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?
In the Life of Jesus trilogy, Coetzee was at his most inscrutable, but The Pole takes us back to where the quasi-autobiographical Summertime, left off; though here Coetzee’s stand-in is no longer John, a writer, but Witold, an aging pianist. Like “John” in Summertime, Witold is a disappointing lover, a bungling romantic, idiosyncratic and independent to the point of isolation. Like John, Witold falls in love with a matronly Latina–here, that figure is named Beatriz–who keeps her suitor at a distance. In Summertime, the beloved is Brazilian; in The Pole, Spanish—though Witold obsessively begs Beatriz to travel to Brazil with him (which figures in the novel as an unreal, erotic paradise). Point, counterpoint.
A simulacra of Coetzee’s catalog of semi-heroes, The Pole is yet another obsessive iteration of a story of the Quixotic and Platonic longing. Coetzee’s protagonists, especially in his middle to late phases, beginning with Disgrace, can be categorized as either versions of Don Quixote or Socrates: the knight who has read too many romantic stories, or the aging, unattractive teacher who deploys Eros as a pedagogical tool. What these metafictional archetypes share is an idealism, an ungainliness, outsider status; society finds them largely appalling, but also cannot get rid of them entirely. Taking an even wider view, Coetzee, also a profound reader of Dostoyevsky, has always been interested in holy “idiots” or fools (of which the magnificent The Life and Times of Michael K is most emblematic); his fiction since 1999, then, merges the Dostoyesvkian figure of the the holy idiot with Platonic erotomaniac and the Quixotic knight errant. The Pole, as protagonist, is a compound figure: a distillation of Coetzee’s long metafictional fugue.
The plot of The Pole is purposely bare–just concrete enough to support the book’s meditative superstructure. The wife of a rich patron of classical music, Beatriz receives a mysterious email after she sits in on the master’s class Witold teaches in Barcelona, where Beatriz resides. The themes of teaching and translation recall the Jesus trilogy, which also features protagonists who must acclimate to Spanish, and speaks to Coetzee’s broader political and aesthetic concerns about the dominance of English. It’s worth noting that The Pole was published first in Spanish translation as El Polaco and that Argentine translator Mariana Dimópulos played an “usually large” role in the novel’s creation–not serving just as a translator, but in part as an editor and assistant author. It is not a stretch to say that the relationship between Witold and Beatriz–replete with misunderstanding, emotional distance, embarrassment–hints at the tensions in the novel’s creation. So much of the significance of The Pole is found in the frame rather than the picture.
The novel is nominally set in 2015 (Beatriz still listens to Witold’s recordings on CD), though there is little historical or local color. Beatriz, in her late forties (like Dimópulos at the time of the book’s original Spanish publication), has never slept with a man other than her husband. She's not traveled very much. She speaks stilted English, and he doesn't speak Spanish. Her lack of strong characteristics actually makes her a perfect canvas for Witold’s Saturnine romantic projections. Witold, at one point, tells Beatrice what the reader may already be thinking, that she's named after Dante's beloved (Witold tells Beatriz that he feels they occupy “separate realms”). The novel is so saturated in allusion that it seeps into the consciousness of the characters’ themselves. The Pole–and the double name, at least in English, is referenced again and again–magnetically attracts literary, musical, and artistic allusions to the point where he almost ceases to exist as an independent representation of a human being; he is a cipher far more than a man.
Beatriz thinks they might have fallen in love if they were young, but, as it is, Witold’s old enough to be her father. She confesses to her husband that the famous pianist is pursuing her. The husband says he is jealous, but Beatriz knows that he's lying, the husband doesn't care; they don’t even sleep together anymore. It's just that he “owns” her. Beatriz does not have affairs. She takes a hot bath and goes to bed early. She's never been to Brazil. Punning on the word pole—Beatriz notes that no electric current passes between her and Witold, between the two poles they occupy. Like Quixote or Dante, Witold only loves her because she is unattainable. She tries to think about sex with Witold, but can't really imagine it; she can't imagine Witold’s decrepit, “bony body” over hers. And yet eventually, they do consummate their affair (which up to that point has been entirely driven by The Pole’s relentless if tactful pursuit) on the island of Majorca where Beatriz’s husband has a family estate. Over the course of a week, The Pole visits Beatriz, dutifully and haltingly fucks her, and goes back to his room in the big, empty house at the end of each night. Beatriz, consenting, remains detached, a spectator in her own erotic experience. It is hard not to detect a buried metonym for the translation of English into Spanish.
When The Pole leaves Majorca, and Beatriz, however, she finds herself in a state of shock, though she does not miss him, or will not admit it. Four years later, Witold’s daughter contacts Beatriz to tell her that Witold is dead and that he has left “some things” for Beatriz in Warsaw in a box. If she does not make arrangements to pick them up or ship them, these mysterious items will be thrown out. Beatriz chooses to have them shipped but finds it difficult to communicate with the Polish movers. Her directives are lost in translation, and she finds herself compelled to travel to Warsaw herself. There, she finds that Witold has left her a book on Chopin and a series of poems in Polish: a “book of Beatrice by an obscure follower of Dante.” Upon return to Barcelona, Beatriz must decide whether to have these works translated into Spanish (leaving her in a position not unlike Dimópulos whenever she received Coetzee’s original manuscript of The Pole for translation). Whether or not Beatriz will ever have Witold’s last testaments translated, and thus be able to read them herself, is unknown; the reader must decide. And yet, one senses that for Coetzee–who argues in the essay “What is a Classic?” that a classic may lay buried (like Bach) for centuries without losing its potential to join world culture–it ultimately does not matter. The Pole’s manuscripts, for the meantime, are safe. One day they may be rediscovered in an attic in Barcelona and find their way to another interpreter of Chopin, revealing not only lost secrets of counterpoint, but of the soul.
Matthew Gasda is a writer and director.
