Abstract
Patrick Hayes
'Coetzeean Comedy: Folly, Play, and the Political in Age of Iron.'
Much of the best recent criticism has sought to defend Coetzee's work from those who require a more demonstrative political commitment by emphasising its ethical seriousness; Age of Iron in particular has been likened, in the depth and intensity with which it stages Elizabeth Curren's encounters with alterity, to the philosophical projects of Levinas, Blanchot and Derrida. But in doing so, this approach has tended to underplay the comic, silly and even downright absurd aspects of the text - which, now that the immediate pressures of Apartheid have withdrawn, we might begin to appreciate. Vercueil may be an arrivant, but he is also a clown with an old hat, a silly grin, and a foolish young dog; Elizabeth may be grappling with alterity, but her complex ethical drama is as ignored and redundant as the mad Quixote's fine speeches on the plain of Montiel. My paper will argue that Age of Iron is a profoundly Erasmian text: that it is at its most serious and most engaged with the challenge of the political when it appears to be simply playing around, letting Folly have her say, allowing the clown to interrupt the proceedings.
The greatest Erasmian text is of course Don Quixote: Coetzee discussed this work in his Jerusalem Prize address of 1986, the year in which he began work on Age of Iron, and chose to align the status of the Novel in Africa with the absurd and old-fashioned "willed act of the imagination" made by Alonso Quixano. I will show how Coetzee makes Elizabeth into an Quixotic fool by forming her out of the topoi of the Richardsonian epistolary novel - a sub-genre surely as dated and redundant today as the chivalric romance in 1605. She sallies out in the car she names "Rocinante" to combat reality - now transformed into a genre she cannot recognise - as the modern incarnation of Richardson's Pamela (1740). I will compare Vercueil and his dog to the type of clowning role taken by Sancho Panza in Don Quixote, arguing that both works use clowning to create a zone of play between the sheer folly of the protagonist and the dour seriousness of what the Canon of Toledo called "verisimilitude" and what Bheki now insists - with considerable moral authority - is "real life".
Under the playful influence of Vercueil and his dog, Age of Iron becomes a
process of writing in which Elizabeth's searching ethical concerns and
lacerating self-doubt are neither centre-stage nor off-stage, but being
toyed into a new status within a fiction that is opening itself up to the
truly new. Speaking to David Attwell about why he could not endorse, as
Milan Kundera had, the novelistic legacy of Cervantes from his position in
South Africa, Coetzee remarked that his task lay instead in "imagining this
unimaginable, imagining a form of address that permits the play of writing
to start taking place." This type of play, through a Cervantian "form of
address", is surely of the utmost seriousness - never more than now that
Apartheid has fallen and the play of new invention can begin in earnest.