Pole Dancing: On J.M. Coetzee’s Late Style
J.M. Coetzee | The Pole | Liveright | September 2023 | 176 pages
There are a few obvious reasons we tend to be interested in a writer’s late works. For one, they allow us to indulge the superstition that the author is somehow more present, that the labor of their human hand is more clearly visible, whether through a generalized mental debility—the absence of youthful pyrotechnics or gracile phrasings—or by dint of their own encroaching death. In this respect, we’re buying into the conception of late works as “products of an uninhibited subjectivity” described by Theodor Adorno in his well-known essay on Beethoven’s late style. This harsh subjectivity, Adorno writes, “breaks through the envelope of form to better express itself, transforming harmony into the dissonance of its suffering.”
Naturally, and relatedly, we grub for insights as well—the mummy truths of the living dead. The author, staring death in the face, must have something to say on the matter, even if indirectly. We consume late styles with a morbid fascination, in part because we wish to observe how the master will convert a surplus consciousness of death into wisdom or a heightened subjectivity.
That death and heightened subjectivity go hand in hand is a tacit truth central to most conceptions of late style. The ever-present thought of death, we seem to hope, will force the author’s hand into an overextension, or radical reworking, of style. And of course, there’s something a touch sadistic about our reception of, and fascination with, late style—we read or listen or look in order to see a master trip up. We crave evidence of their flagging powers.
The body of late work amassed by the now-eighty-three-year-old J.M. Coetzee—his Jesus trilogy (released between 2013 and 2019) and his latest novella, The Pole (2023)—seems to betray our expectation of decay. Never known for his human warmth, Coetzee has supplied a series of late works that chart new terrains of restraint and syntactic frigidity. Withdrawn into his tower, pacing the crumbling battlements as he waits to be gathered into the artifice of eternity, Coetzee has given himself over fully to arid intellectual games.
Coetzee’s fiction has always lacked a certain human grain, but in the early works a complex eroticism was often at play. The latest work tends to lack even this diluted human curio. We’re left with a conundrum. That Coetzee is known for refining himself out of his works, for writing fictions as airtight and impersonal as a stripped-down submersible, means that our fascination with late style will, naturally, be greater than with other, less disciplined writers.
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Enter The Pole, Coetzee’s fifteenth novel. The book’s enigmatic first sentence strikes a characteristically late-Coetzeean note, of a textual self-questioning so direct and cleareyed it feels less postmodern than simply philosophical.
“The woman is the first to give him trouble,” Coetzee writes, “followed soon afterwards by the man.” The author himself is the one making this confession. Along with the book’s numbered paragraphs, this metafictional fillip—having the text stage, however briefly, its own composition—recalls works like Elizabeth Costello (2003), Slow Man (2005), and Diary of a Bad Year (2007). But unlike the probing lecture-narratives of Elizabeth Costello or the Wittgensteinian skepticism of the Jesus trilogy, The Pole isn’t philosophical in any rigorously analytic sense. There is something noncommittal, almost propositional about the prose—each sentence is offered with a calm circumspection. The author, we sense, is tentative not out of a lack of confidence, but out of an awareness that for each supposedly real detail we are given, the opposite might just as well have sufficed.
The book’s eponymous Pole is Wittold Walccyzkiecz, “a man of seventy, a vigorous seventy,” who bears a rough resemblance to the actor Max von Sydow and is known primarily for his austere interpretations of Chopin. In the early pages of the book, when we seem to be caught at some uncertain stage in the compositional process, we learn that “in matters of soul, of feeling, he is troublingly opaque.” This presents a problem for the author, whose fiction has as one of its central responsibilities the peering-into of that soul. Here, too, we sense the text’s exhaustion with itself—the rules of realism necessitate a series of gestures on the author’s part that he has less interest in making, or less energy to effect.
Beatriz, a married mother of two in her late forties, helps administer a series of monthly recitals in the Sala Mompou in Barcelona. She is well educated, cultured. Her beliefs generally align with a simple, actionable humanism—the good, philosophically considered, is that which “makes people better people.” As a society lady, she is an object of sorts, ancillary to the rarefied sphere of cultural production and consumption that she stewards—for this reason, “she is not taken seriously,” a fact that chafes but that is not entirely unamenable to her. “A portion of her intelligence,” we are told, “consists in an awareness that excess of reflection can paralyse the will.”
Like David Lurie, the protagonist of Disgrace, Beatriz seems to have solved the problem of sex, though her solution is a touch more stoic. “She and her husband are no longer intimate,” we read. “She is getting used to doing without sex. She does not seem to need it.” It comes as no surprise that when Witold and Beatriz eventually meet up and make love, it clarifies nothing. “Body wrestling against sweaty body,” Coetzee writes. “After a duel like that, no room left for adoration, for veneration.”
Complicating their affair is the fact that Witold cannot express himself to his liking in English, while the language he has mastered—music—doesn’t lend itself to the simple conveyance of meaning. He privately records Chopin’s B minor sonata and sends it to Beatriz as an email attachment. “She listens, paying hawk-like attention to the phrasing, the inflections, the minutest accelerations and decelerations—anything that could be construed as a private message.” And yet, she “comes up blank, baffled,” unable to make sense of the performance and its meaning in this quite unexpected context. “It sounds just like his Deutsche Grammophon recording in the Concert Circle library,” she realizes. “If he has smuggled in a message, it is in a code she does not know how to read.”
Translation and interpretation have long been Coetzeean hobbyhorses. Language, as Coetzee’s novels assert again and again, is power of the purest sort. “It is not speech that makes man man but the speech of others,” as the nameless protagonist of In the Heart of the Country (1977) reflects. It’s nice, in The Pole, to see these themes treated with a certain lightness, a faint humor. “It is sometimes hard to know what the man means, with his incomplete English,” Beatriz thinks. “Is he saying something profound or is he simply hitting the wrong words, like a monkey sitting in front of a typewriter?” At its heart, The Pole is a novel of misprision, of generative misreadings and fruitful misunderstandings—wisdom seeps in through the cracks in language.
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Because Beatriz and Witold, a Spaniard and a Pole, are forced to conduct their relationship in English, the activity of translating occupies a privileged place in the novel. Its characters are constantly passing through languages, turning one phrase into another in their heads, testing and questioning meanings. Over dinner, Witold makes a hypothetical observation about Chopin, “managing the tenses warily but correctly.” Later, in response to a curious, post-prandial phrasing of his, Beatrice is forced to inhabit three languages at once. “A big stomach: might that be a Polish idiom? He certainly does not have a big stomach,” she thinks. “He is even a bit—she reaches for a word she does not often have a need for—cadavérico, cadaverous.”
This sort of thing is warying after a while and takes up far more of the book than it should, though it’s par for the course. Coetzee’s late works are often painfully demonstrative—you often get the sense he’s working out his various philosophical concerns ab initio, deducing them right there on the spot. At times, the work can feel frustratingly deictic; like the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, itself a late, palinodial work, Coetzee feels the need to spend page after page pointing fervidly at one truism or another, holding our noses up against the elemental, running our palms over the purest of facts. His late fictions adopt the illusion of simplicity, and have the form of a clear-cut didactic machinery hanging over a vast philosophical fog. The atmosphere, necessarily, is one of conjecture; the tool best suited to his purpose is a flensed language, one that, despite its simplicity, is utterly preoccupied with itself.
The three novels that make up Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy are shrouded in this same fog. As Christian Lorentzen has written, the novels “take place in a purer world than our own and, on the surface, a simpler one.” In this brave new world, “which might be an afterlife or a waystation in the transmigration of souls,” everyone speaks the same simplified language, an Esperanto of the soul—that is, “beginner’s Spanish.” It’s difficult to trace Coetzee’s love affair with Spanish and his tendency to deploy it whenever a universal language is called for by one of his fictions. As far back as In the Heart of the Country, Spanish—or a language purporting to be Spanish—has served as a bridge language. In the novel’s final act, as its protagonists descends into madness, strange, insect-like flying machines begin criss-cross the sky, dropping words that “seem to hang in suspension in the air,” and that “sift down as they grow colder, just as the dew does, and the frost in frost-time.” The language airdropped by these UFOs into the dark heart of South Africa’s Karoo region is, mirabile dictu, Spanish. Fortunately, this presents no challenges to the narrator:
I know no Spanish whatsoever. However, it is characteristic of the Spanish that is spoken to me out of the flying machines that I find it immediately comprehensible. I have no way of explaining this circumstance save to suggest that while in their externals the words may present themselves as Spanish, they belong in fact not to a local Spanish but to a Spanish of pure meanings such as might be dreamed of by the philosophers, and that what is communicated to me via the Spanish language, by mechanisms I cannot detect, so deeply embedded in me do they lie, is therefore pure meaning.
This vision of a language that drifts down, crystalline, from the heavens, that is no longer in any real sense a language, since it deals in pure meaning, is a sort of celestial ravishment. (It’s also a synthesis of sorts, since haziness and purity are both at play in beginner’s Spanish, in the trainee pidgin of any language, which frustrates precision and obfuscation alike.) “Words are coin,” Magda reflects. “Words alienate.” As soon as we speak we betray ourselves, lower ourselves into the muck of expression. Language, paradoxically, is incapable of conveying what must be said, and what must be said is that we are animals, at least part of the time—mere desiring machines. “Language is no medium for desire,” Magda observes. “Desire is rapture, not exchange. It is only by alienating the desired that language masters it.”
In recent decades, Coetzee’s general skepticism of language and its subjugating power has become a denunciation of the forces of a globalized literature. At the same time, Coetzee has leaned into his cosmopolitan tendencies, flitting about the globe and transforming himself into a citizen of the world—which is to say, a citizen of nowhere. He has, for instance, involved himself in the Argentinian literary scene, and The Pole was in fact first published in Spanish in Buenos Aires, where it appeared as El Polaco (a title that, as Michael Gorra recently pointed out, lacks the subtle polysemy of its English counterpart). When he’s deigned to make public statements, his targets have emerged as the culture-flattening effects of a globalized literary marketplace, and the English language itself, specifically its “universalist pretensions” and “uninterrogated belief that the world is as it seems to be in the mirror of the English language.” In particular, Coetzee has voiced his disdain for “the arrogance that this situation breeds in its native speakers.”
As many critics have pointed out, the question of Coetzee’s mother tongue is a vexed one, and an ambivalence to both Afrikaans and English runs throughout his career. Although Coetzee’s parents spoke Afrikaans, he was raised with English as his first language. For his parents’ generation, as David Attwell writes in J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, “Afrikaans was a kombuistaal,” that is, “a language of the kitchen, distinct from Dutch.” English was the language of cultural pretension, and while Coetzee excelled in Afrikaans at school, “he did not read Afrikaans books and magazines for pleasure.” Embracing an Afrikaaner identity, for Coetzee, would have “meant accepting the terms of post-1948 nationalism, with its identikit of strict linguistic, religious and political loyalties,” as Attwell explains. (Once again, In the Heart of the Country offers up a salient passage. “I was born into a language of hierarchy, of distance and perspective,” Magda reflects at one point. “I do not say it is the language my heart wants to speak. I feel too much the pathos of its distances, but it is all we have.”)
From a young age, then, Coetzee had a sense of himself as deformed (the word is his own) by the fact of his having grown up in South Africa as the child of Afrikaners. It was a tainted, tainting birthright. Impersonality presented itself as a solution, of sorts. “The neutrality of Coetzee’s spoken English, one would have to conclude,” as Attwell observes, “is a function of his cosmopolitanism and his election of world culture over regional or national culture.”
Though it would be wrong to claim Coetzee’s relationship to his Afrikaner heritage has always or purely been one of renunciation. As a young man and into the 1980s at least, Coetzee could still feel cagily protective of Afrikaner identity, a tendency that shows up most clearly in his fraught relationship with Nadine Gordimer. Famously, Gordimer had taken Coetzee to task in a review of Life & Times of Michael K published in The New York Review of Books, arguing that the book was politically detached and failed precisely, in its airy allegory, to speak to the moral and political needs of the moment. “Allegory is generally regarded as a superior literary form,” Gordimer wrote. “It is thought to clear the reader’s lungs of the transient and fill them with a deep breath of transcendence.”As Gordimer saw it, Coetzee’s text was, if not an out-and-out cowardly book, then at least a book that offered little in the way of courage—that failed to engage with the transient real.
While composing The Life & Times of Michael K, Coetzee was deeply aware of the various political readings his text might engender, among them the charge of political quietism; as Attwell has convincingly shown, Coetzee was at pains to address this problem while drafting the text. Whether he did so successfully or not is a matter of critical debate; Gordimer certainly felt his efforts had fallen short. Yet, as Coetzee saw it, she was bound, in a certain sense, to misread his book—in fact, she seemed to misunderstand his project entirely. Central to Coetzee’s early novels was what he viewed as the moral necessity of writing from a position of historical complicity—a claim the pull of which Gordimer clearly felt less strongly. In Coetzee’s opinion, Gordimer, born to a British mother and a Jewish father from Lithuania, had a diminished right to criticize Afrikaners; at the very least, she had a diminished right to do so with the dismissiveness and contempt, “the de haut en bas manner [she] came to cultivate.”
These concerns were distilled into the figure of Elizabeth Costello, who is partly modeled on Gordimer. As Michael Gorra observes, Coetzee “has never seemed comfortable with the idea of the writer as a necessarily public figure, someone who’s supposed to stand for a set of clearly articulated positions.” The attitude of exhortation called for by the role of public writer was incompatible with the deep ambivalence Coetzee felt when contemplating his Afrikaner heritage, as well as his need to implicate himself in his writings—to speak from a place of acknowledged complicity. The only authority left to the public writer is that of prophecy. Costello, as she appears in her eponymous novel, is a traveling lecturer, a sort of Cassandra figure, delivering inflammatory speeches on animal rights and the state of the humanities and other hot-button issues du jour. A late-career novelist, she has been reduced to a life of performance, one that strangely resembles the life led by Witold, who, as a concert pianist, is ferried around the globe—they are both peripatetic priests of a sort.
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“The maturity of the late works of significant artists does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit,” Adorno writes (again, Beethoven is his jumping-off point). “They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged,” and “lack all the harmony that the classicist aesthetic is in the habit of demanding from works of art.” In short, they “show more traces of history than of growth.”
In this paradigm, style is a drawn-out synthesis, rather than a discrete undertaking to be worked out anew in each successive work. What sets Beethoven’s late works apart, in Adorno’s view, is their refusal of this classical paradigm of artistic development. Taking up Adorno’s line of argumentation in his classic study of the phenomenon, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, Edward Said posits that the truly late work is characterized by an air of “sustained tension” and “unaccommodated stubbornness,” a refusal, at last, to cohere. “There is therefore an inherent tension in late style,” Said writes, “that abjures mere bourgeois aging and that insists on the increasing sense of apartness and exile and anachronism, which late style expresses and, more important, uses to formally sustain itself.”
But then, what are we to make of the late style of a writer like Coetzee, who has always emphasized a sense of apartness, of austerity, of anachronism? And what are we to make of The Pole, this strangely late novel, a work of such perfect polish it seems to gleam with an inly light? There is an almost unsettling quality to the book’s refinement, as though Coetzee had worked harder than usual to eliminate any trace of personality. This tendency to abstraction, abundantly evident in the Jesus novels, has defined the atmosphere of many of Coetzee’s greatest novels, though what’s often missed is the extent to which it has defined the process of their production as well.
As Attwell notes, in drafting a novel, Coetzee typically engages in several rounds of “self-masking,” excising himself from the text bit by bit. Works that begin with a personal or autobiographical impetus are subjected to a process of “deliteralization.” This naturally raises interesting questions about style, and whether it is the working-out of a personal vision, or something else entirely. There are deeper conceptual problems at play, of course. To fruitfully define late style, we’d have to possess a solid working definition of style itself, which is surprisingly hard to come by, even as hazy humanisms abound. Though, sensu stricto, we might define style as the particular way one expresses oneself in art, this definition is so sensible as to have almost no utility at all.
A strictly materialist reading would have it that an author’s style is a result of the various historical and social forces that condition them. Under a definition like this, which holds that every artist is necessarily historically conditioned, and that their work will bear the imprint of this basic fact, every artist is presumed to possess a style, be it good or bad. If this is our operative definition, Coetzee, too, would naturally possess a style—in fact, given the ways his corpus has been shaped by the anxieties attendant to his historical situation, we might even say that he has a particularly strong style.
But is this really what we mean when we talk about style? We’re far more likely to have something a touch more personal and idiosyncratic in mind. “Style,” the Italian poet and ur-fascist Gabriele D'Annunzio observed, “is isolating power.” It is a use of language that cajoles, that convinces utterly, precisely because we sense the writer has made a unique imprint on their language. Style is a totalizing vision, a way of perceiving the world that permeates language, down to the level of individual words, morphemes, phonemes. It’s an achievement, the grinding out of a unique voice from the bones of one’s reading—the result of a Bloomian agon with one’s literary precursors. Under this rubric, not every writer is automatically possessed of a style.
So what are we to make of Coetzee’s plain style? If the classical notion of style holds that, over the course of a lifetime, the artist will gradually refine themselves out of their work, then you could certainly argue that Coetzee’s “style” is classical in nature. The Pole becomes a late work in an early mode; you might even say that Coetzee has always been writing late works. Interestingly, Coetzee’s late works bear a resemblance to the final works of Richard Strauss, which, as Said observes, “are escapist in theme, reflective and disengaged in tone, and above all written with a kind of distilled and rarefied technical mastery that is quite amazing.” As Said goes on to note:
All of this produces a studiously surface effect. Even the drama in Capriccio, as well as the world-weary Last Songs, is undramatic, free of contrast and real tension, unthreatening. And here we are at the unsettling and disconcerting core of this music: that from beginning to end it makes none of the emotional claims it should, and unlike late-style Beethoven with its fissures and fragments, it is smoothly polished, technically perfect, worldly, and at ease as music in an entirely musical world.
The charge that Strauss’s late music “makes none of the emotional claims it should” finds a neat parallel in a common criticism of Coetzee’s writing, one that’s maybe best exemplified by James Wood’s contemporary review of Disgrace. Coetzee, as Wood writes, is “extremely intelligent, lucid, exacting and elegant; but his talent is still warily governed.” Unlike, say, Dostoevsky, Coetzee “is unlikely ever to be monstrously demanding of his characters or his readers.” A similar complaint is lodged against the novel’s language, which “is never inefficient,” but only “because it so limits the scope of its own efficiency.” In fact, as Wood concludes, a “reader's only frustration with this movingly bleak, impressively unsparing book may be that it keeps its own borders so neatly trimmed.”
“I cannot find a trace of humor in the music of Chopin or Liszt,” the pianist and critic Alfred Brendel once observed, and the same might be said—in fact has been said—of Coetzee’s prose. As a writer, Coetzee has been hounded by accusations of preternatural restraint throughout his career. Martin Amis famously described Coetzee’s style as “predicated on transmitting absolutely no pleasure,” while Wood has written variously of Coetzee’s “chaste, exact, ashen prose,” describing it, elsewhere, as “almost bloodless in its pale perfection.” In his review of The Pole in The New York Review of Books, Michael Gorra, falling in line with the prevailing critical mood, deems Coetzee’s prose “bare and toneless.” All of which is to say that to speak of a late style when it comes to Coetzee can feel like a gentle paradox, since to possess a late style one has to have possessed a style in the first place, one whose qualities could shift, develop, or disappear over time.
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Like the works of Coetzee’s major period, The Pole probes questions of power and narrative control. It is, on one level, an investigation of how we create love objects, of how we narrativize the other—and of how, when we find ourselves subsumed by another’s fiction, we push back against the foreign vision. If the novel itself had an opinion, it’s easy to imagine that it would consider Beatriz’ actions proper, the right thing to do. She is skeptical, procedural; she leaves little to chance. Her occasional coldness is like Coetzee’s own desired state of compositional apatheia. It reflects an awareness that once we have acquiesced to another’s story, it is only a matter of time until that story begins to shape our own reality, until we become what we’ve been told we are.
It can seem pointless to subject a writer like Coetzee to biographical criticism; after all, he’s done more than most authors to scrub himself out of his books. As Attwell reports, Coetzee’s drafts contain various reflections of a self-exploratory nature, in which Coetzee ponders what sort of writer he wants to be. “Fiction, being a serious affair,” he writes at one point, “cannot accept pre-requisites like (1) a desire to write, (2) something to write about, (3) something to say. There must be a place for a fiction of apathy toward the task of writing, toward the subject, toward the means.”
The Pole seems to have fallen down to us from the heights of this divine apatheia. Said notably writes of lateness as itself “a form of exile.” Just as Coetzee has self-exiled to more antipodean climes—since 2002, he’s resided with his partner Dorothy Driver in Adelaide, Australia—it’s possible to read his late style as another turn of the exilic screw. Coetzee has always understood exile and an increased subjectivity to go hand in hand. One reading of the particular coolness of his late style might be as a stratagem for dodging the gratuitous traces of personality that, with the onset of his physical exile from South Africa, he has laid himself open to.
It’s possible this ratchet effect is pointless, of course. “For Adorno,” as Said writes, “lateness is the idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal.” It’s a description that in many ways applies to Coetzee. As Ella Fox-Martens writes in a recent essay in The Drift, “Coetzee, in the last few years, has [had] increasingly little to say about new South African writing,” adding, for good measure, that “he was never overly forthcoming in the first place.” There is no escape from lateness; you can only go further in. “Perhaps one of the best things you can say about Coetzee’s work is that it’s not as true as it used to be,” Fox-Martens concludes, so “that one day it will appear to readers as text from a very long time ago, written in a strange, dusty language that nobody speaks.”
The Pole, too, revolves around a dusty language. Witold speaks of passion, though Beatriz is at a loss to understand precisely what he means. “All their conversations seem to be like that: coins passed back and forth in the dark, in ignorance of what they are worth.” As a lover, he is antiquated, tethered to bygone modes of intimate expression:
The Pole was in love with her, seriously in love–and probably still is—but the Pole himself is a relic of history, of an age when desire had to be infused with a tincture of the unattainable before it could pass as the real thing.
Witold’s exaltation of Beatriz models an older form of love. “He bears her image with him as a lover in the old days bore the image of his sweetheart in a locket around his neck,” Coetzee writes. The bearing of the image is chivalric, and signals that we are in the realm of courtly love. And then, the novel isn’t shy about drawing parallels between Witold and Dante, Beatriz and Beatrice.
This emphasis on amatory ritualism recalls the Byronic motif in Disgrace, and like Disgrace, The Pole can be fruitfully read as an elegy of sorts, a novel about the withering away of desire and the place of longing and intimacy in a post-sexual life. For Beatriz, Witold is “this late lover,” late in life, late in style, and eventually simply late—which is to say, deceased. When Witold passes away, Beatriz is left to tangle with this strange anachronistic love. In many ways, she is dissatisfied with the passion that had fallen so aberrantly into her lap. “You had the whole creaking philosophical edifice of romantic love behind you, into which you slotted me as your donna and saviour,” she writes in a letter to the deceased Witold near the novel’s close. “I had no such resources, apart from what I regard as a saving scepticism about schemes of thought that crush and annihilate living beings.”
Language itself, for Coetzee, is one of those “schemes of thought.” Love, and especially a formalized love, is another. In the courtly tradition, as C.S. Lewis writes in The Allegory of Love, “[t]he lover is always abject,” humbled before his beloved. “Obedience to his lady’s lightest wish, however whimsical, and silent acquiescence in her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim.” There is a secondary meaning to this obedience; as Lewis goes on to observe, the “service of love” central to the ideal of courtly love is “closely modelled on the service which a feudal vassal owes to his lord.” In a sense, the tradition of courtly love amounts to a feudalisation of love, the conversion of the lover into a vassal. Coetzee’s past comments on the global dominance of English suggest an opinion of the language that mirrors this process of feudalisation.
But then why couch these strictly linguistic concerns in the form of a love story in the first place? And why in this particularly old-fashioned romance? The answer would seem to have something to do with the self-deceptive nature of love, and what might tell us about the self-deceptive nature of fictions in general. In an essay on Italo Svevo’s novel Senilità, Coetzee writes that the affair central to that book’s plot “has been senile through and through,” which is to say, “not youthful and vital at all, but on the contrary lived from the beginning through the medium of the self-regarding lie.” As Beatriz sees it, Witold’s view of their affair is a lie so self-regarding that it can hardly recognize itself as a lie. But then, as Coetzee suggests, it’s entirely possible this element of self-deception is necessary for the production of a work of art—even if it is a faulty or minor one.
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The question of impersonality in the work of art is an old one. It’s at the heart, for instance, of Eliot’s famous and essentially neo-classical distinction between personal and artistic emotion. For Eliot, the ideal poet was entirely separate from the poem, a formulation that harkens back to an older ideal of poetic composition. Northrop Frye has written of “the confusion between literary and personal sincerity” as a common critical fallacy, especially when discussing romance narratives. “If a poet is really in love,” Frye notes in Fables of Identity, “his Muse may well desert him.” Personal experience is in fact detrimental to the artistic process. “It is not the experience of love but practice in writing love sonnets that releases the floods of poetic emotion,” Frye writes. A reformulation more fitting of Coetzee might have it that if a writer is really engagée he runs the risk of losing his Muse’s loyalty, of running out of things to say.
Because late works tend to give vent to a disordered subjectivity, as Adorno observes, they are often “relegated to the outer reaches of art, in the vicinity of document.” Coetzee does not believe that the work of art reaches beyond itself. There is no room in his art for inspiration, for the warm and wimpling touch of divine afflatus. Whatever formal perfection the objet d’art achieves is the work of discipline and industry, of merciless technique. The denial of late style is, in a sense, the denial of death—as well as the denial of the transcendence offered by the work of art.
Another way of saying all this is that the problem of how to avoid subjective disorder is central to an understanding of Coetzee’s late works. His solution in The Pole, oddly enough, is to indulge in the obscuring pedantries of language and love. When Witold passes away, he bequeaths to Beatriz a binder containing “what are evidently poems, in Polish, one to a page, typewritten and numbered I—LXXXIV.” The process of divining the poems’ meaning—both their basic semantic content and the intent behind them—occupies most of the remaining text. As Coetzee makes clear, it’s an ultimately quixotic venture. To translate poetry from a language as notoriously prickly as Polish is one thing; to pin a final meaning on a textual artifact is another; to plumb the depths of the human soul that created it is, one would hope, an utter impossibility.
Beatriz types a poem into a computer translator, hoping, not for a perfect translation, but simply for a glimpse of the project’s tone. “Are they a hymn to the beloved; or on the contrary are they a bitter parting shot from a rejected lover?” Unfortunately, “the computer is as tone-deaf as it is stupid,” and the essence of Witold’s final gesture remains tantalizingly out of reach. A human touch is necessary; contacting the Polish consulate, Beatriz is provided with the name of a translator, whom she promptly hires.
It is a pitiless ending. “With the whole of his pathetic project laid out before her on her desk, his project of resurrecting and perfecting a love that was never firmly founded, she is overcome with exasperation but also with pity,” Coetzee writes. “The picture grows clearer and clearer before her eyes: the old man at his typewriter in his ugly apartment, trying to force into life his dream of love, using an art that he was not master of.”
What do you know? Romance lives—or better to say, lives on.