Faith, Irony, Salt, and Possible Impossibilities: J. M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus in Conversation with Zbigniew Herbert's “From Mythology”

Abstract

This essay reads J.M. Coetzee’s novel The Childhood of Jesus, exploring the confrontations the novel stages between ways of reading the world. Using the categories of the metaphoric, the metonymical, and the literal, I try to delineate the epistemological and ontological structures that underlie these different worldviews. I particularly focus on how the novel reconfigures the relations between concepts that are traditionally conceived as oppositional pairs: the metaphoric and the literal, irony and faith, fiction and reality, the concrete and the abstract, the material and the ideal. To probe the novel’s recasting of these conceptual pairs, I introduce another interlocutor: Zbigniew Herbert’s prose poem “From Mythology.” Herbert’s poem enters the conversation through its uncanny contiguity with a line in Coetzee’s novel: this line creates an opening through which I invite the poem as another voice that enables me to unravel the interrelation of irony, faith, and the literal. By probing the epistemological and ethical implications of different voices in the novel in relation to Herbert’s poem, I finally reflect on the novel’s bearing on our present and the way it imagines literature’s relation to the world.