J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron and the poetics of resistance

Abstract

Since the beginning of his career, J. M. Coetzee’s writing has occupied an uneasy threshold between the literary ideals of European modernism, with its emphasis on aesthetic autonomy, and the demands of socio-historical accountability that derives from his background as a South African novelist. This article revisits one of Coetzee’s novels in which these tensions come to the fore most explicitly, namely Age of Iron, to argue that it is precisely from the generative friction that arises between these two opposing fields that his writing draws its singularly affective force. I begin by considering the agonistic relationship between transcendent ideals and socio-material demands that marks Coetzee’s account of the classic (“What is a Classic?: A Lecture”), describing it as a defining feature of his literary sensibility. The article then moves on to a reading of Age of Iron that focuses on the protagonist Mrs Curren’s efforts, in the midst of the violent political struggle in apartheid South Africa, to speak in her own voice. My thoughts conclude with the suggestion that Coetzee’s perennial staging of the conflict between a desire for autonomous expression and a socio-historical milieu that is indifferent to that desire can be read as an imaginative form of resistance, in the field of literary expression, to both the pressures of historical determinism and the dangers of postmodern insularity.

Introduction: The question of the classic

In his essay “What is a Classic?: A Lecture” J. M. Coetzee recounts the moment when, at the age of 15, he first experienced the impact of the classic. It arrived in the form of a recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, drifting over from the house next door into the backyard of the Coetzee family residence in Rondebosch one Sunday afternoon. For the young Coetzee, “mooning around” in the garden, wondering how to fill up his time, it came as a revelation: “As long as the moment lasted, I was frozen, I dared not breathe. I was being spoken to by the music as music had never spoken to me before” (2001: 9). ¹ The experience, he writes, was “of the greatest significance” in his life and a “key event” in his formation — a moment after which nothing would ever be the same (10).

In the rest of the essay, Coetzee goes on to question what this rather extraordinary claim — that he was spoken to, “across the ages”, by the classic (10) — might mean. He does so by drawing a comparison between two opposing notions of the classic: the “transcendental-poetic” and the “socio-cultural” (9). The first of these, the “transcendental-poetic”, takes seriously the thought that to come into contact with the classic is an ideal experience: a sublime moment that gives access to an Eliotic “transpersonal order” and that becomes the mythical point of origin for a subsequent artistic vocation. The second notion — the classic as a “socio-cultural” phenomenon — accounts for Coetzee’s moment of transfixion when he heard the Well-Tempered Clavier as an instance of exposure to “high European culture”, one that led to an unconscious decision on his part to master “the codes of that culture” as a way out of the “historical dead end” presented to him by his situation as a young white male in South Africa in the 1950s (11). “In other words”, asks Coetzee, “was the experience what I understood it to be — a disinterested and in a sense an impersonal aesthetic experience — or was it really the masked expression of a material interest?” (11).

The answer, it turns out, is neither, or not quite either. Instead, by way of a historical account of the survival of Bach’s music through the generations — a survival that requires the rigorous “day-by-day testing” afforded by the traditions of musical apprenticeship — Coetzee makes the deceptively simple point that the classic is that which “emerges intact” from the passage of history, or that which exists because “generations of people cannot afford to let go of it and hold on to it at all costs” (19). It is a deceptive answer because it does not resolve the opposition Coetzee has sketched for us between the two contrasting notions of the classic, namely the “transcendental-poetic” and the “socio-cultural”. By defining the classic as that which survives, he seems rather to be describing a situation in which the meaning of the classic emerges from a rivalry between the two:

So we arrive at a certain paradox. The classic defines itself by surviving. Therefore the interrogation of the classic, no matter how hostile, is part of the history of the classic, inevitable and even to be welcomed. For as long as the classic needs to be protected from attack, it can never prove itself classic. (19; emphasis added)

“[S]urviving”, “interrogation”, “hostile”, “protected from attack”: evidently Coetzee conceives of the space from which the meaning of the classic emerges — a space that is drawn between the pressures of historical materialism, on the one hand, and the insistence of transcendental value, on the other — as a space of relentless conflict. For him there is no easy resolution in the matter of the classic, no synthesis between that which we hold to be valuable and the assault on that value by the world of current affairs. To experience such a classic would not mean to reach through history in order to salvage from the past a fixed value for the present, but entails rather an immediate sense of the classic as a site that bears the traces of the conflict that has shaped it into what it is today. The classic, in Coetzee’s view, opposes itself to history, but it is never entirely apart from that history — it is, in a word, immanent to the world of historical process and socio-cultural change. ²

Although Coetzee makes a point in his analysis of deflecting our attention from the autobiographical import of the moment he describes (it has “the virtue of dramatizing the issue”, he apologizes [9]), it is nevertheless revealing that the figure of the young author comes into being precisely at this moment of crosshatching between socio-historical pressures and the formulation of an individualistic aesthetic ideal. The tension between these two opposing forces has been a characteristic feature of Coetzee’s writing since the beginning of his literary career. From the opening pages of Dusklands (1974), in which the troubled protagonist Eugene Dawn feels that his creative sensibilities are being suppressed by the conformist demands of his manager, “Coetzee” (Coetzee, 2004: 1–4), J. M. Coetzee’s work has been marked by an uneasy, and often unsettling antagonism between a private idealism, on the one hand, and a socio-historical awareness within which that idealism struggles to find purchase, on the other.

The novel of Coetzee’s in which this unremitting state of conflict finds its most powerful and sustained expression, and that is the focus of my enquiry in this article, is Age of Iron (1990). Speaking about the novel in an interview with David Attwell in Doubling the Point, Coetzee has the following to say:

So a contest is staged, not only in the dramatic construction of the novel but also within Elizabeth’s — what shall I say? — soul, a contest about having a say. To me as a writer, as the writer in this case, the outcome of this contest — what is to count as a classic in South Africa — is irrelevant. What matters is that the contest is staged, that the dead have their say, even those who speak from a totally untenable historical position. (Coetzee, 1992: 250; emphasis in original)

The conflict that animates the novel, then, occurs along the same broad lines as the process of rivalry that describes the emergence of the classic: an anachronistic attachment to an ideal sense of value (the voice of “the dead”, in this instance) that struggles to define itself against a historical paradigm that is singularly unsympathetic towards its existence (“a totally untenable historical position”). It is a struggle that plays itself out on two levels: in the individual being of the protagonist (her “soul”), and in the larger socio-historical framework that circumscribes the action in the novel (its “dramatic construction”). What is most striking about the passage quoted above, however, is the notion that the point of the novel is not to resolve the conflict — not to bring the struggle to a close — but to articulate it, or to give voice to the agonistic state of affairs that determines the nature of the classic. My aim in this article, then, is to examine the ways in which Coetzee gives voice to this conflict in his novel, but also to suggest that the novel recalibrates the very notion of “voice” as a site that provides the scope for the struggle between these two opposing domains to occur. It is in this peculiar configuration of voice, I argue, that Coetzee finds a way, as a writer, to create an affective aesthetic counterpoint to the otherwise indifferent progress of history.

The voice of revolution

In The Wretched of the Earth (2001/1965), Frantz Fanon describes the atmosphere that prevails when an oppressed people is on the point of erupting into revolution. One characteristic of this atmosphere, writes Fanon, is a sense of brooding violence: police and military presence is increased; “the smell of gunpowder” is in the air (2001: 56). Any open show of force by the colonial authorities serves only to bolster the aggression of the oppressed, because it confirms to the native what he has known all along in his bones, namely that violence is the only mode of expression that has any real currency in the social dispensation of the colony. Those values which have been inculcated for generations in the schoolrooms of the colony, namely the values of universal dignity and respect for the individual, for individualism, are called out and dismissed as purely Western constructs, an ideology in the service of Western domination. The movement that occurs is one from a tradition of individual subjectivity — “[i]ndividualism is the first to dis-appear”, writes Fanon (2001: 36) — to an awareness of the common goal of liberation as the only relevant concern. The force that binds this new, collective identity to reality, and that marks the native’s decision to “embody history in his own person” (2001: 31), is violence (2001: 45).

Although it is perhaps not entirely accurate to designate the Cape Town of the late 1980s as a pre-revolutionary site in a strict Fanonian sense — most jarring in the analogy would be perhaps the absence of an external motherland — there are nevertheless some striking affinities between the two, most notably the fact that the struggle between oppressor and oppressed played itself out along lines of racial differentiation. In J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron, which is set in a bleak and wintry Cape Town during the “state of emergency” period in South African history, ³ the resonance with Fanon’s description is amplified, and we find ourselves in a world that is characterized quite strongly by an emphasis on violence, by a growing disillusionment with the precepts of individualism that emerge from the tradition of Western culture, and by a collective purpose that presents itself to the protagonist as a stony silence, an impenetrable mask, a resolve that cannot be breached (a “hardened rhetoric of absolutes”, as David Attwell puts it [1993: 120]).

Critics have been keen to remark on the urgency with which Age of Iron confronts the immediate realities of the socio-historical situation in South Africa during the mid-1980s. Susan VanZanten Gallagher, for example, describes Coetzee as approaching the conventions of realism in the novel, pointing out that “[u]nlike any of his previous novels, Age of Iron is directly linked to a particular historical moment in South Africa” (1991: 194). David Attwell links that sense of historical engagement directly to the novel’s evocation of the racialized struggle for liberation, mentioning that “Age of Iron breaks ground which had been somewhat intractable in Coetzee’s previous novel, Foe […] here, ethnographic and class differences are revealed in their specific detail” (1998: 168). Attwell names especially “the novel’s social density, the graphic depictions of township violence” as signs of its historical realism (1998: 174). ⁴ And yet the infusion of realistic historical elements in the novel — the vivid depictions of struggle, the brutal violence of the apartheid machine — is not the only departure from Coetzee’s previous work that it enacts. Age of Iron also signals the arrival of what Jarad Zimbler identifies as a “spiritual register” (2014: 197) in Coetzee’s writing: an appeal to transcendent realities that feels more sincere, or less cloaked in a mood of ironic detachment, than evocations of the otherworldly in his previous novels (2014: 176). Zimbler takes a stylistic approach to tracing the emergence of a transcendental appeal in Age of Iron, ⁵ relating it explicitly to the aesthetic dimension of the novel. Thus, Mrs Curren’s appeal to the soul is not used “to name a particular metaphysical entity”, but rather “to evoke an otherwise occluded zone of existence” (2014: 177), one which has to do with “the power of fiction as fiction, art as art”, or more specifically with “the capacity of fiction — indeed the work of art — to produce the truth content of a particular moment” (2014: 197). As the details of life in South Africa during the “state of emergency” period come more brutally into focus, it seems, so too the insistence of a reality beyond the vagaries of historical circumstance — a transcendent ideal that manifests in the writing as a capacity for aesthetic experience — speaks ever more forcefully.

Age of Iron was first published in 1990. It is, in the words of Mike Marais, a “stark, yet full, depiction of the indigence and distortion of life under apartheid” (2009: 103). The novel presents itself to us in the form of a letter, addressed by the protagonist, Mrs Curren, a former classics professor, to her unnamed daughter, who has turned her back on the petrification of life in apartheid South Africa and made a new life for herself in America. In the letter, Mrs Curren describes the events which befall her during the last days of her life, from the moment when she is diagnosed with terminal cancer, to what may or may not be read as the moment of her death. It is a period in her life that coincides with the arrival of a stranger, a vagrant who goes by the name of Vercueil and who takes up intermittent residence in her home. Apart from her relationship with Vercueil, the narrative also portrays her growing involvement in the life of Florence, her domestic worker, and of Florence’s family. It is an involvement that draws her from her secluded life in the suburbs of Cape Town into a confrontation with the naked realities of the struggle against apartheid, and consequently into an involvement that occasions a dramatic shift in her perception of what it means to be alive in her particular time and place. In short, Mrs Curren is drawn from her sheltered life spent in the company of the classics and brought face-to-face with the demand for accountability that is made by the political situation in the country.

The novel resonates quite strongly, as I have mentioned, with Fanon’s description of the transformational period that precedes the outbreak of a revolution. This is most evident in the realistic depictions of civil unrest and confrontation between the security forces and the budding revolutionaries, who are typified in this instance by Florence’s son Bheki and his ambiguously named friend, “John” (Coetzee, 2010: 147). ⁶ It is also evident, if less overtly so, in the confrontation which is staged for us in Mrs Curren’s sustained belief in the importance of speaking in her own voice — a belief that derives from her immersion in classical literature and expresses itself as a concern for the passing of her individual soul — and the realization that this tradition has not furnished her with a sufficient response to the pressing demands of the socio-historical reality that defines her life. The shift of values and behaviour which characterizes the larger socio-political period of transition in which the story takes place is thus intertwined in very complex ways with her private musings concerning her passage towards death.

I refer to one of the key passages in the book to demonstrate my point. The passage occurs as one of the various soliloquies that Mrs Curren delivers to Vercueil concerning the meaning of her death. She begins by saying that, in the face of the shame that attends her life by virtue of having lived as a person privileged by the oppressive regime, the most she has hoped for is an honourable death, “honesta mors” (164), a notion that derives directly from her classical education. ⁷ Then she goes on:

What I did not know, what I did not know — listen to me now! — was that the price was even higher. I had miscalculated. Where did the mistake come in? It has something to do with honor, with the notion I clung to through thick and thin, from my education, from my reading, that in his soul the honorable man can suffer no harm. I strove always for honor, for a private honor, using shame as my guide. As long as I was ashamed I knew that I had not wandered into dishonor. That was the use of shame: as a touchstone, something that would always be there, something you could come back to like a blind person, to touch, to tell you where you were. (165)

Mrs Curren is aware here that there is something wrong with the “notion” of honour that she has clung to like a “blind person”, despite the evidence of her senses; that is to say, despite the challenges which the realities of circumstance may have levelled at it. Her notion of honour has sprung untempered from her immersion in the classics and taken up residence as a universal value in her moral being. Her description of the value of honour, of the value of the value, so to speak, reads like a truism: “in his soul the honorable man can suffer no harm”. In its generalization of gender (“the honorable man can suffer no harm”), the truism reveals a marked lack of particularity in Mrs Curren’s notion of honour; or, to put it differently, it shows us to what extent the idea of “a private honor” has taken root in her being without in fact being aware that it is her being in which it has taken root.

This is rather perplexing, because along with its emphasis on the individual soul (“in his soul the honorable man can suffer no harm”), it suggests that the idea of honour, taken by Mrs Curren as is from her classical education, does not concern itself much with the situation of the particular soul in which it resides. As a vehicle for honour, it seems, one individual soul is as good as another. What counts is not the actual, de facto private honour of a particular soul, but rather the idea of private honour, disembodied, interchangeable from being to being. What Mrs Curren seems to signal here is an awareness of her embeddedness in an irredeemably Western system of cultural transmission. When Fanon tells us that the rebellious native turns his back on the preaching of individualism, we may understand it as his perception that what is being taught is not any concern for this or that particular soul, but rather an attempt to transmit and further entrench those self-serving Western values of which the oppressor is the inheritor and master. Mrs Curren’s musing on the meaning of her own life and death thus becomes interlaced with the larger rejection of cultural values that characterizes the historical moment of resistance in which her life takes shape.

Sauve qui peut

There is a certain phrase in the novel — or a trope, if you will — that seems to encapsulate the transmission of the value of individualism that characterizes the oppressive society to which Mrs Curren belongs. At the beginning of the narrative, when Mrs Curren discovers the terminal nature of her illness, her doctor tells her: “We will do everything we can […] we will tackle this together” (4). However, she is not convinced. Here are her thoughts on the matter: “[A]lready, behind the comradely front, I could see he was withdrawing. Sauve qui peut. His allegiance to the living, not the dying” (4). Her concern in this particular instance has to do with the private matter of her death, rather than with the cultural transmission of the philosophy of individualism which I have been describing. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the motto she selects for the tribal allegiance in which she and the doctor have their common being is precisely one that emphasizes the well-being of the individual above all else: “sauve qui peut”, save yourself. This phrase, with its allusion to a state of savage disorder, has a rich and manifold significance for various aspects of the novel. I would like to focus specifically on its encapsulation and transmission of the idea that each person is responsible, in the final analysis, when things have fallen apart, for the well-being of his or her own individual soul.

Let us consider first the extent to which this value of self-preservation (and its twin, self-reliance) functions as a description of the larger society to which Mrs Curren belongs. We have already noted that it exists as a sort of unspoken code between her and the doctor, an acknowledgement that that which underlies their performance of camaraderie is the recognition that there exists no true obligation to care for the other. It is an attitude that resurfaces when Mrs Curren visits the injured young friend of Bheki in the hospital — the same friend who is later killed by the police — and has a vision of white people as “a herd of sheep […] milling around on a dusty plain”, uttering “the same bleating call in a thousand different inflections: ‘I!’ ‘I!’ ‘I!’” (80). Elsewhere, in a passage of considerable satirical bite, Mrs Curren rails against the flight of the rich and the powerful from the “worm-riddled ship” of the apartheid state, which is “clearly sinking” (128) — a description in which it is hard not to hear the resonant cry of sauve qui peut! as a vindication of the rights of self-preservation. Suffice to say that the value which privileges individualism and responsibility to the self is an integral aspect of Mrs Curren’s criticism of the culture from which she has emerged, and from which she tries so hard to distance herself. It is this political sense of individualism that riles the spirit of the revolutionaries, and which Mrs Curren herself finds so despicable in the cultural belief system of the apartheid overlords.

Yet in the aforementioned speech that she makes to Vercueil — a speech in which she is trying her best to come to terms with the meaning of her position as a voiceless old woman on the point of dying — we find that the one thing she wishes to communicate to those who will not hear her, the one value that captures the message she wishes to transmit before she goes, is precisely this value of sauve qui peut. Specifically, when she thinks of Florence’s daughters imbibing the lesson of “Freedom or death!” (163) — the battle cry of the young revolutionaries — she wants nothing more than to cry out to them: “No! […] Save yourselves!” (163). That which forms the basis of her criticism against the petrifying regime of apartheid and that which has stripped her of her voice from the opening pages of the book, namely the value which justifies the promotion of self-interest above any other concern, is the same value she wishes to transmit with her dying breath, so to speak.

What we have here is the confounding ambiguity of a criticism that is at the same time an assertion of that which it wishes to criticize. It is an ambiguity, I would suggest, that emerges from the complex intertwining of the two distinct spheres of transition that inform the structure of the narrative, namely: 1) the socio-historical collapse of the political regime (that which I have described, following Fanon, as the pre-revolutionary state); and 2) Mrs Curren’s passage from the land of the living to the land of the dead, a transitional stage that draws extensively on classical and mythico-religious topoi for its imagery. The referential ambiguity of the notion of sauve qui peut, the fact that it serves at once to criticize the oppressive mentality of individualism and to assert the rights of the living soul, results from this double-situatedness of the subject who speaks it, Mrs Curren.

Critics have drawn attention to Coetzee’s subtle negotiation of the complications that surround the positioning of the subject in writing, and its implications for what might broadly be described as an ethics of community. Patrick Hayes, for example, is especially preoccupied, in his book J. M. Coetzee and the Novel, with what he sees as the capacity of Coetzee’s writing to transform our understanding of what political community entails. Hayes argues that Coetzee’s prose style — a style that he describes as “jocoserious” (2010: 4), pointing to Coetzee’s borrowing of the term from Joyce in his essay on Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, and that he traces in particular to Coetzee’s assimilation of the “comic energies of Beckett” (2010: 11) — constitutes an approach that is “most truly amenable to an anti-foundational imagining of moral community” (2010: 71). It is an approach that “tries to hold open, and bring about dialogue between divergent ideas of what makes for a good community” (2010: 130). Hayes describes the position of the self in relation to the other that is brought about by Coetzee’s writing as a position in which fixed identities are resisted in favour of an indefinitely sustained and “potentially transformative alertness to […] the difference the other might bring” (2010: 30) — a situation, in turn, that invites a re-imagining of how people relate to each other in political communities. If we follow Hayes’s thought here, we can read the ambiguity of Mrs Curren’s position in the novel as an attempt to hold open the notion of individual subjective being while at the same time allowing that being to be infused with or altered by the culturally specific and materially distinct aspects of her particular socio-historical environment.

Carrol Clarkson provides another perspective on the ambiguous positioning of the subject in Coetzee’s writing when she considers, in a chapter in her book Countervoices that is dedicated to the topic of voice, the “importance” that is accorded in Coetzee’s work to “the speaker’s construction of the place from which he or she speaks” (2009: 78). Clarkson arrives at the conclusion, via a consideration of Coetzee’s engagement with Bakhtin and Erasmus, that “even when all rhetorical and narrative strategies are purposely deployed to disturb the attributing of positions and dispositions to speakers and listeners, to writers and readers, still the writing seems to effect the realization of an authorial voice” (2009: 97; emphasis in original). While the focus of Clarkson’s argument concerns specifically “the positions and dispositions of the writer and reader” (2009: 78), I believe it is also possible to draw on her thought here to elaborate on the peculiar ambiguity of Mrs Curren’s role in the two distinct domains that give shape to her life. That is to say, by virtue of the paradox that inheres in Mrs Curren’s speech concerning the value of individualism, we are able to see her as someone who occupies a sort of fold between the cultural and artistic heritage of the West, on the one hand, and the contingencies of her historical reality, on the other, and furthermore that this position enables her to resist the potentially oppressive tendencies of both those domains (or enables her to still have a voice). What it comes down to, I suggest, is that Mrs Curren’s voice in the novel is precisely one in which the conflict between individual expression and collective, revolutionary purpose is given scope to articulate itself.

“A toothless whisper sticky with sibilants”

To explain what I mean, I turn once more to the aforementioned speech that Mrs Curren makes to Vercueil. Directly after she has expressed her wish to tell Florence’s daughters that they must not heed the call to revolution, she bemoans the fact that she has no voice in which to speak, no voice that entitles her to an audience:

“Whose is the true voice of wisdom, Mr. Vercueil? Mine, I believe. Yet who am I, who am I to have a voice at all? How can I honorably urge them to turn their back on that call? What am I entitled to do but sit in a corner with my mouth shut? I have no voice; I lost it long ago; perhaps I have never had one. I have no voice, and that is that. The rest should be silence. But with this — whatever it is — this voice that is no voice, I go on. On and on.”

Was Vercueil smiling? His face was hidden. In a toothless whisper sticky with sibilants I went on. (164)

To my mind, this passage gives distinct expression to the notion of a voice that persists despite its constitutional impossibility, or despite the rhetorical emphasis on the fact that there exists no legitimate position for it from which to speak. But what kind of voice is it that continues to speak despite the fact that it has no place? It is certainly an evocatively described voice: “a toothless whisper sticky with sibilants”. I would recommend to the reader to read the speech out loud, to him- or herself, in a “toothless whisper sticky with sibilants”, in order to experience the measure of pathos that attaches to Mrs Curren’s words if we hear it in that voice. It is an uncanny and mesmerizing voice, one that is haunting as much as it is comic. In a very material sense, then, a very vivid sense, this voice that has the properties and dimensions of a real voice finds its way to us from a position that is all but untenable in the politically fraught environment from which it speaks.

However, that is not all there is to it. The qualifiers that attach to this particular voice, namely “toothless”, “whisper”, “sticky”, and “sibilants”, all resonate in very particular and meaningful ways with the textual plane from which it speaks. I would like to consider each of them in turn, to appreciate in full the measure of this voice that speaks where no voice is possible. First, we have “toothless”, which evokes for us the graphic image of Mrs Curren as an aged and destitute person, one who has just had a stick poked into her mouth by street children in search of gold dentures (159; 161). It also suggests, to speak metaphorically for a moment, the lack of bite in her words, reflecting the non-authoritarian position from which she speaks.

The next qualifier is “whisper”, which has the curious effect of combining Mrs Curren’s lack of authority with the force of penetration. That is to say, despite the desiccation of her voice — despite its having been stripped of the full-bodied resonance of the vocal chords — it is still a voice of some potency. It is a voice that gains its expressive quality precisely from its threadbare existence. As such, it is a voice that reflects Coetzee’s notion of the voice of the writer in apartheid South Africa, namely that it suffers from a “stuntedness and deformity” (Coetzee, 1992: 98) as an inevitable result of its psychic association with the “unnatural structures of power that define the South African state” (1992: 97).

The “stickiness” of the voice seems to recall — gratuitously, perhaps, but also to remind us of the material reality of her situation — the aforementioned stick that has been pushed into her mouth. More than that, however, it appears to insist on the peculiar staying power, or persistence, of her voice. A “sticky” voice is a voice that inserts itself into the cracks between the official avenues of discourse and binds together the disparate elements that may have fallen by the wayside of that discourse. It is thus a voice that provides a space for the subject that finds itself in the no man’s land between the oppressive rhetoric of politics and the neutered classical heritage which is its inheritance.

The fourth qualifier, namely the “sibilance” of the toothless whisper, takes us back, I would suggest, to that classical heritage, by way of a detour through modernism. In the passage quoted above, Mrs Curren insists that hers is the “true voice of wisdom”; and furthermore, that with her voice of wisdom, a “voice that is not a voice”, she goes on: “On and on” (164). A disembodied voice that despite itself cannot refrain from preaching its wisdom and that belongs to an old woman who is somewhere between life and death, beyond the pale; a voice that speaks in “sibilants”: to my mind, this voice recalls the Sibyl of Cumae, who furnishes the epigraph to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Coetzee’s indebtedness to Eliot is evident from the way in which Eliot frequently resurfaces in his writing (I have in mind here especially the pivotal role that Eliot plays in Youth [2003], and Coetzee’s essay on the classic discussed above, “What is a Classic?: A Lecture”), and it is not my purpose here to draw an extensive comparison between Mrs Curren and the unhappily immortal seer of Cumae. What I would like to draw attention to, rather, is the implication that the notion of the classic is refracted in Age of Iron through the collapse of structural integrity that is characteristic of Eliot’s emblematic poem. In his guide to the poem, C. J. D. Harvey puts it thus:

The metaphorical “Waste Land” in which the entire poem is enacted is waste, both physically and spiritually, because its inhabitants do not want to live and yet they will not die and “let go” of their individual identities, the only things they can attach value to, either. (1978: 7)

Mrs Curren’s ambiguous attachment to the idea of “individual” identity, which has been challenged quite severely, as we have seen, by the discourse of the pre-revolutionary state, as well as by her own personal disgust at the self-serving ideology of the oppressive classes, now acquires another dimension through its association with the modernist questioning of those values which have been inherited from the cultural tradition of Western thought. What she appears to be resisting is the censure against individual voice that is implicit in both the practice of high modernism and the political realities of the environment in which she has her being. It is indeed not an enviable position from which to speak the meaning of one’s death.

In Clarkson’s aforementioned study of Coetzee, she emphasizes the persistence of a singular authorial voice despite the contingency of that voice on the cultural and historical milieu that gives it shape (2009: 105). She makes the point that it is precisely the fact of the voice’s responsiveness to the various layers of discourse which make up its habitat that allows us to identify that voice as a position from which it is possible to speak (2009: 105). A different way of saying this is that the singularity of a voice is constituted precisely in the inflection that it gives to the multiple demands that is made on it by its environment. In the case of Mrs Curren, then, we might say that her resistance does not take the form of asserting her individualistic ideals despite the stone-faced collectivism of the revolutionaries, or despite the perversion of Western culture that is the ideology of the apartheid state, or despite the structural collapse of subjective autonomy that is implicit in the artistic productions of high modernism. Rather, we could say that her resistance, or even her defiance, lies in her willingness to include these historical and cultural realities in her discourse, to articulate that which is foreign to her sympathies in her own voice.

Imaginative possibilities

In his treatise on the art of poetry, Aristotle places considerable emphasis on the distinction between the modes of diction that are appropriate to the rhetorician and historian, and those that are appropriate to the poet. The difference between poetic truth and historical truth, he writes, is that “it is not the poet’s function to describe what has actually happened, but the kinds of thing that might happen, that is, that could happen because they are, in the circumstances, either probable or necessary” (Aristotle, 1965: 43). I would like to suggest that Mrs Curren’s resistance entails the safeguarding, or re-invigoration, of precisely such a position, namely one in which it is possible to engage in an imaginative exploration of the multiple possibilities that are contained in the realities of circumstance. It is a resistance, as we have seen, that involves a fraught and often violent intrusion of socio-historical realities into the scope of that which is spoken about, and which becomes more potent precisely because it makes space for those intrusions.

What I have tried to demonstrate in this reading of Age of Iron, then, is that we might conceive of Mrs Curren’s position in the novel as the embodiment of a sort of poetics of resistance. It is a position that can be defined as the struggle to define her own voice despite her awareness, in the face of approaching death, of the contingency of her being on the oppressive dictates of the society that surrounds her. The signature that signs off Mrs Curren’s long letter to her daughter tells us that she began writing it in 1986. It is a date, as Kannemeyer observes in his biography of Coetzee, which corresponds to the “genesis” of the novel itself (2012: 444), thus providing us with a historical contingency that feeds well into my argument. I refer to two articles that Coetzee published in The New York Review of Books in 1985 and 1986 respectively. The first article, “Satyagraha in Durban”, is a straightforward literary review of a novel by Sheila Fugard, namely A Revolutionary Woman. It is a scathing review, and in it Coetzee criticizes the novel for its “failure of craft” (1985: 3) and its apparent lack of historical awareness. ⁸ The second article, “Waiting for Mandela” (Coetzee, 1986), is, among other things, a review of a work of non-fiction by Richard John Neuhaus, namely Dispensations: The Future of South Africa as South Africans See It. In that article, Coetzee evinces a considerable working knowledge of and insight into the political complexities of the ANC and its dealings with the apartheid state. Taken together, these two pieces seem to point to the level of historical engagement that Coetzee envisions as the proper responsibility of the novelist. They also indicate — if we consider what Age of Iron excludes, that is, a political response to the political problems of the nation — that he does not quite conceive of creative expression as an efficacious tool in the service of political justice. As the novel progresses, we begin to see that a personal voice, in its literary form, is not simply a matter of finding a place from which to speak that is unaffected by, or protected from, the discomfiting realities of the social milieu in which one lives and breathes. On the contrary, the voice becomes more poignant, more powerful and affecting, if we conceive of it as a literary imprint that carries the fine traces of its author’s personal inclinations and desires, but that weaves its patterns from the pressing — and frequently antagonistic — socio-historical realities in which those desires come to life. ⁹

There is an early essay by Coetzee that sheds additional light on the strategy of resistance that thus finds an expression, in my reading, in Age of Iron. The essay in question (“Nabokov’s Pale Fire and the Primacy of Art”, 1974) attempts to untangle, systematically but also perhaps mock-systematically, the various layers of illusion in Nabokov’s inventive story about critical interpretation gone awry. Nabokov’s novel, writes Coetzee, makes use of a double irony (it pokes fun at its own conspicuous method of writing a novel that consists almost entirely of exegesis [1974: 6]) in order to protect itself from literary–critical interpretations that would seek to explicate it (or “reduce” it [1974: 4]) according to some other, external field of meaning (the main culprit in this case being psychoanalysis [1974: 4]). Coetzee’s verdict is that the true hero of Nabokov’s novel, lurking behind the layers of irony, is “the imagination personified and triumphant”:

The ideal of Pale Fire is a Symbolist ideal: a state of being in which, having incorporated into itself all possible interpretations of itself, the work of art has, like a closed system of mirrors, shut itself off forever from interpretation and become a monument of unageing intellect. (1974: 6)

However, it turns out that Nabokov’s clever method for resisting the reduction of art to an auxiliary role within a larger explicatory framework — his anti-reductionism, we might say — is at best a temporary measure. Every act of exegesis, including Nabokov’s ironically subversive application of it in Pale Fire (1992/1962), is itself open to “the endless exegesis of the meta-myth we call history”, and “[b]y incorporating the exegesis into the fiction we do not escape history, we merely pre-empt its first stage” (Coetzee, 1974: 6). Coetzee’s reading of Pale Fire thus stakes out a confrontational relationship between the autonomy of imaginative expression, on the one hand, and the force of historical determination, on the other — a force, in Coetzee’s view, that neuters the potency of the imagination by roping it in as a supplement to its own material ends. Seen from this angle, Coetzee’s incorporation of the pressures of socio-historical determination in Age of Iron — and, more precisely, his persistent staging of the irreducible rivalry between that determination and the ideal of autonomous creative expression — becomes an attempt, no less committed than Nabokov’s, to outwit the indifferent judgement of history, but also to prevent his writing from falling into a kind of postmodern insularity (or from becoming an internally signifying “closed system of mirrors”). What we are left with instead is a literary work that responds in full — that is to say, imaginatively and with pathos — to the historical situation of its setting, without sacrificing the singularity of its own voice.