AustLit

'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)

'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)