A love from Barcelona in the latest novel by Nobel Coetzee

Don't underestimate literary festivals for what can happen when like-minded people get together backstage.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
26 September 2022 Monday 01:05
14 Reads
A love from Barcelona in the latest novel by Nobel Coetzee

Don't underestimate literary festivals for what can happen when like-minded people get together backstage. I met John Coetzee in 2017, at the Bogotá Book Fair, together with Soledad Costantini, director of the independent Argentine publisher El Filo de Ariadna. With Leandro Pinkler, Costantini had made her known in 2010 with Jung's Red Book. It is an extension of her work as director of the literary area of ​​the MALBA Museum, which hosts the Buenos Aires International Book Fair.

In 2011, Costantini invited the South African writer to FILBA and on that trip he proposed directing a Personal Library, in the manner of Borges' homonymous one. They completed the project of eleven books, among which an intimate anthology of poetry stands out. Coetzee announced it as a way to "re-explore those books that have been of great importance in the course of my life." He wrote prologues of enormous critical value, eventually collected in Late Essays. "The publication of the work of J.M Coetzee is one of the vector axes of Ariadna's thread", Soledad explains to me. It is now the novelist's platform, where he publishes his works in world premiere, rather than in English. “Coetzee represents an intellectual figure of singular power and originality with an ethical and integrating gaze –adds Costantini–. It is a historical milestone that an Argentine publisher can carry out this task and it is not something random, it is associated with the look around what the South means: South Africa, Australia, South America.” Shortly after we met in Bogotá, our collaboration began: Granta in Spanish published a preview of Seven Moral Tales, and we presented the issue together in Madrid. We continue to collaborate, for example, in the MALBA Writers' Residence. In 2015, a J.M. Coetzee to encourage exchange between authors, literary critics, researchers, from the South.

Coetzee is a committed writer on several levels: moral, ethical, social, political and aesthetic. In the material world, Coetzee prefers to express himself with gestures, avoiding the discourse of politics. If we want words, we have his writings. In his speculative essay What is a Classic?, Coetzee deconstructs a lecture that T.S. Eliot delivered in London in 1944. Eliot's lecture is entitled What is a classic? Coetzee refers to how Eliot forged a new identity "not on the basis of such things as immigration, settlement, residence, domestication, acculturation," but used all of his "accumulated cultural power" to change the state of educated opinion.

I share with the reader what Coetzee wants to be known about himself. He was born in South Africa, of Afrikaner origin, and his childhood was spent in conflict, almost sickly, with that identity. Trained as a mathematician, he began writing in English, a learned language, for small publishers. But he had ambitions to be published in the real world, which he then understood as the United Kingdom, the colonial capital, and the United States. He spent years studying and teaching in London, Austin and Buffalo, but he returned, disenchanted, to Cape Town in 1971 when his visa was revoked for protesting the Vietnam War.

At the age of forty, his novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) broke into the United States. Recognition of him increased, his books were regularly published and therefore translated into other languages: Foe (1986), The Iron Age (1990), The Master of Petersburg (1994); his autobiographical novels Childhood (1998) and Youth (2002), which were followed by Elizabeth Costello in 2003. That year he moved to Australia and was awarded the Nobel Prize. He was acclaimed as an international author, although the irony of a phrase that would never have been used for a writer born in the United States or the United Kingdom was not lost on him. It seemed more and more strange to him how his work was read in the Anglo-Saxon world, and he began to distance himself from the imperial metropolis.

At the same time he approached his translators, into other languages, and began translating Afrikaans and Dutch poetry. He gradually identified himself as an “international writer, but in a new way”, that is to say, that he does not come from any notable language or country. Coetzee has been writing in English for half a century, but he is not culturally or linguistically part of the Anglophone world: the pre-eminence of English became one of his concerns, along with the dominance of the North in publishing. In an essay on Kafka in Cartas de Navegación, Coetzee refers to the way Kafka transgresses the limits of language as if he could sense an alternative time. As if it were even possible to think “outside one's own language, perhaps to inform how one thinks outside of language itself”. How do you think outside of your own language? Through other forms of expression that are not based on language, such as music, painting, dance, used as rhetorical devices?

Coetzee's first sociopolitical gesture as an "international writer in a new way" was to publish in Dutch rather than English. And on the poetic/transcendental level, we have the radical experiment of his masterpiece –a conversation with Don Quixote and a tribute to the Spanish language–, the trilogy: The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Days of Jesus at School ( 2016), and The Death of Jesus (2019). In a twist to Benengeli, and to Don Quixote as a translation from Arabic, Coetzee places the novels in a kind of afterworld, where Spanish is the lingua franca. He wrote them in English, but they are understood as translations from Spanish.

Another gesture was imposed when he met Costantini in 2011, and they launched their Personal Library. world literature. The South is a real part of the world with its own flora and fauna, with important points in common in its history and culture, including long histories of colonization. The North sees the South as a set of absences and lack of resources. Like a negative other. By bringing its poets and thinkers closer, I do my best to counteract the cultural hegemony of the North”.

The new life

I asked about his reasons for setting his new novel, The Pole, in Catalonia, given that Spain is an extravagant country in the South of Europe: “The South is a land longed for by light, warmth and happiness, where the northern cold allows of inhibitions and plunge into the life of the senses. Think of Gauguin and the South Seas, for example."

The Polish is a palimpsest, a genealogy of love that can be read as an allegory: as a book that will bear the weight of having been interpreted, and meant by Coetzee's own time. In What is a classic? (Coetzee's essay, not Eliot's), he describes a moment of revelation from his childhood in the back garden of his house in Cape Town: “From the next door, I heard music. While it lasted I froze, I didn't dare to breathe. Music spoke to me like it had never spoken to me before.” It was a recording of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Poetry and his love of music are what bring to life these modern iterations of Dante and Beatrice, Chopin and George Sand, who are Witold and Beatrice in his recent novel.

The story is simple: Witold, an old Polish pianist with an impossible last name, and Beatriz, a middle-aged woman from Barcelona, ​​meet. Witold is invited to play his idiosyncratic version of Chopin, austere and heir to Bach, at Sala Mompou. Beatriz acts as hostess and guide. She prefers a more romantic version of Chopin, and she lets him know. English is her common language, a third language. Witold is strangely attracted to her and recognizes her as her destiny. She brings him peace. He sees her as a whole. Beatriz is more self-absorbed and skeptical, she is not convinced. She sees Witold in parts and images: suddenly a spider, then a skeleton, his hands, the wild tangle of white hair. The veil imposed by that third language creates a hesitant and strange atmosphere. What does he mean? What does she mean? She is irritated by the unknown in Witold, something both horrible and exciting; das ding, the abyssal object in the other that is indecipherable, the primordial spur of anxiety. However, there is something magnetic about the Pole. Significantly, Coetzee cites The Double Flame: "The influence of Octavio Paz is undoubtedly present in the novel," he tells me, "specifically in his reflections on the nature of love, on what he defines as the double flame of the sexual and the spiritual." , the two flames that burn together”.

Witold returns to Catalonia to teach in Girona, he gives Beatriz a beautiful wooden rose from Chopin's manor house. He asks her to come with him to Brazil. Instead, she invites him to spend some time with her family at her Majorcan house after the Chopin festival held there, at which he will play. Beatriz endlessly questions herself, rationalizes her feelings, confused by this strange love. Because she? He sends recordings in which he plays Chopin because he can't express his feelings in English. And they begin an epistemological exploration of love: Dante opposes tradition in the Vita Nuova, his friend Cavalcanti, he prefers a lady “who has knowledge of love”. In Coetzee's twist on the tradition of courtly love, the omniscient narrator allows insight into the point of view of Beatrice, a married woman with two children: an intelligent woman facing a moral and intellectual conundrum. I ask him what would have happened if Cervantes had allowed us to glimpse Dulcinea's point of view: "Cervantes offers us, in the second book of Don Quixote, exactly the change of perspective that you imagine, except that, being a great magician of fiction, he adds a dizzying second layer of complexity: I refer you to chapter 10.” (I take one of my editions down from the shelf to consult it when I finish writing these lines.)

In Mallorca they spend three days together, while he plays Chopin on a dilapidated piano. At the end Witold gives him his book. I assumed that the Catalans would like to know why he decided to set his novel in Barcelona and Mallorca, and Coetzee replied: “It seems to me that composing a work of fiction – like creating any work of art – is a practical process, more like cooking than philosophize. The important thing is above all what serves. Should I set the story in Barcelona? Let me try, see if it works. If it doesn't work – if I put it in my mouth and I don't like it – I'll try something else: maybe set the story in Saint Petersburg. If it doesn't work again, maybe it's no use starting the fiction by placing it in a specific place, so let's try another start. What works is a matter of intuition, of judgement, of experience”. And I naively asked him if the exchange of a book and a rose between the lovers was a nod to the tradition of Sant Jordi: “The same comment is valid for other aspects of the narrative. The reader stops at some detail – Sant Jordi, the rose – and wonders what that is doing there. But for me, what does that do there? is not the relevant question. The relevant question is: does this detail contribute to the functioning of the whole? Let's try to leave it out. Does the concoction still taste the same? If so, skip the detail. If not, if its absence makes a difference, put it back."

In Warsaw, Beatriz sees three children crossing a street chasing a dog into a square. Back in Barcelona, ​​she uses an automatic translator to decipher a poem Witold wrote in Polish, and the image of three men and a dog appears, who are Homer, Dante and a tramp. But when it is translated by a woman in Barcelona, ​​a Polish Jew, the image has been transformed into a rose, and the reader feels an ontological shock. It's a brilliant use of dramatic irony: Beatriz doesn't seem to realize that the image repeats itself, she has forgotten that scene in Warsaw, caught out of the corner of her eye. But the reader remembers it clearly. And he wonders, after the revelation of the functioning of Beatriz's mind thanks to the transparency of the style, if thought proceeds in circles, in spirals, if it is a vortex or arborescent. The narrator is omniscient, but the story is seen through the eyes of Beatriz. In a scene of her in Mallorca, we read: “Looking at herself in a mirror is something that women do in books and movies, but she is not in a book or a movie and she is not looking at herself. No, it is the being on the other side of her mirror who is looking at her, to whose examination she now submits. What does that other see? Making an effort, intensely, she tries to send herself through the mirror to inhabit that alien self, that alien gaze. She doesn't make it." And I think of the phrase of the apostle Paul, "Through a mirror darkly", from the same epistle in which it is stated that without love there is nothing. Whoever can understand the word before it is pronounced and the sounds form the images of the word, will be able to see the enigma through the mirror, that is, the divine face. This is how St. Augustine thought when speculating about God and the word.

“There is no direct knowledge of music –Coetzee clarifies me–. What we know, through hearing, is always already an interpretation, nuanced by the art and personality of the interpreter. A portion of the novel (a minor portion) concerns Chopin's performance traditions. In one of them, Chopin is considered a female musician; in reaction, another tradition attempts to masculinize his music. The evolution of the pianoforte from the feminine instrument of Pleyel that Chopin preferred to the more masculine of Steinway contributes to this contrast.” Time passes, things change, nothing changes, fashions change, the classics remain, sometimes hidden, and have to wait their time. “A hymn to modern love? –says Coetzee– I think not. I am by no means an expert in the modalities of love, but the Pole's love for Beatriz seems to me anything but modern, it can even be old-fashioned, old-fashioned. Beatriz is a more current figure than Witold, but in her attitudes toward sex and love I suspect she will appear to young readers as a representative of her parents' generation, not theirs." Dante's great contribution to the tradition is to have added hope: "So, if it pleases him for whom everything lives that my life lasts a few years, I hope to say of it what no one has ever said."

Since we are reading from Barcelona, ​​I also decide to check what a wise man from the city says about the possibilities of my reading. In Juan Eduardo Cirlot's Dictionary of Symbols I read: "The symbolic function makes its appearance precisely when there is a tension of opposites that consciousness cannot resolve with its own means." I am looking for the pole: all the traditions agree in designating it symbolically as a fixed point, since “around it the rotation of the world is verified… in China, the central hole of the jade disc called Pi. The Chinese book of mutations points out that the continuous metamorphoses are caused by the great pole.” Elder: “the hidden principle… personification of the ancestral knowledge of humanity or the collective unconscious.” Spider: “the creative capacity… continuous sacrifice through which man is constantly transformed; death itself limits itself to winding up an old life in order to spin a new one.” Hand: “placed on the chest it indicates the attitude of the sage, on the neck it indicates the position of the sacrifice.” Rosa: "mystical center, heart, garden of Eros, paradise of Dante." Three: "Spiritual synthesis... idea-number of heaven... resolution of the conflict posed by dualism." And mandorla: “the perpetual sacrifice that renews the creative force by the double current of ascent and descent (appearance, life, and death, evolution and involution).” The mandorla is the place where the two circles overlap, the middle world, where the divinity appears, as Victoria Cirlot has taught me.

In each of the four novels after Tierras de Poniente, there is an outstanding technical trait, Coetzee says in Cartas de Navegación: “In the middle of nowhere it was the cut, the montage. In Los barbaros it was the environment. In Michael K it was the rhythm of the narration. In Foe was the voice”. What then is that technique in The Pole? “In The Pole, I went back to numbered prose paragraphs, it allows me to be brief, to present the story in neat chunks with a minimum of connective tissue. Life goes on, of course, during the gaps, but that life is not part of the structure."

Cut, montage, music, sequential movements. The brevity of the novel, which is read in one sitting, leaves a design, an image in the mind, like an emblem of love that includes a rose and a book. Or a composition, with a coda. Or a cameo with two faces lost in the substratum of history. And the feeling, if you read with Chopin, is intense. And it endures, like an artifact, like an object that is projected beyond the narrative frame. It reminds me of a verse by Valéry in The Marine Cemetery: “I am in you what is secretly changing”.

Valerie Miles, author of this text, is an editor, writer and teacher. In 2003 she co-founded the Spanish edition of Granta magazine.