J M Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus - Considerations of Living and Dying

Abstract

The article focuses on Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus while referring also to the earlier two novels in what is called the ‘Jesus trilogy’. Instead of pursuing the trail of literary studies – novels of migration, of the postcolonies of the South, of whether in their formal representation the novels are allegories or not allegories – I turn towards religious studies. As the novels do, I grant significance to Coetzee’s ideas on a moral education in contexts of ideological duplicity; on the struggle of the soul between passion and reason; and on a message that society anticipates from an exceptional child who wishes to be a saviour. Beneath such concerns, I argue, we encounter the palimpsest of an older story: that of Jesus of Nazareth, to which the name ‘Jesus’ in the title of each novel should have pointed us but did not. Like the almost invisible author, the reader in secular times is reluctant, perhaps, to venture beyond earthly belief and engage with the challenge of what Walter Benjamin termed the ‘spiritual rag picker’ of ‘weak messianic power’. How does The Death of Jesus, or indeed Coetzee, struggle with such a challenge?