Fiction beyond words: late style in J. M. Coetzee's Jesus trilogy

This thesis looks at the paradoxical representation of non-verbal modes of communication in J. M. Coetzee’s late works, focusing particularly on the trilogy formed by The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), and The Death of Jesus (2019). It uses the idea of the non-verbal as a reading strategy that enables the exploration of how characters communicate through music and dance, and with animals. Each chapter examines a specific dimension of language. Chapter 1 foregrounds an alternative form of language that echoes through the characters’ mother tongue. In Chapter 2 the limits of what constitutes language are tested by Coetzee’s imagining of a kind of human–animal communication that verges on the miraculous. Chapters 3 and 4 examine music and dance as aesthetic modes of intelligibility and communication. The aim of this engagement with Coetzee’s use of language is to show that the trilogy reflects an existential dimension governed less strongly by the linguistic and more by a new connective tissue resulting from the subordination of ordinary language in favour of modes of communication that allow the reaching of a more fundamental experience of being in the world. These three novels epitomise Coetzee’s experimentation with aesthetic, ethical, and affective experience that often resists verbalisation, while highlighting a form of pre-linguistic and pre-rational interconnectedness. The idea of the non-verbal is therefore crucial as a way of bringing to the forefront the underlying possibilities of communication and connection resulting from a conscious engagement with ordinary language and an inherent desire to transcend it that characterises Coetzee’s late style.