J. M. Coetzee is a singular case. Born in South Africa, he grew up there and has dilated on his childhood near Cape Town and on his uncle’s farm in several autobiographical works. He won expansive praise for his early novels philosophizing on racial intolerance in his native country, then got the cold shoulder from the African National Congress for (it was alleged) sustaining racial stereotypes. When he won the Nobel Prize, the ANC hastened to reclaim him—by which time he had moved to Australia.
“My intellectual allegiances,” he has said, “are clearly European, not African.” Or maybe, as in this new novel, merely earthly. The Schooldays of Jesus is an echoing ossuary of a story: mostly dialogue, minimal plot, bare-bones description. Think Beckett, but with a bit of the marrow of meaning.
In a nameless country lies the town of Estrella, whose near-rhyme with Australia teases the ear. But it can’t be Australia, since the language is Spanish. Beyond the city there’s a farm with a band of migrant workers and a nondescript lake with a wedge of beach, everything lit as if by a bank of fluorescent lamps. To the farm comes a cobbled-together family: 6-year-old Davíd; a man named Simón, who is not really his father but dutifully protects him; and Inés, the woman whom Simón believes, without much evidence, is Davíd’s mother, and who may be a lesbian. They’re lying low, evading authorities who might take the boy away. For a time Simón picks fruit, then they risk a move to Estrella to enroll Davíd in school.
“Jesus” appears nowhere here except in the title; clearly, though, Davíd is our boy, his name hinting at the line of Davíd to which Jesus belonged. The points of attachment with the Gospels are plain, yet seem no more than pegs holding down a wind-whipped tent; there is no sustained biblical analogy. The novel undertakes to flesh out the sort of story the biblical accounts omit: how it was that the boy grew up, what he said, thought, and did—but in an emptied setting neither Jewish nor Greek nor anything else. He pouts and poses insolent challenges to the stupor of Estrellan society: “Why is staying alive more important than anything?” Unlike Simón and the others, he does not “accept that what our eyes see is the only life there is.” All role models fail him, none adequate to the project of individuation (as Jung would have it) that opens before him.
Davíd lands in “an academy devoted to the training of the soul through music and dance,” conducted by a couple named Arroyo who have a special entrée to the spheres or simply are spaced out, we’re not sure which. The celestial beauty Ana Magdalena Arroyo teaches the students an esoteric form of ballet. Their dancing calls down numbers from the stars—not the integers of mere arithmetic but real numbers, reason’s reverse, which, called down, dance with the dancers. Not only that, but Ana escorts the class on an outing to the lake, where Simón, having gone for a look, finds her and the children splashing in the nude.
Soon the dreamy, obdurate Davíd wants to move out of his nominal parents’ apartment and board at the school. As in all things, he gets his way. The Arroyos understand him, he says, as his parents do not: “You act as his father,” wonders Señor Arroyo to Simón, “yet you do not know who he is?” Inés scoffs at the notion of “dancing to the stars as a substitute for learning one’s multiplication tables.”
This book continues the narrative of Coetzee’s earlier The Childhood of Jesus, which some found mystifying to the point of not being a novel at all. In truth, both books are old-fashioned novels of ideas—the sort of thing that Mary McCarthy accused Henry James of just about killing off. The ideas are metaphysical, perhaps stretching McCarthy’s point. Coetzee unfolds them like flowers within flowers, each one pushing forth the next, Davíd questioning without end.
Davíd worries that he might be a ghost—a nod to the proposition, as in Buddhism, that all is illusory. No, Simón assures him, a bit glibly: “You are real and I am real.” All the answers will come clear in the next life, says Simón, with Pauline aplomb. Davíd: “I don’t want to go to the next life. I want to go to the stars.”
Inevitably, there comes the question of evil: its provenance, its perverse kinship with the good. At the heart of the story is a monstrous crime of passion. Dmitri, a guard at a museum near the school and a man of ungovernable passion, commits the crime or, seen differently, performs it. Love and hate are indivisible, he pleads. Davíd peers down, godlike, on the corpse in a basement cubicle. Davíd was—is—Dmitri’s friend, and according to Dmitri, “each of us desires to kill the beloved but only a few elect souls have the courage to act on their desire.”
Dmitri, it strikes us, does not have a Spanish name; nor does Alyosha, Ana’s handsome, benign assistant at the school. In name as well as in character, Dmitri and Alyosha correspond to two of the siblings in The Brothers Karamazov. Dmitri, whether Coetzee’s or Dostoevsky’s, stands trial on a lofty stage—stands, that is, for all humanity in his passion and his mingling of good and evil. Coetzee tenders a reverie on passion, on desire suffused with suffering. As Alyosha frames it: “What is it that we lack when we lack nothing, when we are sufficient unto ourselves? What is it that we miss when we are not in love?”
In the courtroom, where he has gotten in against the wishes of Simón, Davíd alone rises in defense of Dmitri, but is not allowed to speak. Dmitri, his crime aside, is capable of love—as the rational, passionless Simón is not.
The judge goads the accused to defend himself. The crowd demands punishment. Does Coetzee submit this as a parable, or a parody, of the Passion itself? ¿Quién sabe?
Parker Bauer is a writer in Florida.
