Migration and the South in J.M. Coetzee's Jesus Novels

• Published in: Journal of modern literature Vol. 46; no. 2; pp. 127 - 139
• Main Author: Boehmer, Elleke
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bloomington Indiana University Press 01.01.2023
• Subjects: Australians; British & Irish literature; Chatwin, Bruce (1940-1989); Coetzee, J M (1940- ); English literature; Geography; Migrants; Migration; Novels; Poetics; South African literature; Australia; South Africa; United Kingdom; Argentina; Karoo; Southern Hemisphere
• DOI: 10.2979/jmodelite.46.2.10
• ISSN: 0022-281X

The first two novels in South African and Australian writer J.M. Coetzee's Jesus novel trilogy invite being read as studies in migration that explore the ambiguities of crossing over and arriving in a seeming "new life," as it is repeatedly called. The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) dramatize this arrival as a one-way experience, with no possibility of return. Moreover, key features of the migrant crossing--contingency, isolation, an inarticulable mystery and strangeness, and repetition--are evoked through what we might term a southern poetics, following Coetzee's own definition of the "one south." This southern framing in turn throws light on the provinciality of the trilogy's settings, on the provisional and derivative nature of the lives lived there, and on the precarity of migrant crossings, not least in the south, including the Global South, today.