2 Facile Goodness and Shame: Age of Iron

What shall we tell the blind woman in Rilke's poem who lamented that 'I can no longer live with the sky upon me?' Would it comfort her if we told her we can no longer live with the earth underneath our feet? 1Age of Iron is another novel by Coetzee written, like Waiting for the Barbarians, during the apartheid period and published in 1990. It was awarded the Sunday Express Book of the Year award. Unlike Waiting for the Barbarians, the temporal and spatial settings of Age of Iron are clearly stated in the text: the Cape of apartheid South Africa, during the turbulent period of the late 1980 s, the so called State of Emergency. As Coetzee comments, Age of Ironwas written during the years of the State of Emergency in South Africa. It reflects not only the outward manifestations of those years - the boycott of schools, the running battles in the townships, the relentless control of the media by the state - but some of their inward temper as well: bitterness and rage on the one side, despair and exhaustion on the other. In that sense one can call it an emergency novel, I suppose.2Many critics have noted Coetzee's explicit engagement with the political in Age of Iron, an aspect that distinguishes it from his previous novels, which more readily invite allegorical readings. Michael Neill calls Age of Iron Coetzee's "most openly political novel,"3 while Poyner notes that "Coetzee's critique [of the apartheid regime] shifts focus to the manner and mode of political commitment itself."4Age of Iron is the story of an educated white woman, Mrs Curren, living alone (apart from her domestic help, Florence) in Cape Town, in apartheid South Africa. She suffers from terminal cancer and feels an irrepressible need to write a final letter to her daughter, who lives in America. The novel itself consists of this long letter, structured in four parts, in which Mrs Curren registers the waves of irrecoverable degradation of her body, and also the experiences she goes through during this last period of her life.The first part sets the coordinates of the novel and contains most of the major issues that will be developed in the subsequent two parts: approaching death (the novel starts with Mrs Curren's account of the news delivered to her by her doctor the same day she finds the beggar Vercueil in her garden); the need she feels for comfort and love; the shamefulness of the times (as reflected in Mrs Curren's reaction to the falseness of the media, and in her occasional thoughts), and the question of trust (dramatized through Mrs Curren's incipient relationship with Vercueil). The presences in this first part are therefore limited to Mrs Curren, Vercueil, the figures of politicians on television, and death. The final part contains the same 'characters', as Mrs Curren dies in Vercueil's arms.The middle parts (two and three) consist of the account of Mrs Curren's unmediated experience with the black resistance movement. As a consequence of witnessing atrocities involving the death of children, Mrs Curren (and the reader) is forced to question her life-long moral attitudes as a white liberal who is part of an unjust system. Owing to her particular condition (she knows she is about to die) and to seeing the dead bodies of children she had known, Mrs Curren reaches, in this middle part of the novel, a climax of emotional negativity, experiencing acute feelings of shame, helplessness, even inner death.The fact that Coetzee makes these choices - to write a so-called "illness story," from the perspective of a white educated woman, in the form of a letter - has particular relevance to the moral suggestiveness and significance of the novel. Age of Iron is, first and foremost, a letter born of the acute existential need of a dying body. As Arthur Frank observes in his study of real-life cases, the stories coming from ill people are told "through a wounded body [...]. The body, whether still diseased or recovered, is simultaneously cause, topic, and instrument of whatever stories are told. …