Reason and Its Others in Coetzee's Jesus Novels

The trajectory of J. M. Coetzee's career as a novelist—some would say the foremost novelist writing in English over the past forty years—is not a straightforward one. Beginning with two works uncompromisingly in the modernist tradition, the disparate pair of novellas titled Dusklands (1974) and the numbered paragraphs of In the Heart of the Country (1977), he shifted to a more accessible style, and achieved international recognition, with Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). There followed a series of novels each of which marked a new direction: Life & Times of Michael K (1983) is set in an imaginary near future and Foe (1986) in an equally imaginary eighteenth century; Age of Iron (1990) takes the form of an impossible letter; The Master of Petersburg (1994) presents a fictional episode in the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Only with Disgrace (1999) did Coetzee undertake a novel that, although not without its opacities, follows realist conventions (one reason, no doubt, for its huge popular success). Subsequent works again struck out in new directions, troubling familiar distinctions between fiction and nonfiction (Elizabeth Costello [2003] and Diary of a Bad Year [2007]), between fiction and autobiography (Boyhood [1997], Youth [2002], and Summertime [2009]), and between character and author (Slow Man [2002]). After this wide-ranging exploration of the possibilities of the novel, Coetzee's next move was anybody's guess—but no one could have surmised that it would be a work titled The Childhood of Jesus (2013). Surprising in a different way was what followed: not the accustomed change of direction, but two more novels in the same vein, The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) and The Death of Jesus (2019).1 These three works, set in an unnamed country inhabited by a population of immigrants cleansed of memories of their former lives and speaking a newly learned Spanish, are as strange as anything Coetzee has written; critical responses, though respectful, have registered bafflement and sometimes disappointment. If Coetzee can imagine a world as richly detailed as the setting of Waiting for the Barbarians or recreate reality as vividly as in Age of Iron or Disgrace, why has he opted for a fictional style that eschews physical description, devotes page after page to philosophical (or pseudo-philosophical) dialogue, and makes little use of the available novelistic resources to absorb and beguile the reader?We might begin to answer these questions by observing two of the most significant continuities in Coetzee's fictional (and semifictional) oeuvre. First, all his writing engages with questions that have been central to moral and political philosophy for centuries; these include questions about ethical responsibilities to others, especially groups subject to ill-use by those in power (a category that includes animals), the role of sexual desire in ethical life, the notion of a just society, and the place of reason in achieving such a society.2 They also make a case, both by example and in their own fictions, for literature's capacity to throw light on these vital issues in ways unavailable to philosophy. And second, all his writing is characterized by a highly economical style, eschewing rhetorical flourishes, extended description, and discursive elaboration. It is no surprise to find in his draft materials reworkings of sentences extending to twelve or more versions. Not for Coetzee the project of entertaining readers by exploiting language's capacity to meander and proliferate; his work is at the opposite extreme from that of, say, Philip Roth or David Foster Wallace. (This is one reason why his writing cannot be called “post-modern”; if a label is necessary, a better one would be “late modern.”) Coetzee's debt to Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett has been amply acknowledged (by himself as well as by others), but it's not the Kafka of The Castle or the Beckett of The Unnamable so much as the shorter, starker fictions; moreover, his writing resists—even while it sometimes foregrounds—the allegorical mode, preferring to represent directly the inner struggles of his central characters, however “unrealistic” the setting.The three Jesus novels, far from constituting a break with Coetzee's earlier output, manifest these two characteristics to a marked degree. Like their predecessors, they ask important questions about such topics as social justice, sexual desire, and responsibility to the other, although more than ever these questions arise in the course of dialogues between characters. And their style is even more pared back, relying very little on descriptive color or metaphorical richness, and unafraid to employ cliché. One is tempted to term it “late style,” bearing in mind Theodor Adorno's comments on late Beethoven (developed by Edward Said in the essays collected under the title On Late Style); certainly, some of Adorno's remarks ring true with these novels: “From the very late Beethoven we have extremely ‘expressionless,’ distanced works” (564); and “Everywhere in his formal language, even where it avails itself of such a singular syntax as in the last five piano sonatas, one finds formulas and phrases of convention scattered about” (565). Coetzee's own comments, when asked by Paul Auster for his views on Said's argument, are relevant here: “In the case of literature, late style, to me, starts with an ideal of a simple, subdued, unornamented language and a concentration of questions of real import, even questions of life and death” (Here 97).3 But here too there is continuity as well as departure: in a 1983 interview with Tony Morphet, Coetzee confessed, “I don't have much interest in, or can't seriously engage myself with, the kind of realism that takes pride in copying the ‘real’ world,” and added that the attempt to create a “world out of place and time” as he did in Waiting for the Barbarians “was an immense labour” (455). In once more creating such a world in the Jesus novels he has abandoned the exercise of this labor in favor of an intense focus on the “questions of real import.”An initial question in coming to grips with these three novels is whether or not it's appropriate to treat them as a trilogy. This may seem to be a non-question: they trace in chronological sequence the activities of the same three characters, Simón, whose exclusive perspective holds sway throughout; David, the boy he adopted on the voyage from their previous existence; and Inés, the woman he chooses to be David's mother—not to mention the dog, Bolívar. There are small inconsistencies that are easy to ignore, such as the accent in “Davíd” in Schooldays, unnecessary in Spanish and absent in the other two novels, and the change in the name of the city to which the small group is headed at the end of Childhood from “Estrellita” to “Estrella” in the subsequent novel.Less easy to dismiss are some more significant differences, especially between Childhood and the later two novels, which is to say between the narrative of Novilla (the city that first accommodates Simón and David) and the narrative of Estrella. A major preoccupation of the first novel, because it's a major preoccupation of Simón's, is the unusual character of Novillan society and the mode of life of its citizens. Reason dominates social organization as well as personal activities and attitudes. Simón is struck by such quasi-socialist features such as free buses, the availability of (unskilled) employment, the provision of basic accommodation and cheap food, and the centrally organized brothels. And there is a generally accepted moderation of emotions and attachments, including a belief in the virtue of “goodwill,” an absence of passionate love, and a willingness to live on a diet consisting largely of bread and bean paste.By contrast, we hear nothing of such peculiarities in Estrella, which appears to be an unremarkable modern town, “a sleepy provincial city with an exiguous cultural life” (D 29). Its cultural life is not all that exiguous, in fact; it has an Academy of Dance and an Academy of Singing, an “Atom School,” an art museum, an antiques store, bookshops in the “old quarter” (S 204), a record store, a conjurer for hire, several veterinary establishments, and a theater festival. In contrast to the single shop selling fruit and vegetables Simón patronizes in Novilla, we hear of kiosks on Estrellan street corners selling cigarettes and newspapers, a pastelería, a market, and cafes serving coffee and sandwiches. The ladies' outfitters Modas Modernas where Inés works holds a “show to promote the new spring fashions” (S 224), something hard to imagine in the other town. Even the advertisements Simón distributes in Estrella suggest more colorful lives than those of his earlier home: among them are piano lessons, astral consultations, the services of a “lingerie model,” and “Ferdi the Clown, guaranteed to bring your next party to life” (S 224). The contrast between cities with and without spice emerges in a literal fashion at their respective Institutes: in Novilla, Simón finds that the dinner of spaghetti—a rare treat—has no seasoning, nor can he find any salt or pepper to add (C 122), whereas after a cooking course at the Estrellan equivalent he's presented with a “little tray of spices . . . : cumin, ginger, cinnamon, turmeric, red pepper, black pepper” (S 183). And not only is there salt in Estrella; there are salt mines. It is true that not all the citizens of Novilla live moderated and orderly lives, notably the shady señor Daga and the occupants of La Residencia, an upmarket villa, but these are clearly exceptions. And what is especially remarkable is that nobody in Schooldays or Death adverts to the peculiarities of Novilla or its significant differences from the richer and freer life offered by Estrella—not even the members of the little family who have escaped from one to the other. It is as if one whole part of the experience of Novilla has been washed away on the journey. And the focus of the trilogy, taken as a whole, is less on ideas of socialism or migration—as might have appeared from the first novel on its own—than on the questions raised by David's problematic presence.Especially marked is the changing character of Simón. In the context of Novillan moderation, he stands out as the spokesman for passion, for humor, for the gratification of appetites, for the inexplicable, the invisible, the instinctive. He paints himself as “the exception, the dissatisfied one, the misfit,” the only one with “secret yearnings” and “hankerings after another kind of life” (C 64). The diet of bread and bean paste leads to a longing for “[b]eefsteak dripping with meat juices” (C 29). Unlike everyone he encounters in Novilla, he has intimations of his past. He finds no one who reciprocates his sexual desires. At the Institute—where free classes are offered—he seeks to join the life class in which the lovely Anna poses, and finds that the Novillans regard the naked body simply as an educational resource. Above all, there's nothing rational about his election of a complete stranger to be David's “natural” mother. Defending his action to Elena, he asks what is wrong with “native intuition” and what else one can trust; Elena's answer is “Common sense. Reason” (C 104–5). Simón is the exception, then: the man of feeling and impulse among the placid rationalists, the ironist among literalists, the sexual being among upholders of friendship and goodwill. Even when he instigates a rational reordering of the system of grain-handling, his project fails: the existing system, though labor-intensive, has a logic of its own.When, in Schooldays, the little group reaches Estrella, the picture changes entirely. Now, against the background of a city that has none of Novilla's peculiarities, there's a striking reversal: Simón takes on the role of the rationalist, and it's now his interlocutors who advocate the life of feeling, the heart, the mystical. Although in Novilla Simón had relied on intuition to find a mother for David, in Estrella he tells Arroyo, “I have no intuitions. Intuitions are not part of my stock-in-trade” (S 199); and his actions in the second pair of novels are characterized by caution rather than impulse. In his exchanges with David, he “thinks of himself as a sane, rational person who offers the boy a sane, rational elucidation of why things are the way they are” (S 207). As the “man of reason” (S 171, 222, 229), he is repeatedly contrasted with Dmitri, the murderer of Ana Magdalena and later acolyte of David. In Death he reflects on Dmitri's contempt: “He is well aware that Dmitri mocks him behind his back as ‘the man of reason,’ the man whose passions are always under control” (D 102). He calls himself “a dry old stick” (S 119) and “Simón el Lerdo, Simón the Dull” (D 122), and, in imagining himself being reborn under a new star, asks: “Will he cease to be tame, prudent, dull? Will he become (too late!) the man he should have been to be the right father for David: volatile, reckless, passionate?” (D 193–4).What are we to make of this reversal? Is it just that against the background of Novilla Simón appears to be the passionate one, but in the context of Estrella he comes across as the rationalist? Have some of the assumptions that govern life in Novilla brushed off on him?4 Perhaps the answer is just that Simón is a complex character, not to be pigeonholed as either rational or passionate. Towards the end of Schooldays, reflecting on the condition of his soul, he contrasts “what people tell him about it: that it is a dry soul, deficient in passion” with “his own, obscure intuition—that, far from lacking in passion, his soul aches with longing for it knows not what.” Yet even as he thinks this, he reflects that this is “just the kind of story that someone with a dry, rational, deficient soul will tell himself to maintain his self-respect” (S 194).Regarding the most important commitment of his life, however, Simón's outlook remains consistent throughout the three novels: when David proves to be even more resistant to rational thought than he is, he becomes the advocate of reason and logic. One of many examples is their disagreement about the character of Don Quixote: for David, the Don's fantastic images are the reality that the plodding Sancho and others fail to see, and Simón's attempts at inculcating a rational understanding of the novel are to no avail. To the end, Simón keeps defending the Sancho Panza interpretation of the world while David maintains the Quixotic view. It's the same with David's avoidance of cracks in the pavements, his eccentric view of numbers, and his mysterious account of the invisible “dark stars” (D 116–17).In Death, David rounds on Simón: “I don't have reasons for anything. You are the one who has reasons” (36). When David expounds his plan to come back from the “new life” by means of a rope, Simón at first gently pours water on the idea but eventually—in response to the boy's repeated “Why?” —falls back on the statement that “a rule is just a rule. . . . This universe is a universe of rules” (S 206)—though when David, near death, asks him how he knows the rules he is forced to answer, “I do not know how I know” (D 109). Simón's faith in rationality seems to be less than rational. If we are to treat the novels as a trilogy, then, we have to accept that Simón, Inés, and David, in moving from Novilla to Estrella, encounter a new set of challenges, and that Simón, though always playing the part of the rationalist in his discussions with his son, finds his role in relation to the wider society shifting from that of an advocate of passion to that of a defender of reason.One issue that has preoccupied Coetzee throughout his career, as I have suggested, is the role of reason in human behavior and social arrangements. Earlier examples include the satire on the dehumanizing rationality of American military policy in “The Vietnam Project,” Elizabeth Costello's denunciation of reason in The Lives of Animals, and the opinions concerning number and probability by the writer we know only as J. C. in Diary of a Bad Year.5 But the philosophical terrain across which the topic of reason is explored in the Jesus novels is even more extensive, from Plato (a constant presence, as the philosopher of universals who nevertheless relies on fiction and myth) to Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I propose to explore this terrain by examining some of the many words and phrases that suggest alternatives to the operation of, or trust in, reason, in order to clarify both the object of Coetzee's critique and the positive values he endorses in its place. These alternatives include passion, the heart, the soul, desire, faith, laughter, beauty, madness, irony, the miraculous, animality, music and dance (and perhaps, by extension, art); the “new life” and the “next life”; and the name “Jesus” in the three titles. We could add the figures of Daga and Dmitri to this list; and it goes without saying that David belongs here too. Space will allow a consideration of only a selection of these terms.A leading contender as an alternative to reason is passion. In Childhood, the word occurs five times, all of them in a conversation between Simón and Elena: she views his need for passion in a relationship as an example of “an old way of thinking” (C 63). In Schooldays, however, passion or passionate occurs sixty-nine times. In response to a question from six-year-old David about the sex act, Simón tells him, “Passion can't be explained, it can only be experienced. More exactly, it has to be experienced from the inside before it can be understood from the outside” (S 20). Reason is ruled out here, although there's perhaps some irony in Simón's employment of a carefully considered argument to do the ruling out. Again, in his logical way, he explains to David during the latter's interview for admission to the Academy of Singing that a passion for singing is different from a physical passion—though when he reports on the interview to the three sisters who are subsidizing David's education, he condemns the idea that a six-year-old could have a “passion for music.”Most frequently in Schooldays, however, the word is associated with Dmitri and has negative connotations. True to his namesake in The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri is, and sees himself as, a passionate individual, though Simón accuses him of playing up the idea that he is a “man of passion,” rather than merely a criminal (S 143–44). When Simón attempts an exercise for his Spanish teacher at the Institute, he finds himself reflecting on Dmitri's censure: “Dmitri would not write as I write now, in paragraphs linked one to the other. Dmitri would call that passionless writing, as he would call me a passionless man. A man of passion, Dmitri would say, pours himself out without paragraphing” (S 176). In a later exercise, he once again acknowledges that in Dmitri's eyes he lacks passion but adds a footnote suggesting that the way music can bring tears to his eyes is proof that he is not without it (S 179–80).When Simón explains to David that Dmitri does not love Ana Magdalena, but has a passion for her (S 122), the word suggests a destructive force. Inès's view is even stronger: “So much the worse for passion. . . . If there were less passion around the world would be a safer place.” (Simón thinks, but does not say, “What do you know about passion, Inés?” [S 131].) The conversation with the sisters returns to the earlier topic when David announces, “Ana Magdalena had a passion for Dmitri” (S 136) and accuses Simón and Inés of hating passion. Alma then makes a staunch defense of it, in a direct (though unconscious) rebuttal of Inés's position: “I think passion is good. . . . Without passion the world would stop going round. It would be a dull and empty place” (S 136). And she rejects Valentina's suggestion that there might be a good and a bad passion.In Death, the topic of passion recedes once more. There are only six mentions, none of them alluding to the Passion of Christ, despite the book's title. One noteworthy instance is Dmitri's familiar accusation, in a letter claiming that his blood could be safely transfused to David, that Simón is “beyond passion” (D 189). He insists that “if you are ready to die for someone, your blood will work every time. The passion in your blood burns up the little blood corpuscles” (D 191).Considering the trilogy as a whole, the only conclusion to be drawn is that passion has an ambiguous presence.6 It seems admirable in Simón and reprehensible in Dmitri, so we might conclude that it exists in both “good” and “bad” varieties. However, if Alma's values count for anything, even this way out may be too easy. We need to look elsewhere for a source of values that will offer a challenge to the dominance of reason.A more moderate version of passion as a counter to reason is the idea of the prompting of the heart. The word “heart” occurs 163 times in the trilogy, and many of these instances involve an appeal to a way of understanding that bypasses the conscious rational faculty.7 Whether it constitutes a positive alternative remains unclear, however. There are many examples in Childhood, one being when Simón tries to persuade Inés to take David as her son. In doing so, it's to the metaphor of the heart that he appeals, almost obsessively: “I plead with you: put doubt aside, listen instead to what your heart says. Look at him. Look at the boy. What does your heart say?” (C 79). He claims that “in her heart she knows” she is his mother (C 80) and pleads in similar terms to Diego, her brother: “Look into your heart! If there is goodwill in your heart, surely you will not keep a child from his mother!” (C 81). When Simón explains to Álvaro that he has moved out of the apartment to leave Inés alone with David, he receives a troubling answer: “‘But it does ignore the urgings of the heart, doesn't it?’ The urgings of the heart: who would have thought Álvaro had it in him to talk like that? A man strong and true. A comrade. Why can he not bare his heart frankly to Álvaro?” (C 94). And writing an application to the bordello, he thinks, “If he is going to be judged, let it be on the movements of his heart rather than the clarity of his thought” (139).If in all these cases the heart represents a desirable, or at least desired, alternative to reason, then in Schooldays, the picture becomes more complicated. Dmitri endorses it: he rejects Simón's suggestion that he could get married, saying, “When it comes to life's great choices, I follow my heart. Why? Because the heart is always right and the head is always wrong” (S 119). And Simón himself explains the murderer's urge to kill as follows: “It came from his heart, where it had been lurking for a long time, waiting to strike like a snake. . . . As long as he refuses to look into his heart and confront what he sees there, he will not change” (S 227).In Death, the complications continue. Señora Devito defends Dmitri—“In all the world Dmitri is David's truest follower. He loves him heart and soul”—but Simón is skeptical: “She may claim that Dmitri's heart belongs to David, but his own heart tells him that Dmitri is a liar. Which heart is to be trusted: the heart of Dmitri the murderer or the heart of Simón el Lerdo, Simón the Dull?” (D 122). Dmitri turns the tables, however, suggesting that Simón's heart is not as pure as he would like to think: “Look into your heart. The bitter truth is: I was the one who stayed with the boy through his agony, while you were at home relaxing, having a drink and a snooze” (D 182). Listening to the heart, like obeying the dictates of passion, may be a valuable alternative to rational understanding, but it is not an entirely reliable one.References to the “new life” and the “next life,” with their religious overtones, abound in these novels, and, given their titles, one must ask whether religion in some guise is being offered as a major alternative to reason. For the first part of Childhood, the references to the “new life” are almost all to the lives of the Novillans, lives started afresh after having been “washed clean,” taught Spanish, and transported across the sea to this apparently empty land.8 “Everyone comes to this country as a stranger. . . . We came from various places and various pasts, seeking a new life,” says Elena (C 187). This new life is a given of the novel, so can hardly be said to be irrational or mystical within the fictional context, mysterious though it may be to the reader; it's treated by the Novillans, and later the Estrellans, as a simple fact. One obvious way to understand this new existence is as a depiction of what might be in store for us after death; there is a familiar genre of such fictions, in which the afterlife turns out to be rather like the life we know. But there's not much we can do with this interpretation in Childhood; the interest of the novel lies not in why people have arrived but how they experience the new life once they are there.In the second part of Childhood, the phrase “new life” takes on a different meaning: the members of the small family group use the term in reference to what lies ahead once they have escaped from Novilla.9 The last words of the novel, as they drive on to the city of Estrellita, are an italicized “new life.” At this point, a comparison of the two meanings of the phrase is inevitable, and we are forced to ask: will arrival in Estrellita/Estrella involve another washing clean, another bestowing of fresh names, another new language?With the publication of Schooldays, it became immediately evident that the answer is “no.” Estrella, as we have noted, is a very different town from Novilla, but Spanish is still the only language; Simón, Inés, and David keep their assigned names and ages; and they refer back unhesitatingly to events in Novilla (although, as we have seen, no one comments on its peculiarities). At the start of the novel, Simón asks himself, “Will a new life be possible in Estrella?” and the phrase is used once more with this reference (S 66). It can also refer to the new life David supposes Ana Magdalena and Dmitri will lead after they have run away from Estrella (S 122, 125), as well as to Dmitri's imagined existence in the salt mines (S 225).10 Most common, however, is the more mysterious meaning, looking both back and forwards: we hear again of the new life they all began after their journey across the sea (S 17, 67, 215); Simón tells David that the murdered Ana Magdalena has entered a new life (S 163); and the phrase occurs in reference to the already mentioned rope trick David thinks will bring him back from the next life. By contrast, Dmitri tells David: “The new life is a lie, my boy, the biggest lie of all” (S 157). In Death we hear of the “new life” only three times, once to refer to David's life in the orphanage to which he has taken himself (D 37), once to refer to the life entered upon after the earlier sea crossing (D 193), and once, like many of the instances in Schooldays, to an imagined afterlife (D 108).The complementary phrase “the next life” makes several appearances, usually to invoke the idea that there is another life, or a series of lives, after the one we are reading about. In Childhood, apart from a joke of Simón's (C 123), the phrase “the next life” occurs only as a comforting idea offered to David on the death of Marciano (in the same way that El Rey is said to have clop-clopped to his new life) (C 156–58). It is much more frequent in Schooldays, where Simón again uses it to console, this time after Ana Magdalena's death (S 138–39): “Trust me, my boy, there will always be a next life. Death is nothing to be afraid of. It is over in a flash, then the next life begins.” David, however, is not impressed: “I don't want to go to the next life. I want to go to the stars” (S 139). When Simón rejects David's rope trick, he provides reasonable grounds—the boy “will have been immersed in the water of forgetting” and so will not be able to “come back from the next life and report what you saw there” (S 206)—but he doesn't discount the idea itself of a next life. Dmitri is at first adamant in his dismissal of the idea—“There is no next life. This is the only one there is” (S 157)—but his later assertion is slightly more tentative: “Maybe there won't be a next life—not for me, not for any of us” (S 171). He remains inconsistent, imagining himself being welcomed by Ana Magdalena in the next life (S 221) and assuring David that he will see her again there (S 252).The idea of “the next life” is further elaborated in Death. It first occurs when David sings a half-remembered song and receives an assurance from Arroyo that its meaning will be revealed in the next life (D 13). Simón, after suggesting that the song may come from the boy's past life, half agrees. Later, Simón and David have a conversation about the latter's entry into the next life (where he is looking forward to meeting Don Quixote), and Simón again implies it will be a process similar to the one that brought them to Novilla, a crossing of the sea and a forgetting (D 105, 108, 110). He avoids answering David's anxious query, “What if there are no new lives? What if I die and I don't wake up?” (D 109).Near his end, David asks Simón if he will “do sexual intercourse” in the next life, and Simón's assurance implies not just that this new life will be followed by another new life, but that the series will continue beyond that: “You will have sexual intercourse in this life, when you are old enough, and you will have it in the next life too, and all the lives after that—that I can promise you” (D 128). The last occurrence of the phrase occurs in a letter from Dmitri to Simón: explaining why he prefers burial to cremation, he imagines the corpse “waiting for the next life to announce itself” (D 182). Yet he asserts