Kasia Krzyżanowska, RevDem book editor, reviews the novella The Pole by J.M. Coetzee.
Oh, to be a citizen of the world, what a pleasure and what freedom! What a relief to speak only for yourself, and never represent your country of origin!
Whoever has lived abroad for a while instantly understands what ultimate misunderstandings these exclamations contain. International life often requires being a reluctant spokesperson for the state you come from; there is an underlying assumption that, in addition to your professional knowledge, you are an expert in general matters relating to your country of origin, even if you resent this role. Small talk resembles coins passed back and forth between the speakers with a question: And how is it in your country?
The banality of many such international encounters is certainly not limited to the academic world. When, in 1964, Witold Gombrowicz (at that time presenting himself as “a person from Argentina”) visited Berlin on a scholarship he met with some young German artists. “Lame dialogues” — he noted in his diary — “did not allow for any significant rapprochement.” He did not speak German well, nor did his hosts speak much French. Gombrowicz at first simply admired these youths’ progressivism and openness, but then realized the political interplay of identities. Let me quote a larger excerpt from his diary:
I knew that they did not want to be “Germans” with me, just as I did not want to be a “Pole” with them — and maybe even, who knows, they no longer wanted to be Germans at all, thrown into the world, starting from the beginning, thirsty for the widest possible horizons. But the hook was in the wall! […] So they were private people. And I, who have always tried to be a private person in life, could not help but applaud this. Citizens of the world. Europeans. Just this hook in the wall, stuck in, stuck in…
The hook is, of course, the Polish-German history that slides into perfectly decent relations between like-minded people. The hook is the national identity of an individual that surfaces in the international environment.
This long introduction speaks well to the recently published novella by J.M. Coetzee (not only because the main character’s name is Witold as well). “The Pole”, a collection of several short stories, of which the title one is preponderant, presents a story of an older Polish pianist giving a rather modest concert for the Music Circle in Barcelona. An ambiguous love affair unfolds when Witold is smitten with a woman who is two decades younger, Beatriz. But even if this unlikely love story is central to Coetzee’s novella (and numerous reviews have already reconstructed it quite neatly), I would like to focus on a less explored aspect – namely the expectations arising from ascribed nationality and disappointments that are produced when we do not conform to them.
But, first, some background to Coetzee himself. Born in Cape Town, South Africa to a family of Dutch descent, educated at the University of Texas in Austin, and currently a resident and citizen of Australia, he has quite a complex national identity. Internationally recognized — awarded with the National Booker Prize (twice) and the Nobel Prize— and broadly writing about universal moral principles, he is constantly asked to speak about his country of origin. In a 1983 interview he criticised a “wholly ideological superstructure constituted by publishing, reviewing and criticism that is forcing on me the fate of being a ‘South African novelist.’” Coetzee constantly tries to break free from the scripted national image. To fight the English-language hegemony in the literary world, he defies publishing patterns by giving precedence to translations of his works — “The Pole” first appeared in the Spanish version from an Argentinian publishing house in 2022.
In fact, Witold Walczykiewicz could be interpreted as Coetzee’s alter-ego. The pianist has “so many w’s and z’s in [his name] that no one on the board even tries to pronounce it. They refer to him simply as ‘the Pole.’” Similarly, Coetzee is no stranger to the wrong pronunciation of his name. But, more importantly, Witold comes to Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter to play no other than Chopin.
It is little wonder that Coetzee has chosen Barcelona, the heart of Catalonia, as the setting for his novella, since the Spaniards do have a well-known derogatory term for the people of this region: “los Polacos.”
This subtle irony suggests that there might be some semantic understanding between the Pole and the Catalan woman, but this is not the case. The small but devoted Music Circle — comprising laypeople who simply have the privilege of free time — expects to hear “Chopin played by a real Pole.” In this sense, Witold’s performance is already scripted, as if he was there to provide some “authentic Polish experience” to the Catalan audience that should be accompanied by some traditional Polish food (pierogi or bigos?).
Coetzee depicts the audience’s expectations regarding music masterfully. There’s a special interpretation of Chopin that Beatriz desires: “her Chopin has the power to transport her out of the Barri Gòtic, out of Barcelona, into the drawing room of a great old country house in the remote Polish plains, with a long summer’s day wheeling to an end, a breeze stirring the curtains, and the scent of roses wafting indoors.” Ah, yes, to have a confirmation of one’s idea of a foreign land, that would be lovely! To be transported to a manor house — the one she has never seen in person — with a squeaky wooden floor and white curtains, this is desirable (and imaginary)! In the course of the novella, Coetzee makes Beatriz travel to Poland for the very first time in her life. Only then does she confront her imaginary ideas of Witold’s life and his music with Warsaw’s suburban and grey blocs of flats.
Beatriz “is not the only one who has been disappointed” by the concert. Witold expressed himself in the universal language of music, but his original interpretation just didn’t conform with some preconceptions about a Pole playing Chopin. He should have been more romantic and less austere, the narrator judges. But when he has a chance to communicate in a language of words, it is no better. Beatriz is fluent in English, whereas he finds it hard to navigate this realm.
The narrator, who is very close to Beatriz’s perspective, wonders: “it is sometimes hard to know what the man means, with his incomplete English. Is he saying something profound or is he simply hitting wrong words, like a monkey sitting in front of a typewriter?”
The sentence is no doubt weighted towards the second harsh possibility, as we see his clumsiness with phrasal words and crude, almost impolite answers.
It is not only Gombrowicz who had lame dialogues with international colleagues — Coetzee’s characters engage in them as well. After the concert, a married elderly couple and Beatriz take “the Pole” to dinner (to enjoy universally acclaimed Italian food). This is a hilarious moment in the novella, though Coetzee is not really famous for his sense of humour. To break the ice, Ester, a lay music aficionado and a veteran of dinner talks with musicians, asks Witold the classic question: “And your country—how are affairs in your country nowadays?” One reviewer noticed that the novella actually starts in 2015, so in the year when the Law and Justice party came to power, but this is not what Ester is alluding to. She adds: “I remember the good Pope, he was from there, was he not? John Paul.” So, this is it — one of the ready-made subjects to pick up during a decent dinner of civilized people. Witold is reluctant to speak on this topic and orders gnocchi (another universally known thing with a tricky pronunciation).
But it is not only Beatriz or the Catalans that share some national preconceptions and demand a specific type of behaviour from the Pole. At the beginning, Witold also has some low opinions of Beatriz: he imagines that she is “one of those nagging wealthy women who will not leave him in peace until they have extorted their gram of flesh.” A woman married to a banker, with plenty of leisure time, “from a cultivated family” — how plausible! However, we see that his ideas on Beatriz are not mediated by national stereotypes, but rather are based on his disappointing experiences or misogynistic attitudes. The latter might not really be the key here, as within a couple of months Beatriz is transformed into “the angel who watched over [him] in Barcelona,” the one who gives him peace. She became Beatrice of Dante, a revered and unexpected muse, as explicitly mentioned by the narrator. For the Other, the national stereotypes are not really that important.
Witold’s love story is an attempt to break down the banality of interactions conducted in a third language. He reaches for something improbable, even unattainable: a romance with a married woman from a foreign country with the intention to keep it until his very last days. Though, finally, some austere intimacy does develop between them, she is not interested in pursuing the affair any further. So then he resorts to letters. And later to poetry, written in Polish. Beatriz discovers them only after Witold’s death. She is, of course, intrigued by the poems — she commissions the translation to a Jewish woman of Polish descent, breaking the intimacy by inviting a mediator in to their relationship. Beatriz, again, expected something else (it is not clear what exactly) – she even gets embarrassed by the intimacy discovered in his poetry. But, in the end, this form of communication compels her to write post-mortem letters to Witold in English, ruminating about this Polish stranger until her very last days. In this reading, the true understanding that escapes the fate prescribed by national identities does not rely on knowing the other, but getting to know oneself.
In collaboration with Oliver Garner and Ferenc Laczò.
