TMoP - Chapter Three - Pavel [more]

[Richard Ryan]

"What he cannot bear is the thought that for the last fraction of the last instant of his fall, Pavel knew that nothing could save him, that he was dead..."

"It is from knowing that he is dead that he wants to protect his son...."

"Sitting at the table, his eyes closed, his fists clenched, he wards the knowledge of death away from Pavel.  He thinks of himself at the Triton on the Piazza Barberini in Rome, holding to his lips a conch from which jets a constant crystal fountain."  All day and all night he breathes life into the water.  The tendons of his neck, caught in bronze, are taut with effort."

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triton_Fountain

As we did earlier in Chap. 3 (in the "turtle dream") we once again find Coetzee's Dostoevesky using his formidable imagination - what we might call his vision - to both invoke the unchangeable reality of Pavel's death and transform it - and, once again, the warding off is through self-transformation.  In this instance, it is a "double-metamorphosis" - for D. imagines himself as (1) a mythological character [the sea God Triton] or rather  (2) as Bernini's great sculpted depiction of the god, and so as a RE-representation of a myth....

But there is a third transformation - one that occurs in the transaction between Coetzee and his reader: for while the fictional D. imagines himself a Triton with his neck tendons "caught in bronze," surely Coetzee and his readers know that Bernini's Triton is a stone sculpture executed in *travertine*.....

Coetzee has, thus, imagined a fictional variation of a famous writer of fiction mis-imagining an imagined depiction of an imaginary being.  And the fictional fiction writer is doing so as a means to imagine his stepson's fictional death...was unimagined, unimaginable.







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