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"Who Clipped the Hollyhocks?":
J.M. Coetzee's Age of Iron and
the Politics of Representation
Michael Marais
In a recent interview David Attwell confronts J.M. Coetzee with the
proposition that his work, while "declining the role of herald to a
reconstructed social order ... seems to project, at a much deeper level, a
certain faith in the idea, or the possibility, of an ethical community"
(Coetzee, "South African Writers: Interview" 340). My intention in this
paper is to explore the occurrence of this "idea" or "possibility" in Age
of Iron-and there is no better place to start such an exploration than
with Coetzee's response to Attwell's proposition, a response which
sheds light on the transcendental ethics and aesthetics of the novel in
question:
I don't believe that any form of lasting community can exist where
people do not share the same sense of what is just and what is not just
. . . community has its basis in an awareness and acceptance of a
common justice ... awareness of an idea of justice, somewhere, that
transcends laws and lawmaking. Such an awareness is not absent
from our lives. But where I see it, I see it mainly as flickering or
dimmed----the kind of awareness you would have if you were a
prisoner in a cave, say, watching the shadows of ideas flickering on
the walls. To be a herald you would have to have slipped your chains
for a while and wandered about in the real world. I am not a herald
of community or anything else ... I am someone who has intimations
of freedom (as every chained prisoner has) and constructs
representations--which are shadows themselves~f people slipping
their chains and turning their faces to the light.
("SoiJth African Writers: Interview" 340-41)
In this paper I shall demonstrate that these allusions to Plato's simile of
the cave and theory of forms are explicated in Age of Iron, where they
contribute to a debate on the politics of representation in South Africa. I
English in Africa 20 No.2 (October 1993)
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2
MICHAEL MARAIS
shall argue, in particular, that the Platonic notion of a transcendental
reality of which the world of things is only an inferior imitation underlies
the novel's portrayal of colonial history as the apartheid State's text---a
distorted, ,debased representation of an ideal reality or ethical community
which, like the "idea of justice" which Coetzee remarks upon in the
interview with Attwell, "transcends laws and lawmaking." Moreover, I
shall show that much of the novel dramatizes the impact of this corrupt
social context on the individual South African, the manner in which it
distorts his or her essential humanity or, as Coetzee puts it elsewhere, has
its "psychic representation in a deformed and stunted inner life" (Coetzee,
"Jerusalem" 98); and, further, that it reflects on the nature of literature
in such a society and does so in Platonic terms by depicting it as an
imitation of a distorted imitation. South African literature, then, is
characterized as a debased or, in the terms used by Coetzee in his
Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech, "less than fully human literature,
unnaturally preoccupied with power and the torsions of power, unable to
move from elementary relations of contestation, domination, and subjugation
to the vast and complex world that lies beyond them" (98). Fettered as it
is to "history," compelled to represent a representation, it is a "literature in
bondage" (Coetzee, "Jerusalem" 98). Finally, I shall indicate that this
metarepresentational debate in Age of Iron concludes with an argument
for the liberation of this enthralled literature by positing a transcendental
basis for aesthetics in the novel's representation of a mode of writing
which "slip[s]" its "chains" and "wander[s] about in the real world"
("South African Writers: Interview" 341), that is, a mode which
circumvents "history" by representing the transcendental idea of an ethical
community.
In a mise en abyme of the politics of representation in· South Africa, Mrs
Curren, the protagonist of Age of Iron, describes a photograph which was
taken of her in her grandfather's garden when she was a child. Initially
the description focuses on those who are present in the photograph-Mrs
Curren, her mother, and her brother. It then, however, speculates on those
who have been occulted by the photograph:
Who clipped the hollyhocks? Who laid the melon-seeds in their
warm, moist bed? Was it my grandfather ... ? If not he, then whose
was the garden rightfully? Who are the ghosts and who the
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].M. COETZEE's AGE Of IRON
3
presences? Who, outside the picture, leaning on their rakes, leaning
on their spades, waiting to get back to work, lean also against the
edge of the rectangle ... bursting it in? (102)
Clearly the description of this photograph focuses on tepresentation or,
more specifically, on the textual capture of South Africa in what Helen
Tiffin has called "the European ethnological moment," a moment which
witnesses the translation of colonial programmes of conquest, annihilation
and suppression into systems of representation (174). This concern with
the collusion between ideology and action is evident elsewhere in the
novel in the numerous descriptions of media representations of South
Africa which omit all reference to the violent world of the townships; "Of
trouble in the schools the radio says nothing, the television says nothing,
the newspapers say nothing. In the world they project all the children of
the land are sitting happily at their desks" (36); "The land that is presented
to me is a land of smiling neighbours" (49).
The point of these passages is that white South Africans' understanding
of their social and political "reality" is almost entirely dependent on the
form in which it is communicated. Like the prisoners in Plato's cave, they
are presented with phenomena, that is, mere shadows of the ontologically
real world. Plato's explication of the image of the cave is particularly
relevant here: after asking Glaucon whether the prisoners in the cave
"could see anything of themselves or their fellows except the shadows
thrown by the fire on the wall of the cave opposite them," Socrates concludes
that people in such a situation could not but "assume that th~ shadows they
saw were the real things" (Plato 317). White South Africans, whose
knowledge of "reality" is filtered through the State's structures of power,
are precisely "people in such a situation." Since the State- controlled
media's representations of the country are all that they ev~r see, they
(mis)take these representations for reality. The outcome of this mediation
is a textualization and re-invention of South African "reality" which fixes
the European moment in history and denies the existence of what it does
not capture, that is, the colonial other (see VanZanten Gallagher 198).
The disjunction between the actual South Africa and its representation
as "a land of smiling neighbours" (49) is laid bare by Mrs Curren's visit to
Guguletu township, where she is confronted with a "looming world of
rage and violence" in which "people [are] revealed in their true names"
(89-91). This disjunction not only points to the textual nature of her
"reality," but also to the conspiracy between ideology and entity in South
Africa, the terrifying extent to which her geophysical reality-that of
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4
MICHAEL MARAIS
"white" suburbia--colludes with the State's representation of the country
by excluding the colonial other. Ultimately, then, the stark rea1ities of the
world which Mrs CUrren encounters in Guguletu question the reality of
the white bourgeois world whose presence depends on its absen~. They
make her realize that the world and her experience of it are discontinuous
and this, in tum, translates into the realization that the very fabric of her
society is baseless, a fabrication of the apartheid discourse manufactured
by the white government in the "House of Lies" (128), her telling tenn for
the Houses of Parliament. Thus she refers to the Afrikaner politicians
who fonnulated apartheid policy as the "men who have created these
times" (107). History, by implication, is to be viewed as a fictional
creation, a narrative construct. The corollary here is, of course, that Mrs
Curren herself is a character in this narrative. Indeed, as her self-reflexive
probings reveal, her consciousness is an historical consciousness, part of
the national narrative:
A crime was committed long ago .... I was born into it. It is part of
my inheritance. It is part of me, I am part of it .... Though it was
not a crime I asked to be committed, it was committed in my name. I
raged at times against the men who did the dirty work ... but I
accepted too that, in a sense, they lived inside me. (149-50)
As this citation makes clear, then, Age of Iron examines subject fonnation
within the South African social and historical context.
Initially it would appear that Coetzee, rather than presenting a humanist
notion of subjectivity, places the subject within the nexus of the political,
social, class, racial and gender forces which determine it. The suggestion
thus seems to be that Mrs CUrren's identity is not essential but contextual
---that is, that it is constructed through insensible social relations of
power. In this respect, her observation that "power invades all" (107) is
especially pertinent. The novel appears to subscribe to the theory that the
individual is exposed to the dominant ideology which, as a practice of
representation, "subjectifies" him/her, that is, it interpellates him/her as a
subject in the social fonnation whose system of relations then proceeds to
govern his/her attitudes concerning the real problems within that society
and its history (Belsey 56-67; Coward and Ellis 71-82).
However, the novel does not in fact advance a case for unqualified
determinism. Rather than depicting an empty subject which meChanically
inhabits a specific ideological fonnation, it ultimately takes a humanist
position on subject construction by suggesting that the individual does
possess an innate sense of self, that a human essence does exist, but that it
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].M. COETZEE's AGE OF IRON
5
is perverted or defonned by the structures of power which insert the
individual into that fonnation, a fonnation which fixes a distorted image
of real relations. This integration of essence and context in the novel's
exploration of subject construction is suggested in the following sentence:
"Our humanity, that we are born with, that we re born into" (73). Here the
word "humanity" stands in grammatical relation to both the preposition
"with," which implies an essential humanity, and the preposition "into,"
which implies a notion of humanity as a social construct. This holistic
view of the subject is also apparent in the novel in the recurring image of
the doll which signifies not on1y the liminal state of death-in-Iife which,
according to Mrs Curren, is an ontological feature of white South African
existence, but also the artificial nature of identity as a construct, the fact
that it is an imitation of, and a falling off from, a true human essence: "I
have intimations older than any memory, unshakeable, that once upon a
time I was alive .... and then was stolen from life. From the cradle a
theft took place: a child was taken and a doll left in its place to be nursed
and reared, and that doll is what I call I" (100). In subjectifying the
individual, the ruling ideology of the apartheid state (signified by the
figure of the doll-maker) imposes an artificial identity on him/her which
eclipses hislber original, essential sense of self.
Ideology's role as eventual detenniner of subject fonnation emerges
when Mrs Curren states that dolls such as she "exist forever in that
moment of petrified surprise prior to all recollection when 'a life was taken
away, a life not theirs but in whose place they are left behind as a token"
(101). This statement alludes to an earlier passage in which the effect of
the State's "message," that is, its systems of representation, on the
individual, is described:
Television .... The parade of politicians every evening .... their
message stupidly unchanging . . . . Their feat, after years of
etymologiOlI meditation on the word, to have raised stupidity to a
virtue. To stupefy: to deprive of feeling; to benumb, deaden; to stun
with amazement . . . . Stupid: dulled in the faculties, indifferent,
destitute of thOUght or feeling. From stupere to be stunned,
astounded. A gradient from stupid to stunned to astonished, to be
turned to stone .... A message that turns people to stone .... Boars
that devour their offspring. The Boar War. (25-26)
This passage makes the point that ideology's interpellation of individuals
as subjects constitutes a metamorphosis of sorts, one which alters an original
state. So, although depicted as an author in the novel, ideology is not an
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6
MICHAEL MARAIS
auctor in the sense of an originator: it transfonns and defonns rather than
fonns. It is for this reason that the above passage alludes to the story of
the Gorgons in Greek mythology, a myth acCording to which Medusa had
such a. frightful aspect that whoever looked upon her was turned to stone
(Graves 127-29). This story serves as an aIialogue for the de-forming, rather
than formative or originative influence of the State-indeed, the equation
is made further apparent in the passage by the pun on boer, an Afrikaner
nationalist, and "boar," since the Gorgons were represented with heads
entwined with snakes and with huge tusks like those of a boar (Grimal 174)..
Elsewhere in the novel a set of allusions to the myth of Circe further
develops this essentialist argument by once again stressing the deforming
influence of the State's structures of power on its citizens. While. in
Guguletu, Mrs Curren describes the effect on Mr Thabane of the Stateinstigated violence she has witnessed: "His look had grown uglier: No
doubt I grow uglier too by the day. Metamorphosis, that thickens our
speech, dulls our feelings, turns us into beasts. Where on these shores
does the herb grow that will preserve us from it?" (95). Like Circe's spell
which metamorphosed Odysseus's men into beasts (Graves 358~59), the
State's power structures deform and brutalize those who are exposed to
them. Not surprisingly then, throughout the novel, South Africans are
described as ugly: for example, when Mrs Curren exclaims "How ugly we
are growing, from being unable to think well of ourselves!" (121).
Obviously the ugliness described here is not a physical state but a
metaphysical condition endemic to South Africa. Coetzee's point seems
to be that the social context formed by an age of iron, an historical period
such as that described by Hesiod which is characterized by war and
warped interpersonal relations (see Graves 35-37), is antithetical to the
human essence, and that the master narrative of apartheid history which
confines and defines self-interpretation in South Africa has through the
institutionalization of violence produced a consciousness which is less
than human. As much emerges from Mrs Curren's conversation with
John in which she refers to Thucydides, the Greek historian: "If you had
been in my Thucydides class ... you might have learned something about
what can happen to our humanity in time of war" (73).
Age of Iron, however, is ultimately an optimistic novel. For example, Mrs
Curren, even while she reflects on what seems to be the determinism of
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].M. COETZEE's AGE OF IRON
7
her "doll's life" in the repressive community of which she is a part, is
aware of the idea of an alternative, ethical community, an awareness
which eventually translates into the realization that it is possible to escape
this determinism: "But in our dead sleep we may at least be visited by
intimations. I have intimations older than any memory, unshakeable, that
once upon a time I was alive" (100). Significantly, these words echo
those used by her creator who, it will be remembered, responds to
Attwell's suggestion that his novels project the idea or possibility of an
"ethical community" (Coetzee; "South African Writers: Interview" 340)
with the contention that South Africans are "aware" of "an idea of justice,
somewhere, that transcends laws and lawmaking," and that he is
"someone who has intimations of freedom" (340). Understandably, then,
Coetzee is not simply content to emphasize the deforming influence of the
State's ruling ideology in Age of Iron, but also strives to show that it is
possible to recognize the forces which shape the individual's identity, and
thereby to escape them and recuperate selfhood. Implicit in such a
rehabilitation of selfhood is a theory of agency which posits the possibility
of social change.
So, for example, Mrs Curren's visit to Guguletu, which reveals to her
the discursive nature of her society and identity, is depicted as a liberation
of sorts. Like the prisoner in Plato's cave who is "let loose, and suddenly
compelled to stand up and tum his head and look and walk towards the
fire" (plato 318), she experiences an epiphany, a gaining of consciousness:
"Now my eyes are open and I can never close them again" (95).
Significantly, she now refuses to watch television, that is, to be deluded by
shadows or the State's distorted representation of South Africa: "There are
men behind the pictures. They send out their pictures to make people
sick" (165). Following her epiphany she describes the State's distortion
of the individual in terms of a loss of consciousness, and expresses it
metaphorically as a regression to bestiality accompanied by blindness:
"Evolution, but evolution backwards .... I see eyes clouding over again,
scales thickening on them, as the land-explorers, the colonists, prepare to
return to the deep" (116). At the same time this recognition of the State's
power to deform translates into her resolve to escape its controlling master
narrative and recover selfhood, hence her desire not "to die ... in a state
of ugliness" (124).
As Mrs Curren discovers, however, consciousness is usually ephemeral,
and threatened by an overpowering urge to lapse back into unconsciousness.
Once again, her experience here is identical to that of the prisoners in
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8
MICHAEL MARAIS
.Plato's cave. Socrates argues that upon being first exposed to the light, a
prisoner who had been released from his bonds would "tum back and
retreat to the things which he could see properly, which he would think
really clearer than the things being shown him" (Plato 318). This is
precisely the nature of Mrs Curren's experience in Guguletu: even while
still there, she f~els the compulsion to relinquish full consciousness by
"clos[ing] out this looming world of rage and violence" (89), and escaping
"to [her] safe house, to [her] bed of childhood slumber" (100). This urge
to escape the burden of selfbood derives from the representational logic of
the national narrative, its ability, through the collusion of entity and
ideology, to assert as natural and normal what is, to all intents and
purposes, a political construct, a fabricated version of "reality." Once she
returns home, for instance, Mrs Curren finds that the desire to forget that
which she has seen strengthens because the world of the township now
seems remote and insubstantial from the vantage point of the geographically
separate white suburbs;
sitting at home among my own things, it seems hardly possible to
believe there is a zone of killing and degradation all around me.
Something presses ... inside me. I try to take no notice, but it insists.
I yield an inch; it presses harder. With relief I give in, and life is
suddenly ordinary again. With relief 1 give myself back to the
ordinary. (109; my italics)
Through banalizing evil and making that which has been ordered seem
"ordinary," the State occludes knowledge of reality. In this way it enthrals
the subject in the dominant ideology, making him or her participate in the
maintenance of the authority of the social formation. To regain control of
her identity, Mrs Curren has therefore to resist being seduced into 'a
suspension of disbelief by the realism of the national narrative, its
vraisemblable aspect or ability to appear natural and normal.
Her efforts to resist the stupefying power of this banalization of evil are
metaphorically conveyed by her struggle to cope with the pain caused by
her terminal condition. While this pain stands in a metaphoric relation to
the actual South Mrican reality, the medication which deadens it signifies
the State's power to repress this reality. Thus Mrs Curren's description of
the anaesthetizing effect of her medication is clearly reminiscent of the
State's power to stupefy: "I swallow [the pills] and they release a fog
inside me, a fog of extinction .... when 1 have taken the pills, nothing is
terrible any more, everything is indifferent, everything is the same" (159).
Furthermore, her reason for not wishing to be hospitalized and drugged is
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J.M. COETZEE's
AGE OF IRON
9
expressed by the visual metaphor, "I cannot have my eyes closed"
(164-65), and thus echoes her resolve to retain consciousness, not to "give
[her]self back to the o~inary" (109),. not .to "get over" (115) her
experience of the true reahty of South Afncan hfe.
At fin;t Mn; Curren does not know how to rehabilitate an independent
sense of self: "I want to sell myself, redeem myself, .but. am full of
confusion about how to do it" (107). Eventually, though, she devises two
strategies, the fin;t of which is to commit suicide by self-incineration outside
the Houses of Parliament. The choice of the "House of Lies" (128) as the
locus for this gesture of protest indicates that it is a means of destroying
the false self created for her by the State authorities and of regaining her
true and original identity. For Mn; Curren, suicide is not therefore an act
of self-annihilation, but one of self-redemption. The second recuperative
strategy which she considen; in her attempt to escape the State's
controlling master narrative is the inscription of her self into her own,
independent narrative, the outward symbol of which is, of course, the novel.
Initially Mn; Curren seems intent on opting for suicide as the better of
the two strategies for asserting selthood. In this respect it is significant
that once she starts planning this act of self-affirmation, she finds that
"some faint glow of pride began to return to [her body]" and that "[t]he
crab had stopped gnawing" (106), a reference to the earlier use of the doll
image to signify the fictionality of her State-imposed sense of self: "Were
I to be opened up they would find me hollow as a doll, a doll with a crab
sitting inside licking its lips" (103). Since the word "cancer" in Latin
means "crab," the suggestion here is that Mn; Curren's illness should be
construed as a metaphor for the erosion of selthood by the State's structure of
power. In this regard, it is significant that she should describe her tumoun;
as a message "sent by Saturn" (59) or Cronus, the archetypal political father.
Mn; Curren, however, eventually discards this strategy of selfredemption after dreaming about Florence's reaction to the suicide, were
she to see it:
I stand in the middle of the avenue opposite the Parliament buildings,
circled by people, doing my tricks with fire . . . . In a white slip
ruffled by the wind, her feet bare, her head bare, her right breast bare,
[Florence] strides past, the one child, masked, naked, trotting quickl y
beside her, the other stretching an arm out over her shoulder,
pointing.
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10
MIQ-IAEL MARAIS
Who is this goddess who comes in a vision with uncovered breast
cutting the air? It is Aphrodite, but not smile-loving Aphrodite,
patroness of pleasures: an older figure, a figure of urgency, of cries in
the dark, short and sharp, of blood and earth, emerging for an instant,
showing herself, passing. From the goddess comes no call, no signal.
Her eye is open and is blank. She sees and does not see.
Burning, doing my show, I stand transfIXed . . . . Forever the
goddess is passing, forever, caught in a posture of surprise and regret,
I do not follow .... the woman who should follow behind is not
there, the woman with serpents of flame in her hair who beats her
arms and cries and dances. (164-65)
As this dream sequence reveals, Mrs Curren's "show" is calculated to
redeem selthood by attracting the attention of and gaining recognition
from the cultural other. Aorence, however, refuses to acknowledge the
dOUbting self's presence and so affinn its reality. It is for this reason that
Mrs Curren and her group of spectators are described as "wraiths," a clear
indication that the "show," as a strategy of self-affinnation, will fail to
invest Mrs Curren's waning self with substance. Indeed, the final irony is
that the "show," as a result of the cultural other's refusal to acknowledge
Mrs Curren's presence, serves as a tacit response to the question prompted
by the photograph of herself in her grandfather's garden, a photograph she
re-examines following her visit to Guguletu: "Who are the ghosts and who
the presences?" (102). The import of her observation, "Dies irae, dies ilia
when the absent shall be present and the present absent" (103), now also
becomes clear.
After realizing that her "show" will not succeed in recovering an
independent sense of self, Mrs Curren decides on the alternative strategy
of literary inscription. Before considering this strategy, however, it is
necessary to explicate the context in which it occurs, part of which is the
metaliterary debate implicit in Mrs Curren's "show." In the passages
dealing with the "show," there is a strong indication that it should be
construed as an image of South African literature. Apart from being
compared to a literary work open to multiple interpretations (105), its
producer, Mrs Curren, likens herself to "a juggler, a clown, an entertainer"
(129), that is, to a minor and marginalized artiste. If the "spectacle" (129)
is seen as an image of literature, then the relation, in the passage quoted
above, between it and the mythological tableau representing Aphrodite in
her aspect as a goddess of war, bloodshed and destruction should be
construed as a figure for the relation of fiction to the reality of violence
and war in South Africa. On the one hand, the passage seems to indicate
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J.M. COETZEE's AGE OF IRON
11
that in such a violent context, all art pales into insignificance. In tliis
regard, it is obviously significant that the novel's analogue for such art is
likened to trivial fonns of entertainment like juggling. The suggestion
seems to be that, like Mrs Curren's "spectacle" (129), South African
literature and white writing, in particular, constitute a trivial gesture whose
function is narcissistic rather than interventionist, that is, calculated to
allay an endemic sense of guilt and to affinn a precarious sense of self.
The novel's point about the triviality of literature in an age of iron is not
confined to this scene, but is made elsewhere, as for example when Mrs
Curren compares her writing to John's blood, which has previously been
described as "both darker and more glaring than blood ought to be" (58):
"How thin, by comparison, my bleeding on to the paper here" (125).
Later still, in a scene reminiscent of the opening lines of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in which the Ancient Mariner
accosts the reluctant Wedding Guest, she again alludes to the triviality
of fiction while forcing the reluctant John to listen to her "story:" "You
say ... 'I don't want to listen to the story of how you feel, it is just another
story, why don't you do something?'" (132). Clearly, Mrs Curren's "story"
signifies fiction in general and is contrasted with action. The novel as a
whole is populated with characters who, like John, fonn a reluctant
audience and are "impervious to words" (73) and, by extension, to fiction.
In Guguletu, for example, Mrs Curren finds herself addressing a group of
black people who find what she has to say, that is, her message, trivial:
"'This woman talks shit,' said a man in the crowd .... No one contradicted
him. Already some were drifting away" (91). Clearly this scene presents
yet another "spectacle" (129) of sorts within a context of violence and
should be read as a metaphor for the marginalization of fiction in an
historical period which is antipathetic to it. The only difference between it
and the suicide scene is one of degree: in the latter scene, Florence is not
merely a reluctant spectator, she completely ignores the "spectacle."
The point of this meta fictional debate which extends across the entire
novel, is that literature cannot perfonn its function, namely, to protest
against social ills, in a hostile social context. This impotence is hinted at
in Mrs Curren's dream of self-immolation by her failure to pursue
Florence and her children. In a pointed allusion to the Furies of Greek
mythology, who were represented as crones with snakes for hair whose
task it was to protect the social order by hunting down perpetrators of
crimes against society (Graves 37-38, 122), she is described as "the
woman who should follow behind ... the woman with serpents of flame
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12
MICHAEL MARAIS
in her hair" (164). The similarity between literature and the Furies in
tenns of social function points to a further correspondence between the
two: just as the Furies lost their ability to protect Classical Greek society
when that society ceased to believe in them, so too literature in modern
South Africa is losing its purpose and becoming obsolete because of a
sceptical and indifferent audience.
Apart from being an anachronism in an age of iron, there is another
reason for the impotence of sociaUy-engaged literature in the South African
context. In Mrs Curren's dream, she cannot follow Florence and her
children because she "stand[s] transfixed," and is "caught in a posture of
surprise and regret" (164). This description is very similar to the description
of the State's deformation of its subjects, its ability to "stupefy" them, to
"stun with amazement," or, punningly, to "astonish" them, to tum them to
stone (26). The suggestion here, then, is that South African fiction is
petrified. It too has been deformed by the State's structures of power.
Coetzee's point is related to the novel's meta fictional debate on the
politics of representation, in tenns of which the South African social and
political reality is depicted as a distorted representation of the transcendental
ideal of an ethical community. Being an imitation of this debased
imitation, South African literature is three times removed from the ideal.
As Coetzee's description of it as "a less than fully human literature,
unnaturally preoccupied with power and the torsions of power" ("Jerusalem"
98), suggests, it merely replicates the operation of the State's structures of
power. And in so doing, it implicates itself in these structures and thereby
compromises its ability to effectively condemn them. Mrs Curren's
realization that "Power is power, after all. It invades. That is its nature"
(107) thus also pertains to South African literature, as does her perception
concerning her ideological context: "It is part of me, I am part of it" (149).
The ability of such a deformed literature to engage effectively with the
South African political scenario is further compromised by the fact that
even language-the condition of possibility for literature and for protesthas been contaminated by the politics of violence in South Africa. In this
regard Mrs Curren's application of the novel's imagery of deformity to the
words of her diary is significant: "Words vomited up from the belly of the
whale, misshapen, mysterious" (128). And her earlier reference to her
words as the "issue of a shrunken heart" (125) also alludes to the corrupt
and stunted nature of language and literature in South Africa. From
within the prisonhouse of this deformed language, effective literary
protest seems impossible.
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J.M. COETZEE's AGE OF IRON
13
It is partly due to its defonnity, and that of its medium, that literature is
depicted in Mrs Curren's dream as a Fury manque, unable to "follow"
Florence and her children, unable, that is, to perform its designated social
(unction. In this regard, it is significant that she should be described as
"the woman with serpents of flame in her hair" (164), a highly ambiguous
description which could serve equally well to associate her with the
Gorgon Medusa who, like the Furies, was represented with snakes for hair
(Graves 127-29). This ambivalence indicates that rather than being a
Fury, Mrs Curren is actually a Gorgon and, by analogical extension, rather
than serving the adversarial role that it intends to, South African literature
actually reinforces the State's defonning drive. Irrespective of their
different impulses and intentions, the effect of Mrs Curren's "spectacle"
(129) and the State's "message" (26) is ultimately the same and that, it
wiU be remembered, is to tum "people to stone" (12). As Mrs Curren
presciently realizes, her envisaged gesture of protest is a public show over
which she has no control and which is bound to escape her intention:
These public shows ... how can one ever be sure what they stand
for? An old woman sets herself on fire, for instance. Why? Because
she has been driven mad? Because she is in despair? Because she
has cancer? I thOUght of painting a letter on the car to explain. But
what? A? B? C! (105)
With the State's "message" (26) as its ultimate auctor, it follows that
South African literature, rather than undennining the stunted and deformed
relations which obtain, unintentionally affirms, conserves and perpetuates
the status quo. Being trapped in the State's ways of seeing and categorizing,
this literature inadvertently complies with the colonial enterprise and its
drive to ensure the continuance of existing power relations by reproducing
them.
The logical response to this argument on the state of literature in South
Africa would be subsidence into silence. And, indeed, Mrs Curren comes
to question the legitimacy of a white South African "voice:" "What am I
entitled to do but sit in a comer with my mouth shut? I have no voice"
(149). However, Age of Iron does not ultimately posit silence as the only
avenue open to the white writer. After all, it is itself a product of white
South African writing. Moreover, after echoing Hamlet with the words,
"The rest should be silence" (147; my italics), Mrs Curren goes on to say:
"But with this-whatever it is---this voice that is no voice, I go on. On
and on" (149).
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14
MICHAEL MARAIS
Mrs Curren's reason for not choosing silence forms the alternative
representational manoeuvre which the novel offers to the literature of
defonned relations. She tells John that she is fighting to preserve that
which is "condemned unheard" (134), namely "everything indefinite,
everything that gives when you press it" (133-34). This category
encompasses all that has been marginalized in the age of iron in which
"only blows are real, blows and bullets" (133): concepts like love and
charity which have "perished in this country" (19) and, ironically enough,
things like words and "devious discourse" such as the novel itself (75).
Ultimately this notion of the "unheard" rests on a Platonic premise and
suggests that literature's function in an inhuman age of iron should not be
to reproduce the State's distorted representation of the human essence, and
thereby merely replicate its defonned relations, but to represent the human
essence itself which is in danger of extinction. In this way it not only
avoids being a representation of a representation, that is, being thrice
removed from the essential reality, but also preserves· the marginalized
idea of humanity. This argument explains the novel's constant allusions
to the Circe myth. When Mrs Curren notices the brutalizing effect of the
Stale's violence on Mr Thabane and alludes to Circe's metamorphosis of
Odysseus's men, she comments suggestively: "Where on these shores
does the herb grow that will preserve us from it?" (95). The answer
implicit here is that literature could serve this purpose. Just as the herb
moly which Hennes gave Odysseus protected him from being transformed
into a pig by Circe (Graves 359), so too literature, by preserving the idea
of humanity, could protect South Africans from the dehumanizing influence
of the cycle of violence in their society. In a self-reflexive gesture,
Coetzee has his characters act out this possibility on a metafictional plane
when Mrs Curren, the surrogate author who describes herself as "[g]iving
voice to the dead" (176), commissions Vercueil, a Hennes figure, to bear
her letter, the surrogate novel, to her daughter, the surrogate South African
reader. The image of the novel as genre which is presented by this triad of
characters is that of the preserver and vocalizer of the "unheard," of ideas
which are dying or have died. In this regard, the fact that Coetzee makes
the Hennes-figure who bears this literary version of the herb moly an
alcoholic is significant: alcohol is punningly described in the novel as
"{mJollificans," as that which "softens, preserves" and which "dissolves
iron" (75). The difference, then, between the literature of deformed
relations and the alternative representational mode mooted by Coetzee's
novel is that the former reinforces the times by mirroring their stunted ness
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].M. COETZEE's AGE OF IRON
15
and defonnity, while the latter transcends the times by representing an
essential reality, a reality which encompasses ideas and concepts that have
the ability to "dissolve iron," to humanize society.
While Mrs Curren's proposed spectacle of self-immolation is a metaphor
for the defonned mode of writing in the novel, her letter to her daughter
(and, by extension, the novel itself) serves as a metaphor for the
alternative, transcendental mode of writing. Indeed, the novel is depicted
as Mrs Curren's attempt at a recovery of self, the outcome of her
transcendence of the State's defonned relations through learning to love.
In his Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech, Coetzee equates love with
fraternity, which he then places in opposition to the "defonned and stunted
relations between human beings" that have been created by the South
African State's unnatural structure of power (97-98). Not surprisingly,
then, Mrs Curren finds that in order to transcend the State's defonned
relations, she has to discard the notion of setting herself alight outside
Parliament, a gesture which would merely replicate the State's stunted
relations. Instead, she has to learn to love and care for the "children of
iron" (46), that is, the children of the townships who have rejected their
parents. So, after confessing her dislike of one of these children-John
--she arrives at the following perception: "I want to be saved. How shall
I be saved? By doing what I do not want to do .... I must love, first of
all, the unlovable. I must love, for instance, this child .... He is part of
my salvation" (125). The moly by means of which this "salvation" can be
accomplished is love-learning to love that which appears unlovable, that
which has been metamorphosed by the State's "message" (26) or
deformed by the stunted relations in South African society. Mrs Curren's
bid to love is successful, as she discovers during John's violent
confrontation with the police: "Yet something went out from me to him. I
ached to embrace him, to protect him" (139). The allusion to the umbilical
coni here connotes a restoration of the filial relation between mother and
child, a resurgence of maternal love. And love, as Mrs Curren later comes
to learn, is an empathetic emotion which leads to insight capable of
counteracting the State's power to blind. It enables her through a willed
act of the imagination to see John. Thus she imagines him, in Florence's
room, lying on his back, "Envisioning the moment of glory when he will
arise, fully himself at last, erect, powerful, transftguretr' (137; my italics),
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16
MICHAEL MARAIS
and in this way comes to understand his desire to assert seUhood, to
discard his State-conferred identity. Thus, too, she is able to identify with
him by recreating his final moments:
despite my dislike of [John}, he is with me more clearly, more
piercingly than Bheki has ever been. He is with me or I am with him:
him or the trace of him. It is the middle of the night but it is the tgey
of his last morning too. I am here in my bed but I am there in
Florence's room too .... Outside the door men are waiting, crouched
like hunters, to present the boy with his death . . . . His eyes are
unblinking, fixed on the door through which he is going to leave the
world .... His eyes are open and mine, though I write, are shut.
(159)
Through her imaginative recreation via words and love of John's final
moments, Mrs Curren keeps her attention riveted on the "terrible sights"
(91) of the actual South African reality. This act of writing thus counters
the anaesthetic effect of the fabricated version of "reality" propagated by
the State's systems of representation. It enables her to refuse to "yield" to
the "ordinary" (109), to prevent the consciousness and perceptual clarity
which she has gained from experiencing the true reality of South African
life from again being obliterated by the stupor induced by the State's
"message" (26). In this respect, it is significant that Mrs Curren's
medication, which serves as a metaphor for this stupor, militates against
writing. Upon realizing this, she asks herself the following questions:
"Must one die in full knowledge, fully oneself! Must one give birth to
one's death without anaesthetic?" (129), the suggestion being that in
writing about John's recovery of self, she recovers her self. Writing is
thus metaphorically cast as a rebirth of sorts, the death of a Stateconferred identity and resurrection of an original, essential identity.
Fittingly, then, Age of Iron portrays its putative writer's rehabilitation
of self as a metamorphosis into text. It is consequently an ontogenetic
novel which does not so much speak of its own coming into being as of its
protagonist's becoming an oppositional text, one which counters that of
the State. For example, at a very early stage the novel lays bare its
epistolary presentation as Mrs Curren's letter to her daughter in America
in the following unusual terms: "So day by day I render myself into words
and pack the words into the page like sweets: like sweets for my daughter,
for her birthday, for the day of her birth. Words out of my body, drops of
myself, for her to unpack in her own time, to take in, to suck, to absorb"
(137).
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].M. COETZEE's AGE OF IRON
17
The novel's metaphor for Mrs Curren's metamorphosis into text is the
life cycle of the butterfly or moth. For much of the novel insect imagery
is used to suggest the liminal state of death-in-Iife in which white South
Africans exist. So, for example, in the opening pages of the novel, Mrs
Curren refers to white children as "soul-stunted ... spinning themselves
tighter and tighter into their sleepy cocoons .... Their residence the limbo
of the unborn, their innocence the innocence of bee-grubs, plump and
white" (7). Later, this larval stage is again invoked as a metaphor of white
South Africans' threshold existence: "White as grubs in our swaddling
bands, we will be dispatched to join those infant souls whose whining
Aeneas mistook for weeping .... In limine primo: on the threshold of
death, the threshold of life" (85). Once she transcends this liminal state by
learning to love and maintaining her perceptual clarity, Mrs Curren is
associated with a butterfly or moth, a particularly apt metaphor since, as
she states, the butterfly "bear[s] itself' (14), as she herself does when she
recreates her original identity.
Strictly speaking, then, the novel does not end with Mrs Curren's death
but with the birth of her new identity. This much is implicit in the
penultimate sentence, which implies the release of Mrs Curren's spirit, her
eventual metamorphosis: "[Vercueil] took me in his arms and held me
with mighty force, so that the breath went out of me in a rush" (181). The
allusion here is to the representation in Greek mythology of the soul as a
butterfly emerging from a dying person's mouth, a representation invoked
earlier when Mrs Curren mentions "A white moth, a ghost emerging from
the mouth of the figure on the deathbed" (118). Furthermore, the Latin
spiritus signifies both "spirit" and "breath," as is intimated by Mrs
Curren's words to her daughter: "It is not my soul that will remain with
you but the spirit of my soul, the breath" (119). The novel thus ends by
alluding to Mrs Curren's metamorphosis into a butterfly or moth which
serves to signify her recovery of her original sense of self, her rebirth or
"resurrection" from the state of death-in-Iife in which the State's theft of
her original identity and imposition of a false identity has left her.
Initially the novel's depiction of Mrs Curren's rehabilitation of
selfbood appears to be fairly straightforward: she rejects the identity
conferred on her by the State and reasserts her original one. Coetzee
complicates matters, however, by equating Mrs Curren's essential self
with the text itself, in this way exposing the fact that it is merely a literary
representation and therefore of the same ontological order as the State's
representations of the Platonic essence of selthood. This meta fictional
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18
MICHAEL MARAIS
equation is clearly evident in the coincidence between the re-emergence of
Mrs Curren's original identity and the completion of the novel and its
emergence as a text, the self-reflexive implication being that the text is the
final stage of Mrs Curren's metamorphosis. It is therefore fitting that the
butterfly or moth, which serves as an image of this newly-created self, is
in itself an image of the novel, a conflation which yokes together self and
text. In the following passage, the physical resemblance between the
shape of a book and that of a winged creature like a butterfly or moth is
elicited: "[Vercueil and I] share a bed, folded one upon the other like a
page folded in two, like two wings folded" (173). Moreover, Mrs Curren's
following words to her daughter, the reader's counterpart in the novel,
conflate a description of the life of the moth following its metamorphosis
with the text's migration from reader to reader following its genesis:
Like a moth from its case emerging, fanning its wings: that is what,
reading, I hope you will glimpse: my soul readying itself for further
flight .... And after ..• the dying? Never fear, I will not haunt you.
There will be no need to close the windows and seal the chimney to
keep the white moth from flapping in during the night and settling on
your brow or on the brow of one of the children. The moth is simply
what will brush your cheek ever so lightly as you put down the last
page of this letter, before it flutters off on its next journey.
(118-19)
Mrs Curren's afterlife is thus a life of being read, hence her earlier
premonition of it as an ateleological journey in which she is publicly
exposed to the gaze of strangers:
Perhaps that is what the afterlife will be like: not a lobby with
armchairs and music but a great crowded bus on its way from
nowhere to nowhere. Standing room only . . . aushed against
strangers . . . . Promiscuous contact. Forever under the gaze of
others. An end to private life. (27)
The life of the text is, as she puts it, her "way of living on" (120).
Although this portrayal of Mrs Curren's metamOJphosis into text suggests
that she escapes containment in the State's text, it qualifies the
suggestion that she has recovered her original, uncontaminated identity by
indicating that this identity is itself discursive and therefore merely
another representation of selfhood. Accordingly, it is not exempt from
ideological contamination, an admission which (given the novel's
identification of self and text) can be construed as a self-conscious
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J.M. COETZEE's AGE OF IRON
19
acknowledgement of the novel's ineluctable contamination by and
complicity with history. What Mrs Curren says of her life, her identity, is
therefore equally true of the novel: "Power is power, after all. It invades.
That is its nature. It invades one's life" (107). So even while representing
its refusal to imitate the State's distorted imitations and its intention to
represent the Platonic ideal itsel~ the novel wryly advertises its inevitable
imbrication in history. The corollary here is that this supposedly alternative
representational manoeuvre is, in fact, no different from the literature of
deformed relations which, in failing to recognize its essential complicity
with that which it represents, merely reproduces the status quo. If this is
so, "the rest," in Mrs Curren's words, "should be silence" (149), silence
being preferable to the perpetuation of the State's petverted relations.
Paradoxically, however, it is precisely this self-conscious tension in the
novel between its inevitable complicity with and aspirant detachment from
history that invests it with an incredulity about itself and history which
enables it to "speak." On the one hand, its reflexive awareness of its
ideological status as a mode of representation-that it is, in Macaskill's
words, "an infectable site" (81, his italics)-renders it less susceptible to
reproducing the State's petverted relations than those representational
modes which are oblivious of the extent to which they comply with that
which they represent. On the other hand, the novel's endeavour to
represent the transcendental world of ideals and thus circumvent what
Coetzee refelS to elsewhere as ''the oppositions out of which history and
the historical disciplines erect themselves" ("The Novel Today" 3), posits
the possibility of changing the status quo by realizing these ideals in
history through the act of reading. Age of Iron does not therefore retreat
from history, it merely refuses to supplement it. 1 Instead, the novel seeks
to revise history through acting upon the South African reader in history.
This emphasis on the reading process exp)ains why MIS Curren is
depicted as coming to life, as being born upon being transformed into a
text. Being an image of the substantiation of a liminal existence, it
prefigures and mirrors the realization during the act of reading of the
novel's representation of essential selfbood. This becomes clear when
MIS Curren describes her letter---and, by implication, the novel-to her
daughter---and, by implication, the actual reader-in the following
manner. "In this letter from elsewhere ... truth and love together at last.
In every you that I pen love flickers and trembles like St Elmo's fire"
(118). Here, the text advertises its own liminality: only through the reader
can it and that which it represents be realized or be given substance.
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20
MICHAEL MARAIS
Hence. the stress on the perfonnative dimension of the novel in Mrs
Curren's concern ihat her daughter receive the text: "IfVercueil does not
send these writings on, you will never read them. You will never even
know they existed. A certain body of truth will never take on flesh"
(119). Directly before this citation, there is a reference to the "ariosos
from the Matthew Passion" (119), which suggests an analogy here
between'the reception of the Eucharist and the reception of the text .. This
analogy is confirmed shortly afterwards when Mrs Curren, echoing
Christ's words atthe Last Supper, tells her daughter and, by,extension, the
actual reader, the following: "This is my life, these words" (120). Just as
the Eucharist represents Christ who stands for love, so too the texf
represents Mrs Curren who stands. for love. And, by consuming the text,
the reader enables the transubstantiation of this idea of love into the reality
ofJove.
Through the act of reading, the word takes on flesh. Indeed, in .an
allusion to the Annunciation, the .reader is apprized of this incarnation by
Mrs Curren: "These words, as you read them, if you read them, enter you
and draw breath again . . . . Once upon a time you lived in me as once
upon a time I lived in my mother;- as she still lives iQ me, as I grow
towards her, may I live in you" (120). The sexual overtones in this
passage suggest that the text, during the reading process, impregnates the
reader with the idea of love which, after a period of gestation, emerges
incarnate. This is probably why the actual reader, as a result of his or her
identification with Mrs Curren's daughter, is implicitly cast as a woman.
It also accounts for the depiction of the text as a butterfly: the butterfly
connotes free and public love. In its dissemination of the idea of love, the
text as emblem of love spreads· its favours freely and openly, taking up
only temporary residence in a reader, after which "promiscuous contact"
(27) it "flutters off on i~ next journey" (119).
Apart from the sequence of conception, g~tation and birth which
serves as a metaphor for the reader's realization· of the, text's ~presentation of
the idea of love, there is in these passages a suggestion that the text is a
muse which inspires the reader to become the author of history. Like Mrs
Curren's house, the novel is a "museum" (174) which preserves
representations of marginalized ideas and also, as the etymology of the
word "museum" suggests, inspires the reader to become the author of his
or her times, that is, to humanize society by authoring an alternative text, a
"new" reality to replace the (no less fictional) one which South Africans
have inherited and become accustomed to.
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J.M. COETZEE's AGE OF IRON
21
Besides the role of muse, Age of Iron constructs for itself the role of
Fury in its attempt to raise the consciousness of its reader and so inspire
social change. This role is self-consciously alluded to by Mrs Curren's
projection of her daughter's response to her letter: "I do not need this, you
say to yourself through gritted teeth: this is what I came here to get away
from, why does it have to follow me?" (178). Significantly, the text in this
representation of reading is shown to follow the reader, an allusion to the
inability of petri-fiction to play the part of Fury and protest against the
defonnation of human relations. In contradistinction to this failure, the
text of refonned relations hunts down its reader, who is consequently
portrayed as a deformer of relations. Indeed, his or her surrogate in the
novel, Mrs Curren's daughter, has abandoned her mother and is therefore
guilty of filial impiety, the distortion of the bond between mother and
child. Like the township children, she and, by extension, the reader are
"children of iron" (46}---children who have rejected their parents.
The issue at stake here, however, is not the personal relation of mother
to child, but the public relation of citizen to country, of the South African
reader to his or her poLis. This is made apparent by the affinity of
maternal figures with the land, as emerges, for example, when Mrs Curren
conflates earth and mother by describing "the stopping-place at the top
of Prince Alfred's Pass" as "the starting-place, the place of the navel,
the place where I join the world," and by identifying the one with the
other: "This is my mother . .. this is what gives Life to me" (110-11).
Furthennore, the archetypal mother-daughter relationship in the novel,
that of Demeter and Persephone, also has a geographical dimension
since Demeter is the Greek earth-goddess whose daughter is abducted
by Hades (Graves 89-96). Apart from reflecting paradigmatically on
Mrs Curren's relationship with her daughter, who has left South Africa
and is now resident in America, this myth also points to Mrs Curren's
affinity with the land, an affinity which is revealed when she accuses
white South Africans of not having loved their country well enough
and of having abandoned it, a charge which she also levels at her daughter
(23; 127).
By identifying the South African reader with Mrs Curren's daughter,
the novel therefore characterizes this reader as a lotus-eater, someone who
has abandoned and forgotten his or her country. In this regard, Mrs
Curren's description of this severance is pertinent:
But about everything there would now be a flatness, a stillness, a
calmness .... he would feel a tug, light but continual, toward stupor,
22
Mlo-lAEL MARAIS
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detachment .... All is receding, he would think; in a week, in a
month I will ... I will be among the lotus-eaters, separated, drifting.
(111)
Since this characterization is couched in terms identical to the description
of the stupor induced by the State's "message" (26) and by Mrs Curren's
medication, the suggestion is that the reader escapes the actual South
Africa by suspending disbelief in the mythical version of South Africa
presented by the controlling master narrative of apartheid history. In
characterizing its readers thus, the novel accuses them of filial impiety, of
having abandoned their true country and, in so doing, seeks to act out its
role of Fury by not allowing them to escape, to "get away from" (178) the
reality of life in South Africa. By confronting them with that which they
seek to escape, it strives to raise their consciousness and increase their
perceptual clarity.
Ultimately then, Coetzee, in Age ofIron, suggests a dual role for South
African literature: as Fury it should prevent the reader from suspending
disbelief in the State's distorted representation of South African reality;
and as muse it should inspire him or her with the idea of an ethical
community, in this way prompting him or her to recreate his or her times.
In terms of the controlling metaphor of Plato's cave, this means that South
African literature should aspire to provide the reader with intimations of
freedom which will prompt him or her to turn his or her face from the
shadowy representations of ideas flickering on the wall to the light. If it
succeeds in doing so, the reader will be motivated to narrow the gap
between the phenomenal, sensory world of existence and the ontologically
real world of ideals, to transfonn the static South African reality into a
realm of becoming, a state of continuous development seeking to improve
itself by moulding itself into the pattern laid down by the supersensible
world of ideal reality.
Despite setting South African Hterature these ambitious goals, Age of
Iron is haunted by a sense of its own social insignificance. This is evident
in its self-absorption with its reception and, more specifically, its fear that,
instead of having its intended effect on the reader, it wiJJ be reduced to the
status of what it itself calls the "unheard" (134). In this regard it is
significant that the motif of the reluctant audience should include the
novel itself, a text which, after all, is presented as a letter which mayor
may not reach its implied reader. It is therefore potentially, in Macaskill's
words, a "purloined letter, unbound to the hands in which it has fallen"
(73). The novel's self-conscious preoccupation with its own reception and
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I.M. COETZEE's
AGE OF IRON
23
liminality extends its ending beyond its physical boundaries into the locus
and time of reading, that is, into history. Such reflexivity, consequently, is
not simply an admission of the limitations of the novel's liminal status,
but a transferral of authorial responsibility to the reader. By virtue of this
metaleptic manoeuvre, Age of Iron defines the reader's response to it as a
political and historical act. Should the reader, for instance, respond to the
text in its intended roles of Fury and muse, he or she will construct for it a
prosperous conclusion by transfonning his or her reality into a realm of
becoming, one which continually strives to realize the world of ideals.
Should the reader, however, form a reluctant audience by ignoring the
text's "message," he or she will construct for it a tragic ending by
conserving the historical status quo. In other words, through his or her
action (or inaction) in the arena of history, the reader becomes, willy-nilly,
not only the novel's co-author, but also an author of history.
NOTE
1. In "The Novel Today," Coetzee draws a distinction between those novels
"that suppkment the history text" (2) and a "novel that operates in terms of its
own procedures .... perhaps going so far as to show up the mythic status of
history" (3).
WORKS CITED
BeIsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Methuen, 1980.
Coetzee, J.M. "The Novel Today." Upstream 6.1 (1988): 2-5.
- - - . Age ofIron. London: Secker & Warburg, 1990.
- - - . "Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech." Doubling the Point: Essays and
Interviews. Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1992. 96-99.
- - - . "South African Writers: Interview." Doubling the Point. 335-43.
Coward, Rosalind, and John Ellis. Langunge and Materialism: Developments in
Semiology and tile 'flll!ory of the Subject. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1977.
Grimal, Pierre. TIle Dictionary of Classical Mythology. Trans. A. P. MaxwellHyslop. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
Graves, Robert. Till! Greek Myths. Vol.1. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960.
Macaskill, Brian, and Jeanne Colleran. "Interfering with 'The Mind of Apartheid:"
Pretexts 4.1 (1992): 67-84.
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MICHAEL MARAIS
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