J. M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus: The Ethics of Ideas and Things ed. by Jennifer Rutherford and Anthony Uhlmann (review)

J. M. Coetzee's 2013 novel The Childhood of Jesus (2013) is even more enigmatic than the rest of the author's challenging oeuvre. No one named Jesus—or Mary or Joseph—makes an appearance in the book. It is set not in Bethlehem, Nazareth, or Jerusalem, but in a seaport named Novilla. The local tongue is not Aramaic, Hebrew, Latin, or even English, the language in which Coetzee's Jesus books were written, but rather Spanish. The title of the novel invites a reader to expect some sort of Christian allegory, but the signifié, whatever it is, has drifted far, far away from the signifiant.

It is inevitable that Coetzee's Jesus fiction would provoke analysis. And, since the author, a native of South Africa, has been a citizen of Australia since 2006, it is natural that two Australian scholars, Jennifer Rutherford and Anthony Uhlmann, would assemble nine essays on The Childhood of Jesus. Because most of the papers were presented at a conference in Adelaide in 2014, they were unable to take account of The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), a sequel in which the main characters, David, Simón, and Inés, flee Novilla for Estrella, where David enrolls in the Academy of Dance and Coetzee extends his philosophical investigations, interrogating the nature of education, passion, justice, penance, and death. No account of The Childhood of Jesus can be complete without a reading of Coetzee's second Jesus novel.

Nevertheless, these essays, overlapping in their concerns, offer many useful entries into a puzzling fiction that Rutherford likens to a fairy tale, in that "it magnifies the darkness and complexity of being human" (p. 59). Coetzee lures the reader with promise of the pleasures of narrative, though, as Yoshiki Tajiri notes, "we are faced with a kind of carcass of story-telling, the essential component of literature" (p. 192). The Childhood of Jesus seems as if it should be an allegory. However, Tajiri warns that: "It is as though the allegorical mode were simply offered as a trap" (p. 189).

Both Robert B. Pippin and Jean-Michel Rabaté make a convincing case for the apocryphal infancy gospels lurking beneath Coetzee's depiction of the precocious and willful young David. Rabaté also examines the linguistic alienation in an Anglophone novel in which characters abandon their primary tongues and adopt Spanish and in which readers are to imagine that they are reading a translation from Spanish. There is no answer to David's petulant question: "Why do I have to speak Spanish all the time?" (p. 48). Nor is there any evidence of a prior tongue, or at least an alternative to the language of Don Quixote, the novel that young David uses to teach himself to read.

Tim Mihegan observes that the pervasiveness of dialogue represents a new development in Coetzee's oeuvre, and he and several of the other essayists invoke the Platonic dialogues as models for the conversations that take place throughout a book that constitutes a contribution to the literature of ideas. Uhlmann finds traces of Phaedrus and Ion in Coetzee's handling of the themes of recognition and intuition and in his examination of the relationship between the two. Platonic distinctions between reality and appearance recall The Republic, as does the depiction of Novilla as a kind of utopia/dystopia. It is a place devoid of memory, passion, and ambition, leading Rabaté to conclude: "Novilla's Platonic Republic thus smacks of totalitarianism" (p. 53).

The most explicitly political reading of Coetzee comes in an essay in which coauthors Lynda Ng and Paul Sheehan note the endemic condition of migrancy in the novel and relate it to both the author's own history and his opposition to the Australian government's callous treatment of refugees. They also note the parallels between forced assimilation...