Article Title：Dancing to the Stars The Poetics of the Child and Redemptive Imagination in J. M. Coetzee's The Schooldays of Jesus
Abstract：
J. M. Coetzee's 2016 novel The Schooldays of Jesus has since its publication stirred up quite a controversy for its minimalist style and the far too arcane theme, with some going so far as to disparage it as an unimportant bore. Building upon the signs of interconnectedness between Nietzsche's Lebensphilosophie and Coetzee's novelistic practice, this paper provides a detailed elucidation of the poetic imagination and the aesthetics of redemption that undergird the Coetzeean mode of literary vision. Set in a disenchanted universe after the death of God populated by the Nietzschean last man who symbolize splintered subjectivities in the absence of higher aspirations and past memories, the novel tracks the unrepresentable psychological and emotional plights of two adult characters bowed by a prevailing sense of slave morality and mediocre rationalism, while also scanning the darkened horizon for previously unnoticed glimmers of grace through sympathetically inhabiting our neonate selves in the aesthetic utopia of art. Coetzee's boy dancer David, disclosing through the dance of the universe an ethos predicated upon the primordial vitality and inner rhythm of creation before the secular onslaught of modernity, invokes the child spirit of the Nietzschean Ubermensch as a paradigm of miracle, freedom and creativity. Coetzee re-envisages the diminishing contact with our embodied childhood and its relevance to our spiritual transformation through his trenchant commitment to the novel's possibility of imagining the unimaginable, capturing in this latest oeuvre a transcendental imperative imbued with poetic imagination and sublime exuberance that sustains mankind's quest for selfsalvation in a Post-Christian world.
Keywords: Coetzee; The Schooldays of Jesus; Nietzsche; poetic of the child; redemptive imagination
DOI: 10.6637/CWLQ.201906_48(2).0004
Source：CHUNG WAI LITERARY QUARTERLY
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