Making Adult Love (on J. M. Coetzee’s The Pole)

A book can be well-reviewed and judiciously praised yet still be underappreciated. Reviews must concentrate on telling what happens and why that seems to matter. Critical essays can take on different tasks. They can assume the work they are considering has already been experienced, so their major concern will often be to enrich our frameworks for evaluating the work. And they have the freedom from deadlines enabling the time to work on such projects. This distinction seems especially important for J. M. Coetzee’s short but intricate novel The Pole. After strange opening sections that foreground the narrator’s role in understanding the characters he will develop, there emerges a love story in which an elderly Polish pianist falls in love with a married upper-class woman in her fifties who resists returning his love but remains fascinated enough to keep seeing him. She cannot decide whether to accept the titular Pole’s idealistic rhetoric about the nature of his love. In order to believe him she would have to understand a character shaped by his resistance to emotionally theatrical renderings of Chopin’s music. His concern is the structure making expressivity possible, just as in matters of love he is awkwardly elemental. Only after traveling to Poland after his death to gather the poems he wrote late in life does she come to understand him and appreciate what makes it possible to return his love. 

When I re-read The Pole, there emerged for me almost a novel within the novel based on paying careful attention to two subtle features of the writing—the opening sections focusing on the narrator and how Coetzee’s prose seems to reflect the Pole’s artistic values. The writing as well as the music is more like Bach than like Rachmaninov in its restraint and precision. These features require that any emerging love story will be a strange one, attuned in part to characters who fit these constraints on theatricality while evoking a space for reflective feeling that can incorporate musical analogues. At stake here is developing a readerly ability to locate deep romantic feeling not in gesture but in attentiveness to the structural dynamics driving the subtle internal relations, paralleling those in Chopin’s musical scores. And attention to structural dynamics in Coetzee’s novel requires careful attention to the roles of the narrator, and the author presenting the narrator, who are actively involved in simultaneously staging and resisting the modes of self-defense inherent in Western cultural forms of self-consciousness—especially in older adults trying to preserve their identities as single agents while opening themselves to the possibilities of shared lives made possible by love. Beatriz and Witold meet in Spain at dinner before Witold’s concert and become warily fascinated by one another. But Beatriz is painfully aware of her position in society, and Witold’s overweening sense of commitment to his art alienates her. And the two are from very different, almost incompatible linguistic traditions. It is the novel’s task to use its stylistic and dramatic resources to establish the loving relationship both persons desire, despite their also making it difficult to achieve.

A review by Michael Gorra in the New York Review of Books (2 November 2023) sets the stage for this essay’s basic concern with authorial strategies by calling attention to how the opening sections establish a focus on “the process of writing itself.” But he has neither the space nor the interest to pursue fully what I hope to show in Coetzee’s dramatic rendering of what this process can accomplish. These are the passages he refers to: 

1. The woman is the first to give him trouble, soon followed by the man.

2. At the beginning he has a perfectly clear idea of who the woman is. She is tall and graceful; by conventional standards she might not qualify as a beauty but her features . . . are striking and her voice, a low contralto, has a suave attractive power. Sexy? No, she is not sexy and certainly not seductive. She might have been sexy when she was young . . .
      That is how he would sum up her exterior. As for her self, her soul, there is time for that to reveal itself. Of one thing he is convinced: she is a good person, kind, friendly.

3. The man is more troublesome. In concept, again, he is perfectly clear. [The paragraph goes on to describe his commitment to emphasizing structure rather than “romantic” passion when he plays Chopin.] . . . 
      But barely has the Pole emerged into the light than he begins to change. With his striking mane of silver hair, his idiosyncratic renderings of Chopin, the Pole promises to be a distinctive enough personage. But in matters of soul, of feeling, he is troublingly opaque. . . . And if that soul strikes one as unusually dry and severe, it may point to a certain aridity in his own temperament.

4. . . . All year they have been knocking at the door, wanting to be in or else dismissed and laid to rest. Now, at last, has their time come?

For Gorra, this focus on the narrator’s imagining of Witold and Beatriz provides a guide projecting for the audience a way of seeing the stakes in how the lovers handle the opportunities made possible by their chance meeting. But while this observation is certainly important, the idea of narrator as stand-in for the audience ignores another probably more important feature of the narrative activity—the staging of the narrator’s own interest in how his modes of activity engage, shape, and assess his own involvement in working out how “their time” can come to fruition. We must be able to feel both for the lovers and for the narrator, who has made an enormous imaginative investment in their finding some kind of resolution. This doubling of investment makes me think that treating the ending as inviting a psychological interpretation of finding love is too thin a register for fully appreciating the depth of what finally occurs. It becomes crucial to develop a mode of emotional participation that incorporates an identification with what the narrator might feel for what the characters present as their own ways of feeling. We have to respect the fact that the narrator has constructed here the need to negotiate issues of translation embodied in the story as a challenge to mutual understanding. The lovers are both speaking English, which is not either person’s native language. And, perhaps more important, in the concluding pages we have to imagine Beatriz reading Spanish translations of Witold’s poems in Polish and trying to project herself into their original meaning.

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In order to capture what is most distinctive about the novel I will concentrate on three features of Coetzee’s decision to foreground the narrator’s activity primarily through stylistic choices rather than by imposing commentary on the actions. These features of narrative voicing involve producing totally different ways of rendering each of the main characters so that we, and he, can fully appreciate what is involved when they eventually find mutual understanding. And Coetzee takes full advantage of possible roles music can play in the text by having the same musical score printed as the introduction to each chapter. These scores reinforce that the writing closely parallels the Pole’s anti-theatrical performance style. Ultimately such parallels elicit a space of feeling more comprehensive, more intimate, and less verbally interpretive than fiction typically provides. 

We can begin with considering how the different manners of presenting the two main characters can affect our engagement in the story—primarily by intensifying the differences that must be negotiated to achieve a satisfying resolution. The rendering of the Pole, for example, does not do very much to make him immediately attractive, even while showing how his sensibility is a unique one. The narrator keeps his distance from the Pole. He records what he says and does. But he does not enter his “troublesome” consciousness as means of interpreting these activities. It seems that the narrator does not want to confine this idealistic performer to standard psychological judgments. The result is that we see someone almost ridiculously direct, without penetrating to his inner life, which his poems eventually show is very lively and intricate. Readers are hard-pressed not to see Witold as the distanced, inexpressive character whom Beatriz sees—until the ending. 

But with Beatriz, the object of the Pole’s passion, the means of intimacy is the deployment of what is probably the most persistent use of “free indirect discourse” in English fiction. This is the definition of this stylistic structure offered by the Oxford Research Encyclopedias:

In free indirect discourse (FID), the narrative discourse of a text incorporates the language and subjectivity of a character, . . . without an introductory attributing frame like “she thought that” and without shifts in the pronouns or the tense sequence to accord with the character’s perspective.

A brief example from the novel will help. And it will allow me to speculate on why this stylistic choice deepens our understanding of Beatriz’s position—both in terms of her self-protectiveness and in terms of her transformation as she reads and rereads the poems sent by the Pole after his death. Here, early in the novel, Beatriz is responding to an invitation from the Pole, who hopes to see her again:

She allows a day to pass while she ruminates on for you. Whatever the words mean in English, . . . what do they mean in reality? He is here for her as one in a bakery for bread? . . . Or is here for her as one is in church for God? . . . When she was young she would unquestionably follow impulses. . . . But (thank God!) she is no longer young. She is wiser, more prudent.

The first sentence seems sheer narrative description. Yet in context of the rest of the passage it could also be her reflection on herself. Then the passage becomes strikingly both her and not her. It is her mind working. But the repeated feminine pronouns are in the third person, even as she reflects intensely on her own feelings. The lack of transition from narrative to her state of consciousness treats them as if they were both equally visible to an observer.

We almost have to ask what the author gains by such insistent reliance on this method of rendering self-conscious reflection. One reason leaps out. This stylistic choice enacts the narrator’s desire to understand his own creation while claiming ownership for such understanding. We could say that free indirect discourse combines the virtues of narrative control with respect for the freedom of a modified stream of consciousness made objective in the scene. But there may be also a more sinister dimension of the narrator presenting how Beatriz thinks. I am tempted to ask, “is what is rendered as her thoughts an adequate account of her states of mind?” She clearly thinks these thoughts. But would she really believe they provide an adequate picture of her feelings? Could she fully assent to them in her most private moments and not just accede to them because they are what she should think, given her age and social situation? To answer this question, we have to reflect more carefully about the situation. Responding to his invitation has been, and is, a huge challenge to her peace of mind. And she does admit that thinking of him “tickles her fancy, makes her smile.” Yet her actual reasoning as rendered by the narrator does not acknowledge the temptation, even though the reader eventually finds out that she has accepted the invitation without offering any reasons. 

Might this passage be occurring in part because the narrator feels her divided self and so stresses the more ideological aspects making it possible for her to protect her self-image? Rather than stage a scene of her questioning herself, and taking the risk of entering territory that is both an invasive action and a speculative one, the free indirect discourse stresses what is most public about her thinking. In fact, one could argue that this side of Beatriz is what the narrator can know, because it is the side by which social pressures and ideological structures enter her reflections. If this is true, free indirect discourse becomes a constant dramatic reminder of what we can know about Beatriz simply because of what her social situation allows her to think. In my view, being aware of this reduction to her social role by the narrative produces deep sympathy with Beatriz’s confusion. We more readily appreciate how the mind of Beatriz that the narrator lets us see presents only what she wants to think, so that she can suppress other features of her possible interests. This hypothesis helps us understand the dramatic power in the last chapter of the novel: when Beatriz fully acknowledges her love, the discourse is no longer free indirect discourse. Presented in a letter to Witold, the entire process is staged in first-person terms, as if the narrator had to withdraw because she takes responsibility for feelings that he does not control (perhaps the better to enjoy how his creation has turned out). This is when “their time” comes, ironically thanks to how the narrator makes the contrast possible.

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Consider now this more dramatic passage illustrating the complex effects of free indirect discourse on our feelings about Beatriz and clarifying what the main characters are facing. The passage occurs after Beatriz has agreed to spend a week with the Pole at Girona. In this context it becomes painfully clear that her full involvement in the situation is not fully aligned with how the narrative presents her thinking.

Coetzee manages to develop a divided consciousness without producing a character’s self-conscious theatrics about such division:

They go for a walk on a tree-lined path along the riverside. . . .

“I ask again,” she says: “why have you come here? Girona—you have no reason to be in Girona.” . . . “Do you want me to sleep with you? If so, let me tell you at once: it is not going to happen.”

“Do not be angry,” he says. “Please.”

“I am not angry. I am impatient. I don’t have time for games. You invited me here. Why?”

Why is she so angry? What does she want from him that he is refusing to give?

“Dear lady,” says the Pole, “you remember Dante Alighieri the poet? His Beatrice never gave him one word and he loved her all his life.” . . .

She shakes her head. “We are strangers, you and I,” she says. “We belong to different worlds, different realms. You belong to one world with your Dante and your Beatrice, I belong in another, which I am accustomed to call the real world.”

“You give me peace,” says the Pole. “You are my symbol of peace.”

She, Beatriz, a symbol of peace! She has never heard anything more nonsensical.

Again, the passage begins with a narrative moment that modulates into a dramatic scene, eventually in the fifth paragraph fully developing the resources of free indirect discourse. “Why is she so angry” could be uttered by the narrator after Beatriz denies she is angry. But because her next speaking returns to “she,” it seems that the questioning is being erased in favor of an attitude of dismissal by now familiar to the narrator. Were she speaking in the first person, it might be more difficult to ignore her incipient fascination. The narrator’s intervention here makes it easier for her to conceal from herself the gap between what she thinks and what she feels.

Then, with the Pole’s intervention, the drama gets more intense and Beatriz’s self-protective assumption of her public role more costly because her behavior is so clearly aligned with what the narrator can readily interpret. Here the Pole is a little ridiculous but perfectly sincere in his introducing Dante’s Beatrice into the conversation. Yet her words are utterly divisive, as if unfamiliarity could call for sheer repudiation rather than an effort at understanding. And she finds comfort in absolutely rejecting his plea—first in a reasonable tone about their belonging to different worlds, and then in an overdetermined contempt that represents the victory of her public self (and her unfortunate alignment with the narrator’s control over her means of expression). Now she is governed by how she wants to see herself thinking—hence the sense of distance from herself suggested by the reduction of his appeal to “non-sense.” Yet we find out later that she does sleep with him.

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I have focused on the work achieved by the contrasting styles deployed to define the characters of Witold and Beatriz. Now it is time to speculate on the difference it will make when a third mode of discourse becomes the center of attention. I refer to the poems Witold has sent to Beatriz after he dies. But before turning directly to the poems we need to attend more closely to the treatment of Witold’s character as context for understanding why he turns away from playing Chopin as his preferred means of expression. And then we should be able to appreciate fully Beatriz’s reactions to his poetry as she turns to a first-person perspective able to express unqualified love. 

I like to think of Witold as attempting to be faithful to a level of experience most people would think of as foolish idealism. But most people are not gifted pianists regularly objectifying feelings by structural relations and tonal shifts rather than discursive idealization. In fact, there may be too much consistency between his insistence on structure rather than emotional effusiveness in the playing of Chopin and his mode of courting Beatriz. He relies on direct assertion rather than on what he would see as romantic frivolities and displays of intricate self-consciousness. Perhaps the best way to put the case for Witold is that his values would have counted as a higher realism in the world of Dante which he tries imaginatively to inhabit. There, love is too central a value for anyone to tarry with concerns for seduction that involve winning and losing for the individual. Dante sees Beatrice; he announces his love; and he finds an imaginative guide for taking the high road in his life. This high road involves directly stating his passion and treating it as a life-shaping source of inspiration. This is also Witold’s way of participating in an ideal realm where meaning is simple, clear, and direct, without theatrics but also without much concern for helping his beloved contextualize what he offers. It is only when his emotional life turns him to writing his own poetry that he brings a charming concreteness to his directness, thus enabling the narrative to imagine the two lovers sharing an ideal but inhabitable world. 

Initially, Witold’s behavior does not work well for professing his love. When Beatriz starts to become interested in him, she wants to be courted, probably as an entry into her accepting an imaginative life that is capable of resisting the caution and defensiveness endemic to her age and class. Had Witold been less obsessed with fidelity to his own ideals, he might have realized he is professing love to a middle-aged woman with a comfortable social position and a psychological penchant for distrust and self-protection: she thinks the last thing she wants is to lose self-control and enter a passionate love affair. So, she insists on treating the Pole’s statements as pure idealistic prose, without the supplements of identifiable romantic behavior because of his “aridity of temperament.” In sharp contrast to his expressiveness, she is always thinking about practical concerns and so lacks any form of personal speech that directly expresses her own passions. Yet it is not difficult to imagine these attitudes as covers for wanting to be seduced. Unfortunately the dream of being seduced by romantic gestures is probably another fantasy that derives from her ideological position—as perhaps the only way she can escape her self-protective ways. It will take his death to free her to try to step outside those cultural parameters. With this death it seems that even the narrator knows that his ways of casting her mental states are inadequate. So the story finally yields to the possibility of her expressing herself in the first person.

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The turn toward the ending begins almost at the conclusion of section five, which closes the body of the narrative. Here we see Beatriz willing to have the Pole’s poems translated after his death while still giving in to her self-defensive voice by refusing to take the Pole’s poetic utterances seriously. She simply cannot let herself fully appreciate the devotion these poems embody. I cite what is probably her most callous moment, perhaps in large part because she fears she may be trapped in caring about a dead person—now engaged in a language less difficult to interpret than his dependency on music as the site for his idealizations of love and desire:

I should never have encouraged him, she thinks. I should have nipped the whole thing in the bud. But I did not see where it was leading. I did not see it was going to end up like this.

She puts the translations back in their folder. Who else but she would ever want to read this stuff? All for nothing, all that patient labor, all that packing of one brick on top of another. There is not even a museum of bad poetry where it can be stored away . . . Poor old fellow! she thinks. Poor Old Guy! 

It seems that all he gets for his passion is these two exclamation marks—probably among the most emotionally complex exclamation marks in English literature. I think these comments are intended as a definitive refusal to care any longer for the Pole. Yet these exclamation marks probably have to be seen as also an opening to tenderness. She may despise herself for the efforts she took to get the poems translated. But the poems themselves required a much greater degree of devotion. It may be the case then that by the moment of exclamation she is also experiencing an emerging capacity for sympathy that will enable her to find her own voice in the concluding section as she writes letters to the now dead Witold about his poems. The voice that had been in possession of the narrator cannot register the possibility of seeing these poems as offering a vision of deep peace for the soul, far beyond the pleasures and doubts involving seduction and being seduced. His dying may open a different perspective than the one her social position seemed to require. She might be open to states of idealization that one’s social being cannot inhabit.

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Perhaps the best way to appreciate the ending, in which Beatriz reacts to Witold’s poems in her letter to him, is to recognize that she no longer needs her defenses, in part because what was irritating about the Pole is no longer dominant. He lives only in this poetry—a poetry offering a different person, perhaps no longer defensive in his own right and masking that with overassertive idealization. It may be the case then that the reader seeking understanding has to imagine who Beatriz could be were she not so fixed in her own self-protective ways. If readers are to open themselves to a world where music and poetry have real consequences, they will have to learn to believe utterly direct idealizing discourse with no supporting gestures involving psychological theatrics. Yet this belief may not be possible when the speaker is alive and subject to culturally framed expectations, which he encourages by what now has come to seem his own defensiveness. Who can trust someone who compares his love to Dante’s fictions about Beatrice? 

Here narrative may have to grapple with the enormous gap between conditions of belief generated by adapting conventional forms of wisdom and an effort to align with sensibilities that eventually challenge such conventional understanding. That gap may be able to be bridged only by a poetry composed within contexts where the imagination has learned to dwell in the spaces established by musical structures. The poetry functions primarily as something that breaks down Witold’s reliance on the masterful control of his Chopin, thus enabling him to find a voice no longer quite protected by that mastery. Yet there is music in the verse—less in the form than in the honest passion and willingness to expose states so intimate that they can only be accepted by identifying directly with the need driving him. 

Probably it is no wonder but still a delightful surprise that Beatriz ultimately develops a sympathetic relation with this spirit of intimate honesty. She begins still cautiously, reminding him that she is neither the goddess of one of his poems nor the Beatrice he projects from Dante. But now she is remarkably open to the possibilities she feels they defended themselves against: “If we had dropped the adult masks and approached each other as child to child we might have done better.” This recognition allows her a long speech about how she would have liked to be “wooed” and “paid the sweet compliments and told the flattering lies that men tell the women they want to sleep with.” Then giving way to that sentiment leads into other complaints that he did not write her after she rejected him or call when he knew he was dying. 

Such speaking is finally an honest effort to be fully in the first person. And it allows her just to cite her favorite poem of his—as if she could enter the world made up of his love for her. A lovely poem it is—about his mother telling him that having a penis enables possibilities of giving. Here he recognizes that in his sleeping with Beatriz he failed to give joy or light. And, characteristically, he also sees the other side: there is always the possibility of new life reconciled with his penis because he can celebrate her power to make him view himself as capable of self-contempt. In fact, he sees this so clearly that the poem can end with a very gentle acceptance of a not-so-symbolic death. Let us look at this acceptance from the perspective of Beatriz as she learns to read the poetry as different from normal social speech, still sustaining the Pole’s values but embodying them in figures that replace Witold’s authoritative and perhaps defensive manner:

Here there is finally self-questioning. Here there is pervasive concreteness thanks to the metaphoric reach of the penis in the poem. Here there is wit at the end made sublimely yet humbly painful because of the fact of his having died. 

How could she not write a second letter, since she is so full of this new self? This second one apologizes for her critical comments about his ways of loving and the weakness of his poetry. Then she focuses on her feelings about his death and her regrets that she could not be moved by his dwelling in an ideal realm:

You had the whole creaking philosophical edifice of romantic love behind you, into which you slotted me as your donna and savior. I had no such resources, apart from what I regard as a saving scepticism about schemes of thought that crush and annihilate living beings.

This line of thinking generates hope that they can be always honest with each other but never cruel. Fortified by this hope, she turns again to specific criticisms based on one of his poems stating an interest in staring at her. But the poem speaks only of staring as a means of possessing her—not possessing her body but attuning to her modesty, grace, and goodness. I suspect that she half recognizes her error, because she acknowledges that the poem is too difficult for her and calls her own defensiveness into question, now buttressed by her admitting her responsiveness to his “high opinion of me.” 

Then there occurs in the closing lines of the novel its most important sequence. That she ultimately attaches to his way of speaking directly affords the substance for what eventually becomes a very rare occasion of pure bonding. After her criticisms, she actually gets tender and exuberant: “Good night, my prince—time for bed. Sleep well. Sweet dreams. . . . P.S. I will write again.” She descends into cliché in order to accept the banality of happiness and finally align her will with her word. There is no way to escape the tragic sense that her discoveries come too late for the characters to bond while both are still alive. Yet that awareness provides a feasible and even glorious state of romance because that death ultimately allows her to speak to this now imagined lover with all the directness and commitment that he had sought. 

There is no defensiveness here and no self-contradiction. We have to take “will” in this context as a quiet form of full investment in their relationship. She commits to a future that almost realizes the core of the romantic tradition shaping Witold’s belief that love capable of possessing the spirit need not end with the body’s death—so long as there is the construction of a space of conversation that compels one to write again. The richest feature of this ending is that Beatriz need not believe explicitly in the place that her honest gratitude composes for both lovers.

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Finally, we cannot finish discussing the novel without inquiring further into the connection between Witold’s values and the novel’s structure based on beginning each section with the same musical score. I can think of only one explanation. But it offers an intriguing possibility. There is a level of experience all through this text (and in Coetzee’s many remarks about trying to escape the hegemony of English) that language consistently oversimplifies or distorts sensibility, at least until poetry affords an adequate level of understanding. This background musical score, always the same, provides a means of suggesting that the entire text ultimately aligns with a sense of powerful forces in the psyche that resist discursive interpretation because these forces are such basic elements in themselves, perhaps beyond linguistic representation. There is an “Other” to language established by music that addresses what language cannot say. But perhaps the only way to appreciate fully this background is to go through the constant misalliance between well-meaning people attempting to negotiate feelings in language. Perhaps the withdrawal of the narrator from the last section is the fullest recognition in the text of this need for a supplemental domain where feeling can be treated more directly and celebrated more convincingly. After all, Coetzee did write his dissertation on Beckett.

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*An essay-review of The Pole, by J. M. Coetzee. New York: Liveright, 2023. 176 pp. $17.99, paper.