Love, death, and secular grace in J.M. Coetzee's The Pole

Abstract The aim of this article is to contribute to the critical debate on grace in Coetzee's works by offering a reading of The Pole (2023). Analyzing the references to La Vita Nuova , the article argues that Coetzee's novella can be viewed as a polemic with Dante's understanding of love and—indirectly—with Platonic and Christian traditions, which are based on the duality between the soul and the body. By writing critically from within those traditions, Coetzee imagines a different kind of love that would be capable of transcending the soul‐body divide. This understanding of love, introduced through references to Octavio Paz's The Double Flame , appears as a distant possibility that nevertheless shapes the thoughts and emotions of Coetzee's protagonists. This article refers to the existence of such a loving union and the fulfillment achieved through it as secular grace. Secular grace is to be found not in the act of transcending the earthly and the corporeal but in the experience of a union between the soul and the body. While Coetzee's novella does not describe secular grace as a realized possibility, it expresses a longing for it, which is both corporeal and spiritual in its nature.