Content provided in partnership with
Age of bronze, state of grace: Music and dogs in Coetzee's Disgrace
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2000 by Attridge, Derek
"The age of iron. After which comes the age of bronze. How long, how long before the softer ages return in their cycle, the age of clay, the age of earth?" (Age of Iron 50). Mrs. Curren, writing to her daughter about the South Africa of the mid1980s in which she is slowly dying of cancer, views the grim panorama of devastated communities, callous authorities, and armed children through the lens of classical myth, Hesiod's account of the successive ages of men. She performs an odd reversal on the traditional sequence, however: she places the age of bronze after the age of iron in which she feels she is living, and which provides J.M. Coetzee with the title of his novel.' Unlike every previous novel by Coetzee, Age of Iron is set entirely in his native country at the time of its composition, the years of emergency laws and township warfare which in retrospect we see as the death throes of apartheid but which then felt like a nightmare without foreseeable end.
In the late 1990s, we find Coetzee at work on another compelling novel set in the South Africa of the time of composition? The struggle against the repressive, racist state is finally over, apartheid is a discredited policy of the past, and democratic government has finally been established. The age of iron is no more. Has South Africa re-entered at last one of those "softer ages" longed for by Mrs. Curren in her reinvention of Hesiod's creation narrative? The new novel, Disgrace, published in 1999, certainly suggests that the ten or twelve years that have passed since Mrs. Curren's dying days have indeed wrought a transformation in the country, but it's not easy to say what age we find ourselves in now. A time of rampant crime, inefficient police services, middle-classes barricaded into their fortress-homes: have we followed Mrs. Curren's inverted sequence and moved beyond iron only to reach bronze? "In this place, at this time" Coetzee's fiction has always had a mixed reception in South Africa, and its very success elsewhere in the world has increased the suspicion felt among some groups in his native country. Coetzee himself has insisted on the complexity of the relation between fiction and history, and his most astute critics have read the novels as in part exploring precisely that relation.3 Although he once wondered in an interview "whether it isn't simply that vast and wholly ideological superstructure constituted by publishing, reviewing and criticism that is forcing on me the fate of being a `South African novelist"' ("Two Interviews" 460), there can be no question about the ceaseless, intense engagement with the country and, more specifically, with its political and social history that has marked his writing. Nor should there ever have been any doubt about his strong opposition to the policies and practices of the Nationalist government in power between 1948 and 1994 and the older colonial traditions on which they were built, even though his fiction did not take the form of straightforward "resistance writing." In such works as "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" (one of the two novellas in Dusklands), with its memorable descriptions of colonial brutality; Waiting for the Barbarians, with its representation of a state apparatus relying on torture and cross-border raids; Life & Times of Michael K, with its imagined state of war in a future South Africa; and Age of Iron, with its vivid depiction of the violence in the townships and the systematic viciousness of the police, Coetzee, quite as much as any South African author, has registered for his time and for future generations the brutality, the anger, and the suffering of the apartheid era. After the democratic elections of 1994 and the sweeping ANC victory that brought Nelson Mandela from prison to the presidency, one might well have expected from his pen a novel with at least a tinge of celebration and optimism.
It's hardly surprising, then, that mixed in with the huge acclaim that has greeted Coetzee's far from affirmative new novel there have been expressions of annoyance and anger, especially from South African commentators.4 The overriding question for many readers is: does this novel, as one of the most widely disseminated and forceful representations of post-apartheid South Africa, impede the difficult enterprise of rebuilding the country? Does the largely negative picture it paints of relations between communities hinder the steps being made toward reconciliation? Is it a damagingly misleading portrait of a society that has made enormous strides in the direction of justice and peace? Even readers whose view of the artist's responsibility is less tied to notions of instrumentalism and political efficacy than these questions imply-and I include myself among these-may find the bleak image of the "new South Africa" I in this work hard to take, as I confess I do.
Nor is it possible to argue that the novel makes no claim to represent or criticize ANC-governed South Africa, that it's fundamentally the story of a group of individuals who happen to live in a particular place and time, the place and time in which the work was written. Quite apart from the fact that a novel dealing with relations between racially-defined groups set in immediately post-apartheid South Africa could hardly be read as having no interest in national issues, there are repeated references to the changed times and their impact on the way lives are now being lived. But what is new in this picture as Coetzee paints it, what are the changes that are making themselves felt in the workplace, on the farm, in the classroom? To what extent, in particular, are the assessments of the changes offered by characters in the novel interpretable as criticism of ANC policies, and of the national effort of reconciliation and regeneration more widely, as they filter through to the local level? What I propose to do by way of an introduction to some further questions about the novel and its relation to its historical and political context, and also as a way of recalling its narrative outline, is to devote some pages to an examination of a number of these references in the text to "the times" in which the characters find themselves living.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Reference
- Academe
- African American Review
- African Arts
- African Studies Review
- Afro-Americans in New York Life and History
- Alabama Heritage
- Alabama Review
- American Mathematical Monthly, The
- Anglican Theological Review
- Annals of Dyslexia
- Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ)
- Auk, The
- Australian Journal of Anthropology, The
- Christian Century
- Natural History