J. M. Coetzee's Jesus trilogy — “The Childhood of Jesus” (2013), “The Schooldays of Jesus” (2016) and now “The Death of Jesus” — chronicles the life and death of a child with certain resemblances to that holy terror.2020/05/26
Fiction J.M. Coetzee's Jesus Sees the World as Don Quixote ...
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Don’t mock me, says Simón.
“Your son has a sense of duty, of obligation, that is unusual in a 10-year-old,” the headmaster replies. “He feels a certain duty toward Fabricante’s orphans, toward orphans in general, the world’s orphans.”
“The Death of Jesus” is the novel in which David becomes most recognizably a Jesus figure. He has followers, imparts wisdom, suffers martyrdom. One follower is the headmaster; another is Dmitri, a trickster, rapist and murderer straight out of Dostoyevsky who sees in David his redeemer, his master, a comet on a brief visit to earth.
“O man,” David’s Quixote tells a man who tries to buy Rocinante, the knight’s faithful nag, “you see not the world itself but only the measures in which the world is veiled. Woe unto you, blind one.”
There Is No Other Place: J. M. Coetzee's Jesus Trilogy
https://lareviewofbooks.org › article
2020/06/22 — (The US edition of the novel appeared in May.) But why a story about Jesus? Has Coetzee turned to faith in his old age? All three novels take place in a fictitious land. None ...
In a lecture given in 1987 upon accepting the Jerusalem Prize, Coetzee dwelled briefly on “Don Quixote.” His comments clarify, a little, what he is doing with the novel in this trilogy. Coetzee unpacks the “why?” he has David ask in response to Simón’s assertion that fantasy is unreal and the unreal is dangerous. “Don Quixote,” says Coetzee, is making the opposite claim. Its question is: How does literature take us out of our delusions, our world “of violent phantasms,” and bring us to “a true living world?”
The Mad Knight knew: “He leaves behind hot, dusty, tedious La Mancha and enters the realm of faerie by what amounts to a willed act of the imagination.” And why must Don Quixote come home to die? Because the crushing weight of the physical world imposes itself on him and his imagination, “which, whether he likes it or not, has its residence in his body.”
In this reading of “Don Quixote,” the knight is not mad, but rather the imagination made flesh, or, as Dmitri says of David, “the word, the fiery word that will reveal why we are here.” Having been embodied, David, too, must die. But who will give the world his message? David asks Simón. Who will write about his deeds? In other words — words David wouldn’t use, since neither he nor anyone else seems to have heard of Christianity — who will write his gospel?
I will, says Simón. “I am not much of a writer but I will do my best.”
In that case, David says, “you must promise not to understand me. When you try to understand me it spoils everything.” Sometimes not trying to understand is a pathway to grace.
Judith Shulevitz is a journalist, cultural critic and the author of “The Sabbath World.”
THE DEATH OF JESUS
By J.M. Coetzee
197 pp. Viking. $27.
*****
In the name of God
Malaysians are fighting one another over the word “Allah”
Can anyone use it, or should only Muslims be allowed to utter it?
AsiaApr 3rd 2021 edition
Apr 3rd 2021
The first tenet of Islam is La ilaha ill’ allah—“There is no deity but God.” Allah is simply the word for God in Arabic and several other languages, including Malay. But Malaysia’s home ministry decreed in 1986 that the word Allah, among others, would henceforth be reserved for the exclusive use, in print at least, of Muslims, who are more than 60% of the population. Christians and other religious minorities had to find other ways to refer to God. The intention was to prevent pious Muslims from being confused and then led astray by non-Muslim texts. In mid-March the Malaysian High Court struck down the ban, finding in favour of Jill Ireland Lawrence Bill, a Christian woman who took the government to court for confiscating Catholic tracts with the word Allah in the title. The government has appealed.
It is a long-running dispute. In 2009 a court ruled in favour of a Catholic newspaper, the Herald, which had sued the home ministry for its right to refer to God as Allah. The judgment set off days of protests and arson attacks on churches. The government appealed then, too, and a few days later the court set aside its own ruling. In 2013 an appeals court reconfirmed the ban.
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