MFS Modern Fiction Studies

J. M. Coetzee's Jesus trilogy of fictions (a term Coetzee prefers to novels), published between 2013 and 2019, constitute a singular stage in the late career of the Nobel laureate. The trilogy revolves around the young child David (the closest figure we have to the Jesus named in the titles) and his adoptive father, Simón. Like all the other characters, David and Simón arrive in Novilla after having been purged of their former memories (the theme of forgetfulness plays a large role throughout Metaphysical Exile: On J. M. Coetzee's Jesus Fictions). They are forced to learn Spanish as their mother tongue and to adapt to a new life in Novilla (a nonplace, a utopia) as refugees. The initial reception of the Jesus fictions, variously described as perplexing or arcane, is a recurring feature of Metaphysical Exile, the first work of criticism dedicated to the trilogy. Pippin notes how [End Page 580] the "baffled reviews" (58) of Coetzee's critics amount to a trenchant "middle-brow plea for accessibility" (90). Key to Pippin's apologia is the articulation of the philosophical import of the novels' peculiar setting and narrative structure (which substitutes dramatic action for philosophical dialogue and signifying chains of intertextual allusion). Pippin's thesis is bold and compelling: he argues that "the trilogy is an allegory of absolute exile" (13), concerned with the as if that structures the relation between the human being and the world in which the human being is destined to live. Is there a purposive fit between us and the world, a connection "between how one feels one should live and what the world, especially the social world makes available to one" (6)? Drawing on the implications of Novalis's idea that philosophy is really homesickness, Pippin argues that the fictions he examines respond to metaphysical homesickness or absolute exile by depicting an attempt at homecoming, which philosophy itself has never fully attained.

As one of Coetzee's foremost philosophical commentators, Pippin is well placed to separate the profound from the perplexing, notably by drawing on frameworks and ideas from Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hegel. However, a key strength of his book is the way it registers the trilogy's uniquely literary engagement with its ideas. As he writes: "It is . . . not a measure of the philosophical power and value of a piece of fiction that a discursive thesis is forthcoming" (21). Engaging with the concept of allegory, popular in previous Coetzee criticism, notably Derek Attridge's famous essay "Against Allegory," Pippin's task is not to translate the ambiguity of Coetzee's works into familiar intellectual patterns—an exercise in "analogical geography" (14)—but to register the singular implications that arise from the situations they present; implications that are imaginative rather than merely propositional. This somewhat constrains the standard procedure of philosophical argumentation, but Pippin's caution is rightly justified by the power of the questions (rather than answers) that he is able to excavate from the trilogy.

This work of excavation is nowhere more evident than in the discussions that trace the intertextuality of the works. The internal organization of Pippin's project is structured by three "regimes" (25)—those of reason, passion, and nothing, each corresponding respectively to the three novels. The second chapter, on the regime of reason in childhood, explores the many references to the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (explored previously by Jean-Michel Rabaté). The real highlight of this chapter, however, is Pippin's account of Novilla's conspicuous resemblance to Plato's city of pigs in Book 2 of the Republic. [End Page 581] Like Novilla, Plato's city is marked by an absence of passion or excess; here desire, yearning, and restlessness have ended: "human beings can approach a state of collective lassitude and indifference and in that paradoxical sense, because they are human, can cease to be human by ceasing to care about what it is to be human" (38). Such a vision is also related to Nietzsche's idea...