Title: The Pole
Author: JM Coetzee
ISBN: 9781324093862
Publisher: Liveright
The Jesus book trilogy by JM Coetzee, the renowned South African author who now lives in Australia, defeated me. I had not been getting on well with his books since Elizabeth Costello, which was the last of his books of fiction I had enjoyed. So by the time The Pole came out last year, I wasn’t really interested in reading it until a friend whose reading taste I admire, urged me to try, saying it contains all of the JMC writing traits and themes. Indeed it does. But they feel kind of stale with an aftertaste in this book. These ideas that run like threads on Coetzee’s writing are anxieties about:
- solipsistic moral resonances in heterosexual sexual relationships;
- misfitting and disjointedness;
- humiliations of ageing and sexual intercourse;
- philological articulation or lack thereof;
- use of classical characters from the Western
There’s something anachronistic and bland about The Pole. The uncritical JMC fans will probably argue the bland part is deliberate, as a means of using a plain-language style to tell a vivid story, going back to the novel seed as seen in the likes of Miguel Cervantes, Herman Melville, Robison Crusoe, yada, yada. Suffice it to say, I don’t find the writings of Cervantes, Melville and Crusoe bland.
In almost all writers of fiction, in particular, you find recurring themes. This is because no one writes from a position of tabula rasa. Fiction writers are a collection of identity conditioning, life experiences, education, etc. They don’t imagine from a clean slate. So, they tend to have preconceived ideas that form strong parts of their worldview – the Germans have a better word for it: Weltanschauung, of which the meaning is more comprehensive and extends into the philosophy of living. I can’t recall who said the act of writing is an attempt at escaping self-obsession. When you read JMC’s oeuvre, especially books like Summertime, Boyhood, Youth, The Good Story, etc, you understand the meaning of this saying. Some writers write because they want to thrash out certain ideas beyond just mere storytelling. These ideas loosen or tighten their grip on their minds by the proportion they succeed or fail in thrashing them out.
In The Pole, the quintessential JMC literary traits are all present, brushed with a light writing quilt and spareness, which is the book’s saving grace. You perennially hold your fingers for fear of the discussion tipping over the precipice. JMC likes walking a tightrope in moral discourse with a cultivated, careless nonchalance that builds a wonderful tension in you as a reader. The book gives an overall feeling of watching someone trying to control a kite dance during a hurricane. The use of concise prose is there also, but it lacks the depth and capaciousness of (fictional) built environment and atmosphere that I enjoy most in literal fiction.
I suppose, after Disgrace, it is no revelation to say JMC has quaint ideas common to white males of condescending conservatism. In The Pole, they’re treated as something of classical refinement. The art of music is used as a purchase to sophistication and virtuosity. Alas, most of it is flaunted on a superficial level, which is a pity for an amateur classical student like myself, who has been drawn to that field by my daughter’s cello playing and obsession with Bach’s African rhythms. Nor is it anything of lamenting the lack of fierce confrontation with sociopolitical issues of the day from JMC writings. Gone forever are the days of Waiting for The Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, or The Age of Iron, my favourite book in his oeuvre. He seems to have reckoned it not worth the fuss after he got his hands burnt with Disgrace, which despite its tone-deaf content, is probably still the apex of his technique and skill as a writer.
The plot of The Pole is simple: Witold Walczykiewicz is a Polish piano player who rose to fame by interpreting the works of Chopin. When he has a performance in Barcelona a middle-aged lady, Beatriz, who is a university lecturer, is assigned to care for him during his stay. He becomes obsessed with Beatriz, though she is married. At first, the love is unrequited, but, unlike the real Beatrice of Dante, she takes pity on him by allowing him into her bed, as opposed to eloping with him to Brazil as he had wished. He is humiliated by his sexual needs and eventually has his “spiritual revelation” between her legs. She rejects him after a week of sympathy fucks and dry passion at her holiday home. He goes home, and dies of natural causes, or unrequited love, after an obsession with writing poetry, at which he is not good, during his last days. He leaves her the book of poems written in Polish. She must organise a translator to decipher them, and so on.
In his earlier literary career, when he still worked for IBM, JMC regarded himself as a poet, preoccupying himself more with computer-generated poetry. I wonder if he has found his element now again in the AI GPT. The poems written for Beatriz read as though they might have been written by AI. There’s hardly any story in The Pole, just pedestrian bland stuff often saved by low-key studies of heterosexual sexuality. The characters are ungrounded navel gazers whose only interest in the world is how it moves or unmoves them. Deliberate misappropriation and disproportionate priorities of the zeitgeist is something JMC’s post-94 writings are mostly critiqued for, and here again, you would know why.
I dispute those who, because JMC hardly ever gives interviews, say he avoids the writer’s urge to confess and reveal himself. Now that the biographical details of his life are growing in the public sphere, it is becoming clear that he has strewn them vastly in both his fiction and what he calls “fictionalised memoirs”. And he greatly infers his characters with his consciousness and intellectual understanding. It is obvious that writing as a means of self-study is extremely important to JMC. He makes that assertion obvious in his non-fiction book, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction & Psychotherapy, which he jointly wrote with the psychotherapist, Arabella Kurtz. As a talented writer of tremendous technical ability, it is becoming obvious to this reader that JMC entered a writing cul de sac after Elizabeth Castello. Now he seems to be at a dead end and has run out of stories to tell. What makes a writer run out of stories? Your guess is as good as mine. Old age is supposed to be a verdant ground for storytelling. From reading some writers’ sunset writings I discovered that creative stasis comes when they become too individualistic, ahistorical and culturally ungrounded. This shrinks the imagination and makes it sterile.
The post The Pole by JM Coetzee: a review first appeared on LitNet.
The post <i>The Pole</i> by JM Coetzee: a review appeared first on LitNet.