A Book of Friends

‘Each artist seems. . .to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten, and which is different from that whence another great artist, setting sail for the earth, will eventually emerge.’ Proust, The Captive

In J. M. Coetzee’s The Schooldays of Jesus, the key characters have moved to Estrella from Novilla, the site of Coetzee’s earlier novel, The Childhood of Jesus, and while much remains the same, a great deal is different. The child David is still bossy, even more so; the relationship between the figures functioning as his parents, Simón and Inés, remains brittle; where and why they are where they are, what it means that their memories have been largely erased, and why they must speak Spanish (the language of the ‘first novel’, Don Quixote), all remain mysterious. Above all, Simón and Inés continue to try to find a solution to the problem of educating the profoundly unteachable David. There was some evidence of violence in Novilla. One Emilio Daga, who became a favourite of David’s, had a knife and was willing to wield it. There was also some evidence of sexual longing there. Simón slept with Elena, the mother of David’s playmate, Fidel; raised the topic with the sceptical and contemptuous Ana; and tried with comic results to visit a brothel. But Novilla was largely pacific, and there was very little erotic intensity anywhere. There was even some hostility to the very idea on the part of the women Simón encounters. But in Estrella, one of their first experiences is of a group of boys tormenting some ducks, throwing rocks at them, and one of the boys, Bengi, succeeds in fatally injuring one. David insists that Bengi is not sorry for what he did, and claims that Bengi was obviously thrilled by his sadism. ‘He was shining…He wanted to kill them all.’

The scene appears to be an echo of sorts of a similar scene in Book Four of The Brothers Karamazov, when Alyosha tries to stop a group of boys from throwing rocks at a boy named Ilyusha. Moreover, there is also a passion-fuelled murder in Schooldays, as there is in The Brothers Karamazov, and there are characters named Dmitri and another named Alyosha in Coetzee’s novel as there are in Dostoyevsky’s. In general, Dostoyevsky’s novel looms large as a kind of reference point in this sequel, as Don Quixote and Plato’s Republic did in Childhood. Echoes and intimations of these works have not disappeared, and in Schooldays the Republic is called to mind by mention of a version of The Myth of the Metals. That already points to the very different moral environment in Estrella, one connected with the passionless docility of Novilla, and to the contrasting presence of the theme of, and evidence of, intense sexual and violent passion in Estrella. And, as just noted, the novel has a central event, towards which everything seems to be leading, and which has major implications for all of the characters: the murder of David’s dance teacher, Ana Magdalena, by a man with whom she had been having a secret affair, Dmitri, a custodian for a museum that occupies a floor in the building housing the dance studio. Sexuality, nakedness, lust, irrationality and passion are all explicit themes in the book. Neither the adultery nor the murder nor these topics would have been imaginable in Novilla.

Yet the literary form of the sequel novel is continuous with the first. The fable-like tone and the spare, economical prose remain characteristic of the novel, as do the mystery and general abstractness of the place. It is not clear whether the setting is to suggest a post-apocalyptic world, an after-life, or simply some sort of alternate world where memories have been ‘washed clean’ and people have been massively relocated for some unspecified reason. Once the reader grants the novels their counter-realistic premise—that there is such a land, that no one seems curious about why, and that David is as he is—both novels develop in a relatively even if minimalistically realistic way. People do recognisably human things, explain themselves to each other; there are civil authorities, jobs, money, sports, amusements. There are no miraculous events, no suspensions of the laws of nature. The pace and everyday tone of life in both places seem quiet, still, regular, except for this one spectacular exception. One has the feeling of thousands of people going about their business peacefully, with little fuss or tension, purposively, with no drama.

The mystery of the title and the designation of David as Jesus or a Jesus-figure continue too, of course, although the issue is somewhat less prominent. Childhood seemed partly inspired by the intriguing problem of Jesus as a child, a God who must live through the emotionally unstable period of human childhood. And that becomes somewhat explicit. David, to prove that he can read and write, once writes out, ‘Yo soy la veridad’, ‘I am the truth’, a clear echo of John 14:6. (The Gospel of John makes another, subtler appearance in Schooldays, at the end of chapter fourteen, when Dmitri tells Simón, ‘Don’t believe everything I say. It is just air, air that blows where it listeth.’ This evokes John 3:8: ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.’ And this in turn evokes the theme of contingency, arbitrariness, the lack of any reason for the murder, and perhaps even the immeasurability of the universe, a later theme.) In Schooldays, there is also a story related about a fisherman who would be king, and his failure to inspire belief that he is, but these are faint echoes of biblical themes. The problem of belief is certainly central to the sequel, but it concerns an odd topic that can only be called faintly religious: a belief (or not) in dance, in dance’s powers, especially to ‘call down the numbers’. In fact, this seems to be the central thematic pivot of the novel, and I will concentrate on it shortly. The problem of educating ‘Jesus’ or David in this novel, given that David does not need or want the ‘normal’ education Inés desires, appears to be ‘solved’ after a fashion by this strange solution: dance. This is not, to say the least, a theme in the Christian Bible.

Finally, we now know what was easy to imagine when the second novel appeared: that this is a planned-out series. There is a third novel, published in Spanish first, La muerte de Jésus, and, given its title, we know the series is a trilogy, and it is likely that The Death of Jesus will complete, dramatically and thematically, that trilogy, and thus backshadow the first two. But there is plenty to try to understand in the details of the second in the series; one theme especially, referred to in my title. This limited focus, while concentrating on what I believe to be the key to the novel, will necessarily omit matters of substance. The role of Dmitri especially, and through him, the bearing of The Brothers Karamazov on the novel is one such issue, not to mention David’s great affection for Dmitri, the source of many surprising developments in the second half of the novel, or the development of David’s relationship with Simón and Inés, or the meaning of his intense commitment to the academy and to dance, and the contrast on this score with Simón.

The little ‘family’ in Schooldays first settles on a farm with another mythological resonance. It is run by three sisters, clearly the three sisters of fate, at least the fate of David, which is yet another reference to Plato’s Republic. They will determine his future, at least for a while. For, after another disastrous episode with a tutor (there had been a similar failure in Childhood), an episode with a focus on another continuous theme (numbers), the sisters offer to finance David’s education at a dance academy, Academia de la danza, run by one señor Arroyo and his spectacularly beautiful and statuesque wife, Ana Magdalena. She bears the name of J. S. Bach’s wife, and this seems, and will turn out to be, important. Señor Arroyo is a superb musician, especially on the organ. Señora Arroyo explains that the purpose of the school is, by a certain sort of dance instruction, to train the soul ‘in the direction of the good’. Simón and Inés are sceptical but, as Simón explains, they have been ‘flattened’, ‘bulldozed’ by David; their will to resist and direct him is almost gone, and if David wants to attend the school, they will not object.

He does want to attend, and the issue of dance is now front and centre. Here is Ana Magdalena’s explanation of the school’s philosophy of dance (there will be similar pronouncements by her husband later):

To bring the numbers down from where they reside, to allow them to manifest themselves in our midst, to give them body, we rely on the dance. Yes, here in the Academy we dance, not in a graceless, carnal, or disorderly way, but body and soul together, so as to bring the numbers to life. As music enters us and moves us in dance, so the numbers cease to be mere ideas, mere phantoms, and become real. The music evokes its dance and the dance evokes its music: neither comes first. That is why we call ourselves an academy of music as much as an academy of dance.

Simón will never be able to convince himself that this is not a lot of crackpot nonsense, and that opens a rupture of sorts with David. David realises that Simón does not believe, so he will not dance for him, and eventually he accuses Simón of not loving him or even caring for him.

The idea of bringing numbers to life in a sensuous dance or in a bodily, living form is connected by contrast with Simón’s coldly rational nature, his lack of passion, his admission that he has never loved anyone, and so with his scepticism. Of course, the pro-dance people note, someone like Simón would not understand such a view. After Dmitri murders Ana Magdalena, Simón’s problem with the theory is put definitively in a conversation with Mercedes, Ana’s sister. (Everyone misunderstands the murder as motivated by Dmitri’s frustration and anger that his love for her was unrequited. But that is not true. His love was reciprocated and not reluctantly or under pressure, but passionately, as Simón learns from some letters he discovers. For Simón this means that Dmitri ‘killed her for no reason’.) Here is Simón’s conversation with Mercedes.

Mercedes gives a laugh, low and hard, like a dog’s bark. ‘You need to learn to dance, Simón—may I call you Simón? It will cure you of your obtuseness. Or put a stop to your questioning.’

‘I fear I am past cure, Mercedes. To be truthful, I don’t see the question to which dance is the answer.’

‘No, I can see you don’t. But you must have been in love sometime. When you were in love, did you not see the question to which love was the answer, or were you an obtuse lover too?’

He is silent.

The dance, and all that it means to the Arroyo clan, is also contrasted late in the novel with a different attitude towards numbers. An itinerant lecturer, señor Moreno, an old friend of señor Arroyo when they ran a clock-making business, is in town to deliver a lecture on a thinker named Metros, whose views concern the use of numbers in measurement. It is not entirely clear if the Metros view is that the universe itself cannot be measured, or that there is nothing in the universe that cannot be measured, or whether Metros said both and whether they are compatible or not, or whether the issue is what can be measured or what should be measured. Señor Moreno appears to feel that ‘all can be measured’ and ‘should be measured’, and this was the source of his break with Juan Sebastian and señor Arroyo, and of Arroyo’s abandoning clock-making.

It is unlikely that these two approaches to ‘metrons’ and numbers, the ‘dance’ view and the ‘measurement’ view, amount to the extent of their significance in the novel. The allusions to Plato and Wittgenstein, and the importance given the issue aesthetically, suggest that the issue and the controversies bear on precisely what keeps appearing explicitly in the novel: philosophy, or ideas in general, and so the question of intelligibility itself, of all forms. The metron view is linked explicitly with scientific law and so with that model of universal intelligibility (as all the intelligibility there can be), and the dance view suggests a contrasting aesthetic mode of intelligibility, here so bodily and sensual that it is a pre-literary form, pre-discursive even. It is this latter view that is both central to the novel and the hardest to understand in its full significance.

Finally, there is one further element, another literary echo, concerning the numbers and dance, or cold, distant and dead numbers versus embodied, living numbers, and even though the reference is only mentioned three times, the text that is called to mind is significant. In another passage where Arroyo is trying to explain the school’s theory of dance, he notes that dance is not about beauty. If that were the goal, the school would employ marionettes.

Marionettes can float and glide as human beings cannot. They can trace patterns of great complexity in the air. But they cannot dance. They have no soul. It is the soul that brings grace to the dance, the soul that follows the rhythm, each step instinct with the next step and the next.

Later Alma and Roberta and Consuelo, the three farm sisters, give David a present, a family of marionettes that they used to play with as children. And later still, after the sisters have refused to continue financing David’s education at the dance academy, David is worried that they will also take the marionettes back. He is reassured that they will not. When the full range of this reference is clearer, it will seem that what the sisters mean to say by the donation, or what the donation simply means of itself, is: if it is dance you want, here are the best dancers of all.

Given that the literary form of the two novels (fabulistic or parabolic) calls to mind such authors as Kafka and Beckett, this theme must be calling to mind another earlier author who, two hundred years ‘before his time’, belongs in this same unusual mythic genre—Heinrich von Kleist and his famous very short story, ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ (1810). This evocation is first of all formally significant because that story too is a fictional account of a philosophical conversation, a form that often misleads readers by seeming to encourage them to regard the work as a treatise, to ignore the potential for irony created by the difference between the literary form and the philosophical ‘content’. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello ‘lessons’ share the same fate, as readers and critics alike can be much too hasty in considering Elizabeth simply a mouthpiece for Coetzee. This is all especially important as a model for Schooldays because the basic situation of Kleist’s story is the basic structure of the novel: a somewhat fanciful philosophical account of the nature of dance, attended and responded to by a sceptical interlocutor; in Kleist, Herr C. and his sceptical, unnamed ironic interlocutor, and in Schooldays señor and señora Arroyo on the one hand, and principally Simón on the other. Inés also rejects the theory but her interest is mostly in David getting a proper education.

Kleist’s story consists of a conversation between two old friends, one of whom, Herr C., has been appointed principal dancer at a local theatre, and who is trying to explain to his friend why he is so fascinated by a marionette theatre he attends regularly. In general, the view he expounds agrees with the Arroyos’ at least to the extent that, if beauty were the object of dance, the best dancers would be marionettes. Puppets are not subject to gravity and do not make human mistakes, as when ‘the soul wanders from the body’s centre of gravity’ in human beings. (Translations from Kleist’s ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ are my own.) To paraphrase the interlocutor: Of course puppets don’t make mistakes. They don’t have souls. But most crucially, Herr C. notes, they are not self-conscious, they have not suffered the human fate described in Genesis, have not eaten the forbidden fruit of knowledge and so cannot, as they dance, observe themselves dancing, know they are dancing. And when that has happened, when they know what they are doing, affectation (Ziererei) is inevitable.

The interlocutor chimes in with his own Genesis-like story, about a young boy who once was able to perfectly embody a gesture famous from ancient statuary, a boy pulling a thorn from his foot. But our young man happened to see himself in a mirror and could never repeat the unplanned, spontaneous, unposed gesture, now that he had ‘in mind’ what he was to accomplish. For his part, Herr C. contributes a story about a fencer, himself, who could take on and defeat expert opponents, but could not compete at all with a thoughtless, instinctual bear who was being trained on the estate of a friend. Herr C. concludes from all this that in the organic world, as ‘thought grows dimmer and weaker, grace (Grazie) emerges more brilliantly and decisively (strahlender und herrschender)’. The ironies here are multiple: the boy is imitating and then trying to imitate a self-consciously designed artefact, an imitation of an imitation in other words; the bear is hardly in its natural state, is chained up and being trained. There is ‘thought’ everywhere in all this, and little grace.

The idea of self-consciousness, a fall from innocence, as responsible for an alienation from the world, a subject aware of itself and therefore sceptical of whether its experience of objects is of them as they really are, is of course a staple of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German thought. It often leads, as it does for Herr C., to an aspiration for a return to such innocence, or a self-divination, or some other way of coming ‘out the other side’, as it were, of such a fall. Or else it leads to some tragic sense of a paradise lost that simply can never be regained. On the other side of the issue, for philosophers like Hegel, the fall, in its metaphorical meaning, is a decisive and great liberation from animal dumbness, the first step on the way to full self-knowledge, rather than being the end of self-knowledge. Dominant in Estrella, at least around the dance academy, is the Rousseauian idea of a ‘lost paradise’ and its potential recovery. Naked swimming in nature, Alyosha-esque ‘innocence’, an anti-utilitarian animus, and more, envelop the core theory of dance as the bringing to life of numbers. This is obviously connected to the dance-versus-metron, Arroyo-versus-Moreno divide mentioned earlier.

And that core theory of dance—as opened up by Kleist—involves more than its proponents or its sceptics like Simón seem to realise, and something other than the Arroyos realise. As already noted, something is at stake that has to do with the status of ‘ideas’ in the arts or an aesthetic modality of truth. Whatever that presence is, it would look quite crude, something like philosophical thought ‘decorated’ by literary detail, if it involved relying directly on the explicit assertions of claims by characters. This is not to say that such an approach is not popular. It seems to have dominated a good deal of commentary on Kleist’s story, for example, with commentators assuming that Herr C. is a mouthpiece for Kleist. (One is reminded of Marcel’s reflection in Proust’s Time Regained that ‘A work of art in which there are theories is like an object which still has the price tag on it.’) Simón’s scepticism blocks him from appreciating that the achievement of ‘dance’ and all that it figures in the novel is an indispensable living embodiment of abstractions, and señor Arroyo’s view seems much less interested in the numbers themselves that the dance ‘calls down’ than he should be if that is the point of the dance. He makes the mistake Herr C. makes, assuming that any presence of self-conscious thought destroys the possibility of any spontaneous life, rather than the possibility that art can transform such abstractions into a living form. In a distinctly aesthetic way, Simón will realise this at the end of the novel, as we shall see. That possible modality is the question to which dance is the answer.

Both novels are as much continual reflections on art and literature as, in themselves, literary works. They also continually reflect on the echoes in any writer of many other writers, and on the relations between ideas and their sensual embodiment in the arts. They are, in other words, forms of reflective thought. In keeping with the spirit of these forms of thought, then, my own mind is turned to the way they offer an echo of Proust; this, at least, is one way for me to make sense of them.

This resonance might not be wholly personal. When Ana Magdalena had been explaining why dance is so important for young children, she introduces a classic Proustian theme—that our past is forgotten, but not wholly so. Remnants remain, not memories, but something like shadows of memories (we cannot call them to mind voluntarily), until we become ‘habituated’ to our new life in the present and we forget our origins entirely. The narrator of Proust’s novel also often talks about habit as comforting but deadening, obscuring. However, Ana goes on, these remnants are more vivid and recoverable in the child, although we have lost a language to evoke them, except for a primal language. Foremost among the primal words are the names of the numbers. The echo of Plato is again important, for our ‘deep past’ could be, as Socrates sometimes claims, another, enlightened life, which we can only dimly recollect in this life. This could suggest that Novilla and Estrella are not, despite how unfamiliar and strange many aspects seem, some new post-apocalyptic or after-life, but life itself; that the experience of having our memories washed clean, and so having the sense that we know things we can’t recall, are all conditions of existence itself, here highlighted and exaggerated but not strictly counter-factual. We might all have the sense that our ‘origins’, in whatever sense, are forgotten, lost, and most of us cease at some point to be curious about them and just soldier on.

Simón appears to know now that he doesn’t understand this. He doesn’t understand how he could be missing something important by not understanding, but he senses that he does. Some intimation prompts him to something surprising. He asks Mercedes for a dance lesson and she, while sceptical that anything will come of it, agrees. He is moved by the music and begins to appreciate ‘its structure, point by point’. And when he finally starts to dance, he is told to go on despite his ‘dizziness’, is told he will get over it.

He obeys. It is cool in the studio; he is conscious of the high space above his head. Mercedes recedes; there is only the music. Arms extended, eyes closed, he shuffles in a slow circle. Over the horizon the first star begins to rise.

‘Estrella’ is of course the Spanish word for star, and that, together with the star that appeared at Jesus’s birth, clearly has something to do with the reference. But, as Simón begins to see what the ‘artists’, the Arroyos and Mercedes, see or experience, in however limited the way they do, I would like to believe that this is a last reference to Proust, here specifically to the Vinteuil septet passage in The Captive, from which this essay’s epigraph is drawn:

The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.

This raises one final issue: what it means to ‘call down’ the name of Bach by giving Ana Magdalena the name of Bach’s wife. I want to suggest it has something to do with the form of this novel and Coetzee’s literary style. It is also of great personal significance to Coetzee, as he explained in his essay ‘What is a Classic?’:

One Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1955, when I was fifteen years old, I was mooning around our back garden in the suburbs of Cape Town, wondering what to do, boredom being the main problem of existence in those days, when from the house next door I heard music. As long as the music lasted, I was frozen, I dared not breathe. I was being spoken to by the music as music had never spoken to me before.

Aside from its personal significance, there are a number of ways the music of Bach could be said to bear on the novel, and they all have to do with what could have been ‘said’ to the fifteen year old by the music. But the one I would like to close by considering has to do with the literary style of the novel. This takes me to Coetzee’s general reception, as well as the reception of his two Jesus novels.

Even the few appreciative critics of the novels, when they go beyond plot summary with an occasional complement like ‘haunting’, and while they note the somewhat hypnotic effects, often profess the works baffling, mysterious and confusing. More prominent are the critics who proclaim the work passionless, ascetic, a sacrifice of fiction on the altar of philosophy, ‘a story that suggests more profundity than it ever incarnates’. They often use the occasion to reprise many long-established conventions, we might call them, of Coetzee criticism. They mention the ‘parched, etiolated quality of Coetzee’s prose’, that his approach is ‘irritatingly coy’, that his style makes him a ‘paragon of austere literary authority—the Nobel Prize, the air of almost comical seriousness, the sense of preternatural restraint and control that emanates from everything he writes’. The list could go on endlessly.

For the most part the criticisms of Schooldays seem to me simply lazy and, accordingly, superficial, a kind of middle-brow plea for accessibility, all on the assumption that the work of art is there ‘for us’, that it can make no serious demands on us. But the frequent criticisms of the style raise an important issue that bears on the point of both Jesus novels. For my part, I have always found the prose elegant, economical to the point of genius, and intense to the point of explosion, but there is no accounting for taste. However, in much of the criticism, there lies a complaint about ‘abstractness’ or overdone economy that misses something important relating to the achievement of the novels.

There are two senses of abstraction that are important here. One is more familiar. We get to the general by leaving out aspects of particulars until we reach the highest levels of shared features that we can manage. The idea of discarding the concreteness and messiness of the sensible world to reach such generality makes it seem like we end up with something ‘lifeless’, cold, sterile, ‘cerebral’, ‘etiolated’ and, for important existential matters, passionless. This is what the critics of Coetzee’s style seem to have in mind, and so what they regard as the spare, overly ideational and abstract setting and prose of the Jesus novels.

But there is another sense of generality for which the notion of abstractness is not quite appropriate, at least not without caution. In this sense, we can understand the general by means of an intense compression of meaning and detail in an exemplar, a token of a type that embodies the type at its core, its essence. In this sense, we understand what it is to be a basketball player not by collecting properties basketball players have in common, but by watching Michael Jordan. He is what a player is, is supposed to be. (The former idea of generality is what is taken to descend to us from Aristotle; the latter from Plato.) Such compression of meaning in an expressive singularity is what happens in great poetry, and it is what Coetzee’s prose seems to aspire to, and, as far as I am concerned, achieves: a philosophically relevant generality, not by abstraction but by compression, concretisation, and so manifold allusiveness. (Mythic fables have exactly this quality, both in antiquity and in Kafka, for example.) The latter can be considerably more difficult to exfoliate but that does not make it any less compelling. In the novel, for example, the love that Simón feels for David, and his anguish at not knowing how to express it, how to help David know it, is all the more powerfully expressed by the intensity of its compressed, infrequent expression in a few words or a single gesture, or simply by quietly keeping faith with David throughout everything, even to the hurtful point of moving out and removing himself from David’s life, if that will help.

The same can be said about the criticisms of Bach sometimes heard, that the music is ‘mathematical’, ‘cerebral’, ‘cold’, ‘an intellectual exercise’. To fail to appreciate the sexual energy of the Bach violin sonatas, or the melancholy of the St. Matthew Passion, or what can only be described as the calm frenzy of the Well-Tempered Clavier, is to mistake one sort of attempt at communion with a listener through some shared generality of emotional resonance, with another sort that aims at it with a compression of elements so well-formed that its implicit wealth can seem to some listeners like poverty. I suspect many of Coetzee’s critics are making the same mistake.