By Georgiana Tudor
Georgiana Tudor is a PhD Student in Comparative Literature, Babeș-Bolyai University, her research interests focus on the links between literature and politics, religion and ideologies. An extended version of the analysis of meta-utopia in J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus Trilogy can be found here.
This op-ed is part of the Utopia and Democracy series. Op-eds in this series draw on presentations delivered at the conference held under the same title on July 3 to 5, 2024, which was organized by the Utopian Studies Society/Europe and hosted by Zsolt Czigányik, Iva Dimovska, and Daryna Koryagina – members of the Democracy in East Central European Utopianism research group, CEU Democracy Institute – at Central European University’s Budapest campus.
Meta-utopia could serve as a literary indicator of change in post-authoritarian cultures. Its presence exposes a space where every idea is subverted and where skeptical relativism is encouraged opposing any form of universalism following a great sense of betrayal and loss of faith in familiar socio-political forms.
Revisiting the concept of meta-utopia developed by Edith Clowes in Russian Experimental Fiction. Resisting Ideology after Utopia (1993) and enriching its analysis with the taxonomy developed by Corin Braga in Pour une morphologie du genre utopique (2018), I propose that meta-utopia is still a valid genre starting with an application on J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy (The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus, The Death of Jesus).
The key point to remember about meta-utopia is the undermining of every utopia and universalisms. Notwithstanding the apathy, it expresses a complex process of change starting from the point of distrust towards present socio-political realities.
Meta-utopia is a text that reflects on the nature of all kinds of utopias, that includes the entire variety of subgenres of utopias, but at the same time also undermining them and offering no clear perspective. It is a form of didactic and ludic art, its chrono tope specifically subverts the dystopian border and the notion of the wall that characterize the closed universe of the utopian world, by acknowledging the sameness of the conditions on both sides. Unlike traditional utopias with their subvariants (eutopia, o-utopia, anti-utopia and dystopia), the fictional conditions in meta-utopia neither represent a goal to strive for, nor a situation to get rid of, it presents the world as it is with all utopias exhausted and no possibility of change. “There is nowhere else to be but here” acknowledges a character from Coetzee’s trilogy.
Why does meta-utopia open a space for socio-political change, implicitly paving the way for the emergence of democratic thinking? Its essence would uncover itself as depicting a world that has exhausted all forms of utopias, leaving no horizon, thus, reaching naturally a state of fundamental democratic thinking – the freedom to negate everything.
In terms of meta-utopia, after authoritarian cultures and censorship, a world can finally be expressed where no system has to be forcibly believed in and where the loss of faith in socio-political forms is not a crime. It is not the content of a meta-utopia that shows a way for change and potentially democratic thinking, but its structure and form.
J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus Trilogy, as a meta-utopia, subverts any form of “easy optimism” particular to stories written during authoritarian cultures, namely to realist novels. However, it stimulates the search for socio-political alternatives, therefore, allowing the emergence of a space where democratic thinking could appear.
Moreover, skepticism to all fixed systems represents a natural manifestation of the freedom of thought.
The three novels tell the story of a child, David, found by a man, Simon, who tries to find the boy’s mother. The characters reached the island by a large ship, by the time they arrive, they forget everything about their past and identity. Reaching the Belstar camp, they are required to follow a specific way of life in order to fit in the new society, and eventually, Simon chooses a random mother for the child based on his intuition. The odd couple tries to protect the child who possesses unusual intelligence, imagination, and resistance to authority. As a result, the institutions attempt to separate them, aiming either to force David into faster integration or isolation. They have difficulties in finding proper education for David and every interaction with him becomes an epistemological challenge for the community, which rejects his imagination and creativity. In the end, the child dies from an incurable blood disease.
J.M. Coetzee’s fictions The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) and The Death of Jesus (2019) have a typical form of meta-utopia in the context of Coetzee’s living during the apartheid censorship. The author had a special affinity for the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky and an intriguing interest in the radical conditions under which Russian literature was written during the reign of Nicholas II and the Soviet regime. More recently, he has actively criticized the Australian border policies where he has lived for more than twenty years. All these authoritarian socio-political and cultural contexts have influenced the abstractions specific to meta-utopia.
Given the fact that Communism, Nazism, Apartheid have in common the aggressiveness of cultural and ideological control policies or the practice of intensive censorship, the Jesus trilogy as meta-utopia
“with its penetrating insight into Utopian modes of thinking, is a powerful stimulus to those seeking social and political alternatives to a long-standing authoritarian culture”
according to Edith Clowes. This phenomenon could serve as an indicator of change in a given post-authoritarian culture, a space where a possibility of democracy, among other forms of governance, is debated to be created, adopted or merged. Moreover, post-authoritarian cultures should be explored for meta-utopias as literary form in order to investigate this thesis and extend its applicability, even though the last novels of a multi-cultural writer such as J.M. Coetzee provide a strong argument.
The central thesis of the novel, the existence of a world where all references to the past are forgotten, represents an ideal society from the perspective of the majority of the characters.
According to the author, in reality, a man can live happily without remembering his crime, while, in telling a story, such a plot is almost impossible.
However, the state of oblivion is not a blessing to everyone and some elements of constraints and limits on freedom could be identified in the novels: language control – the obligation to learn Spanish, discouragement of a literary language, name control and generally the rejection of any attempt to speculate, imagine or fantasize.
David, the special child and the main character, creates his own fictional world by inventing stories and expressing a deeply personal way of perceiving reality, while some characters even adopt his worldview. His fantastical world is presented rather as a philosophical approach, than as an excess of imagination. His theory shares a similarity with Platon’s theory of ideas, except that, instead of ideas, there are numbers floating in the universe. Incompatible with the mundus, David’s world unfolds in three stages: first, through the philosophical dialogue prompted by Simón’s desire to understand David’s refusal to deal with numbers or calculations; second, through the validation of David’s preconceptions concerning numbers in Arroyo’s Academy where his approach develops the school’s philosophy; and third, although David acts as a prophet of the numbers’ mysticism, nonetheless it remains unclear if he is a Prophet of the Past or a Prophet of the Future.
From a meta-utopian perspective, each idea or number would be an island, a utopia, whilst, the reader is forced to pass from one to another in order to become aware of the diversity between them and the distance between ideas-numbers and reality.
By subverting any kind of utopia, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) and The Death of Jesus (2019) “meditate on the nature of all Utopias – and, indeed, a larger set of ideologies – as the constructs that they are: fictional but vital to the formulation of social identity” as Cowes asserts.
Ideal society?
Every discussion of utopia takes into account the rendering of an ideal society. The Jesus trilogy considers Coetzee’s imago mundi in a dialectic manner. In The Good Story, a thought-provoking dialogue between Nobel Prize-winning writer J.M. Coetzee and psychotherapist Arabella Kurtz, according to the author, an ideal society would be a space where personal fictions go “unchallenged”:
“and where some grand Leibnizian presiding force sees to it that all the billions of personal fictions interlock seamlessly, so that none of us need stay awake at night”
and keep questioning nervously the reality of our world. At the same time, the author consciously addresses himself the concern of
“whether we really want to move in a society in which everyone around us feels empowered […] to ‘be who they want to be’ by acting […] the personal myths […] they have constructed for themselves.”
Finally, Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy provokes skepticism towards any fixed system and engenders preconceptions of cultural objects and language prescription. This very fact enriches the reader with a more dynamic perspective of the world, despite the apathy that may accompany such an approach. Thus, it can be concluded that meta-utopia functions as an indicator of socio-political change, encouraging the reader to ask questions and embrace the freedom to negate or disagree.
This op-ed is part of the Utopia and Democracy series. Op-eds in this series draw on presentations delivered at the conference held under the same title on July 3 to 5, 2024, which was organized by the Utopian Studies Society/Europe and hosted by Zsolt Czigányik, Iva Dimovska, and Daryna Koryagina – members of the Democracy in East Central European Utopianism research group, CEU Democracy Institute – at Central European University’s Budapest campus.
