J.M. Coetzee, Eros and Education

Abstract

I focus on J.M. Coetzee's contribution to philosophy of education by examining his most recent novels, The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016). These novels appear to narrate the formative education of the child, Davíd, together comprising a contemporary bildungsroman. Coetzee's transformation of the genre's characteristic features, however, invites a reading of these novels as an anti‐bildungsroman. This article thus argues that these two novels constitute a revaluation and reclamation of the genre. While they purport to be about childhood—and tell a ‘coming of age’ story— more accurately they are about the stifling effect a certain conception of adulthood has on our erotic nature. I provide a detailed summary of Coetzee's Jesus novels against a background description of the bildungsroman genre in order to demonstrate that these novels conceptualise schooling in terms that subvert the genre that Coetzee employs with deeply ironic intent. The schools in Coetzee's novels are necessary, but not for the numeracy and literacy skills, nor the social advancement and cultural capital that they provide. Rather, they are necessary because they are home to a full range of artistic, intellectual and athletic truth‐seeking activities. The practice of these activities disciplines the soul by inspiring budding poets, mathematicians and athletes to aspire to a perfection that they may glimpse but never reach. Ultimately, I suggest that in the world of the novels—as well as in our own—education is a means to value the intuited promise of transcendent intrinsic value in the midst of the increasingly successful administration of rationally instrumental control and coordination.