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Abstract
This article takes as its starting point the divergent responses that J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy (The Childhood of Jesus [2013], The Schooldays of Jesus [2016] and The Death of Jesus [2019]) has drawn from reviewers and scholars respectively. Where reviewers have generally regarded these works’ difficulty as obstructive, scholars have taken their difficulty as both the justification and catalyst for sustained engagement. This divergence is explained, in part, as a consequence of the literacies developed by and in response to modernism – literacies which regarded difficulty as both the signature of the worthwhile artwork and as the criterion which justifies the special attention of specialized readers. If one aim of this article is to situate Coetzee and Coetzee studies within this tradition, a second aim is to ask whether the forms of attention garnered by his late trilogy are less an index of intrinsic challenges than of Coetzee’s reputation as a challenging writer. To do so is to worry the overready ascription of ‘Coetzeean’ difficulty – along with the modes of reading it tends to enlist – in order to reposition bewilderment, embarrassment and other ugly aesthetic-affects as generative for criticism.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Arthur Rose, Derek Attridge and Michael Titlestad for comments on draft versions of this article.
Notes
1 These are The Childhood of Jesus (Citation2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (Citation2016), and The Death of Jesus (Citation2019).
2 See, for instance, Markovits, Tait, and Bellin.
3 The editors write (2): ‘At the forefront of literary invention, the novel affirms the enduring capacity of contemporary literature to engage with the most intractable social, political and spiritual problems confronting us at the beginning of the twenty-first century.’
4 ‘The criterion of “embarrassment” … or “contradiction” … focuses on actions or sayings of Jesus that would have embarrassed or created difficulty for the early Church. The point of the criterion is that the early Church would hardly have gone out of its way to create material that only embarrassed its creator or weakened its position in arguments with opponents’ (Meier 169).
5 The latter (‘Making No Compromise with the Public Taste’) served as slogan on the cover page of The Little Review from June 1917 onwards.
6 I use the book’s subtitle for ease of reference.
7 See Meier: ‘Once again, it is highly unlikely that the Church would have taken pains to invent a saying that emphasized the ignorance of its risen Lord, only to turn around and suppress it’ (169).
8 As will become clear, I use the term ‘epiphenomenal’ in a distinct way from George Steiner (27–30). In Steiner’s usage, ‘epiphenomenal difficulty’ is synonymous with his preferred term ‘contingent difficulty’, which largely pertains to intertextual or linguistic obscurity.
9 The question featured among ten ‘Extended Essay Themes’ for M. Phil. Students in 1981. I am grateful to Andries Wessels for supplying me with a copy.
10 The original source seems to be Jason Farrago’s review of Childhood.
11 For the German/English confusion, see Childhood 67; Death 12–13.
12 E.B. Pusey, Augustine’s translator, provides a useful gloss on the same page: ‘He means Christ; the first letters of whose Names did in Sybiles acrostic verses make up the word ιχθυζ, a fish. He was also resembled by Jonas drawn out of the fish and deep … . He is fed upon at the Communion’ (in Augustine 296–97).
13 I am indebted to Leonard Diepeveen’s The Difficulties of Modernism for drawing my attention to this piece.
14 Most of these reassessments are contained in Eliot’s On Poetry and Poets.