Imagine: On J.M Coetzee
In this Coetzeean utopia, not only are the workers unionized, but nearly everyone is a vegetarian. One side effect of all this kindness and benevolence, however, is that there is no mischief, no irony or sarcasm, no playfulness—not even in fiction. When David asks who wrote Don Quixote, Simón replies, “A man named Benengeli.” It is as if Cervantes’s witty prologue had been stripped out of the novel and, with it, the metafictional nature of the book. Who wants to live in a world where Don Quixote is missing its game of mirrors? Idle reader: I don’t have to swear any oaths to persuade you that I should not like it.
About the Author
Laila Lalami
Similarly, the courses at the Institute are varied, but there are no languages on offer except Spanish. There is no possibility to learn other idioms, no room for translation or mistranslation, no exposure to other societies. As for the philosophy lectures, they quickly degenerate into discussions of the chairness of chairs, which Coetzee sends up in a later chapter as “the pooness of poo,” a deadpan parody of academic quibbling. Coetzee is often criticized for his unrelenting seriousness, but these passages are perhaps some of the funniest he has ever written.
There is one course, though, that interests Simón: the life drawing class where Ana, a clerk from the resettlement center, poses nude. Unfortunately for him, all the class sections are full. Simón is attracted to Ana, but she rebuffs him. “The more beautiful you find me, the more urgent becomes your appetite…. What is the connection between the one and the other?” she asks. Sex is completely absurd to her: “You want to grip me tight and push part of your body into me…. I am baffled.” In Novilla, then, one must give up not only one’s history and language, but also one’s sexual desire. Eventually, Simón begins a sexual relationship with his neighbor Elena, but it quickly becomes clear that she does it out of pity, not out of passion.
As time passes, Simón gets accustomed to the blandness of the food, the simplicity of the life, the scarce and dispassionate sex. He becomes consumed only with protecting David. Since he is not the boy’s father, Simón acts as a surrogate, though everywhere he goes, he has to explain his unusual relationship—just as, one imagines, Joseph had do to with the child Jesus. “Not my grandson, not my son,” Simón says, “but I am responsible for him.” “I am not David’s father, nor am I his padrino.” “I am not his father. I look after him. I am a guardian of sorts.”
When Simón announces to Inés that David is her son, she is befuddled. “Are you suggesting that I adopt your boy?” she asks. “Not adopt,” Simón replies. “Be his mother, his full mother. We have only one mother, each of us. Will you be that one and only mother to him?” After some hesitation Inés agrees, and her faith in the idea that she is the child’s full mother is absolute.
As for David, he has some difficulty with formal instruction, but he is gifted in other ways: he is unbeatable at chess and can memorize lines from a Goethe poem with little effort. When his teacher asks him to write “Conviene que yo diga la verdad” (I must tell the truth), he writes “Yo soy la verdad” (I am the truth). So what does David, this child Jesus, have to teach those around him? “You must never fight,” he says solemnly. “Protecting yourself isn’t fighting,” Simón counters. To explain this, he pretends to slap David, but the boy willingly presents his cheek. By the end of the novel, Simón and Inés’s devotion to the child is so complete that they are willing to break the law to keep him satisfied.
* * *
It is difficult to resist an allegorical reading of The Childhood of Jesus, because of its title as well as its author. Coetzee has been associated with this representative mode ever since the publication, in 1980, of Waiting for the Barbarians, his third and perhaps most famous novel. In it, a magistrate in a far-flung outpost of an unnamed empire dares to question the decisions of a colonel who has been sent to put down a barbarian rebellion. The magistrate’s questions grow more persistent and eventually turn into a direct challenge; for this, he is imprisoned and tortured, like the barbarians. The experience makes him reassess everything he has believed about how the empire conducts itself, or should conduct itself:
My torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. They were interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well, which very soon forgets them when its head is gripped and a pipe is pushed down its gullet and pints of salt water are poured into it till it coughs and retches and flails and voids itself…. So I had no chance to throw the high-sounding words I had ready in their faces.
Many critics saw in Waiting for the Barbarians a searing indictment of the apartheid regime in South Africa, but the novel could just as easily be interpreted as a sober assessment of the Roman Empire or sixteenth-century Spanish conquest or twentieth-century American expansionism. “One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire,” Coetzee writes: “how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era.” The genius of the book is that it captures essential traits of every colonial era: the power of its military, the silence of its intellectual elite, the turning of its subjects into barbarian Others, the acceptance (and even the celebration) of torture.
The same interpretive lens was applied to Life & Times of Michael K (1983), in which a hare-lipped gardener takes his ailing mother away from a Cape Town ravaged by civil war to a farm in the Karoo, where she was born. She dies along the way, but he continues his journey to the farm, where he buries her ashes. He tries to make a life for himself there until the police arrive, accuse him of being part of a guerrilla force and torture him for information. Michael K’s experiences, specific and individual though they are, came to be seen as representative of the black experience in South Africa in the 1980s.
Coetzee neither encouraged nor discouraged such readings; he remained silent and resisted any attempts to interpret his work for audiences. (This is a stance I admire and wish other novelists would emulate.) When Life & Times of Michael K won the Booker Prize, Coetzee did not go to the ceremony. Nor did he go in 1999, when Disgrace won. It was his most realistic novel to date, but here too readers searched for allegorical representations. In Disgrace, David Lurie, a (white) professor of English, loses his job after he forces himself on a female student. Lurie does not see his actions as assault. “Not rape,” he tells himself, “not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core.” He retires to his daughter Lucy’s farm in the Eastern Cape, with the intent of writing a libretto for an opera about Byron. Then three (black) men attack the farm; they lock Lurie up in a bathroom and rape his daughter.
