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'AFTER The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, J. M. Coetzee completes his trilogy with a new masterwork, The Death of Jesus.
'David loves to kick a soccer ball with his friends in Estrella. His father, Simón, and Bolívar the dog usually watch. His mother, Inés, works in a fashion boutique.
'David still asks lots of questions. In dancing class, he dances as he chooses. He refuses to do sums and the only book he will read is Don Quixote.
'One day, Julio Fabricante, the director of a nearby orphanage, invites David and his friends to form a proper soccer team. David decides to leave Simón and Inés and live with Julio. Before long he succumbs to a mysterious illness. Will he have time to deliver his ‘message’?
'In The Death of Jesus, J. M. Coetzee continues to explore the meaning of a world brimming with questions.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
The Childhood of Jesus
Melbourne
:
Text Publishing
,
2013
Z1908494
2013
single work
novel
(taught in 2 units)
''The child is silent. For a while he too is silent. Then he speaks. '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. Yet I promise you, if you will simply say Yes, without forethought, without afterthought, all will become clear to you, as clear as day, or so I believe. Therefore: will you accept this child as yours?'
The Schooldays of Jesus
Melbourne
:
Text Publishing
,
2016
9704550
2016
single work
single work
novel
'When you travel across the ocean on a boat, all your memories are washed away and you start a completely new life. That is how it is. There is no before. There is no history. The boat docks at the harbour and we climb down the gangplank and we are plunged into the here and now. Time begins.'
'David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simón and Inés take care of him in their new country. He is learning the language; he has begun to make friends. He has the big dog Bolívar to watch over him. But he’ll be seven soon. He should be at school. And so David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance in Estrella. It’s here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky. But it’s here too that he will make troubling discoveries about what grown-ups are capable of.'
'The Schooldays of Jesus, the startling sequel to J. M. Coetzee’s widely praised The Childhood of Jesus, will beguile its readers. With the mysterious simplicity of a fable, it tells a story that raises the most direct questions about life itself.' (Source: Text Publishing website)
'The article focuses on Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus while referring also to the earlier two novels in what is called the ‘Jesus trilogy’. Instead of pursuing the trail of literary studies – novels of migration, of the postcolonies of the South, of whether in their formal representation the novels are allegories or not allegories – I turn towards religious studies. As the novels do, I grant significance to Coetzee’s ideas on a moral education in contexts of ideological duplicity; on the struggle of the soul between passion and reason; and on a message that society anticipates from an exceptional child who wishes to be a saviour. Beneath such concerns, I argue, we encounter the palimpsest of an older story: that of Jesus of Nazareth, to which the name ‘Jesus’ in the title of each novel should have pointed us but did not. Like the almost invisible author, the reader in secular times is reluctant, perhaps, to venture beyond earthly belief and engage with the challenge of what Walter Benjamin termed the ‘spiritual rag picker’ of ‘weak messianic power’. How does The Death of Jesus, or indeed Coetzee, struggle with such a challenge?' (Publication abstract)
Metaphysical Exile : On J.M. Coetzee's Jesus Fictions
Oxford
:
Oxford University Press
,
2021
22006425
2021
multi chapter work
criticism
'This is the first detailed interpretation of J. M. Coetzee’s “Jesus” trilogy as a whole. Robert Pippin treats the three “fictions” as a philosophical fable, in the tradition of Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Rousseau’s Emile, or Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Everyone in the mythical land explored by Coetzee is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place, and they have all had most of the memories of their homeland “erased.” While also discussing the social and psychological dimensions of the fable, Pippin treats the literary aspects of the fictions as philosophical explorations of the implications of a deeper kind of spiritual homelessness, a version that characterizes late modern life itself, and he treats the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection and self-knowledge. So, the state of exile is interpreted as “metaphysical” as well as geographical. In the course of an interpretation of the central narrative about a young boy’s education, Pippin shows how a number of issues arise, are discussed and lived out by the characters, all in ways that also suggest the limitations of traditional philosophical treatments of themes like eros, beauty, social order, art, family, non-discursive forms of intelligibility, self-deception, and death. Pippin also offers an interpretation of the references to Jesus in the titles, and he traces and interprets the extensive inter-textuality of the fictions, the many references to the Christian Bible, Plato, Cervantes, Goethe, Kleist, Wittgenstein, and others. Throughout, the attempt is to show how the literary form of Coetzee’s fictions ought to be considered, just as literary—a form of philosophical reflection.'
Source : publisher's blurb
'J. M. Coetzee has written two trilogies: Scenes from Provincial Life, his thinly fictionalized tripartite memoir, and the “Jesus” novels, of which The Death of Jesus is the slim, fittingly titled final installment. In the third book of both series, we must contend with the death of a central figure: in Summertime, the final part of Scenes, it is the author John Coetzee; in The Death of Jesus, it is David, an extraordinary young boy who leaves the world having only partly relayed his message. There are some very obvious conclusions to draw here. They are conclusions reminiscent of the messianic terms in which Wamuwi Mbao discusses Coetzee and his “followers” in his review of Photographs from Boyhood, an exhibition of Coetzee’s childhood photography: “If they could sit at his feet,” Mbao says of the writer’s acolytes, “I suspect they would.” A fair conclusion, I’d say.' (Introduction)
'Let’s imagine that after this life, or perhaps before it, perhaps as a step in an endless transmigration of souls, we arrive by ship in a new land. Our memories of a previous existence are washed away. A beneficent but impersonal bureaucracy assigns us names and ages – the ages are apparently chosen by guesswork on the basis of how old we look – and arranges for us to learn Spanish, the language spoken in this new life. The state then pays us a resettlement allowance and leaves us to our own devices in a country that has cars, hospitals and law courts but little in the way of heavy industry, policing or politics. The landscape and the language suggest we’re in a temperate part of Latin America: Argentina or Uruguay, perhaps. But this is a country without a past, a colony or a province without a metropole or a concept of race or ethnicity. People go placidly about their business, sometimes engaging in philosophical debate. ‘There is no before. There is no history. The boat docks at the harbour and we climb down the gangplank and we are plunged into the here and now.’ What would our lives be like under these conditions?' (Introduction)
'Back in 2013, JM Coetzee, a writer whose fictions had long combined philosophical investigation, formal experiment and political engagement, published a novel that seemed in some respects typically ‘‘Coetzean’’. Yet it unfolded in a manner unlike anything he had written before.' (Introduction)
'Before Jesus became the man-god of Christianity, he was a brat. Or so say the Infancy Gospels, gnostic folk tales popular in their day but left out of the Scriptures for obvious reasons. The stories feature a boy Jesus too immature to control his supernatural powers. He kills friends who anger him, then revives them. Teachers who mistake his wisdom for impudence are made to fall down in a faint. His parents don’t know what to do with him.' (Introduction)
'Let’s imagine that after this life, or perhaps before it, perhaps as a step in an endless transmigration of souls, we arrive by ship in a new land. Our memories of a previous existence are washed away. A beneficent but impersonal bureaucracy assigns us names and ages – the ages are apparently chosen by guesswork on the basis of how old we look – and arranges for us to learn Spanish, the language spoken in this new life. The state then pays us a resettlement allowance and leaves us to our own devices in a country that has cars, hospitals and law courts but little in the way of heavy industry, policing or politics. The landscape and the language suggest we’re in a temperate part of Latin America: Argentina or Uruguay, perhaps. But this is a country without a past, a colony or a province without a metropole or a concept of race or ethnicity. People go placidly about their business, sometimes engaging in philosophical debate. ‘There is no before. There is no history. The boat docks at the harbour and we climb down the gangplank and we are plunged into the here and now.’ What would our lives be like under these conditions?' (Introduction)
'It is commonly accepted that the modern European novel begins with Don Quixote. Lionel Trilling went so far as to claim that the entire history of the modern novel could be interpreted as variations on themes set out in Cervantes’s great originating work. And the quality that is usually taken to mark Don Quixote as ‘modern’ is its irony. It is a fiction about fiction. The new sensibility it inaugurated begins in a spirit of mockery, ridiculing the obsolete genre of chivalric romance, insisting on the disconnection between reality and fantasy. As a character observes in The Childhood of Jesus (2013), the first novel in J.M. Coetzee’s trilogy about a precocious orphan named David and his accidental guardian, Simón, the innovation of Don Quixote is to view the world through two sets of eyes: where Quixote sees giants, his loyal sidekick, Sancho Panza, sees only windmills.' (Introduction)
'J. M. Coetzee has written two trilogies: Scenes from Provincial Life, his thinly fictionalized tripartite memoir, and the “Jesus” novels, of which The Death of Jesus is the slim, fittingly titled final installment. In the third book of both series, we must contend with the death of a central figure: in Summertime, the final part of Scenes, it is the author John Coetzee; in The Death of Jesus, it is David, an extraordinary young boy who leaves the world having only partly relayed his message. There are some very obvious conclusions to draw here. They are conclusions reminiscent of the messianic terms in which Wamuwi Mbao discusses Coetzee and his “followers” in his review of Photographs from Boyhood, an exhibition of Coetzee’s childhood photography: “If they could sit at his feet,” Mbao says of the writer’s acolytes, “I suspect they would.” A fair conclusion, I’d say.' (Introduction)
Metaphysical Exile : On J.M. Coetzee's Jesus Fictions
Oxford
:
Oxford University Press
,
2021
22006425
2021
multi chapter work
criticism
'This is the first detailed interpretation of J. M. Coetzee’s “Jesus” trilogy as a whole. Robert Pippin treats the three “fictions” as a philosophical fable, in the tradition of Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Rousseau’s Emile, or Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Everyone in the mythical land explored by Coetzee is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place, and they have all had most of the memories of their homeland “erased.” While also discussing the social and psychological dimensions of the fable, Pippin treats the literary aspects of the fictions as philosophical explorations of the implications of a deeper kind of spiritual homelessness, a version that characterizes late modern life itself, and he treats the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection and self-knowledge. So, the state of exile is interpreted as “metaphysical” as well as geographical. In the course of an interpretation of the central narrative about a young boy’s education, Pippin shows how a number of issues arise, are discussed and lived out by the characters, all in ways that also suggest the limitations of traditional philosophical treatments of themes like eros, beauty, social order, art, family, non-discursive forms of intelligibility, self-deception, and death. Pippin also offers an interpretation of the references to Jesus in the titles, and he traces and interprets the extensive inter-textuality of the fictions, the many references to the Christian Bible, Plato, Cervantes, Goethe, Kleist, Wittgenstein, and others. Throughout, the attempt is to show how the literary form of Coetzee’s fictions ought to be considered, just as literary—a form of philosophical reflection.'
Source : publisher's blurb
'The article focuses on Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus while referring also to the earlier two novels in what is called the ‘Jesus trilogy’. Instead of pursuing the trail of literary studies – novels of migration, of the postcolonies of the South, of whether in their formal representation the novels are allegories or not allegories – I turn towards religious studies. As the novels do, I grant significance to Coetzee’s ideas on a moral education in contexts of ideological duplicity; on the struggle of the soul between passion and reason; and on a message that society anticipates from an exceptional child who wishes to be a saviour. Beneath such concerns, I argue, we encounter the palimpsest of an older story: that of Jesus of Nazareth, to which the name ‘Jesus’ in the title of each novel should have pointed us but did not. Like the almost invisible author, the reader in secular times is reluctant, perhaps, to venture beyond earthly belief and engage with the challenge of what Walter Benjamin termed the ‘spiritual rag picker’ of ‘weak messianic power’. How does The Death of Jesus, or indeed Coetzee, struggle with such a challenge?' (Publication abstract)
