Abstract
Maisun Sharif
“Children's and Parents' Bodies: Ageing, Writing, Surviving – J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Age of Iron ”
Taking as examples two of J.M. Coetzee's novels, Disgrace (1999) and Age of Iron (1990), I will explore the relationship between the construction of identities, fictional bodies and narrative strategies in the texts. I will draw special attention to the process of ageing and to conflicts between the generations of parents and children.
The two novels are suited for a comparative analysis for various reasons. While the one text, Age of Iron , is set during the time of Apartheid and focuses on a particularly violent phase of it, the other, Disgrace , deals with the emergence of the “New South Africa” after the decisive elections in 1994. I shall therefore be able to examine the construction of individual and cultural identities against the background of historical change. A combined analysis also seems promising with regard to my central questions concerning bodies and voices, because the protagonists of both novels are confronted with the effects of disease and/or age on their bodies. They seek to gain stability and security by trying to leave a trace of their selves in the world after their death. In different ways they attempt to write their selves into the bodies of their daughters and wish to secure that they live on in the bodies of their children. Furthermore, they want to leave a body of words behind – in Mrs Curren‘s case her letter to her daughter, in David's case his chamber opera on Byron. Moreover, both texts negotiate the political situation in South Africa and the relationship between Self and Other with the example of a conflict between generations.
Disgrace , as well as Age of Iron , can be described as revolving around a triangular constellation between its protagonists and dealing with the importance of words – written as well as spoken – for the construction of identities. In Disgrace , I will emphasise the relationship between David Lurie and his daughter Lucy on the one hand, and the relationship between David and the female character he invents for his opera, Teresa Guiccioli, on the other hand. The opera is an important indicator for the development of David's as well as Lucy's identity. First of all, the opera serves as a means for David to find a voice of his own. But as the plot progresses it emerges that he can only draw nearer to that voice once he gives up his attempts to explain those who are Others to him: Lucy and Teresa. Only after he stops offering explanations for Lucy's behaviour (which she all rejects as misreadings of herself) and only after he stops giving his voice to Teresa does he experience a moment in which his fractured identity seems at least temporarily to be re-constructed. In a crucial scene he moves from singing and playing Teresa's part, that is from speaking for her, to listening to her. The effect of this scene is supported by the ending of the novel in which David accepts that he will live on not only through Lucy but also through the body of the child Lucy bears after the rape. Although the novel is far from ending on a happy note, it can be read as a positive conclusion of the text that David seems to have recognised the importance of speaking with and about the Other without speaking for the Other. This respectful and ethical approach towards the Other, as I would like to call it with reference to Lévinas, is constitutive for the Self, for the construction of individual as well as collective identities.
In Age of Iron , I will focus on the relationship between Mrs Curren, her daughter and Mr Vercueil. The letter, which Mrs Curren addresses to her daughter, but which is at the same time the fictional text addressed to its implied readers, is central to Mrs Curren's attempts of leaving a trace of herself after her death. She tries to escape her aching body with the words she writes down, but at the same time these words keep her alive, even create her. Her words evoke her body and it is the textual body of her letter that she leaves behind at the end of her life and at the end of the novel.
In his novels, Coetzee stresses the dynamic qualities of the construction of identities. He conceptualises identities as processes which remain unfinished. Stability, or fixity, is only ever achieved during short moments in time, which are aesthetically rendered as moments of epiphany. This instability of identities is at the same time presented as a source of insecurity and an opportunity for subversion or liberation.