Introduction: “His Mother Is a Polish Princess”
In mid-September 2002, J. M. Coetzee commenced his work on the concluding volume of his autre-biographical trilogy Scenes from Provincial Life. Although in most cases the “scenes” written between September 2002 and March 2006 did not make it to the final version of Summertime (2009), they offer a fascinating insight into the creative process behind Coetzee’s radical act of both self-narrativization and self-fictionalization. One “scene” drafted on September 24, 2002, remains of special interest to the present article. It reads:
His mother is a Polish princess. She has dark hair and a long nose. Her name is Vera. She speaks Polish: “Yaksha braksha watlmeyer, yaksha braksha marsh; yaksha braksha meva shonka, sar dou magwash.” She is not just the daughter of a farmer from Uniondale.Footnote 1
Without a doubt, this passage is intriguing for a number of reasons and, like many archival documents from the J. M. Coetzee Papers held at the Harry Ransome Centre in Austin, Texas, provides a valuable insight into different aspects of Coetzee’s oeuvre.Footnote 2 For example, it reaffirms the central role of Coetzee’s mother, Vera Wehmeyer, to the writer’s autobiographical project and the impact of what Kai Easton has defined as Coetzee’s “maternal lines” onto his entire creative practice.Footnote 3 Also, it can be seen as an expression of Coetzee’s own sense of “marginality” and “provincialism” in South Africa;Footnote 4 as another exercise in the poetics of self-estrangement whose first traces are to be found in Boyhood (1997) with John identifying himself first with the Jews and then with the Russians.Footnote 5 I should, however, like to pay special attention to what clearly remains the most puzzling fragment of the “scene”: the line “Yaksha braksha watlmeyer, yaksha braksha marsh; yaksha braksha meva shonka, sar dou magwash.”
Although the passage unambiguously stipulates that the line attributed to Vera is in the Polish language, anybody who is fluent in Polish is likely to find it as confusing as a non-Polish speaker would—at least at first glance. First, none of the language units identified in the fragment corresponds to the actual words that exist in the Polish language corpus. Second, even when read phonetically, the sound units and their composition bear little resemblance to linguistically meaningful expressions in Polish. However, a detailed scrutiny of the fragment—one that has been carried out for the purpose of the present article and has involved syntactic, phonemic, and semantic analysisFootnote 6—encourages one to conclude that the piece spoken by Coetzee’s mother is the opening lines of the 19th-century Polish song “Jak się macie Bartłomieju” (How Are You, Bartholomew) whose first written version is to be found in the 1882 collection Wybór pieśni narodowych Footnote 7 (A Selection of National Songs). Consequently, one is justified to argue that the cryptic line in the early “scene” of Summertime reads as follows:
Yaksha braksha watlmeyer, / Jak się bracie Bartłomieju, / Oh how, brother Bartholomew,
yaksha braksha marsh; / jak się bracie masz? / oh how are you, brother of mine?
yaksha braksha meva shonka, / Jak się bracie miewa żonka, / Oh how, brother, is your wife,
sar dou magwash. / cały domek wasz? / your entire house?Footnote 8
The perplexing materialization of the Polish language (or some version of it) in one of Coetzee’s manuscripts encourages one to pose a number of questions regarding, among others, its origin, history, meaning, as well as justification for its appearance. In the light of the existing biographical findings,Footnote 9 the first and the last issues appear to be the easiest to address. The scene in which Coetzee’s mother is described as a “Polish princess” was drafted around the time when Coetzee himself was involved in researching his family’s genealogy, which concluded with the discovery that his great-grandfather (hitherto referred to as Batlthazar du Biel) was not a German but a Pole: one Balcer Dubiel born in 1844 in the village of Czarnylas in the Prussia-annexed territory of Poland.Footnote 10 Therefore, given her Polish roots, it is not surprising that Coetzee’s mother could recite (or sing) some lines in broken Polish—most likely unaware of their meaning or even language—which her son remembered and, subsequently, recalled in the early draft of Summertime.
I should, however, like to insist that the presence of the opening lines of the “peasant’s lament” in the writer’s manuscript is not just a “footnote” to Coetzee’s genealogy and a demonstration of his Polish lineage.Footnote 11 Also, I would argue that the passage’s implications transcend it being merely a testament to the transgenerational and cross-continental sustainability and longevity of Polish memory in South Africa. As a matter of fact, it appears tenable to claim that the “peasant’s lament” recited by Vera and quoted by her son could be recognized as one of the most powerful articulations of a transnational affinity between Poland and South Africa, J. M. Coetzee and his Polish ancestor.
What justifies this reading is the song itself and the story it narrates. Most likely created after the January Uprising of 1863–1864, that is, a failed insurrection against the Russian Empire in partitioned Poland, it focuses on the misfortunes of Poles who suffer from violent repercussions imposed on them by “Muscovites” (including arrests, deportations to Siberia, confiscation of property, etc.) voiced by the titular Bartłomiej—one who laments the fate of his family and fellow Poles. Hence, what Vera recites is the story of colonial expansion in Central-eastern EuropeFootnote 12 and its tragic consequences for the conquered people, including her grandfather, Balcer.Footnote 13 Because the lines are pronounced “in the heart of the country,”Footnote 14 in colonial South Africa, however, they (inadvertently) also become an expression of anguish over one’s entanglement in colonial relationships and its history of violence and persecution.
The voicing of the Polish song by Uniondale-born Vera and their inscription by her son decades after first hearing them clearly bear witness to the existence of what Leela Gandhi has aptly described as the “axis of filiation”—one that, in this particular case, successfully crosses the Central Europe–South Africa divide, is essentially transhistorical, and reveals a “transnational or affiliative solidarity” between colonized subjects.Footnote 15 But there is one aspect of the “peasant’s lament” (as pronounced by Vera) that this article finds particularly pertinent to its main concern, namely the continued, multifaceted, and transversal relationship between J. M. Coetzee and Poland. If one looks closer at the Polish song and its rendition by Coetzee, it becomes evident that the common name “Bartłomiej” (Bartholomew) becomes substituted by the word watlmeyer, which bears a strong resemblance to Vera’s family name, that is, Wehmeyer. Thus, what we can observe here is a shift from one self (generic, collective, Polish) to another (specific, individual, South African); in short, “Bartłomiej” equals Wehmeyer (Bartłomiej = Wehmeyer). However, given the autobiographical nature of Coetzee’s Scenes from Provincial Life (where the quote does rightfully belong) and the trilogy’s repeated concern with ancestry, parenthood, and lineage, as well as the writer’s preferential treatment of the mother’s side of his family and his ostensible self-identification with Balcer Dubiel recognized as the first writer in the family, one is invited to extend this equation by adding one more unit to it, that is, J. M. Coetzee himself. Thus, in its final version, the equation could look like this: Bartłomiej = Wehmeyer = Coetzee; or, in its simplified form, Bartłomiej = Coetzee, which, in turn, could lead us to a conclusion (both false and trueFootnote 16) that J. M. Coetzee is a Pole.
Of course, the aim of this article is not to formulate any claims (absolute or partial) about J. M. Coetzee’s national identity. Instead, I would like to use the formula “J. M. Coetzee = a Pole” as a convenient metaphor to talk about Coetzee’s lifelong preoccupation with Polish literature and visual culture, which in 2022 culminated with the publication of his novel El polaco (The Pole). The article does not intend to identify and thoroughly discuss all the Polish “traces” in Coetzee’s writing; yet by selecting a handful of them it intends to argue that Coetzee’s transnational dialogue with Poland is by no means accidental but part of a larger strategy of seeking different alliances and partnerships, of building an alternative “affective community,”Footnote 17 of simultaneously de- and reprovincializing oneself and one’s oeuvre by initiating and sustaining the conversation with another minor culture and literature;Footnote 18 finally, of seeking one’s rightful ancestry, both literary/cultural and genetic. Consequently, what this article wishes to showcase is how the figure of the Pole is not simply a literary trope or the subject of Coetzee’s scholarly/readerly interest, but an instrument of both self-defacement and self-creation—another “fiction[s] of the self, version[s] of the self.”Footnote 19
Among the Poles
In Coetzee’s writing (both published and unpublished), the Poles appear to be everywhere. The likes of Stanisław Barańczak, Frédéric Chopin, Zbigniew Herbert, Andrzej Konwicki, Jerzy Kosiński, Czesław Miłosz, Andrzej Munk, Bruno Schulz, Wisława Szymborska, and Aleksander Wat (to name the main ones) show up in the writer’s novels, essays, interviews, lectures, (e-)letters, notes, manuscripts, and research materials.Footnote 20 Their presence is subtle, often bracketed, quiet, and unostentatious, many a time unexpected. However, once they materialize in his writing (as historical or fictional figures,Footnote 21 as sources of inspiration or subjects of inquiry,Footnote 22 or providers of intertextsFootnote 23) they usually become crucial points of reference and interpretative tools in one’s attempt to establish the possible meaning(s) of his works. Suffice it to mention Foe (1986) in which mutilated Friday playing the “damnable tune”Footnote 24 on his flute is likely to be recognized as a version of Marsyas from Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Apollo and Marsyas.” Or the impact of the WWII-ravaged landscapes in Jerzy Kosiński’s The Painted Bird (1965) onto the setting and the main character of Waiting for the Barbarians (1980).Footnote 25 Or the writer’s acknowledgment of the linguist Anna Wierzbicka and her book Imprisoned in English (2013),Footnote 26 which, in hindsight, could be considered instrumental in Coetzee’s growing alienation from English and decision to publish his latest works in a Spanish translation.Footnote 27
In the light of the wide scope of Coetzee’s Polish interests, as well as the sheer quantity and variety of Polish references that can be identified in both his published works and the writer’s archive, it seems justified to focus on just one example—the kind that might best illustrate the article’s argument about Coetzee’s affinity (or self-identification) with the figure of the Pole and serve as an appropriate introduction to its discussion of El polaco. To this aim, I should like to briefly address a few instances of Coetzee’s lifelong concern with the life and work of Zbigniew Herbert.Footnote 28
There is no doubt that Polish poetry has been on Coetzee’s radar since the beginning of his literary career. The earliest newspaper cut that is to be found in the writer’s research materials comes from the 3,262 issue of The Times Literary Supplement (September 3, 1964) and already contains two poems by Miron Białoszewski: “War Myths” and “Concerning the Revolution of Things.”Footnote 29 Over the next decades, Coetzee’s reputation as a reader of Polish poetry grew to such an extent that in 2001 he was the first to be approached by the vice-president of W.W. Norton to provide a jacket comment for a new translation of Wisława Szymborska’s selected poems entitled Miracle Fair. Footnote 30 However, it is with Zbigniew Herbert that Coetzee has developed a special kind of comradeship that is not “substantialize[d] … via race, ethnicity, nationality” but rests on a shared sense of belonging, on being “on the same side of the division.”Footnote 31
If one is to believe the narrator of Youth (2002), Coetzee discovers Herbert when he moves to London in early 1962.Footnote 32 The Polish poet—who together with Joseph Brodsky and Ingeborg Bachmann provides a counterpoint to John’s reading of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and F. M. Ford—becomes his aesthetic compatriot: “[he] is with him, by his side, day by day.”Footnote 33 Herbert, whose poetry Coetzee might have, indeed, first heard on the radio during his stay in Britain,Footnote 34 speaks to John “from lone rafts tossed on the dark seas of Europe.”Footnote 35 The lines of Herbert, as well as those of fellow Central and eastern European poets, are:
release[d] … into the air, and along the airwaves the words speed to [John’s] room, the words of the poets of his time, telling him again of what poetry can be and therefore of what he can be, filling him with joy that he inhabits the same earth as they. “Signal heard in London—please continue to transmit”: that is the message he would send them if he could.Footnote 36
A detailed scrutiny of Coetzee’s work confirms that the “transmission” has never stopped and the “signal” has been heard regardless of the writer’s location, his current literary projects, professional commitments, and aesthetic concerns. In the 1970s, Herbert’s two poems “Apollo and Marsyas” and “Elegy of Fortinbras” occupied a privileged position in the poetry course that Coetzee cotaught with Jonathan Crewe at the University of Cape Town—even though the course was supposed to pay tribute to the poetic works of Hugh McDiarmid and Pablo Neruda.Footnote 37 In the 1980s, he repeatedly read and studied Herbert’s poetic oeuvre, including the Mr Cogito series, as well as kept himself informed on the latest contributions to Herbert’s criticism.Footnote 38 Not only did it result in the well-known essay “Zbigniew Herbert and the Figure of the Censor” in which Coetzee showed an extraordinary expertise in Cold War poetry from “the other Europe,”Footnote 39 but it also provided him with much needed inspiration in the early stages of conceiving Age of Iron (1990). In November 1988, while trying to establish the nature of the relationship between the female narrator and Pratt (a prototype for Vercueil), as well as the latter’s status in the narrative, he reminds himself that he should “re-read Z. Herbert.”Footnote 40 Although neither the Age of Iron black-and-red notebook nor the book’s manuscript reveals which poems by Herbert Coetzee had in mind, in the fragments written over the next three days, one is likely to identify the direct impact of (at least) two of his poems: “Mr Cogito’s Abyss” and “Why the Classics.” Be it when Coetzee wonders whether Pratt, the figure of an angel, should communicate through the medium of poetry in line with the belief that “the obligation of the poet [is] to act heroically”Footnote 41 or when the future Mrs. Curren confesses that what was “called for” in the dark days of apartheid was “heroism,” where a “hero” is understood as a “figure from antiquity.”Footnote 42 Finally, in the 2000s, when acting as a curator of Berlinde de Bruyckere’s exhibition displayed in the Belgian Pavilion of the 2013 Venice Biennial, he responded to the artist’s plea to provide her with “something” she could drew inspiration from by sending her two pieces: his new Elizabeth Costello “lesson” entitled “The Old Woman and the Cats” and Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Apollo and Marsyas.”Footnote 43
The complex and multifaceted relationship between Coetzee and Herbert is worth a monograph in itself. However, I would like to call attention to only one of its many aspects: a special kind of affinity that appears to characterize their relation (despite the fact that this relationship is essentially one-sided).
It is evident that Herbert’s poetry has appealed to Coetzee, both aesthetically and politically. But it is also clear that Coetzee has felt a strong sense of identificationFootnote 44 with Herbert as a “historical” figure, as the inevitable “product of a difficult, complex, … Polish history.”Footnote 45 Crewe, for example, interprets Coetzee’s choice of Herbert for their shared poetry course due to the latter’s ambiguous position and resistance to be easily positioned in a binary model of perpetrators or victims (“neither a Stalinist nor a freedom-loving poster-boy of the US State Department”),Footnote 46 as well as him being powerfully affected by the legacy of oppression and suffering handed down from one generation to another. This corresponds to Coetzee’s own sense of implication in the history of violence in South Africa to which he alluded a number of times, most explicitly, perhaps, in his Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech delivered in 1987. In that speech, the echoes of Herbert’s “Gordian” situation (to use a classical reference favored by both writers) and his acceptance of one’s inescapable involvement in the transgenerational transmission of historical traumas are acutely heard. For example, when Coetzee addresses his own sense of entanglement in South Africa’s legacy of oppression (“the power of the world his body lives in to impose itself on him and ultimately on his imagination, which, whether he likes it or not, has its residence in his body”)Footnote 47 or when he acknowledges his problematic and morally compromised subject position (he argues that in South Africa everyone born with a white skin inescapably belongs to a “closed hereditary caste [from which one] cannot resign.”)Footnote 48
Coetzee’s affinity with Herbert is also disclosed in his partly autobiographical piece “What Is a Classic?”—despite the fact that Herbert, “the great poet of the classic of our own times,”Footnote 49 appears only in the concluding section of the essay. In the piece, Coetzee writes about himself deliberately choosing classical musical culture represented by Bach over the middle-class popular musical culture of his South African childhood and suggests two alternative readings of the episode, which he calls “transcendental-poetic” and “sociocultural.” While exploring the latter, he asks the following question:
Was I … symbolically electing high European culture, and command of the codes of that culture, as a route that would take me out of what I must have felt, in terms however obscure or mystified, as an historical dead end—a road that would culminate (again symbolically) with me on a platform in Europe addressing a cosmopolitan audience on Bach, T. S. Eliot, and the question of the classic?Footnote 50
For Coetzee, the “high European culture” that he embraced in place of his “native” culture comprises not only Bach but also Herbert. Consequently, the “sociocultural” interpretation of one’s identity formation also applies to Coetzee’s early election of Herbert and positioning the Polish poet in the very heart of his own literary patrimony. Choosing Herbert is not merely an act of self-deprovincialization.Footnote 51 It is, above all, the election of one’s ancestry.
However, Coetzee’s identification with Herbert—one where the latter is a mirror of not only the former’s artistic and cultural longings but his life experiences as wellFootnote 52—is particularly well articulated when one considers Coetzee’s recurrent acknowledgment of “Apollo and Marsyas”Footnote 53 in his writing. Surely, the poem in which Apollo becomes an indifferent witness to Marsyas’s agonyFootnote 54 must have appealed to Coetzee due to the way it showcases different responses to multiple forms of violence that one witnesses or is involved in: those of the “judges [who] have awarded victory to the god,” of Apollo with his “nerves of artificial fibres,” of a “petrified nightingale,” which falls at Apollo’s feat in the wake of Marsyas’s scream.Footnote 55 Given Coetzee’s preoccupation (both literary and personal) with the question of “response-ability”Footnote 56 in the face of suffering, oppression, and cruelty, it is evident that the Polish poet—for whom, according to Alissa Valles, the myth was just an “intensification … of reality”Footnote 57—and his lines have served as a kind of lens through which Coetzee could investigate his own authority and accountability, his own status as the “implicated subject”Footnote 58 in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.
But a comparative reading of Herbert’s poem and Coetzee’s early draft of Boyhood (1997) adds another reason why Coetzee’s repeated evocation of “Apollo and Marsyas” should be read—first and foremost—autobiographically. Central to this interpretation is the image of the tree to which Marsyas is tied and which in the final line of Herbert’s poem turns white. If one is to believe the majority of ancient writers,Footnote 59 it is a pine tree, which, in the aftermath of Marsyas having been nailed to it, becomes a crippled tree. Coetzee is not alien to the image of a crippled pine tree either. In “Notes for Autobiography,” under the date of May 11, 1993, he makes a direct link between a crippled pine tree and his life in South Africa. He evokes the deformed trees that grow on the golf course in Simonstown—the pine trees that are both alien and dangerous species; alien because they are native to the Mediterranean region and were introduced to South Africa during the seventeenth century and dangerous because they use more water than native vegetation. In Coetzee’s reading, they become a metaphor for his own position as a white South African citizen: “Deformation. My life as deformed, year after year, by South Africa. Emblem: the deformed trees on the golf links in Simonstown.”Footnote 60
In the light of this, it appears justified to argue that the crippled pine tree evoked by Herbert in “Apollo and Marsyas” is recognized by Coetzee as a “preposterous”Footnote 61 version of Simonstown’s damaged pine trees whose “bones,” as he has observed elsewhere, are twisted by “something in [their] genes, some bad inheritance, some poison.”Footnote 62 But Herbert’s white, grief-stricken tree, which, in my reading, mirrors Coetzee’s deformed trees not only testifies to the affinity between the two writers understood as sharing parallel experiences, subject positions, or historical conditions (in regime-controlled states). It also reveals an affinity, which true to the word’s Latin provenance (affīnitās) implies a family relationship. Thus, similarly to the peasant’s lament identified in the opening section of this article, “Apollo and Marsyas” becomes a trace of Coetzee’s patrimony, of his lineage: not only aesthetic or ideological but also genetic. It is an expression of his “Polishness,” which, just like the crippled tree, “grows out of the buried past into our clean present, pushing its knotted fingers up through the grate/gate behind which we have shut it.”Footnote 63
J. M. Coetzee Is (Not) El polaco
“Enter into my bosom, thou, and breathe / As at the time when Marsyas thou didst draw / Out of the scabbard of those limbs of his.”Footnote 64
In the autumn of 2022, J. M. Coetzee published the latest addition to his long-standing dialogue with Poland: a novelFootnote 65 entitled El polaco, which at the time of writing this article has not been published in English. There is no doubt that the book remains the most profound, complex, and extensive means of addressing Coetzee’s concern with Polish cultural heritage to this day. The titular character of “el polaco” is Witold Walczykiewicz, a Polish pianist in his seventies who has risen to international success due to his “revisionary” and highly “idiosyncratic” interpretations of Chopin’s music: “His Chopin is not at all romantic but, on the contrary, austere; a Chopin who is an heir to Bach,” the narrator states.Footnote 66 The novel opens in 2015 when Witold arrives in Barcelona to give a piano recital upon the invitation of the Circulo de Conciertos—a group of Catalan enthusiasts of classical music. It is in Barcelona that he meets Beatriz, a member of the group who acts as his host and who in the subsequent parts of the book becomes the unwilling object of his affection/obsession,Footnote 67 his reluctant muse,Footnote 68 unenthusiastic lover (“out of pity”Footnote 69 and for three nights only), and, finally, an inheritor of eighty-four poems in Polish written by Witold and dedicated to her, which she collects in Warsaw and translates into Spanish to decipher their meaning.
Though in itself a late supplement to Coetzee’s oeuvre, El polaco bears no trace of so-called “late style”Footnote 70 but, in fact, might be seen as an extension of the writer’s earlier works, particularly Foe (1986), Diary of a Bad Year (2007), and his autre-biographical trilogy. For example, it has an explicit intertextual frame, which is provided by Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy with Beatriz becoming a contemporary incarnation of Beatrice.Footnote 71 What is more, it addresses the problem of authority, which has occupied a central position in Coetzee’s fiction and criticism.Footnote 72 Echoing Susan Barton’s struggle for her own story (and the right to tell it), Beatriz repeatedly fights with Witold (alive and dead) over herself and the role she is supposed to play in his fantasies and in his poems: among others, she refuses to consider herself the lost object that he has been looking for, reasserts her autonomy (“I am who I am” [“Yo soy quien soy!”]),Footnote 73 protests against being seen as part of history (unlike Witold whom she calls a “relic of history” [“una reliquia de la historia”]),Footnote 74 and fiercely opposes the ways she is represented in Witold’s “pathetic project” (“patetico proyecto”),Footnote 75 which she regards as his act of revenge on her.Footnote 76 The book is also profoundly preoccupied with the question of translation and its consequences, including the threats of miscommunication and the process’s imminent failure.Footnote 77 When Beatriz and Witold communicate in English (the only language they share) she often wonders about the actual meaning of his words in his native tongue and whether in Polish he might actually be a “perfectly charming” companion (“perfectamente encantador”)Footnote 78—contrary to the way he appears to her and others when he speaks English. As a matter of fact, the final part of El polaco is in itself a penetrating examination of translation and its ultimate defeat. To learn about the meaning of the poems, Beatriz first uses computer-assisted translation software but, having found the result baffling, she decides to employ a translator, one Clara Weisz Urizza. Not only does Clara have no experience with literary translation but also—due to not being a native Polish speaker herself—requires assistance from her son Natán, who appears to be critical of the literary qualities of Witold’s poems;Footnote 79 and, as Beatriz suspects, prejudiced against Poland and the Poles because of his Jewishness and the latter’s anti-Semitism. Much to Beatriz’s confusion, Clara’s and Natán’s translations differ significantly from the computer-generated translations. Consequently, neither Beatriz nor the reader of El polaco—even a Polish readerFootnote 80 fluent in Spanish—is able to formulate any judgment with regard to the two poems (nos. 2 and 20) that feature in the final chapter of the book—be it with reference to their potential (un)faithfulness to the source texts or the nature and quality of Witold’s poetic diction.
However, the most ostensible link between El polaco and Coetzee’s earlier works is the character of Witold, who could be put on a par with Coetzee’s other autofictional (or autre-biographical) creations such as Señor C or John from the Scenes from Provincial Life trilogy. Typically for Coetzee’s avatars, Witold’s portrayal is ruthless and offers an amalgamation of (self-)contempt,Footnote 81 mockery, and deprecation—with a pinch of irony, for example, when Witold compares himself to Max von Sydov, whom he names his “evil brother” (“hermano malvado”).Footnote 82 Beatriz, on the other hand, joins the company of such female characters as Julia Frankl, Adriana Nascimento, and Sophie Denoël, who remain highly critical and condescending toward their admirer. She is disappointed by his much-awaited recital: while she hopes that the performance will transport her to the “Polish plains” (“llanuas polacos”), she finds it “overintellectualized” (“sobreintelectualizad[o]”), “stern” (“sever[o]”), and characterized by “aridity” (“aridez”).Footnote 83 His behavior will constantly irritate her, particularly his moodiness (“malhumorado”), lack of initiative, frequent retreats into silence, and, finally, coldness that emanates from him (“algo frío”).Footnote 84 She will call him a “mummy’s boy” (“un niño de su mama”), a “poor old man” (“pobre viejo”), and, most painfully of all, an “old clown” (“viejo payaso”).Footnote 85 In Beatriz’s view, Witold’s “dry” soul (“seca”) is matched by his frigid body—although she agrees to have sex with him, she is repulsed by his chest hair (“like a bear” [“como un oso”]) and skin of an old man (“la piel de un hombre viejo”).Footnote 86 Finally, just like other autofictional selves, Witold shares a number of biographical characteristics with his creator: both were born during WWII, both refuse to eat meat, both divorced their wives (Philippa Jubber and Małgorzata, respectively) in the late 1970s, both have a complicated relationship with their daughters (Witold refers to his daughter Ewa who lives in Berlin as “not blessed” [“no bienventurada”] and describes their relationship as “civilized” [“somos civilizados”]).Footnote 87
However, what clearly distinguishes El polaco from Coetzee’s earlier works and what remains of primary interest to this article is the book’s unprecedented (in terms of scope and complexity) acknowledgment of Coetzee’s conversation with Poland, the Poles, and Polishness, which can be interpreted as a recognition of the writer’s “unpronounceable” and “untranslatable” heritage, a tribute to his (and his mother’s, and Balcer Dubiel’s) “meaningful past.”Footnote 88
In Coetzee’s novel, the Polish tropes manifest themselves in a variety of ways. Poland itself is a frequent topic of conversation between Beatriz and Witold.Footnote 89 The former’s idea of Poland mirrors her idea of Witold: it is a place that is “stuck in the past” (“atascada en el pasado”)Footnote 90—one that is incapable (or unwilling) to follow the principles of modernization and rationalization and is firmly cemented in the old ways, such as the presence of ticket collectors (“hombre[s] que recoge[n] los tickets”) on buses, trams, and trains. When she visits Warsaw in October 2019 to collect her “inheritance,” Poland makes a disappointing (and quite surreal) impression on her with its characterless buildings, an empty square where three solitary children riding their bikes are chased by a white dog, as well as a woman dressed in black who is spying on her from her balcony. She spends the night in Witold’s apartment, which matches its bleak surroundings: it is inhospitable, very simple and austere, practically empty with just a piano, a plaster bust of Bach, a photo of her, and an urn with Witold’s ashes. “There is nothing worth seeing” (“No hay nada que valga la pena ver”)Footnote 91—she will say before her quick departure back home. For Witold, however, Poland is a more complicated case and the way he talks about the place and its impact on his life distinctly reminds one of Coetzee’s own troubled relationship with South Africa. He confesses to having a love-hate relationship with Poland (“Amo a Polonia y odio a Polonia”Footnote 92), which, in his view, is characteristic of a number of his fellow country(wo)men. He also acknowledges its haunting legacy and the impossibility to escape it. According to Witold, if Chopin had lived longer, he would have returned to PolandFootnote 93 because of the way the place has been “crippling” or “deforming” (to use Coetzee’s terms quoted before) its children. Witold’s idea of his motherland is, perhaps, best summed up by his vision of Poland as a dumping ground, a site for all that is unwanted and unusable. He will say: “Poland is full of garbage. Centuries of garbage. We do not bury it. We do not hide it” (“Polonia está llena de basura. Siglos de basura. No la enterramos. No la escondemos”).Footnote 94 In short, Poland is a landfill of history, which, in turns, compels Witold to identify himself as history itself (“Soy historia”).Footnote 95
But Witold is not just history but, as a matter of fact, a composite of histories, including individual histories of a number of Polish artists who—in the wake of El polaco—should be recognized as an essential part of Coetzee’s cultural patrimony. One of them is Witold Gombrowicz, who shares with “the Pole”Footnote 96 his first name, an ambivalent relationship with his home country,Footnote 97 a special affection for South America,Footnote 98 as well as the prominent role of Barcelona in both men’s livesFootnote 99—not to mention the fact that the ship that brought Gombrowicz from Argentina to Europe in 1963 was named “Federico C.”Footnote 100 Another is, of course, Frédéric Chopin who in Coetzee’s novel undergoes a complex transformation process that consists of two elements. The first is heterodiegetic transformation: one in which Witold becomes an incarnation of Chopin with his unique vital statistics and features (these include small hands, paleness, gauntness, as well as suffering from a terminal illness). The second is transpositionFootnote 101—a procedure in which the events of one’s life become transposed from one period to another or from one location to another. In El polaco, the event in question is Witold’s “randezvous” with Beatriz in Mallorca, which is a reenactment of the famous (and equally frustrating) visit to Palma de Mallorca and Valldemossa by Chopin and George Sand in the winter of 1838/1839. Beatriz herself is particularly distressed with the evident parallel between the two situations—especially as she fears the role that she might be asked to play (i.e., of George Sand): “Perhaps this is what the Pole really wants: a nurse to look after him in his final years” (“Quizá es eso lo que realmente quiere el polaco: una enfermera que lo atienda en sus años finales”).Footnote 102
But there is one Pole whose “marks” become particularly noticeable in the character of Witold, namely Zbigniew Herbert. The first trace of a special affinity between the two is the novel’s early mention of Bach,Footnote 103 who emerges as one of Witold’s spiritual and aesthetic fathers and whose bust the pianist keeps in his Warsaw apartment. Bach—to whom Coetzee referred in “What Is a Classic?” alongside Herbert himself—was also the “beloved”Footnote 104 composer of the Polish poet and features in his poem “What Mr Cogito Thinks of Hell”—one that is set in the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno. What Witold and Herbert also share is the role they played in the dissemination of the post-WWII Polish cultural production abroad. If Witold is credited by Margarita for “paving the way”Footnote 105 for the new generation of Polish musicians, Herbert is correctly acknowledged for leading the way in introducing the international readership to the poetry from the “other Europe.” Both are celebrated and recognized abroad but have chosen to live in Warsaw. Both write poetry and their lines contain the same repertoire of references, mostly classical (e.g., Aphrodite or Orpheus(.Footnote 106 Natán’s claim that Witold’s poetry reminds him of the verses of the Polish Romantic poet Cyprian Kamil Norwid is yet another example of the pianist’s kinship with Herbert. For the latter, Norwid—who knew Chopin personally and who dedicated a series of works to himFootnote 107—consistently served as a major point of reference and source of inspiration: particularly as one of the forefathers of his own “classicism.”Footnote 108 Herbert’s professed “love”Footnote 109 for Norwid, whom he considered his favourite Polish poet,Footnote 110 was so great that he regularly used to read his poems outloud to celebrate his poetic genius.Footnote 111 Needless to say, another link between Witold and Herbert is Chopin. Quite ironically, one of Herbert’s early works was a 1949 radio program entitled “Chopin in a common room” (“Chopin w świetlicy”) in which he introduced the life and works of Chopin to the people of the People’s Republic of Poland—in line with the requirements of the new communist doctrine. Footnote 112 Even the apartment that Beatriz visits in order to collect the poems is reminiscent of Herbert’s flat in Warsaw’s Promenada street, while a desire to escape to South America makes one think about Herbert’s craving to flee to Bayonne, Pisa, or Venice in the final months of his life.Footnote 113 Still, the most powerful connection between Witold and Zbigniew Herbert is one Władysław Walczykiewicz, Herbert’s closest friend who shares his surname with Coetzee’s character. Not only did Herbert and Walczykiewicz study and work together (at the Nicolaus Copernicus University and at the Ministry of Foreign Trade, respectively), but they lived together (in Toruń and Warsaw) and, until the latter’s death in 1980, they enjoyed a “brotherly” relationship characterized by mutual care, loyalty, and support.Footnote 114 Herbert’s late elegiac poem “Mr Cogito on a Set Topic: ‘Friends Depart,’” which is dedicated to Walczykiewicz, is a tribute to the “devoted Władysław” and the two men’s kinship (or twinship): to their “common tastes / ideals / twin characters.”Footnote 115
Consequently, what one is bound to conclude is that Witold is a commixture of selves: of Gombrowicz, Chopin, and Herbert. The Pole is a complex “avatar” or a “mask” that stands for (or hides) a number of other Poles—in the manner of Herbert’s Mr Cogito, about whom Coetzee wrote extensively in “Zbigniew Herbert and the Figure of the Censor.” His surname, which (apart from its link to Herbert’s friend) derives from the word waltz (Pol. “walc”), clearly implies the act of rotation: not only the constant movement of selves but, more importantly, an alternation of selves.
But Witold is not just an incarnation of Gombrowicz, Chopin, and Herbert. As argued before, he is also an avatar of Coetzee himself. In this sense, the correlation that lies at the very heart of El polaco (i.e., Witold = Herbert = Chopin = Gombrowicz = the Pole, as well as Witold = Coetzee) is not only an encouragement to recognize a special kind of kinship or affinity between Coetzee and selected giants of Polish culture (e.g., Coetzee = Herbert)—one which, after Mr Cogito, we could define as a communion of “common tastes / ideals / twin characters.” More importantly, it is also a means to acknowledge Coetzee’s own “Polishness,” his Central European patrimony (i.e., Coetzee = the Pole). What further emboldens me to offer such an interpretation of El polaco is what I consider two subtle allusions to the unpublished Summertime scene that I referred to in the opening of this article. One is the profession of Witold’s mother. According to the pianist, she was a singer, which, one could claim, tallies with Vera singing “Jak się macie Bartłomieju” to her son. The other is the recurrent complaint made by Beatriz about the unpronounceability of the Pole’s name, which matches the unpronounceability of the lines of the “peasant’s lament” evident in the song’s inaccurate and faulty transcription.
Clearly, El polaco is a testament to Coetzee’s lifelong interest in Polish cultural production and an extension of the conversation with the Polish writers in which he has been continually involved since the 1960s. Most of all, however, it is an act of self-identification with his Polish heritage, with his Polishness, which “presumably is behind English” (“presuntamente está detrás de inglés”).Footnote 116 If Witold plays Chopin because he believes that the latter tells us about ourselves,Footnote 117 then Coetzee writes about Witold and Herbert, and other Poles because, in the end, they tell him of himself.
Conclusion
The major thematic preoccupation of Coetzee’s autre-biographical trilogy was the parent–son relation. If Boyhood paid more attention to Coetzee’s mother, Summertime unambiguously focused on the father. The book’s exploration of the figure of Jesus, this fatherless man for whom the relationship with his “father” (God) was an ontological imperative, offered an opportunity for Coetzee to creatively revisit his own difficult relationship with Jack Coetzee, who first appears in the trilogy as “an appendage, a contributor to the economy as a paying lodger might be.”Footnote 118
David Attwell most accurately defined Summertime as an “act of reparation”Footnote 119 toward Coetzee’s father. But if Summertime was concerned with “being a son,”Footnote 120 El polaco is—in the light of the reading proposed in this article—about being a great-grandson. Consequently, Coetzee’s transnational dialogue with Poland and its cultural production whose various manifestations have been addressed throughout this article is not only part of the writer’s attempt to claim a new political and aesthetic alliance across the north-south/ east-west divide. More so, it is not only a proof of Coetzee’s comradeship with the poets and writers from behind the Iron Curtain and his recognition of a shared implication in the history of the past and present injustices. Finally, it is not only about a special kind of solidarity between colonized subjects. El polaco—a supplement to Coetzee’s autre-biography—proves that Coetzee’s conversation with Poland is, more than anything else, about Coetzee’s patrimony and about his Polish heritage. It is an instrument of acknowledging one’s ancestry and a means of self-identification. It is about being Balcer Dubiel’s great-grandson.
Acknowledgments
This research was funded in whole by the National Science Centre, Poland, grant no. 2020/39/B/HS2/02083. The publication was part-funded by the program Excellence Initiative–Research University at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC-BY public copyright license to any author accepted manuscript (AAM) version arising from this submission.
Competing interest
None.
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