A Bridging Fiction: The Migrant Subject in J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus

Abstract

SummaryThe article examines, with reference to J.M. Coetzee’s novel, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), how the migrant is narrated into being as a subject over the divide between a previous life, which is being transformed into memory, and a future life, which has to be imagined before being realised. Drawing on Coetzee’s own metaphor in Elizabeth Costello of writing fiction as constructing a bridge over a chasm between the real world and an imaginary one, as well as Calvino’s similar metaphor in If on a winter’s night a traveller (1979) of story being a bridge over a void, the article shows how the narrative in The Childhood of Jesus is located in, and constitutes a passage from, an unspecified past to an indeterminate future. The reader is reminded throughout the narrative of the void beneath the minimalist fictional bridge, and of the problem that the young protagonist, David, has with the logic of conventional numeracy – the hypotext for David’s difficulty with numbers being Musil’s novel, The Confusions of Young Törless (1906). Coetzee’s novel expands the fictionality around the story of Jesus not only through the parodic resemblance of his young protagonist to the Biblical Jesus, but also through its intertextual use of works by Voltaire, Cervantes and Kafka, and especially the apocryphal Infancy Gospels with their miraculous and anecdotal stories about the childhood of Jesus. Coetzee’s novel, with its essential simplicity of plot and character, gravity and meaning that resides in metaphor, may perhaps usefully be approached as a self-reflexive fictional parable – a novel about parables, Biblical, apocryphal and literary.