Abstract
Sonja Altnoder
The Self Embracing the Other in J. M. Coetzee's Novel Age of Iron
This paper explores a liberal white woman's passionate attempts at transcending the boundaries of categorical differences so as to create a greater alliance of Others in the struggle against apartheid illustrated by the recurrent motif of ‘embrace' in J. M. Coetzee's novel Age of Iron (1990). For the purpose of this paper, the protagonist's passion to embrace her Other(s) and be embraced by them in return shall be considered in the broader context of those emotions that lead humanity to greater achievements1. For with regard to the South African people's struggle against the repressive system of apartheid, it was and still is the passion to achieve something greater that provides the essential basis for a kaleidoscopic future to emerge in which the previously hierarchical relationship of domination can develop into a horizontal one of synchronisation so that finally, all people may enjoy equal rights and opportunities, so that finally, all voices may speak and be heard in their own right.
The protagonist Elizabeth Curren has been opposed to the lies and brutality of apartheid all her life; yet she has lived isolated from its true horrors. The disturbing events of the State of Emergency in the 1980's, however, force her to face and come to terms with her own responsibility. So on the threshold of death, Elizabeth Curren breaks her lifelong silence and actively reaches out to embrace the Others she encounters: her black domestic worker Florence, the township teacher Mr. Thabane and the vagabond Vercueil who has pitched camp in her garage. More importantly, however, she longs to be embraced by these Others in return so that she may find acknowledgement and confirmation of her subversive identity she has invented at the interface of the paradigms race and gender .
But as all these Others refuse to complete the embrace, Elizabeth Curren must eventually understand that every Other in her uniqueness – and consequently all these Others united in their diversity - will remain at best partially knowable and deficiently defined Selves in their own right to whom Elizabeth Curren herself will always be an equally strange and unfamiliar Other. T he ensuing uncertainty as to the respective Other's identity initially poses a threat to the Self's ontological safety because each subject's discursive construction of selfhood relies on a complementary discursively constructed otherness. Nevertheless, the awareness of this causal interdependence of Self and Other as well as of their mutual, simultaneous and ideally even symmetrical reversibility may promote mutual respect for and co-operative engagement with the incompletely known thus providing the opportunity to reconcile the irreconcilably different and proposing a creative way forward for a new post-apartheid South Africa.
1As Hegel puts it: “Ohne Leidenschaft [ist] nie etwas Großes, nie etwas Ruhmvolles geschehen, [wurde] nie ein großer Gedanke gedacht oder eine Handlung der Menschheit würdig vollbracht.” (quoted in Nischik 1998:13)