The Childhood of Jesus
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. …