays reproduced here were originally presented at Traverses: J. M. Coetzee and the World, an international conference held in Adelaide in October 2014. This conference was sponsored by the J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide, the Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia, with the support of the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University, the University of Paris 8, the Australian Research Council and the Institut Universitaire de France. The research undertaken by Professor Anthony Uhlmann towards this book and the work he has published within it have been supported under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project no. DP140104427, J. M. Coetzee and Making Sense in Literature). The research undertaken by Associate Professor Paul Sheehan and Dr Lynda Ng is supported under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project no. DP150102502, Transnational Coetzee: Revisioning World Literature through the Margins). Yoshiki Tajiri’s essay in this volume is a reprint (with minor emendations) of an article which was published in Journal of Modern Literature 39:2: 72–88. We appreciate the kind permission of Indiana University Press. Anthony Uhlmann’s essay in this volume builds upon and takes in new directions a shorter essay originally published by The Sydney Review of Books under the title ‘Signs for the Soul’. We appreciate the kind permission of Western Sydney University. Jean-Michel Rabaté’s essay in this volume is a revised version of Chapter 9 of The Pathos of Distance (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016, 163–82), and we appreciate the permission of Bloomsbury. The editors would like to thank Arka Chattopadhyay for his diligent work as a copy editor on this volume. We would also like to express our appreciation to Haaris Naqvi, the commissioning editor at Bloomsbury Academic, for his advice and support in developing this project.

Introduction Jennifer Rutherford (University of Adelaide) and Anthony Uhlmann (Western Sydney University)

A number of critics, including Yoshiki Tajiri in this volume, have begun to talk about the idea of ‘late style’ in Coetzee’s fiction (Murphet,1 MacFarlane2). This is something Coetzee himself discusses with Paul Auster in Here and Now. He states: It is not uncommon for writers, as they age, to get impatient with the so-called poetry of language and go for a stripped-down style (‘late style’) […] One can think of a life in art, schematically, in two or perhaps three stages. In the first you find, or pose for yourself, a great question. In the second you labor away at answering it. And then, if you live long enough, you come to the third stage, when the aforesaid great question begins to bore you, and you need to look elsewhere.3

Critics, including Auster himself in Here and Now, relate the term to the work of Edward Said and his posthumously published On Late Style: The Evolution of the Creative Life, though Coetzee distances himself from Said’s particular use of the concept.4 In any case, the impetus, in turning to this idea, is to consider the differences that emerge and set the later works apart from earlier works. Other terms have been used in recent years by critics of Coetzee as a form of shorthand. Critics have divided the works between the South African fiction, beginning with Dusklands and ending with Disgrace, and the Australian Julian Murphet, ‘Coetzee and Late Style: Exile within the Form’, in Twentieth Century Literature 57:1 (2011): 86–104. The entire issue of this journal 57:1, edited by Murphet, is dedicated to Coetzee’s ‘late style’. 2 Elizabeth C. MacFarlane, ‘Elizabeth Costello and the Ethics of Embodiment’, New Scholar 1:1 (2011): 57–68. 3 J. M. Coetzee in Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee, Here and Now: Letters 2008–2011. (London: Faber and Harvill Secker, 2013), p. 88. 4 Auster and Coetzee, Here and Now, p. 97. 1

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fiction, foreshadowed by Elizabeth Costello (an Australian character in international settings), followed by two novels ‘set’ in Adelaide (Slow Man) and Sydney (Diary of a Bad Year). This distinction, then, refers at once to the place of composition and the settings of the works. Yet this idea has come to seem increasingly unhelpful, since the last part of Scenes from a Provincial Life, Summertime, returns to South Africa. It is still more unhelpful with regard to The Childhood of Jesus (2013), which is set in an indeterminate Spanish-speaking place that resembles Latin America but cannot be strictly identified with it. While this shift might indeed be linked with Coetzee’s now sustained engagement with Argentina (which has developed most fully after the novel appeared, as he has been visiting professor at the Universidad Nacional de General San Martín since 2014), categories related to place seem most useful as ideas that need to be critiqued or rendered more complex. Still, it is apparent that the connection between actual places and imagined places is not an arbitrary relation in his works. While the relationships are made complex in works such as Waiting for the Barbarians, Foe and The Master of Petersburg, in many of them it seems a structuring dialogical relation. Yet how does this play in The Childhood of Jesus, where the actual place to which the imagined place is related seems deliberately opaque? We will leave this question in suspension here, only raising it to underline again the problem of difference that necessarily motivates readers of The Childhood of Jesus considering the book in the context of his work as a whole. When The Childhood of Jesus was published in 2013, it was met with an initially puzzled reception, as critics struggled to come to terms with its odd setting and structure, its seemingly flat tone, and the strange affectless interactions of its characters. Most puzzling was the central character David, linked by the title to an idea of Jesus. The articles assembled here are at the forefront of an exacting process of critical engagement with this novel, which has begun to uncover its rich dialogue with philosophy, theology, mathematics, politics, and questions of meaning. The essays offer a number of things. First, they provide contexts necessary to a fuller understanding of the work. Pippin and Rabaté, for example, are

Introduction

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the first critics to examine in detail how Coetzee’s novel enters into dialogue with apocryphal infancy gospels left out of the New Testament canon of the Bible, that record the strange nature of Jesus as a child. Here he is at once all-powerful and lacking in discipline and higher knowledge, striking dead those who offend him, tormenting his teachers and so on. Other contexts concern the migrant or refugee experience (Sheehan and Ng, Rutherford); the importance of mathematical theory to this novel (Brits) as Coetzee draws on his deep understanding of mathematics; and a range of engagements with other writers (such as Gerald Murnane and Borges), as well as other texts (the Bible, Plato and the philosophical tradition, Coetzee’s own earlier works). Behind these contexts are key philosophical, political and formal concerns – concerns which all relate to questions of meaning and how meaning is constructed. With regard to philosophy, a key distinction between the immaterial (the spiritual or conceptual) and the material (matter, mud, shit) is developed. With regard to politics, these concerns play out in terms of ideals of justice and truth that confront physical realities. These concerns in turn enter into dialogue with an understanding of how literary form might approach its own limits: the limit that separates representation from the real, and the mirroring limit that creates ‘realities’ out of representations. While the essays in this book speak to one another or against one another, they did not emerge from dialogue proper; rather, most were presented at a major conference on Coetzee’s work in Adelaide in 2014 and so the authors were not able to engage directly with one another’s work. Rather than this being something we have sought to smooth out in the editorial process, we feel instead that points of overlap and apparent contradiction that at times emerge in the readings underline the multiplicity of approaches that can be taken to Coetzee’s book. That is, for example, it is possible to read the new life in Novilla as an exploration of the migrant experience and an exploration of an imagined afterlife. That is, for example, it is possible to see within the book both the utopian Plato of The Republic and the mythic Plato of Phaedrus. The novel itself is built around paradox and seemingly deliberately points its readers in several directions at once. While it is not possible to follow all of these at the same time, the critics assembled here each follow distinct lines,

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together offering readers an overview of the startling complexity of Coetzee’s novel. This collection is organized into four sections. While all sections speak to aspects of the interactions set out above, they have been grouped in terms of their principal points of emphasis. Section I, with chapters by the distinguished philosopher Robert B. Pippin (a former colleague of Coetzee’s at the Chicago Committee on Social Thought) and Jean-Michel Rabaté, concerns questions of philological, philosophical and literary critical interest – offering specific, detailed answers to the puzzle offered by the title of the book and its relation to the substance of the novel. Section II, with chapters by Rutherford, and Sheehan and Ng, concerns the social and political resonances of the novel. Rutherford links Coetzee’s imagined Novilla with the Cartesian fantasy of creating artificial human life, reading the text’s many scatological references as analogues of modernity’s waste-making regimes. Sheehan and Ng suggest that the politics and aesthetics of place are central to the work, linking the unlocatable quality of Novilla with the question of migrancy and the assimilating drive of modern nation states. They further link the novel to the genre of the political utopia through reference to Plato’s Republic. Section III, with chapters by Uhlmann on intuition and literature and Brits on mathematics and religion, considers formal processes of making meaning in literature and in mathematical and theological representations. These essays consider how meaning is generated and developed through intertextual strategies, with identifiable references to concepts from mathematics and themes from writers with whom Coetzee enters into dialogue. Uhlmann interrogates the concept of intuition in the novel, and Brits considers it in relation to Cantor’s transfinite number ‘aleph-null’ (ϰ0). Section IV interrogates the kinds of relationship that might allow us to reflect on ethics; that is, on education, formation, familial bonds and the larger question of how we should live. Kossew traces the search for mother, motherland and mother tongue in the novel, suggesting this interrogation of familial bonds sustains the possibility of constituting forms of belonging for all displaced peoples. Mehigan explores Coetzee’s ‘literature of ideas’ and its excavation of the idea of the good in a secular age, and Tajiri takes up Coetzee’s

Introduction

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late style and the question of meaning in a contingent, relative and random world, reflecting on the manner in which the novel enters into dialogue with themes apparent in all of Coetzee’s oeuvre. These diverse, far-reaching and at times discordant chapters testify to the multifaceted critical engagement inspired by the novel. At the forefront of literary invention, the novel affirms the enduring capacity of contemporary literature to engage with the most intractable social, political and spiritual problems confronting us at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The essays gathered here allow a fuller understanding of the searching questions the book raises, beginning what will undoubtedly be a much longer conversation about this novel and its forging of new forms of thinking in literature.

References Auster, Paul and J. M. Coetzee. Here and Now: Letters 2008–2011. London: Faber and Harvill Secker, 2013. MacFarlane, Elizabeth C. ‘Elizabeth Costello and the Ethics of Embodiment’. New Scholar 1:1 (2011): 57–68. Murphet, Julian. ‘Coetzee and Late Style: Exile within the Form’. Twentieth Century Literature 57:1 (2011): 86–104.

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Section I

Philological and Philosophical Concerns

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What does J. M. Coetzee’s Novel, The Childhood of Jesus have to do with the Childhood of Jesus? Robert B. Pippin

At the beginning of the novel, a forty-five-year-old man and a five-year-old boy are in a place called Novilla, having arrived after a sea voyage and a stay in some sort of transitional refugee camp called Belstar. At least, those are the ages they are assigned when they arrive, based on how old they looked to the assigner. They have had to learn Spanish at Belstar, the language of Novilla (and of Cervantes, a relevant fact later1), and they have been given new names. We are told a few times in the novel that the journey also involves being ‘washed clean’ of one’s past memories, and while the man remembers that he had a prior life, and while he knows it was very different from the life he experiences in Novilla, he does not seem to be able to recall any details, and so we learn nothing about that life, or why the sea voyage and what appears to be the resettlement of whole populations were necessary. He says once that he has ‘a memory of having memories’.2 The man is now called Simón, and the boy’s new name is David.3 The novel begins when they show up at their new home, Novilla. During the voyage, the boy had become separated from his mother and Simón assumed responsibility for him. A letter which the boy had worn in a pouch around his neck, apparently explaining some aspects of his Alonso Quixano in Cervantes’s novel will also get a new name, Don Quixote, and is about the same age as Simón. 2 J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 2013), p. 98. 3 Their original names are never mentioned. Simón is mostly referred to in the third person or as ‘the man’ and infrequently referred to by name. 1

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situation, was also lost on the ship. (So at least in David’s case, his ‘pastlessness’ is due to a lost text, something that will be important later.) The boy’s father is only mentioned once: ‘His father is a different matter’,4 but in the context of the novel this is not unusual. It is often suggested, and sometimes we are told, that fathers are rather dispensable in a family. Mothers are all-important.5 I propose that we approach this novel by focusing on three prominent aspects that should help us begin to understand it: the major elements of the plot, the content of the many conversations, and the constant intertextual formal structure. There are three major elements in the narrative. Simón must try to understand the conventions and culture of his new home. He finds work as a stevedore, but while there is modern technology in Novilla – cars, cranes, electricity, and so forth – these are not used on the docks, and so the work is, in Simón’s view, more suitable for pack animals than humans.6 Simón, bewildered, must try to understand how his comrades tolerate what they are doing, why they accept it. His job is simply to carry very heavy sacks of grain from the hold of a ship onto the docks. (At one point, he persuades them to try a crane and the results are disastrous. He ends up in the hospital.) He settles in, meets neighbours, tries to adjust to an extremely simple diet (mostly bread and a bean paste), and engages in several philosophical conversations with various interlocutors. Then, second, there is the main element of the narrative, a quest, and its consequences. Simón is committed to finding David’s mother in Novilla. When questioned about how that is possible, given that he has never seen her, has no information whatsoever about the woman, and has no reason to believe she is even in Novilla, he confidently says that he will know her when he sees her.7 Out on a walk with David one day, he comes across a place, La Residentia, apparently occupied by people considerably better off than most. (Novilla appears to be some sort of benevolent socialist country,

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 74. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 104. 6 In fact, the contrast is explicit; there are large draft horses which perform essentially the same work on the docks. The horses, and David’s affection for them, call to mind the Don again, and his horse Rocinante. 7 If one were intent on finding conventional religious resonances of the title, this (strictly speaking, wholly irrational) ‘act of faith’ about the possibility of finding David’s mother might well be one. 4 5



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and this sudden appearance of class difference and a gated community with tennis courts, where no one seems to work, is not explained. It is one of many potential sites of disruption and dissatisfaction that the contented, rather bovine citizens simply seem to accept.) He sees a young woman of about thirty with her two brothers on the tennis courts and immediately decides she is David’s mother – his real, one and only mother. He manages to meet her and he proposes that she accept David as her child. She appears to be a spoiled, self-indulgent, rather whiny and unpleasant woman, but she does immediately accept and moves into Simón’s apartment, displacing him to a storage house on the docks. There are several suggestions that the woman, named Inés, is a virgin, and for this and various other obvious reasons she could not possibly be David’s biological mother.8 (The suggestion of a virgin mother, as well as Simón’s St Joseph-like position, sound a few faint notes of the mysterious title of the novel. So does the notion of a ‘new life’ and pastlessness, since these go together in Christianity. A new life, born again, just is escape from, forgiveness for, the past; redemption from it.) But Simón insists that she is nevertheless David’s ‘real’ mother, even though he does not dispute the biological facts. (At one point, he even explains her attachment to the child by saying that ‘blood is thicker than water’,9 even though they cannot be blood relatives, and it is clear that Simón knows this.) Thus begins the third major turn in the plot. David is a very unusual child, as we shall discuss later, and begins to have trouble after they have been in Novilla for a year and he must start school. He is non-compliant, disruptive, disrespectful and often simply bizarre. When the authorities try to place David in what appears to be some sort of reform school, he escapes, and Inés decides to flee the city they are in and to begin another ‘new life’ somewhere else. Simón finally agrees to go along. They drive the car of Inés’s family away from the city. David has an accident and is temporarily blinded. They pick up a hippie sort of hitchhiker named Juan, and drive off to their new future. The novel ends in a way that could suggest the possibility of a sequel and indeed, as this book goes to press The Schooldays of Jesus has just been published.

Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 94, 102–3. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 95.

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There are two other striking features of the novel that will help create a context – a context of ideas, one should say – within which these details begin to make some sense. The first sort of context arises from the many philosophy discussions. These concern mostly human desire in a number of different contexts (not at all an unusual theme in Coetzee’s novels, especially the last three, if one counts Summertime as a novel), and metaphysics, especially the metaphysics of numbers and of the body–soul relation, and we shall return to them shortly. But before considering those discussions, we need to note some details about the literary form. The novel is written in the historical present, and seems a kind of fable, in the manner of Kleist or Kafka. The laws of nature are not suspended as in so-called magical realism, and so we have a kind of realist novel, but only after the governing presupposition of one irreal premise: that there is a country named Novilla populated entirely by refugees, and having the unusual and barely believable characteristics we have briefly described. Once that premise is established, the rest of the narration is realistic and relies a great deal on free indirect discourse. Accordingly, we could say that Simón’s mind is, largely, as much ‘the landscape of the novel’ as Novilla is. However, the novel’s most prominent literary or formal feature is its complex intertextual referential structure. There are many references to Plato (probably more to Plato than to anyone, and so to a major, repeating theme: the relation between the ideal and the real), to Wittgenstein, to Nietzsche, to Goethe, to Kafka, to Cervantes among others. But the most obvious and most puzzling is the very first thing we literally read: the title, The Childhood of Jesus. There is a small boy at the centre of the narrative, and so the title directs our attention to him. He is obviously not the historical Jesus, but the title seems to require us to find some other sort of meaning, since it is David’s childhood we read about, and the book purports to be about a childhood. Coetzee has said in a public lecture that he wanted to publish the book without a title – just a blank cover, with the title only revealed at the end.10 And one can imagine the shock to, and perhaps amusement of, the reader at such an end – at least This was at a reading in Cape Town in December of 2012. It is a fact mentioned in several reviews. For example, Jason Farago, The New Republic, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114658/ jm-coetzees-childhood-jesus-reviewed-jason-farago [accessed 1 May 2016].

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to the patient, diligent reader who does not skip ahead – upon discovering that what appears to be some sort of allegory or fable was all really about ‘the childhood of Jesus’. What could the novel just summarized above have to do with Jesus as a boy? This is, and could wholly be, of course, ironic. Imagine you have a friend with a child who is treated by his mother as a little prince, is wheeled around places even though he is five, is dressed like little Lord Fauntleroy, who proclaims his own private language, constantly disputes obvious facts, claims to be able to read minds, is very worried about unusual metaphysical possibilities (like gaps between numbers), insists on his own way in everything, describes himself as an escape artist and a great magician, says that he is invisible when he is not, is given to saying things like ‘Stay, I command you!’,11 and so forth. And imagine that this is just the beginning of such distinctions. You say, ‘My goodness, what you have been going through.’ And your friend says, ‘Yeah, the childhood of Jesus.’ That is, your friend means to say that he is burdened by a child who thinks himself the equivalent of, or greater than, Jesus himself, and, what is worse, that this view about his Jesus-like status is devoutly shared by his mother. And there is always the possibility we are being made to see that whatever the relation is between a title – any title – and a fictional work, it is not a relation, or need not only be a relation, of referential or historical ‘aboutness’ at all. Pale Fire is not a novel about a faint flame, after all. Perhaps more to the point, Bruno Dumont’s 1997 film The Life of Jesus also has nothing whatsoever to do with the Nazarene. But there are also enough deliberate references to the synoptic gospels that something more seems to be going on than self-negating irony. Simón is an alternate name for Peter, the rock on whom Jesus built his church. (It also means ‘He who has heard,’ a foreshadowing of Simón’s unusually strong ‘faith’ in David.) The name of the woman chosen, as if in an annunciation, to be the boy’s mother, Inés, means holy, chaste or pious, another reference to her virginity. Most directly and startlingly, when the boy is asked to prove that he can read and write, he writes on the board: ‘Yo soy la verdad, I am the truth.’12

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 273. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 225.

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This is far too direct a reference to Jesus to be just an ironic indication of David’s sense of his own self-importance (John 14.6, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life …’). Or at least that would be too easy. Perhaps the ultimate irony, or double irony, in other words, is that there is a serious element of truth to this ‘I am the truth’ proclamation. Or so I want to suggest later. We should also note first that the childhood of Jesus is an interesting issue in itself. If Jesus really had two natures, divine and human, was he fully human as well as fully divine throughout his life? If he was, would this not mean that at one point he was actually a human child, and not a small adult waiting for his body to grow? And if a real child, would he not be subject to the whims, narcissism, petulance and bouts of anger that children are subject to? And if so, and also fully divine, would that not be, to say the least, somewhat dangerous for his playmates and for the adults around him? In the canonical New Testament gospels, there is only one reference to Jesus as a boy before the age of twelve and his famous visit to the temple. That is in Luke (2.40), where it is simply said that Jesus ‘grew and became strong’. But there were infancy gospels that did not make the cut, or make it into the canon. (They might be said to be like David’s lost letter.)13 The infancy gospel called pseudo-Matthew resolves the issue just raised by having Jesus calm Mary and Joseph about it: ‘Do not be afraid nor consider me a child; I always have been a perfect man and am so now.’14 But in the earliest infancy gospel, that of Thomas,15 the bearing of that narrative on Coetzee’s novel is very clear. In that gospel Jesus is most definitely a child, or perhaps a vindictive and petulant and very childish small adult. A boy bumps into the child Jesus at one point, and Jesus strikes him dead. Another boy displeases him and is said to be ‘withered’. And, again very directly mirroring particular elements of David’s story, the young Jesus is taken by Joseph to Zacchaeus to learn to read, and Jesus outwits and humiliates the man to the point where Zacchaeus begs Joseph to take him away. (Jesus, it is clear, does not need to learn to read.) He is later taken to learn Greek and Hebrew (which again he clearly already The citations that follow are from Willis Barnstone (ed.), The Other Bible (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). Barnstone, The Other Bible, p. 396. 15 Barnstone, The Other Bible, pp. 398–404. 13

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knows) and in a fit of anger he kills the teacher, although he brings him back to life. (In the novel, David has kept secret that he taught himself to read, and he torments his teacher, señor Léon, until the teacher insists the boy be removed.) Moreover the Thomas Jesus performs miracles that are much more like feats of magic than benevolent displays, and David says several times that he is and will be a great magician. These cannot be accidental and they go beyond irony, or at least that first sort of exasperated irony. If David is not merely an ironic ‘Jesus,’ then in this sense – and perhaps in another irony – he is more ‘realistically’ ‘divine’ and human (‘age-appropriate human’) than the ‘official’ biblical Jesus, and so is much more like the Thomas Jesus. There are other references to the New Testament and to Christianity. To some degree the people of Novilla accept that their journey there involves being born again, ‘washed clean’ as if baptized; they believe that they have made a new beginning. (This seems Orwellian to us but we have to remember that it is a crucial Christian ideal, either by simply being forgiven, or by the more radical steps of being born again, or being redeemed in everlasting life, a life with no more past.) How their memories have been actually erased is never explained, but aside from Simón, no one else seems to care, even though they all appear to know that they had memories that they cannot recover. And this fact draws them closer to more recognizable human beings, as if ‘losing’ one’s memories can be a function of being indifferent to them, a result of living carelessly, ahistorically, without what Simón devoutly wants, ‘residence in a body with a past, a body soaked in its past’.16 One more remark about the title; this one is much more speculative. To me ‘the childhood of Jesus’ and the setting of the novel call to mind, by contrast, the death of God. By this famous phrase, Nietzsche tells us he meant the death of the highest values, and he claims we will live in the shadow of this event for centuries. (We will see more evocations of Nietzsche very soon.) It is in this sense that the conditions of exile that the two must endure could be of more general significance, a historical, not purely geographical reference. We also live ‘exiled’ from the old world, the world of the long life of God and of deep, substantive agreement about the highest values, and we must live now Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 143.

16

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in a world whose rules are hard to discern at all, much less understand. We have no living, vital memory of what it must have been like to live in such a world, and so have been washed clean. We have no good sense of how or why this happened to us, or even what it could mean that there could have been two such histories, before and after God. Perhaps there is some missing text or letter that will explain it or at least describe the moment of loss (the Chandos letter, perhaps). It is in this sense that the title, and the absence of any religious dimension to life in Novilla, might suggest some sort of new accommodation to our fate. Occasionally these references are woven through the text in a way that is barely noticeable, they are dropped in so ‘softly’ as it were. At one point, when Simón is trying to explain to David that unless he speaks the same language as everyone else (plays the same language game, we can say, given the references to Wittgenstein and private languages, rule following) he will be lonely, be shunned. He explains what ‘shunned’ means by saying: ‘You will have nowhere to lay your head.’17 This is such an unusual way to describe such loneliness that it must be a reference to a famous and beautiful passage in Matthew 8.20: ‘The foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests. But the son of man hath not where to lay his head.’ The phrase is repeated later when Simón is trying to explain being a gypsy, or what he thinks their so-called new life will look like. He says: ‘Being a gypsy means that you don’t have a proper home, a place to lay your head. It’s not much fun being a gypsy.’18 It is altogether typical of this novel that this formulation is also very relevant to another set of themes interwoven into the conversations, the issue of human nature and the problem of history. For the phrase from Matthew is a way of saying that human beings have no natural niche, no natural way to be, like the other animals. Their mode of being is up to them in a way not open to other animals. (Or, in Christian terms, our true home is finally not of this world.) Human beings, in other words, are ontological gypsies, restlessly wandering through various historical epochs and various forms of life, yearning always for more than they have, with no final resting place. Or at least, that is what

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 187. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 231.

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they are when they are most realizing what it is to be a human being. But it is a yearning and restlessness that can end; human beings can approach a state of collective lassitude and indifference and in that paradoxical sense, because they are human, can cease to be human. Novilla appears to be some sort of warning about such a possibility. (Perhaps the question of how Inès can be David’s mother, even, somehow, his blood mother, is meant to raise the oldest philosophical problem, the distinction on which philosophy and much else rests: that between physis and nomos, nature and convention.) That is not of course a definitive or final view. There are many other ‘idea contexts’ suggested by the intertextuality that also must be noted. Novilla is the Spanish word for steer or heifer, and the suggestion of a docile herd of cattle is appropriate for almost everyone we meet in Novilla. This may be a reference to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and its city of the ‘many colored cow’, and to Nietzsche’s general description of modern society as a ‘herd society’. For the most prominent characteristic of the Novillians is the faint, barely detectable level of eros animating, again barely, their everyday lives. It is as if there were some control switch for erotic longing that had been turned down to nearly zero. This too recalls Nietzche’s characterization of the coming modern human being as ‘the last men, who have invented happiness, and blink’. Nietzsche’s image is also appropriate: bows that have lost their tension, making it impossible to shoot ‘the arrow of longing’ very far. As just noted, in Nietzsche’s account of the crisis of nihilism, famously summarized by the phase ‘the death of God,’ the real death that worries him is the death of ambitious desire, of any desire for ‘the highest’, beyond the needs and pleasures of the body. Excess and useless desire, like philosophy and the creation of art and music, are also the source of human nobility, beauty, and genuine value, but it has no place in this city of last men. This only begins the multiple associations of Novilla. For example the name also evokes Novalis and so the German Frühromantik. This, and the echo of ‘novel’ in Novilla, suggests their discussions of the novel as the modern art form, and those Romantics’ singling out as the archetypical modern novel – what else? – Cervantes’s Don Quixote.19 Moreover, we would need a separate There is of course also the fact that Novilla is a city that is no real city, a no-villa.

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paper altogether to discuss the references to Coetzee’s own work, especially to the parent–child theme in Foe, or the theme of homelessness, or to Elizabeth Costello ‘before the law’. There are some detectable hints of erotic longing but they are faint. Fidel, a boy who befriends David, practises violin and David wants to learn music too. (So there is music, and some aspiration for the beautiful, but Simón tells us later that for him, music in Novilla ‘lacks weight’.)20 A comrade of Simón’s on the docks, Eugenio, attends adult education classes in philosophy at night. But it is noted that this is a philosophy suitable for Novilla, concerned with questions about tables and chairs, and not with what Simón wants, a philosophy that can change your life. It is also noted that the most popular class is life drawing with nude models although everyone seems to believe that those students simply have an objective interest in the human body. Simón’s later suspicion about large-scale self-deceit in Novilla may have some merit.21 Aside from the reference to Cervantes, there is another clear literary reference, to a poem by Goethe later set to song by Schubert, the poem ‘Erlkönig’, which David has been learning to sing in school. In Goethe’s poem, which is about a child being pursued by, tempted by death, or in other words, a child who is dying. By the last stanza, he is dead. The first stanza is: Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind; Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm, Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.

Or: Who rides, so late, through night and wind? It is the father with his child. He has the boy well in his arm. He holds him safely, he keeps him warm.

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 64. Self-deceit is important because although it is possible that Novillans have settled for a measure of happiness and contentment without knowing what they are giving up, it is more interesting and more probable that they do ‘know’ but have found a way of hiding from themselves what they know.

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But David has either learned it incorrectly or misremembers it. He sings (thinking it is a song in English): Wer reitet so spät durch Dampf und Wind? Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind; Er hat den Knaben in dem Arm, Er futtert ihn Zucker, er küsst ihm warm.22

He changes some words (hält or holds to küsst or kisses, him warm) and the last line from ‘faßt ihn sicher’ to what it must have sounded like to him, futtert ihn Zucker, so we get ‘He feeds him sugar, he kisses him warm’. The poem, of course, is about a father either desperately trying, and failing, to protect his child from death, the Erlkönig, by trying to distract him, convince him that death is not really pursuing him, or who is himself blind to what the child knows. So we have the father–son theme again, and now we are being reminded, by the boy, ironically enough, of the limitations in what a parent can protect a child from (something even clear in God the Father’s relation to his Son), or a limit in what a father can bring himself to acknowledge when the boy is in danger, all even though Goethe’s picture of the child’s dependence is exaggerated by David (one ‘feeds’ or futtert in German an animal, not a person), and if the level of tenderness is intensified (he kisses him warm, not just holds him warm).23 As mentioned above, Plato and other philosophers play a large role. In a book where names are quite important and where we are told they are – ‘And in the name the essence’, Simón thinks24 – Plato’s name is mentioned. But it is mentioned in a way that again raises the issue of irony. David had been watching television at someone’s home and is very excited to see Mickey Mouse and his dog, ‘Plato’. Mickey’s dog is Pluto, of course, as anyone of my generation would know.25 In Novilla, Plato might have the same standing as Pluto.

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 67. There is, then, some transmission of ‘the classics’ in Novilla, but at such a distance that the language is wrongly identified and the text begins to show signs of corruption. David may have the father kissing him warm because he confuses the strange erotic nature of the Erlkönig’s attempted seduction with his father’s concern. But it would be fair to say that David sees something of his relation with the protective Simón in the poem and is struck by it. 24 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 81. 25 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 183. 22 23

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The references all mostly and most clearly refer to the famous City of Pigs in Plato’s Republic, Book Two. That city is a ‘natural city’, one where a rough division of labour can provide for the most basic human needs, but where there is no excess or surplus desire beyond what provides simple contentment. The citizens of this city are so satisfied that Socrates and his interlocutors cannot ‘see’ justice in it. Justice becomes relevant as a virtue when there is something to correct or restrain or redistribute, when the deepest tension in that book (and in much of Western political thought) arises, between eros, especially eros for one’s own, and justice. So they need to ‘look at’ a ‘feverish city’. In Plato’s work, the entire project to construct such a more recognizable Kallipolis arises in the simplest of ways, when Glaucon asks of this city whether the citizens would not want spices.26 This turns out to mean either that they will want something they cannot produce, or they will have something that their neighbours will want too. This means they must protect themselves, arm themselves, and that means they require guardians who can be watchdogs to the homeland and wolves to their enemies at the same time. This starts the question of the proper education of the guardians that dominates the book. Novilla is also a land with nothing in excess and, explicitly, no spices: ‘He has yet to find a shop that sells spices.’27 Novilla does not seem to have any army, or much of a police force either. Indeed, like the courtly romances that Cervantes is parodying, there is also nothing in the way of politics. There are other references to Plato, for example to Phaedrus.28 Simón once has a dream about a chariot pulled by two horses, in Plato an image of the soul and about the difficulty of getting reason to control thymos and eros, to get them to ‘pull in the same direction’. (Plato’s Phaedrus chariot is also invoked in Coetzee’s Slow Man.) In the dream though, David is driving with no difficulty and we are told that ‘the look on his face is a familiar one: selfsatisfaction, perhaps even triumph’.29 There is our ‘Jesus’ irony again. There is also a very funny riff on both Platonic dualism (‘We partake of the ideal,’ Simón says to David, ‘but we also make poo. That is because we have a double Plato, Republic, Bk 2, 372b, pp. 618–19. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 59. Plato, Phaedrus, 246aaf, pp. 493–4. 29 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 238. 26 27 28



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nature’)30 and the theory of forms. The chapter concludes with something like the metaphysics of poo or how Simón imagines philosophers would formulate the issue – what he calls ‘the pooness of poo’.31 This might be a reference to the discussion in the Parmenides when Socrates is embarrassed in defending his theory of ideas under Parmenides’ interrogation about the possibility of ideas of hair, or mud or ‘dirt’, something unclean (rupos).32 But it is the Platonic account of eros that is the most important in the book, and those conversations should be noted more fully. Then we will be in a position to return to the question of the title. The issue of eros comes up mostly of course when Simón tries to explain dimensions of human sexual desire to people who seem to have none, and so experience none of its implications and consequences (much of which, in Plato, goes far beyond sexual satisfaction). This is especially true in a discussion Simón has with Ana, the woman whom they first met at the induction centre. She asks them to a picnic with friends, but the three of them are the only picnickers who show up. Simón wonders if this is some sort of invitation, and he learns quickly that it is not. Ana is not only indifferent but hostile to sexuality. She asks Simón where human desires in general lead. And he tells her that they lead him to ‘more than crackers and bean paste … They lead, for instance, to beef-steak with mashed potatoes and gravy … beef-steak dripping with meat juice.’33 He describes the country as ‘bloodless’, and goes on: Everyone I meet is so decent, so kindly, so well-intentioned. No one swears or gets angry. No one gets drunk. No one even raises his voice. You live on a diet of bread and water and bean paste and you claim to be filled. How can that be, humanly speaking? Are you lying, even to yourselves? 34

Simón goes on to try to explain what he calls the mystery of beauty to Ana, but to no avail. Her response is blunt, when he says that a sexual attraction inspired by beauty is a tribute or an offering to a woman. She responds: Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 133. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 135. 32 Plato, Parmenides, 130a–3, pp. 924–7. 33 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 29. 34 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 30. 30 31

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J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus And as a tribute to me, an offering, not an insult, you want to grip me tight and push part of your body into me. As a tribute you claim. I am baffled. To me the whole business seems absurd – absurd for you to want to perform and absurd for me to permit.35

This is the kind of reductionist result Nietzsche worried about among those who accept without understanding the implications of the death of God and the highest values. The Platonic tension between eros and justice emerges at the end of their conversation when Ana points out that if she were some incarnation of the good, and not the beautiful he would not want to ‘perform such an act upon me’. And Novilla does seem to have somehow tamped down or almost eliminated any intoxication or rapture at the beautiful, and all of its destabilizing dangerous implications, in favour of some pedestrian, rather unambitious view of the good – the secure, peaceful, civil world Simón finds so dissatisfying. (When he fills out an application to be serviced at a brothel, he writes: ‘I am starved of beauty, feminine beauty … I crave beauty, which in my experience inspires awe and gratitude …’36) Simón also responds in a way that seems to channel Plato’s Symposium when he disputes his young friend Eugenio’s account of what he learned in philosophy class, which is a misunderstanding of Plato.37 Since the love of the beautiful is ultimately a love of the ideal, he has learned, we should ignore or repress our desires for ‘inferior copies’ and so avoid the inevitable disappointment and sadness that comes from such inferiority. But Simón briefly offers the more Platonic, less starkly dualistic view: If it is of the nature of desire to reach for what lies beyond its grasp, should we be surprised if it is not satisfied? Did your teacher at the Institute not tell you that embracing inferior copies may be a necessary step in the ascent towards the good and the true and the beautiful? Ask yourself where we would be if there were no such things as ladders.38

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 32. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 139. Plato, Symposium, 210aff., pp. 561–2. 38 Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 141–2. 35 36 37



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Simón does sleep with Elena, the mother of David’s playmate, Fidel, but she too is passionless and matter-of-fact about it. (‘“If you like, we can do it now,” she will say, and then close the door and take off her clothes.’39) When Simón again expresses unease at the absence of passion, Elena, like Ana, expresses what seems to be the very widely held view of Novillians. She says: Yet I am willing to bet that if tomorrow you were offered all the passion you wanted – passion by the bucketful – you would promptly find something new to miss, to lack. This endless dissatisfaction, this yearning for the something-more that is missing, is a way of thinking we are well rid of, in my opinion. Nothing is missing. The nothing that you think is missing is an illusion. You are living by an illusion.40

This notion of illusion is an important one in the novel and we will return to it. It is connected to the only book Simón can find to read to David, a children’s version of Don Quixote, and connected to the question of the relation between fantasy, or perhaps art itself, and the real, or mundane reality. This is the conflict that arises over whether Sancho Panza, who sees windmills, or the Don, who sees giants, is right. Or at least whether that question is so straightforward. Finally we should note that Novilla is not completely uniform, and there are forms of affection. There is certainly intense and genuine familial love between Simón and David,41 and a general caritas among the citizens; they are concerned with and care for each other. There is joy, and sport, and camaraderie. And there certainly is an erotic subculture. It is not as if everyone shares all the views of Inés, Elena, Álvaro and Eugenio. We also meet one Emilio Daga, a kind of pop-culture dandy who eventually wields a great deal of influence over Inés and David, much to Simón’s dismay. Daga is certainly not satisfied with what the Novillians are satisfied with. When we first see him he starts a fight and steals money. (The event also highlights another absence in the townspeople, something else missing: thymos, spiritedness. There is no outrage over the theft, no call for vengeance, no pursuit of Daga.) But the nature of Daga’s ‘excess’ seems consumerist, unserious, trivial. When he Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 61. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 62. 41 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 90. 39 40

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returns to the narrative over a hundred pages later, he enchants David with a magic pen, which David, Don Quixote-like, describes this way: There’s a lady inside it, and you think it’s a picture, but it isn’t. It’s a real lady, a tiny, tiny lady, and when you turn the pen upside down her clothes fall off and she is naked.42

As Simón describes Daga: He wears a earring, he carries a knife, he drinks firewater. He has a pretty girlfriend. He has Mickey Mouse at home in a box. I have no idea how to bring the boy to his senses. Inés is under the man’s spell too.43

So, another question to pose: the significance of this natural affinity between David and Daga. Is it more than a child’s interest in an exotic character who has as little regard for the rules as David? There is much more philosophy discussed than we have time to isolate and consider in the light of the novel’s literary purpose. This, for example, is Simón’s summary of David’s problem with mathematics. It is for our purposes less important as a theory or intellectual issue than for the fact that Simón, who has tried to voice a kind of Sancho Panza probity and realism to David, is now defending David. About David, he says: It is as if the numbers were islands floating in a great, black sea of nothingness, and he were each time being asked to close his eyes and launch himself across the void. What if I fall? – that is what he asks himself. What if I fell and then keep falling forever? Lying in bed in the middle of the night, I could sometimes worry that I too was falling, falling under the same spell that grips the boy. If getting from one to two is so hard, I asked myself, how shall I ever get from zero to one? From nowhere to somewhere: it seemed to demand a miracle each time.44

The numbers theme is connected with a kind of low, Wittgensteinian rumble throughout the narrative: the private language argument,45 the rule-following problem, the nature of mathematical knowledge. (There is clearly an aesthetic and perhaps philosophical connection between the austerity, precision and Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 179. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 188. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 249. 45 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 186. 42 43 44



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sparseness of Coetzee’s prose, and the conceptual austerity, minimalism, and the ‘placeless’ tonality of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, between aesthetic and philosophical modernism, one might say.) There is also a debate about the meaning of work,46 about whether history is real, about the nature of value, whether there is a human nature, Simón often evinces fatalist sentiments, and there is more. But perhaps we have enough to re-raise the question in the title about the boyhood of Jesus. We are clearly not in Nazareth, so where are we? Nowadays, our first inclination is probably to believe that this is some post-apocalyptic world, and that for some reason Novilla and perhaps a few other places are the only regions safe to inhabit. The setting might be our dystopian future, or perhaps our utopian future. It is also possible that the characters are dead and in the underworld or heaven or some transitional state. People die in Novilla too, although the journey they take after they die is described in terms that sound very much like the journey that Simón and the boy have taken in order to get there. When Simón is explaining Marciano’s death to David, he says: ‘Marciano doesn’t want to be saved, to be brought back to this life … He is probably crossing the seas at this very moment, looking forward to the next life. It will be a great adventure for him, to start anew, to be washed clean.’47 Those who die may go to a transitional place to be reincarnated and with all the references to Plato’s Republic, perhaps the choice of a new life in the Myth of Er is suggested.48 Simón tells David at one point: ‘After death there is always another life. You have seen that.’49 (He may mean that they have died or that David has seen that a new life is possible after his mother’s death or disappearance, even a new life with a new mother.) He goes on to tell David: ‘We are like ideas. Ideas never die.’50 This all may indicate another fainter allusion. There is something in Simón’s and David’s quest that is like Virgil’s and Dante’s passage through the realms of the dead in The Divine Comedy – in the case of Novilla, the spiritually dead. As Hegel said of such Dantean realms in his Lectures on Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 108–11. Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 156–7. 48 Thanks to Nathan Tarcov for suggesting this possibility. 49 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 133. 50 See also Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 101, 123, 127, 145. 46 47

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Aesthetics, the dead there live changeless lives because they have no longer any history; they live in a permanent nunc stans. But just as Dante allows his characters to introduce novelty, bringing fresh news of the living to Farinata and Cavalcante de Cavalcanti for example (greatly upsetting both of them, changing what they experience), Simón and David might be said to have introduced novelty, the stuff of history into Novilla. There is such stasis in Novilla because it is a loveless place in every sense. It is Simón’s and Inès’s love for David that prompts their little revolution, their hope for a genuinely new beginning, a resistance to static repetition that is like Dago’s erotic rebellion, but more substantial, more generous. Perhaps it is safest to say that they are in a world that ours could be, could turn into, is turning into, or has turned into. It could be all that but also a kind of death, in the sense that Nietzsche means when he says the soul can die well before the body. It could even seem to be an ideal that, in our world, one that is certainly erotically animated, violent and chaotic, we project as an alternative. (Plato echoes again: this would be Cephalus’s ideal from Book One of The Republic, when he quotes Sophocles praising old age as an escape from ‘raging and savage beast of a master’.)51 But perhaps all we need to say is that it is a recognizably human world, even if extreme in a way that brings to light, as Simón says, what is missing, eros and its dissatisfactions, its own mysterious comings and goings in human life, its role as a ‘ladder’ to something higher. This would mean many things: a yearning for more than bodily satisfactions, for the beautiful, for philosophy, for self-knowledge, with all the unpredictability, disappointment, and unhappiness all that can bring with it. We can see such yearning and what it entails better, by virtue of its absence, in the way that the absence of justice in Plato’s City of Pigs shows us where to look for it. I noted briefly before that in such a world, Simón comes to believe more and more in David, to have faith in him, comes to admire the ferocity of Inés’s refusal to let the state take David to reform school. By the end of the novel, David is inviting people, like Juan, the John the Baptist figure they meet on the road and the doctor he sees for his eyes, to join them in their new life, all like Plato, The Republic, Bk 1, 329c4, p. 578.

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Jesus calling on Matthew and others, and issuing various other commands, and Simón, despite an occasional weak protest, goes along with all of it, defending David and his ideas when he needs to. So, to say it all at once then, one of the many ironies in the book is that David actually does ‘redeem’ them; he is their redeemer, saviour, pulls them out of their rut. (In yet another irony, they would not be saved from sin, but from the absence of sin.) The three of them do not settle down to bread, bean paste and occasional fruit, to mind-numbing work, passionless procreation, weightless music, a life in the herd of contented cows, and this all because of David. They are going to Estrellita, a new little star, announcing a new kind of nativity, and all of them believe they will have such a new life, even a new form of life. In fact, Simón, who at least has memories of having memories and so is the only one he encounters who is dissatisfied, is primed for this new faith in David. He had already begun the process leading to this break by insisting, in effect, that there was a sense in which Inés could be David’s ‘real mother’, but that sense was not biological. This new life, together with the defence of David, involves faith of a sort that requires participation in a kind of fantasy, but it also raises the question of whether the most relevant thing to say about a fantasy, at least in several contexts, is that it is literally false. When they read together a child’s version of Don Quixote – a child’s version, but one that preserves the astonishing meta-fictional, self-referential quality of the original – the conversation between Simón and David mostly involves Simón’s attempt to convince David that in the narration Sancho Panza is right and the Don is deluded; there are no giants, the Don does not really descend into the earth. (Novilla is full of Sancho Panzas – without the humour – and David is the only Don.) In the context created by the novel, however, this misses the point of the Don’s quest. It recalls rather Ana’s literalism and her conception of the role of beauty in romance, as if the truth behind the fantasies of rapture, offerings and tributes is ‘you want to grip me tight and push part of your body into me. As a tribute you claim.’ It recalls Elena’s utilitarian servicing of Simón, and Eugenio’s version of philosophy as a series of puzzle cases and as asceticism. Perhaps we have enough to say that in such a context, insisting that the New Testament is literally false is of a piece with the same point-missing error in insisting that

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it is historically true. When Simón says that he is starved of feminine beauty, it is not only obviously irrelevant to point out that one cannot eat such beauty and so cannot be starved of it, but also missing the point if we translate the claim and think he simply means to say that he would like to look at beautiful women. What he does mean and why he must say it that way is the question constantly being addressed in the novel. Perhaps we also have enough to suggest that the same point is missed in the baffled reviews of Coetzee’s novel by reviewers who insist that what is described could not happen, does not make ‘realistic’ sense. (This point is also connected with the large question of the point, the literary purpose of the complex intertextuality in the novel. Why are so many of the events and dialogue we read about in the novel always already a reflection of or an echo of or an allusion to some literary or philosophical text? This question is obviously of a piece with: what does it mean to imply that this novel could be, should be called, The Childhood of Jesus, as if a comment of sorts on the beginning or source of all that ‘Jesus’ has come to mean? I will return to this issue in closing.) This is not to say that we are being encouraged to ‘side with’ the Don, indulge and act on fantasies, or simply believe David’s fantastical claims, believe in his fantastical actions. We don’t believe there is a country named Novilla in which everyone, no matter their native language, must speak Spanish, but we also don’t believe that telling the tale is a pointless exercise in fantasy either. This only begins to touch on the question of whether the novel, as in effect a kind of fantasy, especially if it is a fantastical novel, should be considered not only a form of thought (a distinct way of understanding the nature of human desire, say) but also a form of truth. But I am convinced we are brought right to that question by this remarkable book. Finally, I have suggested that, in the first place, the reference to the childhood of Jesus is ironic, a reference to David’s and Inés’s pretensions to grandeur, and suggested too that this is a double irony, because David is more like a child who is also divine (in the Platonic sense of inspired and inspiring, self-transcending, as well as a human animal) than was the biblical Jesus, and because he is in some sense a kind of redeemer. But this is all subject to a third irony, or third level of irony. There will be no new beginning in Estrellita. (Has Simón had somehow ‘washed away’ his earlier yearning for ‘a body soaked in



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its past’, not a new beginning? Has he become a Novillan?) The ending of the novel echoes its beginning, and our three heroes will no doubt soon be dealing with Novilla’s passive-aggressive bureaucrats yet again. But, again, that is not the point. When David asks what they are actually going to do in Estrellita, all Simón can say is that they will again find the Relocation Centre and again say: ‘Good morning, we are new arrivals, and we are looking for somewhere to stay.’52 David reasonably asks: ‘And?’ Simón can only reply: ‘That’s all. Looking for somewhere to stay, to start our new life.’53 But a belief in a new life, one different from Novilla, is certainly not ironized away. Such a belief is an expression of what matters, and it matters to everyone in various ways that they not be chained to their past, reliving it, burdened always by it. But mattering in any sense arises and subsides in the domain of the imagination, a tangled domain of beauty, fantasy, desire, yearning, and, as here, in hope against hope; as well as in the domain of narcissism, selfindulgence, tawdriness, impulsiveness. Inés is captured by the image of herself as a mother, not by any biological evidence. There is no such evidence, and her decision is not a product of reflection. But Simón, in a final irony, has been proven right. She is, has become, his ‘real’ mother. Perhaps more to the point, for all of the irony and the fantastical elements of the plot, we, the readers, ‘believe in’ Inés and David and Simón. We want David to escape the reform school, we believe in how much Simón misses David when Inés takes over, and we believe in Inés’s love for and ferocious, uncompromising defence of David. We believe, one could say, in the reality created by great literature, and Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus surely counts as great literature. This issue of literariness prompts one last, very speculative remark on intertextuality. We have seen that a great deal of what happens and what is said in the novel echoes, or resonates with, some other philosophical or religious or literary text. What point is being made by tying the novel to these sources? We hear that in ‘postmodern’ fiction, this is a sign that what we take to be real is always really textual – not literally made of printed words but inaccessible in

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 277. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 277.

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itself. We never escape the play of language and text, never get hors de texte; the pretence of genuine referentiality can always be deconstructed. But in Coetzee’s novel, the point of this formal feature seems to me just the opposite. It is in the interanimated world of thought and letters that whatever reality worth knowing is always to be found. (It is a common non-sequitur to think that because the world is intelligible only as imagined or represented that the world, the one we must content ourselves with, consists in imaginings and representings.) Rather, it is the conception of a so-called reality from which these meaning-making efforts have been ‘subtracted’ that is fictional, even delusional.54 It is also much more artificial and constructed a conception of the real, and not at all ‘genuine’. The world encountered without the inspiration of a ‘divine’ eros, and without the efforts of the imagination to understand and live in it, is the world of Novilla, as unreal as Ana’s biological literalist realism. There is a passage from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science that puts the point very well. It seems to me as if written in anticipation of The Childhood of Jesus: Without this art we would … live entirely under the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.55

References Barnstone, Willis (ed.). The Other Bible. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Coetzee, J. M. The Childhood of Jesus. New York: Penguin, 2013. Coetzee, J. M. The Schooldays of Jesus. New York: Vintage, 2016. Farago, Jason. ‘J. M. Coetzee’s Stunning New Novel Shows What Happens When a Nobel Winner Gets Really Weird’. New Republic, http://www.newrepublic.com/

The philosophical locus classicus for this argument is in the Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, where he criticizes a view of knowledge as an instrument, or screen or filter. It is also a crucial premise for all of the early Heidegger’s work. See also this passage in Nietzsche on the very idea of ‘subtracting’ our contribution to knowing the truth: this would be to demand ‘an eye which cannot be thought at all, an eye turned in no direction at all, an eye where the active and interpretative powers are to be suppressed, absent, but through which seeing still becomes a seeingsomething, so it is an absurdity and non-concept of eye that is demanded’. The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), III, §12, p. 87. 55 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kauffmann (New York: Vintage, 1974) §78, p. 133. 54



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article/114658/jm-coetzees-childhood-jesus-reviewed-jason-farago [accessed 1 May 2016]. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, trans. W. Kauffmann. New York: Vintage, 1974. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. W. Kauffmann. New York: Vintage, 1978. Plato. The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

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Pathos of the Future: Writing and Hospitality in The Childhood of Jesus1 Jean-Michel Rabaté

If Coetzee’s first novels examined the wounds left by colonial and postcolonial times in South Africa and speak, more often than not, by letting them bleed more openly, the recent novels have focused on new and broader topics. The texts of the recent decade have opened another field, either by launching a sort of ‘auto-fiction’ in which one cannot distinguish between ‘real’ memories and invented stories, or by creating a new novelistic space to explore. This is the case in The Childhood of Jesus,2 since the first thing that strikes any reader is that we have to follow the engrossing adventures of Simón and David by adapting, as they do, to a world in which all the rules are new. They look like refugees from another continent, probably devastated by a war or a catastrophe, moving to Novilla, a city designed for immigrants leaving behind their former lives. However, in this new setting, The Childhood of Jesus manages to repeat and invert the main plot of The Master of Petersburg. Both novels are connected by the topos of a father who comes to terms with paternity by facing a son who is not really his son. The Russian novel begins after the death of Pavel and sketches a struggle between two types of Russian pathos, corresponding to different utopias, whose counterpart the novel of Novilla/Australia provides in its very dystopia. The Childhood of Jesus seems to offer a belated development of the interaction between Dostoevsky and Anna, just when they make love for the last time in This is a revised version of Chapter 9 of The Pathos of Distance (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 163–82. 2 J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2013). 1

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the novel and when she blurts out: ‘So was that meant to bring about the birth of the saviour?’3 Meanwhile, the male clash between the tortured Dostoevsky, aware of his general failure as a substitute father for the now dead Pavel, and the nihilist Nechaev, ready to exploit the writer’s guilt for his revolutionary aims, is the backbone of a narrative replete with sexual crises, epileptic swooning, existential despair, metaphysical anguish and mad Russian pathos. The contrast is enormous when we witness the programmatic destruction of affect in the world of Novilla whose apparent utopia, promising peace and good to all newcomers, is predicated on the erasure of passion. This dystopic element comes to the fore when we understand to what point this world is cleansed, devoid of emotion and sexual desire. All strong affects, mostly those connected with love and sex, have vanished, as if they were blamed for the unnamed disaster in the old world. The novel thus suggests obliquely the need for a saviour, that is someone capable of destroying the consensus against pathos and bringing back the salt of life. Such a programme implies reawakening pathos, which entails the unleashing of unholy passions. As Nietzsche repeated, the ‘death of God’ may have led to a worse nihilism, that is to a moment when all values disappear. The question of a renewal of religion facing an all too bland nihilism is linked in The Childhood of Jesus with the issue of language. To investigate this link, I will take as my point of departure a remark made by Coetzee to Paul Auster about Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other in an exchange of letters from May 2009.4 Coetzee quotes the sentence with which Derrida begins Monolingualism of the Other. Derrida had imagined that someone looking very much like him would say: ‘I only have one language; it is not mine.’5 Coetzee compares his relation with English to Derrida’s assertion that he does not ‘have’ the French language, adding: What interested me is Derrida’s claim that, though he is/was monolingual in French (monolingual by his own standards – his English was excellent, as I am J. M. Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 225. The statement is interpreted as a ‘blasphemy’ by Dostoevsky in the novel. 4 Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee, Here and Now, Letters 2008–2011 (New York: Viking, 2013), pp. 65–7. 5 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 1. 3



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sure was his German, to say nothing of his Greek), French is/was not his mother tongue. When I read this it struck me that he could have been writing about me and my relation to English; and a day later, it struck me further that neither he nor I is exceptional, that many writers and intellectuals have a removed or interrogative relation to the language they speak and write, in fact that referring to the language one uses as one’s mother tongue (langue maternelle) has become distinctly old-fashioned.6

Coetzee develops the implications of Derrida’s remark by adducing his own sense of non-ownership facing English, which for him was originally one among many school subjects that had to be learned at school. Even though he spoke English fluently, Coetzee imagined the ‘English’ language to mean, literally, the property of the English. The English alone would own English. English would be the language of one human group, a group that made up an empire including large parts of Africa. English, the language of those who defeated the Boers and ruled South Africa. As Joyce would say, describing Stephen Dedalus, acutely aware that he was using the language of the conqueror of his nation, the same words do not have the same value for the oppressed and for the oppressor: The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and foreign, will always be for me an acquired language.7

What Joyce experienced as a young man in colonial Dublin was not different from Coetzee’s youth in a South Africa that had been a British dominion and saw the rise of Apartheid. If Coetzee’s family was bilingual, switching easily from English to Afrikaans, this was not the case for Joyce’s family: they spoke English only and not Gaelic, as Nora Barnacle had earlier. Later in life, Joyce and Nora used the Triestine dialect of Italian to converse with family members. In Derrida’s family, no other language but French was spoken in El Biar or Algiers. However, at the age of ten, Jackie Derrida was turned away from his French high school. Vichy’s racial laws had set a quota for Jewish Auster and Coetzee, Here and Now, pp. 65–6. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 205.

6 7

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children in 1942. The anti-Semitic zeal of the French administration could not even be blamed on the Nazi regime: these rules were imposed by the French colonial administration in order to please the German authorities. The trauma had lasting effects for Derrida and partly explains his complex position facing the French language – the language in which he spoke, wrote and thought was never fully a ‘mother tongue’. When British and American troops landed in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, Derrida, who had been sent to a Jewish school and felt that he did not belong there either, went back to his old school. De Gaulle took over and French nationality was restored to the Jewish community. At the other end of the same continent, in Cape Town, Coetzee was just two years old. These biographical details apprehend a larger history that is envisioned, even if obliquely, by Coetzee’s novels. In the context of this colonial history, we understand how the author was caught in conflicting allegiances when he went to England at the age of twenty-one. He could speak English better than most of the natives, and yet, as soon as he opened his mouth, betrayed that he was a foreigner. When they were speaking their mother tongue, he borrowed it as a guest.8 The predicament seems universal: how can anyone conceive of language as his or her own? Paul Auster’s response stresses the other side of what is implied by linguistic inheritance. He was well placed to grasp the contingent character of a writer’s relation to language: ‘Just three generations ago, my great-grandparents spoke Russian, Polish, and Yiddish. That I was raised in an English-speaking country strikes me as a wholly contingent fact, a fluke of history.’9 His letter then mentions a joke, more precisely a ridiculously serious assertion made by a Southern fundamentalist whom he had heard on the radio. This person believed that the US should stop wasting money teaching foreign languages, and added this definitive argument: ‘If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.’10 Auster generously decides that this remark does not just betray provincial stupidity but also confirms the post-Wittgensteinian theory that ‘your world is your language’. Indeed, it seems difficult to see Auster and Coetzee, Here and Now, p. 67. Auster and Coetzee, Here and Now, p. 70. 10 Auster and Coetzee, Here and Now, p. 69. 8 9



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anything beyond one’s language, especially if one lives in the Bible belt. Could Auster’s funny vignette have triggered an associative process and planted the seeds of a story about the childhood of Jesus? If this had been the case, it would leave us wondering what language Jesus really ‘had’. What do we know about the language of Jesus, let alone the language of God? The riddle was often solved in this manner: God would have written the first tables of the law, before Moses destroyed them, and spoken to Moses in Hebrew; Jesus, or Christ, or Rabbi Jeshua, spoke and wrote in Aramaic, the lingua franca of Palestine in the first century ad, a language that gave birth to Arabic. This Babelic divergence should lead us to examine the name of one of the main protagonists of The Childhood of Jesus, Simón, which obviously quotes a famous pun of Biblical history. This was a foundational pun in the Gospels, when in John 1.42 presented Jesus’s most faithful disciple: ‘“You are Simon son of John, you shall be called Cephas”, which means Peter.’ Cephas was the nickname given by Jesus to the apostle known as Simon, who became ‘Simon Peter’.’ The Greek of John 1.42 can be transliterated as Κηφᾶς (Kēphâs). There is no etymological link between the apostle’s given name of Simon and the Aramaic nickname of kêpâ, meaning ‘rock’ or ‘stone’. In Greek, a sigma had to be added to kêpâ so as to make the name sound masculine. The meaning of the name was more important than the name itself. We now accept the Greek translation of Πέτρος (Petros) as Peter. We can evoke other translations, like the name of Joyce deriving from a French name, Joyeux, Freud’s name translated into German to mean ‘joy’, a French Huguenot family giving to Beckett the liquid echoes of Bequet, not to mention another French immigrant, Dirk Couché, born in 1655 – possibly a Huguenot too – whose name was transliterated as Coetsé after he had settled in The Cape. Coetsé settled on a farm in Stellenboch later called Coetzenburg.11 All this forces us to look more closely at diacritics, especially at accents. The main protagonist’s name is Simón with an accent on the ‘o’, but this name is not even his real name. When his passbook is mentioned along with that of David, he says about Belstar, their port of arrival: ‘This is where

For these details, see J. C. Kannemeyer, J. M. Coetzee, A Life in Writing, trans. Michiel Heyns (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2012), pp. 620–1.

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they gave us our names, our Spanish names.’12 In fact, Simón, the focalizer of the narrative, is always called ‘he’. We are reminded of his name when he is addressed by other characters or has to decline his identity. Similarly, David is not the child’s name: Elena notes that Simón keeps referring to him as ‘the boy’. Simón explains his use of the generic thus: ‘David is a name they gave him at the camp. He doesn’t like it, he says it is not his true name. I try not to use it unless I have to.’13 Such a denial of one’s name can lead one into the domain of what Freud called a ‘family romance’, in which one imagines one’s parents as noble personages or divine beings. Foundations always imply new baptisms. An early mode of Christian punning corresponded to a linguistic baptism working via a series of translations from Hebrew to Aramaic to Greek and to Latin. From the Hebrew Shim’on, meaning ‘hearing, or he who hears’, we have Cephas, Petros, Petrus and Peter. Such an accretive punning process played a huge role in the constitution of the Gospels themselves. In order to follow these investigations, we should not limit ourselves to the ‘authentic’ or ‘canonical’ gospels but take into account a larger tradition that includes deviant, apocryphal, or even subversive gospels. One of these is called the gospel of Thomas. Not being sure whether it constituted one of the sources of The Childhood of Jesus, I want to quote it because it has always intrigued me and seems relevant anyway. The gospels implicitly alluded to by the title of the novel should include the gospels of pseudo-Thomas or pseudo-Matthew, if only because these two describe the childhood of Jesus. Those important years of formation are skipped or dealt with cursorily by the canonical gospels; a lot of attention is given to the circumstances of the birth, but then we jump from the birth to the life of Jesus as an adolescent and an adult. In the apocryphal gospels, we discover a wild and often terrifying younger Jesus. He kills with one gaze at the least provocation. In the gospel of Thomas, before we reach the passage I want to comment on, Jesus has already killed two boys who annoyed him and he has blinded all those who refuse to recognize his divinity. His motto is the sentence: ‘Don’t make me upset.’14 Hearing of the deaths, curses and unsocial Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 2. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 56. 14 The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas, ed. and trans. Ronald F. Hock, The Scholar’s Bible (Santa 12 13



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behaviour, a schoolteacher named Zacchaeus decides to teach Jesus. If he can teach him to read, he assumes, this will subdue his fierce spirit. Joseph argues that it is impossible: ‘No one is able to rule this child except God alone. Don’t consider him to be a small cross, brother.’15 Jesus adds that there is nothing one can teach him, because, as he claims, he was alive before the teacher was born. Jesus offers to bring wisdom to the teacher: he will tell him when he dies, adding ominously: ‘When you see the cross that my father mentioned, then you’ll believe that everything I’ve told you is true.’16 All the others marvel and are in awe: the child is barely five years old and he speaks like a prophet. Nevertheless, the teacher insists: ‘Bring him to the classroom and I’ll teach him the alphabet.’17 Here is the scene: Joseph took him by the hand and led him to the classroom. The teacher wrote the alphabet for him and began the instruction by repeating the letter alpha many times. But the child clammed up and did not answer him for a long time. No wonder, then, that the teacher got angry and struck him on the head. The child took the blow calmly and replied to him, ‘I’m teaching you rather than being taught by you: I already know the letters you’re teaching me, and your condemnation is great. To you these letters are like a bronze pitcher or a clashing cymbal, which can’t produce glory or wisdom because it’s all just noise. Nor does anyone understand the extent of my wisdom.’ When he got over being angry he recited the letters from alpha to omega very quickly. Then he looked at the teacher and told him: ‘Since you don’t know the real nature of the letter alpha, how are you going to teach the letter beta? You imposter, if you know, teach me first the letter alpha and then I’ll trust you with the letter beta.’ He began to quiz the teacher about the first letter, but the latter was unable to say anything.18

With all the audience listening, Jesus explains to Zacchaeus the rudiments of his own grammatology: ‘Listen, teacher, and observe the arrangement of the first letter: How it has two straight lines or strokes proceeding to a point in the middle, gathered together,

16 17 18 15

Rosa: California, 1995), p. 111. The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas, p. 113. The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas, p. 115. The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas, p. 115. The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas, p. 117.

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Jesus’s vibrant evocation describes Alpha, the first letter of the Greek alphabet, its loop crossing in the middle, not Aleph, the first letter of Hebrew or Aramaic. Zacchaeus hears the child present intricate allegories (allegorias) regarding the first letter and despairs of his profession: a mere child has shamed him while proving his divine nature, and he mutters: ‘I just don’t know, friends’ (agnoô, ô philoi). Confessing his ignorance of the arche or the telos of the alphabet,20 he admits to being an ‘ignorant schoolmaster’ as Jacques Rancière had it. Jesus laughs and pardons him and all the others, promising that the blind will see. The unbelievers whom he had blinded open their eyes and see. After the unexpected recantation of the pedagogue, Jesus appears less vicious. A subsequent series of miracles resurrect dead children and heal people’s wounds. However, this is not the end. After the bad experience with a first teacher, Joseph again insists that Jesus should learn the alphabet. He finds a second teacher, who having heard of what happened to Zacchaeus is cautious. Indeed, Jesus is less patient. After the exasperated teacher strikes him, Jesus curses him; the teacher falls to the ground, lifeless. Joseph concludes: ‘Those who annoy him end up dead.’21 Undaunted, Joseph summons a third teacher, and all goes even faster. Jesus does not waste time discussing the shape of the letters, he takes a book and interprets it: ‘Jesus strode boldly into the schoolroom and found a book lying on the desk. He took the book but did not read the letters in it. Rather, he opened his mouth and spoke by the power of the holy spirit and taught the law (nomos) to those standing there.’22 Satisfied with his performance, Jesus then revives the second teacher. In all these narratives, Jesus is presented as a gifted but contrarian child aware of his divine powers, who can truly say: ‘I am Alpha and Omega’, as Revelation 1.8 has it. He is before and after time, and the pedagogues who cannot explain the mystical links between the first and the second letter of the 22 19 20 21

The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas, p. 119. The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas, p. 122. The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas, p. 133. The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas, p. 135.



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alphabet and the apocalyptic ending of time have to be taught a lesson. We find an equivalent of this scene in The Childhood of Jesus when David says: ‘Yo soy la verdad, I am the truth.’23 David was asked to write ‘Conviene que yo diga la verdad’ (I must tell the truth) but distorts the sentence wilfully. The Jesus of the canonical gospels would say in Spanish: ‘Yo soy el camino, la verdad y la vida.’ At this point, however, the teacher explodes and complains about the child’s insubordination, stating that there can be only one authority in a classroom.24 Hence authority will have to be re-examined, perhaps subverted, if not discarded in the name of the freedom of the Imagination opening to the otherness of the future. The Alpha–Omega trope is alluded to obliquely in The Childhood of Jesus when David claims that 888 is bigger than 889 – for him, three 8s together form a larger volume than 8+8+9. Trying to teach the child basic rules of arithmetic, Simón thinks: ‘Why is it that this child, so clever, so ready to make his way into the world, refuses to understand? “You have visited all the numbers, you tell me,” he says. “So tell me the last number, the very last number of all. Only don’t say it is Omega. Omega doesn’t count.” / “What is Omega?” / “Never mind. Just don’t say Omega. Tell me the last number, the very last one.”’25 The boy remains silent. Simón reflects that he has overrated David’s IQ and shakes the boy, awaking him from a trance. The boy screams in a high-pitched voice: ‘You are making me forget! Why do you make me forget? I hate you!’26 This echo of Plato’s idea that an uneducated child like the slave of his friend Meno ‘remembers’ numbers and geometrical shapes that were already in his soul reduces teaching to reminiscence. Meno’s young slave ‘already had the knowledge in his soul’, as Socrates asserts. Unwittingly, we have shifted from a discussion of letters to a discussion of numbers – for both entail a specific pathology for David. This is why he distorts in an amusing fashion Mickey’s dog Pluto into Plato. Simón manages to have David leave Daga’s apartment where he was watching television (a tricky situation any parent has had to face at some point): ‘“You can look at Mickey next time,” Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 225. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 225. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 150. 26 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 151. 23 24 25

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says Daga. “I promise. We will keep him here just for you.” / “And Plato?” / “And Plato. We can keep Plato too, can’t we, sweetie?”’27 The reference to Plato leads us to the question of the autonomy of the letter or the independence of the spirit. Plato always tries to reduce written language to a situation of spoken dialogue: there, speakers can appear clearly as the ‘fathers’ of their words. What is dangerous, as Derrida demonstrated about Phaedrus, is when writing functions like a wayward son not accountable to the authority of the father. Thus, in the scene with the television and Plato, David utters: ‘I haven’t got a mother and I haven’t got a father. I just am’28 – a weak echo of ‘I am who I am’, perhaps. If we compare this with ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’, we see the implications of this new grammatology: it is pedagogical (where does the authority of the teacher, of the father, of the mother come from?) and ethical (can one let a child be seduced by an adult who will take advantage of his naivety?). The quandary will have political consequences as well. David is not a child of television yet but he wants to learn words visually, in a synthetic manner, and not letter by letter. When he counts, on the other hand, he is afraid of not being able to jump from one number to the next. David succeeds in a synthetic or ‘global’ method as a beginning reader whereas he has to struggle against more odds when he tries to master numbers. If one gazes at letters, they end up tied up to each other, whereas one is never sure whether counting begins with one or with zero: It is as if the numbers were islands floating in a great black sea of nothingness, and he were each time asked to close his eyes and launch himself across the void. What if I fall? – that is what he asks himself. What if I fall and then keep falling forever? […] If getting from one to two is so hard, I asked myself, how shall I ever get from zero to one? From nowhere to somewhere: it seemed to demand a miracle each time.29

Indeed, one will need daily miracles, which is why there is such a sense of theological mystery and apocalyptic promise in each page of the novel. In The Childhood of Jesus, the adult protagonists have to solve the problem posed Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 183–4. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 184. 29 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 249. 27 28



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by a divine dyslexia, that offers interesting parallels with the ‘writing lessons’ discussed by Derrida when he comments on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s story of a tribe chief who pretended to know how to write in Tristes Tropiques. This is the object of his well-known essay on ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ in Writing and Difference.30 Without reopening the file, one question insists in the novel: can we guess what languages David and Simón spoke before they learned Spanish? They learned the language upon their arrival, being given Spanish lessons every day for six weeks. Simón mentions the names they were given in Belstar, and they often complain about having to speak in Spanish. Simón says to Elena: ‘What do you think I am doing in this country where I know no one, where I cannot express my heart’s feelings because all human relations have to be conducted in beginner’s Spanish?’31 But is this the language in which the novel is written, a language that we must assume to have been translated from the Spanish? We read an English text with dialogues in English spoken in Spanish by the characters. Once in a while, the actual signifier is quoted, as on the first page: ‘Centro de Reubicacion Novilla, says the sign. Reubicacion: what does that mean? Not a word he has learned.’32 A reader familiar with Coetzee’s work will remember the word in Afrikaans or in English: in Life & Times of Michael K, the hero survives in the Jakkalsdrif Relocation Camp, a resettlement camp.33 If The Childhood of Jesus rewrites Michael’s desperate plight, its utopia soon exhibits its sinister side. Simón and David have nothing in common except Spanish. The little that we know is murky: they were on the same boat, the boy could have been sent there to be reunited with his mother but during the trip David lost the pouch containing the name of his mother. Simón and David met during the general search for the missing letter on the boat. The story comes straight from Kafka, with Simón playing the role of the uncle who appears miraculously at the end of the first chapter of Der Verschollene or Amerika, an allegorical novel narrating the discovery of a new country, a novel with which The Childhood of Jesus has much in common. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 278–93. 31 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 106. 32 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 1. 33 See J. M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K (New York: Penguin, 1985), pp. 73, 75, 78, 81, passim. 30

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David and Simón have come to a country in which Spanish is the official language. Immigration is encouraged provided people become fluent in that language. Most of them have also come from abroad. For both of them, there is an uneven progression in language acquisition. At the beginning, David does not know what padrino means;34 however, Simón does.35 Simón is the only one who knows the meaning of residencia. At one point, he wonders: ‘Anodina: is that a Spanish word?’36 Does Simón know words with Greek roots? When he decides that it is time for David to begin reading, he finds a tattered copy of Don Quixote adapted for children. David is so engrossed in it that he never abandons the book and teaches himself to read with it. When they need toilet paper at the end and have only this book, he refuses to tear off a page to clean himself. There would be a lot to say about the role played by Don Quixote in the novel, first of all because this is not really a book for children, even if this simplified version has beautiful illustrations. Coetzee ends the superb Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech with a telling comparison with Cervantes: ‘how do we get from our world of violent phantasms to a true living world? This is a puzzle that Cervantes’ Don Quixote solves quite easily for himself. He leaves behind hot, dusty, tedious La Mancha and enters the realm of faery by what amounts to a willed act of the imagination.’37 At one level, this is what David stands for: he refuses to let himself be gagged by official knowledge and takes up the quest for a more promising future. Typical is David’s reaction to the famous story of the cave of Montesinos, in which Don Quixote claims that he spent three days and three nights there, whereas he was there one hour only. Inside the cave, the valorous knight converses with old Montesinos himself, known for having cut out the heart of Durandarte, his cousin, after the latter’s death. Montesinos took the heart to Belerma, Durandarte’s wife, but then Merlin put all of them under a spell, which is why they are still imprisoned in the cave. Merlin had also prophesied that Don Quixote would come to the cave and would lift their enchantment. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 28. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 33. 36 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 64. 37 J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 98. 34 35



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Why is this episode so often commented on? It is because in the following chapter we find a hand-written note by Cid Hamet Ben Engeli, who asserts that he cannot believe the Montesinos cave story because ‘it exceeds all reasonable bounds’.38 Notwithstanding this witty inner dialogism, the pseudotranslation (hence the whole story) continues. In the Montesinos cave episode, Don Quixote asks the old Montesinos whether it is true that he has cut out the heart of his friend Durandarte with a dagger. Montesinos confirms the truth of the story with one exception: ‘He replied, all was true, excepting as to the dagger (daga): for it was neither a dagger, nor little, but a bright poniard (puñal buido) sharper than an awl.’39 It is perhaps from this passage that Daga derives his name: his weapon is the knife, with which he wounds the gentle Alvaro.40 Daga bypasses the local laws and even seduces both David and Inés, but his name tells us that he is a deceiver. He is like Simon the Magus who wanted to buy Jesus’s powers and whose name left us with the medieval concept of ‘simony’. The fact that Simón shares this name alerts us to a dangerous proximity. However, David trusts Daga because he embodies the very idea of magic. David believes in the efficacy of the spurious cloak of invisibility that he is given at the end, exactly in the same way as he believes in the presence of the treasures glimpsed by Don Quixote in the cave.41 To prove to the teacher that he can write, David copies from the book: Deos sabe si hay Dulcinea o no en el mundo (God knows whether there is a Dulcinea in this world or not).42 Apart from a misspelling (David writes Deos instead of Dios), the sentence is correct. Of course, this leads him to ask: ‘Who is God?’ Simón avoids a direct answer and the child asks again. Simón then says: ‘God is not no one, but he lives too far away for us to converse with him or have dealings with him. As for whether he notices us, Dios sabe.’43 The sentence comes from an exchange between the knight and the duke and the duchess, Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Charles Jarvis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 623. Miguel de Cervantes, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Luis Andrés Murillo (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1978), vol. II, p. 213. 40 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 46. 41 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 165. 42 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 218. 43 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 218. 38

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whose aim was to assert the possibility of fiction; Don Quixote himself says: ‘God knows whether there be a Dulcinea or not in the world, and whether she be imaginary: this is one of those things, the proof whereof is not to be too nicely inquired into.’44 This triggers a moment of doubt for Alonso Quixano, the real name of the knight in Cervantes’s novel. Soon, however, ‘Don Quixote’ will die, first in a metaphorical way, that is because he never existed. The knight dies as knight if no one believes in him. This is followed by Quixano’s physical death, a death not caused by illness or old age but triggered by a melancholic depression. Melancholia engulfs him after he has rejected his romantic adventures as delusions. He dies from being ‘disenchanted’, above all from losing his belief in Dulcinea. When Sancho realizes that Quixano is about to die for good, he pretends to believe in the old chivalric delusions, but too late. Sancho even urges him to start a new adventure: ‘let us be going to the field, dressed like shepherds, as we agreed to do: and who knows, but behind some bush or other we may find the lady Dulcinea disenchanted as fine as heart can wish?’45 Cervantes’s novel ends with a paradoxical appeal to romantic fiction once it had been made impossible. When Quixano is restored to sanity, he cannot survive in a rationalistic world. Cervantes suggests thus that we cannot live without some belief in magic, even if the belief is based on romantic delusions. The choice of Don Quixote as the equivalent of a non-religious Bible of literature is accounted for in the brief but sharp analysis of the novel that Coetzee gave in 1980, in connection with René Girard’s theory of triangular desire:46 Triangular desire makes its first appearance and becomes a target of analysis in Don Quixote, which marks the beginning of the Romanesque tradition of critical fictions. It is thus a specifically modern phenomenon. It arises as a consequence of post-religious humanism and multiplies as social differences are leveled.47

All of which cannot but call up a canonical essay of the postmodern moment, Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote’. That ‘fiction’ had Cervantes, Don Quixote, p. 680. Cervantes, Don Quixote, p. 941. ‘Triangular Structures of Desire in Advertising’, in Coetzee, Doubling the Point, p. 131. 47 ‘Triangular Structures of Desire in Advertising’, Doubling the Point, p. 131. 44 45 46



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been suggested to Borges by the fact that he had first read Cervantes’s novel in English as a child. He was disappointed when he later discovered that it came from a Spanish original. In the wonderful exercise of meta-translation that he provides, the narrator takes one sentence from Don Quixote, ‘Truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future counselor’ only to disparage the original, ‘mere rhetorical praise of history’, and heap praise on Pierre Menard’s identical passage. It is groundbreaking, staggering, opens new vistas: a contemporary of William James asserts that History is the foundation of reality: ‘Historical truth, for Ménard, is not “what happened”; it is what we believe happened.’48 The ironical insertion of belief in what could otherwise be taken as a mere succession of facts resonates in Coetzee’s novel. Coetzee’s novel looks back to the gospels and also to the Bible of modern literature, Don Quixote. Cervantes flaunts the originality of his conception in the Preface, when we are told that we won’t find catalogues of other authors as in the other books of the times. It is easy to take any of these books, copy the authors’ names from A to Z, and ‘transcribe that very alphabet into your work’.49 Of course, this is disingenuous, since Cervantes parodies all previous romances and ‘overthrow[s] that ill-compiled machine of books of chivalry’.50 Thus when David asks who was the author of Don Quixote, Simón replies that it was ‘a man named Benengeli’. Benengeli would be easy to recognize: ‘He wears a long robe and has a turban on his head.’51 Is Simón mistaken, does he half remember, is he making fun of the very idea of authorship? He has apparently read Don Quixote – he describes the main character competently for David, explaining that the hero is ‘a knight in armour, from the old days’.52 Whoever knows Don Quixote remembers that the story, as we have seen, is supposed to have been written in Arabic by ‘Cid Hamet Ben Engeli’.53 Cervantes would have translated into Spanish an Arabic text written by author with whom he disagrees once in a while. Indeed, Ben Engeli means in Arabic J. L. Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998), p. 94. Cervantes, Don Quixote, p. 19. 50 Cervantes, Don Quixote, p. 20. 51 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 154. 52 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 151. 53 Cervantes, Don Quixote, p. 104. 48 49

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the ‘son of the stag (cervo)’, to allude slyly to Cervantes’s name. In the novel, Simón takes pains to identify Don Quixote with the letter Q and Sancho with the letter S.54 These meta-fictional games with authorship partly explain why the characters of The Childhood of Jesus have to speak Spanish, but also why they seem frustrated with the language. At least David expresses his frustration close to the end of the novel when talking with Simón: ‘Why do I have to speak Spanish all the time?’ ‘We have to speak some language, my boy, unless we want to bark and howl like animals. And if we are going to speak some language, it is best we all speak the same one. Isn’t that reasonable?’ ‘But why Spanish? I hate Spanish.’ ‘You don’t hate Spanish. You speak very good Spanish. Your Spanish is better than mine. You are just being contrary. What language do you want to speak?’ ‘I want to speak my own language.’ ‘There is no such thing as one’s language.’ ‘There is! La la fa fa yam ying tu tu.’55

The best demonstration of the otherness of any language is provided by a baffling passage of The Childhood of Jesus, when David wants to show that he can sing and then intones a song that he says is in English: Wer reitet so spätt durch Dampf und Wind? Er ist der Vater mit seinem Kind; Er halt den Knaben in dem Arm, Er füttert ihn Zucker, er küsst ihm warm.56

Readers who know German will have recognized the most famous poem in the language, Goethe’s ‘Erlkönig’. But the text is not accurate. The original goes like this: ‘Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? / Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind; / Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm, / Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.’ (Who rides so late through the night and wind? It’s the father with his child; He has the boy safe in his arm, He holds him secure, he holds him warm.) Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 152. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 186. 56 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 67. 54 55



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‘Dampf ’ (mist) has replaced ‘night’, the third line is grammatically incorrect (‘halt’ should have an Umlaut), and the last line distorts the original grotesquely, meaning: ‘He feeds him sugar, he kisses him warm.’ Why, above all, is the language English, according to David? Simón doesn’t seem to know either, merely adding: ‘I don’t speak English.’57 He does not seem to know that David is wrong when he asserts that he loves this English and prefers it to Spanish. I want to stress this moment of dispossession as it emblematizes a textual Uncanny. However this moment of singing in German/English is the prelude to the encounter with Inés at La Residencia. This is the moment of an extraordinary Annunciation: Simón offers the child to her by asking her to become David’s mother. Uncanny ambivalence rules: has Simón sensed a desire for a child in Inés, or has he imagined that she would make a good mother? Is David a bright child endowed with prophetic powers, or a difficult, opinionated, almost autistic or quasi-psychotic child, who is indulged too much by his two adoptive parents? The title gives away that David might be a new Christ in disguise for a new world where Christian legends based on the gospels have been erased or forgotten. At the end of the novel, we recognize the full mythical pattern of an older father, living in an asexual relationship with a younger woman who may or may not be a virgin. Both are running away from repressive laws threatening their preternaturally gifted child. They are leaving the city of Novilla and go north into the unknown in order to start ‘a new life.’ It is the same, but totally different. The traditional paradigm has been transformed by the Uncanny. Yoshiki Tajiri argues in ‘Beyond the Literary Theme Park: J. M. Coetzee’s Late Style in The Childhood of Jesus’58 that one finds all the themes of the previous novels in this one. This is true if one adds that these themes have been impacted by a Freudian or Kafkaian uncanny, whose deeper roots are both linguistic and political. Derrida’s analysis of monolingualism shows that language is always an Other’s language, an idea developed by Proust when he states that the most beautiful books of the world have been written in a foreign language. In Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 67. Yoshiki Tajiri, ‘Beyond the Literary Theme Park: J. M. Coetzee’s Late Style in The Childhood of Jesus’, Journal of Modern Literature 39:2 (Winter 2016): 72–88. A slightly revised version of this chapter appears in this volume.

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Coetzee’s work, the theme of linguistic alienation combines political denunciation with a curious estrangement predicated upon the Freudian Uncanny. This mediation can be paralleled with what Derrida has to say about hospitality and the ‘democracy to come’. The theme of hospitality has been well treated by Mike Marais in Secretary of the Invisible: The Idea of Hospitality in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee.59 As the book was published in 2009, it leaves out The Childhood of Jesus. I am here providing the missing chapter in his book. Coetzee’s novels are political in the sense that they all take up the issue of hospitality. However, unlike most previous novels that started by describing or evoking a situation of oppression and alienation deriving from the horrors of Apartheid, here, since we are in a sort of utopia, at first, everything looks positive, bathed in the rosy light of futuristic experiments with the good life. Indeed, life in Novilla seems defined by a willingness to accept all immigrants, to provide for them by offering cheap housing, free food, and allowing adults the right to work even when they are unskilled or older like Simón. However, hospitality has limits in Novilla. The first night David and Simón spend there, because of a mishap with a key, they have to sleep in a provisional shelter built from scratch by Simón in Ana’s garden. They are only given bread and water. Simón, exasperated and miserable with the night’s cold, knocks at her door in the middle of the night; she simply throws them a blanket, and Simón shouts angrily: ‘Why do you treat us like this? Like dirt?’60 Then they are woken up roughly, given more bread and water, and Ana refuses to lend money despite Simón’s pleading. Later on, Ana does not seem so hostile; she even invites them for a picnic but wants to prevent any sexual innuendo. We guess that, given her enviable status as a nude model for the arts centre, this was a concern for her. We understand, given the different role played by Elena, that hospitality might entail sexual services. This leads me to Derrida’s powerful meditation on Hospitality, also taken as a point of departure by Mike Marais and of course by Derek Attridge. Let me restate the way in which Derrida contrasts an absolute law of Hospitality that he calls ‘unconditional’ with a limited version of hospitality. Mike Marais. Secretary of the Invisible: The Idea of Hospitality in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee (Rodopi: Amsterdam, 2009). 60 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 80. 59



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In all his texts, I find in Derrida a Quixotic quest for an absolute that he knows is impossible, yet he keeps trying to measure our poorly diminished reality with this yardstick. Hyperbole is the dominant trope here, which is why he often speaks of a hyperbolic hospitality. However, Derrida is also a Sancho Panza who never forgets the network of performative constraints imposed by society. For Derrida, a ‘pure’ or ‘unconditional’ hospitality can imply extreme conse quences, since it consists ‘in leaving one’s house open to the unforeseeable arrival of the guest, who can be intrusive, even dangerous, eventually susceptible to cause harm’.61 Pushing the request for unconditionality to a limit, one risks losing one’s safety – here is one of the negative lessons of Disgrace. In contradistinction to this absolute law, there is the array of relative norms that regulate access. They are made up of old customs, written or unwritten rules specifying when and how one can accept a guest. They distinguish between others who are close enough to be considered as brothers and cousins, and others who are excluded and can be considered as non-human or even animals, for instance. The power of Derrida’s analysis is to want to combine those two forms of hospitality. As Samir Haddad has stated in Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy, ‘the unconditional law, on its own, is not enough to achieve hospitality, for following this law as such is impossible’.62 However, the conditional laws provide imperfect instantiations of the unconditional law, without which hospitality would be impotent. Haddad sums up this aporia thus: ‘One could say that the unconditional law depends on the conditional laws in order to be a law, whereas the conditional laws depend on the unconditional law in order to be hospitable.’63 In this asymmetrical relationship, there should be the radical openness of the home to the other, and there should be at the same time multiple regulations limiting access to the home. Thus, in order to keep its efficiency as a law, unconditional hospitality calls for its own transgression. But in order to be hospitable, the conditional laws of hospitality similarly call for their own transgression. Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, De quoi demain … Dialogue (Paris: Fayard/Galilée, 2001), p. 102. 62 Samir Haddad, Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), p. 13. 63 Haddad, Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy, p. 15. 61

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One can see this mechanism at work in The Childhood of Jesus if we look at Daga’s behaviour. Unlike Simón, he rejects the status quo and demands more than his share. He smokes despite the interdiction and takes extra breaks. He wants to quantify the number of sacks he carries, attempting to bargain: fifty sacks per day, no more. When he is paid for his days of work, he throws the coins in the face of the paymaster and shouts contemptuously: ‘Rat’s wage.’64 He slashes Alvaro’s hand with a switchblade knife, takes the money and leaves with the bicycle of the paymaster. David is terrified by the sudden violence, but Simón pretends that almost nothing has happened.65 The scene has the eerie feeling of a dream. Indeed if Daga embodies a human desire to get more than one’s share, Simón cannot criticize this dangerous guest. Simón does not intervene to help his friend Alvaro. The rupture produced by Daga’s violent and illegal actions wake up in Simón a nostalgia for the old days. He is ambivalent because the fight with an abusive guest destroys the consensus evinced so far by the group about the idea of happiness. Daga sounds more than the note of nostalgia; he insists on the craving for more, the old desire to get everything quickly and by all means, which implies rejecting the measured, simple and easy enjoyment of a prudent present. This recurs in the discussion with Elena who insists that they should not regret the loss of passion for absent delicacies. There should not be any hankering for the missing object of desire: ‘This endless dissatisfaction, this yearning for the something-more that is missing, is a way of thinking we are well rid of, in my opinion.’66 Indeed, collective life in Novilla is underpinned by a rational decision to abolish the endless frustrations of desire. The people seem to have agreed to accept the present as it is, to live in a state of limited survival – all the basic needs are satisfied, there is no excess of value either as surplus-value or lustvalue (surplus enjoyment, Lacan would say). In the same way, there is no longing for a past or a future. The scene of the philosophical discussion with the other stevedores revolves around whether one should live in a timeless present or in a more historically conscious society. Simón invokes history to argue that they could use a crane to lift the heavy bags they carry on their Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 45. Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 47–8. 66 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 63. 64 65



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backs. His version of history is marked by technological progress but meets the resistance of the others who claim that they do not feel history present in their ‘bones’.67 If Simón wins and convinces them that machinery is useful, he is the first to suffer the consequences when the badly managed crane almost kills him. The point of Coetzee’s political allegory is clear: no society can abolish its link with history even if it is with the best intentions. What he attacks here is a democratic totalitarianism, a collective agreement to limiting desires by leading a simple life of labour and occupying evenings with classes on philosophy and the arts. Novilla’s Platonic Republic thus smacks of totalitarianism. Coetzee denounces the soft totalitarianism of meliorist cultures displaying a ‘tolerance’ that soon exhibits its limits. In the name of educating the boy, one has to send him to a specialized school for delinquents despite his young age, etc. This is what Lacan calls the discourse of the university (very French as ‘scolaire’). You decide for the others because you want their good, but then you impose it forcibly to all. What opposes to this democratic totalitarianism is the wish to think a democracy to come. For this, even the figure of the child as dictatorial monster is useful and productive, as Haddad also argues.68 The point was made best in an essay by Claude Lefort who opposes democracy and totalitarianism given their antagonistic conceptions of history: Democracy proves to be the historical society par excellence, a society which, in its very form, welcomes and preserves indeterminacy and which provides a remarkable contrast with totalitarianism which, because it is constructed under the slogan of creating a new man, claims to understand the law of its organization and development, and which, in the modern world, secretly designates itself as a society without history.69

In order to reconnect a society with its history, it is important to combine the indeterminacy or openness of a democracy to come (to use Derrida’s phrase) Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 116. Haddad, Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy, pp. 126–7. 69 Claude Lefort, ‘The question of democracy’, in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 16. The paper was read in 1982 at LacoueLabarthe’s and Nancy’s Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political, at which Derrida was present, and I too. 67 68

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with a principle as absolute and transcendent as Justice. This is perhaps why Simón invokes Justice in the passage preceding the one I just quoted: I am not trying to save you, he says […] Like you I crossed the ocean. Like you I bring no history with me. What history I had I left behind. I am simply a new man in a new land, and that is a good thing. But I haven’t let go of the idea of history, the idea of change without beginning or end. Ideas cannot be washed out of us […] The idea of Justice, for instance. We all desire to live under a just dispensation.70

Even if the workers reach a compromise about a just division of tasks and salaries, we discover that the world of Novilla does not present a perfect utopia. This is not a classless society; there is a police and a powerful bureaucracy; Simón meets idle people living in luxury at La Residencia. There is worse to come with the trophies accumulated by Daga: he has a penthouse in the City Blocks equipped with television, and next to having a young and sexy girlfriend, he has a spacious apartment with a view. Daga embodies the wish to enjoy. He shares with David the fact that he has not renounced his primal narcissism. For instance, when they all meet at Inés’s, he wants to have a good time and go out dancing at night.71 Earlier, as we have seen, he was ‘tempting’ David with the local equivalent of the Disney Channel … However, material seductions have little force against major issues like the desire to have children, the wish to live in a just world, or the respect for freedom. Inés and Simón do agree about these priorities. Throughout the novel, Simón had been yearning for a philosophy ‘that shakes one. That changes life.’72 He has changed Inés’s life radically. But his rival is Daga, younger, more daring, also more phallic and sexual. He had offered to ‘give’ a child to Inés, as she says,73 by having a baby with her – but he is also ready to steal David from her. Simón had accomplished the only possible gift according to Derrida, that is the free gift of life (or death) when he had ‘given’ her a son, David, who then becomes ‘the light of her life’. Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 114–15. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 191. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 238. 73 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 181. 70 71 72



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In conclusion, I would argue that The Childhood of Jesus is less an Imitatio Christi than a Projectio Christi. The novel never falls into traditional Christian eschatology but stays close to Derrida’s concept of ‘messianicity without a Messiah’. If we want to take David as the new Messiah, following the programme outlined by the title, this can only be insofar as this Messiah announces a democracy that is still to come. More than the Jesus of the gospels, David is like a new Adam. Adam was called by Romans 5.14 Adam Forma Futuri: he is the shape of the future. Here is the generic concept of the ‘child that gives birth to man,’ because he embodies an open-ended future. Coetzee tells us that because it perpetuates a belief in miracles and thus keeps the future open, the childhood of any child can be called the childhood of Jesus.

References Borges, J. L. Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin, 1998. Cervantes, Miguel de. El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Luis Andrés Murillo. Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1978, 2 vols. Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote, trans. Charles Jarvis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Coetzee, J. M. Life & Times of Michael K. New York: Penguin, 1985. Coetzee, J. M. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1992. Coetzee, J. M. The Master of Petersburg. London: Vintage, 1995. Coetzee, J. M. The Childhood of Jesus. London: Harvill Secker, 2013. Coetzee, J. M. and Paul Auster. Here and Now, Letters 2008–2011. New York: Viking, 2013. Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 278–93. Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Derrida, Jacques and Elisabeth Roudinesco. De quoi demain … Dialogue. Paris: Fayard/Galilée, 2001. Haddad, Samir. Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

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Hock, Ronald F (ed.). The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas, trans. The Scholar’s Bible. California: Santa Rosa, 1995. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Penguin, 1992. Kannemeyer, J. C. J. M. Coetzee, A Life in Writing, trans. Michiel Heyns. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2012. Lefort, Claude. ‘The Question of Democracy’, in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Marais, Mike. Secretary of the Invisible: The Idea of Hospitality in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee. Rodopi: Amsterdam, 2009. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. The Pathos of Distance. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Tajiri, Yoshiki. ‘Beyond the Literary Theme Park: J. M. Coetzee’s Late Style in The Childhood of Jesus’, Journal of Modern Literature 39:2 (Winter 2016): 72–88.

Section II

Sociopolitical Concerns

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3

Thinking Through Shit in The Childhood of Jesus Jennifer Rutherford

‘Like a fish’ Reading through J. M. Coetzee’s early notebooks in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, I find odd sentences keep evoking his most recent novel, The Childhood of Jesus, as if this novel has been percolating through all the earlier works. Like many of its readers, I have been intrigued with the way The Childhood of Jesus glimmers and flashes with ideas, as if the entire lexicon of Western philosophy lies under the surface of a prose that has none of the explicit critical engagement of a novel such as Diary of a Bad Year, but that nonetheless encompasses the great impasses of modernity. Characteristically devoid of figurative embellishment, the novel has a quality of empty density that gives it the simple elegance of one of the Grimm brothers’ tales (1823), and, like a fairy tale, it magnifies the darkness and complexity of being human. Set in a mythical future that references both the religious and philosophical past, the novel speaks into the present in a language that never names but cups the void of modernity. Novilla, Coetzee’s imagined city, is inhabited by people so washed clean of appetite that they are more semblant than human. Stripped of memory, appetite and desire, we are never quite sure if they are dead or alive, human or replica, and yet they inhabit a reality as concrete as a Soviet housing complex. This question (are they dead or alive?) hovers throughout the novel, which also seems to have slipped its form. Like its characters, it evokes an uncertain state – fiction or philosophy? – conjuring an afterlife of literature. As slippery

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as a fish, the novel demands its readers also sustain a slippery mobility, moving with the novel as it changes register, and dances its reader from one matrix of ideas to another. The Childhood of Jesus is not about anything per se, but it is like many things. Coetzee alludes to this in the novel when Simón, perplexed by David’s enigmatic character, looks into the child’s eyes and momentarily glimpses something: For the briefest of moments he sees something there. He has no name for it. It is like – that is what occurs to him in the moment. Like a fish that wriggles loose as you try and grasp it. But not like a fish – no, like like a fish. Or like like like a fish. On and on. Then the moment is over, and he is simply standing in silence, staring.1

In the Coetzee archive, I keep finding passages in the early notebooks that are like The Childhood of Jesus. In a diary entry from 1974, Coetzee writes of history that it is ‘a stable but changing fiction of origins’ and he muses: ‘there is no reason why within a fiction one should subscribe to this myth. One may equally well construct a fiction against an “historical” background of a history which is one’s own fiction.’2 Coetzee notes that he has been reading Snow White, but he no doubt has in mind the fictional histories of The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee in his first novel Dusklands (1974), and the novel he was working on at the time, In the Heart of the Country (1977). Nevertheless, the fairy-tale allusion sounds a note that chimes with the elusive and mythical The Childhood of Jesus. In a notebook from 1977 (15/7/77), Coetzee describes boatloads of refugees being offloaded on an island, observing an overpopulated gaol, the UN’s inability to cope with the mass of people, and a tent village arising. This description transports me to The Childhood of Jesus, with its intimations of the global refugee crisis and Australia’s own sordid history of incarcerating thousands of refugees in tent cities on islands excised from the nation’s migration zone. Such sentences leave their reader scenting an idea, just as in The Childhood of Jesus one catches the whiff of something familiar, as the ground shifts under foot. J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013), p. 220. ‘Small Notebook’, 16 March 1974–9 February 1976. Entry 19/2/74/5 The J. M. Coetzee Papers Manuscript Collections, MS 0842, Subseries A, The Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas at Austin.

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Poo and ‘I’ After a week spent in the overwhelming matrix of Coetzee’s archive, I catch a cab to Austin’s famously ‘weird’ Sixth Street in search of respite from the entanglements of fiction and reality that are so integral to Coetzee’s writing. In Austin’s raffish streets, I ribbon my way past cavernous bars dimmed to a Vermeer shadow, pick out details of tatts snaking around eyes, blue-studded fingers clutching beer glasses. A lurching cowhide makes a fist as I walk on by. Fragments of overheard conversation suggest lives unravelling (‘They’ll be coming at 5 p.m. to commit you: you’d better be clean’). In this arty town in an oil-rich state, the people on the street look wasted, their bodies strapped together with bandanas and cowboy boots. In my archivally induced daze, I feel like the people I see – sweaty, grainy and grimy – and I end up taking refuge in a glamorous old hotel of fairy-tale splendour named the Driskill. But, after a meal of greasy scrambled eggs, I make a mess in the hotel’s rather elegant ladies bathroom. Staring in dismay at the matter in the toilet bowl, I think of the scene in The Childhood of Jesus when Simón and David discuss poo, as Simón, up to his elbows in Inés’s shit, attempts to clean her blocked toilet. It is a shocking scene. Characters in fictional works, as much as characters in life, tend to observe the psycho-social taboos that regulate defecation in the West. There are of course notable exceptions: Philip Roth clads his protagonist in nappies in Exit Ghost (2007), fusing incontinence and phallic disempowerment, while in Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Jamaal makes a famous nose-dive into shit as the only path to the celebrity he craves. Such examples attest to the enduring symbolic power of violating toilet taboos. Nevertheless, toilets and toilet matters in fiction tend, through their invisibility, to reflect what David Inglis has dubbed ‘the modern faecal habitus’.3 As Inglis writes: Excreta in the modern period is regulated through an evaluative nexus of disgust and embarrassment. It is on this basis that defecatory practices are carried out in private locales, excretory matters are only referred to (in David Inglis, A Sociological History of Execratory Experience: Defecatory Manners and Toiletry Technologies (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), p. 3.

3

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J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus legitimate modes of speech) in euphemistic and circumlocutory ways, and the sight and smell of excreta are little tolerated, so foul and unpleasant are such products deemed to be.4

What is shocking about the scene in which Simón unblocks Inés’s toilet has less to do with its representation of the tabooed subject of shit than with the way it brings to the fore the confluence of toilet mores and the emergence of the modern ratio. At least this is what I am thinking as I contemplate my shameful matter. Poo! Shame and embarrassment, Norbert Elias tells us in The Civilizing Process (1937), forms part of the expansion of a new frontier of internalized regulation that was integral to the transformation of the social personality structure of Western people in the modern era.5 Modern subjects, Elias argues, were moulded through increasingly complex social figurations, leading to increasing self-steering, stricter regulation of libidinal impulses, more tightly controlled drive impulses and a heightened rationally functioning consciousness.6 According to Elias, shame is ‘a specific excitation, a kind of anxiety which is automatically reproduced in the individual on certain occasions by force of habit’.7 As external forms of coercion retreat, shame emerges as an internalized restraint, regulating behaviour that is in conflict not simply with social opinion but with that part of the self that represents social opinion.8 Hence, my shame, even in the privacy of a public toilet, at having produced such disgusting shit. What strikes Simón as strange, when he comes to help Inés unblock her toilet, is that she doesn’t appear to experience shame at all: Inés speaks of sewage without embarrassment. It strikes him as odd: if not intimate, the matter is at least delicate. Does she regard him simply as a workman come to do a job for her, someone whom she never need lay eyes on again; or is she gabbling to hide discomfiture?9

Inglis, A Sociological History, p. 4. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 414. 6 Elias, The Civilizing Process, p. 414. 7 Elias, The Civilizing Process, p. 415. 8 Elias, The Civilizing Process, p. 415. 9 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 150. 4 5



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As the scene unfolds, it becomes evident that, despite her loquacity, Inés is highly aware of the ‘modern faecal habitus’. When David brings Simón his chamber pot to use as a receptacle for wads of soiled paper retrieved from the toilet, she snatches the pot away without a word. This highly evocative gesture suggests that in her thinking, the chamber pot, albeit a receptacle for David’s poo, can be polluted by the shit of others – even hers. In Novilla, things lack the complex associations that normally transform things of use-value into things of symbolic value. Simón is always stumbling over the absence of symbolic value, as if he alone carries the memory of a world where meaning accrues around bodies, actions and objects. But, in the wordless gesture of snatching away David’s potty, Inés’s action suggests that, in Novilla, shit at least retains its dangerous symbolic power. David wants to help Simón unblock the toilet and suggests he can offer helpful ideas. Simón responds: ‘That’s true. You are good at ideas. But alas, toilets are not receptive to ideas. Toilets are not part of the realm of ideas, they are just brute things, and working with them is nothing but brute work. So go for a walk with your mother while I get on with the job.’10 When David protests that poo is just poo, Simón responds with a further distinction: ‘Toilets are just toilets, but poo is not just poo. There are certain things that are not just themselves, not all the time. Poo is one of them.’11 Of course, toilets are never just toilets, but rather are densely ideational, as Simón says of the ubiquity of ideas at large: ‘The universe is instinct with them.’12 And certainly, staring at my matter, ideas are springing to mind. Jacques Lacan tells a story of a little girl and little boy on a train that is pulling into a station: ‘“Look”, says the brother, “we’re at Ladies!”; “Idiot!” replies his sister, “Can’t you see we’re at Gentlemen.”’13 He illustrates the story with the now famous diagram of two signifiers ‘LADIES’ and ‘GENTLEMEN’, and below them, divided by a bar, are two identical doors. The toilet, as the story demonstrates, is far from being just a toilet, but carries ‘the unbridled power of ideological warfare’.14 Inés’s toilet is no less ‘entered by Coetzee, The Childhood, Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 155. 12 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 136. 13 Lacan, Écrits (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. 152. 14 Lacan, Écrits, p. 152. 10 11

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the signifier’15 and overflows with the discriminating ideologies of class, caste and gender. Separated from the kitchen by a mere curtain, the toilets of Novilla might lack the seclusion of the modern water closet and its singular capacity to make shit disappear, but the emotional language of Simón and Inés’s interactions reveal that neither of them have been ‘washed clean’ of the ideological powers of the toilet. Inés’s shamelessness in speaking about shit to Simón establishes his lowly place in her social hierarchy. Her defence of the sanctity of David’s chamber pot from the pollution of the general shit evokes the polluting value of public as opposed to private shit, and her fury and upset at the situation suggests that even in Novilla ‘matter out of place’, to borrow Mary Douglas’s term,16 carries the danger of symbolic pollution. In a swift inversion of power, Simón, who has been attempting to ameliorate Inés’s shame, fishes a soiled sanitary napkin from the toilet’s S-bend and launches into a patrician remonstration on the proper disposal of sanitary pads. He may have Inés’s shit under his fingernails, but she is stained by the signifier of a polluting femininity. But I’m digressing. As Barthes writes, ‘when written shit does not smell’.17 My shit is real and it stinks: I flush the toilet. To my horror, instead of it disappearing with a clean whoosh, the toilet flushes backwards and water comes rushing forth, disgorging all the sodden paper and poo-water of Austin, Texas’s faulty bowels. It’s not an academic moment. It’s not a matter to ponder or theorize about. I want to slink out of the toilet, out of the Driskill, and out of Austin, Texas, but instead I am faced with an ethical dilemma: an overflowing toilet that I am responsible for. At least I think I am. I did it. But am I responsible for it now that my poo has returned merged with the shit of Austin? Who owns this poo? ‘It’s my poo’, he says. ‘I want to stay!’ ‘It was your poo. But you evacuated it. You got rid of it. It’s not yours any more. You no longer have a right to it’ […]

Lacan, Écrits, p. 151. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge Classics, 2002), p. 44. 17 Cited in Dominique Laporte, History of Shit (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002), p. 10. 15 16



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‘Once it gets into the sewer pipes it is no one’s poo’, he goes on. ‘In the sewers it joins all the other people’s poo and becomes general poo.’18

It is a story one tells a child, a deceptively simple explanation of the complex modern machinery of waste management, in which shit – that most private of all products – is evacuated from the self into an invisible public cesspool with a ‘get thee hence!’ act of swift and absolute disavowal. In The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (2005), Gay Hawkins reflects on the double-thinking this produces in relation to pollution and one’s own implication in it. In Sydney, if one’s garbage is strewn across the street, there is an immediate sense of shame, as one’s private waste is exposed to public view. In contrast, when Sydney’s inadequate sewerage system regularly floods the city’s streets and beaches with raw shit, the public response is one of public outrage. Nobody owns this shit, but the government is responsible for it.19 Dominique Laporte writes an intriguing history of how ‘private’ shit historically emerged in tandem with the modern subject, conflating, as Rodolphe el-Khoury writes, ‘the “highest” forms of consciousness with the “basest” of human products’.20 In Laporte’s reading, the domestication of shit regulated through royal edict in 1539 in France mirrored the cleansing of the French language.21 The privatization of shit and the emergence of the modern ‘I’ converged in a society where shit became privy to the civilising drive for ‘cleanlinesss, order and beauty’, a compulsion to orderliness in which language was purified of its stink and subjects of their materiality. This privatization of shit became the medium of socialization: This little pile of shit, heaped before my door, is mine, and I challenge any to malign its form. This little heap is my thing, my badge, a tangible sign of that which distinguishes me from, or likens me to, my neighbour. It is also what distinguishes him from me. His heap will never be mine. Whether he be friend or foe, this alone will allow me to recognise if we are alike: neat, clean, negligent, disgusting or obviously rotten.22

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 155. Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005), p. 65. 20 Rodolphe el-Khoury, ‘Introduction’, in History of Shit, Dominique Laporte (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. viii. 21 Laporte, History of Shit, p. 2. 22 Laporte, History of Shit, p. 30. 18 19

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So who owned the shit? Was it the Driskill’s shit, Texan shit or my shit, and who was disgraced by its egress under the toilet door? As Laporte writes: ‘To touch, even lightly, on the relationship of a subject to his shit, is to modify not only that subject’s relationship to the totality of his body, but his very relationship to the world and to those representations that he constructs of his situation in society.’23 In that moment in the toilet, with shit lapping at my shoes and spreading out shamefully from the confinement of a private toilet cubicle into the public spaces of the Driskill’s ladies’ bathroom, I slipped momentarily through the hole of the toilet into the collective shit-stream. Touched by my shit, and now touching you with my shit, I caught a glimpse of why shit matters in The Childhood of Jesus and how, through the matter of shit, Coetzee interrogates us moderns, who are safely ensconced in our private water closets and washed clean of our pasts, even as we produce them. Densely ideological, socially and ideationally saturated, the distinguished medium of psycho-social taboo and, as Gay Hawkins writes, ‘the dead matter that affirms our living subjectivity’,24 shit can’t be washed away by the fantasy of a cogito complete unto itself, that fantasy that underwrites modern subjectivity. The characters in Coetzee’s imagined world embody the mythos of disembodied reason. As if made of their reason alone, ideas, affects, passions and drives have no status in their lives, just as we might imagine, from another mythical point of view, that reason played no part in a fantasized pre-modern world of spontaneous expression, affect, transparent drives (and collective shit). The Childhood of Jesus counterposes this mythos of reason to the being of shit, posing, with Simón, the question: what is ‘the pooness of poo?’25

Like dirt Through a series of digressions which unfold like a complicated dance routine, the novel steps out the predicaments of the modern condition. Novilla’s characters are decidedly unmodern. They share none of the drives Laporte, History of Shit, p. 29. Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste, p. 2. 25 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 159. 23 24



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to maximize consumption and pleasure so endemic to the modern self, but rather, they approach needs as finite. And yet, modernity and ‘its dark shameful secret’ of waste26 sounds on every page. In the first seven chapters of the novel (and the novel has a numerical structure that reflects its preoccupation with numbers), modernity’s drive to order, sanitize and rationalize – as its waste products proliferate – finds a likeness in Novilla, as David and Simón wash up on its shores – refugees in search of a new life. Like thousands of refugees arriving by sea on Australian shores, David and Simón’s first residence is a refugee camp – a tent city in the desert. For Australian readers this conflation of tent city and desert is highly evocative, as it merges two of the most inhumane features of Australia’s refugee policy: forced incarceration in the desert and forced incarceration in tent cities on Pacific Islands excised from the nation’s migration zone.27 David and Simón are met with a contradictory logic that also resonates with the Australian state’s ‘benevolent’ governance of refugees and, more generally, with the rich West’s response to the global refugee crisis (charity and push-backs; humanitarian rhetoric and deterrence strategies). A reception centre awaits them, but they end up sleeping rough in the welfare worker’s backyard. They are provided with money to purchase immediate provisions, but no food is to be found. Work is available for Simón, but it involves labouring like a beast of burden, unloading impossibly heavy sacks of grain at the docks and in perilously dangerous conditions. ‘“Why do you treat us like this?” Simón asks Ana, the welfare worker. “Like dirt?”’28 This question brings to the fore the baffling condition Simón finds himself in. On the one hand, Novilla is a city of exemplary order. Refugees are provided with housing, food, and labour. The city provides its residents with a transport system, a leisure system, including comfort centres to provide sexual services, and parks and playgrounds for the children (a detail not omitted in Australian refugee camps, where children descend into psychotic states with Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Cambridge Polity Press, 2004), p. 27. 27 Jennifer Rutherford, ‘Washed Clean: The Forgotten Journeys of Future Maritime Arrivals in J. M. Coetzee’s Estralia’, in Lynda Mannik (ed.), Migration by Boat: Discourses of Trauma, Exclusion and Survival (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016). 28 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 15. 26

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a systematized predictability). Life in Novilla is similarly ordered, rule-bound and devoid of the chaos of lives governed by appetites and drives. And yet, as new subjects entering into this ordered society, David and Simón are treated ‘like dirt’ and they become like the world’s millions of stateless and displaced people – increasingly ‘dirty’. Unable to procure a room, they are aided by Ana, but her benevolence extends only to a pitcher of water, four slices of bread and margarine, and some rough building materials to build themselves a temporary shelter to sleep outside in her backyard. Her only concession to the ‘modern faecal habitus’ is a roll of toilet paper she hands Simón, who understands he and the boy are to defecate in the open yard. Like millions of the world’s poor (597 million in India alone),29 shitting outdoors marks them as outside Novilla’s logic of benevolent order. Not yet integrated into the system, they are ‘matter out of place’, which in Douglas’s famous phrase suggests all the rejected and ambiguous elements of an ordered system. Treated like dirt and dirty, Simón and David are outside the illusion that they are untouched by the excrement they produce. They are both outside and without a barrier to demarcate their own inside from outside. Already begrimed by a week’s travelling, they become increasingly stained with the odours of the human body. They eat, they smell, they shit, their humanity residing in these persistent signifiers of life, even as they increasingly resemble the animals they labour beside. David’s nails are ‘grimed with dirt’ and, like the work-horses on the docks that smell ‘urinous and drop steaming dung in the street’.30 Simón must work like a pack animal in order to avoid ‘being a beggar shivering in a tin shelter in a stranger’s backyard’.31 As shitting subjects forced to shit in public, deprived of sanitized modes of elimination and purification, their bodies grimed in their own waste and as wasted subjects reduced to their biological needs, they are like … those subjects relegated to ‘bare life’,32 the millions of stateless on the borders, in refugee camps, sinking in ships, incarcerated in refugee camps, who are seen by the rich West as garbage, unclean, polluting, Citing WHO, Doran, A. and Raja, I., ‘The Cultural Politics of Shit: Class, Gender and Public Space in India’, Postcolonial Studies 18:2 (2015): 189–207. 30 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 21. 31 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 20. 32 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 29



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deserving at most benevolence in the form of the provision of animal needs (food and makeshift shelter). ‘Everything is wrong’, Simón says. ‘It is cold out here. Will you please let us into the house.’33

Waste-making desires By the end of the seventh chapter Simón is ‘girding his loins for the next chapter in his life’.34 This ‘new chapter’ turns from the manners and practices of modernity that transform some humans into disembodied beings and others into desubjectivized bodies to a new matrix of ideas that enunciate the problem of desire and its waste-making logic in modernity. Simón and David move into a new apartment, where David befriends a young boy and Simón courts his mother. Simón is not particularly interested in Elena, but he vaguely remembers that in his former life men and women desire each other: […] but the past is not dead in me. Details may have grown fuzzy, but the feel of how life used to be is still quite vivid. Men and women, for instance: you say you have got beyond that way of thinking; but I haven’t. I still feel myself to be a man, and you to be a woman.35

‘Plain old physical contact’,36 he suggests to Elena, might be a better universal balm for ills than good will. But when he finally contrives to get her into bed, it’s a desultory affair. He imagines he is thawing her back into life, but in Elena’s view Simón is stuck in an illusion from the past: In the old way of thinking, no matter how much you have, there is always something missing. The name you choose to give this something more that is missing is passion. Yet I am willing to bet that if tomorrow you were offered all the passion you wanted – passion by the bucketful – you would promptly find something new to miss, to lack. This endless satisfaction, this yearning for the something-more that is missing, is a way of thinking we are well rid of, in my Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 15 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 66. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 70. 36 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 70. 33 34 35

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J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus opinion. Nothing is missing. The nothing that you think is missing is an illusion. You are living by an illusion.37

Just as Inés seems to know nothing of ‘the modern toilet habitus’ but is in fact steeped in its culture, Elena remembers the storms of passion of the old life, even as she repudiates them. Devoid of desire and almost lifeless in her disembodied response to sex, there is something emphatically true and yet mechanically reductive in her rendition of the ‘truth’ of desire in modernity. Unchecked by love, fuelled by the drive to consume, discarding objects and subjects as relentlessly as they are consumed, the desiring subjects of late modernity are, as Zygmunt Bauman argues in Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts, waste makers. Driven to consume as if they are programmed automatons that serve the economy’s need to grow and fed by an endless supply of disposable love objects, modern subjects waste objects, others and life itself. As Bauman writes: ‘Consumables attract; waste repels. After desire comes waste-disposal.’38 But does Elena’s suggested alternative of dispassionate friendship and the limitation of desire to need provide an alternative? Lacan – the elephant in the room in this interchange between Elena and Simón – suggests that what constitutes the ‘metonymic chain of desire’ is language itself. Desire, he argues, derives from the entry of the symbolic into the real; the signifier cuts a hole in the real (the word murders the Thing). As subjects of language, humans are caught up in an endless pursuit of partial objects (elements in the chain of signification) that always carry the trace of what they have lost. The missing thing is unattainable, a primal loss that drives the search for objects that stand in the place of loss itself. Elena’s insistence that passion is unnecessary in a world without lack (‘nothing is missing’) evokes the idea of a human world undoubled and undivided by language. This Novillan world, where people speak in a barely acquired Spanish that is given to them by the state and is always in translation, is reflected in the novel’s language, which consists almost entirely of reduced and sparse dialogue devoid of all figurative

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 79. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), p. 9.

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play. In Novilla, the passions that drive humans (desire, hunger, taste, rivalry, distinction, ambivalence) have been erased. Novilla’s citizens enjoy debating the ideal form of various objects, but in this republic (without letters) subjects are untroubled by interiority. They are, in the language of the novel, ‘washed clean’ of their past. Perplexingly empty, Novilla’s inhabitants are subjects without lack. Untroubled by the yawning chasm between need and desire that is intrinsic to being human, they are humans without holes dwelling in the timeless state of a society where all needs are met and where desire is foreclosed as the wellspring of action. Conversely, Simón remembers a world weighted with desire and, convinced by his fuzzy memories that desire has something essential to do with being human, he sets off in search of his missing Thing. And so we stumble with him through a sequence of disastrous steps, in which he courts and proposes marriage to Elena and then almost immediately loses erotic interest in her. Just as the novel has taken a turn into a new matrix of ideas, Simón has also taken a subjective turn. In the first seven chapters of the novel, he embodies the humanity of a subject denied their humanity by a system that renders them waste. In the second set of seven chapters, this same human subject, insisting on ‘the substantiality of animal flesh, with all the gravity of blood-letting and sacrifice’39 embodies the irrationality and stupidity of human desire. On the one hand, there is the almost lifeless world of Novilla – devoid of time, passion, history and weight – and on the other, the all too human idiocy of Simón, convinced of the rightness of his (embodied) intuitions, fantasies and desires. Buoyed up by the fantasy of having found the missing object (David’s mother), he delivers David into the all too familiar world of a dysfunctional family. Installed as David’s mother, Inés manifests not the ideal (missing) mother, nor even a ‘good-enough’ mother, but a maternal nightmare, claustrophobically anticipating David’s every need until the psychic space between mother and child collapses and there is no separation between self and other – and thus no space for desire. In absenting himself from the family trio, Simón delivers David into Inés’s need and within days he begins to regress into infancy, as Inés returns him to a state of complete dependency, buttoning his coat up Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 80.

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against the threat of cold, shutting windows despite the stifling heat, returning him to the baby carriage and to baby clothes, and, in so doing, creating a psychologically disturbed subject without holes; a variant of madness no less delusional than the modern fantasy of the subject who doesn’t shit.

Broken stories The next sequence of seven chapters traces out the void in story: how does narrative fill the breach left in the wake of the death of God? Here, Simón again becomes the pivot within the narrative for a constellation of ideas that circumnavigate a void. Like modern subjects, the inhabitants of Novilla die, but death itself poses no existential dilemma to them. In their platonic-like worldview, Novillans regard things as mere approximations of their idealform, which excuses them from striving towards a perfection that is assumed to be already given. Simón, in contrast, is burdened by the memory of his very modern sensibility. Convinced that transience and history are intrinsic to the meaning of human experience and that, subject to time, humans are also agents of change, he can’t resist interrogating the meaning of their lives and labour: ‘Still, what is it all for in the end? The ships bring the grain from across the seas and we haul it off the ships and someone else mills it and bakes it, and eventually it gets eaten and turned into – what shall I call it? – waste, and the waste flows back into the sea […] I don’t see any larger picture, any loftier design. It’s just consumption.’40

Why, he presses them, do they labour like beasts merely to produce food that is recycled into waste? ‘What is there to be proud of in working to feed a host of vermin?’ he asks.41 Alvarez’s response to Simón’s outrage that he is labouring to produce rat-food is both reasoned and unthinking: ‘You might say they are our shadow. Yes, they consume some of the grain we offload. Yes, there is spoilage in the warehouse. But there is spoilage all along the Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 128. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 135.

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way: in the fields, in the trains, in the ships, in the warehouses, in the baker’s storerooms. There is no point in getting upset about spoilage. Spoilage is part of life.’42

At the Institute where Novillans gather to debate philosophy and study the ideal form of things, Simón again insists on the mutability of a human world subject to time, countering the dystopia of Novilla’s timelessness with his irony and melancholy, while continuing to idealize Inés as the ideal mother right up until the moment he encounters her in the form of her poo. Philosophizing over her blocked toilet bowl, he attempts to explain poo to David – as matter that was his and is no longer, that does not matter in itself but is saturated with ideas, that is not good for you but is nothing you need to worry about – and in the midst of this conceptual muddle he falls into the psychic void posed by poo as matter that bespeaks human mortality: ‘Dead bodies are bodies that have been afflicted with death, that we no longer have a use for. But we don’t have to be troubled by death. After death there is always another life […] We are not like poo that has to stay behind and be mixed with the earth.’ ‘What are we like?’ ‘What are we like if we are not like poo? We are like ideas. Ideas never die. You will learn that at school.’ ‘But we make poo.’43

According to psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, in order to live we thrust aside all that is not the self; we spit out, excrete and wash away the effluent the body produces. We feel disgust at this effluent because it marks us as potentially ‘that’. We are not the pus, blood and shit that we excrete, but it comes from us and, eventually, we will become that. The reason the corpse is so threatening to the human psyche is because, in order to maintain the bound self, we have to extricate ourselves from the claim our bodily products make on us: If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel. I is expelled.44 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 133. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 156 Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 3–4.

42 43 44

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Simón’s only recourse when David confronts him with this existential dilemma (but we make poo) is to fall back on an old and familiar story in which human time and human materiality are transcended by the soul – an ideal concept of a disembodied and timeless subjectivity. ‘We partake of the ideal but we make poo. That is because we have a double nature. I don’t know how to put it more simply.’45 Simón’s philosophizing has led him into an ideational cul-de-sac he can only extricate himself from through fabulation. On the one hand, he insists that humans are subject to time and, on the other, that they are irreducible to the effect time has on them. On the one hand they are makers of excrement and dead bodies and on the other, they are possessed of an eternal and immaterial essence. Stalled in this conceptual quagmire pondering ‘the pooness of poo’, Simón’s storytelling unleashes a fabulating drive in David and he begins recreating reality according to his own fantasy. If humans can be eternal like ideas, he can be the ‘third brother’ after his birth as the first son. Don Quixote’s windmill is a giant, and is only a windmill when it is a picture in a book. When a cargo worker is killed at the docks, Simón’s fictionalizing once again fills in the breach (‘He is probably crossing the seas at this very moment, looking forward to the next life. It will be a great adventure for him, to start anew, washed clean.’46), feeding David’s anxiety about the hole in the story. Haunted by the poo that stains even the food he eats – Simón tells him his sausages are poo-meat produced from the shit pigs eat – he becomes increasingly anxious about the spaces that separate one thing from another and increasingly preoccupied with finding a magical solution to suture the psychic void that threatens him. ‘There is a hole. It’s inside the pages. You don’t see it because you don’t see anything’,47 he tells Simón. He begins collecting discarded and broken things, creating his own private museum, as if this could forestall the moment when things fall into the void of death, while Simón continues creating untenable distinctions. Protesting against David’s accumulating clutter, Simón tells him: ‘A cup has no feelings. If you threw it away it wouldn’t care. It wouldn’t be hurt […] Things are not meant Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 156. Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 185–6. 47 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 195. 45 46



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to last forever […] Each thing has its natural term. That old cup has had a good life; now it is time for it to retire and make way for a new cup.’48 But David’s world has already broken; holes, gaps and cracks are proliferating in any story that can be told. ‘Now you are confusing cracks with holes’, Simón tells him. ‘You are thinking of people dying and getting buried in graves, in holes in the ground. A grave is made by gravediggers using spades. It is not something unnatural like a crack.’49 As Elizabeth Costello says in Slow Man (2005), God, even if ‘he does not exist, at least fills what would otherwise be a vast, all-devouring hole’.50

Descartes’s children In the last septet, the novel once again shifts focus, while sustaining and condensing the ideas of the first three septets, and here again, shit emerges as the master-signifier of an irreducible void at the heart of the modern condition. The last septet – the most elusive and enigmatic in The Childhood of Jesus – begins with David’s declaration: ‘I haven’t got a mother and I haven’t got a father. I just am.’51 Echoing God’s ‘I am who I am’,52 his enunciation of being ex nihilo registers something real: his thrownness into the world of Novilla and its demand that he be washed clean of all trace of his past. There is something missing in the story David has been told of his provenance (some madness afoot in Novilla) and he fills in the breach with fabulation. Enter señor Daga, an unsavoury character, who appears as a surrogate godfather threatening to supplant Simón and promising magic in the form of obscene pens, television sets and the gift of a brother. There is something familiar about Daga; his name suggests an inversion of the character Drago in Slow Man, another doubling which continues the open-ended inter- and intra-textual dialogues that traverse Coetzee’s oeuvre. In The Childhood of Jesus, Daga is the unlikely surrogate godfather of David, Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 198. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 210. 50 Coetzee, J. M. Slow Man (Sydney: Vintage, 2005), p. 187. 51 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 217. 52 Exod. 3.14. 48 49

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whereas in Slow Man Drago is the unlikely surrogate godson of Paul Rayment. Daga, like Paul, desires the mother and seeks to establish intimacy with her through a feigned affection for the child, and both Daga and Drago are on the wrong side of the law, their charm residing in their inherent lawlessness. In The Childhood of Jesus, David is drawn to Daga’s obscene games that encourage a new lawlessness in him: ‘[…] is your bum clean?’53 he asks Diego, Inés’s brother, as he swills alcohol in a game that pushes the boundaries of all social protocols. Declaring himself the progenitor of all things, including himself, David begins to gabble in an invented language: ‘La la fa fa yam ying tu tu.’54 In response, the ever-mutable Simón takes up a new subjective position as the spokesperson of the law, in contrast to his earlier position as its interrogator: One of the ways we get along is by speaking the same language. That is the rule. It is a good rule, and we should obey it […] If you refuse, if you go on being rude about Spanish and insist on speaking your own language then you are going to find yourself living in a private world. You will have no friends. You will be shunned.55

And he is. A letter arrives decreeing David must go to school, where he is bound for a collision with the hitherto invisible face of Novillan law. Refusing to learn to read or enumerate, he is lost in a world of his own making. Troubled by holes only he can see, his universe has become a world of holes, where the space between two things is a space he is always at risk of falling into: ‘Is it like when the numbers open up and you fall?’56 And yet, from this singular point of view – a singularity he shares with all those who fall outside reason – he magically sees with the eye of God, or rather, he sees like God. Or like like like God. The synthetic order of symbols and numbers that creates similitude out of singularity is something he cannot see, because he sees only singularity and, like God, he sees the spaces between each and every thing. Trying to grasp how David sees, Simón conjectures: ‘What if we are wrong and he is right? What if between one and two there is no bridge at all, only empty space? And what if Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 228. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 219. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 220. 56 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 265. 53 54 55



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we, who so confidently take the step, are in fact falling through space, only we don’t know it because we insist on keeping our blindfold on? What if the boy is the only one among us with eyes to see?’57 Is he the child Jesus or a child whose delusions mirror a delusional world? Novilla’s madness – as the inevitable fellow traveller of its ordering regime – manifests itself when a court decrees that David is to be consigned to a camp for delinquent children. His teacher has found his singularity intolerable and declared him unteachable, even after David proves he has miraculously acquired both literacy and numeracy. In response to the teacher’s demand that he write ‘I must tell the truth’, he instead writes ‘Yo soy la verdad, I am the truth’,58 guaranteeing his constitution as a subject outside of Novillan law. At a tribunal deliberating over David’s incarceration, Inés and Simón are found to be at fault for their failure to ground David in the real. In a society that demands all its subjects are washed clean of their human traits, their fault is a failure to ground David in a real parentage and a real past. David lacks a letter, they are told, the missing letter that was lost in the sea that held the name of his real missing mother. As Lacan writes, the letter always arrives at its destination, and this letter arrives at Novilla’s court of law, articulating the madness of the law’s logic: its mis-recognition of its own condition as constituted by lack. As matter out of place, David is assigned by the state to a new place of containment, a new camp. The novel has unfolded in such a hole – in the space between camps, words, pages, and numbers – and now, falling into the space between things, David is stateless in every sense of the word. Here again, the reader catches a glimpse of something like the invisible holes where unseeable and nameless subjects are consigned today for the crime of being the waste products of a system of waste making. And Simón too has fallen into a hole. Knocked by the crane he has introduced at the dock, he falls into the space between ship and sea, leaving David truly fatherless and naked in a world of barbed wire, or is it imagined barbed wire? We no longer know. Like the missing mother, and now the missing father, truth in this fiction has

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 291. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 263.

57 58

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gone awry. We find a clue however to the unresolved ambiguity of David’s godliness, and the novel’s ‘truth’ in a small detail he narrates of his life in Punto Arenas, when he comes to visit Simón in hospital: […] And they’ve got a mother duck and ducklings and one of the boys trod on a duckling and its inside came out of its bum and I wanted to push them back but the teacher wouldn’t let me, he said I must let the ducking die, and I said I wanted to breathe into it but he wouldn’t let me.59

This curious detail of a duckling with its insides coming out of its bum sounds a familiar note, a likeness that conjures, along with all the misplaced poo of the novel, another duck that quacks and shits. Just as the inverted name Dago/ Drago (the surrogate godson/godfather) leads us to the question of who is the real father, the duck leads us out of the novel to Drago’s real father in Slow Man – Miroslav Jokić, an immigrant, famed in his former life for reviving an antique mechanical duck. As Marianna tells Paul Rayment: ‘Only man who can make mechanical duck walk, make noise like how you say kwaak, eat’ – she pats her bosom – ‘other things too. Old, old duck. Come from Sweden. Come to Dubrovnik 1680, from Sweden. Nobody know how to fix it. Then Miroslav Jokić fix it perfect … In Australia nobody hear of mechanical duck. Don’t know what it is. Miroslav Jokić, nobody hear of him. Just auto worker. Is nothing, auto worker.’60

Miroslav is the stumbling block to Paul Rayment’s seemingly benevolent plans to become Drago’s godfather in order to procure Marianna (Miroslav’s wife). The joke, of course, is that Miroslav, the real father in this narrative and a migrant living in Adelaide’s northern wastelands (the ‘is nothing, auto worker’), has played a part in the Enlightenment’s dream of surpassing God by creating an automaton with the likeness of humans. The duck Miroslav has ‘breathed life into’ bears an unmistakable likeness to Vaucanson’s famous mechanical duck, presented to the French Academy of Sciences in 1738 and celebrated for its uncanny capacity to digest food and then excrete it. As Jürgen Barkhoff writes: ‘This slightly gory detail points to the ultimate aim of the exercise: to Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 285. Coetzee, Slow Man, p. 92.

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imitate life as closely as possible.’61 The duck could move, ruffle its feathers and quack, but its capacity to shit, while based on an illusion, appeared to realize the ambition of enlightenment clockmakers to create man-made automatons that imitated God’s creative power. An impetus inspired by Descartes: When philosophising about the res extensa, the soulless object world, René Descartes had claimed in his 1637 treatise Discours de la Méthode that animals are nothing but soulless automatons, machines working according to mechanical and hydraulic laws […] he also suggested that one day man himself might be able to create animals.62

Coetzee’s imagined Novillans – timeless, colourless, devoid of history, memory and appetite, and appearing to act as if governed by reason alone – are like or like like those fantasized artificial humans that have teased technological and literary imagination since the dawn of modernity. Like Descartes’s automata, Novillans quack and shit in contrived and mechanical ways, recalling the hubris of modernity and its spectacular failure to achieve godliness through reason’s triumph. David’s desire to breathe life into the duck squashed on the ground with its entrails coming out of its bum is like (we might imagine) God’s desire … if only his creations had not made such a mash of their dreams to create in his likeness. Novilla, a machine world where reason’s madness has no limit, recreates the mythos of the Cartesian fantasy and the duck with the shit coming out of its bum conjures the afterlife of that myth – the brokenness of the present and its muck-making ordering regimes. At the end of this septet, three chapters take the novel back to its beginning in a circular logic that leaves the (now extended) family once again homeless and in search of refuge. This overarching circular structure is repeated in the interior ‘circles’ of the novel, each of which, as I have suggested, step out a paradox intrinsic to the modern condition (seven steps; four circles; the form of the novel doubling the automaton’s regulated dance). Against the backdrop of Novillan reason, modernity is enunciated as a matrix of contradictory Jürgen Barkhoff, ‘Perfecting Nature – Surpassing God: The Dream of Creating Artificial Humans around 1800’, in Christian Emden and David Midgely (eds), Science Technology and the German Cultural Imagination: Papers from the Conference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), p. 41. 62 Barkhoff, ‘Perfecting Nature’, p. 41. 61

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logics: of accumulation and waste making; of heart-felt passions fuelling an economy of disposable objects; of fantasies proliferating around a broken story. Superimposed and contained by the narrative frame of the novel, each matrix creates a labyrinth of dead ends which play out against the barren field of Novillan reason. The last septet turns upon reason itself, as the social bond and its law (social, juridical, linguistic) is counterposed against its absence in the context of the madness of a system that knows only reason. While there is an inherent danger in attempting to contain the semantic reach of a novel as ‘open’63 as The Childhood of Jesus, in focusing on shit and its analogues, and in stepping out of the novel to touch my shit/your shit I’ve attempted to bring to the fore the matter of the work, not in order to foreclose the text’s semantic openness, but rather to register the body of the text – the four septets that unfold like clockwork around the void of being human. At the end of the novel, David and his surrogate family are travelling north. David needs to poo, but this time there is no toilet paper and only Inés’s handkerchief saves him from a ‘dirty bum’.64

References Agamben, G. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel HellerRoazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Barkhoff, J. ‘Perfecting Nature – Surpassing God: the Dream of Creating Artificial Humans around 1800’, in Christian Emden and David Midgely (eds), Science. Technology and the German Cultural Imagination: Papers from the Conference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005. Bauman, Z. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Cambridge: Cambridge Polity Press, 2008. Bauman, Z. Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. Coetzee, J. M. The Childhood of Jesus. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013. Coetzee, J. M. Slow Man. Sydney: Vintage, 2005. Umberto Eco, ‘The Poetics of the Open Work’, in The Role of the Reader: Exploration in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 47–66. 64 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 305. 63



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Coetzee, J. M., Dusklands. London: Vintage Books, 2004. Coetzee, J. M. In the Heart of the Country. London: Vintage Books, 2004. Coetzee, J. M. ‘Small Spiral Notebook’, 11 July 1977–28 August 1978, Entry 17/7/77, The J. M. Coetzee Papers Manuscript Collections, MS 0842, Subseries A, The Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas at Austin. Coetzee, J. M. ‘Small Notebook’, 16 March 1974–9 February 1976. Entry 19/2/74/5 The J. M. Coetzee Papers Manuscript Collections, MS 0842, Subseries A, The Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas at Austin. David, I. A Sociological History of Execratory Experience: Defecatory Manners and Toiletry Technologies. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. Doran, A. and Raja, I. ‘The Cultural Politics of Shit: Class, Gender and Public Space in India’, Postcolonial Studies 18:2 (2015): 189–207. Douglas, M. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge Classics, 2002. Eco, U. ‘The Poetics of the Open Work’, in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Elias, N. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. el-Khoury, Rodolphe. ‘Introduction’, in D. Laporte, History of Shit. Trans. N. Benabid and R. el-Khoury. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Grimm, J. and W. [1823] Grimm’s Fairy Tales. London: Puffin Books, 2010. Hawkins, G. The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005. Kristeva, J. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lacan, J. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. A. Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1977. Laporte, D. History of Shit. Trans. N. Benabid and R. el-Khoury. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Pillow, K. ‘Intertextuality and Other Analogues in J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man’, Contemporary Literature, 50:3 (2009): 528–52. Roth, P. Exit Ghost. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007. Rutherford, J. ‘Washed Clean: The Forgotten Journeys of Future Maritime Arrivals in J. M. Coetzee’s Estralia’, in Lynda Mannik (ed.), Migration by Boat. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015. Slumdog Millionaire. Dir. D. Boyle and L. Tandan, 2008 (film). Swift, J. Gulliver’s Travels. London: Jones & Company, 1826.

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Coetzee’s Republic: Plato, Borges and Migrant Memory in The Childhood of Jesus Lynda Ng and Paul Sheehan

To be a refugee is to be in need of protection, reliant on the protocols of international human rights law. To be a migrant, by contrast, is to exercise choice, perhaps prompted by employment or education opportunities, other forms of economic advantage, or just family reunification. As well as this element of choice, the tempo of departure for each is different. Since refugees are, by definition, escaping persecution of some kind, they often have to flee their home countries at short notice, leaving behind property and belongings, and severing or suspending ties to family, friends and language. Migrancy, however, is a more drawn-out process. It must be planned, and must go through the proper legal channels in order to be ratified (in advance). It is also, in theory, reversible; migrants are generally free to return to their home countries, unlike refugees, who may face further persecution if repatriated. As with many German intellectuals, the social philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt left her home country in the 1930s, eventually arriving in the United States in 1941. Two years later she wrote of her deracinated situation, in an essay entitled ‘We Refugees’. The title is a deliberate misnomer; Arendt begins by stating that ‘we don’t like to be called “refugees”’.1 She objects to the term not just because of its political overtones, but also its psychological ramifications. Before the war broke out, says Arendt, ‘We did our best to prove to other people that we were just ordinary immigrants. We

Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’, in Marc Robinson (ed.), Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile (Boston and London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 110.

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declared that we had departed of our own free will, to countries of our choice, and we denied that our situation had anything to do with “so-called Jewish problems”’ (110). Free will and choice, as noted above, are not available to refugees. To see yourself as in need of refuge, then, is to continue to shoulder the burden of expulsion and exile, to persist in the non-agential state that the term ‘refugee’ implies. But embracing the role of ‘ordinary immigrant’, as a way of rejecting the choiceless condition of ‘refugee’, presents other difficulties. The chief of these is what might be termed the regime of compulsory forgetting. One’s former occupation and language must (continue to) be forgotten, and so too must the tokens of trauma. Arendt writes: In order to forget more efficiently we rather avoid any allusion to concentration or internment camps we experienced in nearly all European countries […] Even amongst ourselves we don’t speak about this past. Instead, we have found our own way of mastering an uncertain future.2

That ‘way’ is via a turn from political observation and reflection, towards various superstitious practices – reading the stars, for example, or the lines of the hand – in order to maintain optimism. Trauma and optimism are obviously contrapuntal, for which the solution is ‘to forget more efficiently’. But even without having the memory of trauma to negotiate, forgetting is a kind of pre-condition when it comes to national resettlement – for migrants as much as for refugees and their peers (asylum seekers, displaced persons, and so on). In The Childhood of Jesus, J. M. Coetzee effectively confounds the refugee/ migrant distinction. Several critics have chosen to see the novel’s two protagonists, Simón and David, as refugees, newly arrived from across the water in the fictional town of Novilla.3 This is certainly plausible, especially in the wake of Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007). In its essayistic sections, Diary is a kind of compendium of twenty-first-century social and political plaints – including Strong Opinion #22, ‘JC’s’ reflections ‘On Asylum in Australia’.4 It is Arendt, ‘We Refugees’, p. 118. See Joyce Carol Oates, ‘Saving Grace’, New York Times, 29 August 2013; Hedley Twidle, review of The Childhood of Jesus, Financial Times, 8 March 2013; David L Ulin, ‘J. M. Coetzee’s “The Childhood of Jesus” is a land without memory’, Los Angeles Times, 5 September 2013. 4 J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (London: Viking, 2008), pp. 111–13. 2 3



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also notable that Coetzee’s stance on this issue is not so different from his alter ego’s. Early in 2016 he was one of sixty-one signatories to a letter sent to the Australian Prime Minister, condemning his government’s policies of offshore detention for its ‘disregard for human dignity’.5 The premise of The Childhood both does and does not suggest refugeeism. Before arriving in Novilla Simón and David have passed through a ‘camp’ in Belstar; the journey across the water is understood to be one way; and once in Novilla they are ‘processed’ and resettled with the bare minimum of resources. However, it is not evident that Simón and David are fleeing persecution, nor do they show any regret or misgiving for what has been left behind. Moreover, once the book moves beyond its premise, the experience of migrancy becomes paramount. The fact that everyone in Novilla has undergone the same process suggests that this might be a better lens for understanding the events that ensue than refugeeism. Coetzee’s perennial subject is what could be termed ‘outsider experience’, expressed through the cast of pariahs, misfits, outcasts, dissenters and various dispossessed peoples that populate his fiction. In The Childhood, we argue, he is positing the migrant as outsider, as someone forced to adjust to new forms of communal organization.6 The novel could then be seen as an exploration of this form of experience – the obdurate strangeness and opacity of everyday life, the seeming counter-logic that governs how the social world is organized. The pressure, as Arendt put it, ‘to forget more efficiently’, to be ‘washed clean’ of the past, is the rationale behind the novel’s apparent suspension of realism, and why everything appears to be so bemusing and insubstantial. Far from being an ‘afterlife’, as has been suggested, Simón’s existence in Novilla distills the migrant experience of the ‘new life’.7 The politics and aesthetics of place are paramount in The Childhood, given that Novilla cannot be located on any existing map. Yet this ‘unlocatable’

Ben Doherty and Ken D’Souza, ‘Asylum policies “brutal and shameful”, authors tell Turnbull and Dutton’, Guardian, 6 February 2016. 6 Let us not forget, too, that Coetzee himself is a migrant, having left South Africa for Australia in 2002, and taken up citizenship there in 2006. See J. C. Kannemeyer, J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing (Melbourne: Scribe, 2012), p. 4. 7 See Jason Farago, review of The Childhood of Jesus, The New Republic, 14 September 2013; Theo Tait, review of The Childhood of Jesus, Guardian, 27 February 2013. 5

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quality is also crucial to the question of migrancy that shapes the narrative. In this chapter, we explore the philosophical cartography of Novilla through two key figures: Plato, the progenitor of some of the foundational texts of Western philosophy; and Jorge Luis Borges, certain of whose enigmatic fictions refract the history and politics of his native Argentina. The curious consonance between these two writers gives weight and definition to the question of migrant memory, shedding light on some of the more inscrutable aspects of the novel, and revealing them to be both purposive and resonant.

History is not real: Plato on the docks The ambiguities of The Childhood of Jesus do not end with the refugee/ migrant couple. They continue with the novel’s setting, which has prompted speculation along two related lines. First, there is the question of geo-fictional specificity. Where might Novilla, which (broken in two) means ‘no-town’, be situated, in the world that we know? Spanish is spoken in the town – Simón and David learnt it at Belstar, the transit camp through which they passed – but the story does not take place in Spain. South America is more likely, as a locale, and, as will be discussed in the next section, there are literary parallels to affirm this supposition. It is the second line of speculation that is more relevant for this section, namely, the question of geo-fictional non-specificity. Can Novilla be read as some kind of utopia? As the town’s residents are the first to acknowledge, their lives are devoid of want. Everything from housing to food to sporting events has been subsidized, even if Novilla is hardly a society of abundance. However, it becomes apparent that the townspeople’s lack of want has in some sense been ‘engineered’. For the denizens of the Novilla are not just cleansed of memories and of ties to their former lives; they also appear to have been ‘washed clean’ of passion, desire and ambition, evidenced through the sexual abstinence that they embrace, the bland food that sustains them, and an almost complete lack of creature comforts. The kind of polity that this calls to mind is a socialist utopia – one in which manual labour is revered (Simón takes a job on the docks, shifting sacks of grain all day); self-improvement is



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promoted, via free night classes at the Institute; hardly anything costs money; and there is a generous welfare system. Indeed, like all manifestations of nineteenth-century utopian socialism, it is apparently classless, co-operative, and fully secularized. Yet despite these imputations, there are other, more plentiful textual allusions that point to a much earlier model of utopia. In the English literary tradition, utopian imagining has oblique associations with South America. Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) consists largely of the ‘recollections’ imparted to him by the Portuguese traveller Raphael Hythloday. Although these recollections are necessarily fictional, More uses a non-fictional text, Amerigo Vespucci’s Four Voyages (1507), to give a backstory to Hythloday: that he was one of twenty-four men left ‘in a garrison at the farthest point of the last voyage’,8 from which he ventured out to other lands, including Utopia. The ‘point’ in question is Cape Frio, a promontory off the coast of Brazil; which would situate Utopia somewhere to the east of the South American continent. Vespucci’s travelogue is, however, just the starting point. For the range of topics covered by Hythloday, in Book II, More appropriates certain elements from Plato and others; and the institutional structure of the island is primarily derived from designs engendered by Plato and refined by Aristotle.9 Philosophical echoes of Plato are also evident throughout The Childhood, particularly when it comes to the question of desire. At the base of Plato’s moral psychology is the tripartite division of the soul, comprising rational, desiring and spirited or honour-loving components. In the Timaeus Socrates warns against sexual incontinence (a ‘soul-sickness’), and describes the male libido as disobedient, headstrong and ‘goaded by … frantic appetites’.10 Hence his recommendation in The Republic that the desiring part of the soul, ‘the companion of indulgence and pleasure’, be subdued by the other parts until it can be made to serve the ‘desires of reason.’11 Simón learns from Ana, Elena Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Robert M. Adams, eds George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 10. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams, ‘Introduction’ to Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Adams, eds Logan and Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. xxv–xxvi. 10 Plato, Timaeus and Critias, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), pp. 91, 97. 11 Plato, The Republic, trans. Tom Griffith, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 136. 8

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and Eugenio that their carnal urges have been tamed in just this manner – by recognizing their irrational or aberrant character, and quelling them on that basis. (Plato is actually mentioned by name in The Childhood, but only as a misnomer for ‘Pluto’, Mickey Mouse’s dog.)12 Related to this refusal is perhaps the most striking – and perplexing – formal feature of The Childhood: the passages of extended dialogue between Simón and one or more of Novilla’s residents. In some ways echoing the procedures of the Socratic dialogue form, the subjects covered include hunger, beauty and sexual appetition (with Ana); desire versus benevolence (with Elena); and the dignity of labour (with Álvaro). What begins to emerge from these disquisitions is a Plato-inflected concern with the real, sometimes in comparison with the ideal. The first third or so of the novel, for example, is driven by Simón’s search for David’s mother – not his biological mother, but the woman who might still be, in some sense, his ‘real’ mother (just as Simón, who publicly presents himself as David’s uncle or caretaker, in effect becomes his ‘real’ father). ‘Surely there is such a thing as overvaluing the biological?’ he says to the education authorities (207), implying that biology is not real, because not an adequate measure of human relations. Platonism asserts itself even more insistently at the Institute. Simón learns from Eugenio, a fellow stevedore, about a discussion that took place there on the subject of sexual disappointment. Why do the women of the Salón Confort, a sort of state-sanctioned brothel, invariably leave their clients dissatisfied? Because they fail to live up to the ‘womanly ideal’ that is the object of male sexual desire, in relation to which the real women of the Salón are but ‘inferior copies’ (141) – a none-too-subtle restatement of Plato’s theory of forms. This is later reworked in terms of fiction. After David transcribes a sentence from Don Quixote, his mother, Inés, asks Simón, ‘Who is Dulcinea?’ to which he replies: ‘She is a woman Don Quixote is in love with. Not a real woman. An ideal. An idea in his mind.’13 The Don is thus condemned to disappointment, because that is the effect of the ‘womanly

J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2013), p. 184. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 218.

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ideal’, indeed, of all ideals. Without necessarily contradicting this precept, Simón acknowledges elsewhere that ideas can be forceful, even agential, as we will see. But the signal instance of this many-sided engagement with Platonic philosophy occurs on the docks. In Chapter 14, Simón argues that he and his co-workers could be doing more ‘intelligent’ work than shifting sacks of grain all day long, like beasts of burden. The other stevedores, led by Álvaro, firmly resist this overture, preferring to cling to the ‘timeless’, pre-industrial mode of physical labour that is their livelihood. Their counter-argument finally turns on the notion of ‘history’, and what status it should be accorded: ‘[H]istory has no manifestations. Because history is not real. Because history is just a made-up story […] History is merely a pattern we see in what has passed. It has no power to reach into the present.’14 Given that everyone in Novilla (except, it would appear, Simón) has been ‘washed clean’ of their memories, and thus of their personal histories, it makes sense that the much broader, collective history would also be seen as something evanescent and inconsequential. The scene can also be interpreted as a strange act of translation: the stevedores regarding their physical, material existence in terms that emulate the unchanging nature of the Platonic empyrean. (Insofar as Plato has an actual philosophy of history, it is elucidated in Books VIII and IX of The Republic – a pessimistic view that sees it in terms of universal degeneration and decay.) The deprecation of history by Novilla’s workers, and apparent belief that their labours are timeless and unchanging, sanctions those readings of The Childhood as pure allegory, as perhaps even suggestive of an afterlife. We posit, however, that materiality and history cannot be bracketed entirely. Simón holds to the Heraclitean view that, as he tells Alvaro, ‘You cannot step twice into the same waters.’15 But he also believes that we have a ‘double nature’, as he explains to David, while fixing a blocked toilet: ‘We are like ideas. Ideas never die. […] We partake of the ideal but we also make poo.’16 The essence of this double nature is revealed when David, whom Simón thinks is ‘good at Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 116. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 114. 16 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 133. 14 15

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ideas’,17 believes that his mother has plans to reproduce. Simón confronts Inés about this: ‘David says you are going to give him a brother.’ ‘I was telling him his bedtime story [replies Inés]. It was something that came up in passing, it was just an idea.’ ‘Well, ideas can become reality, just as seed can become flesh and blood.’18

The ‘reality of ideas’ is one way of explaining the debate on the docks, and the ‘inverted Platonism’ to which the stevedores seem to subscribe. Throughout The Childhood, ideas are never simply ideas. They are either spurs to action (Simón), or they are barriers to change (the stevedores, and Novilla’s sociopolitical charter more broadly). ‘The Platonists sense intuitively that ideas are realities […] language is nothing but a system of arbitrary symbols’: Jorge Luis Borges makes this assertion in an essay on allegory, published in 1949.19 Nine years earlier he narrativized the notion in a story, a quasi-science-fictional fable entitled ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’.20 Drawing clearly on Berkeleyan ‘immaterialism’, the tale describes how an ideal universe encroaches on, and eventually overtakes, the real one. Insofar as it is ‘about’ anything, ‘Tlön’ is a cautionary tale that exemplifies the capacity of ideas to reshape material reality – whether as ‘Platonist intuition’, which risks stagnation, or as more insidious fascist rhetoric, with violent eventualities. Fascinated with the ‘purity’ of ideas throughout his career, Borges nonetheless saw language as inevitably falling short of that immaculate ambition.

History is real: Borges and the limits of translatability One of the side-effects of reading Novilla into the utopian tradition is to render it insular and detached, existing in a parallel universe to ours. This is Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 132. Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 190–1. 19 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘From Allegories to Novels’, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger, trans. Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine and Eliot Weinberger (New York: Viking, 1999), p. 339. 20 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 68–81. 17 18



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a built-in requisite of the genre, which, as John Carey notes, is predicated on eliminating as much as possible from ‘the world that we know’.21 Yet Coetzee’s Republic, as we have just seen, is somewhat less than ‘ideal’. His reframing of Plato works not to present Novilla as a Hispanic update of the Greek polity, but to highlight the limits of how far such a ‘revision’ can be taken. It reaches a head of sorts with the claim that ‘history is not real’, at which point Simón recoils. In this section, we argue that the claim is also belied in other ways. The Childhood, in short, incorporates a great deal of ‘the world that we know’, both directly and indirectly. We demonstrate this by exploring the novel’s intertextual affiliations with Borges and with Argentinian history. These, we argue, provide a robust and revealing context, both as a way of approaching the novel’s enigmas and as a lens through which to examine the question of migrant memory. That The Childhood incurs a debt to Cervantes is self-evident enough.22 The sole book in David’s possession, An Illustrated Children’s Don Quixote, becomes the text that facilitates his ability to read and write. Underscoring the work’s foundational literary status, Simón uses it to explain to David that the story takes place in La Mancha, and that ‘La Mancha is in Spain, where the Spanish language originally came from’.23 Taking further cues from this text-within-the-text, stylistically and thematically it seems to be firmly grounded in the clinical experimentation of Borges. Indeed, it mirrors his penchant for rendering fantastical elements believable through a heady combination of historical ‘facts’, non-fictional frames and a sombre variation of ‘realism’. The presence of Borges in Coetzee’s writing has been remarked upon, over the years, but never fully explored. In the 1980s Stephen Watson detected traces of the Argentine writer in the ‘pseudoscholarship’ of Dusklands; and Nadine Gordimer saw Age of Iron as pivoting on the ‘incomparable Borges’, especially in its turning ‘to what restlessly resists artistic form, the naming John Carey, ‘Introduction’, in The Faber Book of Utopias, ed. John Carey (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. xii. 22 Cervantes’s influence on Coetzee is mapped out in detail by Maria J. Lopez in Lopez, ‘Miguel de Cervantes and J. M. Coetzee: An Unacknowledged Paternity’, Journal of Literary Studies 29:4 (2013): 80–97. 23 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 152. 21

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and recounting of lives which apparently stand for nothing but themselves’.24 More recently, Rebecca Walkowitz, Urmila Seshagiri and others have noticed echoes of the Borges story, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ (1939), in The Childhood of Jesus.25 We wish to argue, by contrast, that Coetzee’s work mirrors, draws inspiration from, and furthers the Borgesian literary project. Without going so far as to claim that The Childhood of Jesus is ‘set’ in Argentina, we posit that Borges and his native land provide important cultural, political and geographical anchor points for our understanding of Novilla. The lack of any of the capitalist drives towards efficiency or progress; the resistance to technological innovation and change; and the emphasis on education and personal improvement – all these have precedents in nineteenth-century Argentina. In the second half of the century, the country sought actively to attract European immigrant labour in order to liberate its vast potential for agriculture. The Argentine situation was unique, however, in that its immigration policies were geared towards maintaining the existing oligarchic system. As Adriana Puiggrós, the Argentinian historian and politician, explains: The source of oligarchic riches was not dependent, however, upon a workforce or technical advances, but rather upon the easy rents coming from extensive exploitation of the land. Thus Argentina received its immigrants in a very different way from the United States. In Argentina, those getting off the ships found themselves facing a closed economic system, where almost all of land ownership was in very large latifundios (landholdings) and where industrial development was limited.26

The society she describes provides a kind of rationale or framework for the resistance that Simón meets on the docks, when he questions his fellow stevedores about their reliance on manual labour and the lack of mechanization. Stephen Watson, ‘Colonialism and the Novels of J. M. Coetzee’, Research in African Literatures 17:3 (Autumn 1986): 371; Nadine Gordimer, ‘Preface’, Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee, eds Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson (London and New York: Macmillan; St Martin’s Press, 1996), p. xi. 25 Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 5; Urmila Seshagiri, ‘The Boy of La Mancha: J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus’, Contemporary Literature 54:3 (Fall 2013): 650. 26 Adriana Puiggrós, ‘Politics, praxis and the personal: An Argentine assessment’, Politics of Liberation: Paths from Freire, eds Peter L. McLaren and Colin Lankshear, trans. Fiona Taler (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 161. 24



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Significantly, Argentina thrived in the pre-war era as a major exporter of grain and beef; then languished with protectionist policies that eventually led to economic stagnation. This could be seen as the ‘back-story’ to Novilla’s importation of grain, to the warehouse (over-)storage of the grain, and to the stevedores acceptance of the rat infestation that keeps the grain supply down to manageable levels. The difficulties associated with David’s schooling, which dominate the later chapters of The Childhood, also have nineteenth-century auguries. In the late 1860s, President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento drew attention to the role of education, as he pushed Argentina towards modernization. The introduction of free, compulsory and non-religious primary school and military service was designed to foster a sense of national unity among its diverse immigrant population. It was, in fact, cultural and linguistic homogenization by proxy, a form of inculcation to help migrants assimilate into mainstream Argentinian culture. There is an element of this doctrinaire stance in Coetzee’s novel, when David is brought to the attention of the school administrators, and is obliged to attend classes. Inés hesitates to enrol him, thinking that he is still too young; and, indeed, once enrolled, he proves to be disruptive.27 David’s teacher grudgingly recognizes the child’s ‘specialness’, but has neither the resources nor the inclination to nurture it; his solution is simply to remove David from the system, maintaining the illusion of unity and coherence at all costs. These episodes turn on the complexities of language learning; and it is language, and linguistic adaptability, that assert themselves more forcefully as the novel unfolds. In 1998 Coetzee reviewed Borges’s Collected Fictions, a retranslation of the entire corpus. In evaluating these new versions, Coetzee demonstrates an intimate knowledge of the Borges oeuvre, both Spanish originals and English translations.28 The adjectives that he uses to describe Borges’s style are reminiscent of those often applied to Coetzee’s own writing: Borges’s prose is controlled, precise and economical to a degree uncommon in Spanish America. It avoids (as Borges notes with some pride) ‘Hispanicisms, Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 209. Published as ‘Borges’s Dark Mirror’, New York Review of Books, 22 October 1998, pp. 80–2. Republished in 2001 as part of the collection, Stranger Shores. See J. M. Coetzee, ‘J. L. Borges, Collected Fictions’, Stranger Shores: Essays, 1986–1999 (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001).

27 28

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J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus Argentinisms, archaisms, and neologisms; [it uses] everyday words rather than shocking ones’.29

Coetzee and Borges also have certain affinities in terms of upbringing: both were raised to be bilingual, to speak with equal aptitude the minority language of English and the dominant national language (for Coetzee, this was English and Afrikaans; for Borges, English and Spanish). Furthermore, their bilingual backgrounds led each of them, later in life, to probe the limits of translatability. It is no coincidence that both Coetzee and Borges are author-translators whose fictional work exploits and extends the possibilities of accommodating, within that work, non-fictional elements – apocryphal or otherwise. Coetzee’s remarks about Borges in translation emphasize the role of language as a repository of cultural memory and identity. They also provide cues as to how language and the question of translation operate in The Childhood. Coetzee notes that, towards the end of his life, Borges produced some English-language translations of his own work. In a quirky about-face, the latter favoured revisions that would make the work sound more natively English, rather than preserve any traces or evocations of the original Spanish. Coetzee, surprisingly, sides against the author on this matter: Pace the author, the versions of Borges that we want to read are not necessarily those that sound as if English were their native tongue: if there is indeed a proportion of grandiloquence in the originals, the reader may prefer to hear that grandiloquence and discriminate for himself what is authentically Borgesian in it, what native to the Spanish, rather than have the language uniformly muted on his behalf.30

Reading works in translation, says Coetzee, can produce a certain frisson, a gratified response to the unusual or unexpected way in which a non-native speaker uses the language. In the case of Borges, there are aspects of his writing so deeply embedded in the Argentinian context and the Spanish language that to eliminate them almost amounts to a betrayal of the Borgesian spirit. In addition, Coetzee raises the question of readerly agency. Borges’s refashioning

Coetzee, Stranger Shores, p. 175. Coetzee, Stranger Shores, p. 177.

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of his works in an Anglophone style removes the reader’s ability to discern for him or herself what an ‘authentic’ Borgesian style might consist in. In The Childhood of Jesus Coetzee exploits this notion of translation. The book is, after all, an English novel that pretends to be translated from Spanish. The ‘local’ flavour of this Hispanic world is conveyed through the intermittent use of Spanish words and locutions, sometimes accompanied by an English translation (‘“Vale de trabajo,” says the woman. “Show me your passbook”’).31 English is working twice as hard here, as the primary language of communication (between author and reader), and a symbolic substitute for the Spanish language (between characters within the text). In Chapter 9, when David recites an English poem, there is the problem as to how it can be presented without causing undue confusion. Coetzee circumvents it by replacing English with German (‘Wer reitet so spat durch Dampf und Wind?’).32 This canny substitution maintains the illusion of a Spanish-speaking milieu with no ties at all to the Anglophone world (it is explicitly made clear that neither David nor Simón can understand English). In terms of Borges’s stylistic innovations with Spanish, the qualities of restraint and precision have been adduced. For example, Mario Vargas Llosa writes: ‘Borges’s prose is an anomaly, for in opting for the strictest frugality he deeply disobeys the Spanish language’s natural tendency towards excess.’33 Coetzee performs his own act of ‘deep disobedience’ by working against, even ironizing, the stereotype of Spain as the land of passion, and the Spanish language as the verbal and graphic embodiment of that passion. In a land where desire has been expunged from, or at least assuaged within, most of the populace, this signifies a broadside against linguistic idealism. That there is something outside or beyond language is evident enough; Simón’s corporeal desires, as we will see, point decisively to that ‘outside.’ The dual function of English in The Childhood also creates a certain distance, allowing Coetzee to examine the complex relationship between language and migrancy. Logical explanations are provided for the imposition of a universal language in Novilla. When David protests at having to speak Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 9. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 67. 33 Mario Vargas Llosa, ‘The Fictions of Borges’, Third World Quarterly 10:3 (July 1988): 1329. 31 32

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Spanish all the time, Simón explains that it demonstrates one’s willingness and desire to be a part of society. ‘One of the ways in which we get along is by speaking the same language’, he tells him.34 But this linguistic sovereignty deepens Simón’s dissatisfaction with the lack of choice in Novilla. Scrutinizing the list of courses available at the Institute, Símon notices something odd: ‘No other language courses. No Portuguese. No Catalan. No Galician. No Basque. No Esperanto. No Volapük.’35 The absence of vernacular languages seems unnatural – a gesture towards homogeneity and a new society of equals, but also a wilful act of forgetting. If, as Coetzee suggests, the relationship between individual, culture and language is inseparable, then the removal of vernacular languages also bespeaks the destruction of culture and of the individual. Forced not only to give up but to forget his mother tongue, Simón realizes that this is instrumental in the regulation of desire. What he wishes to tell his companion Elena, but cannot bring himself to say, is: ‘Our very words lack weight, these Spanish words that do not come from the heart.’36

Migrancy and memory: Nothing is missing In Novilla, being ‘washed clean’ signifies a regime of enforced forgetting. However, it is never made clear whether the act of being purged of memories is an actual, physical process by which memories of the past are scrubbed away (in, say, the journey from Belstar to Novilla); or whether it is merely a convention, a necessary social contract for gaining admittance to Novilla. In any case, the act of washing is both a chance for rebirth and, as Simón’s experience reveals, a violation of the self as an entity with a past, an entity in possession of ‘[m]emories lying deeper than all thought’.37 At the same time, the notion of ‘cleansing’ cannot but evoke the spectre of assimilationist policies promoted by most of the Western countries throughout the nineteenth century and for the greater part of the twentieth. Again, it is noteworthy that Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 187. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 121. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 65. 37 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 77. 34 35 36



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Argentina at the turn of the twentieth century – the Argentina of Borges – was a wealthy country to which migrants flocked, attracted by the promise of economic prosperity and encouraged by national policies that explicitly promoted immigration.38 Beatriz Sarlo describes Buenos Aires as a peripheral metropolis, a city trying to establish itself as the ‘Paris of the South’, yet unwilling to let go of its European origins. She writes: ‘In the first decades of the twentieth century in Buenos Aires, there were more foreigners than “natives”. Then, from the 1930s onwards, thousands of people arrived from the interior of the country.’39 This sudden influx of migrants into an anxious settler society – anxious, that is, about the legitimacy of its ‘native’ identity – caused much consternation among the existing ‘criollo’ elite. They maintained that new migrants had to adopt the ‘criollo’ definition of ‘native’ Argentinian culture, insisting that cultural homogeneity was needed to maintain social stability. This situation is taken to an extreme in The Childhood: Simón and David appear to have arrived in a society comprised entirely of migrants, with a complete absence of any indigenous inhabitants. The levelling effect this creates among the inhabitants of Novilla is evident in the novel’s opening pages, when Simón seeks assistance from Ana at the Centro de Reubicación Novilla (Relocation or Resettlement Centre). Informing her that they have just journeyed from Belstar, she says that she is familiar with the camp, having been a resident there herself for three months.40 But the moment of mutual recognition and camaraderie fails to arrive. Its absence is accentuated when Simón and David are unable to gain access to their assigned room, and Ana offers to house them for the night. Simón is touched by her offer, until it becomes apparent that her notion of ‘housing’ means allowing them to build a rudimentary shelter in her backyard.41 Why is she so indifferent to their predicament, and so devoid of hospitality? It later emerges that

See Andrés Solimano, International Migration in the Age of Crisis and Globalisation: Historical and Recent Experiences (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 6. 39 Beatriz Sarlo, ‘The Modern City: Buenos Aires, The Peripheral Metropolis’, in Through the Kaleidoscope: The Experience of Modernity in Latin America, ed. Vivian Schelling, trans. Lorrain Leu (London and New York: Verso, 2000), p. 113. 40 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 2. 41 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 7. 38

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in a society of migrants, the passage through Belstar is neither unusual nor unique. Ana’s strange behaviour stems not from willful parsimony but from her complete faith in the state’s ability to take care of everyone’s basic needs, a circumstance that pares down the usual social obligations that individuals have for one another. Her subsequent refusal to help Simón in his search for David’s mother further reinforces the fact that connections formerly binding communities together – culture, kinship, shared experiences, strong emotions – have now been severed. Ana encourages Simón to let go of his old attachments, not nurture them.42 Coetzee is thus taking the most basic premise of assimilation and pushing it to the limit. Novilla is a community consisting solely of ‘ideal migrants’ – shorn of their previous passions and affiliations, and of any vestige of their former selves, they should have no reason to do anything but settle down peacefully and develop loyalty solely to the state, the body that provides for all their needs. And yet, despite this ostensive expurgation of the past, Simón has difficulty accepting his new life. He is unnerved by the apparent complacency of Novilla’s populace, their contentment with the little that they have. Moreover, he is unable to scale back his expectations the way an ideal migrant should, simply to be grateful for the life that the state provides without daring to ask for more. Those around him see this as a personal defect. Elena attributes his unhappiness to his lingering memories, or his memory of having memories. She says: ‘In the old ways of thinking, no matter how much you may have, there is always something missing […] This endless dissatisfaction, this yearning for the something-more that is missing, is a way of thinking we are well rid of, in my opinion. Nothing is missing.’43 But in any other context, Simón’s nostalgia, his inability to let go, would mark him as sensitive, empathetic and human. Elena’s assertion that nothing is missing recalls Borges’s description of the encroaching world of ideals towards the end of ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’. Here, the narrator warns of the dangers that inhere in any act of forgetting: Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) ‘primitive language’ of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 20. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 63; emphasis in original.

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episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty – not even that it is false.44

In Tlön, the act of substitution is insidious, for as reality is supplanted by fiction, any ontological surety is dependent on people’s memories of the past. As these memories slowly disappear, so too does any connection with the real. Such a change is facilitated by the lures of the fully rational, logical world offered by Tlön. As Borges’s narrator observes: How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet? It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws – I translate: inhuman laws – which we never quite grasp. Tlön is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.45

Yet Tlön’s appeal – its human-engineered perfection – is also the source of its problems, for human beings are nothing if not fallible. It is the glint of the divine, of any element that cannot be imagined or predicted, that Simón finds so lacking in the mundane tranquility of Novillan life. Beyond satisfying basic needs, what the state fails to provide for here, and what no bureaucratic formation can ever administer, is the variety of interests or desires, the passions and partialities, that make life singular, uncertain and worth living. By taking apart the underlying tenets of migrant re-culturation, Coetzee highlights the fallacy of the assimilationist project. In ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, Borges famously uses the example of the lack of camels in the Qur’an to illustrate the artificial nature of identifying national or cultural traits. He points out that a tourist or an Arab nationalist would have pointedly inserted camels into their narrative as a way of imparting some ‘local’ colour, but Mohammad had no need to mention camels in the Qur’an because for him, camels were an ordinary part of life.46 Most significantly, Borges says: ‘Mohammad, as an Arab, was unconcerned; he knew he could be Arab Borges, ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, pp. 42–3. Borges, ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, p. 42. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger, trans. Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine and Eliot Weinberger (New York: Viking, 1999), pp. 423–4.

44 45 46

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without camels.’47 The premise of assimilation – that national identity can be forged, and social stability achieved, through cultural homogenization – proves to be another fiction. Coetzee’s novel demonstrates the insufficiency of such an approach, for being washed clean of memories and the past does not guarantee loyalty to the state. Indeed, for Simón it has the opposite effect. The pressure he feels to be content, and his failure to measure up to these expectations, turns out to be alienating: ‘Only he is the exception, the dissatisfied one, the misfit. What is wrong with him?’48 Even with all that he has forgotten, he cannot measure up to the ideal, cannot forget as unconditionally as the others have. At his core, Simón never questions that he exists, because he never doubts the validity of his corporeal needs and desires. The philosophy class that he (briefly) attends at the Institute begins with the teacher saying: ‘We were asking ourselves what unity lies behind all the diversity, what it is that makes all tables tables, all chairs chairs.’49 Simón is dismayed by this because for him ‘being’ is not definable through categorical procedures, but something indisputably singular and experiential. To assert one’s bodily needs – to resist the easier option of acceding to ‘unity’ at the cost of ‘diversity’ – is to assume responsibility for oneself as an agential entity. As Arendt reminds us, the compulsion to assimilate via conformity, the willingness to be ‘washed clean’, is a treacherous capitulation: Refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples – if they keep their identity […] The comity of European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted.50

Migrants, like refugees, cannot leave their histories behind them, as we have seen; but this need not preclude them from assuming new identities, from finding and developing new(er) versions of themselves. In the final chapters, Simón and Inés refuse to allow David to be taken away to Punto Arenas, a school for children requiring special attention. They Borges, ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, p. 424. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 64. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 120. 50 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 119 47 48 49



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choose instead to make their escape from Novilla – the three of them together, an unorthodox family unit. In doing so, they assert their commitment to one another and to memories of past kinship, even if these connections are not fully understood. With this action they become not only a family but also more strongly individuals: people with desires, and with hope. On the road, embracing mobility, they are more truly in migration than at any other point in the novel, and yet there is also the sense that, with each other, they at least have a chance to understand the true nature of kinship, memory and their divine selves.

References Arendt, Hannah, ‘We Refugees’, in Marc Robinson (ed.), Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile. Boston and London: Faber and Faber, 1994, pp. 110–19. Borges, Jorge Luis. ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, Collected Fiction, trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin Books, 1998, pp. 68–81. Borges, Jorge Luis. ‘From Allegories to Novels’, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger, trans. Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine and Eliot Weinberger. New York: Viking, 1999, pp. 337–40. Borges, Jorge Luis. ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger, trans. Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine and Eliot Weinberger. New York: Viking, 1999, pp. 423–4. Carey, John. ‘Introduction’ to The Faber Book of Utopias, ed. John Carey. London: Faber and Faber, 1999, pp. xi–xxvi. Coetzee, J. M. Diary of a Bad Year. London: Viking, 2008. Coetzee, J. M. ‘L. Borges, Collected Fictions’, in Stranger Shores: Essays, 1986–1999. London: Secker & Warburg, 2001, pp. 164–78. Coetzee, J. M. ‘Borges’s Dark Mirror’, New York Review of Books, 22 October 1998, pp. 80–2. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1998/10/22/borgess-dark-mirror/ [accessed 1 May 2016]. Coetzee, J. M. The Childhood of Jesus. London: Harvill Secker, 2013. Doherty, Ben and Ken D’Souza. ‘Asylum policies “brutal and shameful”, authors tell Turnbull and Dutton’. Guardian, 6 February 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/ australia-news/2016/feb/06/asylum-policies-brutal-and-shameful-authors-tellturnbull-and-dutton [accessed 1 May 2016].

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Farago, Jason. ‘Review of The Childhood of Jesus’. New Republic, 14 September 2013, https://newrepublic.com/article/114658/jm-coetzees-childhood-jesus-reviewedjason-farago [accessed 1 May 2016]. Gordimer, Nadine. ‘Preface’, Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee, ed. Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson. London and New York: Macmillan; St Martin’s Press, 1996, vii–xii. Kannemeyer, J. C. J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing. Melbourne: Scribe, 2012. Logan, George M. and Robert M. Adams. ‘Introduction’ to Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams, trans. Adams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. xxv–xxvi. Lopez, Maria J. ‘Miguel de Cervantes and J. M. Coetzee: An Unacknowledged Paternity’, Journal of Literary Studies 29:4 (2013): 80–97. More, Thomas. Utopia, ed. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams, trans. Robert M. Adams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Oates, Joyce Carol. ‘Saving Grace’. New York Times, 29 August 2013, http://www. nytimes.com/2013/09/01/books/review/j-m-coetzees-childhood-of-jesus.html?_ r=0 [accessed 1 May 2016]. Plato. Timaeus and Critias. Trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008. Plato. The Republic, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari, trans. Tom Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Puiggrós, Adriana. ‘Politics, Praxis and the Personal: An Argentine Assessment’, Politics of Liberation: Paths from Freire, ed. Peter L. McLaren and Colin Lankshear, trans. Fiona Taler. London and New York: Routledge, 1994, pp. 154–72. Sarlo, Beatriz. ‘The Modern City: Buenos Aires, The Peripheral Metropolis’, Through the Kaleidoscope: The Experience of Modernity in Latin America, ed. Vivian Schelling, trans. Lorrain Leu. London and New York: Verso, 2000, pp. 108–26. Seshagiri, Urmila. ‘The Boy of La Mancha: J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus’, Contemporary Literature 54:3 (Fall 2013): 643–53. Solimano, Andrés. International Migration in the Age of Crisis and Globalisation: Historical and Recent Experiences. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Tait, Theo. ‘Review of The Childhood of Jesus’. Guardian, 27 February 2013, http:// www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/27/childhood-of-jesus-jm-coetzee-review [accessed 1 May 2016]. Twidle, Hedley. ‘Review of The Childhood of Jesus’, Financial Times, 8 March 2013,



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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/151395ea-84e4-11e2-891d-00144feabdc0.html [accessed 1 May 2016]. Ulin, David L, ‘J. M. Coetzee’s “The Childhood of Jesus” is a land without memory’, Los Angeles Times, 5 September 2013, http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/05/ entertainment/la-ca-jc-0908-jm-coetzee-20130908 [accessed 1 May 2016]. Vargas Llosa, Mario. ‘The Fictions of Borges’, Third World Quarterly 10:3 (July 1988): 1325–33. Walkowitz, Rebecca. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Watson, Stephen. ‘Colonialism and the Novels of J. M. Coetzee’, Research in African Literatures 17:3 (Autumn 1986): 370–92.

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Intertextual Concerns

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Creative Intuition: Coetzee, Plato, Bergson and Murnane Anthony Uhlmann

This chapter has two parts. The first concerns the concept of intuition and how it might relate to the truth in The Childhood of Jesus. The second offers a reading of the novel in relation to Gerald Murnane’s work, further reflecting on the question of how truth might be conveyed in fiction.

Part I: Intuition and the truth A number of critics have now commented on the importance of Plato to J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus (see Rabaté, Pippin, Section I in this volume). The structure of the world in which the story takes place seems to relate to the Platonic notion of the recollection of ideas, ideals or forms from the world above, which are forgotten once one returns to this world, but are recognized as eternal truths once re-encountered. This Platonic myth of the forgotten world above, which is the world of the forms or ideals, is discussed in a number of dialogues: Phaedo, Meno, Ion, Philebus, but the myth itself is most clearly set out in Phaedrus. In The Childhood of Jesus the main protagonists, Simón and David, and indeed all those who exist in the Spanish-speaking world that includes Novilla, Belstar, Estrellita del Norte and the reform school of Punto Arenas, have crossed the sea to reach a new world in which their old lives are forgotten and they are able to begin again, with new names and little memory of what has gone before. It is suggested on a number of occasions that this process

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of entering into the new life relates to death, as one passes from one life to the next, forgetting one’s former state and starting again.1 Simón tells David: ‘After death there is always another life. You have seen that’,2 and ‘Marciano has found peace. He is probably crossing the seas at this very moment, looking forward to the next life. It will be a great adventure for him, to start anew, washed clean.’3 This in turn is linked, by Simón’s interlocutor Eugenio, to the concept of ‘bad infinity’: the mise-en-abyme of endless repetitions.4 The main protagonist, Simón, differs from others he meets in that he carries with him the shadows of the former life; he states: ‘I am beginning to think there is something in my speech that marks me as a man stuck in the old ways, a man who has not forgotten.’5 On the one hand then, an idea of understanding in The Childhood of Jesus brings with it the structure that underpins Plato’s concept of recognition. In Phaedo, Socrates states: And unless we invariably forget it after obtaining it we must always be born knowing and continue to know all through our lives, because to ‘know’ means simply to retain the knowledge which one has acquired, and not to lose it. Is not what we call ‘forgetting’ simply the loss of knowledge?6

It is worth stepping back and offering a rough chronology. Developing Plato’s understanding of inspiration set out in Phaedrus, Ion and elsewhere (which involves the recollection of the truth as a memory of the life above), there is a tradition, moving from Plato to Aristotle, before being highly developed by Descartes, that links intuition to the truth.7 The notion is also crucial to Spinoza’s conception of knowledge, with the highest form of knowledge for

J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (Melbourne: Text, 2013), pp. 28–9, 31, 70, 76, 168. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 156. 3 Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 185–6. 4 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 292. 5 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 168. 6 Plato, The Collected Dialogues, including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Bollington Series LXXI, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 58, §75d. 7 For a detailed account of Descartes’s understanding of intuition, which also involves a reading of Aristotle’s immediate apprehension or nous, see Stephen Gaukroger, Cartesian Logic: An Essay on Descartes’s Conception of Inference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Thanks to Joseph Hughes for pointing me to this work. 1 2



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Spinoza being linked to intuition, and intuition is also crucial to conceptions of knowledge, though in somewhat different ways, for Kant and Bergson. The idea of the truth is further underlined in the novel through references to stars and their implied link to the heavens or the Platonic world above. Simón says they are on a star,8 and the names of places in the novel refer to stars: Belstar, Estrelitta. So too there is a link to Phaedrus and the myth of truth Plato develops. This is underlined through a vision Simón experiences, which directly refers to the chariots described in Phaedrus, which ascend the heavens to look upon the truths or forms of the intellect. For the Gods the ascent to this region of the truth is easy, as their horses lead them truly, while for humans the ascent is difficult, as we are led by one true horse (perhaps symbolizing the mind or spirit) and one unreliable horse (perhaps symbolizing the desires of the body).9 David, however, seems more of the Gods than men in the dream-like vision Simón has of him late in the novel: With uncommon clarity he sees a two-wheeled chariot hovering in the air at the foot of his bed. The chariot is made of ivory or some metal inlaid with ivory, and is drawn by two white horses, neither of whom is El Rey. Grasping the reins in one hand, holding the other aloft in a regal gesture, is the boy, naked save for a cotton loincloth.10

This is far from all that is at stake, however, because as well as forgetting what was known (including a form of truth) from the previous life, the protagonists in the new world have also lost some of the desires that are associated with ‘normal’ life in our world. They no longer feel intense particular desires, and this is something that preoccupies Simón.11 They seem to have moved to a realm in which universal desires or universal goods have taken the place of particular desires. Rather than this being something he can easily understand, however, this is a matter of concern for Simón. He does not wish to let go of his former desires; he does not wish to forget everything that has passed in the previous life and he actively seeks to resist this process of generalizing and the stripping away of desire. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 208. Plato, Collected Dialogues, pp. 494–5, §§247–8. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 277. 11 Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 70–81. 8 9

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The main way in which his resistance to this process of divestment of feeling manifests is through the counter process of understanding itself. He seeks to claim a ground of understanding by ‘finding’ the former mother of the boy who has been given the new name ‘David’. Simón seems to clearly remember details of their voyage together: David had at one time a letter fastened by a string around his neck which carried with it the answer to the question of the identity of David’s mother and father. This string had broken, and the letter was lost. Simón claims, however, that the boy will recognize his mother the instant he sees her, and so he remains confident that the mother will be found. In practice, however, the boy fails to instantly recognize his mother. In practice Simón claims, through pure intuition, to himself recognize David’s mother moments after he first sees her. He discusses this with David: ‘Didn’t you feel a strange movement in your breast when she spoke to us, when she said hello – a kind of tug at the heartstrings, as if you might have seen her before, in some other place?’ Doubtfully the boy shakes his head. ‘I ask because the lady may be the very person we are looking for. That, at least, is the feeling I have.’ ‘Is she going to be my mother?’ ‘I don’t know for sure. We will have to ask her.’12

As we can see, it is Simón and not David who claims this intuition or feeling, though it is not clear whether Simón a) had ever seen David’s mother in the previous life, or b) whether Simón had seen her but had a more substantial relationship with her than he remembers. This is not clear, in part because it remains possible that Simón is David’s actual father, something that is suggested purely through his constant denial that he might be. Were this the case, a previous relationship with Inés might have existed. The validity of the intuition is questioned by Elena: [Simón] ‘Elena, she is his mother. I arrived in this land bare of everything save one rock-solid conviction: that I would know the boy’s mother when I saw her. And the moment I beheld Inés I knew it was she.’ Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 88.

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‘You followed an intuition?’ ‘More than that. A conviction.’ ‘A conviction, an intuition, a delusion – what is the difference when it cannot be questioned?’13

In turn, then, the idea of intuitive recognition, or its status as a foundation of truth, is called into question. Yet because intuition as a method for finding the truth is held in suspension a second aspect of the power of intuition is underlined: it is suggested that while intuition might not reveal a presentation of the truth, it nevertheless has the power to create or manufacture the truth. That is, while it remains uncertain and unprovable through the evidence offered by the book as to whether Inés is in fact David’s true mother, in practice Inés becomes David’s mother, just as Simón becomes David’s father. Rather than intuition, in Platonic fashion, pointing to an ‘eternal’ realm situated temporally before the present, a former life in which one had access to particular truths, intuition, in a manner that corresponds more closely to Henri Bergson, realizes the present that is coming into existence and allows it to be understood. In Bergson’s terms: Intuition […] signifies first of all consciousness, but immediate consciousness, a vision which is scarcely distinguishable from the object seen, a knowledge which is contact and even coincidence.14

Perhaps alluding to Joyce, Coetzee’s Simón has emphasized how the idea of ‘the father’ is a concept that must be inhabited, that has no physical existence. What happens in the book is that ‘the mother’, which usually does have a non-conceptual physical existence, in turn becomes an idea that needs to be inhabited, a state that needs to come into being or needs to be created. There are other links between knowledge and intuition: David seems to learn to read on his own; that is, he teaches himself how to read. So too, he understands mathematics in a mysterious way (see Baylee Brits, Chapter 6 in this volume). The moment he needs to add up five and three to get eight demonstrates how he thinks through visualizing and grasping an answer in a Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 102. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), pp. 34–5.

13 14

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magical rather than a logical process that in turn carries with it elements of intuition.15 Here, rather than a Platonic understanding of the term intuition, which links it with a recognition of what he already knew we are closer to that set out by Descartes, which sees it as an immediate grasping of a self-evident truth (see Gaukroger and Hughes). It also links to a reading of Bergson, which sees the intuition as coinciding with what is becoming true. David recognizes his ‘brother’ Juan, whom they pick up hitchhiking late in the book through a similar intuitive recognition, yet the concept of ‘recognition’ is again held in suspension; or rather it is created: Juan becomes David’s brother because of David’s assertion (or intuition) that he is his brother. This in turn reminds us of the innate knowledge David seems to possess, in learning to read and so on in The Childhood of Jesus. At first this might be understood to involve intuition as recognition: how could David ‘learn’ to read in this way without innate knowledge, since, in effect, he claims to already be able to read from the very beginning. But if we look more closely this knowledge is not simply innate; rather, it is suggested or provoked and the provocations in turn transform the kinds of knowledge that become possible. That is, David is pushed to reveal this knowledge or demonstrate it, at first by Simón, who challenges his claims to understanding and rejects them. At this point, however, David merely asserts his understanding in passages I will return to below. The ‘true’ reading of the book (that is, the one that corresponds with the expectations that his teacher señor León and Simón and others have for such knowledge) only emerges as knowledge of this kind once he is forced to formulate it in those terms. Something else is at stake here: the possibility that the kind of knowledge David claims is not a knowledge of forms at all, but something other, even opposite: a knowledge of things, a kind of nominalism rather than a kind of idealism. Simón sets this out: ‘While I was in hospital with nothing else to do, I tried, as a mental exercise, to see the world through David’s eyes. Put an apple before him and what does he see? An apple, just an apple. Put two apples before him. What does he see? An apple and an apple. Now along comes señor León [señor León is his class Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 263.

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teacher] and demands: How many apples, child? What is the answer? What are apples? What is the singular of which apples is the plural?’16

Yet the clear contradictions here somehow remain viable in the novel, since while David might actually be a nominalist, he is provoked, tempted or seduced into revealing his understandings as if they were kinds of idealism. The idea of provocation and its function in the ‘creation’ of knowledge is most forcefully demonstrated through the interventions of señor Daga. Daga enters the story as a peculiar exception: he does not follow the rules of the world of Novilla, which as we have seen urge people away from particular desires towards general ones, and he seems to be a kind of impossible throwback, a violent figure ruled by desire. After the scene on the docks where he steals from and assaults his work colleagues Daga returns later in the novel as an influence on David. Here again he is a source of bad example for David, and Simón is deeply concerned about this (the pen with the naked woman, giving David alcohol, potentially exposing him to sexual examples). All this does not seem to worry his ‘mother’ Inés, and Simón reasons that this is because she is also in Daga’s thrall, herself having been tempted by particular desires to abandon the general idea of good. Daga, then, tempts and suggests and provokes. Yet the moment of major suggestion occurs late in the book when David makes use of the gift given to him, irresponsibly, by Daga, setting alight the magic powder. The sparkling dust Daga encourages David to ignite is magnesium17 and initially blinds the boy. The doctor in the town of Nueva Esperanza determines that David is not really blind,18 concluding rather that David is highly suggestible and that he has entered into a process of becoming in which he is taking on the properties of the magician or miracle worker Daga has suggested he might be. There are of course a number of ways of interpreting this as this collection demonstrates. Yet I contend that he is forging a truth out of an asserted intuition. This process is extremely complex, as it involves apparently

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 290. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 312. 18 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 322. 16 17

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conflicting understandings of intuition: on the one hand it seems to be linked with a Platonic understanding of the truth as recognition, and on the other to a more Bergsonian understanding of intuition as the experience of the emergence of what is in the process of coming into being, an experience that involves understanding as that which bears witness to creation. There are contradictory elements in play then: creation and discovery seem to be mutually exclusive, but this is not the only apparent contradiction at the heart of the idea of intuition as it appears in the novel. Against Leibniz who famously argued in his Theodicy that there is an infinity of possible worlds but that this world is the ‘best of all possible worlds’ underwritten by the judgement of God (a conclusion ridiculed by Voltaire in Candide), the stevedore Álvaro makes the provocative claim that there are no possible worlds, only this one.19 Álvaro’s view is seemingly undermined by the worldview of the book as a whole. As we have seen above and as Simón argues, the world of the novel might be understood to involve some kind of revisiting and revising that builds upon former selves. It is important to underline what is at stake: that is, that these two ideas are, in logical terms, mutually exclusive. There is either one world, or many. If we were attempting to resolve this contradiction, the obvious place to start would be another dialogue by Plato, Parmenides, where the question of the relation of the one and the many and the paradoxes put in play through this relation is set out in detail. With regard to intuition, however, the implications are as follows: a) if there are many worlds recognition comes into play as a means of understanding; b) if there is only one world there could be no recognition, only immediate understanding, a coincidence of ideas and things as they emerge. Again, as we have seen, the contradiction involves, on the one hand, the understanding of intuition as recognition of an ideal and immutable truth, and on the other hand, the understanding of intuition as that which in some sense ‘creates’ or brings truths into being.

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 54.

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Part II: The ideal and the real We have considered the way in which the truth is understood through intuition (as recognition) and alternately how intuition (as consciousness of being) creates the true, with Coetzee provocatively suggesting that the temporal process of the life above that, for Plato, precedes and underwrites the truths that emerge in this world below is capable of being inverted, with ungrounded intuitions founding truths which then transform the world. In order to come to terms with some of what is at stake in these paradoxical understandings of intuition it is useful to take another tack, moving away from Coetzee’s interest in ideas drawn from philosophy, to his interest in how ideas might emerge in fiction. In December 2012, Coetzee published an article on the contemporary Australian novelist Gerald Murnane in the New York Review of Books. Coetzee has long written for the NYRB and many of these essays have been collected and republished in Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986–1999 and Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 2000–2005. This republication in itself demonstrates that the essays are not only occasional pieces, but contain insights of sufficient importance to Coetzee to justify their preservation. Their relevance to Coetzee’s fiction is apparent: his review of Joseph Frank’s biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, for example, appeared soon after he published a novel concerned with Dostoevsky, The Master of Petersburg. Yet a second engagement with Plato emerges in The Childhood of Jesus; one that questions the relation between the ideals (or forms) which carry the truth for Plato and the real to which these truths are applied. Here it is useful to engage with the intertextual methods Coetzee makes use of in many of his works, entering into dialogue with other writers who have addressed similar concerns to his. The reading Coetzee offers of Gerald Murnane is interesting in a number of ways: it not only tells us things that Coetzee sees in Murnane, it tells us that Coetzee considers Murnane’s work to be important, and worthy of wider attention. It also tells us that Coetzee sees things in Murnane that concern him, in every sense of the word concern. It is possible to go further, but not without risk. It is possible to claim that Coetzee’s essay offers a kind of preface

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to a dialogue that is played out as one debate among others, but one of the most important, in The Childhood of Jesus. Murnane is a well-known figure in the academic discipline of Australian literature and is considered by a small but committed group of readers, both nationally and internationally, to be among the most important novelists currently writing in English. But wider recognition, even in Australia, has proved elusive. In 2006, he was in contention for the Nobel Prize, with the international betting house Ladbrokes quoting him at 33–1. Yet it is telling that the highest awards he has received in Australia are special awards – the Patrick White Literary Award, and the NSW Premier’s Special Prize – that are intended as recompense for authors who have been unfairly overlooked (see Genoni, 2009). In his review of Murnane, Coetzee examines passages from Barley Patch in which the narrative voice contemplates the nature of fiction and the nature of the self. The self, Murnane’s narrator states, is made up of a ‘network of images’. It is worth citing at length from Coetzee, who concludes: The activity of writing, then, is not to be distinguished from the activity of selfexploration. It consists in contemplating the sea of internal images, discerning connections, and setting these out in grammatical sentences (‘I could never conceive of a network of meaning too complex to be expressed in a series of grammatical sentences,’ says Murnane, whose views on grammar are firm, even pedantic). Whether the connections between images lie implicit in the images themselves or are created by an active, shaping intelligence; where the energy (‘feelings’) comes from that discerns such connections; whether that energy is always to be trusted—these are questions that do not interest him, or at least are not addressed in a body of writing that is rarely averse to reflecting on itself. In other words, while there is a Murnanian topography of the mind, there is no Murnanian theory of the mind worth speaking of. If there is some central, originary, shaping force behind the fictions of the mind, it can barely be called a force: its essence seems to be a watchful passivity. As a writer, Murnane is thus a radical idealist.20

J. M. Coetzee, ‘The Quest for the Girl from Bendigo Street’, The New York Review of Books, 20 December 2012, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/12/20/quest-girl-bendigo-street/ [accessed 1 May 2016].

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This passage underlines a feeling of unease, which seems to be paired with a feeling of admiration, and further indicates an interesting point of difference: a philosophical difference about the nature of the writer and the nature of the reader; a philosophical difference about the kinds of meaning that might be generated through works of fiction. The problem of idealism is at the heart of these differences. ‘Idealism’ is a problem that also concerned Coetzee in a talk he delivered at the second China Australia Literary Forum in Beijing, where he shared the stage with the Chinese Nobel laureate Mo Yan. Here Coetzee discussed the history of the Nobel Prize for literature itself, which stipulates, following the will of Alfred Nobel, that the award should be given not to the best writer per se, but to the writer who produces ‘the most outstanding work in an ideal direction’.21 The question of the ideal, and what this might mean, and how on the one hand, this might adequately face what might, in contrast, be called the real, and how on the other hand, the real as we understand or experience it might exist at all without ideas or the ideal, are inter-related questions that seem to be pressing, for Coetzee. The nature of the inter-relation between the ideal and the real provides one of the most important themes of The Childhood of Jesus. As we have seen we find ourselves in the midst of a world that is, in some sense, washed clean of the memory of a former life in the manner of Plato – though in the case of the central character, Simón, not all of the images – of our own imperfect and passion-filled world. It is, or offers, in an often repeated phrase, a ‘new life’, but there is something here that Simón finds empty. While it is not entirely clear, the emptiness might stem from the feeling of promise itself, a promise that could only be an idea. This idea might be that the ideal, which is universal, should inhabit the material of the personal and fill it with meaning: And why is he continually asking himself questions instead of just living, like everyone else? Is it all part of a far too tardy transition from the old and comfortable (the personal) to the new and unsettling (the universal)? Is the Writing and Society Research Centre (with the China Writers’ Association), The China Australia Literary Forum 2, http://www.uws.edu.au/writing_and_society/research/current_research_ projects/chna_australia_literary_forum_2013 [accessed 1 May 2016].

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round of self-interrogation nothing but a phase in the growth of each new arrival … If so, how much longer before he will emerge as a new, perfected man?22

But does the ideal give meaning to life, or is it the other way around: do things give meaning to ideas? Simón informs us that ‘Ideas cannot be washed out of us, not even by time. Ideas are everywhere. The universe is instinct without them.’23 Simón is also certain – at least, when he is forced to explain the world to David, the boy he is compelled to look after – that we are more than just earth, more than simple matter: ‘What are we like if we are not like poo? We are like ideas. Ideas never die.’24 His own urges are physical in nature, but as the philosopher stevedore Eugenio explains to him, such urges are not directed towards a particular woman but ‘the womanly ideal’.25 Who, then, is obsessed with the ideal, the philosopher or the one who lusts? At first, we might think that the world Simón and David find themselves in is a world of universal ideals. But Elena, who belongs in this new world, chides Simón for failing to live in the present, for failing to correspond with the real. The emptiness Simón feels stems not so much from either the real or the ideal, but from the fact that they correspond too neatly in this new world. For Simón, the sense that things have meaning is generated, paradoxically, by the failure of the ideal and the real to correspond. What seems lacking to him, both in Elena’s views and this new life more generally, is a sense of doubleness: ‘Elena is an intelligent woman but she does not see any doubleness in the world, any difference between the way things seem and the way they are.’26 The relation between the ideal and the real is complex, then, but what seems clear is that meaning, or the feeling that we have when we do not feel that things are empty, is generated by this fraught and unstable exchange of differences between what seems to be and what is. Here Coetzee has reimagined a theme that is classical, a favourite theme of Shakespeare’s. There is something

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 72. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 136. 24 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 156. 25 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 166. 26 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 80. 22 23



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essential in this tension, something essential to literature, because literature is formed through the act of drawing unstable signs into relation. What, then, of the dialogue with Murnane? My argument is based around two broad premises. First, ‘meaning’ does not pre-inhabit works of fiction; it has to be created or constructed. Secondly, there are two main ways in which writers construct or create a sense of the meaningful in their works, both of which involve repetition and resonance, echoing, mirroring one sign with another. The first method involves correspondences between the book and something outside the book, which might be ‘the real’ (recognizable worlds that have been fictionalized) or might be other books or other imagined worlds. The second method involves the book building internal networks and references – to ideas, images, words, characters, and so on – that occur once in the work and are then varied through repetition. Through this repetition themes or images emerge that invite interpretation. While all writers necessarily make use of both methods in generating a sense of the meaningful in their works, there are different degrees of emphasis, so that readers might notice one kind first and skate over the importance of the other in particular writers. In terms of emphasis Coetzee seems to be a writer who values the external: his works enter into a dialogue with what is outside, though what is outside his works are not only real world problems, but other works, other books. Foe, for example, refers to Robinson Crusoe and The Master of Petersburg refers to Dostoevsky’s Demons. In terms of emphasis Murnane seems to be a writer obsessed with the internal: the networks of images he creates – his marbles, his plains, his horse races with their silks and patterns of movement – recur not only within individual works, but throughout all of his works, creating a field of meaning that seems somehow self-contained. Yet, in fact, Coetzee depends as much on internal resonance, just as Murnane depends as much on external resonance, to create meaning. Coetzee can enter into a dialogue with Murnane in a way that Murnane, who claims he no longer reads new fiction, cannot with Coetzee. Even with what he has read, Murnane claims it is his reading of them and not those works themselves that are important to his own work. Yet there is a similarity here, because when Coetzee refers to other writers in his books, he never really refers to them, even when he names them. Rather, he offers deliberately

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distorted images of them – so that his character Foe is not Daniel Defoe but an idea of ‘the writer’, and his Dostoevsky is not the historical author but an idea of ‘the writer’. Yet perhaps this deliberate distortion is a kind of dialogue – a doubleness that enables meaning to emerge. Coetzee’s dialogue with Murnane is signalled ambiguously in The Childhood of Jesus. The boy at the centre of the novel, whom we necessarily relate to Jesus, is called David. Jesus, of course, claimed to be a descendant of King David and ‘David’ is undoubtedly also a reference to Coetzee’s brother, David Keith Coetzee, who died in 2010, and indeed the novel is dedicated to ‘DKC’. The idea of the brother is something that recurs throughout the novel: David wishes he had two brothers and that he was the youngest. In the New Testament, Jesus is said to have four older brothers, one of whom is called Simon (Mk 6.3, and Mt. 13.55), though the Catholic Church, dedicated to the idea of Mary as a virgin, rejects this and asserts that these ‘brothers’ were either cousins or the sons of Joseph from a previous marriage. In the novel, David’s mother (if she is in fact his mother) is called Inés – the Spanish version of Agnes, one of the Catholic Church’s more prominent virgin saints – and in learning this Simón, or the narrator, reflects: ‘Inés! So that is the name! And in the name is the essence!’27 The confusion – if it can be called that, because it is clearly deliberate – allows these references to point in several directions at once. It is an example of Coetzee’s method of deliberate dissonance or distortion. Furthermore, in Coetzee’s novel we are told that David is not the boy’s real name. Elena discusses this with Simón: She pauses. ‘You keep referring to David as “the boy”. Why don’t you use his name?’ ‘David is the name they gave him at the camp. He doesn’t like it, he says it is not his true name.’28

Yet there is also a story by Murnane, appended to A History of Books, called ‘The Boy’s Name was David’. Here Murnane writes: The boy’s name was David. The man, whatever his name was, had known, as soon as he had read that sentence, that the boy’s name had not been David. At Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 99. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 71.

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the same time, the man had not been fool enough to suppose that the name of the boy had been the same as the name of the author of the fiction, whatever his name had been. The man had understood that the man who had written the sentence understood that to write such a sentence was to lay claim to a level of truth that no historian and no biographer could ever lay claim to. There was never a boy named David, the writer of the fiction might as well have written, but if you, the Reader; and I, the Writer, can agree that there might have been such a boy so named, then I undertake to tell you what you could never otherwise have learned about any boy of any name.29

This is not the only clue that some reference to Murnane’s work might be being made. In Inland, Murnane tells us that his book Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs takes its title from the last paragraph of André Maurois’s biography of Marcel Proust.30 Murnane’s narrator underlines that his own interest in external references only involves passages or images from texts that have made a forceful impression on him, leaving behind a residue in words or images. Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs includes the essay ‘Some Books Are To Be Dropped Into Wells, Others Into Fish Ponds’, an essay that begins with an extended reflection on his memory of reading Don Quixote. Considering a theme he develops at greater length in A History of Books, Murnane reflects on what, exactly, he retains from his reading of this book, and is surprised that he can remember almost nothing. He can only remember a passage read out by a university lecturer that involves the image of someone being struck in the face by wind-borne vomit. Murnane then cautions readers of the essay who might have a fuller knowledge of the book and might wish to correct him on this point by, for example, refuting the existence of any such passage in Don Quixote. To this potential objection Murnane replies: ‘I am not writing about Don Quixote but about my memory of the books on my shelves.’31 Don Quixote is the book David both does not read and uses to learn to read in The Childhood of Jesus. The version of Don Quixote he has read to him by Simón is written not by Cervantes, but by a ‘man named Benengeli’, the fictional Moorish author to whom Cervantes attributed the work. The

Gerald Murnane, A History of Books (Sydney: Giramondo, 2012), p. 182. Gerald Murnane, Inland (Sydney: Giramondo, 2012), p. 190. 31 Gerald Murnane, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (Sydney: Giramondo, 2005), p. 33. 29 30

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small boy David quickly claims that he can read the book himself, but Simón is scandalized by this claim, which involves asserting one’s own images and imaginings (which might in no way in fact be related to the book itself) over what appears in the book: ‘No, you can’t. You can look at the page and move your lips and make up stories in your head, but that is not reading. For real reading you have to submit to what is written on the page. You have to give up your own fantasies.’32

The boy replies that he can read and ‘quotes’ a passage, which is not from Don Quixote, but begins, ‘There was a man of double deed…’ spookily citing an anonymous nonsense poem, and crying that ‘It’s not your book, it’s my book!’ Simón lectures him in response: ‘On the contrary, it’s señor Benengeli’s book that he gave to the world, therefore it belongs to all of us – to all of us in one sense, and to the library in another sense, but not to you alone in any sense. And stop tearing at the pages. Why are you handling the book so roughly?’ ‘Because. Because if I don’t hurry a hole will open.’ ‘Open up where?’ ‘Between the pages.’ ‘That’s nonsense. There is no such thing as a hole between the pages.’ ‘There is a hole. It’s inside the page. You don’t see it because you don’t see anything.’33

In a passage from Inland that Coetzee cites in his review, Murnane’s narrator reflects on a quote from Paul Éluard, a poet he claims to know nothing about and to have never read: ‘There is another world but it is in this one.’34 Murnane’s narrator tells us the quotation appears at the front of a book by Patrick White, which Coetzee identifies as The Solid Mandala. The narrator conjectures, purely by the light of his affirmed ignorance, about where the quote might have originally appeared, showing how the contexts that surround it might change it, but equally claiming the authority of his own ignorance to allow understandings to emerge that will open up this other world inside the pages:

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 195. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 195. 34 Murnane, Inland, p. 148. 32 33



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The other world … is a place that can only be seen or dreamed of by those people known to us as narrators of books or characters within books … until Paul Éluard comes into my room I have only a copy of his written words. He wrote his words and at the instant of his writing them the words entered the world of narrators and characters and landscapes.35

The hole that opens up seems, for Murnane’s narrator, to be one that also opens between the reader and the writer – the reader and the writer who are, in effect, the same person, or ideas of the ‘same’ person, or mirror reflections of the person that calls himself Murnane when he writes. Even when he does not name himself, he conflates the selves he describes and, in order to keep track, it is almost necessary to file all the selves within both brackets and inverted commas under the word ‘Murnane’. In Inland, the narrator-writer (‘Murnane1’) imagines his ideal reader (‘Murnane2’) reading a passage he, the narrator-writer, has just written about a young girl, who is the obsessive image at the heart of Inland. Then the narrator-writer (‘Murnane1’) imagines another writer in ‘a room very different from my room’.36 This second writer (‘Murnane3’), whom (‘Murnane1’) now imagines as having ‘written all the pages around me’, now moves to write a final paragraph, while the ideal reader (‘Murnane2’) is also about to read a final paragraph written by (‘Murnane1’). The paragraphs will be identical, except that whereas (‘Murnane2’) will read that the girl lives in ‘Bassett Street’, (‘Murnane3’) will write that the girl lives in ‘Bendigo Street’.37 Bassett is the name of the fictional town in which Gerald Murnane’s first novel, Tamarisk Row, is set. This novel in turn is reputed to involve the fictional development of autobiographical themes related to the author’s actual childhood in the actual Victorian city of Bendigo. It is apparent, then, how holes can open up within pages, at least the kinds of pages that Murnane and Coetzee, for all their many differences, write. What also becomes apparent is how these pages are concerned with the ideal, which is understood to involve the relation between seemingly ‘identical’ but actually incommensurable elements: the imagined world and the real world Murnane, Inland, pp. 150–1. Murnane, Inland, p. 128. 37 Murnane, Inland, pp. 127–8. 35 36

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of the one who both imagines and is, but who, in imagining, is no longer what he was. He is no longer forced to exist, but becomes something that persists. That is, these pages are concerned with how the ideal is capable of creating meaning. This differs again, then, from the complex plays between the real and the ideal, nominalism and idealism, we have touched on above. It is not just the real that can enter into and alter the ideal, but also the other way around. The ideal is that which might be, in truth, ungrounded, but is nevertheless capable of generating the truth once it has been created in what Murnane calls a viable work of fiction. Or is the ideal in turn suggested by the real, as Coetzee also seems to suggest. That is, the real is capable of being idealized, and once this has been done, once a sensation of meaningfulness has been created, the newly minted ideal truth is intuitively recognized as being the truth. Or rather, intuition is the process through which the real is transformed into the ideal that serves as the truth. Making meaning is not easy: a viable fiction of the truth has to be created. ‘Meaning’ here refers to the feeling that things ‘have meaning’. ‘Meaning’ must always remain undefined in other than tautological terms, since it only exists as a relation that someone feels or senses. Via Kant beauty might be linked to truth because something in the world resonates with something in me: a feeling of meaning. The artist conveys the resonance, not the thing in the world or the thing in me.38 Murnane offers his own, similar, definition in Barley Patch: The sound in his mind of one or another name would often seem to denote not a mere painted toy and not even an actual straining, staring racehorse but a knot of what he might have called compressed mental imagery or, using the word in a sense particularly his own, meaning.39

Yet he also defines it as a kind of latency: a compressed power waiting to be brought forth by a reader or a writer, who might be different aspects of one’s self: See Paul Cézanne, ‘what if I could create this impression by means of another, corresponding one’, cited in Richard Kendall (ed), Cézanne by Himself: Drawings, Paintings, Writings (London: Macdonald Orbis, 1988), p. 296. 39 Gerald Murnane, Barley Patch (Sydney: Giramondo, 2009), p. 210. 38



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The movement of the specks caused the chief character to think of energy held in check or of meaning waiting to be expressed.40

This meaning is lacking in the real world, because that world fades and dissolves from memory, but it might be found in imagined worlds, which have the potential, at least, to persist. Murnane develops these themes in many of his works, but they are to the fore in his recent works Barley Patch and A History of Books. The reader of A History of Books wants books to leave him with images that will persist and will outlive the books themselves. His mind, as Coetzee notes in his review, is comprised of a network of images. The images are drawn from everything he has experienced, but he has long realized that some images persist, some images resonate with what might be called his essence: coloured marbles, the various colours of the silks of horses in imagined horse races that carry the weight of all human joy and suffering, plains that extend to the horizon, and so on. In Barley Patch, the narrator refers to a book that influenced his ideas: The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates. Murnane’s narrator is most impressed by passages that describe how one might remember by creating, through imagination, a house. The house is filled with rooms and the rooms with objects. Each of these objects in turn might be linked, deliberately, in the mind of the one who wishes to remember, with things that are to be remembered. The practitioner of this art of memory might then recover, at any time, the object to be remembered, by walking through the house in his imagination and going to the place where the remembered object has been left. The structure here is the structure of allegory: a sign A (‘the vehicle’ or the imagined object) is paired with a sign B (‘the tenor’ or the object to be remembered). The imagined house, then, is capable of preserving or carrying within it another world, which resembles this one. There is a strange effect, however, as ‘this one’ is now doubly removed from what we usually call ‘the real’. It is seen only in the inverted reflection of the imagination. There is a central image of a house in Barley Patch. The house was once a seminary of the kind the chief character once occupied as a Catholic Murnane, Barley Patch, p. 217.

40

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seminarian. He had gone to the seminary in order to find a room that looked out over plains with trees in the distance, where he had hoped he might reflect and write. He would have reflected in order to find meaning. To find meaning, one reflects, one contemplates the self in this world and another: a sign A is brought into relation with a sign B. He would have written to find meaning – the world that is written giving shape and sense to the world as it is experienced. Yet the chief character could not remain in the seminary, having failed to find there a capacity to reflect; having failed to find there a capacity to write; having failed, in short, to create meaning in that space. He instead moves back to the city and moves among a group of friends who are centred about a particular friend who has developed a hatred for the Catholic Church. This friend devises a game in which the group imagines purchasing an abandoned Catholic seminary somewhere in rural Australia. They imagine themselves moving to this seminary and converting it into a ‘black’ seminary, where black masses are performed and various orgies are played out within the black chapel. Long after he has moved away from these friends and they have forgotten their game, the chief character continues to imagine the black seminary. As the game recedes, the image remains of the chief character in his room, in the house, which has now become a house of memory. The goal is still the same: to create meaning. Yet, insofar as meaning is found, it is found by the imagined man, in the imagined house, who creates knots of relations, filed in filing cabinets but compressed into images that persist. The imagined man sits at the window of a house of two storeys contemplating the view of plains with trees in the distance, which is also an image of the self. In Inland, the narrator claims that ‘a page of a book is not a window but a mirror’.41 While this might have the structure of solipsism it becomes more, entering into a spiritual tradition that does not contemplate a meaning that pre-exists as an external fact, but as something that is created through the fact of contemplation itself – the fact of the self that reflects the self and does not exactly correspond. That is, the self that is read does not correspond with the Murnane, Inland, p. 176.

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self that is written, and the hole that opens up is profound. It is as difficult to see the bottom of this hole as it is to see to the bottom of a deep well, or a cloudy fish-pond, or the spaces that open between the pages in David’s copy of Don Quixote. Placing Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus in dialogue with the work of Gerald Murnane shows how they, while very different, also seem, with their echoing relations of the ideal and the real, to offer distorted reflections of each other. Both writers’ books are meaningful because they create signs that double each other by not exactly matching. Their works hold out signs for the soul towards readers, which are necessary because if a soul were to emerge it could only emerge between signs: there is no sign that is the soul. Yet there is a difference of emphasis and tone. As Coetzee notes in his review, Murnane is supremely confident in the value of the truths generated through the power of the ideal, even as this power undermines and sets to one side the real. Coetzee on the other hand, is troubled by the open question as to whether the sense of truth that is provoked by an assertion that claims the status of intuition can by any means be trusted, even as it consistently demonstrates its power to create such truths, which consistently carve themselves into the flesh of the real.

References Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison. New York: Philosophical Library, 1946. Coetzee, J. M. Foe. London: Penguin, 1987. Coetzee, J. M. The Master of Petersburg. London: Vintage, 1999. Coetzee, J. M. Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986–1999. London: Secker and Warburg, 2001. Coetzee, J. M. Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 2000–2005. London: Harvill Secker, 2007. Coetzee, J. M. ‘The Quest for the Girl from Bendigo Street’, New York Review of Books, 20 December 2012, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/12/20/questgirl-bendigo-street/ [accessed 1 May 2016]. Coetzee, J. M. The Childhood of Jesus. Melbourne: Text, 2013.

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Gaukroger, Stephen. Cartesian Logic: An Essay on Descartes’s Conception of Inference. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Genoni, Paul. ‘The Global Reception of Post-national Literary Fiction: The Case of Gerald Murnane’, JASAL (2009): 1–13. Hughes, Joseph. The Authority of Reason: Proof, Rhetoric and the Movement of Thought in the Ethics, paper delivered at Power and Joy: A Workshop on Spinoza, Western Sydney University, 19 November 2015. Kendall, Richard (ed). Cézanne by Himself: Drawings, Paintings, Writings. London: Macdonald Orbis, 1988. Leibniz, G. W. Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, ed./intro. Austin Farrer, trans. E. M. Huggard. Chicago: Open Court, 1990. Murnane, Gerald. Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs. Sydney: Giramondo, 2005. Murnane, Gerald. Tamarisk Row. Sydney: Giramondo, 2008. Murnane, Gerald. Barley Patch. Sydney: Giramondo, 2009. Murnane, Gerald. The Plains. Melbourne: Text Classics, 2012. Murnane, Gerald. A History of Books. Sydney: Giramondo, 2012. Murnane, Gerald. Inland. Sydney: Giramondo, 2012. Plato. The Collected Dialogues, including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollington Series LXXI. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Voltaire. Candide, trans. John Butt. London: Penguin Classics, 2001. Writing and Society Research Centre (with the China Writers’ Association), The China Australia Literary Forum 2, http://www.uws.edu.au/writing_and_society/ research/current_research_projects/chna_australia_literary_forum_2013 [accessed 1 May 2016].

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The Name of the Number: Transfinite Mathematics in The Childhood of Jesus Baylee Brits

‘I know all the numbers. Do you want to hear them? I know 134 and I know 7 and I know’ – he draws a deep breath – ‘4623551 and I know 888 and I know 92 and I know –’ The Childhood of Jesus, p. 149 The coupling of mathematics and literature in J. M. Coetzee’s biography is well documented, not least in his own ‘autrebiographical’ work Youth.1 This novel recounts Coetzee’s years working in computer programming and experimenting with poetry in London. During this time Coetzee also wrote his Masters thesis on Ford Madox Ford, in which he describes The Good Soldier as ‘probably the finest example of literary pure mathematics in English’.2 It is here that we see the first clear delineation of a conceptual isomorphism between literature and mathematics in Coetzee’s work. Coetzee certainly did not, in his analysis of Ford, carry out any extended investigation into or argument for a literary mathematics, and the two domains are awkwardly joined here: literature construed as form of mathematics and mathematics as a metaphor for artistic achievement. This remark relates an early and perhaps naïve claim that formal perfection in language is analogous to the clarity of pure mathematics, an issue that would be approached and problematized with greater Coetzee comes up with this term in the final interview collected in J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 394. As cited in Peter Johnston, ‘“Presences of the Infinite”: J. M. Coetzee and Mathematics’ (doctoral thesis, Royal Holloway University of London, 2013), p. 63.

1

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sophistication in his prose fiction that would emerge some eleven years later. In a later publication, Coetzee offers an equally direct comparison between mathematics and literature through an unexpected circuit: love. In his review of the 2008 volume Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics (edited by Sarah Glaz and JoAnne Growney) Coetzee observes that there are similarities between love and mathematics that lie in the stakes that each domain has in symbolism. Just as poetry relies on varieties of semantic and lexical association, so too do ‘[s]cientific discoveries often start with a hunch that there is some connection between apparently unrelated phenomena. So there are a priori grounds for thinking of poetry and mathematics together, as two rarefied forms of symbolic activity based on the power of the human mind to detect hidden analogies.’3 Coetzee suggests that there exists shared formalism between the seemingly antithetical domains of poetry and mathematics. This formalism is metaphysical: it is the process of recognition of obscure but compelling analogies, rendered either in poetic or numeric symbolism. Many of Coetzee’s novels deal with a closely related intersection between mathematics and poetry: the problematic presence of number in identity and the absence of a stable numerical identity, a preoccupation urgent to both the sociopolitical (late twentieth-century South Africa) and philosophical (structuralism and post-structuralism) contexts from which he writes. Numerical identity – the capacity to count both subjectively and numerically and to give an account, a coherent, consistent and linear testimony – is both established and undone in Coetzee’s novels. Numbers here bring the processes and successes of naming – and the grammatical world that accompanies the designation of a name – into question. Numbers mediate the process of individuation because they are simultaneously the abstract and local means by which individuation is conceptualized; in Coetzee’s work numerical identity provides the schema for which individuation is understood to occur, and as such mediates the language of social equality, democracy, and recognition and communication.4 J. M. Coetzee, ‘Review of Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics’, eds Sarah Glaz and JoAnne Growney, Notices of the AMS 56:8 (2009): 944–6. 4 The only extended study of Coetzee and mathematics written to date is Peter Johnston’s thesis ‘“Presences of the Infinite”: J. M. Coetzee and Mathematics’, which considers much of Coetzee’s early and middle work, focusing on tracing a biographical link between Coetzee’s literary and 3



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In this chapter, I will look at Coetzee’s most substantial engagement with numeracy, in the novel The Childhood of Jesus. This novel is preoccupied with the problems of initiating a sequence where there is no origin story for identity, or, in other words, the capacity to continue to count when the first, founding number has been forgotten. The novel revolves around an unusual child, David, and the man who cares for him, Simón. David and Simón are refugees in a city whose inhabitants have been ‘washed clean’ of their memories and desires, given new identities and a new language: Spanish. I will argue here that David’s ‘divinity’ emerges in this novel out of his unwittingly nominalist mind: David cannot comprehend sequence, probability or linearity. He can only comprehend singularity. It is in David’s simultaneous embodiment of and sense of singularity that Coetzee produces a profound intersection between name and number. In this novel David embodies both the number without name and the name without number. In this, Coetzee achieves a profound reciprocity between mathematics and literature. Indeed, this novel realizes what I will call a ‘transfinite exchange’ between literature and mathematics. The novel opens with a boy, David, and a man, Simón, arriving at a welfare centre in a city named Novilla. It transpires that these new arrivals have come to a Spanish-speaking place, having undertaken intensive Spanish lessons for several weeks at a processing camp called ‘Belstar’, where they were also assigned names and ages. They had arrived at this camp by boat, having no memories of a past, having been ‘washed clean’. They are thus in the literal sense new arrivals in a new place, without origin stories and only the vaguest sense of a life before Novilla. It is this erasure of history and identity that precipitates the strange search for the boy’s mother. According to Simón, the boy’s mother had travelled by ship to Novilla ahead of the boy, expecting to be reunited with David at a later stage. David had papers relating to his mother but he lost them on the ship, an unusual predicament given that once his mother had undergone the rehabilitation process at Novilla, and been given a new name, an approximate age, and allocated housing, the papers would not have been useful.

mathematical pursuits. Johnston’s study is a crucial and rare analysis of how mathematics influenced the early work of Coetzee and how this may shape his later work.

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There are many subtle but intricate connections between The Childhood of Jesus and the biblical infancy gospels. Simón and David are forced to spend their first night in Novilla in an improvised shack at the back of a house when they fail to secure accommodation at the relocation centre, a predicament not unlike the one faced by Mary and Joseph, who stayed in a stable at Bethlehem. Like the infant Jesus, David only has a mother and his father figure is a ‘god-father’ or kind of uncle, as Simón describes his own role. But of course, David does not remember or resemble his mother (once she has been found) and she does not know him: she will be a mother by nomination rather than biology or even proper adoption (and, perhaps appropriately, is always referred to by her name, Inés, rather than directly as ‘mother’). Simón supposes from the outset that he and the boy will recognize her as soon as they see her, relying on an intuitive notion that mother and child have some form of transcendental bond, and foregoing the usual biological or legal necessity that would determine motherhood. Inés is thus, potentially, a virgin mother and indeed Saint Inés, or Saint Agnes, is the patron saint of virgins.5 The common situation shared by Jesus’ mother Mary and Inés is that they become mothers through nomination, and it is this nomination that will be the origin story for a child who has no traceable origins or, in another set of terms, no (earthly) father. In this novel, there is no message from the heavens, or any other world outside of Novilla, and the society is one based on pragmatic management without any apparent transcendental, religious or spiritual foundation: without any foundation based on another world. The absence of necessity or verifiability for such an origin story has arisen several times in Coetzee’s recent fiction, including in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which raises the connection between the recognition of a miracle and the absent referent or necessity in allegory. In ‘He and His Man’ – yet another text that revolves around the foundations of personal and the generic pronoun – ‘his man’ comes across a scene where the form of a cloud is nominated as an allegory: The arbitrary names, under the title, are suggestive without establishing allegory. The biblical David was a king and is suggested to be an ancestor of Jesus. Before becoming king he triumphs over Goliath, defying the giant’s might by killing him with five small stones. ‘Simon’ was the first name of St Peter, and ‘Simon the Zealot’ was also an apostle of Jesus; Jesus also had a brother named Simon.

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I came upon a crowd in the street, he writes, and a woman in their midst pointing to the heavens. See, she cries, an angel in white brandishing a flaming sword! And the crowd all nod among themselves, Indeed it is so, they say: an angel with a sword! But he, the saddler, can see no angel, no sword. All he can see is a strange-shaped cloud brighter on the one side than the other, from the shining of the sun. It is an allegory! cries the woman in the street, but he can see no allegory for the life of him. Thus is his report.6

The angel with the flaming sword appears again in The Childhood of Jesus as a statue in the garden of the housing estate where Inés originally lives. The nomination of Inés as the child’s mother occurs in the same way that the designation of the miracle occurs: a recognition of an allegory without any necessary referent. In the short scene from ‘He and His Man’, the woman’s vision and the surrounding crowd’s acceptance of this vision is founded not upon an allegory as she attests (sight, we are reminded, does not guarantee the recognition of a form) but the naming of an allegory: another act of nomination that traverses a transcendental gap which presents no assurance of its existence or character. The suggestion in this scene is that the divine communication is one that is delivered by an appearance that must be named, one that presents without offering its own name. Simón’s process of ‘nominating’ Inés as David’s mother is not an act of pure chance or a refutation of reason. It is an appeal to a deeper reason that resides in intuition; a form of reason that follows not logic but allegory. From the moment of his arrival, Simón resists the absence of sexual desire and passionate attachment in Novilla, as well as more generally the absence of sensual pleasure: in Novilla food is nutritious but basic (bean paste and crackers) and Simón craves meat. Simón’s appeals to the sexual passions fall equally flat in the face of a world for whom these are unsolicited and absurd. His insistence and attempts to become romantically involved with women appear misguided and pathetic. Simón finds work as a stevedore, even though loading and unloading cargo every day is physically demanding on his ageing body. He is initially perplexed by his integration into the group of labourers:

J. M. Coetzee, ‘He and His Man: The 2003 Nobel Lecture’, World Literature Today 78:2 (2004): 19.

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The fellow stevedores are friendly enough but strangely incurious. No one asks where they come from or where they are staying. He guesses that they take him to be the boy’s father – or perhaps, like Ana at the Centre, his grandfather. El Viejo. No one asks where the boy’s mother is or why he has to spend all day hanging around the docks.7

The men are not unfriendly, but rather seem immune to the question of origins or the necessity of situations, precisely that which Simón – in part because of his obligation to find David’s mother – seems preoccupied by. When Simón questions whether their world is the best possible world, a fellow dock worker, Álvaro, assures him that this is not a possible world: it is the only world. Simón notes that to Álvaro there is no irony in that statement, and in Elena, the mother of one of David’s friends, he finds a similar problem: ‘Elena is an intelligent woman but she does not see any doubleness in the world, any difference between the way things seem and the way things are.’8 For Simón, this means that the world ‘lacks weight’. ‘The music we hear lacks weight. Our lovemaking lacks weight’, he complains. ‘The food we eat, our dreary diet of bread, lacks substance – lacks the substantiality of animal flesh, with all the gravity of bloodletting and sacrifice behind it. Our very words lack weight, these Spanish words that do not come from our heart.’9 For Simón irony, desire and an interrogation of the necessity of labour and habit lend ‘weight’ to the components of that world. Of course, this notion of ‘weight’ is irremediably, maddeningly vague because it operates on a certain structure: not deduction or induction but tropology: the doubleness of words that can associate flesh and gravity. Simón’s desire to lend weight and value to his world lies in stark contradiction to the organization of Novilla and the disposition of its inhabitants. A society like Novilla, one that involves an exceptional consistency of biopolitical organization, has a peculiar relation to value: a numerical one. Novilla seems to be a society that, in providing all basic necessary services for its citizens, has mostly conquered desire that leads to inequality and competition: work is readily available, goods seem cheap, housing and education are free, and people are generally open-minded and amiable if incurious and somewhat J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 2013), p. 22. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 64. 9 Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 6–5. 7 8



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passive. Biopolitics works with a curious numerical form: the population, which is a ‘global mass that is affected by the overall characteristics specific to life […] like birth, death, production, illness, and so on’, a number indistinct in its numerical form.10 This is a society whose founding myth lies in the consistency of the count. The intransitive progression of numbers continues unbroken: there is no new number, or a number without a name, rather there is a sequence of numbers whose identity is their name, a sequence that continues unbroken for no one knows how long, but certainly long enough to generously provide for the calculus of human life. What Simón seems to be looking for is an aspect to life in Novilla that will lend value that exceeds economic terms, a value that does not already have a place in the economy of number; a transcendental necessity, a transcendental ideal. Anthony Uhlmann has suggested that this book may in part be a response to Coetzee’s Nobel Prize win, which recognizes authors based on ‘the most outstanding work in an ideal direction’.11 The question of idealism is most certainly under scrutiny, here, and Coetzee takes one of the dominant idealistic socio-economic models of the twentieth century, welfare state socialism, and recreates a version of it. This society may be described as ideal where ‘ideal’ is taken to imply the ‘best situation’ in biopolitical terms, i.e. in terms of the successful management of life. Rather than being an ideally managed society, then, Novilla seems to be a place that has no ideals left, no ideals beyond the affirmation of quotidian reality, no ideals that exceed or transcend the successful management of life. Simón is looking for a necessity or an ideal that is qualitatively rather than quantitatively different from the Novillan conception of these terms. Simón uses the same words as his companions in Novilla, but means the exact opposite. In Novilla necessity implies the ‘minimum requirement’ whereas for Simón necessity implies ‘imperative’, and whereas ‘ideal’ implies the ‘suitable or practical’ in Novilla, so ‘ideal’ for Simón is an elusive standard of perfection. In each case, we see the This is Foucault’s later definition of biopolitics. His earlier definition referenced ‘a generalised disciplinary society’. For a discussion of this distinction see Michell Senelart, ‘Course Context’, Security, Territory, Population, trans. Graham Burchill (New York: Picador, 2007), p. 378. 11 Anthony Uhlmann, ‘Signs for the Soul’. Sydney Review of Books, 9 July 2013, http://www. sydneyreviewofbooks.com/signs-for-the-soul/ [accessed 1 May 2016]. Elements of this essay are revised, expanded and included in Chapter 5 in this volume under a different title. 10

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split between a pragmatic and a transcendental side of the coin. Likewise, for Simón meaning is delivered not through a pragmatic rationality of cause and effect but the ‘doubling’ necessary to a consciousness of the transcendental: through the aporetic leaps of metaphor and symbol. This is exemplified by the literal traversal of signs that leads Simón to Inés. Simón and David are on a walk, following a path that will take them to a ‘scenic spot’ that is signified on their map by a starburst. With the title of the book in the back of readers’ minds, this will allude to the Star of Bethlehem. Simón stumbles upon Inés playing tennis with her brothers at the end of the walk, where the starburst signals a supposed scenic spot. Here, he introduces himself and implores her to consider mothering David. He will later reflect on this failed conversation using a metaphor of the star: ‘But alas, it came too suddenly for her, this great moment, as it had come too suddenly for him. It had burst on him like a star, and he had failed it.’12 As in the unreasonable and unverifiable ‘recognition’ of Inés as David’s mother, we see Simón link otherwise unconnected signs together associatively, joining together the three separate stars and their significations in his discovery of Inés, albeit unconsciously. While Simón struggles with his new life in Novilla, and the absence of ‘doubleness’ in his newfound home, it is David who will most fully – and unintentionally – resist the founding elements of that society. David’s resistance is also rooted in his use of language, in particular his capacity to name. David cannot think in terms of either universals or economics, but only singularity. David is unwittingly a nominalist and in his struggles in school with numbers and stories will undermine the notion of ‘possible worlds’ held by Simón as well as the conviction in ‘one world’ held by other members of Novilla. David is acutely aware of the singular, and oblivious to the natural or habitual law or accepted interpretation of ‘the way things are’. This is most directly illustrated through a conversation between David and Simón as they are walking home one evening: ‘Come on, hurry up,’ [Simón] says irritably. ‘Keep your game for another day.’ ‘No. I don’t want to fall into a crack.’ Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 77.

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‘That’s nonsense. How can a big boy like you fall down a little crack like that?’ ‘Not that crack. Another crack.’ ‘Which crack? Point to the crack.’ ‘I don’t know! I don’t know which crack. Nobody knows.’ ‘Nobody knows because nobody can fall through a crack in the paving. Now hurry up.’ ‘I can! You can! Anyone can! You don’t know!’ 13

While it initially appears that David is being facetious, here, this behaviour will come to appear genuine. David’s way of seeing the world repeatedly flaunts probability for what others take to be radical contingency. Above all, David’s sense of possibility operates according to an approach to situations and objects as singular rather than general. Where Simón occupies what might be described as a ‘Platonic’ position, aware of the discrepancy between appearance and reality, the imminent and the ideal, so David is mired cognitively and behaviourally in a nominalism that recognizes only singularities. David’s disruptive behaviour will come to a head in his inability to learn to read and write. There are other laws of numeracy – and indeed of literacy – that this ‘nominalist’ child struggles with. Long before his time has come to go to school, Simón has already begun to introduce David to books and counting. He acquires a copy of Don Quixote from a library and reads David the story. But David refuses – or is unable – to accept the ‘doubleness’ necessary for a traditional reading of Don Quixote. He takes Don Quixote’s perspective, not Sancho’s, convinced that Quixote’s observation of a giant is correct, and Sancho’s view of a windmill is incorrect.14 David’s problems with literature seem to be an extension of his problems with numeracy: David’s grasp on the narrative is not checked by any necessity of natural law, just as his experience with the cracks in the pavement was not checked by neither any necessity to size, gravity or the finitude of the crack. Giants and windmills have equal purchase in David’s mind, because the value that attributes identity to the objects is in the unique encounter (putting Quixote on the side of singularity, and Sancho on the side of probability). Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 35. Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 152–3.

13 14

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Further signs of David’s numerical dissonance come in his interpretations of the stories that Inés tells him: an interpretation that links the strange blank origin narratives of all the citizens of Novilla – which disrupt what we consider to be the natural law of progeny – with a wider problem of order. Inés tells David a story of three brothers, who leave home in turn to seek out a cure for their mother’s illness from the ‘Wise Woman who guards the precious herb of cure’.15 The first two brothers leave and each meets an animal along the way, who offers to show each brother the way to the Wise Woman in exchange for food. Both brothers dismiss the animals and are never heard of again. The third brother meets a bear on his way to the Wise Woman and agrees to give the bear food in exchange. The bear asks for his heart, and he assents, and the bear leads him to the Wise Woman where he procures the necessary herb. Upon returning to the mother, who is healed by the herb, the third son turns into a star (he cannot continue to live with no heart), leaving his mother alone. David has decided that he wants to be like the third brother, which is significant in the first instance because it reinforces David’s idiosyncratic relation to the world: the third brother does not operate according to types or probability (that the bear will attack him) but rather takes his situation at face value, giving the bear food. When Simón disputes the possibility of David becoming like the third brother, claiming that he can only be the first, because he has no siblings, David objects and tells him Inés will give him more brothers. The boy is demanding and uncompromising, and while he understands that numbers occur, he has no comprehension of sequence; no comprehension that, even if two brothers are born, he will still be first in the familial sequence. David is typically unresponsive to the requests and reasoning of his parents and others and responds to Simón with intensity: ‘I want to be the third son! She promised me!’16 ‘One comes before two, David, and two before three’ Simón retorts, ‘Inés can make promises until she is blue in the face but she can’t change that. One-two-three. It’s a law even stronger than a law of nature. It is called the law of numbers.’17 Despite Simón’s reasoning, David will not, or cannot, be convinced. And here we have the Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 146. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 148. 17 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 148. 15 16



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most significant instance of number in the book: David effectively identifies himself as that singular number, a number not yet named ‘one,’ or, to use the words from Revelation 22.13: ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega.’ The Alpha and the Omega: a beginning and an end, a number outside of sequence. The only number in mathematical history that may be akin to this ‘singular number’ is Cantor’s transfinite ‘aleph-null’ (ϰ0): the cardinal number that measures the infinity of all definable numbers. It may seem that number and Christian divinity are antithetical to each other – the cold eye of abstract measure surely has little to do with the ephemerality of faith, miracle and divinity central to the Christ story. However, the two are intimately linked. Thomas Aquinas uses Aristotle’s claims about the perfection of the number to interpret the significance of Christ’s resurrection on the third day after the crucifixion.18 Aristotle claimed that the number of the universe was the triad, because it had a beginning, middle and end (notably making the assumption that the number three contains all of its prior numbers). What is fascinating, here, is the equivalence between what is essentially a narrative convention and a number. The triune nature of God does not only possess a narrative numerological function, however. It also mediates the philosophical categories of ontology, metaphysics and phenomenology for Christianity: ‘it is the Father who generates, the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds. The divine unity is Triune.’19 The Trinity provides the answer to God’s presence at all three levels. But for a tale like The Childhood of Jesus with no beginning, or a foreclosed beginning, and which ends with the beginning of a journey, or a flight (almost an inverse of Mary and Joseph’s removal to Bethlehem), the number three is redundant. So which number, then, would be appropriate, here? A number that steers us away from the faith required for numerological interpretation and towards a faithless numerical interpretation that nonetheless still offers us the sort of ‘substance’ or ‘weight’ that Simón is looking for. See Corey L. Barnes, ‘Aristotle in the Summa Theologiae’s Christology’, in Aristotle in Aquinas’s Theology, eds Giles Emery and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), which elaborates Aristotle’s influence on Aquinas’ interpretation of the perfection of the resurrection. 19 Catechism of the Catholic Church, The Holy See, http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/ catechism/p1s2c1p2.htm [accessed 1 May 2016]. 18

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The position in mathematical epistemology that exists in antithesis to the numerical regime in Novilla is nominalism: a philosophical position – espoused most famously in the twentieth century by Willard Quine – that enforces a system of what can and cannot be known, and seeks to clarify language and thought by injecting such a distinction into linguistics and the sciences. Nominalism is the philosophical position whereby universal entities are denied existence, while the existence of particular or singular entities is affirmed. While nominalism is an operative version of metaphysics, in The Childhood of Jesus we encounter nominalism as epistemological condition. In mathematics, nominalism thus denies the existence of mathematical objects or entities; these are, rather, merely tools to assist in the description of particulars. This is opposed to Platonism, which posits that such mathematical objects do have a positive existence in an ideal realm. On one level, nominalism can involve only a minor amendment to mathematics, which involves the clause that, although mathematics involves conceptual entities, any claim to the actual existence of a universal entity such as a number would be a transgression against the proper metaphysical implication of mathematics. On another level, nominalism can imply a much greater transformation in the way that objects in the worlds are recognized: if numbers are taken as objects, they cannot exist within a sequence but must be encountered individually. David does not choose nominalism as a philosophical position but cognitively cannot comprehend universals, only particulars. In a society that runs on sequence, and the identity that emerges from sequence, this contrary numerical cognition will be a disability. The nominalism that we encounter in the character of David will require a much more radical renunciation of mathematical tenets, with enormous upheavals in social and personal existence. The problem that precedes a successful nominalism is that of individuation which, as defined by Ray Brassier, is the question of ‘how it is that something comes to be counted as one’.20 In Brassier’s account, Quinean individuation is linguistic: it bears not on a reality but on what is deemed a ‘one’ in language. The initial means of clarifying this is through grammatical significance: Ray Brassier, ‘Behold the Non-Rabbit: Kant, Quine, Laruelle’, Pli 12 (2001): 50.

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We shall not forego all use of predicates and other words that are often taken to name abstract objects. We may still write ‘x is a dog’, or ‘x is between y and z’; for here ‘is a dog’ and ‘is between … and’ can be construed as syncategorematic: significant in context but naming nothing.21

In this sense, universals or abstractions can be qualifiers but not the variables that establish meaning. Where Simón has a conception of value of numbers that differs from the narrative that structures Novilla, David’s dissent arises from a different conception of the identity of numbers. David appears a kind of radical nominalist because he takes numbers to have an existence and identity that is not sequential. In other words, for David, each number is a ‘one’ in language and thought: his application of nominalism takes abstractions as existent, reversing the Quinean allocation of abstraction and singularity. When David explains to Simón that Inés believes he does not have to go to school because he is clever (and thus will be bored by school), Simón asks David what it is that he thinks makes him so clever. David answers that he is clever because he knows all numbers: ‘I know all the numbers. Do you want to hear them? I know 134 and I know 7 and I know’ – he draws a deep breath – ‘4623551 and I know 888 and I know 92 and I know –’ ‘Stop! That’s not knowing numbers, David. Knowing numbers means being able to count. It means knowing the order of the numbers.’22

When Simón challenges the boy to tell him the next number after 888, and corrects the boy when he produces a number nowhere near 888, David retorts that Simón cannot know which number comes after ‘888’ because he has never ‘been there’.23 This is a direct contradiction to knowing all the numbers, although David’s response to Simón – that he hasn’t ‘been there’ – suggests that David’s idea of knowing numbers differs very significantly from Simón’s: that numbers are encountered or arrived at rather than simply extracted from their sequence. Where Simón has a conception of value of numbers that differs from the narrative that structures Novilla (and hence has a resistance that is Nelson Goodman and W. V. Quine, ‘Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism’, The Journal of Symbolic Logic 12:4 (1947): 105. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 149. 23 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 150. 21

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largely affective), David’s dissidence arises from a different conception of the identity of numbers (and hence a resistance that is cognitive, that is epistemic). David appears a kind of radical nominalist because he takes numbers to have an existence and identity that is not sequential. If we are going to link this back to the Bible, we might say that David is ‘unfallen’ because he cannot comprehend sequence. Eugenio, who is also a stevedore, and a friend of Simón’s, has his own point of view on David’s predicament. ‘An apple is an apple is an apple’, explains Eugenio: ‘An apple and another apple make two apples. One Simón and one Eugenio make two passengers in a car. A child doesn’t find statements like that hard to accept – an ordinary child. He doesn’t find them hard because they are true, because from birth we are, so to speak, attuned to their truth. As for being afraid of the empty spaces between numbers, have you ever pointed out to David that the number of numbers is infinite?’24

Eugenio’s characterization of David seems to be correct here. David is not attuned to the basic truth that guides others. And the subsequent question will revolve around whether David is attuned to a different truth (and subsequently how many truths then might exist) and what the implications might be for society should wildly different perceptions of the way reality is structured exist. And yet Eugenio reveals himself as also fundamentally incapable of truly comprehending David’s singularity. Eugenio seems to have no conception that the number of infinities is infinite, and that infinities can take on numerical value and be different ‘sizes’. Eugenio’s point regarding the infinity of numbers suggests a ‘whole’ infinity that exists as a single totality without gaps. Eugenio, along with several of the other stevedores, attends a philosophy course at a place called ‘The Institute’ that offers a wide range of evening courses and seems popular with the residents of Novilla. Simón declines to join, but is given an account of one of the conversations that group engaged in: ‘We talked about infinity and the perils of infinity. What if, beyond the ideal chair, there is yet more ideal chair, and so forth for ever and ever?’25 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 250. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 123.

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Eugenio does not dwell on what the perils of infinity might exactly be, though his conception here is revealing enough. The danger of infinity, it seems, is that any concept of matter never really stops: the ideal chair will always withdraw from the grasp of thought and knowledge. Eugenio then goes on to present a novel theory of the infinite: ‘There are good infinities and bad infinities, Simón. […] A bad infinity is like finding yourself in a dream within a dream within yet another dream, and so forth endlessly. […] But the numbers aren’t like that. The numbers constitute a good infinity. Why? Because, like being infinite in number, they fill all the spaces in the universe, pack one against another tight as bricks. So we are all safe. There is nowhere to fall. Point that out to the boy. It will reassure him.’26

Again, Eugenio’s analytic philosophy misses the point and he seems oblivious to any theory of numbers that may include the gaps between numbers or multiple infinities. This is a totality that is at once infinite, consistent and whole. Eugenio envisages numbers as bricks: each standardized, solid and strong but ultimately identical, distinguishable only in their existence in a sequence. This, it would seem, is the mathematics of ‘one world’ rather than possible worlds or worlds of singularities. David’s comprehension is not that of infinity, as in that which is signified by a transfinite number or the lemniscate, but rather is itself inflected with the infinite. In this sense, David is both closer to any sense of the infinite than anyone else, including and especially Eugenio with his analytic philosophy, and further away: he cannot speak of what characterizes or creates him, and he is above all unable to articulate infinity, because his way of relating to the world is nominalist: is fixated on the singularity (like Eugenio, a transfinite number would likely be a mystery to David). This is not to say that Eugenio is without a conception of numerical identity or has a naïve concept of number. Quite the contrary. Eugenio’s statement belies the fact that he does have a concept of number, indeed, Eugenio’s statement reveals a singular number. Eugenio’s unique number is the brick, the algorithm from which all other numbers and the structure of the universe extends, which is not only an extrapolation from his choice of metaphor but also resonates with his notions Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 250.

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of labour and purpose. David’s number, on the other hand, is the wand, which he becomes obsessed with towards the end of the novel, wearing a cloak and carrying a wand and purporting to be a magician. And what is the wand? The number one that isn’t a number one: the properly singular number without a name. As in Coetzee’s earlier work, there is an extended and complex engagement with sequence, with what constitutes a unit and how it is naturalized in some continuing count. During the composition of Dusklands Coetzee made notes from Henri Poincaré’s Mathematical Creativity. The first quote that Coetzee transcribed in his notes relates to the syllogism. ‘Imagine a long series of syllogisms’, Poincaré writes, and that the conclusions of the first serve as premises of the following. We shall be able to catch each of these syllogisms, and it is not in passing from premises to conclusions that we are in danger of deceiving ourselves. But between the moment in which we first meet a proposition as conclusion of one syllogism, and that in which we reencounter it as premise of another syllogism occasionally some time will elapse, several links of the chain will have unrolled; so it may happen that we have forgotten it, or worse, that we have forgotten its meaning. So it may happen that we replace it by a slightly different proposition, or that, while retaining the same enunciation, we attribute to it a slightly different meaning, and thus it is that we are exposed to error.27

According to Poincaré, the true danger of a syllogism is in the forgetting of the origin in the chain of logic. The syllogistic peril is an issue of the chain of language but it also indicates that the falsity of a sequence may come not from the structure in itself but the acceptance of some original statement as not syllogistic, or as true in itself. Such an ‘original’ statement may be the assertion of an allegory, as we saw in the naming of the cloud as an angel with a flaming sword, a conviction that this is the only world, or a concept of number. Poincaré made a famous distinction between intuitionist mathematicians28 (whom he Quote by Henri Poincaré in Mathematical Creation, found in: J. M. Coetzee, Reading notes including materials for Dusklands, 1960s, Subseries A: Long Works 1960s–2012, Folder 99.3. Harry Ransom Center, University of Austin, Texas, p. 34. 28 The second Poincaré quote from Coetzee’s notes runs as follows: ‘When a sudden illumination seizes upon the mind of a mathematician, it usually happens that it does not deceive him; … [if false] we almost always notice that this false idea, had it been true, would have gratified our natural feeling for mathematical elegance.’ Poincaré, Mathematical Creation, p. 40. 27



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also aligned with geometry) and logicist mathematicians (whom he aligned with analysis). The latter do not think spatially, but the former do, and jump to conclusions faster, at times with an absence of reasoning. Intuitionist mathematicians do not arrive through due process at their conclusions, but see their conclusions. We might call David an intuitionist, rather than logicist. In David’s world the logic of probability (perhaps the most important normative logic) is absent and all works on intuition, a fact that is equally applicable to Eugenio for whom numerical truth extends not from logic but a pre-rational apprehension of truth. Each opposing worldview and epistemology contains its own ‘unique number’ that founds not only all other numbers, but a whole metaphysics of individuation. It is the process of syllogism that extracts a conclusion from one piece of information – in this sense it is a deductive movement that proceeds from one piece of information rather than observation – an illogical process, an erroneous process, Poincaré reminds us, only where the original piece of information is forgotten. The overall effect of this is not to necessarily validate intuitionism over analysis but instead to illustrate the means by which various numerical regimes emerge based on conceptions of the nature of an initial ‘jump,’ the forgetting that facilitates a naturalized world. The variant intuitions of numerical identity – and the truth of number – held by David and Eugenio suggest that the origin of the numerical structure of societies rests in a kind of ‘forgetting’ of the origins of number, just as the residents of Novilla too have arrived with only the shadiest notions of their prior lives. Numerical identity makes a transcendental and unavowed jump that finds its echoes in allegory but never presents itself, in other words, never reveals its own name.

References Barnes, Corey L. ‘Aristotle in the Summa Theologiae’s Christology’, in Aristotle in Aquinas’s Theology, ed. Giles Emery and Matthew Levering. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Brassier, Ray. ‘Behold the Non-Rabbit: Kant, Quine, Laruelle’, Pli 12 (2001). Coetzee, J. M. The Childhood of Jesus, New York: Penguin, 2013.

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Coetzee, J. M. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Coetzee, J. M. Review of Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics, ed. Sarah Glaz and JoAnne Growney, Notices of the AMS. 56:8 (2009). Coetzee, J. M. ‘He and His Man: The 2003 Nobel Lecture’, World Literature Today 78:2 (2004). Goodman, Nelson and W. V. Quine. ‘Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism’, The Journal of Symbolic Logic 12:4 (1947). Johnston, Peter. ‘“Presences of the Infinite”: J. M. Coetzee and Mathematics.’ Doctoral thesis, Royal Holloway University of London, 2013. Poincaré, Henri. Mathematical Creation, found in: ‘J. M. Coetzee, Reading notes including materials for Dusklands, 1960s, Subseries A: Long Works 1960s-2012, Folder 99.3.’ Harry Ransom Center, University of Austin, Texas. Senelart, Michell. ‘Course Context’, in Security, Territory, Population, trans. Graham Burchill. New York: Picador, 2007. Uhlmann, Anthony. ‘Signs for the Soul’, Sydney Review of Books, 9 July 2013.

Section IV

Ethical and Stylistic Concerns

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7

J. M. Coetzee and the Parental Punctum Sue Kossew

While J. M. Coetzee’s works are often described as intellectual, spare and somewhat distant, there are, I am going to suggest, moments within them of sympathetic emotional identification that may be termed a language of the heart. These moments are often associated with the parent/child relationship. For a writer who has the reputation of fiercely protecting his own privacy, Coetzee’s Nobel banquet acceptance speech was remarkably personal, one that has been described by David Attwell as a ‘disarming tribute to his mother’.1 The full transcript of the short speech2 includes Coetzee’s narration of a dialogue between the writer and his partner (referred to as his ‘dearly beloved’ partner in the first handwritten version of the speech),3 fellow academic Dorothy Driver. In this reported exchange, she muses about how proud his mother and father would have been of him, and what a pity it was that his parents were not still alive. The speech continues: Dorothy was right. My mother would have been bursting with pride. My son the Nobel Prize winner. And for whom, anyway, do we do the things that lead to Nobel Prizes if not for our mothers? … Why must our mothers be ninety-nine David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face-to-Face with Time (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2014), p. 162. I read Attwell’s book, which includes a chapter entitled ‘Mother’, at the beginning of which he quotes the Nobel banquet speech in full, only after I had written this chapter. 2 Available as both transcript and video online at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/2003/coetzee-speech-e.html [accessed 1 May 2016]. This acceptance speech is not to be confused with the more formal Nobel Lecture, ‘He and His Man’. 3 Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. J. M. Coetzee Archive. Nobel banquet acceptance speech draft on envelope. Undated. MSP. 1–2 and envelope. Box 61.9. Items: 36 a, b, c. MS-0842/J. M. Coetzee Papers, 1864–2012. This original version is hand-written on Grand Hotel notepaper, Room 627. 1

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and long in the grave before we can come running home with the prize that will make up for all the trouble we have been to them?4

And it concludes with the moving words: ‘To my parents, how sorry I am that you cannot be here.’ In the first version of the speech, this was rendered as a ‘request’ to the Nobel Foundation to ‘next time, perhaps, … give your awards to men and women young enough to gladden their mother’s hearts’.5 Like many members of that night’s audience, I find this a most touching acknowledgement of his parents, and in particular of his mother, one that has prompted me to reconsider this aspect – the parental punctum, as I am calling it – of Coetzee’s literary works. The notion of the punctum comes, of course, from Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, the essays on photography and mortality that he published shortly after his mother’s death and, ironically, shortly before the accident that would lead to his own death. He considers in this work why some photographs have a strong emotional effect while others do not, labelling this distinction the studium and the punctum: the studium being the cultural, linguistic and political elements of a photograph that can be studied fairly objectively and that come under the heading of ‘like/don’t like’; the punctum being the ‘piercing’ or ‘wounding’ of the viewer, some detail in the photograph that establishes a direct relationship with the viewer and disturbs or surprises him/her. It is worth looking in full at his definition of the punctum: The second element [the punctum] will break (or punctuate) the studium. This time is it not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points.6

Coetzee. Nobel banquet acceptance speech. Online version nobelprize.org Coetzee Archive. Nobel banquet acceptance speech. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), pp. 26–7. Original emphasis.

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He continues: This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also the cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).7

The photograph Barthes finds of his mother and her brother as children enables him to ‘rediscover’ what he calls the ‘resurrection’8 of the ‘unique being’9 of his mother at the same time as he senses her mortality.10 This intimation of death or ‘catastrophe’11 and the sense of loss and regret seem to me to apply too to particular moments in Coetzee’s texts; and Barthes’s language of death and resurrection, with its biblical echoes, is particularly relevant to The Childhood of Jesus. I am not the first to notice the importance of the punctum in Coetzee’s work: Debra Castillo has written of the ‘mythic punctum’ in relation to Dusklands where photographs are integral to the text. She notes the importance in that text of Barthes-like words and concepts such as ‘pierce, prick, wound, bruise, poignant’ that indicate the text’s ‘intent to puncture the pretensions of colonialist discourse with short, incisive stabs’ and analyses the photographs described in the text.12 I am positing, in a slightly different move, that literary texts, too, have their punctum – a moment (or moments) when the writer seems to lay bare an emotion so that the reader, like Barthes’s viewer, appears to have direct access to a vulnerability, a piercing or wounding of the writer’s or, indeed, the reader’s own inmost self. It is a moment of shared intimacy, perhaps even of confession. Barthes, Camera Lucida, pp. 26–7. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 82. 9 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 71. 10 Barthes’s words are as follows: ‘I studied the little girl and at last rediscovered my mother (69) … the unique being (71) … Photography has something to do with resurrection (82) … In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: She is going to die: I shudder … over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe’ (96). It is significant that Barthes does not include in his book the photograph upon which he bases this notion of the punctum: that of his mother as a child, so the reader is unable to share his response. Instead, he narrates it obliquely: after her death, he is going through old photographs of her looking for ‘the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it.’ Barthes, Camera Lucida. p. 67. 11 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 96. 12 Debra Castillo, ‘Coetzee’s Dusklands: The Mythic Punctum’, PMLA 105:5 (October 1990): 1115. Available online at http://www.jstor.org/stable/462738 [accessed 15 February 2014]. 7 8

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There are a number of such moments, I would like to suggest, in Coetzee’s texts. The most obvious – and this is perhaps in itself obvious – come to mind in relation to the life-writing of Scenes from Provincial Life when the narrator thinks back on his relationship with his parents.13 Two such examples must suffice, one regarding a mother, the other a father. There is such a moment in Boyhood when the narrator describes siding with his father against his mother by ridiculing his mother’s attempts to ride a bicycle: ‘His heart turns against her. That evening he joins in with his father’s jeering. He is well aware what a betrayal this is. Now his mother is all alone.’14 What I find ‘piercing’ about this description is the narrator’s consciousness of his own betrayal and its consequence: his mother’s isolation within the family. His determination to show that he ‘belongs with the men’15 includes his keeping his life at school ‘a tight secret’16 from his mother, despite his awareness of her strong desire to share this experience with him. That this is a conscious separation makes it even more poignant. A similar moment emerges in the text of Youth where the narrator admits his obdurate refusal to respond to his mother’s entreating letters. My second example comes from the final undated notebook fragments at the end of Summertime that focus on the father/son relationship. Attwell’s archival research in the Coetzee papers leads him to conclude that these fragments at the beginning and end of Summertime are ‘lightly fictionalized extracts taken from Coetzee’s [writer’s] notebooks.’17 The notebook records: ‘He goes with his father … because … sport … is the strongest surviving bond between them, and because it went through his heart like a knife … to see his father … go off to Newlands like a lonely child.’18 Equally poignantly, While the trilogy of memoirs provides ample material for drawing inferences about Coetzee’s own life (and is used as source material by both his biographers, John Kannemeyer and David Attwell), these texts are narrated in the third person and therefore deliberately create a distancing effect between the personal and the authored account of a life. Indeed, Summertime textualizes this alienation effect. 14 J. M. Coetzee, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (London: Secker and Warburg, 1997), p. 3. Emphasis added. 15 Coetzee, Boyhood, p. 4. 16 Coetzee, Boyhood, p. 5. 17 Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, p. 182. The Coetzee archive is housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. 18 J. M. Coetzee, Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life (North Sydney: Random House, 2009), p. 245. 13



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the son John attempts to atone for a childhood misdeed – his scratching of his father’s prized record – by very belatedly, in his adulthood, replacing it, and seeking forgiveness from his dying father, who can no longer speak, for ‘countless acts of meanness … In sum, for all I have done since the day I was born, and with such success, to make your life a misery’.19 The change from the prevailing third-person to first-person narration here marks a significant shift in the emotional register of the text, a confessional moment, perhaps, that goes through the reader’s heart, too, ‘like a knife’. As Attwell suggests in his literary biography of Coetzee, Summertime can be read as ‘an act of reparation’ in which ‘the poignancy of [Coetzee’s father] Jack’s life overwhelms the earlier bitterness’20 in a ‘restoration of the father-son relationship’.21 Significantly, both these examples are marked by the text’s reference to the heart and to the son’s perception of his parents’ loneliness and his own acts of betrayal. The echoes with his Nobel banquet speech are striking. The emerging of this parental punctum is similarly evident in Coetzee’s fictional texts, though of course the distinction between his fictional memoirs and fiction is not so precise. It has been suggested by Mike Marais that the lost child is a motif in these fictional texts that metaphorizes ‘the invisible’22 and that the writer’s attempt to render visible what is invisible is always subject to its betrayal, and this is certainly true. Marais likens this ‘filial metaphor’ to a writerly ‘parental’ responsibility. While the role of parents in these texts has received relatively little critical attention,23 it is clear that almost all of his fictional texts feature or foreground a parent/child relationship of some kind. Thus, Eugene Dawn in Dusklands stabs his own son; Magda in In the Heart of the Country is unable to trace her maternal Coetzee, Summertime, p. 250. Original emphasis. Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, p. 184. Attwell, J. M. Coetzee, p. 186. 22 Mike Marais, Secretary of the Invisible: The Idea of Hospitality in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2009), p. xvi. 23 Gillian Dooley has a chapter entitled ‘Parents and Children’ in her book, J. M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative (New York: Cambria, 2010) in which she concludes that ‘no reassuring message of family harmony can be found in Coetzee’s works’ (170); Paola Splendore has an essay entitled ‘“No More Mothers and Fathers”: The Family Sub-Text in J.M. Coetzee’s Novels’, in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38:3 (2003): 148–61. More recently, Attwell’s J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing includes chapters entitled ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ that intriguingly consider the role of Coetzee’s parents in his life and work. 19 20 21

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origins ‘back to [her] mother’s knee’24 instead having to live by the rule of the fathers; Susan Barton in Foe is haunted by her own lost child; Elizabeth Curren’s book-length letter to her daughter living in the USA agonizes about her own failure to parent the unruly youth of the day in Age of Iron; the Dostoevsky figure in Master of Petersburg fails to bring his son back to life, to recreate him; David Lurie in Disgrace fails to provide his daughter with the fatherly protection he feels he owes her; and the Elizabeth Costello texts feature the rather strained relationship between Elizabeth and her son, John. While there is a pattern here of parental failure, there is also a deep sense of what one critic has called ‘matrilinear memory’25 that is not unrelated to Barthes’s searching for a ‘true’ photographic memory of his mother. Thus, as Ravindranathan points out, both Magda and Mrs Curren movingly call out to their mothers in their times of need in what I am suggesting may be seen as examples of the parental, here the specifically maternal, punctum. Attwell has noted the intensity of Coetzee’s childhood relationship with his mother, Vera, and the profound ‘but by no means straightforward’ influence she had on his authorship.26 Coetzee himself, in his exchanges with clinical psychologist Arabella Kurtz, has mused on the ‘puzzling moral material’ provided to him by his family, and in particular his mother, as a child.27 Here, he is referring most particularly to the gap between his mother’s seemingly ethical personal interactions and her support of the ‘people who ran the country’, that is, the Afrikaner Nationalist government of South Africa at the time. This combination of moral ambivalence and emotional intensity in relation to mothers has left a subtle but discernible and affecting trace in his fiction. Magda, for example, calls out to an absent mother, a ‘soft-scented loving mother who drugged me with milk and slumber on the featherbed and then, to J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 41. A phrase used by Thangam Ravindranathan in his essay, ‘Amor Matris: Language and Loss in J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron’, Safundi, 8:4 (2007): 404. This offers illuminating insights into the issue of maternal memory with particular reference to Age of Iron. 26 Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, p. 166. These influences include Coetzee’s ‘particular relationship with the English language’ (166), the reading material provided to him as a child, and his mother’s strength of character and resilience in the face of material hardship and a largely ineffectual husband – influences that have, Attwell suggests, ‘left their mark on’ Coetzee’s ‘articulate heroines’ who often contest ‘patriarchal authority’ (166). 27 J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, The Good Story (London: Harvill Secker, 2015), p. 110. 24 25



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the sound of bells in the night, vanished, where are you?’28 Like Magda, as she approaches death, Mrs Curren, too, calls out to her ‘lost’ mother: ‘Dear mother, I thought, look down on me, stretch forth your hand!’29 And, again: ‘Mother, look down on me.’30 There are echoes here of that Mother with a capital M, of whom Barthes too speaks: ‘For what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable.’31 Compare this with the words of Mrs Curren in Age of Iron as she rehearses her own ‘matrilinear memory’: ‘I cling not just to the memory of her [her mother] but to her herself, to her body, to my birth from her body into the world. In blood and milk I drank her body and came to life.’32 Here, the mother is both body and soul, the source of life, and the source of loss, recalling Adrienne Rich’s identification of ‘the loss of the daughter to the mother, [and] the mother to the daughter’ as ‘the essential female tragedy’.33 And David Attwell has carefully outlined the ways in which the early drafts of this novel embody the intensity of the real-life relationship between Coetzee and Vera, and the son’s grief in response to his mother’s death – Vera died on 6 March 1985, just over a year before Coetzee began working on the novel that would be Age of Iron – as well as a sense of ‘ethical misgiving’34 about his mother’s conservative political views. It is not surprising, then, that this novel explores ‘familial bonds’ as well as ‘historical guilt’35 through the character of Mrs Curren. The language and imagery of motherhood, particularly Mrs Curren’s words about her mother – ‘in blood and milk I drank her body and came to life’36 – are echoed and complicated in The Childhood of Jesus. One such example is when the child David tells Simón that he wants to have milk in his breasts like women do. Simón replies that men do not make milk but blood: ‘If a man Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country, p. 7. J. M. Coetzee, Age of Iron (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 54. 30 Coetzee, Age of Iron, p. 55. 31 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 75. 32 Coetzee, Age of Iron, p. 110. 33 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), p. 240. 34 Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, p. 169. 35 Attwell, J. M. Coetzee, p. 174. 36 Coetzee, Age of Iron, p. 110. 28 29

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wants to give something out of his body, he gives blood … to sick people … to make them better.’37 And a few lines further on, ‘… fathers aren’t very important, compared with mothers. A mother brings you out of her body into the world. She gives you milk … She holds you in her arms and protects you. Whereas a father can sometimes be a bit of a wanderer, like Don Quixote, not always there when you need him. He helps to make you, right at the beginning, but then he moves on.’38

And, significantly, when David asks who his real father is and what his name is, Simón replies: ‘I don’t know. Dios sabe [God knows] … Even the mother doesn’t always know for sure.’39 But David has also been parted from his ‘real’ mother. It is Simón who ‘finds’ her and who convinces David that she is the ‘right’ mother, telling him that this will be a reciprocal process of mutual recognition: ‘All will become clear as soon as you lay eyes on her. You will remember her and she will remember you. You may think you are washed clean, but you aren’t. You still have your memories, they are just buried, temporarily.’40 While clearly referencing Biblical imagery (particularly in terms of the body and blood of Christ), and thus operating on (at least) two levels, the text here is also differentiating between biological and socially constructed parental roles. But this is just one example of the many references to parenthood, parenting and parental roles (here, downplaying the role of the father) in The Childhood of Jesus. I can’t pretend to have a complete grasp of this very complex text (which itself plays games with reality, fictionality and interpretation, and its own literary paternity, and brings to mind Coetzee’s description of the work of Borges as ‘a game of chess in which the reader is always a move behind the author’41), but I would like to tentatively suggest a few ways of reading its treatment of the triangulated quest for the mother, motherland and mother tongue; and the ways in which it questions the various religious, social, biological and cultural constructions of motherhood and fatherhood. I will return to the parental punctum at the end of the chapter. J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013), p. 259. Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 259–60. 39 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 260. 40 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 31. 41 J. M. Coetzee, Stranger Shores (London: Random House, 2002), p. 169. 37 38



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The text’s treatment of language raises complex issues of translation, identity and origins. Or in the translated words of Borges (whose presence, like Cervantes’s, haunts the text and may explain the Spanish language), from his story ‘The Homeric Versions’ (1932): ‘it is impossible to know what belongs to the writer and what belongs to language.’42 Coetzee has said that the text should be understood as translated from Spanish into English,43 yet even this is thrown into some doubt when David sings the German lied which he suggests is in English (though we read it in German), a language (English) which Simón professes not to be able to speak.44 Even more significantly, Schubert’s song, Erlkönig, is based on Goethe’s verse (not quite accurately transcribed in the text) that describes the death of a son whose father fails to protect him from the ‘elf ’ king, whom only he can see. Here, the intertwining of mother tongue and father role relates to a theme that is threaded through the novel. Throughout the text, the notion of a mother tongue is subject to confusion. The child David apparently dislikes the Spanish that both he and Simón have learned to speak in a basic way at Belstar camp – ‘the Spanish he [Simón] has worked hard to master’.45 When Simón asks David which language he would prefer to speak, David’s ambiguous reply is: ‘I want to speak my own language.’46 Simón’s response assumes that David means his own private language (that Simón refers to as ‘gibberish’47), so that he emphasizes that sharing a common language is ‘one of the ways in which we get along’.48 He continues: ‘If you refuse, if you go on being rude about Spanish and insist on Cited and translated by Silvia Rosman in her chapter, ‘Borges: On Reading, Translation and the Impossibility of Naming’, in Being in Common: Nation, Subject, and Community in South American Literature and Culture (Danvers, Mass: Rosemont Publishing & Printing, 2003), pp. 95–120, 97. 43 See ‘J. M. Coetzee visits UCT to read from his new work’, published online 5 February 2013, available online http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXufoko-HgM [accessed 1 May 2016]. In introducing his reading from The Childhood of Jesus, Coetzee confides that he wished to have the book published ‘with a blank cover and a title page so that only after the last page had been read would the reader meet the title’ – but adds that, ‘in the publishing industry as it is at present, that is not allowed’. Regarding the language of the book, he says: ‘The book is in English but it is to be understood as taking place in a Spanish-speaking country and all the exchanges are to be understood as having been translated from Spanish’ (my transcription). 44 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 83. 45 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 7. Emphasis added. 46 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 219. 47 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 219. 48 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 220. 42

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speaking your own language, then you are going to find yourself living in a private world. You will have no friends. You will be shunned.’49 But maybe David was referring to his mother tongue rather than to the ‘gibberish’ that Simón assumes. What that is, we don’t know. Perhaps it is Aramaic. Or Hebrew. For Simón, too, Spanish is not a language that he feels at home in: he tells Elena that he ‘cannot express [his] heart’s feelings because all human relations have to be conducted in beginner’s Spanish’.50 Linked to this notion of translated feelings, and the limitations of cultural translation, is the loss of the mother and of an originary identity (the unread letter that was lost at sea may or may not have contained this information51). The text (somewhat like Waiting for the Barbarians) holds out the promise of some sort of key that will unlock the mystery of origins (in this case, David’s), only to constantly defer it. On their arrival at the Relocation Centre at the beginning of the novel, they are told to find senõra Weiss who has the key to the room where they can stay. When Simón asks if they have a llave universal [universal key], he is told that there is no such thing, only a llave maestra [master key]: ‘If we had a llave universal all our troubles would be over’,52 she says. This metaphor can be read not just as a teasing reference to the reader’s desire to unlock the text’s referentiality, but also to language itself. The list of language courses offered at the Institute, for example, seems significant in this regard: No Spanish literature that he can see. But perhaps literature falls under Advanced Spanish. No other language courses. No Portuguese. No Catalan. No Galician. No Basque. No Esperanto. No Volapük.53

Moving from the particular (a list of four distinct but related Iberian languages) to the universal (both Esperanto and Volapük54 being ‘world’ or Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 220. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 127. Emphasis added. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 260. 52 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 11. 53 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 142. 54 Volapük is a constructed language, created in 1879–80 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Roman Catholic priest in Baden, Germany. Schleyer felt that God had told him in a dream to create an international language. It is also apparently used as a way of translating Russian on the internet. 49 50 51



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universal languages), the Institute’s exclusive focus on one form of Spanish seems to indicate the bland diet and lack of substance, the ‘bloodlessness’55 (as Simón sees it) of life in Novilla by refusing both the specificity of the other Iberian languages and the shared experience of universal languages.56 The child David’s rebellion against the rules of this systemic sameness is an assertion of his individuality, and perhaps his all-knowingness, as is his own particular way of reading and counting. Existing forms of language seem unable, too, to capture the nature of the quasi-parental relationship between Simón and David; and later between David and Inés. Simón is not David’s ‘real’ father nor even his padrino or god-father (the latter clearly an important Biblical concept). As he tells David: ‘There isn’t a proper word for what I am to you, just as there isn’t a proper word for what you are to me. However, if you like, you can call me Uncle.’57 Words like ‘proper’, ‘true’ and ‘real’ abound in the text, drawing attention not just to Cervantes’s and Borges’s texts, but also to the arbitrariness and limitations of language and naming.58 In The Childhood of Jesus, Coetzee, it seems, is questioning the very basis/essence of parenthood: the motherhoodness of motherhood and the fatherhoodness of fatherhood (or, in Simón’s words, ‘chairs and their chairness’).59 Under interrogation is the very nature of the biological role as opposed to the social role of parenting; and how our concepts of these terms themselves are linked to Christian tropes of the Virgin Birth, God the father, the Holy Family. What, he seems to be asking, is the ongoing effect of these concepts on how we think about parents? What would the relationship of a child conceived under these circumstances be like

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 40. This could also be a reference to Jorge Luis Borges’s story, ‘Pierre Ménard: Author of the Quixote’, which is itself about translation and the paradox of an original and ‘copy’ text. Borges was also interested in different versions of the Spanish language (for example, Argentinian as opposed to European Spanish) as a vehicle for cultural interaction and in the notion of a common language. Borges’s own writing involved a process of translating the oral Spanish of Argentina into written Spanish. See Silvia Rosman, Being in Common: Nation, Subject, and Community in South American Literature and Culture (Danvers, MA: Rosemont Publishing and Printing, 2003). 57 Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 44–5. Emphasis added. 58 David and Simón are not their real names; only the ones they were given at the camp. David ‘says it is not his true name’ (Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 71). Tracking down the origins of the names in the text provides a readerly game of cat-and-mouse e.g. the name Álvaro is from Borges’s story, ‘The Aleph’. 59 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 144. 55 56

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with those who took on the roles of mother and father? In exploring these concepts, the arbitrariness of parenthood is being tested, the idea that we can’t (or can, in the case of David’s mother) choose our parents. While clearly referencing the complexities of motherhood, fatherhood and sonhood that emerge from the Holy Family, the text seems also to reflect on the idea of literary paternity, not just in terms of its own literary predecessors, intertexts and pre-texts, but also in terms of the writer’s relationship to his characters and indeed his text. Thus authorship itself is drawn into the discussion about parental roles and fictionality with the child’s reading aloud of the character Don Quixote’s denial of either ‘engendering’ or ‘giving birth to’ Dulcinea (as proof that he [Davíd] can read).60 This is in contrast to Cervantes’s Prologue to Don Quixote that employs the metaphor of writer as father (or rather stepfather) and his character as son. It reads as follows: I, however – for though I pass for the father, I am the stepfather of Don Quixote – have no desire to go with the current of custom or to implore you, dearest reader, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, to pardon or excuse the defects you may perceive in this child of mine. You are neither its relative nor its friend.61

Here, Don Quixote is denying what Cervantes has earlier admitted to: his fathering or mothering of the character, especially since the ‘real’ woman he encounters is nothing like his imagined ideal princess but rather an ugly peasant girl from Sayago. Don Quixote ascribes this change to her being ‘enchanted’. And the lines that David reads encapsulate the essence of the text, Don Quixote: the imagined ideal versus the quotidian real as well as the ‘new age of Doubt’ that the novel was said to have signalled.62 In Coetzee’s text, David reads a passage, chosen at random by Simón to test his ability to read, about the character Dulcinea. In the original Don Quixote, the Don is defending her from the Duchess’s claim that she is purely a creation of his imagination, endowed with ‘all the charms and perfections [he] wanted’. David reads the lines that follow this in the original: ‘God knows whether there is a Dulcinea in this world or not … whether she is fantastical or not fantastical [though David pronounces the word as ‘fatansical’] … These are not things that can be proved or disproved. I neither engendered nor gave birth to her’ (Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus, pp. 254–5). 61 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. John Ormsby (New York and London: W. W. Norton Company, 1981), p. 9. 62 André Brink, The Novel: Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 29, cited in Maria J. López, ‘Miguel de Cervantes and J. M. Coetzee: An Unacknowledged Paternity’, Journal of Literary Studies 29:4 (2013): 80–97, 84. 60



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This sense of doubt infuses the quest for the mother in Coetzee’s novel, which, while remaining essentially mysterious and unexplained, plays with the notion of the idealized Mother/Madonna/Dulcinea-figure and the ‘real’ woman who is concerned with more mundane issues of parenting, as well as with constructions of ‘fiction’ and ‘truth’ and the differing roles of fathers and mothers. Having decided on Inés as David’s ‘missing’ mother, Simón asks her to be the boy’s ‘full mother’ not his ‘adoptive’ mother, adding paradoxically and, under the circumstances, puzzlingly: ‘We have only one mother, each of us. Will you be that one and only mother to him?’63 Yet later, Simón worries about the possibility of such imposed motherhood: ‘Perhaps there is wisdom in the law of nature which says that … the embryonic being … must for a term be borne in its mother’s womb … for a woman to turn from virgin into mother.’ 64 And Elena is particularly sceptical about Inés’s maternal role, insisting that, ‘She did not conceive him! She did not carry him in her womb! She did not bring him into the world in blood and pain! She is just someone you picked out on a whim, for all I know because she reminded you of your own mother.’65 So what, the text seems to ask, does it mean to be a mother, or indeed a father? How does the human mother relate to the Mother of God, or, to return to Barthes and his mother, a Figure versus a being? The novel tests the limits of the biological and social roles of motherhood and fatherhood; and how our concepts of these terms themselves are linked to Christian concepts of the Virgin birth. There are numerous teasing references in the novel to a possible source-text, the ‘Infancy Gospel of Thomas’, that narrates episodes from the childhood of Jesus from the age of 5 to the age of 12,66 including one where Mary is sick with worry when the child disappears (paralleled in the novel by Inés’s concern when Davíd goes off with señor Daga), suggesting the biblical Mary’s human maternal qualities. The recurring Madonna and Child scenes in the novel, where David is held to Inés’s breast Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 92. Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 109, 110. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 125. 66 For example, the episode with señor León and the scenes in the novel of adults trying to teach David ‘normal’ reading, writing and numbers re-imagine the Infancy Gospel’s story of the teacher Zacchaeus who attempts to teach the child Jesus alpha and beta. In response, Jesus recites all the letters from alpha to omega asserting his knowledge not just of the letters but an understanding of their very ‘nature’. Similarly, David proves to Simón that he is able to read Don Quixote. 63 64 65

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and takes on a glassy beatific expression, can similarly be read as referencing both the biblical Mary and a woman who has missed out on the experience of childbirth and is compensating for it by infantilizing David, as Elena suspects. Under interrogation is how our conceptions of these terms of relationality themselves are inevitably linked to religious and cultural texts. When Simón suggests – in response to David’s question towards the end of the novel, ‘Are we a family?’ – that they are ‘a sort of family’ and that ‘Spanish doesn’t have a word for exactly what we are, so let us call ourselves that: the family of David’,67 we see again the links between language and its limitations, notions of parenthood, and enduring religio-cultural referents. The ambiguous possessive in the phrase ‘the family of David’ (both ‘emanating from’ and ‘belonging to’) raises again the issue of origins, in particular the ‘Davidic line’.68 The ending of the novel reprises the arrivals of the beginning but this time in the form of a new family unit, including the ‘hitchhiker’ Juan (possibly John the Baptist or, indeed, señor Juan from Diary of a Bad Year, a stand-in for the author ‘John’ himself), once more looking for lodgings and a fresh start in Estrellita. It reads, starting and ending with Simón’s voice, with David’s question in between: ‘You and Inés and Juan and Bolívar [the dog] and I … are going to say, good morning, we are new arrivals, and we are looking for somewhere to stay.’ ‘And?’ ‘That’s all. Looking for somewhere to stay, to start our new life.’69

The dialogue in this ending is in the future tense – ‘we are going to’ – rather than the present tense that characterizes the rest of the book or the perfective aspect of being ‘washed clean’70 that refers to the loss of memory of origins, including the memory of parenthood and motherland.71 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 304. There is disagreement among biblical scholars about the ‘Davidic line’ which ascribes Jesus’s genealogy as emanating from King David. 69 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 324. Original emphasis. 70 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 29. 71 Photographic time is, for Barthes, immobilized, ‘engorged’ (Camera Lucida, p. 91), a vividly maternal image. And, of course, Lurie in Disgrace bemoans his students’ inability to grasp the ‘perfective’, ‘signifying an action carried through to its conclusion’ (J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace [London: Secker & Warburg, 1999], p. 71). Ravindranathan points this out in his brief reference to Barthes’s 67 68



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It is in this simple, evocative but ultimately hopeful, albeit potentially painfully repetitive, ending, and this ‘sort of family’ unit, I would like to suggest, that the parental punctum is apparent, expressed in what Simón earlier calls the ‘voice of the heart’.72 Tentative though it is, perhaps it could be said that this is expressed in a shared language (indicated by the italics and the collective pronouns), a language of hope shared by all displaced people, maybe even that ‘universal key’ or common language that prompts a response, a responsiveness, in the heart of the reader, accessed through a sense of belonging that moves beyond the ‘family of David’ to a reconstituted ‘family of hu/man/ity’.

References Attwell, David. J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face-to-Face with Time. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2014. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang, 1982. Brink, André. The Novel: Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Castillo, Debra A. ‘Coetzee’s Dusklands: The Mythic Punctum’, PMLA 105:5 (October 1990): 1108–22. Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote, trans. John Ormsby. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1981. Coetzee, J. M. In the Heart of the Country. New York: Penguin, 1977. Coetzee, J. M. Age of Iron. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. Coetzee, J. M. Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. London: Secker & Warburg, 1997. Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. London: Secker & Warburg, 1999. Coetzee, J. M. Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999. London: Random House, 2002. Camera Lucida in relation to the aorist tense. As Ravindranathan notes, Barthes contrasts memory (whose grammatical expression would be the perfect tense) with the photograph, whose tense, Barthes writes, would be aorist or the perfective. Similarly, in The Childhood of Jesus, the biblical phrase, ‘washed clean’ (Cor. 6.11), that permeates the text and is associated with the condition of the new arrivals in Novilla, is in the perfective aspect (it is not a tense, contrary to Barthes’s description of it as such). 72 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 258.

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Coetzee, J. M. Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life. North Sydney: Random House, 2009. Coetzee, J. M. The Childhood of Jesus. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013. Coetzee, J. M. and Arabella Kurtz. The Good Story. London: Harvill Secker, 2015. Dooley, Gillian. J. M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative. New York: Cambria, 2010. López, Maria J. ‘Miguel de Cervantes and J. M. Coetzee: An Unacknowledged Paternity’, Journal of Literary Studies 29:4 (2013): 80–97. Marais, Mike. Secretary of the Invisible: The Idea of Hospitality in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee. Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2009. Ravindranathan, Thangam. ‘Amor Matris: Language and Loss in J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron’, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 8:4 (2007): 395–411. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. Rosman, Silvia. Being in Common: Nation, Subject, and Community in South American Literature and Culture. Danvers, MA: Rosemont Publishing & Printing, 2003. Splendore, Paola. ‘“No More Mothers and Fathers”: The Family Sub-Text in J. M. Coetzee’s Novels’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38:3 (2003): 148–61.

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Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus and the Moral Image of the World Tim Mehigan

I. The use of dialogue In an interview with David Attwell, published in a volume of diverse writings under the title Doubling the Point in 1992, Coetzee observed of the Russian émigré writer Vladimir Nabokov: ‘Underneath the surface […] there are real pain and real loss. He said he loved America [his adopted country], but how could he have, really? He was grateful to America, he was amused and intrigued by America, he became an expert on America, but his heart (as I read his heart) was as much with the Old World as Rilke’s was.’1 In The Childhood of Jesus – a novel made up almost exclusively of dialogic exchange – the welfare officer Ana tells the man Simón, the protagonist, shortly after his arrival from an internment camp in the town of Novilla: ‘I will help you, […] but not in the way you ask. People here have washed themselves clean of old ties. You should be doing the same: letting go of old attachments, not pursuing them.’2 Shortly afterwards Simón, still digesting this advice, tells his charge, the boy David, a boy of perhaps five years of age whom he encountered on the journey to the new country (not otherwise named): ‘You may think you are washed clean, but you aren’t. You still have your memories, they are just buried, temporarily.’3 J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 28. J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013), p. 23. 3 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 25. 1

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So this is the canvas in The Childhood of Jesus that Coetzee lays out at the start: at its centre the immigrant, mastering his new environment through the accumulation of knowledge, through a sheer act of intelligent will, yet held at the same time under the sway of a painful longing for what has been left behind. As Coetzee says of the Russian Nabokov: ‘His love and his longing for that departed world are plain in his work.’4 The viejo Simón, the ‘old man’ of Coetzee’s novel, an immigrant to a new country, who can indeed be helped, but on condition that he – like all other new arrivals – ‘wash himself clean’. Says Ana of the two ‘a’s’, a textual sign that covertly signals her capacity to speak at this moment of beginning (I will paraphrase): I will help you, but only if you leave all attachment to your past life behind you. Finally, the old man, talking to the boy, a boy he does not know but for whom he nevertheless assumes responsibility (again a paraphrase): You have memories, the memory of your lost mother is one of these; we will subvert this rule of tabula rasa and find her, we will recover the old we have ‘just buried, temporarily’. The Childhood of Jesus, then, begins as a novel of migration, a novel about refugees written for all those who move to a new country where, in the routine business of ordinary survival, one must dispense with the past, shedding memories of the old, turning all intellectual effort to the task of negotiating the new and coming to terms with it, yet screening away the pain and thwarted love for the old and familiar, the pain and love of country and homeland that lies just below the surface and that, as Coetzee observes of Nabokov, cannot be hidden from those who will ‘read his heart’. And this, then, will be one vector, one line of flight the novel follows: we will deny that this advice to shed the old and to wash away old memories is the right advice, we will subvert the new by keeping our pain and love from view, but we will not deny that it is painful and that it is a love, and that it speaks to us at each moment in which we encounter the new and are constrained to learn its habits. But how can this possibly be achieved? How is the new to be mastered for the sake of survival and yet also in some way resisted, how is the memory of the old to be hidden and yet also held onto and retained? How, finally and more broadly, can we maintain our ties to the past and yet also change, how Coetzee, Doubling the Point, p. 28.

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can we accommodate the endless thrust of innovation that urges itself on us in the era of modernity, for the sake of progress – ‘visible progress’, as Ana soon calls it – and yet also have faith that we can preserve our memories, our historical selves, the story of our families, where, like Nabokov, like Rilke, one’s heart is really, ultimately with the old world – a heart that will not let go? These questions provide a clear point of entry to The Childhood of Jesus. But Coetzee does not clear a path in the novel to answering them. The pervasiveness of dialogue in the novel – something new in Coetzee’s writing – already suggests that the novel will take the form of a debate with contrasting positions and opposed interlocutors. As with Socratic method in the dialogues of Plato that inaugurated this form of inquiry, the accent will be on the question rather than the answer, the ambiguity released by a question, explored in its many layers and nuances, rather than the clarity of a single response, however professedly knowledgeable. Consider, for example, an early exchange between the welfare officer Ana and Simón, the protagonist. How, Simón wonders, can you deal with the never-ending stream of needy people arriving with all their troubles – how do you cope with these overflowing needs, don’t you need some kind of faith to get you through? Ana responds: ‘Faith has nothing to do with it. Faith means believing in what you do even when it does not bear visible fruit. The Centre is not like that. People arrive needing help, and we help them. We help them and their lives improve. None of that is invisible. None of it requires blind faith. We do our job, and everything turns out well. It is as simple as that.’5

Simón is set back by this answer. It seems like a cop-out. Ana provides help and this help brings relief as needs are met. As she says about those who are assisted in this way, ‘their lives improve’. But this attitude represents a naïve trust in visible appearances; it does not require a sustaining faith that one is making a difference, that one is making a contribution to the increase of good in the world. Ana goes on to say:

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 33.

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‘Nothing is invisible. Two weeks ago you were in [the camp at] Belstar. Last week we found you a job at the docks. Today you are having a picnic in the park. What is invisible about that? It is progress, visible progress.’6

In this exchange about the question of the good, two opposed positions come into view. The one view is carried by a general belief in an ethic of progress. According to this view, help is measured by the degree to which it provides palpable relief from need. The aim is to secure material improvement, rather than release from emotional or psychological suffering. It follows the conviction that ‘nothing is invisible’. The contrasting view is carried by a general concern with the underlying condition of the world. This view turns on the implicit assumption that everything that truly matters is invisible, a thing of spirit. Simón suggests that only faith can sustain this view. Ana has considered this question of faith but rejected it. She is familiar with common understandings about faith. Faith, she observes, ‘means believing in what you do even when it does not bear visible fruit’.7 This kind of faith requires its own form of justification that can only come from the confidence that there is something in the world we are entitled to call the good, that we sense as the good, and that when good deeds are accomplished they bring about an increase of goodness such that the world becomes a better place to live in. This view is underwritten by a belief in something like a moral image of the world – the belief that the world we live in has moral coherence, that it has a moral and ethical core. In the age before the belief in a divinity suddenly became, in Nietzsche’s words, ‘unconvincing’,8 it was still possible to view this moral and ethical core as something divinely ordained. But if it is not and, as Nietzsche contended, belief in the divine is now behind us, does the moral image of the world equally fall by the wayside? Are we reduced to seeing help for needy immigrants as a form of social welfare and nothing more? In reference to the novel’s title, which purports to find a supernatural level of significance in the story, however obscurely, will the childhood

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 33. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 33. 8 This is the meaning of Nietzsche’s famous remark heralding the death of God. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. In: Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Karl Schlechta, vol. 3 (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1954), p. 480 (Aphorism 25, ‘Der tolle Mensch’). 6 7

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of Jesus in a post-religious age be followed by a secular adolescence and a secular maturity where no ethico-religious fundament to the world can be sustained? And if our secularity is now a fact of life, how are we to imagine the oxymoronically secular god of our invisible ends; how, in short, are we to ratify our moral commitments in life? The figure of Ana, with whom this series of questions begins, is, as she freely confesses, ‘not a nun.’9 She has given herself over completely to a materialist ethic and appears to hold to nothing beyond this. As she tells Simón at a later stage, she also vests no trust in the coming together of man and woman, she does not believe that sexual union has a greater purpose, that there is any more to sexual congress that the intrusion of one body part into another body with all the unwanted dimensions of power over another person that this implies. Simón, by contrast, with his commitment to unseen things, acknowledges his attraction to the opposite sex as something positive: an appetite, a need, on one level, but also, when driven by a response to beauty, a ‘tribute’, as something greater than the individual that speaks through the urge to couple and connect with another human being. As Simón observes: ‘If we had no appetites, no desires, how would we live?’ He sees ordinary impulses, hungers and desires as something to be welcomed, not condemned: ‘What is wrong’, he asks, ‘with satisfying an ordinary appetite?’10

II. A literature of ideas As is already apparent from these passages, The Childhood of Jesus makes good use of the dialogic exchange that makes up the form and feel of this novel. The series of questions the novel introduces leads to further questions and often presupposes them; these questions are openly debated in the novel and do not admit of easy responses – indeed, there might not be a final response to any of them. The use of dialogue constitutes a departure from earlier works of the author, particularly of the South African period culminating in

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 33. Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 34, 35.

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the novel Disgrace, in which plot and narrative are the main vehicles for the communication of ideas. It suggests a movement away from plot-dependent narrative voice (what Coetzee referred to as ‘middle voice’ in an early remark on writing11) in favour of a literature of ideas reminiscent, for example, of the Austrian modernist writer Robert Musil in his major work Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.12 Coetzee has noted the importance of Musil in several published essays, with insightful comment in these essays on Musil’s earlier stories and his diaries as well as the major novel itself.13 Taken together, this comment amounts to more published commentary on Musil by this author than on Franz Kafka, that other modernist author he is generally considered to be more properly aligned with in the German tradition. It was the rising cacophony of conflicting opinion on a range of social and cultural matters and a deep concern to debate the direction that civilization was taking following the disastrous experience of the First World War that led Musil to the essayism14 he was to cultivate in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Musil’s main aim, as he foreshadowed in an interview about the novel in 1926, was to provide a ‘reckoning with one’s world through intellectual means’,15 which is to say, through the means of ideas. Coetzee’s deployment of something approaching an essayistic dimension through the medium of dialogue in The Childhood of Jesus seems similarly motivated, although it mostly lacks the studied irony that pervades long stretches of Musil’s major novel. One of the chief advantages of such a literature of ideas would be its greater tolerance of ambiguity and the suspension of its desire for closure Coetzee distinguishes three modes of writing: active, middle and passive. As he explains in ‘A Note on Writing (1984)’: ‘To write (active) is to carry out the action without reference to the self […] To write (middle) is to carry out the action (or, better, do the writing) with reference to the self ’ (DP 94). For further analysis of Coetzee’s deployment of ‘middle voice’, see Brian Macaskill, ‘Charting J. M. Coetzee’s Middle Voice’, in Contemporary Literature 35:3 (Autumn 1994): 441–75. 12 Robert Musil: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930; 1932). English: The Man without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (London: Picador, 1995). 13 There are clues to the early significance of Musil for Coetzee in Doubling the Point. In an interview with Attwell, Coetzee talks of finding in Musil ‘a model of an intelligence turned, however desperately, on the fin de siècle’ (DP 208). 14 For a discussion of Musil’s essayism, see Birgit Nübel, Robert Musil: Essayismus als Selbstreflexion der Moderne (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2006); Mark Freed, Robert Musil and the Nonmodern (New York: Continuum, 2011). 15 In German: ‘eine geistige Bewältigung der Welt’. See Robert Musil, Gesammelte Werke in 9 Bänden, ed. Adolf Frisé, vol. 7 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1978), p. 942. 11

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– the desire that otherwise impels a narrative toward a systematic elision of difference, toward the presentation of single, allegedly coherent, authorial or narratorial viewpoints. We have come too far with Derridean ‘grammatology’ and ‘deconstruction’, Lyotardian ‘grand narratives’, Foucauldian ‘historicism’ and Lacanian descriptions of the hidden aporias of self (subjects who do not wish to know) not to see that fiction-as-fiction is in some ways a doomed enterprise. It is doomed so long as it does not recognize the various investments – historical, psychological, social and political – that lay claim to it, nor acknowledge the prison-house of form and language from which it seeks to launch impossible escapes. As Coetzee has revealed in public comments about his work, these investments are all too obvious to the intellectual writer who has inherited the burden of oppression from earliest days.16 In The Childhood of Jesus this means, for one thing, that the cavilling voice of Ana, who holds to the visibilities of ordinary life and who also has little patience with male desire in whatever form it takes, cannot be dismissed as a matter of principle. When Simón attempts to revive the discussion about being washed clean of old attachments in a later exchange, it is Ana who calls matters a halt: ‘“Another time”, she says lazily.’ But this is not quite the end of the matter. In ‘the hooded glance’ Ana sends Simón, we are told, there is ‘an invitation’ to return to the topic at a later date.17 In this careful choreography inviting tolerance and openness we become aware of Coetzee’s commitment to plural voices and perspectives. Above all we sense an avoidance of a dialectic that would otherwise entrench unequal relations – the master over the slave, the slave, conversely, from below, over the master.18 The price of this avoidance See Attwell’s interview with Coetzee after the award of the Nobel Prize, in which Coetzee acknowledged the problem for a South African writer of the great burden of the past: Dagens Nyheter, 8 December 2003. 17 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 31. 18 Teresa Dovey has noted the presence of the master/slave dialectic in Coetzee in an important book The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1988). Using ideas developed by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Dovey suggests that behind Coetzee’s writing stands a subject whose longing for wholeness and integrity cannot be fulfilled in the terms available to subjects in the South African situation. The desire gains expression in his writing in the drive for individual recognition, a drive whose peculiar quality, as Hegel demonstrated in his Phänomenologie des Geistes, is that while seeking a level playing field in a transaction between equals it is apt to bring about an impasse and something like the opposite: not the equality of parties who mutually contract with each other but the chauvinism of unequal relations locked in a ceaseless struggle to the death. In the form of this problem discussed by Hegel, the desire for recognition entrenches the supremacy of a ‘master’, who enforces recognition, and the submissiveness of a ‘slave’, 16

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may well be the bloodlessness of human relations that Simón otherwise complains about, the deflation of desires and appetites evident in the new city of Novilla among the general welter of good intentions. The sometimes insipid seeming Novilla might be a place none of us wants to end up in, a place at the end of the world where we long for what we have lost. But it is certainly also a place in which the masters might not yet be malign overseers and the slaves might not yet be ransomed to them, a place, in short, where one can live. Whether Novilla truly marks a new beginning or an apocalyptic end depends very largely on the ethical disposition we are able to associate with it. For Ana, the double alpha, the person who speaks at the beginning, since nothing can be taken on faith, there is no certainty that the world has a moral image or substructure. As there is no necessary level of faith, only visibilities, there is no assumption that anything unseen or indirect can be a factor lending justification for actions or beliefs. Allusions precisely to such an unseen thing – to faith and the implicit need for it – nevertheless sit across the novel in the shape of a title in search of a story. Where is the Jesus of the story’s title if no one by this name ever appears in the novel? Is it the case that the child who appears in the novel, David, is somehow destined to become this Jesus? And if this is so, what will make David into Jesus as a faith-source? Will a miracle come to light that convinces us that David is the messiah, or will Jesus be made by more secular means, through a much more mundane search whereby a mother and a father are sought for a child and assume care for this vagrant because the child’s natural mother has gone missing, because the child has lost the note that would explain who his mother is and what has become of her? Is it the mother and the father, then, who will make the ground of invisible faith the novel wishes to stand on, and not, as we might think, David, a foundling, who speaks in the novel as a precocious child rather than as a seer, a prophet? For Coetzee, the new form in which a literature of ideas presents itself comes at an interesting moment. In October 2010 he turned over a great many materials, notes, sketches and letters to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The Childhood of Jesus is the first Coetzee novel who is bound to recognize, but whose form of recognition, because it is solicited from servitude, is never enough for the master. Dovey postulates the existence of a split subject in Coetzee’s works arising from this search for recognition.

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to have been published after the establishment of the archive. One of the great benefits of the archive is the capacity it affords to observe the choices that the author made in the long gestation of each of the novels. To inspect these choices is to study a process of decision-making.19 But it is also to appreciate that all writing is fragmentary, that the final published texts contain the ghost of many other texts, subtexts and intertexts, some actively suppressed, some simply abandoned as unproductive or unwanted enterprises. The inauguration of the archive, because it abjures transcendence and embraces the fragmentary nature of the literary enterprise, marks a distinct phase in the evolution of Coetzee as a writer – a progression, as already contended, towards a new literature of ideas.

III. Ethics and the social compact The interest in a literature of ideas – in fiction whose chief concern is to lay out an open ethical inquiry – has deep roots in Coetzee’s writing. One of the earliest expressions of this interest is Coetzee’s 1983 novel Life & Times of Michael K. As the archive reveals, the final form of the novel almost completely obscures the inspiration that brought it to life. In early drafts from archival materials labeled ‘no. 4 Vn II, 1’ from June 1980, Coetzee moves from fragments of monologues pertaining to a certain figure called ‘Annie’ to a narrative voice that announces the beginning of a story: ‘In the city of Cape Town, in the last quarter of the twentieth century of our Lord, there lived a woman by the name of Annie K – who had worked for forty years as a domestic servant but was turned by illness into a pitiful invalid.’ Despite its South African setting, this beginning is modelled on the opening sentence of a long short story by the German author Heinrich von Kleist, first published in 1808.20 For excellent insight into the evolution of Coetzee’s fictional projects in the light of the manuscript materials now available in the archive, see David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2015). 20 A later version of Kleist’s novel, which is the version now commonly referred to, was published in 1810. See Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas, in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Helmut Sembdner (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983). English: Heinrich von Kleist, 19

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Michael Kohlhaas, a story based on a historical chronicle that Kleist followed closely in the first version of the novel but later modified and finally departed from, is one of the first accounts we have in modern times about how individuals come to stand before a law that does not – or does not clearly – serve them. The story is also one of the first literary responses to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s landmark use of social contract theory in his Social Contract (1762),21 a theory in Rousseau’s account that founds civil society on principles of reason. Kleist’s story suggests that the rational confidence we place in a Rousseauistic volonté générale that establishes a contractual basis for government and appeases the partiality and self-interest of princes might be misplaced. Where Kleist poses this question, wondering whether alternative accounts of modern society such as those put forward by Hobbes in Leviathan,22 whose contractualism secures nothing more than the individual’s survival in a brutish state of nature, get closer to the mark,23 Franz Kafka, in his ‘Kohlhaas story’ published under the title of Der Prozeß (The Trial),24 dismisses all presentiment about the rational state of the human being. The law, for him, is not answerable to reason or rational in any way, but is a modality of pure power, which individuals encounter at their peril. Like the ‘man from the country’ in the parable ‘Vor dem Gesetz’ (‘Before the Law’) which Kafka made the pivotal moment of Der Prozeß, there is no prospect of going to the law and finding satisfaction. Instead, the man from the country who waits at the behest of a gatekeeper ‘before the law’, would encounter, as the attendant points out, ever more intimidating gate-keepers at ever higher points in the legal apparatus. All prospect of legal redress for the individual disappears. Noteworthy here is how the Kohlhaas motif, which is taken up in Coetzee’s Michael K no less than Kafka’s Prozeß, heightens interest in the Michael Kohlhaas, in Three Stories, ed. H. B. Garland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953). Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (1762). The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). 22 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1652), ed. Richard Tuck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 23 For a discussion of Michael Kohlhaas in relation to social contract theory, see Tim Mehigan, Heinrich von Kleist: Writing after Kant (Rochester: Camden House, 2011), pp. 68–83. 24 Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, revised by E. M. Butler (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968). Kleist’s importance for Kafka has been noted on many occasions in the scholarly literature. See, for example, John M. Grandin, Kafka’s Prussian Advocate: A Study of the Influence of Heinrich von Kleist on Franz Kafka (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1987). 21

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nature of individuality even more than it does in the question of the law. In Coetzee’s story, this individuality is forever chafed at by street violence, a military crackdown, and fragile fortune in the form both of the protagonist’s harelip and the early death of Michael K’s guardian, his mother. The law, constraining, incalculable and never obviously rational, is to be regarded as a fact of life, to be noted and observed, and to be avoided wherever possible. The state itself, Hobbesian, at best, is therefore no friend of the individual. The consolations of life are not to be found in a rationality of action or purpose or any confidence that society can provide them. This society may be modern, but it is not truly civil, it is not a good in itself. Coetzee’s novel, whose protagonist, a vagrant, survives a period of incarceration and the random violence around him, is certainly less bleak than Kafka’s version of the Kohlhaas story, although only marginally so. The fate of the novel’s protagonist appears to remind us that individual life might never be more than a subsistence strung out uncertainly against the hard earth, which one must learn to till if one wishes to survive, with the same fear of violent death perennially in the wind which Hobbes had made the foundation stone of his contract with the state. With this general complex of issues in mind already suggesting the moral inadequacy of the state, it might seem perverse to speak of an ethical state of the human being in Coetzee’s work. The Kohlhaas motif, in the hands of both Kafka and Kleist, reminds us that the law is not ethical, and – or because – it is not rational. A straw poll of all three Kohlhaas stories would see a consensus not in favour of Rousseau’s rationalistic version of the social contract but of Hobbes’s account of why the individual contracts with the state: it is the fear of a random and violent death, which is to say, the power of sentiment, vested in the ‘automatic’ responses of the body, that drives the individual into the arms of ‘leviathan’. Even Immanuel Kant, who much admired Rousseau and particularly admired his Social Contract, appears to have had a keen awareness of the problem of rational contractualism by moving his search for a workable principle of community away from the domain of rational religion, in his second Critique, to aesthetic judgement, in the third Critique,25 where Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), ed. Karl Vorländer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1993).

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rationality trumps sentiment only as a second-order effect of our instinctive attachment to beauty. This movement into the aesthetic domain has long had against it the suspicion that sentiment and the passions drive our attachment to beauty more than any rationality does. This reservation, indeed, is explicitly entertained in Coetzee’s exchanges with the psychotherapist Arabella Kurtz that make up The Good Story, published in 2015.26 In an important passage in this book, Plato is reported as condemning poetry precisely on the grounds that the allegiance of poets ‘is not first of all to the truth’. As Coetzee further states: ‘Poetic truth is in part a matter of reflecting the world accurately (‘truthfully’), but also in part a matter of internal consistency, elegance, and so forth – in other words, a matter of satisfying autonomous aesthetic criteria.’27 Here, by implication, we find intellectual justification for a type of literary project eschewing the dominance of standards of beauty. The literature Coetzee, by extension, would appear to have in mind involves a downplaying of the conceits of ‘the good story’ and an upscaling of interest in the primacy of the idea. In line with these precepts The Childhood of Jesus equally appears to resist the primacy of aesthetic considerations while, at the same time, attempting to do service to ideas that cannot take the form of propositional discourse. What is at stake in such a project, as Life and Times of Michael K with its distinguished forbears already indicates, is nothing less than the establishment of the ethical grounds on which the individual comes together with others to constitute the social compact.

IV. The ethical condition in The Childhood of Jesus In The Childhood of Jesus the task of finding a workable basis on which to contract with others is revealed as a supremely difficult undertaking. The protagonist approaches it from the outset with ambivalence. This is signalled, among other things, in the double perspective encountered at Arabella Kurtz and J. M. Coetzee, The Good Story. Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy (London: Harvill Secker, 2015). 27 Kurtz and Coetzee, The Good Story, pp. 7–8. 26

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the beginning in which a sentient older figure is introduced alongside a sentient, but entirely unformed, younger figure, the yet-to-be-schooled child David. The doubling of perspective, where the story follows two figures whose viewpoints are in some ways conjoined, is a familiar feature of earlier works. In Disgrace the perspective of the daughter is increasingly folded into the perspective of the main character David Lurie in order to bring about that character’s ethical advancement. In Slow Man the protagonist, Paul Rayment is reunited with his nemesis, Elizabeth Costello, in the thirteenth chapter of the story; thereafter she takes up residence as a second voice in the head, not just in the narrative. Like all doublings of this sort, we do not end up with singularity but with something different, a second ‘take’ on the same reality that might – and regularly does – contradict the first. In Slow Man Paul Rayment cannot properly embrace Elizabeth Costello and the prospect of cohabitation she raises at the end of the story. Costello cannot offer a ‘real’ cohabitation, only a retreat into the doubling of the self – a doubling, as the elaborate ruse with Marianna/Marijana masterminded by Costello reveals, which at the same time is a kind of psychological entrapment.28 Something different is intended with the perspectival doubling in The Childhood of Jesus. The boy David and his non-related, sometime guardian Simón is not a psychological device that illustrates the coexistence of two voices in the one head, with its commitment to multiplying aspects of the one reality, so much as a doubling of exegesis about the ethical content of the world. As a result the boy’s instinctiveness is set against the older man’s longer perspective, the boy’s naïve ‘lightness’, which knows only the reality it is presented with, is set against the older man’s sentimental ‘heaviness’, born from the wearying weight of experience and sheer knowing, from the long journey of life with its many disappointments. The linking moment for these two perspectives is the older man’s decision to provide protection and take on responsibility for the boy, a foundling, who, like Jesus in the story’s title, lacks a real mother and a father. Unlike the historical Jesus, it is the (stand-in) father

See my discussion of Coetzee’s novel Slow Man in A Companion to the Works of J. M. Coetzee, ed. Tim Mehigan (Rochester: Camden House, 2011), pp. 192–207.

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who comes to play the main role in providing this vagrant child with support and in fashioning what can be made of his education. The two viewpoints of the man and the boy, linked by virtue of the ethical discussion the novel initiates, progressively converge over the course of the story. The moment of convergence, which is not encountered until the end of the story when a familial context emerges, recaptures the starting point of the ethical trajectory – the older man’s decision to help the boy – and becomes significant by a logic of ‘backwards induction’. This logic might be seen to govern all ethical acts, to govern the ethical disposition as such. For ethical acts, as Hannah Arendt suggests, face out into the world inductively, they cannot be derived from any calculus for action or behaviour that precedes them and they cannot be recuperated through memory.29 They are the technically unprovable basis for a life that reclaims the past only to the extent that, as with the biblical Day of Judgement, they experience a ‘second coming’. That the social world is otherwise quite differently premised is underscored by the porter at the resort hotel where Simón seeks the mother of his young charge: ‘Sorry, sir’, [the porter advises], ‘no exceptions. Where would we be if we began making exceptions? Soon everyone would want to be an exception, and then there would be no rules left, would there?’30

Following these clues, the ethical state can be imagined as the state of being in which ‘there would be no rules left’, where the only form of action open to those proceeding ethically would be ‘to make exceptions’ at the risk of stepping outside everything that is known and accepted. Is it not the state of being without rules ­– being without inherited concepts on which to base understanding – the state in which the protagonist finds himself at the start of the story: no homeland (only that new country he has entered and is obliged to make familiar), no work (except that which he finds by chance), no friends

Hannah Arendt has a similar view about the inductive nature of ethical acts: ‘good deeds can never keep anybody company; they must be forgotten the moment they are done, because even memory will destroy their quality of being “good” […] Good works, because they must be forgotten instantly, can never become part of the world; they come and go, leaving no trace. They are truly not of this world’: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), p. 76. 30 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 83. 29

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(except those who learn to trust him and whom he too learns to trust)? The ethical condition, that is announced when all established rules no longer apply, is thus a peculiarly human state of exception in that it holds, from a certain viewpoint, for the condition into which all human lives (to use Heidegger’s term) are ‘thrown’. Its emblematic moment in the story is registered by the word ‘Una’, the name and the number one, the marking on the door behind which the mother who is sought for the boy finally appears. When the mother appears behind this door with the number one on it, it is of course the case that she is no mother, but a childless woman from the prosperous middle classes who lives to all outward appearance an easy life of leisure. In keeping with the exceptional nature of ethical considerations outlined above, there is no rational foundation for the commitment she is called upon to make to the child. As Simón explains: ‘Please believe me, please take it on faith – this is not a simple matter. The boy is without mother. What that means I cannot explain to you because I cannot explain it to myself.’31 Later on the bus trip back to the camp in the middle of the night Simón tells the boy, who wonders whether the woman wants him: ‘Of course she wants you. […] But first she must get used to the idea. We have planted the seed in her mind; now we must be patient and allow it to grow.’32 Simón is right and the seed bears fruit. The woman, whose name is Inés, seeks out the boy and agrees to ‘being mother’. But she has made no agreement about the father, and this is as Simón would wish it: the woman was chosen as a suitable mother for the child, not as a partner for a man much older and less well-to-do than her. For this reason, Simón understands that he must relinquish his caring role toward the child, he must vacate the lodgings in the camp where he and the boy had been living, turning these over to the woman and ‘her’ child, and he must allow her to become mother to the boy in her own way. The most complicated part of the ethical journey of the main character thus begins. It begins as a type of voluntary exile, albeit with discontents. A

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 87. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 87.

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friend, Elena, questions the basis of his decision to leave the boy with Inés, arguing against the intuition that motivated it: ‘Has it occurred to you that if we all lived by our intuitions the world would fall into chaos?’33 The exile involves Simón in a great many hardships, the most striking of which is his sheer longing for the boy. He also must tolerate a growing distance from the boy’s mother Inés.34 A far more suitable – and more virile – man friend for Inés would be the hypermasculine Daga, who is introduced early on in the novel at the waterfront, slashing the hand of the foreman Álvaro when Álvaro attempts to prevent Daga from stealing from the cashbox. Daga returns at the end of the novel, radiating both a strong sexual desire for other women, including Inés, and exerting a certain hold over the boy. Daga’s appearance in the novel underscores the alienation felt by the protagonist from the boy and his mother and thus deepens the exile of the heart he must face. With no attraction of any sort that Inés can reciprocate, and little claim to the boy outside his early act of altruism, Simón’s prospects of being reunited with the boy appear small. But still he persists. Inés eventually allows him to go for short excursions with the boy. Then she allows him to sit with the boy after entreaties he makes about homeschooling. He talks to the boy about literature, reads to him from Don Quixote, and, after an incident at the docks, they converse about the nature and meaning of death. They also talk about questions that concern philosophers and scientists, such as whether nature has gaps. As he explains, if there were no gaps in nature there would only be ‘oneness and silence: So, on the whole, it is good that there should be gaps between things, that you and I should be two instead of one.’35 It is this discussion that ushers in the novel’s turning point. In the story with which the boy has become familiar, as David reminds Simón, Don Quixote fell into a cave and could not get out. If nature has gaps, these are something to be feared, not welcomed. Protesting that David is ‘confusing cracks with holes’, Simón observes that people today ‘live their lives from

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 96. There is no question of cohabitation with this woman or any sexual relationship with her. The topic of sex was settled early on in the novel when Simón establishes a loveless intimacy with Elena, mostly for the sake of the boy’s friendship with Fidel, Elena’s son. The relationship quickly passes. 35 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 201. 33 34

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beginning to end without falling down cracks’.36 The boy has misunderstood what is meant by ‘gaps’. Later in the novel, Simón, an advocate for the use of a mechanical crane at the docks, is struck by a swinging load and cast ‘into the space between the quay and the steel plates of a freighter’.37 Instead of being crushed, the pressure slackens and he drops into the water. Initial attempts to haul him to the surface using a lifebuoy fail. It is only when Álvaro drops into the water, seizes the lifebuoy and takes the weight of both people, that a rescue is effected and he is hauled back up: ‘the two of them, in tight embrace, rise above the water.’38 In the new type of literature of which The Childhood of Jesus is an example, the narrative pivots on the suggestiveness of a single idea. For the idea that nature abhors gaps or, in its Aristotelian form, a vacuum, which modern science has since rejected, is precisely what is cast into view when Simón tumbles into the space between the quayside and a freighter and then into water. This gap – this space in which Simón contemplates his ignominious end, ‘like a rat’ (perhaps also a sideways reference to Josef K’s shameful end in Der Prozeß) – is closed, and it is the foreman, uttering words of friendship, who closes it. Does nature abhor gaps? On the modern understanding, of course, it does not: there is patently no logic of necessary connection between the animals and the angels in a ‘great chain of being’.39 The theodicy, according to which the physical world would at the same time be a divinely ordained universe – with no gaps – a theodicy that even Leibniz, the co-inventor of calculus, could still uphold in the early eighteenth century, is plainly mistaken. And yet, in the ‘space’ into which Simón falls, when his natural end might otherwise have appeared quite certain, it is the humane and valiant act of another human being that closes it. Where do these acts come from – acts which bridge the cracks into which humans fall – if not from a simple belief in other human beings? Says Álvaro: ‘Relax, old friend […] I will hold you.’40

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 204. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 268. 38 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 269. 39 See Arthur Lovejoy’s masterful treatment of this notion in medieval and baroque philosophy in The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009). 40 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 269. 36 37

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The novel of ideas therefore presents us with this notion: while the physical world plainly has gaps and voids, scientifically speaking, human life, in the connective tissue of mutuality and trust that sustains it, depends on the absence of gaps, which is to say, on a core belief in the power to sustain confidence in an ethical continuum. The theodicy, which cannot hold for the natural world, must be made to hold for the human world, for the sake of the ideas, hopes and beliefs that make lives human. Thus it comes about that Simón is made an emissary for an older order of being in the novel. It is an order antedating the social commitment to progress and technological advancement in modern society41 that ties the novel to an ethical fundament. While no theodicy matching human with material ends in a universe holding nature and culture in an unbroken compact is entertained, the ethical foundationalism of the pre-modern era is nevertheless brought into view. With this in mind, it is only natural that the gaps in the human family, which formed the point of the departure of the novel and marked the beginning of its ethical trajectory, are finally closed in the novel’s coda when a new ‘family’ – David, Inés, Simón, Juan the hitchhiker and the dog Bolivár – comes together and begins a new stage of its journey to the Relocation Centre at Estrellita: ‘Looking for somewhere to stay, to start our new life’42 (emphasis in original).

V. Conclusions In what sense, then, does The Childhood of Jesus give evidence of a moral image of the world? As discussed above, Coetzee makes his way to this central question in stages. First, the novel presents itself as a work about ideas. The ideas are not conveyed in the form of an argument or treatise designed to make evident a conclusion already arrived at or known in advance. Rather, ideas are presented and contested within the framework of dialogue; any notion or proposition retrieved from this dialogic exchange must then be adjudicated on the meta-textual level that the novel opens up. This is the That Simón is cast into water through the operation of the very technology whose use he had advocated makes an ironic point about the state of technical advancement humans enjoy. 42 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 318. 41

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level where the engagement of readers is sought. It follows that the novel’s underpinnings are not finally of a postmodern kind where every response of readers must be qualified, perhaps terminally, on formal truth grounds. The scepticism undoubtedly present in the novel instead serves a pluralistic purpose, widening the range and type of textual discourse that it brings into view, allowing, if not requiring, that other voices be heard (for example, Ana’s scepticism about the belief in ‘invisibilities’ defended by Simón). Such scepticism does not seek to invalidate the grounds on which textual discourse itself stands. The sense of the novel’s perpetual openness to new questions is thus a semantic feature of textual operation on a ‘horizontal’ or syntagmatic axis of signification, not a ‘vertical’ or metonymic feature of its operation pertaining to the artwork qua art. To this extent, Coetzee’s commitments appear in the long run to lie more with the assaying of possible meaning in the vein of modernist fiction, not with the postmodernist denial of this same possibility.43 Another feature of the novel is its cultivation of circularity: the end of the novel does not bring about any conventional conclusion or resolution of themes or issues, but rather revolves the story back toward its initial premises. This is not exactly the same beginning as before, for there are new players and a new destination (Estrellita). Nevertheless, the ethical dimension in the novel appears inseparable from a willed sense of return: a type of ‘eternal return’ to a more fundamental ethical humanity which by its very nature, despite the passage of time and the particular state of societal and technological arrangements, keeps perennial questions in view about how human beings should respond to the challenge of living. Both the preponderance of dialogue and the circular trajectory are enabling conditions for the ethical world the story fashions into being. The need for such a world in the story The Childhood of Jesus appears at the outset: the effectively orphaned boy David requires a father and a mother, neither of whom can appear – as with the historical Jesus – in the usual manner. The need to The question of the veracity of the ‘truth world’ of the text is explored at length in The Good Story. While no final view is endorsed, Coetzee’s commitments in these exchanges with the psychotherapist Arabella Kurtz clearly lie with the possibility of the condition of truth or truthfulness: ‘What I wish to focus on is the longing and nostalgia for the one and only truth, a longing that I happen to feel strongly’ (68).

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provide guardianship launches the ethical enterprise: the older man Simón agrees, at least for a time, to take on responsibility as primary caregiver. The caring disposition establishes the ethical state, and, when a mother is provided for the child, it is further defined as eschewing the self-interest of the sexual bond as a matter of course. That it also works without calculation, design and forethought – that, in other words, it presents as a state of exception – is made evident when the old man Simón is later rescued by the foreman Álvaro after falling into water at the quayside where he works. Simón, himself now in need, is helped out of the water by Álvaro with the same immediate and unflinching fellow feeling that parallels Simón’s own ethical engagement with the boy David at the beginning of the story. In its spontaneity and immediacy, the ethical state is that which appears ‘without reason’. On a philosophical plane, ethical acts betray a motivation that runs counter to what science professes to know about nature – to this extent they make their appearance as something both non-scientific and non-natural. Whereas nature, in the meaning construed for it by science, of necessity admits gaps and cracks, the human community is called upon to abjure these gaps if the ethical disposition is to be sustained. This disposition would then take root as a fictional continuum binding one human to another in a peculiarly human ‘chain of being’. In the new type of literary project of which the novel may be taken as an example, ethical acts possess a motive force comparable with religious inspiration – this, at least, would be a plausible conclusion in light of the story’s title. In this literature of ideas, Coetzee makes appeal to a former disposition of the human being, a ‘childhood’ in this special sense. Such a childhood lies both behind and before humanity. Were it to be realized, this childhood, perhaps anticipating a later adulthood of ethical maturity, would presuppose a migration of the spirit to a moment and a state of being in which visibilities and reason no longer exhaust all we know, sense and feel about truthfulness and right action.

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References Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998. Attwell, David. ‘An Exclusive Interview with J. M. Coetzee’, in Dagens Nyheter, 8 December 2003. Attwell, David. J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2015. Coetzee, J. M. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992. Coetzee, J. M. The Childhood of Jesus. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2013. Coetzee, J. M. and Kurtz, Arabella. The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy. London: Harvill Secker, 2015. Dovey, Teresa. The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories. Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1988. Freed, Mark. Robert Musil and the Nonmodern. New York: Continuum, 2011. Grandin, John M. Kafka’s Prussian Advocate: A Study of the Influence of Heinrich von Kleist on Franz Kafka. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1987. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan (1652), ed. Richard Tuck. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Kafka, Franz. The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, revised by E. M. Butler. London: Secker & Warburg, 1968. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), ed. Karl Vorländer. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1993. Kleist, Heinrich von. Michael Kohlhaas, in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Helmut Sembdner. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983. Kleist, Heinrich von. Michael Kohlhaas, in Three Stories, ed. H. B. Garland. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953. Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009. Macaskill, Brian. ‘Charting J. M. Coetzee’s Middle Voice’, in Contemporary Literature 35:3 (1994): 441–75. Mehigan, Tim (ed.). A Companion to the Works of J. M. Coetzee. Rochester: Camden House, 2011. Mehigan, Tim. Heinrich von Kleist: Writing after Kant. Rochester: Camden House, 2011. Musil, Robert. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930; 1932). English: The Man without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike. London: Picador, 1995.

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Musil, Robert. Gesammelte Werke in 9 Bänden, ed. Adolf Frisé, vol. 7. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, in Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Karl Schlechta, vol. 3. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1954. Nübel, Birgit. Robert Musil: Essayismus als Selbstreflexion der Moderne. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Du contrat social (1762). The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

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Beyond the Literary Theme Park: J. M. Coetzee’s Late Style in The Childhood of Jesus Yoshiki Tajiri

1. The literary theme park J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus has puzzled reviewers and critics with its curious elusiveness. Despite its very simple style and relatively straightforward story line, the novel as a whole does not seem to allow us easy interpretative access. We wonder what elements beneath the smooth surface disorient us. At the novel’s opening, a middle-aged man Simón arrives in a Spanishspeaking city called Novilla with five-year-old David, whom he has decided to look after until he finds his mother. All people here are given new names and are supposed to be washed clean of their past memories. While Simón struggles to secure employment and a place to live, David makes friends with a boy named Fidel, and Simón has a passionless affair with Fidel’s mother Elena. One day, Simón abruptly decides that Inés, an apparently virginal woman he meets by chance, is David’s mother. He goes on to build a quasifamilial relationship with her and David. In the process, he realizes that the society here is not ordinary. While people are curiously benevolent and diligent, and most things are free of charge, Simón is constantly frustrated by the emptiness of the life here: people are not interested in sex, for example. And because it is through Simón that we view this strange world, we are also obliged to feel a portion of the tedium of living in it.

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The parallels with the Gospels are obvious, starting with names. As Jesus is a descendant of the Jewish king David, the Christ-like boy David is appropriately named. The name Simón is not accidental since it is another name of Peter, Jesus’ leading apostle. Inés is a form of Agnes, the name of the patron saint of chastity, which is significant given her role as a virgin mother.1 David wishes to be a magician or life-saver, and often reveals his idiosyncratic ideas. At school he challenges the authorities and is thus sent to the special school Punto Arenas from which he escapes. At the end, he journeys with Simón, Inés and a hitchhiker named Juan (Spanish for John, another apostle) to a new place, forming a kind of ‘brotherhood’ and seeking a ‘new life’.2 This is just a broad outline; there are many minor details that suggest a link to the Gospels.3 In a sense, Coetzee appears to have rewritten the Gospels, just as he rewrote Robinson Crusoe in Foe. But at the same time, we cannot help feeling that pursuing and decoding the parallels will not necessarily illuminate the crux of the novel. While allegory has been regarded as Coetzee’s signature style, it is also well known that his works resist simplistic allegorical readings. Derek Attridge noted that Coetzee’s novels ‘seem half to solicit, half to problematize’ allegorical readings.4 More recently Julian Murphet argued that Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year, the three novels that Coetzee published after moving to Australia, ‘are allegories, but what they are allegories of is their own failure to amount to allegories’.5 In The Childhood of Jesus, this feature is all the more prominent because this novel appears overtly allegorical with allusions to the Gospels. Besides, with its unspecified time and imaginary place, it is 1



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When Simón discovers her name, he thinks, ‘Inés! So that is the name! And in the name the essence’, as if he had seen through her virginity (81). At the end of Chapter 22, Simón mentions the possibility of David’s forming ‘the Brotherhood of David’. When the evil man Daga adds, ‘Or it can be a secret brotherhood’, David seems to be inspired (195). One example: Simón tells himself, ‘I am girding my loins’ (52). This expression alludes to ‘Gird up the loins of your mind’ in the First Epistle of Peter (1.13), thus surreptitiously stressing the equivalence between Peter and Simón. Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 35. See Julian Murphet, ‘Coetzee and Late Style: Exile within the Form’, Twentieth Century Literature 57:1 (2011): 90. He explains this in relation to nationality and globalization: ‘It is as though the sudden shift of imaginative centre from an underdeveloped South Africa to a properly globalized “modern state” like Australia has affected the mechanics of national allegory in such a way as to debilitate them’ (ibid.: 101).



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even reminiscent of Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee’s quintessentially allegorical novel. But while it is easy to read the political conditions of South Africa in the earlier novel, the deceptively obvious allegorical mode of The Childhood of Jesus leads us nowhere. It is as though the allegorical mode were simply offered as a trap. Among Coetzee’s previous works, the final section of Elizabeth Costello, ‘At the Gate’, has the most similar atmosphere. In this section, Elizabeth Costello, the Australian novelist, is presented in a strange European city in which she is required to state her beliefs in order to pass through a gate that could allow her to continue her trip; the guards reject her statements and we get no further clarification when she is twice questioned by judges in a curious court. This set of circumstances offers an obvious parody of Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ and The Trial, and Elizabeth herself is well aware of this. In the dormitory, she feels as if she were in a concentration camp: ‘She could be in any of the gulags, she thinks. She could be in any of the camps of the Third Reich. The whole thing put together from clichés, with not a speck of originality.’6 Her judges look ‘excessively literary’.7 She feels that she is in ‘a purgatory of clichés’8 or ‘not so much in purgatory as in a kind of literary theme park’.9 But she wonders why the whole thing is such a poor imitation: ‘If the afterlife, if that is what this is, give it that name for the moment – if the afterlife turns out to be nothing but hocus-pocus, a simulation from beginning to end, why does the simulation fail so consistently?’10 She makes similar remarks about the Kafkaesque motifs she encounters: ‘Kafka, but only the superficies of Kafka; Kafka reduced and flattened to a parody.’11 This section of Elizabeth Costello and The Childhood of Jesus share the same eerie, dream-like atmosphere.12 But the more significant similarity between the two is the sense that literature is ‘reduced and flattened to a parody’. While J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (New York: Viking, 2003), pp. 198–9. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, p. 200. 8 Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, p. 206. 9 Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, p. 208. 10 Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, p. 209. 11 Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, p. 209. 12 In addition, both Elizabeth and Simón find that people around them do not understand jokes. Elizabeth thinks: ‘Evidently they are not used to being joked with in this place’ (197). There are many occasions when Simón finds joking or irony has no effect on people around him in The Childhood of Jesus. 6 7

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Elizabeth the novelist is aware of this and thus makes the story metafictional, in The Childhood of Jesus it is not Simón, who looks less literary than Elizabeth, but the reader who is compelled to notice it.13 Simón’s frustration about the emptiness of the life in Novilla and the reader’s perception of literary clichés are combined to give this novel a tinge of flatness or even dullness. The following are examples of literary themes which are recycled to create the atmosphere of a ‘literary theme park’. 1) Kafka. At the beginning of the novel, Simón and David arrive at the relocation centre of Novilla, where Simón asks for employment and a place to live. But the key to his allocated room cannot be found, and the person who may have the master key has already gone home. Ana, an employee at the centre, brings them to her own flat, but only allows them to sleep outdoors in the yard, humiliating and exasperating Simón. This sequence about bureaucratic mess reminds us of the world of Kafka, and also of an early scene in Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (itself Kafkaesque in many ways) where Michael K is treated inhumanly by a policewoman at the relocation counter of the police station when he asks for a permit to travel. As in ‘At the Gate’, however, the Kafkaesque theme here feels rather too familiar and conventional. Once the opening sequence is over, it is not pursued further. 2) Utopia. Simón arrives in a strange place and has to adjust to strange people around him. The world he sees has some utopian qualities: many things, including flats, buses, music lessons, courses at the Institute, and tickets for football games are free; people are usually friendly and helpful; Simón’s fellow stevedores at the wharf are proud of their labour. In this sense, the novel seems to fall into the traditional category of utopian narrative, and the vaguely socialist vision in it is reminiscent of William Morris’s News from Nowhere in particular.14 However, there are so many negative aspects to this world that it might be better to call it dystopian. The residents’ lack of ordinary sexual desire Though Simón does not seem to be particularly literary, he is interested in Don Quixote and capable of explaining its essential features to David. However, there seems to be a class distinction in this city. Inés and her brothers live in La Residencia, which appears to be for wealthier people.

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frequently dismays Simón, who, like David Lurie in Disgrace, affirms the power of impulse.15 His fellow workers at the wharf are completely content with the boring job of carrying heavy bags of grains on their back day after day. They indignantly oppose his proposal for introducing a crane. People almost always eat bread, but not meat; when they eat pasta they do not think of adding salt. The after-work philosophy course offered at the Institute is dull as dishwater: they are discussing ‘the chairness of the chair’. Simón believes he feels so alienated because he is still a newcomer and retains a faint memory of his past life. He wonders: ‘And why is he continually asking questions instead of just living, like everyone else? Is it all part of a far too tardy transition from the old and comfortable (the personal) to the new and unsettling (the universal)?’16 The important point, however, is that whether we regard it as utopian or dystopian narrative, there is no obvious satire or criticism of the real world as we often find in such narratives. This novel thus presents a kind of hollowedout utopian or dystopian narrative. Traditionally, social satire often targets scholars and their learnings, as in Part Three of Gulliver’s Travels with its descriptions of the Lagado Academy. In The Childhood of Jesus, the descriptions of the Institute may be taken as an enfeebled version of this tradition. The discussion of ‘the chairness of the chair’ in the philosophy course is not very funny and only adds to the sense of boredom. Needless to say, there is no satire of any real academism here. Just like Simón, we are simply left to wonder why people are diligently taking such a boring course. 3) Scatology. The function of scatology to vitalize literature has long been acknowledged. Mikhail Bakhtin in particular emphasizes its significance in his book on Rabelais. He says: ‘[I]n the images of urine and excrement is preserved the essential link with birth, fertility, renewal, welfare. This positive element was still fully alive and clearly realized in the time of Rabelais.’17 In his view, such an invigorating force of scatology was completely lost after Simón says, for example: ‘What is wrong with satisfying ordinary appetite? Why must our ordinary impulses and hungers and desires be beaten down?’ (30). 16 J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2013), p. 57 17 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 148. 15

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Rabelais. But it is generally understood that though it receded from view in canonical literature after Jonathan Swift, it resurfaced with subversive energy in the twentieth century with Joyce, Beckett, and others. Chapter 16 of The Childhood of Jesus centres on how Simón has to fix the toilet pipe in Inés’s flat, struggling with floating excrement in the toilet bowl. After the job is done at last, he muses: What strikes him about the visit to Inés, when he reflects afterwards, is how strange it was as an episode in his life, how unpredictable. Who would have thought, at the moment when he first beheld this young woman on the tennis court, so cool, so serene, that a day would come when he would be having to wash her shit off his body!18

This episode is somewhat absurd, to be sure, but it does not make us laugh. It is difficult to understand why Coetzee inserted it here. I would argue that this episode is strategically placed in order to stress that scatology as a literary theme has become completely banal instead of being vitalizing or subversive. 4) ‘Third Brother stories.’ When Simón asks David what kind of stories Inés tells him, David tells him one of the ‘Third Brother stories’. Three brothers go out to get a precious herb for their sick mother. The first two fail by rejecting help from a fox and a wolf respectively, which offer to guide them in exchange for food. But the third brother listens to a bear and allows it to devour his heart, thus successfully getting the herb and healing his mother. After his achievement, the third son shines and goes up to the sky. Even considering that this tale is told by David, we cannot help feeling that it is an extremely bad parody of folktales with similar three actors. This story does have a function in the novel: David strongly identifies with the third brother in accordance with his wish to become a life-saver (one of his Jesus-like traits). At the same time, we are faced with a kind of carcass of story-telling, the essential component of literature. 5) Don Quixote. After being disappointed by the ‘Third Brother story’, Simón gives David An Illustrated Children’s Don Quixote, which quickly attracts the boy. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 135.

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One naturally wonders why Coetzee chooses Don Quixote. The easiest answer is that Don Quixote is the greatest classic written in Spanish, the language used in Novilla. We may also be aware of the symbolic meaning of this classic as the forefather of the modern Western novel in general.19 But although quoted extensively, Don Quixote is only flirted with in the course of David’s reading practices. It only functions to elicit some characteristically childish responses from David. Our expectation that there may be a serious engagement with the origin of the Western novel is betrayed as soon as it is aroused. Don Quixote here is little more than a specimen of a great classic on display in the literary theme park. At the end of the novel when Simón, Inés and David are escaping from Novilla by car, David wants to ‘poo’ but they have no toilet paper. Simón suggests, ‘Will you give up a page of Don Quixote?’ to which the boy disagrees.20 This exchange is rather out of place, and therefore falls flat instead of inducing laughter. It only indicates a humourless scatological demotion of the classic. In all these examples, themes that might be developed are simply ‘reduced and flattened to a parody’, just as the Kafkaesque themes of ‘At the Gate’ are flattened. To be more precise, they are fair specimens of postmodern pastiche rather than parody. According to Fredric Jameson, pastiche that characterizes postmodernism is ‘without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter’; in short, it is ‘blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humor’.21 Jameson also argues that ‘in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum’.22 His term ‘imaginary museum’ neatly corresponds to Elizabeth Costello’s ‘literary theme park’. In The Childhood of Jesus, the sense that literature has reached a saturation point seems to be connected to the strange lack of historical sense in the world Simón tells David that the author of Don Quixote is Benengeli (154). In Don Quixote, there is a metafictional account that it was written in Arabic by Benengeli and was translated into Spanish. Simón’s mention of the obscure name Benengeli underlines the fact that Don Quixote is a translated work, and this in turn reminds us that the conversations in The Childhood of Jesus are all English translations of the original Spanish. In fact Simón often thinks that Spanish is a barrier for his communication with others. 20 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 261. 21 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Washington: Bay Press, 1983), p. 114. 22 Jameson, ‘Postmodernism’, p. 115. 19

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of the novel.23 It is as if this were the world after history where people are simply content with the status quo and thus society cannot develop further. This is most explicit in Chapter 14, where Simón’s proposal for introducing a crane is strongly resisted by his fellow workers. During their debate, he says: ‘But I have not let go of the idea of history, the idea of change without beginning or end.’24 His fellow stevedore Eugenio objects that ‘history is not real,’ or ‘history is just a made-up story’.25 To this Simón counters, ‘as for history, all I can say is that while today we may refuse to heed it, we cannot refuse forever’ and proposes that they should gather again in five or ten years’ time to see if they are still working without a crane. Later on in the novel, a small crane is unexpectedly introduced but quickly withdrawn after an accident injures Simón on the first day of its use. There is even an implication that this world may be a kind of afterlife, as Elizabeth Costello supposes her world to be in ‘At the Gate’. When Simón’s fellow worker Marciano is burnt to death in a fire, Simón says to David: ‘He is probably crossing the seas at this very moment, looking forward to the next life. It will be a great adventure for him, to start anew, washed clean.’26 Since everyone has to cross the seas and be washed clean before coming to Novilla, we are induced to feel that this present world in Novilla may already be a certain afterlife, where there is no need for history. It seems that in the world of The Childhood of Jesus, history, including literary history, has stopped still and literature has nothing to do but emptily repeat itself. This indicates Coetzee’s continuing concern with the postmodern predicament that attracted critical attention in the 1980s. However, a selfconscious novelist like Coetzee must be aware that such concern is rather old-fashioned in the 2010s. The fact that he engages with it all the same as if he wanted to stress today’s ruined condition of literature appears related In a recent essay, David Attwell detects posthistoricity in Coetzee’s recent novels such as Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year. In his view, it is typical of the new generation of Anglophone diasporic settler-colonials like Coetzee who moved to Australia. Attwell says: ‘It is an afterlife of sorts: one’s formative experiences lie elsewhere and one enters a realm of private accommodations’ (‘Coetzee’s Postcolonial Diaspora’, p. 11). It is plausible that the posthistorical or afterlife-like atmosphere of The Childhood of Jesus reflects this concern. 24 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 115. 25 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 116. 26 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 157. 23



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to his reinforced awareness of the decline of serious literature. In Disgrace, David Lurie’s university downgrades literature in favour of more pragmatic subjects. In Here and Now, Coetzee explicitly deplores the decline: ‘Something happened, it seems to me, in the late 1970s or early 1980s as a result of which the arts yielded up their leading role in our inner life.’ He feels that ‘there was a general failure among writers and artists to resist the challenge to their leading role, and that we are poorer today for that failure’.27 The Childhood of Jesus reflects such a bitter feeling; it is in this respect that it manages to satirize the real world. In Novilla, literature does not seem to flourish.28 In the Institute, the Spanish language is taught in independent courses, but not as literature. Simón does find An Illustrated Children’s Don Quixote, but it was ‘flat on its face under other books, its spine torn off ’ in ‘a tiny library in the East Blocks community centre, with a couple of shelves of books: Teach Yourself Carpentry, The Art of Crocheting, One Hundred and One Summer Recipes and so forth’.29 When a sheet of the Don Quixote is almost used as toilet paper, Coetzee perhaps makes an ironic statement about the marginalization of serious literature in the contemporary world.

2. The museum of the Coetzeean themes Coetzee has been widely regarded as a postmodernist, particularly because of his metafictional textual strategies, one of which is his rewriting of the past classics, such as Kafka’s and Beckett’s works in Life & Times of Michael K and Robinson Crusoe in Foe.30 Now, by rewriting the Gospels in The Childhood of Jesus, he appears to have returned to the mode of writing that established him as a postmodernist in the 1980s. It should be noted, however, that The Childhood of Jesus is different from his earlier rewritings of classics such as J. M. Coetzee and Paul Auster, Here and Now: Letters 2008–2011 (New York: Viking, 2013), p. 98. An exception is the fact that in her music lessons for David, Elena teaches Schubert’s Der Erlkönig, based on Goethe’s poem. David misquotes the beginning of the poem in German, believing that it is English (p. 67). 29 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 151. 30 For the way Coetzee rewrites Beckett’s Molloy in Life and Times of Michael K, see Gilbert Yeoh, ‘J. M. Coetzee and Samuel Beckett: Nothingness, Minimalism and Indeterminacy’, ARIEL 31:4 (2000): 117–37. 27 28

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Michael K and Foe, which were all infused with postcolonial concerns. As David Attwell argued in 1993, ‘although Coetzee’s oeuvre draws significantly on modernism and its legacy, its strength lies precisely in his ability to test its absorption in European traditions in the ethically and politically fraught arena of South Africa. The problem, in other words, is to understand Coetzee’s postmodernism in the light of his postcoloniality.’31 By contrast, The Childhood of Jesus does not seem to share the same political agenda. To be sure, there are scenes that can be read politically. The opening sequence evokes the predicament of political refugees. Simón notes that in the Institute, none of Iberia’s minor languages are taught. And later in the novel, David increasingly rebels against the political authorities of the educational machine of Novilla. However, these motifs are not pursued fully enough to be central to the novel. Coetzee’s postcolonial concern is now significantly weakened by comparison with the nexus of the postmodern and the postcolonial that constituted his major phase until the 1990s. In consequence, it seems that postmodernism was left to manifest itself more conspicuously, not only in the return to his old mode of rewriting classics, but also in the belated emergence of typically postmodern features such as pastiche and posthistoricity. In both cases, postmodernism here looks rather out of date, lacking the freshness it had in the 1980s. The de-politicized return to the old postmodernist mode of rewriting classics is, notably, only one of many kinds of return that characterize The Childhood of Jesus: it contains a collection of the themes that Coetzee explored in his previous works. In a sense, it looks like a showcase or museum of the Coetzeean themes. He recycles not only general literary themes, but also many of his own particular themes. He even appears to be attempting a wholesale recapitulation of his career. Here are several examples. David’s school teacher León, who dislikes the boy’s disobedience, has an artificial eye. This minor detail evokes characters in Coetzee’s other novels who have physical deformities: the barbarian girl’s damaged eyes and crippled feet in Waiting for the Barbarians, Michael K’s

David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 20.

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harelip in Life & Times of Michael K, Friday’s cut-out tongue in Foe, and Paul Rayment’s amputated leg in Slow Man. When Simón is hospitalized after his accident in the wharf, he is nursed by a woman called Clara. When he leaves her, he says, ‘I will not easily forget your care. I would like to believe there was more than just goodwill behind it’ to which ‘Clara does not answer; but from the direct look she gives him he knows he is right’.32 In Coetzee’s previous works, such a romantic encounter with a woman would have generated a major part of the plot. Indeed Paul Rayment in Slow Man falls in love with his nurse and JC’s chance encounter with a woman in Diary of a Bad Year incites the whole plot. But in The Childhood of Jesus, Clara is quickly forgotten after just one chapter. She seems to represent something like an enfeebled vestige of a Coetzeean romantic plot. It is well known that ethical questions concerning the interpretation (often figured as story-telling) of others are important in Coetzee’s earlier works such as Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K and Foe. The ever-passive Michael K, especially, is interpreted arbitrarily by the authorities, thus foregrounding the violence involved in their interpretation of him. In The Childhood of Jesus, this theme is enacted when the school counsellor Otxoa suggests that David go to a special school at Punto Arenas that Inés and Simón suspect is for remedial students. Without understanding David’s private mode of writing, Otxoa asserts that behind David’s problematic behaviours lies an unstable relationship with Inés and Simón, who are not his real parents: ‘But from the talks David and I have had, yes, I believe that in his own mind he is writing stories about himself and his true parentage.’33 This kind of interpretative violence, however, does not become a major theme here as it does in Coetzee’s earlier works. After Inés and Simón reject the authorities’ suggestion about sending David to Punto Arenas, they are summoned to a hearing at the headquarters of the Office of Education in Novilla, where it is decided against their will that David must be sent to Punto Arenas. The trial-like ‘hearing’ does suggest a sinister operation of power in Novilla and makes Inés decide to escape from the city.

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 247. Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 208–9.

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But the scene is short and appears just functional compared to David Lurie’s hearing about his alleged sexual harassment in the earlier part of Disgrace, or the self-consciously Kafkaesque hearings in ‘At the Gate’. At this point, it may be useful to remember Edward Said’s discussion of late style to which Coetzee refers in Here and Now. Asked by Paul Auster to flesh out his opinion on Said’s late style, Coetzee says with detachment: I confess I don’t remember much of what he has to say, except that I found myself adhering stubbornly to the old-fashioned understanding of late style that he was engaged in attacking. In the case of literature, late style, to me, starts with an ideal of a simple, subdued, unornamented language and a concentration on questions of real import, even questions of life and death.34

It is possible to argue that Coetzee wrote The Childhood of Jesus in his own sense of late style because its language is noticeably ‘simple, subdued, unornamented’ and, as we shall see later, it concentrates on ‘questions of real import’. However, there are ways to link this novel to Said’s concept of late style, which is multifarious and protean. In fact, Said had to leave his ideas unformulated due to his premature death. In ‘Timeliness and Lateness’, the principal essay in the posthumously edited book On Late Style, he focuses on ‘artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction’,35 discussing Adorno’s interpretation of Beethoven’s late works and Adorno’s own career. Julian Murphet notices similar lack of formal resolution (‘the seams and fissures, the failures of integration’) in Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year.36 In a different essay, Murphet also points out that Coetzee’s recent novels ‘irascibly break the bonds that hold a “readership” together’, another feature of the late style highlighted by Said in ‘Timeliness and Lateness’.37 Yet The Childhood of Jesus is not so visibly experimental as those three recent novels. The qualities of ‘intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction’ resulting in the break with general readers seem to be subdued in this novel, which has a very smooth surface. Coetzee and Auster, Here and Now, p. 97. Edward W. Said, ‘Timeliness and Lateness’, in On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), p. 7. 36 Murphet, ‘Coetzee and Late Style’, p. 86. 37 Julian Murphet, ‘Coetzee’s Lateness and the Detours of Globalization’, Twentieth Century Literature 57:1 (2011): 2. 34 35



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In other places, however, Said deals freely with various other artists without adhering to the tenets of ‘Timeliness and Lateness’. For instance, when Said discusses in an interview Conrad’s Victory as a typical work of late style, he points out three elements: withdrawal from the world, self-quotation and mannerism. Regarding self-quotation, he says: A second element – and this is also very typical of the late style – is that Victory is a novel full of reminiscences. In other words, it’s full of self-quotation. The island, for instance, is obviously a re-creation of ‘Lord’ Jim on Patusan or one of the Malay islands of the early books, and all the sea going details are clearly a re-articulation of the earlier Conrad as well. But it’s all become much more essentialized now; it’s become – I wouldn’t say a parody of itself – but rather quite clearly recollection.38

Much the same applies to Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus, which is also ‘full of self-quotation’, as we have just seen. The third late-style element, mannerism, is exemplified by Beethoven’s late works in which ‘there are a lot of trills that have no particular structural function’.39 This is what Said describes elsewhere as ‘episodic character’.40 In The Childhood of Jesus there are many episodes whose structural function is unclear: León’s artificial eye, Clara, the scatological toilet-pipe repair episode, the episode about the dove keeper Paloma, and so on. Although it is unlikely that Coetzee was conscious of these particular elements of Said’s concept, it is possible to characterize this novel as partly coloured with late style in Said’s sense.

3. Fatherhood, motherhood and family We see in this novel familiar Coetzeean themes recycled on a smaller scale, as if they were on display in a museum. However, one important theme in this novel is not so much recycled as explored with renewed urgency. In many ways, The Childhood of Jesus is a meditation on fatherhood. Simón is not Said, ‘An Interview with Edward W. Said’, in Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives, eds Carola M. Kaplan, Peter Lancelot Mallios and Andrea White (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 286. 39 Said, ‘An Interview’, p. 287. 40 Said, ‘Timeliness and Lateness’, p. 10. 38

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David’s real father, but he behaves as if he were. During the voyage to this land, Simón decides to look after David until his mother can be found. When he finds Inés, he asks her to be David’s mother because he knows that it will be impossible for him to properly care for David while working as a stevedore. But as soon as he hands David over to Inés, he misses the boy and tries to remain a father-figure for him. In the process, he is preoccupied with the question of what it is to be a father, which dominated The Master of Petersburg and resurfaced to a certain extent in Disgrace. His constant self-questioning over his relationship with David involves a reconsideration of motherhood and family as well. Though Simón contingently chooses Inés to be David’s mother, she accepts that role and tries hard to fulfil it well. Simón and Inés unite in protecting David from the school authorities just like ‘true’ (if not ‘real’) parents. In the end, the three who have no blood ties form a kind of family, as is suggested by Simón’s ironical remark: ‘Like an old married couple, he thinks to himself. We have never been to bed together, not even kissed, yet we quarrel as if we have been married for years!’41 In fact, Coetzee described a similar family relationship in The Master of Petersburg. Dostoevsky’s stepson Pavel, whose death he tries to come to terms with throughout the novel, is a son of his first wife and her husband Isaev. After Isaev died when Pavel was seven, Dostoevsky married Isaev’s widow (Pavel’s mother). But the woman died a few years before the time of the novel (October and November 1869). Now Dostoevsky is remarried to his second wife Anna Snitkina who lives in Dresden with their child while he stays in Petersburg to deal with the aftermath of Pavel’s death; that is, to deal with the police and the revolutionary Nechaev and his comrades with whom Pavel was connected. As regards his life with his second wife and Pavel, he says: ‘My wife and Pavel are of much the same age. For a while we lived together, the three of us, in an apartment on Meshchanskaya Street. It was not a happy time for Pavel. He felt a certain rivalry with my wife.’42 This awkwardness is understandable not least because Pavel had no blood ties with either Dostoevsky or Anna.

Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 267. J. M. Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 64.

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But curiously, in Petersburg Dostoevsky forms another quasi-family; he falls in love with Pavel’s landlady Anna Sergeyevna, who lives with her young daughter Matryona (in whom he later becomes sexually interested). Tension inevitably arises because Matryona does not like the relationship between her mother and their lodger. At one point Matryona explicitly says to Dostoevsky: ‘You can’t tell me what to do, you’re not my father!’43 Nevertheless, Dostoevsky feels that they can be a family. When the three go out for a walk: ‘With Matryona at her other side they stride across the fields. A family, he thinks: only a fourth required and we will be complete.’44 The fourth here could be the lost Pavel, since both Anna Sergeyevna and Matryona liked Pavel. Toward the end of the novel, Dostoevsky rather abruptly declares to Anna Sergeyevna: ‘I would like to have a child with you.’ She rejects this idea as nonsense because he has a wife and child back in Dresden. Yet he persists: ‘They are of a different family. You are of Pavel’s family, you and Matryona, both of you. I am of Pavel’s family too.’45 In this manner, the possibility of forming a quasi-family with Pavel as an absent centre is explored in The Master of Petersburg. In its interest in the notion of the family not necessarily anchored in blood ties, this novel could be regarded as a precursor of The Childhood of Jesus. However, there are significant differences between the two novels. The Master of Petersburg focuses on the rivalry between father and son. While Dostoevsky intensely mourns Pavel, he cannot escape from the sense of bitter conflicts with him even after his death: ‘Fathers and sons: foes: foes to death.’46 Later he similarly concludes: ‘A war: the old against the young, the young against the old.’47 This father-son rivalry is a recurrent motif in the novel. The Childhood of Jesus lacks this element because David is too young to be Simón’s rival. Instead, it centres on how to take care of the child at a more elementary level, such as finding him food and lodging or teaching him the three Rs. Coetzee, The Master, p. 138. Coetzee, The Master, p. 62. 45 Coetzee, The Master, p. 224. 46 Coetzee, The Master, p. 239. 47 Coetzee, The Master, p. 247. The following passage suggests that the rivalry lies at the centre of their relationship: ‘Is it always like this between fathers and sons: jokes masking the intensest rivalry? And is that the true reason why he is bereft: because the ground of his life, the contest with his son, is gone, and his days are left empty? Not the People’s Vengeance [the name of Nechaev’s group] but the Vengeance of the Sons: is that what underlies revolution – fathers envying their sons their women, sons scheming to rob their fathers’ cashboxes?’ (108). 43 44

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A more significant difference lies in the nature of the quasi-family Simón forms with Inés and David. In fact, Dostoevsky’s relationship with Anna Sergeyevna and her biological daughter Matryona corresponds to Simón’s relationship with Elena and her biological son Fidel. After parting from David, Simón, like Dostoevsky, conceives a possibility of forming a family with Elena and Fidel: ‘Companionate marriage: if he offered, would Elena consent?’48 And both Anna Sergeyevna and Elena act as a confidante, advisor, and occasional sexual partner. However, in The Childhood of Jesus, Simón proceeds to form a quasi-family with Inés and David. In this new triangle, Simón has no intention of conceiving a child with Inés. This is no surprise because Simón and Inés do not seem sexually attracted to each other. It is implied that the idea of the family here dispenses with intimacy between mother and father. Elena and Simón often discuss fatherhood and motherhood. Whereas Elena emphasizes the importance of the ‘real’ mother-child bond (therefore she is critical of Inés who has never given birth to a baby), Simón thinks the father–child relationship is somehow abstract: ‘Blood is thicker than water. A child belongs with his mother. Particularly a young child. By comparison, my claims are very abstract, very artificial.’49 Later he reiterates, ‘Once the idea is transmitted, the father is dispensable.’50 He repeats the same idea to David: ‘fathers aren’t very important, compared with mothers. A mother brings you out of her body into the world. She gives you milk, as I mentioned. She holds you in her arms and protects you. Whereas a father can sometimes be a bit of a wanderer, like Don Quixote, not always there when you need him. He helps you, right at the beginning, but then he moves on. By the time you come into the world he may have vanished over the horizon in search of new adventures.’51

This is an extension of David Lurie’s idea in Disgrace, in which he says to his daughter Lucy: ‘Being a father … I can’t help feeling that, by comparison with being a mother, being a father is a rather abstract business.’52 But in The Childhood of Jesus, the relationship between Inés and David is also artificial. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 142. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 95. 50 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 104. 51 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 221. 52 J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 1999), p. 63. 48 49



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This family is evidently based on the Christian Holy Family. The Virgin Mary is suddenly told by the archangel Gabriel that she will conceive God’s son. Inés is similarly nominated as David’s mother by Simón, though unlike Mary, she does not give birth to a baby but instead embraces a partly grown boy. Simón’s position is ‘abstract’ just like Joseph’s. In this reconfiguration of a family modeled on the Holy Family, there is a suggestion that in order to form a family, neither blood ties between parent and child nor a sexual relationship between mother and father is an absolute necessity. Simón at one point says: ‘Who knows how we elect those we love anyway? It is all a great mystery.’53 Love, not blood, constitutes a family – in this case Simón’s and Inés’s love of David. When it is discovered that Inés wants her own child and flirts with the evil man Daga, Elena suggests that Simón should impregnate Inés instead of Daga. Simón says: ‘I? I wouldn’t dream of it. I am not the father type. I was made to be an uncle, not a father.’54 Here he means a ‘real’ father with blood ties. In the end, Simón is persuaded to offer to father a child for Inés, but predictably she coldly rejects it and embarrasses Simón. This indicates that, for them, sexual intercourse is not only unnecessary, but also potentially harmful to their relationship. In the preceding scene, Elena asserts that to be a father, sexual intercourse with a woman is enough (‘Being a father isn’t a career, Simón. Nor is it some kind of metaphysical destiny’), but Simón counters: ‘Fatherhood is not only a matter of having intercourse with a woman, just as motherhood is not only a matter of providing a vessel for male seed.’55 This may sound antithetical to his belief that fatherhood is a matter of providing seed and thus abstract. Earlier, Elena said to Simón: ‘A child needs a mother’s womb to come into the world. After he has left the womb the mother as life-giver is as much a spent force as the father. What the child needs from then on is love and care, which a man can provide as well as a woman.’56 Now Simón seems to be expressing this very idea. But he is not necessarily contradicting himself. He has two ideas about Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 95. Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 189. Indeed, he tells David to call him ‘Uncle’ instead of padrino (p. 33). Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 189. 56 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 104. 53 54 55

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fatherhood. On the one hand, he believes that a father, being only abstract, can wander away from his child after helping him at the beginning as he says to David. Yet on the other hand, he also believes that a man can become a father as long as he can provide ‘love and care’ for a child. These two ideas can coexist: it is only a matter of distinction between ‘real’ father and ‘true’ father. In a sense, The Childhood of Jesus is a story of Simón who becomes a ‘true’ father while continuing to avoid being a ‘real’ father. In the end he serves as a loving and caring father for David.57

4. The contingency of the world One’s parents (both father and mother) are not necessarily determined by blood ties but can be acquired by choice. And that choice can be arbitrary, like Simón’s choice of Inés as David’s mother. As we have seen, Simón says: ‘Who knows how we elect those we love anyway? It is all a great mystery.’58 The contingency of parenthood here may be regarded as a manifestation of the contingency of the world in general (or the sense that this world does not have to be as it is). This is, in fact, a fundamental theme of Coetzee’s oeuvre, particularly his recent work. Again, it is not so much recycled as further explored in a different guise in The Childhood of Jesus. In this novel, everyone who comes to Novilla is washed clean of past memories, given a new name and compelled to learn a new language (Spanish). This can be interpreted as a dramatization of what all of us experience but are not conscious of in daily life. We are born into this world without the memory of our former life, given a name, and compelled to learn a language. In this sense, our life is not so different from that of people in Novilla. Everything is accidental and contingent. My name did not have to be this, my first language did not have to be this, the world I was born into did not have to be like this. The same applies to our parents. We are born to particular parents, but this is purely accidental. In this light, Simón’s nomination of Inés as David’s mother does not appear so absurd. Of course, the ending of the novel does not guarantee any stability of the quasi-family of the three. David randomly asks others to join their journey. The family here may not be a closed unit. 58 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 95. 57



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Coetzee divulges a relevant sentiment in a crucial passage in Here and Now: I stumbled on a little thought experiment the other day that has alternately been troubling and amusing me. I was reflecting on my situation in life, on how I got to be where I am (namely in the suburbs of a small city in Australia), and on the various accidents, including the accident of my birth – being born to particular parents on a particular day – that led to my being not only where I am but who I am. It occurred to me that it was all too easy to contemplate a world in which this fellow John Maxwell Coetzee, born February 9, 1940, was not present and had never been present, or else had lived a completely different life, perhaps not even a human life; but at the next instant it also occurred to me that it was impossible to contemplate a world in which I was not present and had never been present.59

In this passage, Coetzee makes a distinction between ‘John Maxwell Coetzee’ and ‘I’. He says, ‘The simple logical conclusion would seem to be that the equation “I = JMC” is false. And indeed one’s intuitions support this conclusion.’60 It is easy to surmise that this sense of inner division underlies his exploration of alterity in the self, manifested most clearly in his well-known practice of writing about his own life with the use of the third person, as in Boyhood and Youth. The ‘I’ here may be a kind of a Cartesian ego that doubts everything except its own existence. Then all the accidental facts related to the life of ‘JMC’ would seem to be an illusory fabrication that could have been otherwise. In Elizabeth Costello, the reflection that this world does not have to be as it is is implied in the idea that the human world is relative in relation to the animal world. Elizabeth’s son John says: ‘Still, isn’t there a position outside from which our doing our thinking and then sending out a Mars probe looks a lot like a squirrel doing its thinking and then dashing out and snatching a nut? Isn’t that perhaps what she [Elizabeth] meant?’61 Similarly, Elizabeth conceives a mode of being other than human: Other modes of being. That may be a more decent way of phrasing it. Are there other modes of being besides what we call the human into which we can enter; and if there are not, what does that say about us and our limitations?62 Coetzee and Auster, Here and Now, p. 208. Coetzee and Auster, Here and Now, p. 208. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, p. 92. 62 Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, p. 188. 59 60 61

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[A]re they [gods] curious about us, their anthropological specimens, to the degree that we in turn are curious about chimps, or about birds, or about flies?63

There is a possibility that our human world is to the animal world what the gods’ world is to our human world. This relativization or decentring of the human world, often in relation to the animal world, is an important theme in Coetzee’s recent work. In the 2006 lecture ‘Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett’, Coetzee urges us to imagine that the plight of laboratory animals trifled with by humans may be analogous to our own fate that is possibly governed by God or something supernatural.64 In The Childhood of Jesus, such a relativity of the existing world is touched on briefly when Simón says, with irony, to Álvaro: ‘I see. So it is for the best, after all, that I am here, on this wharf, in this port, in this city, in this land. All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.’ Álvaro frowns. ‘This isn’t a possible world,’ he says. ‘It is the only world. Whether that makes it the best is not for you or for me to decide.’ He can think of several replies, but refrains from airing them. Perhaps, in this world that is the only world, it would be prudent to put irony behind him.65

In Novilla, only Simón is capable of conceiving possible worlds, whereas all others seem to lack the imagination to do so. As I mentioned, there is an implication that the world of this novel may be a kind of afterlife. When Simón explains to David where the dead stevedore Marciano has gone, he says ‘He can be a bird. He can be anything he likes’ in the next life.66 He also says that in the next life, ‘we may not recognize him’: ‘we may think we are just seeing a bird or a seal or a whale. And Marciano – Marciano will think he is seeing a hippopotamus while it will really be you.’67 Since the present world of Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, p. 190. We may note that already in In the Heart of the Country, Magda was asking this kind of question by imagining entering into the other modes of being: ‘Though I may ache to abdicate the throne of consciousness and enter the mode of being practiced by goats or stones, it is with an ache I do not find intolerable’ (p. 26); ‘I am lost in the being of my being. This is what I was meant to be: a poetess of interiority, an explorer of the inwardness of stones, the emotions of ants, the consciousness of the thinking parts of the brain’ (p. 35). 64 For a full analysis of this lecture in relation to the contingency of being human, see Yoshiki Tajiri, ‘Beckett, Coetzee and Animals’, in Beckett and Animals, ed. Mary Bryden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 27–39. 65 Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 41–2. 66 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 157. 67 Coetzee, The Childhood, p. 158. 63



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the novel is similar to the next life described here, animals in this world may be human beings. This sense of relativity – the fusion of animals and humans – is typical of Coetzee. This is why he says that he can imagine a possible world in which ‘JMC’ ‘had lived a completely different life, perhaps not even a human life’ in the above-quoted passage in Here and Now. The sense of relativity is connected to the randomness of the world referred to in The Childhood of Jesus. Toward the end of the novel, Simón says to the hitchhiker Juan: ‘The names we use are the names we were given there, but we might just as well have been given numbers. Numbers, names – they are equally arbitrary, equally random, equally unimportant […] In the world we live in there are random numbers and random names and random events, like being picked up at random by a car containing a man and a woman and a child named David. And a dog. What was the secret cause behind that event, do you think?’ 68

The randomness of numbers, names and events will surely apply to parents, countries, languages, and also the very existence of the world and the self. All these are arbitrary and contingent. The profound metaphysical question here is not pursued because the conversation is interrupted. But the urgency of this question for Coetzee is easy to see if we turn to ‘Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett’, in which a very similar question is raised: Are our lives directed by an intelligence, malign or benign; or on the contrary is what we go through just stuff happening? Are we part of an experiment on so grand a scale that we cannot descry even its outlines, or on the contrary is there no scheme at all of which we form a part? This is the question I presume to lie at the heart of Moby Dick as a philosophical drama, and it is not dissimilar to the question at the heart of Beckett’s oeuvre.69

Earlier we noted that for Coetzee, late style aims for not only ‘a simple, subdued, unornamented language’, but also ‘a concentration on questions of real import, even questions of life and death’.70 I would argue that the question explored saliently in The Childhood of Jesus of whether or how we can give Coetzee, The Childhood, pp. 274–5. J. M. Coetzee, ‘Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett’, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 19 (2008): 22. 70 Coetzee and Auster, Here and Now, p. 97. 68 69

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meaning to the contingent, relative, and random world, no doubt qualifies as a question of real import. The most conspicuous features of this novel are postmodern pastiche and self-quotation, this latter element a feature of Said’s late style. Beyond the literary theme park and the museum of the Coetzeean themes, The Childhood of Jesus revisits and further explores an important question of parenthood and family. The contingency of having a parent and forming a family, which is revealed in the process, compels us to consider an even more fundamental question concerning the meaning of the world which has haunted Coetzee’s recent work. This novel thus indicates ‘a concentration on questions of real import’, which an aging novelist can achieve in late style in Coetzee’s own sense of the term.

References Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Attwell, David. ‘Coetzee’s Postcolonial Diaspora’, Twentieth Century Literature 57:1 (2011): 9–19. Attwell, David. J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Coetzee, J. M. Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998. Coetzee, J. M. The Childhood of Jesus. London: Harvill Secker, 2013. Coetzee, J. M. Diary of a Bad Year. 2007. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008. Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 1999. Coetzee, J. M. ‘Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett’, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 19 (2008): 19–31. Coetzee, J. M. Elizabeth Costello. New York: Viking, 2003. Coetzee, J. M. Foe. 1986. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. Coetzee, J. M. In the Heart of the Country. 1977. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Coetzee, J. M. Life & Times of Michael K. 1983. London: Vintage, 1998. Coetzee, J. M. The Master of Petersburg. 1994. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.



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Coetzee, J. M. Slow Man. 2005. London: Vintage, 2006. Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians. 1980. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. Coetzee, J. M. Youth. 2002. London: Vintage, 2003. Coetzee, J. M. and Paul Auster. Here and Now: Letters 2008–2011. New York: Viking, 2013. The Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Bible Publishers, 1983. Jameson, Fredric. ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster. Washington: Bay Press, 1983, pp. 111–25. Murphet, Julian. ‘Coetzee and Late Style: Exile within the Form’, Twentieth Century Literature 57:1 (2011): 86–104. Murphet, Julian. ‘Coetzee’s Lateness and the Detours of Globalization’, Twentieth Century Literature 57:1 (2011): 1–8. Said, Edward W. ‘An Interview with Edward W. Said’, in Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives, ed. Carola M. Kaplan, Peter Lancelot Mallios and Andrea White. New York: Routledge, 2005, pp. 283–303. Said, Edward W. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006. Said, Edward W. ‘Timeliness and Lateness’, in On Late Style, pp. 3–24. Tajiri, Yoshiki. ‘Beckett, Coetzee and Animals’, in Beckett and Animals, ed. Mary Bryden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 27–39. Yeoh, Gilbert. ‘J. M. Coetzee and Samuel Beckett: Nothingness, Minimalism and Indeterminacy’, ARIEL 31:4 (2000): 117–37.

Acknowledgements 1. This is a reprint (with minor emendations) of my article which was published in Journal of Modern Literature 39:2: 72–88. I appreciate the kind permission of Indiana University Press. 2. I am grateful to Professor Robert Eaglestone for his advice on an earlier draft of this article.

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Index Adorno, Theodor 198 afterlife 3, 59, 85, 89, 189, 194, 206 allegory 13, 40, 53, 89–90, 125, 132–3, 144–5, 188–9 Apartheid 35, 50 Aquinas, Thomas 139 Arendt, Hannah 83, 85, 100, 178 Argentina 2, 92–3, 97 Aristotle 87, 108, 139, 181 assimilation 93, 96, 98–100 Attridge, Derek 50, 188 Attwell, David 149, 153–5, 165 Auster, Paul 1, 34, 36–7, 198 Austin, Texas 59, 61, 172 Australia 2, 65, 116, 126, 188, 205 refugee policy 60, 67, 84–5 Bakhtin, Mikhail 191 Barkhoff, Jürgen 78 Barthes, Roland 64, 150–1, 155–6, 161 Bauman, Zygmunt 70 Beckett, Samuel 192, 195, 207 Beethoven, Ludwig van 198–9 Bergson, Henri 109, 111–12, 114 Borges, Jorge Luis 46–7, 90–4, 98–9, 157, 159 Brassier, Ray 140 Cantor, Georg 139 Carey, John 91 Castillo, Debra 151 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote archetypal modern novel 17, 46–7, 160, 193, 195 and authorship 47, 121–2, 160 and illusion/imagination 23–4, 27, 44–6, 74, 89, 137, 180 as a parody 20, 47 and the Spanish language 9, 47, 91 Childhood of Jesus, The critical reception 2, 28, 187

death and afterlife 25–6, 59, 73, 108, 194, 206 eroticism and desire 17–18, 21–3, 69–70, 88, 109, 133, 169 as a fable or allegory 12–13, 53, 89, 188–9 faeces and sewerage 20–1, 61–6, 68, 73–4, 192 faith 13, 26–7, 167–8, 172 fathers/fatherhood 10, 19, 33, 111, 156, 159, 200–4 lack of affect 17, 23, 26, 34, 52, 71, 79, 86, 133–4 links with historical Jesus 11–15, 26–8, 41, 49, 55, 120, 132, 161–2, 172, 188 links with other Coetzee works 18, 33–4, 43, 59–60, 132–3, 144, 155, 177, 188–9, 196–202 magic 13, 15, 45, 113, 144 mathematics 24, 41–2, 111–12, 131, 137–9, 141–5 morality 168–9, 172, 178–80, 182–4 mothers/motherhood 10–11, 13, 17, 111, 132, 156, 161, 179, 202–3 names of characters 13, 19, 37–8, 45, 75, 120, 188 philosophy 12, 17–18, 19–22, 73–4, 88–90, 100, 118 reading 15, 42, 44, 111–12, 121–2, 137, 160 realism vs fantasy 12, 28, 59, 85, 91 rebellion/resistance 23, 26, 52, 109–10, 136, 141–2, 159, 196 schooling 11, 76, 93, 141 utopia 25, 34, 43, 50, 54, 86–7, 90–1, 190–1 views on human nature 16–17, 25, 89 work 10, 52–4, 68, 72, 92, 191 Coetzee, J. M. Age of Iron 91, 154–5

212 Index archival material 59–60, 172–3 biography 35–6, 94, 129, 149, 205 and Borges 93–5 Boyhood 152, 205 and colonialism 33, 36, 171, 196 Diary of a Bad Year 2, 59, 84, 188, 197–8 Disgrace 1, 154, 170, 177, 191, 195, 198, 200, 202 Doubling the Point 165 Dusklands 1, 60, 91, 144, 151, 153 ‘Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett’ 206–7 Elizabeth Costello 2, 18, 154, 188–9, 193–4, 198, 205 Foe 18, 119–20, 154, 188, 195–7 ‘He and His Man’ 132–3 Here and Now 1, 195, 198, 205, 207 In the Heart of the Country 60, 153–5 late style 1, 198–9, 207–8 Life and Times of Michael K 43, 173–6, 190, 195–7 Master of Petersburg, The 33–4, 119–20, 154, 200–2 and mathematics 129–30, 144 and Murnane 115–16, 119–22, 125, 127 and Musil 170 Nobel Prize 117, 132, 135, 149–50, 153 and parents 149–50, 152–5 and poetry 129–30, 176 postmodernism 183, 193–6, 208 Slow Man 2, 20, 75–6, 78, 177, 188, 197–8 Summertime 2, 152–3 and translation 94–5 Waiting for the Barbarians 158, 189, 196–7 Youth 152, 205 Conrad, Joseph 199 Dante Aligheri 25–6 Defoe, Daniel 119–20, 188, 195 democracy 50, 53, 55 Derrida, Jacques 34–6, 42–3, 49–51, 53, 55, 171 Descartes, René 79, 108, 112

desire 17–18, 20–3, 34, 46, 52–3, 69–71, 86–8, 95–6, 109, 133–4 see also eros dialogue 42, 70, 88, 165, 167, 169–70, 182–3 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 115, 119 Douglas, Mary 64, 68 Driver, Dorothy 149 Dumont, Bruno 12 el-Khoury, Rodolphe 65 Elias, Norbert 62 Éluard, Paul 122–3 eros 17, 20–2, 26, 30 faeces 61–6, 73, 78–9, 191–2 Ford, Ford Madox 129 forgetting 84–5, 96, 98, 108, 145 see also memory Foucault, Michel 171 Frank, Joseph 115 Freud, Sigmund 38, 49 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 18–19, 48–9, 157 good, the/universal good 22, 50, 53, 109, 113, 167–8, 175 Gordimer, Nadine 91 gospels apocryphal 3, 14–15, 38–40, 161 New Testament 13–14, 37, 38, 41, 47, 49, 55, 132, 188, 195 Grimm brothers 59 Haddad, Samir 51, 53 Hawkins, Gay 65–6 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 26–7 Heidegger, Martin 179 history 16, 26, 47, 52–4, 89, 193–4 Hobbes, Thomas 174–5 hospitality 50–1, 97 idealism 107, 111–18, 123–7, 135 Inglis, David 61–2 intertextuality 4, 10, 12, 17, 28–9, 75, 115, 160, 173 intuition 108–14, 124, 133, 144–5, 180

Index James, William 47 Jameson, Fredric 193 Joyce, James 35, 111, 192 justice 20, 22, 26, 54 Kafka, Franz 12, 43, 49, 170, 174–5, 181, 189–90, 193, 195 Kant, Immanuel 109, 124, 175 Kleist, Heinrich von 12, 173–5 Kristeva, Julia 73 Kurtz, Arabella 154, 176 Lacan, Jacques 52–3, 63, 70, 77, 171 language 34–7, 47–50, 76, 93–6, 157–9, 163 language acquisition 43–4, 93 Laporte, Dominique 65–6 law 18, 35, 53, 76–7, 80, 83, 174–5, 189, 197 breaking the law 45, 49, 52, 76–7 of hospitality 50–1 natural or scientific laws 12, 79, 99, 136–8, 161 religious 37, 40 Lefort, Claude 53 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 114, 181 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 43 Lyotard, Jean-François 171 Marais, Mike 50, 153 Maurois, André 121 Melville, Herman 207 memory 9, 15, 98, 108, 125–6, 162, 165–6 Ménard, Pierre 47 migration 44, 50, 83–5, 92–3, 96–100, 165–6 Mo Yan 117 modernity 59, 62, 65–7, 69–70, 79, 167, 175 More, Thomas 87 Morris, William 190 Murnane, Gerald 115–16, 119–27 Murphet, Julian 188, 198 Musil, Robert 170 Nabokov, Vladimir 165–7

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Nietzsche, Friedrich 15, 17, 22, 26, 30, 34, 168 nominalism 112–13, 136–7, 140–3 Plato desire 21–2, 87 dialogue 42, 167 the ideal and the real 12, 20, 22, 28, 72, 88–90, 107, 115, 140 knowledge and intuition 41, 108, 111–12, 114, 117, 176 Phaedrus 3, 20, 42, 107–9 and Pluto 19, 41–2, 88 Republic, The, politics and utopias 3–4, 20, 25–6, 53, 87, 89, 91 Poincaré, Henri 144–5 pollution 63–5, 68 postmodern literature 29, 46, 183, 193–6, 208 Proust, Marcel 49, 121 Puiggrós, Adriana 92 punctum 150–1, 163 Quine, Willard 140–1 Rabelais, François 191–2 Ravindranathan, Thangam 154 refugees 60, 67–8, 83–5, 100, 166 Rich, Adrienne 155 Rilke, Rainer Maria 165, 167 Roth, Philip 61 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 174–5 Said, Edward 1, 198–9, 208 Sarlo, Beatriz 97 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino 93 Schubert, Franz 18, 157 Seshagiri, Urmila 92 Shakespeare, William 118 shame 62–4 Slumdog Millionaire 61 social contract 174–6 socialist utopianism 10, 86–7, 135, 190 South Africa 1–2, 33, 35, 154, 173, 189, 196 Spinoza, Baruch 108–9 Swift, Jonathan 191–2

214 Index third brother stories 74, 138, 192 totalitarianism 53 translation 38, 43, 70, 93–5, 157–8 truth 28, 47, 77–8, 107–9, 111–15, 124, 127, 142, 176, 183 utopia 4, 25, 33–4, 43, 50, 54, 86–7, 90, 190–1 Vargas Llosa, Mario 95 Vaucanson, Jacques de 78

Vespucci, Amerigo 87 Voltaire 114 Walkowitz, Rebecca 92 waste 67–73, 77 see also faeces; pollution Watson, Stephen 91 White, Patrick 122 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 16, 24–25, 36 Yates, Frances A. 125