Johannes Scott – July 2024.
The Pole is a novella by J M Coetzee about desire – desire to be desired and desire for the other’s desire. The story begins with the artist’s desire and ends with the desire of the muse.
The artist is Witold Walczykiewicz, a Polish national simply known to his Barcelona audience as the Pole because they find his name unpronounceable. As a young man, Witold published a book of verse and later, after winning the Bach Prize for piano, became known as interpreter to the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin. ‘Not a pianist,’ Witold describes himself, ‘simply a man who plays the piano.’ He plays not to bring the real Chopin back to life, instead, he plays Chopin as heir of Bach’s impossible desire. For Witold, Chopin’s music ‘tells us about ourselves. About our desires,’ and ‘desires for that which we cannot have.’ To sustain this unattainable desire for the real – to capture his audience’s desire for the romantic Chopin – Witold sublimates the real for symbolic representation playing Chopin’s imaginary artifice, such as his musical phrasing, inflections, accelerations, and decelerations.
The Pole knows his formal interpretation is not highly regarded but accepts the Concert Circle’s invitation to travel to Barcelona and perform on their stage. The Circle do not want to hear the authentic Chopin, neither a modernist rendition such as Chopin as Prokofiev, they want to hear the Pole’s over-intellectualised, revisionist reading of Chopin – ‘the Circle invites him for his idiosyncrasy, for controversy,’ the narrator tells readers. This is where 72-year-old Witold meets 48-year-old Beatriz, a married-with-children society lady appointed by the Circle to provide him hospitality, as civic duty. While Witold knows, for the sake of his career, to tolerate the burden of wealthy society ladies ‘extorting their gram of flesh,’ he gazes at Beatriz as stately muse, walking ‘without swinging hips, gliding across the floor erect’.
Unlike the austere Witold, Beatriz is transformed by events. Her character is one of discontentment with symbolic order; she is unhappy because she does not know what she wants; ‘She never dreams, instead, indulges her imagination,’ the narrator tells readers. Disliking the Pole’s ‘formal feel’ and disappointed by him not complying to her expectation of playing the sentimental Chopin, she is unsure if she is hearing the ‘tinkling of piano keys or scraping of horsehair on gut.’ Breaking through Witold’s symbolic facade, she sees him as a giant spider with legs hitting the piano keys; she gazes at his brute stride, tossing back his mane, his shock of white hair waved in a crest. Captivated by the real of flesh, she smells his male sweat, diluted by eau de Cologne. At Witold’s music lesson, instead of listening to him singing in the voice of the clarinet, she hears only a ‘dark stream of liquid.’
Pitying the old man and without seduction, she invites him to bed. While she helps him along in his struggling ‘erotic business,’ she thinks about shopping. All their conversations seem to be like that, the narrator tells us, ‘Coins passed back and forth in the dark, in ignorance of what they are worth.’ After she ends their secret affair and he returns to Poland, she receives letters that she finds nonsensical – thinking of him as a monkey hitting all the wrong keys on a typewriter. He sends her a recording of his Chopin Nocturnes with a note saying, ‘To the angel who watched over me in Barcelona. I pray that the music will speak to her,’ and ‘You are my symbol of peace,’ and, ‘my memory is full of you, the image of you.’ She receives more letters from him but deletes these without reading.
Many years later, she receives a call from his daughter that he died and left her a manuscript of poems. Expecting it to be his revenge on her for throwing him out after the pitying sex, she has the 84 poems translated from Polish to Spanish. She reads his poems expecting an act of mourning, nursing his loss, and turning her into an art-object; ‘a plaster saint to be venerated and carried through the street.’ ‘Mother of mercy’ and ‘Eternally unattainable,’ the narrator explains her suspense. Instead, she discovers that his posthumous poetic performance addresses the medieval poet Dante Alighieri’s muse Beatrice and not her, Beatriz, the living. Addressing him as her prince, she writes back to his unattainable void, complaining, ‘You never wooed me, I would have liked to be seduced, to be told flattering lies, why did you obey and not plea – no theatrics, like the real Chopin.’ At the end of the story, she promises to continue writing and keep his desire alive in her memory. As for her transforming character, Beatriz hopes her children will one day reminisce about this with their psychoanalysts.
The art of Coetzee’s novella lies not in the story but in the narration, its metafiction and intertext. The self-conscious narrator tells the story not in chronological order but, in the process of going back and forth in time, halts in-between and thereby creating a liminal temporality for the reader to enter the fiction. Within this liminal artifice, almost like what is by literary convention known as stream-of-consciousness, the participatory role of the reader in the fiction is enacted, to signify the story. In self-conscious fiction, fiction about fiction, both narrator and reader labor together on equal footing, not about characters simulation reality, but what truth we can learn about ourselves from fiction.
As intertext, the character Beatriz is at the same time Dante’s muse, Beatrice. The medieval poet Dante Alighieri met the married Beatrice di Folco Portinari (1265-1290) from Florence only twice in his life, nine years apart, but she became the enduring symbol of love throughout his acclaimed literary work. In The Pole, the narrator asks the reader, on behalf of the self-reflecting Beatriz, ‘What was it that made Dante choose her over all others?’ Why did Witold not desire Beatriz in the flesh, but instead, desired her as Dante’s artifice, Beatrice?
The answer is embedded in psychoanalytic sublimation. An aesthetic object can stand in, can be exchanged for the unattainable object of desire. Moreover, since the object of beauty is an acknowledged artifice – like a sublime mask or the fragile shell of a porcelain vase concealing the core of emptiness around which it is formed – it is always safe guarded on some or other pedestal or by conventional barrier, like Witold’s musical artifice on stage at the Barcelona Musical Circle – to be orbited and admired at a safe distance. This safe distancing allows us, firstly, not to shatter its fragile veneer and expose the deceptive artistry and secondly, to sustain and prolong our desire for that which it stands in for, the unattainable real that is impossible for the symbolic to truly capture. In The Pole – in her endeavor to seize the real – what Beatriz finds after her close-up penetration through the façade of Witold’s public appearance is an empty, reflective screen in which she, with shocking realization, sees the object image of a whore gazing back at her. However, once her character transforms, after reading Witold’s poems and he had crossed the mortal barrier, she comes to treasure the lasting sustainability of the artist’s symbolic desire.
Witold’s poem about the goddess Aphrodite he finds while submerging down to the seabed sums up the literary pedagogy for desire implied by The Pole. When he gazes at the big painted eyes of the underwater marble statue, he finds that their eyes do not meet, she is not returning his gaze of desire – she is looking straight through him, oblivious. He is not getting what he wants and that is precisely what gives him pleasure. The object of desire is not the artifice, it is the act of desire itself. The inaccessible, distant artifice gives us an ongoing sense of contentment. As beings of desire, we need the artifice to teach us how to desire, to sustain living.
Coetzee, J. M. 2023. The Pole. New York: Liveright.
Johannes Scott received the BA degree in English and Theory of Literature at UNISA in 2011; postgraduate studies in Theory of Drama (2013), Narratology (2014), Critical Theory (2015); and with specialisation in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics.