Journal Article•
Beyond the Literary Theme Park: J. M. Coetzee's Late Style in The Childhood of Jesus
TL;DR: The Childhood of Jesus as mentioned in this paper, a novel by J.M. Coetzee, makes use of postmodern pastiche: various literary themes are recycled as if on display in a literary theme park.
Abstract: J.M. Coetzee’s novel, The Childhood of Jesus , makes use of postmodern pastiche: various literary themes are recycled as if on display in a “ literary theme park.” Coetzee also reuses themes he has explored in his previous works. Here a link can be made to Edward Said’s idea of late style, which includes an element of self-quotation. However, two issues are so important that Coetzee probes them further rather than recycles them. One is a conception of family based not on blood relations, but love. This is part of the other, more fundamental issue: the contingency of the world. By engaging with these subjects, The Childhood of Jesus embodies late style in Coetzee’s own sense of the term.
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TL;DR: The Childhood of Jesus (2013) as mentioned in this paper is a novel where the protagonist is narrated into being as a subject over the divide between a previous life which is being transformed into memory, and a future life which has to be imagined before being realised.
Abstract: SummaryThe article examines, with reference to J.M. Coetzee’s novel, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), how the migrant is narrated into being as a subject over the divide between a previous life, which is being transformed into memory, and a future life, which has to be imagined before being realised. Drawing on Coetzee’s own metaphor in Elizabeth Costello of writing fiction as constructing a bridge over a chasm between the real world and an imaginary one, as well as Calvino’s similar metaphor in If on a winter’s night a traveller (1979) of story being a bridge over a void, the article shows how the narrative in The Childhood of Jesus is located in, and constitutes a passage from, an unspecified past to an indeterminate future. The reader is reminded throughout the narrative of the void beneath the minimalist fictional bridge, and of the problem that the young protagonist, David, has with the logic of conventional numeracy – the hypotext for David’s difficulty with numbers being Musil’s novel, The Confusions...
15 citations
TL;DR: Coetzee's recent trilogy, The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays ofJesus (2016), are extremely strange. as discussed by the authors ) explores the connection between reading and writing allegory within the tradition of what constitutes a novel.
Abstract: The first two books of J. M. Coetzee's recent trilogy, The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), are extremely strange. Just when “the Australian fiction,” following the works set in South Africa and various international locations, was thought to be the last phase of Coetzee's career, the Nobel laureate changed tack. The Jesus books challenge readers and critics with their sparse tone, lengthy philosophical dialogues, and allegorical obscurity. Their difficulty seems to shed little light on some of the most intriguing questions about Coetzee's writing: namely, its form and its interaction with allegory. Beginning with a reappraisal of a classic work of Coetzee studies, this essay then lays out a theory about the connection between reading and writing allegory within traditions of what constitutes a “novel.” In the second section, examples from Coetzee's earlier fiction are analyzed, with focus on In the Heart of the Country (1977) and Boyhood (1997). Parental roles are found to be vital in the connections between the novel form and allegory. The third section applies these analyses to Childhood and Schooldays. Focus on the books’ references to Plato and Don Quixote helps scrutinize their philosophy and reach the thesis of this essay: that with these books, Coetzee experiments with a form that goes beyond the novel.
4 citations
TL;DR: Coetzee's late fictions display a recurrent fascination with attitudes of faith and belief as discussed by the authors, which has been read sometimes as an effort to reinvigorate the novel's engagement with materiality and embodied life, other times as an elegy to the waning power of belief in fiction.
Abstract:
J. M. Coetzee's late fictions display a recurrent fascination with attitudes of faith and belief. This preoccupation has been read sometimes as an effort to reinvigorate the novel's engagement with materiality and embodied life, other times as an elegy to the waning power of belief in fiction. But belief is not a monolithic term in Coetzee's late work, nor does his disposition toward it remain static. This article examines two texts that display a related yet evolving concern with faith and belief—Elizabeth Costello (2003) and The Childhood of Jesus (2013). These works not only share a thematic interest in various forms of belief; they are also linked by the scene of a petitioner “at the gate.” In the final lesson of the earlier novel, aging novelist Elizabeth Costello finds herself in a purgatorial border town, where she must produce a statement of belief in order to pass on. In the opening paragraphs of Childhood, the characters arrive on the other side of a similar portal, entering a world whose institutions reject belief as a form of unreasoned, passionate commitment. Where Costello refuses the institutional demand for belief, insisting that belief in fiction is incompatible with the stronger form of commitment in excess of reason, Childhood's characters attempt a reconciliation between reading and believing. Read together, these texts present an apocalyptic vision of the novel after the end of formal realism, when readerly belief requires more than a weak trust in fiction's mimetic capacities.
3 citations
TL;DR: Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus typify the concerns of his later writings as discussed by the authors, which are crystallized around the concept of life and the dynamic relation between a postsecular valorization of life as sacred and the risk of sacrifice inherent to any attempt to both count or account for life.
Abstract: Abstract:J.M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus typify the concerns of his later writings. These concerns are crystallized around the concept of life and the dynamic relation between a post-secular valorization of life as sacred and the risk of sacrifice inherent to any attempt to both count, or account, for life. This dynamic is not simply thematized. Rather, through what I am terming Coetzee's literary thinking, the ethico-political import of 'life' in Coetzee's late works is bound up with the question of their meaning as literary works. Accordingly, Coetzee's literary thinking helps to address the interaction of life and form that is at the center of debates about affect and the body, animal and posthuman life, and the formal distinctiveness of the literary work.
3 citations
TL;DR: The authors take as its starting point the divergent responses that J.M. Coetzee's Jesus trilogy (The Childhood of Jesus [2013], The Schooldays of Jesus[2016] and The Death of Christ [2019]) has drawn from reviewers and scholars respectively.
Abstract: This article takes as its starting point the divergent responses that J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy (The Childhood of Jesus [2013], The Schooldays of Jesus [2016] and The Death of Jesus [2019]) has drawn from reviewers and scholars respectively. Where reviewers have generally regarded these works’ difficulty as obstructive, scholars have taken their difficulty as both the justification and catalyst for sustained engagement. This divergence is explained, in part, as a consequence of the literacies developed by and in response to modernism – literacies which regarded difficulty as both the signature of the worthwhile artwork and as the criterion which justifies the special attention of specialized readers. If one aim of this article is to situate Coetzee and Coetzee studies within this tradition, a second aim is to ask whether the forms of attention garnered by his late trilogy are less an index of intrinsic challenges than of Coetzee’s reputation as a challenging writer. To do so is to worry the overready ascription of ‘Coetzeean’ difficulty – along with the modes of reading it tends to enlist – in order to reposition bewilderment, embarrassment and other ugly aesthetic-affects as generative for criticism.
1 citations
References
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Book•
01 Jan 1965
TL;DR: Rabelais drew these images from the living popular-festive tradition of his time, but he was also well versed in the antique scholarly tradition of the Saturnalia, with its own rituals of travesties, uncrownings, and thrashings as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Abuse with uncrowning, as truth about old authority, about the dying world, is an organic part of Rabelais’ system of images. It is combined with carnivalesque thrashings, with change of costume and travesty. Rabelais drew these images from the living popular-festive tradition of his time, but he was also well versed in the antique scholarly tradition of the Saturnalia, with its own rituals of travesties, uncrownings, and thrashings. Finally, the carnivalesque character appeared on private family occasions, christenings and memorial services, as well as on agricultural feasts, the harvest of grapes (vendage) and the slaughter of cattle, as described by Rabelais. In the time of Rabelais folk merriment had not as yet been concentrated in carnival season, in any of the towns of France. Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) was but one of many occasions for folk merriment, although an important one.
3,871 citations
01 Jan 2004
TL;DR: The concept of postmodernism is not widely accepted or even understood today as discussed by the authors, and some of the resistance to it may come from the unfamiliarity of the works it covers, which can be found in all the arts.
Abstract: The concept of postmodernism is not widely accepted or even understood today. Some of the resistance to it may come from the unfamiliarity of the works it covers, which can be found in all the arts: the poetry of John Ashbery, for instance, but also the much simpler talk poetry that carat out of the reaction against complex, ironic, academic modernist poetry in the '60s; the reaction against modern architecture and in particular against the monumental buildings of the International Style, the pop buildings and decorated sheds celebrated by Robert Venturi in his manifesto, Learning from Gas Vegas; Andy Warhol and Pop art, but also the more recent Photorealism; in music, the moment of John Cage but also the later synthesis of classical and "popular" styles found in composers like Philip Glass and Terry Riley, and also punk and newwave rock with such groups as the Clash, the Talking Heads and the Gang of Four, in film, everything that comes out of Godard contemporary vanguard film and video but also a whole new style of commercial or fiction films, which has its equivalent in contemporary novels as well, where the works of William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon and Ishmael Reed on the one hand, and the French new novel on the other, are also to be numbered among the varieties of what can be called postmodernism.
651 citations
Book•
27 Oct 1980
TL;DR: In this article, the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire, but a quixotic act of rebellion lands him in jail, branded an enemy of the state.
Abstract: A novel in which, for decades, the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire, but a quixotic act of rebellion lands him in jail, branded an enemy of the state. From the author of DUSKLANDS.
418 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1983
TL;DR: It is now common knowledge to say that in these eclectic post-modern times it is getting increasingly difficult to tell a radical from a conservative as discussed by the authors, and that the illusion of a single unifying vision of progressive culture has been shattered and in the wake of this cultural fragmentation the nature of authority (and audience) becomes an issue.
Abstract: ft is now common knowledge to say that in _ these eclectic post-modern times it is getting increasingly difficult to tell a radical from a conservative. For better or worse the illusion of a single unifying vision of progressive culture has been shattered and in the wake of this cultural fragmentation the nature of authority (and audiencel becomes an issue. Not only 1s the reality of the modern presently under attack from all sides but also the reductive and 'correct' view of history which has led up to it. These days it is hard to decide whether a 'traditional' form is being brought back from the grave, radically, to cause doubts about a merely func tional world or simply as a wilful denial of contemporary history and a conser vative assumption of continuity. Many· artists today ·have re discovered the single most important lesson of modernism (and the driving force behind it) that meaning is not inherent in an object and that 'mean· ingfulness of meaninglessness' is the result. This and the fact that they are exploiting the ambiguity of the art work m such a complex cultural mo-
410 citations
Book•
01 Jan 2006
TL;DR: On Late Style as discussed by the authors examines the work produced by great artists at the end of their lives and finds that most of the late works discussed are rife with contradiction and almost impenetrable complexity.
Abstract: "On Late Style" examines the work produced by great artists - Beethoven, Thomas Mann, Jean Genet among them - at the end of their lives. Said makes it clear that, rather than the resolution of a lifetime's artistic endeavour, most of the late works discussed are rife with contradiction and almost impenetrable complexity. He helps us see how, though these works often stood in direct contrast to the tastes of society, they were, just as often, announcements of what was to come in the artist's discipline - works of true artistic genius.
230 citations