The Death of Jesus
by J. M. Coetzee
(Viking, May 2020)
Reviewed by Marc Farrant
During a 1992 interview with Nobel Prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee, critic Richard Begam surfaced the well-worn issue of the death of the novel, positing that literature had “fallen into a debilitating narcissism” which produces works “of interest only to the academic” before asking after Coetzee’s thoughts. Notoriously taciturn in public and thoughtful in interviews, Coetzee suggested that the tightening bond between writers and the academy has indeed led to more esoteric forms of the novel, and with regard to himself: “Yes, I may indeed be cutting myself off, at least from today’s readers; nevertheless, what I am engaged in doing is more important than maintaining that contact.” Since the 1990s, it is tempting to see a correlation between increased academic interest in Coetzee’s works and his decreasing engagement with, and from, the public. Coetzee’s Nobel Prize in 2003 largely recognized him as the preeminent writer of the South African experience, for example, as we see in the powerful apartheid allegory Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). Disgrace (1999) grappled with the country’s uneasy transition to a post-apartheid state by reflecting on the career and disgrace of a middle-aged academic. The truth, however, is that by 2003 South Africa had receded into the rearview mirror and Coetzee’s new work, Elizabeth Costello, was positioned firmly on academic soil. This philosophical novel, featuring an eponymous academic protagonist touring the world delivering lectures on topics such as animal rights and renaissance humanism, set the tone for Coetzee’s writings in the 2000s, including the Jesus trilogy and its culminating installment, The Death of Jesus.
Elizabeth Costello anticipates the theological themes of the Jesus trilogy, especially in its final section, which features a quasi-allegorical (Elizabeth finds it “Kafkaesque”) rendition of purgatory, outside of recognizable time and space. Several of Coetzee’s later works insist on this engagement with the theological, especially as an antithesis to the rational ordering of life definitive of Enlightenment modernity (an ordering that Coetzee suggests cannot help but be exclusionary—of the animal, of the colonized, of the other). The Jesus novels perpetuate this theme but, even more so than the earlier works, resist the inclination to explain themselves. For instance, they never explain why the young Jesus figure is in fact called David. Critics have speculated that the trilogy is loosely based on the apocryphal gospels and their account of a reckless and petulant God-king in his nascent years, yet Coetzee’s abstraction fails to deliver a key that would unlock them. Indeed, if Elizabeth Costello was more explicitly a roman-à-clef—with the middle-aged Australian Elizabeth serving as avatar for the recently relocated Coetzee (who now resides in Adelaide)—the Jesus novels also play with the ideas of allegories and keys.
The trilogy takes place in a fictionalized Latin America where everyone speaks Spanish. In the first novel, The Childhood of Jesus, David arrives via boat at this purgatorial landscape with his adopted father, Simon. Simon, whose perspective is welded to the third-person narrator (we are constantly reminded of this in the second and third novels by the formulation “he, Simon,” which prevents the reader from being lured in by the neutral, omniscient voice), arranges their accommodation and registration in their new home Novilla (No-town). When asking for access to his room he makes the mistake, in Spanish (which fits incongruently into the English prose, breaking the illusion that what we are reading is a transliteration of the Spanish the characters must themselves be speaking), of asking for a llave universal, a universal key, instead of a Llave maestra. The benign but bemused bureaucrat responds: “Llave maestra. There is no such thing as a llave universal. If we had a llave universal all our troubles would be over.”
These troubles continue through the subsequent novels, which take place in Estrella (Star). From the range of critical responses to the The Death of Jesus, it seems fair to suggest that many had hoped for more by the time of this final installment, and Coetzee’s continued withholding of meaning right to the end has provoked a sense that this new novel of ideas might be lacking in novel ideas. By the time of The Death of Jesus, David is ten, and an accomplished dancer. At the start of the novel, we meet the forthright Dr. Julio Fabricante, the head of a local orphanage, who is keen to recruit David onto his football team. This sparks a continued engagement with the figure of the orphan (an oblique reference to David’s virgin birth, perhaps), a figure that fascinates the young boy’s adventurous and romantic imagination (his hero is that great adventurer/illusionist, Don Quixote). Whereas Simon “lives in the present like an ox,” the precocious David increasingly becomes prophet-like, drawing hordes of young acolytes to hear him tell stories. He tells of the adventures of Don Quixote, which feature enticing allusions, such as an episode with a burning bush that speaks to the Don. “Things don’t have to be true to be true,” David blurts out at one point.
Like The Childhood of Jesus’s universal key, David feels himself to be a “universal exception,” despite Simon’s protestations. “A universal exception is a contradiction in terms,” Simon asserts. “It makes no sense.” When David flees his adopted parents to join Fabricante’s troop of orphaned boys, a wider theme of exceptionality emerges: the figure of the orphan as precisely that of a universal exception in society (and, located outside the town, the orphanage as a site of exception). David takes on a sense of duty toward the orphans, marking another parallel with Coetzee’s interest in lost causes and forgotten others (the dying dogs in Disgrace are a prime example, and at a certain point David refuses to continue to eat meat). David’s illness is also exceptional, and it is never made clear precisely what ails him. While in the hospital, he is reacquainted with his devout follower, Dmitri, a convicted murderer who in the previous novel—The Schooldays of Jesus—committed the crime passionnel of killing Ana Magdalena, David’s lead instructor at the Academy of Dance. Simon is mortified but can do nothing. Dmitri assumes charge over the boy’s body when he dies, and purports to be the bearer of David’s final “message.” Toward the end, he writes to Simon: “I am sure you are aware how unimportant names are. I could just as well have been named Simon, you could just as well have been named Dmitri. And as for David, who cares now what his real name was.” Instead of nominative determinism Dmitri proposes a numerical determinism: “Number rules the universe—that, I can now divulge, was part of David’s message (but only part).” An orphan is thus one without a number, and indeed Simon takes pains to make sure David is not registered on the state census. This makes David exceptional, atypical because he is uncounted. But for Dmitri (and David himself) numbers are not circumscribed by the laws of logical sequence. On the one hand, David is uncounted, on the other hand, David is uncountable. All three novels are delicately poised on the pivot point between these two propositions.
Naming and numbering—and more broadly David’s education as a whole—trickle intricately in the form of the novel itself. The Death of Jesus is the shortest book in the trilogy, and the economy and simplicity of the overall plot (there are few turning points, denouements, and significant events) is incongruously juxtaposed by a precision at the level of the sentence. This is most marked by Simon’s occasional over-weighty parenting. Despite David’s peevishness, Simon’s corrections appear needlessly pedantic (a bit like David Lurie’s obsession with grammatical tense in Disgrace). As with the previous novels, there is something peculiarly moving about the affectless or neutral presentation of the lengthy dialogue scenes. By exploring the ontology of the question Coetzee invites a slow approach to reading:
“But I don’t want to be this boy, Simon! In the next life I want to be me but I don’t want to be this boy. Can I do that?”
“The rule says you do not have a choice. The rule says you have to be the one you are and no one else. But you have never obeyed rules, have you? So in the next life I am sure you will manage to be who you want to be. You just have to be strong and decisive about it. Who exactly is this boy whom you do not want to be?”
“This boy.” He gestures toward his body, with its wasted legs.
By resisting excessive description and remaining at an arm’s length from his characters, Coetzee’s Kafka-like narration remains compelling; its failure to solicit a conventional emotional response that we associate with the novel genre is part of the drive. This distance not only fosters the philosophical tone of the dialogue but is key to the ideas and themes in the work—indeed, to the overall meaning of the novel itself. How seriously are we to take the seriousness Coetzee affords to his craft, the seriousness he affords to words, when these words never quite deliver? By refusing to add up to some take-home “message,” or some isolatable truth, the novels perform the very question that animates them: What does life add up to, in the end? What is the value of an individual life? And how do we measure it?
The two answers the trilogy presents lie in the difference between Simon and David, who, taken together, constitute the twin sides of Coetzee’s own authorship. Simon is coolly rational, recalling Coetzee’s origins as a computer programmer. David is an arch anti-rationalist following in the spirit of Elizabeth Costello and Coetzee’s many protagonists who choose the heart over the head. David represents that side of the author for whom reason is a self-enclosed system whose outputs merely imitate those biased and all-too-human inputs that determine any calculation. In The Death of Jesus, the work’s content, the story itself, seems to favor this latter model: We too ought to embrace David’s philosophy of life and disdain for arithmetic. The novel’s form, however, holds back and swaddles this option in a blanket of irony. “True reading,” Simon tells David, “means hearing what the book has to say and pondering it,” not merely turning printed signs into sounds and making up fantasies as we like. But what does this dialogical account of reading mean for us; that we ought to look beyond the referential, the literal, or that, as Simon asserts, we ought to register “the world as it really is”? Toward the end, Simon is gathering David’s things and finds the boy’s copy of Don Quixote, which contains a library slip in its back cover. The slip is addressed to the book’s young readers (but also to us, Coetzee’s readers), and asks: “What is the message of this book? What will you most of all remember of it?” David’s handwriting is absent from the list of responses. The novel hereby closes, leaving the choice between Simon’s reality and David’s fantasy held in abeyance.
All three Jesus novels are concerned with the life after death, but none more so than this final work. This life is one’s legacy, and it feels that by posing the problem of how to value, how to read, an individual’s life, Coetzee is also allegorizing once again the author’s life and the legacy that a writer, a storyteller, may leave behind. David ultimately fails to transcend the world, but the Jesus fictions maintain the idea that transcendence need not be a flight away from reality but something more like an uncountable, or unreadable, change within reality. After the boy’s death Simon poignantly tells Ines, David’s adopted mother: “The world may be as it was before, but it is also different. We must hold tight to that difference, you and I.” Holding tight to the difference is perhaps what Coetzee means by doing something more important than maintaining contact with “today’s readers.” Far from offering consolation or meaning, these works constitute a powerful allegory of a world bereft of meaning; of a world in mourning. This world is ours. One is reminded of Georges Bataille’s comment on the mendacity of the world: “Moreover, it is time in any case to oppose this mendacious world with the resources of an irony, a shrewdness, a serenity without illusions. If the world insists on blowing up, we may be the only ones to grant it the right to do so, while giving ourselves the right to have spoken in vain.” If the Jesus novels are vain, then they are triumphantly and defiantly so.
In some respects Coetzee’s Jesus enterprise is like the particle-spinning Large Hadron Collider. The novels are the product of a supreme intelligence, located far away from civilization and unencumbered by the petite histoires of life in the twenty-first century. They are made of elements whose genius remains invisible to the naked eye and whose conjunctions and combinations yield cosmic results. They open on to a black hole of meaning that will defy the academic critics who will now pour in to pigeonhole these works in terms of biopolitics or postsecularism or animal studies or affect theory. In a positivist age, these philosophical novels don’t quite fit, just as David never really fits. Yet like David they burn brightly across the sky, never quite entering the celestial sphere while holding tight to the possibility of a minimal difference in our own. Far from fleeing the world in the name of an intellectual-fictional experiment, Coetzee makes the world, and the banality of its tragedies, inescapable. Unlike, for example, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which uses the figure of the child to embody the moral conscience of a fallen world, David functions as a looking glass for a world whose moral conscience seems bereft, platitudinous, and vapid. The novel both mocks our clumsy association of childhood and innocence as well as celebrates it; David’s ethical virtue is to present a challenge to virtue’s inevitable ossification in the form of cliché. So what does this book teach us? The importance of compassion, the power of fantasy, the illusion of neat origins and firm endings. Probably all this and more, but Coetzee’s art is in the probably.
Marc Farrant lectures in modern and contemporary literature and theory at the University of Amsterdam. He completed his PhD on Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee, and he is a Senior Editor at Review31.
Banner: Catedral de la Almudena, Madrid, by Joan. Reproduced under CC BY-NC 2.0 license.