Probing a Culturally Unequal Relationship: The Unexpectedly Transformative Effects of Unromantic Love in J. M. Coetzee's The Pole

Abstract

Although The Pole is not set in a traditionally (post)colonial context,  J. M. Coetzee’s latest novella emerges as a subtle yet efficient vehicle for cultural critique, one that addresses the imbalanced relationship between representatives of ‘dominant’ and ‘non-dominant’ European nations. This paper will look at the ways in which the author reassesses the cultural legacies of Romanticism with a view to questioning the Western ideal of romantic love as a cultural construct. I will also explore how he embraces romance and appropriates some of its narrative codes to open up intertextual dialogue with Dante Alighieri’s first work La Vita Nuova. Finally, I will rely on the notion of “flat affect,” which Lauren Berlant has defined as a mode of “underperformed emotion,” to show how Coetzee’s self-reflexive strategy of revision allows him to contest the archetypality of the romantic narrative and, ultimately, to push back the limits of the genre.