Between Rationality and Passion

Arguably, from his first book Dusklands, to his new and definitively “late” novella The Pole, J.M. Coetzee has followed a simple aesthetic and formal imperative: from simple inputs complexity arises. Reading him from one end of his canon to another—primarily short novels, essays, and reviews—is like watching the permutation of a melody; we can read Coetzee like we listen to Bach’s fugues. And this is no accident; Coetzee’s computer-aided statistical analysis of Beckett’s prose for his Phd thesis seems to have been a starting point for a literary career based, implicitly, on the possibilities of iteration. Coetzee meditates on Bach in his essays and fiction, and his new (perhaps final?) novel is centered on the Quixotic romance between an elderly Polish pianist (and famous interpreter of Chopin) and a less than enthusiastic Spanish woman. The Pole—a better late novel than Kundera’s Slowness or Roth’s The Dying Animal—succeeds because it trusts what has come before, pushing the modal possibilities of the author’s entire body of work forward; expert and precise in his allusions and echoes, Coetzee, now 83, does not rage against the dying of the light, but, rather, meditates on the horizon before him. And what are those allusions? What is Coetzee building in? For new readers, a summary of Coetzee’s oeuvre might go as follows: his is a literature made out of literature, a late and high modernism which places the dialogic philosophizing of Plato and Dostoyevsky inside the allegorical mode of Kafka, framed with the metafictional techniques of Defoe and Cervantes. If this sounds intellectual—it is. Coetzee’s books are rich and suggestive puzzles, saturated with a deep, but unexpressed emotionalism. Both in form and content, Coetzee’s later fictions, and The Pole is no exception, recast Plato’s philosophical parable of the two horses, which pull the chariot of the soul. Which should lead—rationality or passion?