Writing to the Future : J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990)

Abstract

This chapter examines Mrs. Curren’s single long letter in J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron to investigate whether a reworked epistolary narrative can offer any meaningful concept of futurity, dialogue or truth in contexts governed by incommensurability. Coetzee’s novel is rarely described as an epistolary narrative, but Bower argues that Age of Iron takes us through the question of how to use European literary tools to write an epistolary narrative  in Africa—how to forge an adequate epistolary material that can say something about ‘how things are’ in ‘these times, in this place’. The chapter repositions this much-discussed novel by examining its relation to established traditions of ‘writing to the future’ (under conditions of incarceration, forced migration, foreign occupation and institutionalised racism). The chapter also reads the novel through its relation with Mariama Bâ’s epistolary novel So Long a Letter; through Coetzee’s position as an unwilling international literary spokesperson at a time of national crisis; through the importance of political capital in the South African literary field, with its apartheid censor, the changes in book publishing and the demands of a multinational publisher in a global literary marketplace.