Publicado en http://lecturaylocura.com/el-maestro-...El maestro de Petersburgo de J. M. Coetzee. La escritura como sacrificioIntenta lanzar un encantamiento, pero ¿sobre quién? ¿Sobre un espíritu o sobre sí mismo? Piensa en Orfeo cuando camina hacia agrás, paso a paso, susurrando el nombre de la mujer muerta, para engatusarla y obligarla a salir de las entrañas del infierno; piensa en la esposa envuelta en el sudario, con los ojos ciegos, muertos, que lo sigue con las manos extendidas ante sí, inertes, como una sonámbula. No hay flauta, no hay lira: solo la palabra, la única palabra una y otra vez. Cuando la muerte siega todos los demás lazos, aún queda el nombre. El bautismo: la unión de un alma con un nombre, el nombre que llevará por siempre, para toda la eternidad. Apenas respira, pero forma de nuevo las sílabas: Pavel.”Haber leído y analizado varias novelas de Coetzee en el blog me da una ventaja creativa considerable a la hora de afrontar lo que me queda del autor sudafricano (ahora australiano): la de poder fijarme en detalles que, a veces, no definen en esencia la novela, sino más bien al autor. Esta es una de esas ocasiones en las que aprovecho la situación; El maestro de Petersburgo, aparentemente, puede ser considerada como una biografía ficcional de Fiodor Dostoievski que adopta el papel (falso) de padre del recientemente fallecido Isaev:“-Tu padre que te quiere, Fiodor Mijailovich Dostoievski –murmura el magistrado antes de mirarle a la cara-. Hablemos, pues, con claridad. Usted no es Isaev. Usted es Dostoievski.-Sí. Ha sido una treta, un error estúpido, pero inofensivo, que ahora de veras lamento.-Comprendo. No obstante, viene usted aquí y afirma ser… En fin, ¿hay que utilizar esa fea expresión? Utilicémosla cautelosamente, por así decir, al menos de momento, a falta de otra mujer. Afirma ser el padre del difunto Pavel Alenxadrovich Isaev y solicita que le sean devueltas sus pertenencias, cuando lo cierto es que no es usted esa persona. Esto no tiene buena pinta, ¿verdad que no?”“-Utilicé el nombre pensando en no complicar más las cosas, nada más que por eso. Pavel Alesandrovich Isaev es mi hijastro, el único hijo de mi difunta esposa. Pero para mí es como si fuera mi propio hijo. Aparte de a mí mismo no tiene a nadie en el mundo.”Me fascina cómo Coetzee utiliza algo tan sencillo para verter sus ideas que van mucho más allá de este mero relato de posibles hechos biográficos; da la impresión de que utiliza la figura del escritor ruso para reflejar sus propias inquietudes y miedos, como es el inferior papel de los hombres sobre las mujeres:“Este es el gran secreto de las mujeres, eso es lo que les da ventaja sobre los hombres como nosotros. Saben cuándo ceder, cuándo echarse a llorar. Nosotros, tú y yo, no lo sabemos. Aguantamos, embotellamos la pena dentro de nosotros, la encerramos a cal y canto, hasta que se convierte en el mismísimo demonio. Y entonces nos da por cometer alguna estupidez, solo con tal de librarnos de la pena, aunque no sea más que un par de horas. Sí, cometemos alguna estupidez que luego habremos de lamentar durante toda la vida. Las mujeres no son así, porque conocen el secreto de las lágrimas. Tenemos que aprender del sexo débil, Fiodor Mijailovich; tenemos que aprender a llorar. Fíjate: a mí no me avergüenza llorar. El mes que viene se cumplirán tres años desde que sobrevino la tragedia. ¡Y no me avergüenza llorar!”Utiliza una característica tradicionalmente femenina, por costumbre un signo de debilidad, para resaltar que el hombre es inferior precisamente por no saber llorar; y, afortunadamente no se queda ahí, utiliza el marco histórico para criticar el acomodamiento de una sociedad en contra de la revolución en marcha:“-Se lo voy a decir. Sus días están contados. Lo que ocurre es que en vez de hacer mutis y abandonar el escenario sin hacer ruido, quieren arrastrar al mundo entero con ustedes. Les irrita que las riendas pasen a manos de hombres más jóvenes y más fuertes, hombres que van a construir un mundo mejor. Así es como son ustedes. Y no me venga con el cuento de que usted fue un revolucionario, que fue condenado a diez años en Siberia por sus creencias. Sé al dedillo que a usted lo trataron en Siberia como si fuese parte de la nobleza. Usted no compartió los sufrimientos del pueblo, en modo alguno: todo eso es mera falsedad. ¡Los viejos como usted me dan asco! El día en que cumpla treinta y cinco años, me vuelo la tapa de los sesos, se lo juro.”Y llego a las dos reflexiones que se me quedaron grabadas, una es la referente a la muerte, sobre lo que de verdad nos asusta, no tanto el dolor físico como el psicológico:“-Lo que más nos asusta de la muerte no es el dolor. Es el miedo de dejar atrás a los que nos aman, y de viajar solos. Pero no es así, no es tan simple. Cuando nos morimos, nos llevamos a los seres queridos en nuestro corazón. Por eso, Pavel te llevó consigo cuando se murió, y me llevó a mí consigo, y también a tu madre. Aún nos lleva dentro a todos. Pavel no está solo.”La otra, como no podía ser de otra forma, es referente al precio de escribir, el escritor que, de manera faustiana, entrega su alma al escribir cada libro, como hizo su ejemplo, Dostoievski, como hace el propio premio Nobel con cada texto que perpetra:“Le da la impresión de que es un precio enorme el que ha de pagar. Le pagan muchísimo dinero por escribir libros, dijo la niña, repitiendo lo que había oído al niño muerto. Lo que ninguno de los dos alcanzó a decir fue que a cambio había de entregar su alma.Ahora empieza a probar ese sabor, y sabe a hiel.”Los textos provienen de la traducción de Miguel Martínez-Lage de El maestro de Petersburgo de J. M. Coetzee para Random House Mondadori.
Coetzee's Dostoevsky novel. I wonder, in a sense, why Coetzee attempted it: he well knows Dostoevsky is larger than he is. There is a quality in Dostoevsky that is beyond Coetzee: call it "high spirits." Coetzee is Ivan, to the letter, but Dostoevsky had Dmitri, Fyodor, and Smerdyakov in him. So in a way, I would have preferred this novel not to be about Dostoevsky. Coetzee went somewhere sufficiently unpleasant, though, that he had to borrow the garb of a seasoned traveler. His novels of the '80s, for all that the stupid Marxists carped about them, were within the mandate of Enlightenment. This book, though, starts the journey into hell which will be consummated in Disgrace; it has an Orphic motif, and not for nothing.I think the purpose of this book is to answer a question about how the writer does what the writer does and why. We hear a lot about "empathy" these days, but I think it is mostly false. Not that "empathy" is the wrong word to use for the writer's relation to the book and then again the reader's relation to the book; what else is writing but empathy--leaving the self, entering another life? The problem is that empathy isn't nice, not even remotely. You want to leave the self for all sorts of reasons, not just to feel somebody's pain, in the politician's sense. It's because you hunger and thirst for experience, for more, you want to be somebody else, you want answers your life can't give you, pleasures your life can't give you, you want to feel what it would be like to do forbidden things. Empathy is for pickpockets and thieves; it's a fancy word for "casing the joint." I would rather be locked in a room with somebody who had an unwavering sense of self than someone with overflowing reserves of empathy. The empath will be rifling through the pockets of my soul before I know it. A civilized person reins in empathy; it is fit for art, and only for art. Everything can't be art; most other activities require simple self-respect, out of which you can respect others. It is hard to overstate how disrespectful empathy is--it is imagining the other on the toilet, and probably masturbating as you do so. But we live in abysmally stupid neo-Victorian times, in which a histrionically guilty elite delights itself with its tears over the bodies wracked to provide its comforts and pleasures. One would infinitely prefer self-satisfied conquerors. (I write all this because I have overflowing reserves of empathy. What can I say, I'm a writer.)Anyway, back to Coetzee and Dostoevsky: this is Coetzee's imagined story of how Dostoevsky came to create the novel Demons out of the experience of traveling to Petersburg to collect the effects of his dead stepson. It is about learning to empathize with nihilism, child molestation, demonic possession--learning to empathize with those who desire to do you in. It is about learning that these things outside the self could just as well be in it. At first I thought Coetzee copped out by toning down Dostoevsky's anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism. It is alluded to a few times, but mostly evaded. Sure, I thought, don't forfeit the liberal reader's good feeling by making your hero too much of a bigot. But then I saw something more subtle going on (it's terribly dangerous to underestimate Coetzee--my first paragraph should probably be struck out): the novel slowly reveals that Dostoevsky's most characteristic activities are those for which he most blames the Jews and the Catholics, that his prejudices are projective, that he and not "the Jews" does everything for money, that he and not "the Jesuits" justifies his illegitimate actions with tortuous abstraction. The whole novel is this movement--the revelation (to the writer and of the writer) that writing is nothing other than the capacity to become other--and not in the nice way of the literary theorists, but in the terrifying way of leaving behind all humanity to fall through the darkness, in the novel's epileptic figuration. (And the child molestation motif here, so delicately handled, is surely as much a riposte to Nabokov as anything else. Nabokov's inability to comprehend Dostoevsky is the index of his severe limitations. N. is brilliant to be sure, but D. is a genius. Put another way: N. was too brilliant to be a genius. He deserves Harold Bloom's censure of his epigone, Updike: a minor novelist with a major style. Lolita is extraordinary as a linguistic artifact, but the moral intelligence it is supposed to possess just isn't there, it seems to me. Humbert is a cartoon, easy to revile and so to enjoy, but Stavrogin lives right next door--or closer. A naive response to Lolita--that it is fancy moralized smut, the verbally facile maundering of an over-civilized gentleman-collector--seems to get to something that more advanced assessments of Nabokov's "moral art" or whatever miss. Coetzee knows this.)I suspect Coetzee is our greatest living writer because I don't see anyone else willing to face these things without instant recourse to moralizing and politicizing. How anyone can read a novel like this and then think the soppy drivel of a George Saunders is profound is beyond me. (Sorry, I can write fiction out of something like love, but my criticism comes from spite, spite alone.) But Dostoevsky had his high spirits, and Coetzee does not. What's missing? And who's it missing from--him or us? And who is "us"?
What do You think about The Master Of Petersburg (1995)?
This book, it seems to me, is more about Coetzee than Dostoyevsky. As a psychological study of Dostoyesky, I was very disappointed. But luckily I did not approach it with those expectations -- I approached it like I approach every Coetzee book: here is one miserable son of a bitch who can sometimes tell good stories but oftentimes gets caught up in ideas or psycho-sexual theorizing. He is, it seems to me, the grandson (literarily speaking) of Dostoyevskian style -- an inner psychologically tormented depth of searching, in a non-rational (not to say irrational) way. You might even call it mystical, although that word would not be the first I would use to describe Coetzee. There is certainly a taste here, if only a taste, of 19th century Russia, and some of the characters are characters that I begin caring about. There is also the deep turmoil that I´m sure Dostoyevsky experienced--hence, I give it 4 stars. But spiritually, Coetzee misses the heart and soul of Dostoyevsky´s power, like many contemporary readers might as well.
—Michael
I read this book not because it's about F.M. Dostoevsky but because it's a book by Coetzee about Dostoevsky. And I think only because it's well written, and with a kind of sympathy towards the author and his time does it succeed; think of how dangerous this kind of biographical approach to understanding Demons or any other work of Dostoevsky's might be, perhaps reducing those works to mere formalizations of their author's life and opinions (an approach which Dostoevsky's greatest critic, Bakhtin, strongly contested). Coetzee's depiction of Nechaev is too very strong -- perhaps even stronger (intentionally so?) than the equally fanatical Dostoevsky. Nechaev, for all his violence and kind of cowardice, has, one thinks, the right idea; one can sympathize with his revolutionary project with far greater ease than with Dostoevsky's repudiations of it, which come across as emotional outbursts rather than logical argument or even well-made sophist rhetoric. At the narrative core of the novel is a kind of mystery: did Dostoevsky's son commit suicide (the historical son did not)? Qua crime novel the book is self-consciously elusive. The mystery itself is secondary to the questions it asks and actions it instigates. The fictional Dostoevsky himself seems to realize that any potential answer would not present itself as real knowledge.
—Daniel
The dour genius of J. M. Coetzee cannot be denied, not by me at least. He has a relentless intellect that I wish, sometimes, would relent just a little, just enough to allow a crack of a grin -- even a grim grin would do wonders for this reader's constitution. I occasionally picture Mr. Coetzee frowning at his typewriter or computer or inkwell, thinking up the heart-wrenchingest scenes; frown deepening to a scowl, making words into matters of the soul; scowl puckering into a sneer, a sneer of wisdom, a dry and very talented sneer. I won't question his brilliance but I can't help but question his methods, that is, his style, which is grave beyond gravity and heavier than the universe.
—Brent Legault
