AustLit

'Robert Pippin’s Metaphysical Exile is the first book-length study of J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus Trilogy, comprising The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), and The Death of Jesus (2019). It contains an introduction, a chapter on each of the three novels, and a brief conclusion. The author refers to the trilogy as “Jesus Fictions” in order to highlight the gulf between the three texts and other “realist” novels. He suggests that the works may resemble the everyday world inhabited by human beings but, fundamentally, their setting cannot be said to be parts “of any human world that has ever been or is now” (1). This is because they contain “highly unusual elements” like metafictional tropes and characters who are all migrants with memories “wiped clean” (2). As a result, Pippin argues, the trilogy works as a “metaphysical allegory” of exile and homelessness – the texts do not feature displacement as a temporary phenomenon, nor do they present characters who can at all remember their lives in the past (5–6). Hence, the trilogy invites philosophical reflection on its various aspects. These include: intertextual references to episodes from the Bible and literary works including Don Quixote and Coetzee’s own Elizabeth Costello; references to ideas of philosophers ranging from Plato to Heidegger; the importance of dance and music in the lives of its characters; and an essayistic and dialogic narrative style. As Pippin underlines, the reader is invited to reflect on the complexities that the trilogy presents to them without reaching some distilled philosophical principle or expecting a direct conclusion to emerge from the reading (20–21).' (Introduction)