Coetzee, The Limits Of The Law, And (In)Activist Guilt

Through their free indirect discourse and dialogic nature, many of J. M. Coetzee’s novels ask explicit and literal questions of the reader, as, for example, the question put to us of David Lurie in Disgrace (1999): after his daughter is raped and David tries to imagine her experience, the narrator asks, ‘does he have it in him to be the woman?’ (160). In that they ask such questions, Coetzee’s novels require engagement with the debate that such questioning engenders, and while such dialogism might prepare the way for some sort of activist change, most of Coetzee’s characters remain only ever on the edge of change, about ready to change, but unable to enact change. In his recent work, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), however, Coetzee refuses to allow us to remain in the space of dialogic philosophy; the child at the heart of the narrative – David, not Jesus – asks question after question, ‘why’ after ‘why,’ until his questions, most of which bring to the fore the artificiality of various laws, become unanswerable for his sometimes guardian Simón, a man who ultimately believes that ‘there are higher considerations than obeying the law, higher imperatives’ (299). Faced with the prospect of losing David, Simón must act instead of answer, and he breaks the law to leave Novilla with David and Inés, the woman to whom Simón has “given” David to mother. After an exploration of the nature of law-based limitation that characterizes his previous novels, this essay posits that The Childhood of Jesus offers an affront to previous readings of Coetzee’s work as demonstrative of the impossibility of any action that lies outside of ‘the man-made rules’ (289) that exist in a ‘universe … ruled by laws’ (291).