J. M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus

The Ethics of Ideas and Things

Anthony Uhlmann, Jennifer Rutherford

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501318634
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Since the controversy and acclaim that surrounded the publication of Disgrace ( 1999), the awarding of the Nobel Prize for literature and the publication of Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (both in 2003), J. M. Coetzee's status has begun to steadily rise to the point where he has now outgrown the specialized domain of South African literature. Today he is recognized more simply as one of the most important writers in the English language from the late 20th and early 21st century. Coetzee's productivity and invention has not slowed with old age. The Childhood of Jesus, published in 2013, like Elizabeth Costello, was met with a 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. J.M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus: The Ethics of Ideas and Things is at the forefront of an exciting process of critical engagement with this novel, which has begun to uncover its rich dialogue with philosophy, theology, mathematics, politics, and questions of meaning.

1

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 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, 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.

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 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 privat...

Table of contents

• Title
• Contents 
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction 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
• 2 Pathos of the Future: Writing and Hospitality in The Childhood of Jesus Jean-Michel Rabaté
• 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
• 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
• Section IV Ethical and Stylistic Concerns
• 7 J. M. Coetzee and the Parental Punctum Sue Kossew
• 8 Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus and the Moral Image of the World Tim Mehigan
• 9 Beyond the Literary Theme Park: J. M. Coetzee’s Late Style in The Childhood of Jesus Yoshiki Tajiri
• Index
• Copyright