Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  Together with the shadow of Andersen’s original, this version of the Snow Queen story constitutes the pre-text of Nooteboom’s novel. But the pre-text is surrounded by a substantial frame, namely, the story of how the Snow Queen story gets to be told; and the frame story – in a move by now common in post-realist fiction – takes over the status of being the primary and ‘real’ story.

  The hero and narrator of the frame story is Alfonso Tiburón de Mendoza, a middle-aged Aragonese with a reverence for Plato and an affection for the Dutch language, a road engineer by profession and an amateur novelist. It is he who conducts Kai and Lucia through the ritualised movements of the European fairy tale, it is he who hopes to feel their story take on a life of its own under his hands, and it is he who, in the end, has to hear the ghost of Hans Christian Andersen tell him he is not a real writer because he is not unhappy enough.

  Tiburón’s story of Kai and Lucia is set in a land that is fictional but not mythical. He calls it the Southern Netherlands: from the map on the wall of their theatrical agent (reproduced on the back cover of the Dutch edition) it would appear to encompass most of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and the old Yugoslav Federation. The South is joined to the Northern Netherlands (the Netherlands we know) by a corridor snaking through Belgium, Alsace, Bavaria and the Austrian Tyrol.

  In this split, bipartite country, migrants from the South congregate in bidonvilles around Northern cities. Northerners look down on Southerners as dirty and sly and use them for cheap labour; Southerners, for their part, call Northerners ‘the Dour Ones’. Tiburón, a Southerner at heart, dislikes Northerners for ‘their complacency and their unbridled greed, and the hypocrisy with which they [try] to conceal both’. For the North Tiburón feels Fear, ‘a fear that demands a capital letter, German style’. Whereas the South is mountainous (hence the title of the English translation: Nooteboom’s title is simply In Nederland, In the Netherlands), the landscape of the North is flat, a landscape of ‘absolutism’ where one is forced to live in ‘total visibility’. (pp. 40, 4, 2)

  The South can obviously be taken to stand for north-west Europe’s Second- and Third-World hinterlands. However, Nooteboom is not concerned to develop the political dimension of his fable, or to exploit with much energy the possibilities it offers for polemic against his countrymen. Like Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire, he has some incidental fun concocting a language (here a Netherlandic dialect) for his Southerners. For the rest, he uses the South as a frankly fictitious backdrop to his action – an action which, as Andersen’s ghost implies, never quite comes to life.

  The failure on Tiburón’s part to feel the story he is telling deeply enough to move the reader emerges in two ways: in a certain arbitrariness in the emotional logic of the core story, the story of Kai and Lucia; and in a failure, in the frame story, to raise the intensity of the writer-hero’s quest for the meaning of what he is engaged in beyond the levels of quizzical puzzlement, irritation and bombast.

  Tiburón chooses to see his version of the fairy tale as being about ‘perfect beauty and perfect happiness’, about ‘the marring of the sublime by the trivial’. (pp. 9, 23) But in making his hero and heroine adults and turning Kai into the Snow Queen’s sex slave rather than her little reasoning automaton, Nooteboom not only changes the point of the kernel story or fable – which, of course, he is entitled to do – but also loses touch with what in Andersen’s version becomes its moral driving force: outrage and anguish at the corruption of innocence, at the robbing of children of their childhood. The prelapsarian innocence that Tiburón wishes to claim for the grown-up Kai and Lucia is, by comparison, abstract, without emotional resonance. The fate of Andersen’s little Kai, the steadfastness of little Gerda, touch the heart; the plight of grown-up Kai in the Snow Queen’s bed simply does not.

  Tiburón’s lucubrations on the differences between myth, fairy tale and realist fiction evade this rather obvious point. Nooteboom’s ambition is to write a meditation on the nature of fiction, constructed as a story of the writing of a fiction with authorial digressions that will at the same time reflect on (and reflect) the collapse, in our time, of the illusions that gave energy to the great fiction of the past. As a further complication (to a writer who has never been afraid of complications), the fiction that the storyteller invents will become an allegory of his own life (or vice versa, depending on how much of a philosophical idealist he is). Thus as Tiburón drives around Spain inspecting roads and thinking about the book he is writing, and as the ‘real’ Spanish landscape and the ‘fictitious’ Southern Netherlands landscape interpenetrate in his mind, he picks up a hitchhiker, an attractive young woman of brisk, no-nonsense Dutch common sense (she dismisses the story of Jesus as ‘a fairy tale’) who nearly succeeds in seducing him: she is the Snow Queen in his own life. (p. 93)

  ‘Fairy tales are written by people,’ Tiburón reflects – ‘that is what is wrong with them,’ whereas ‘myths are . . . written by no one’. The writing of fairy tales betrays ‘a false longing for the writing of myths’, a longing to be pre-individual. ‘It [is] too late for that.’ (pp. 94-5)

  This is elegantly put, but, in the context within which Tiburón speaks, off the point. Fairy tales are not always written by people, not authored, though Andersen’s were; and in any event, what is wrong with the updated fairy tale which Tiburón writes is not that it is authored but that it is unmotivated, lacks a rationale. As the ghost of Andersen hints, one cannot see what, at the deepest level, has driven Tiburón (or Nooteboom) to write it.

  III

  For the first quarter century of his writing career, until the success of his third novel Rituals (1980; English translation 1983), Cees Nooteboom’s reputation in the Netherlands was as a travel writer who also dabbled in poetry and fiction. While underestimating his rather cerebral verse, this view is not inaccurate with regard to the two earlier novels, which, though avant-garde by the standards of Dutch fiction of their day, are otherwise unremarkable.2

  In his first travel books, put together from his regular column in the newspaper De Volkskrant, Nooteboom can be seen gradually shifting away from the journalistic travelogue as a genre in which to pass comment, at a necessarily superficial level, on the society and politics of another country, toward travel writing as a matrix within which to reflect on the deeper currents of life of a foreign culture.

  With his move to the glossy magazine Avenue in 1969 he was freed to write longer pieces, and began to develop travel narrative in the direction of the personal essay, marked by a more ironic distance from his subject, as well as by a new richness of style, by excursions into art criticism, and by a growing preoccupation with the subject of memory, both personal and communal.

  Roads to Santiago is the first of Nooteboom’s travel books to be translated into English, despite the fact that one of them, De zucht naar het Westen (The Longing for the West) (1985), grew out of a series of visits to the United States during the 1970s and 1980s.

  De zucht naar het Westen is not a particularly good book. It shows the weaker side of Nooteboom as an observer: his interpretive skills, trained on Old World landscapes rich in cultural associations and on architecture layered with historical meaning, turn out to be of little use in America, where surfaces are often all there is and meanings are anything but hidden. Too much time is spent on the futile task of checking American reality against images of America exported by the U.S. entertainment industry. Toward the end Nooteboom is moved to write despairingly, from a small town in Montana, ‘There is no transcendence in these places, as in an Italian mountain village, nothing refers to anything else, nothing evokes a memory or a thought of the future, no reflection is possible.’3 The book comes to life only when he is able to read small-town Wisconsin against an opportunely discovered collection of turn-of-the-century photographs of the same sites, which bring back the dimension of historical depth; or to smuggle meditations on artworks (including some vivid pages on Edward Hopper) into his travel narrative.

  Road
s to Santiago originates in travel essays written between 1979 and 1992. Generally speaking, the later pieces are more thoughtful and substantial than the earlier. The text has been lightly edited to mask its Dutch origins and a few pages added. Too lightly edited, perhaps: the foreign reader will hardly be interested by the problems of writing about Spanish churches in a language (Dutch) that lacks technical terms for Romanesque architecture. The decision to omit the dates of the original pieces is also questionable: Nooteboom has much to say about Basque terrorism, but the text does not indicate that the events referred to belong to the mid-1980s.

  IV

  ‘One of the few constants in my life’, writes Nooteboom, ‘is my love – a lesser expression will not do – of Spain . . . The Spanish character and the Spanish landscape correspond to what in essence I am.’4 As a writer he even claims Spanish paternity: accused of being an epigone of Borges, he has responded that both Borges and he emerge from the hand of Calderón.5

  The landscape that speaks to Nooteboom most directly is the meseta, the high, empty plain of Castile, which evokes in him ‘feelings of eternity’, and which he contrasts with the ‘spiritual bleakness’ of the Mediterranean coast, the Mecca of millions of tourists but to him ‘the curse of Spain’. For the discerning traveller he recommends instead those provincial towns of the interior – Soria, for instance – that have retained their native poverty. ‘Poverty does not shine, poverty is quiet, poverty does not discard the old in favour of the veneer of emblematic junk which, like a botched facelift, has messed up so much of what was old and authentic.’ (pp. 52, 313, 44, 22)

  More of the medieval past survives in Spain, says Nooteboom, than anywhere else in Europe, aided in no small part by what he calls the Spanish ‘mania for preservation’. (p. 35) Much of his attention is devoted to little-known churches and monasteries, to which he is led by scholarly and antiquarian sources rather than by popular guidebooks.

  Here the posture he adopts is that of a man of the late twentieth century wandering among survivals of a world that can still, to an extent, be read and understood, while simultaneously projecting himself in his imagination into a not too distant future when Christian traditions of symbolism will have died out entirely – in other words, into a future in which Christianity will have crossed the line separating religion from myth. The gaze he rests on the Spanish scene – on ‘stooped, gnarled peasants with broad medieval faces of the kind that will have disappeared from the face of the earth in a hundred years’ time’ – is thus full of melancholy foreknowledge. (p. 141)

  The two most considerable chapters of Roads to Santiago are on the painters Velazquez and Zurbarán (the chapter on Cervantes is, by comparison, pedestrian: from a writer as much in the Cervantean line as Nooteboom, this is surprising).

  The language in which he discusses Velázquez is unabashedly idealistic. ‘From the depths of each portrait’, he writes of the paired paintings of Philip IV and his dwarf, ‘radiates the spirit, the soul, that which tells you that Velazquez recognized the intrinsic qualities of each, because he knew their truth.’ (p. 77)

  This is a move worth noting on the part of a writer whose own fiction – witness In the Dutch Mountains – revolves so much around the sceptical interrogation of claims to truth, and who in Roads to Santiago itself shows himself at home in what he calls ‘the church of Borges, Calvino, Barthes’, a church that treats the visible world as a labyrinth of signs. (p. 196)

  At issue here is the question not only of how we read paintings but of how, and in what terms, we value them. Nooteboom confronts the question in a passage as woolly in the original as in translation: ‘Truth, reality, lies, illusion, the thing itself or its name, are all will-o’-the-wisps seeking to relegate the confusing tangos of meaning to the ballroom of postmodernism or of metafiction, just to be rid of them for a while, like a hornet that you chase away either because you are afraid or because you find it annoying.’ (p. 75)

  What Nooteboom seems to be saying here is that although pictures can be looked at as tricks with paint (just as poems can be looked at as tricks with words), and although much of his own art criticism consists of detecting the trick of the brush behind the illusion of truth, certain artworks seem to compel us to return to the language of the real and the true, a language that may be old and despised but remains the only one adequate to the task.

  More original than the chapter on Velázquez is the one on Zurbarán (which has little to do with Nooteboom’s travels in Spain, having been occasioned by the big Zurbarán exhibition in Paris in 1988). Here Nooteboom concentrates on Zurbarán’s renderings of cloth and fabric, which to him constitute ‘an essay on the relation between light, colour and material such as would not be seen again before Cézanne. [Zurbarán] was concerned with something that lay far beyond the borders of human psychology or the anecdotal, a passion of such intensity as to justify calling it mystical.’ (p. 85)

  V

  Religious tourism – which includes not only genuine pilgrimage but visits to religious sites by travellers with no spiritual goal in view – makes up a large part of the tourism industry in Europe. Each year some one hundred million religiously motivated visits take place to the six thousand places of pilgrimage on the Continent.

  In Spain the principal destination remains the shrine of the St James the Apostle (Santiago) in Galicia. As Nooteboom points out, it was the traffic of pilgrims heading for Santiago from countries to the north that kept the idea of a Christian Spain alive during the Middle Ages, making Santiago the spiritual source for the reconquest of Iberia. Santiago in the tide of Nooteboom’s book is the nominal end-point of his travels. However, as both he and road engineer Tiburón are aware, the detour – or, in the Dutch word preferred by Tiburón, the omweg, the roundabout way – usually yields more adventures than the high road; being a pilgrim is more important than arriving at the shrine.

  Nooteboom’s book is more about Spain and its detours than about Spaniards, who appear only as waiters, museum guides, and other background figures. It contains illuminating pages on Visigothic civilisation in Spain, on the Reconquista, on Philip II, but little on contemporary history, and in particular on the economic determinants of that history. Why, for instance, is Castile so empty? ‘The young people no longer want to stay,’ suggests an informant, and Nooteboom passes this on as a good enough explanation. (p. 314) Yet behind the depopulation of central Spain – depopulation so bad that some observers have called it desertification – lie deliberate policies set in train by Franco’s technocratic ministers of the 1960s. These policies brought about a huge transfer of population from the agricultural heartland of Spain to the cities. Millions of people quit the countryside; hundreds of thousands of small farms disappeared; thousands of villages were abandoned by their inhabitants. It is thus that the melancholy spaces were achieved that so move Nooteboom’s spirit.

  Throughout, Nooteboom stresses the fragility of what we call Spain, the way in which an ethnically diverse nation has throughout its history kept collapsing into its ‘singular, idiosyncratic fragments’. (p. 18) Like Gerald Brenan in The Spanish Labyrinth, he sees the bonds of nation as less important to ordinary Spaniards than those of town or village. In this respect Spain has kept the social culture of pre-modern Europe alive:

  Sometimes it is as if Spain is out to preserve the past for the rest of Europe; sounds, smells, occupations which have long since vanished elsewhere . . . human voices uttering long-drawn-out cries, exhortations reverberating among the houses, fruit and fish and flowers in carts and donkey baskets, all those things that have been rendered obsolete by social justice, technology and big business, leaving the world both richer and poorer. (p. 298)

  To these eloquent words one can only add that – alas! – they are less true today than when they were written in 1985. Old Spain is growing harder and harder to find; and, tragically, the travel writings of Cees Nooteboom are contributing to its disappearance. Throngs of Dutch and German readers, heeding Nooteboom’s advice, will a
lready have skipped the Costa Brava in favour of the ‘mysterious, secluded, unknown’ provincial towns of the interior, where – he promises – ‘the food is simple and the wine cheap’. (pp. 204, 45) Roads to Santiago will persuade thousands more from the United States and Britain to head for these less and less mysterious, secluded, or unknown destinations. Whether he likes it or not, Nooteboom is part of the tourism industry.

  7 William Gass’s Rilke

  I

  IN ONE OF the many polls that marked the year 1999, the Folio Society, a fairly staid British book club, asked respondents to name the five Poems of the Century. Four of the titles that came up were – not surprisingly – by English-language poets: Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Plath. The fifth was Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies.

  The fact that Rilke, a foreigner and a considerable Anglophobe, could make it on to the Folio Society’s list with a poem as difficult as the Elegies suggests that even in England the grand poetic manner and the trappings of German metaphysics are not fatal drawbacks as long as the poetry itself speaks with passion and urgency to the great questions of human existence.

  William Gass, whose achievements as fiction writer and philosopher-aesthetician are already considerable, has now come forth with Reading Rilke, a book that manages to be several things at once: a Rilke anthology; an essay on the craft of translation; and an account of Rilke’s growth as a poet, into which an outline of Rilke’s life is woven.1 It includes translations of all ten Duino Elegies and of some forty other poems, among them well-known pieces like ‘The Panther’, ‘Torso of an Archaic Apollo’, and ‘Requiem for a Friend’, as well as of ten of the Sonnets to Orpheus. It concludes with a handy bibliography of translations into English of this much-translated poet, from which we learn that Gass’s Duino Elegies have been preceded by eighteen other full versions. A nineteenth, by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann, appeared while his book was in preparation, a twentieth, by Edward Snow, soon afterwards.2