The Schooldays of Jesus by JM Coetzee review – no passion in an ascetic allegory
JM Coetzee’s Man Booker-longlisted sequel to his 2013 book The Childhood of Jesus poses an intriguing question: when is a novel not a novel? The driving energy of the book, like that of its predecessor, is philosophical rather than narrative: at this stage of his career, Coetzee is far more concerned with ideas than character or plot (which have never, it has to be said, been the main strength of his terse, enigmatic fiction – rarely has a writer so effectively managed to turn his limitations into a trademark). He has always preferred to construct novels that generate their own paradigms, that operate outside recognisable historical or geographical settings, and even outside recognisable psychologies. The Coetzeean landscape is eerily stripped down, often physically rudimentary, like a vista by De Chirico: a featureless arena in which colossal philosophical questions cast long shadows.
In The Schooldays of Jesus, however, the scenery is so flimsily assembled that it could come straight from Ikea. The book picks up where the first one left off, in a nameless country where everyone speaks Spanish and where refugees arrive on boats, are given new names and identities, and are “washed clean” of all their old memories and associations. The capital city is Novilla, a socialist utopia whose citizens are without desires or appetites (the standard fare is bread and bean paste) but are fond of having ad hoc philosophical debates in their breaks from comradely manual labour. These conversations are all rendered in Coetzee’s stilted, courtly idiom, which feels oddly apt here, reading as if it might indeed be a translation from Spanish into English.
The scenery is so flimsily assembled that it could come straight from Ikea
No one in the novel is called Jesus. The Jesus of the title alludes to a motherless refugee child named Davíd who, in the previous volume, is taken under the wing of Simón, an earnest middle-aged man not entirely happy with this brave new world. Simón recruits a suitably virginal young woman, Inés, to be Davíd’s new mother, but their makeshift family unit is threatened when the boy, who has unusual intellectual gifts, begins to resist the officially approved methods of learning and is sent to a reformatory. (He escapes.) The end of the first book sees the holy family in flight, following a star – their destination the “sprawling provincial town” of Estrella.
Reckless romancing or stolid pragmatism? … statues of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in the Place d’Espagne, Brussels. Photograph: Alamy
In The Childhood of Jesus, Simón hazards that “We are like ideas. Ideas never die,” and in the sequel, too, it is ideas that matter. What actually happens is secondary, designed to move us on from one open-ended debate to the next: what is the nature of the created world? Of love? Of freedom? Of the self? Above all, of passion? Once in Estrella, Davíd is enrolled in the local Academy of Dance, run by the severe Ana Magdalena, who has the “alabaster” beauty of a classical statue and who instructs her pupils in a mystical “dance of the universe” that purports to map out “a higher realm where the numbers dwell”. With her “perfect features, perfect skin, perfect figure, perfect bearing”, and chilly commitment to Platonic mumbo-jumbo, Ana Magdalena is the ultimate representative of this strange utopia’s idealising tendency. “Bloodless, sexless, lifeless”, she has all the detachment of the ideologue. Ideologies do not equal passion.
In his fidelity to instructing rather than seducing, Coetzee does not actually write fiction any more
Throughout the book, it is Simón who champions the “primacy of the personal” over the communal, abstract ideal; of clay over marble. As the novel’s Joseph figure and Davíd’s protector, Simón is an indefatigable guide through these Socratic dialogues, always ready to “produce the correct, patient, educative words”. The paradox is that, in spite of being the voice of individualism, he is another of Coetzee’s self-abnegating protagonists, who approaches passion at a slant, dispassionately. Simón is a prim pedant, a killjoy, disapproving of dogs and sausages and inventing one’s own stories to go with the pictures in a book.
Never is this more apparent than when Coetzee invites us to consider philosophies of fiction. Why is Spanish the language spoken in his invented world? Because it is the language of Don Quixote, the Ur-novel, one of the first to pose the question of what realism is and what fiction is for. Which is more “real”, more useful in navigating our existence: Quixote’s reckless romancing or Sancho Panza’s stolid pragmatism? Don Quixote (or a children’s illustrated version of it) is the book that Davíd uses to teach himself to read. In The Childhood of Jesus, it becomes the springboard for an exchange between Davíd and Simón about the nature of fiction. “You can look at the page and move your lips and make up stories in your head, but that is not reading,” warns Simón:
For real reading you have to submit yourself to what is written on the page. You have to give up your own fantasies. You have to stop being silly. You have to stop being a baby.
While Simón is “a dry old stick”, Davíd – rather like the historical Jesus, one imagines – is, in his sense of authority and conviction, his dogged rejection of systems, genuinely uncanny. Davíd (who roots for Don Quixote, the fantasist, rather than for Sancho Panza, the drab realist) knows instinctively that it is “the hole between the pages”, the tapping into our own fantasies, that makes fiction fiction and makes reading pleasurable. His natural affinity is for the transgressive, in particular the novel’s “man of passion”, a voluble murderer called Dmitri who ruminates at length on guilt and justice (“don’t ever let them forgive you, and don’t ever listen when they promise you a new life”). Dmitri’s country of origin is clearly Dostoevsky.
Simón is greatly exercised by the question of passion, but pleasure, rather than passion, is the real problem in The Schooldays of Jesus. It is by now apparent that this mysterious Spanish-speaking country, this place of refugee souls, stands for our embodied earthly life: “The boat docks at the harbour and we climb down the gangplank and we are plunged into the here and now. Time begins.” The name “Novilla” suggests both a place of new beginnings and the genre in which the characters find themselves, the novel itself – that ultimate, well-worn site of inventing things anew.
So, what are stories for? Are they for grownups or babies? In spite of its declared suspicion of Platonic idealism, the spirit of Plato, rather than the anarchic Jesus with his boundary-pushing parables, hovers over this book. Plato was famously dismissive of the seductive properties of mimetic literature, which urge us to make an imaginative identification with a fictional world. He would have agreed without hesitation that novels are for babies. Philosophy is for adults. On the evidence of this austere, barely realised mise-en-scène, it is difficult not to feel that Coetzee, like Plato, is no longer much interested in the accidents of our quotidian human world, the shadows on the cave wall. He is after essence alone, the pure, ungraspable fire. In his fidelity to ideas, to telling rather than showing, to instructing rather than seducing us, he does not actually write fiction any more. The Schooldays of Jesus, philosophically dense as it is, is parched, relentlessly adult fare – rather like eating endless bread and bean paste.
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