Steve_Bamlett_blog

Reflecting on The Death of Jesus (2020) by J.M, Coetzee, London, Harvill Secker.  The third and final book of his ‘Jesus’ trilogy.

For 2016 reflection of the second book from the trilogy, use this link. No reflection by me on the first book in the trilogy.

I feel as though my first reading of this trilogy, in which novel was read on publication has taken a long time. The Childhood of Jesus was first published in 2013. And duration matters. When The Death of Jesus opens its central character, David, who both is an is not a ‘type’ of Christ, is still only aged 10. It is not a spoiler though to tell any prospective reader that in this novel, the hero will no longer be able, as he as heretofore, to focus on ‘staying alive’. He will die as he and various other characters in the novel come, with rather different effects, to realise. This is the novel then that deals with the theme, the process and the technique of closure. A symbolic play narrated in Chapter 21, features the opening and closing of a white lidded  but open coffin, acting as ‘a symbol of his death but also of his life’ p. 153. The play is devised by the Academy and the Los Manos Orphanage. The second institution takes over in prominence in this book that space occupied by the ‘Academy’  in the second. A ‘pimply youth’ in this play, Esteban, says:

… “We the orphans of Las Manos, having been present at the bedside of David during his last travails, decided …” He casts a desperate look at Maria, who whispers in his ear. “Decided that we would celebrate his passing by passing on his message.”

p. 153

One central means of achieving closure in life as in art is the translation of narrative into ‘message’ that interprets a particular, but necessarily the only, pattern that exists in the events supposed to precede their narration. These techniques slip between their function in life and art – they are invariably somewhere linked to the need for a final interpretation. They close the past covered by the story down by putting on a lid, stopper or label that necessitates no further search for additional meaning.

As a psychological process ‘closure’ often individuates and we see this in the different ways death is read by the Simón, the fictive father of David, Dmitri (who as a murderer or saint is expert at closure) or Alyosha from the Academy. For some of these closure comes from adoption of David’s death as a message known only to them, others as a message that ultimately has no content, and fails to close up the questions we continue to want to ask about David’s life, death and meaning. After the play Simón quizzes Alyosha:

                            “Alyosha, did David ever mention a message he was carrying?”

                            “A message? No.”

              David divided people up according to whether they were fit to hear his message. I fell among the no-hopers – too plodding, too earthbound. I thought he might have elevated you to the other camp, the camp of the elect. I thought he might have revealed his message to you. (…)

              “(…) I would have laid down my life for him. truly. but no – he gave me no message.”

(p. 155)

This is characteristic in that every clue that any character has to David’s true thoughts and what these mean is offered only to be almost immediately, or in the longer term, undermined. For instance here Simón’s insistence that his son, made a binary categorisation of his audience as of the ‘elect’ or of the unfit is stated merely to be discredited, although not in any final closed sense discredited. All we know is that none of these participants, unlike some others who are variously psychologically discredited themselves such as Dmitri, received a message they recognised as such. Closure seems to occur for no audience, even those Milton called the ‘fit audience though few’ (Paradise Lost Book 7 ll. 30-39).

This is vitally important. Closure ends the quest for meaning and, although some of his characters desire this, Coetzee will not authorise such closure. But neither will he assert the impossibility of ‘closure’ in modernity because that too would be a closure of a kind.

In a sense this book  is about the function of the book in cultures. It seems ludicrous if we rationalise it that David’s sense of the significance of himself is confined to one book and its exegesis and ‘shows no interest in reading any other book’ (p.10). Yet that is the very truth of cultures focused on single privileged (even holy) texts such as the Bible, Korans or Torah. Why not then Don Quixote? Out of Don Quixote alone, David finds the significance of ‘the world’, despite Simón’s argument that this book is ‘not the world’ (p.10). David’s assertions deflect from Simón’s belief that knowledge of the world is attained through the content of many books. For David it comes from the process of reading itself and not any consideration of the content of that reading necessarily. Hence from Don Quixote, he, as a teacher of orphans in the hospital in which he will die, he derives stories based entirely on that reading, a kind of Apocrypha. And reading in this context means going beyond textual story, into the proliferation of potentials based on beliefs generated by the book. And though things that we believe about a book are based on telling stories, no-one, be it the author, an  authoritative reader/ teacher of the text nor any one of its receptive audience can be sure of what that text means, what message it carries. Dimitri argues that in books our expectation of the death of a character has no ultimate validating authority but inheres in the nature of storytelling itself:

“It is just a story that he died,” he says, “a story that someone wrote down in a book. It is not true. he disappeared into the storm, on his chariot, drawn by two horses, as David said.”

“But if,” the tall boy struggles, “if it is not true that he died, if it is just a story, then how do we know there was a storm, how do we know the storm is not a made-up story to?”

“Because David told us The chariot, the desert, the storm – all of that comes from David. as for growing old and dying, that comes from a book. Anyone could have made t up. Is that not so, David?”

To his question David gives no reply. he wears he smile that he, Simón, is all too familiar with, the knowing little smile that has always irritated him.

p. 73

This is baffling unless either we succumb to the flow of the story or we take seriously its concern with what ‘knowing’ (even as in ‘knowing little smile’) is. Most of us require some authority to  validate that we actually know something, just as both the tall boy and Dmitri need in their own ways. Only David needs no authority for his knowing, a phenomenon that must have irritated more fathers (accustomed to the role of authority) of 10-year-old children than Simón.

And the reader is perpetually in this position of not knowing the meaning of what he is told, even a name, since we are continually told David is not ‘David’s’ true name. We seem to be justified by the title to assume that name might be Jesus, especially given the books play, in different registers from playful to apparently authoritative, with events from Christ’s own New Testament, the book providing the source of metaphors like:

• the description of a football game as ‘ the slaughter of the innocents’ (p. 17) referring to Gospel of Matthew (2:16-18);
• the characteristic play of uses of ‘I am’ definition that characterise Christ and are, in biblical exegesis related to the ways in Christ finds a type in the Old Testament characters Moses and, more specifically, David the shepherd and king. David’s conversation with Simón on page 13f. glosses the conversation with Moses in Exodus 13 (13-14) in which God says ‘I Am Who I Am’;
• His linked association with Madonna and Child and Pieta figures that shadow each other (p. 121). ‘His eyes are close, (…) He looks like a babe at his mother’s breast.’;
• The association with the Paschal lamb (p.96);
• David’s sense of mission, which he, like Christ, both embraces and resists. ‘He is asking why he is here. For what purpose. To what end.’ says Dimitri to Simón (p. 78), linking the sense of closure to questions of meaning and conclusion in a rich sense. This is directly linked to elements of the Life of Christ, the census-takers, on p. 128f. and the obscuring of that mission in hidden messages that prefigure events in time (p.130);
• And above all the constant association of David with salvation, sometimes in a less august register when speaking of ‘rescue’ (and Don Quixote) on pp. 85f., at other times more portentously: ‘You have saved people, many people.’ (p.104).

It’s important that this list is not seen as attempting to assert that the book makes David an allegory of Christ. The hints here are so often of varied registers, some that cannot be taken as other as unauthoritative intertextual hints (p. 17). They must not be read as interpretive code, as carrying the ‘message’ of the book (particularly if there is a desire to find a Christian message). They play with how meaning and message are signified and can be as important taken in relation to Don Quixote and the possible moral function of Literature as they can shadow typologies in the Bible.

My key feeling is that, just as there is no answer to the ‘What next?’ question in the second book (see link to review at top). Therefore, there is, and can be, no final closure – only that Platonic / Yeatsian question, ‘What next?’.

As David elaborates parables from his hospital bed to the orphans round him, their characteristic question, especially when a story stops for whatever reason, ‘What next?’. Perhaps then there is no reading that is so important to comprehend even to the most philosophically inclined of us as that of the child. And surely children ask that to learn that the truth of a world without authoritative answers or myths is, ‘I don’t know’ but it may NOT be nothing. It remains as in Plato and NeoPlatonism, a holy mystery. The problem is that so many discourses, like medicine for instance, play games with stories and the probabilities of prediction. The altogether recognisable Dr Ribeiro, the spinner of ultimate myth, says in answer to Simón’s statement:

              “… Someone, I don’t know who, has told him he is going to die.”

              “That is absurd. we take our patients’ concerns seriously, sen˜or Simón. It would be unprofessional if we did not. But it is absolutely not true that David is in danger. His is a difficult case as I have said, there may even be an element of the idiopathic in it, but we are applying ourselves. We will solve the mystery. He will be able to go back to his football and his dancing sooner rather than later. You can tell him that, from me.”

Can ‘mystery’, as appears to be asserted here, be resolved by authority and the certainty that research finds answers to questions. It can’t, of course, in or out of novels. And, it is to these kinds of truths that Coetzee has dedicated himself in this trilogy.

I love it. But I need to read the first novel again as entry to the reading the trilogy as a whole.

Steve