A New Faith
What shape might religion take in a world not born of Genesis?
The final book of Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy is as elusive as its predecessors. The only certainty in The Death of Jesus is the death the title promises. David, the boy protagonist of the series, decides that Simon and Inés (the strangers who took him in) are not his parents, even though they love and care for him. He leaves them to join an orphanage but, soon after, is debilitated by a mysterious disease. David can no longer play soccer or dance—activities we have seen him excel at in previous books—and quickly succumbs to the illness while confined to a hospital room. The plot is not unexpected, nor does it offer the kind of satisfying conclusion typically expected of a novel.
Instead, the pulse of the book plays in the many conversations between the characters, until and after David’s death. David, the Jesus figure, inevitably takes on the role of the messiah in these conversations, with adults and children alike literally sitting at his feet to listen to him. After his death, several claim that he left behind a message to be carried forth, but nobody can spell out its details. It is not the story that seems to matter in this novel but the dialectics.
For readers unfamiliar with Coetzee’s work, this trilogy is not a recommended entry point. The series is abstruse and often frustrating, unerring as Coetzee’s prose always is. The want of a pay-off also only increases with each book. But for the many ardent followers of Coetzee’s writing, the Jesus books perhaps form an inevitable destination—for years, Coetzee has been shedding the trappings of the conventional novel and moving towards philosophical questioning.
David is a child who disrupts the order of the world. Having rejected normal schooling, he taught himself to read through a copy of Don Quixote, and spends his days thinking about stars and integral numbers. But David is also a rebel in a fictional world that has evolved without Christ, and his “followers” have not known Christ either. Through David, Coetzee seems to be prodding at what shape religion might take in a world that wasn’t born of Genesis. Moreover, in coupling his messiah with Don Quixote—the protagonist of a book that is considered the genesis of modern fiction—Coetzee also seems to be reflecting upon the purpose and potential of the novelist; David, a natural storyteller, is told off by his teacher for his “extravagant” fictions.
In an essay on the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, Coetzee likens Herbert’s Mr. Cogito to Don Quixote, and reads the poem, The Envoy of Mr. Cogito, as a demand “to the self to persist in the faithful life even in the absence of any credible faith”. Coetzee’s own book carries a similar impulse. It is not a demand, but a meditation perhaps, on what faith and storytelling mean in a fundamental world—a world stripped of its saviours and its origin myths.