Miguel de Cervantes and J.M. Coetzee: An Unacknowledged Paternity

Introduction: J.M. Coetzee, intertextuality and the non-English literary traditions

Abstract: In 1919 T.S. Eliot famously stated that ‘not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigor...

The Childhood of Jesus

Abstract: J.M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (Text Publishing, 2013)I have always resisted reading Coetzee allegorically. I took to heart - possibly through wilful misunderstanding - his statement to David Attwell that 'a critical practice whose climactic gesture is always a triumphant tearing-off, as it grows lazy (and every orthodoxy grows lazy), begins to confine its attentions to clothed subjects, and even to subjects whose clothes are easily torn off'; and 'in the act of triumphantly tearing the clothes off its subject and displaying the nakedness beneath - ("Behold the truth!") it exposes a naivete of its own. For is the naked body really the truth?'1 Bolstered by Susan Sontag's essay 'Against Interpretation', I felt justified in resisting the search for meanings below the surface of Coetzee's novels, or indeed anyone else's.But what is to be done with a novel titled The Childhood of Jesus? It's not only tempting to read it as allegory: there seems to be no alternative. Not, of course, that it is simple to do so. The parallels with the New Testament, the novel's most obvious intertext, are far from simple. A man and a young boy arrive in Novillo, a city in a Spanish-speaking country, and are confronted with a blandly courteous but indifferent bureaucracy which at first fails to provide basic necessities. They have been on the road for a week, from a camp called Belstar. So at first, one is might think that this is an allegory of the appalling treatment meted out to refugees, always remembering that the child, as we must presume from the title, is a Christ figure.But after a few initial inconveniences the man, to whom the authorities have assigned the name Simon, and the boy, David, find adequate shelter and means of sustenance, and make friends among the other residents of the city, all of whom appear to have arrived by the same route. Everyone in Novilla is newly-made, and everyone has forgotten their old life, except Simon, who alone, it seems, is unsatisfied, who alone has an ironic cast of mind - the others 'see no doubleness in the world, any difference between the way things seem and the way things are' (80). His fellow workers, however, do indulge in a sterile kind of philosophising which 'just makes him impatient' (144).As I read, I tried out theories. Is Simon Joseph, the 'stepfather' of the Jesus figure? He is adamant that he is not a relative, and is only caring for the boy until he can find his mother. But when he finds the woman he intuits to be David's mother (not literally, but in some vague but more important sense), he seems to play the part of Gabriel at the Annunciation. …

Borges, Cervantes and Coetzee, or the fictionalisation of the author

Abstract: One of the most habitual metafictional devices employed by J.M. Coetzee is the figure or persona of the author, together with the autobiographical use of the third person and the present tense, the critical reflection on the concepts of ‘autrebiography’ and ‘confession’, or references to alter egos such as ‘John’, ‘John Coetzee’ or ‘Senor C.’ The aim of this article is to discuss Coetzee’s process of fictionalisation of the writer in the light of Borges’s use of the persona of ‘Borges’ or ‘the blind poet’, and of Cervantes’s use of Benengeli in Don Quixote. My basic contention is that Coetzee is echoing and recreating Cervantes’s, and especially Borges’s, self-projections, wondering, as he put it in Stranger Shores, ‘which Borges [Coetzee] is real, which is the other in the mirror’.

Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews

Abstract: * Author's Note * Editor's Introduction Beckett * Interview * The Comedy of Point of View in Beckett's Murphy (1970) * The Manuscript Revisions of Beckett's Watt (1972) * Samuel Beckett and the Temptations of Style (1973) * Remembering Texas (1984) The Poetics of Reciprocity * Interview

Age of Iron

Abstract: Dying of cancer, Elizabeth Curren writes a testament to her "lost" daughter, now living in America. Her account describes her relationship with the tramp, Vercueil, who becomes her silent companion and confessor as she tries to make her peace with the world. The novel is an anguished lament for a country on the cusp of change and for all children lost to South Africa's age of iron.