Age of Iron Essay Questions

Coetzee never reveals Vercueil's race. What could be the significance of this omission?

Issues of race relations, segregation, and white privilege are so central to the thematic framework of Age of Iron that Coetzee's omission of Vercueil's race must hold significance. Vercueil is repeatedly defined by his position outside of society. Curren refers to his yellow eyes and fanged teeth (3), and she makes frequent reference to him as some kind of otherworldly being, like an angel. When he finds her stranded on the sidewalk, she says, "When would the time come when the jacket fell away and great wings sprouted from his shoulders?" (161)

Vercueil is, in addition to being cast as inhuman and otherworldly, the only main character exempt from the "age of iron." He escapes the description of being "like iron," a description applied to Florence, Bheki and John, Curren's daughter, and Curren herself at different points in the novel. Curren writes of Vercueil, "He watches but does not judge. Always a faint haze of alcohol about him. Alcohol, that softens, preserves" (82). Vercueil is of an entirely different material. To ascribe race to him, to position him, a nomad, with no definite origin, into the political framework of apartheid, would be to complicate him out of belonging to, as Attwell writes, "a class or caste of 'othered' souls who carry the pollution away" (382). In this case, "carrying the pollution away" manifests as Mrs. Curren's striving toward some sort of absolution.

What is the effect of Age of Iron's epistolary form?

Age of Iron is written in the first person, from the perspective of Mrs. Curren. By writing the novel in the first person, Coetzee introduces a whole constellation of sociopolitical factors into the text, all tied to Curren's identity. In a novel about a white, middle-class South African, who also happens to be a retired classics professor, Curren's identity is essential to the thematic framework of the novel. Coetzee not only speaks through her but is able to speak against her historical position through her. By having her address her daughter, Coetzee introduces yet another perspective for his readers to contend with.

From a plot perspective, it makes sense that Curren would be writing all of this to her daughter. It is an opportunity for an uninterrupted rendering of "her side of the story" in the time she has left after receiving her terminal diagnosis.

Is Curren's confession effective? Does she attain absolution? Why/why not?

Even toward the end of Part 3 of the novel, as Curren wakes up in the woods with Mr. Vercueil after the police have murdered John in her house, she says to him, "It is a confession I am making here, this morning, ... as full a confession as I know how. I withhold no secrets. I have been a good person, I freely confess to it. I am a good person still. What times these are when to be a good person is not enough!" (165) Even at the end of the novel, Curren clearly demonstrates shortcomings in her ability to own up to her level of complicity in apartheid. Her conception of what it means to be a "good person" remains unchanged, even here. Even resorting to such broad terminology—to right versus wrong, good versus bad—demonstrates her sustained failure to completely confess. Moreover, the type of absolution Curren seems to target can only be achieved after death; this could be why it takes a terminal diagnosis for her to frantically pursue absolution.

What is the significance of Curren's career and expertise?

By making Curren a retired classics professor, Coetzee is able to incorporate major Western texts and philosophy into the framework of the novel. In so doing, Coetzee can interrogate these texts and demonstrate, through Curren, how they uphold colonialism—how they, in fact, supply the tenets of colonialism. The irony of Curren's former profession is that, in trying to engage with the rising generation of Black South Africans, she only has "dead" texts, predominantly white, Western texts, to direct her engagement. She often refers to Greek and Roman metaphors to make sense of the current situation in South Africa, but Coetzee shows how these metaphors continually fail, even when Curren is unable to see it herself. In her dream, she envisions Florence as Aphrodite, but in relating the dream back to Vercueil, notes that "Florence has nothing to do with Greece" (179). Curren is unable to totally divest herself from her worldview, even as she begins to understand its limits.

Discuss the significance of motherhood in Age of Iron.

There is a conspicuous absence of fathers in Age of Iron. Curren barely refers to her late husband, the father of the daughter to which the entire novel is addressed. Florence's husband, William, is only ever conveyed second-hand in a hazy memory of Curren's, and even then, most of his character is a total invention and projection of what Curren believes him to be. She doesn't actually know the man.

But when Curren attempts to understand the rising generation of Black South Africans through a fraught discourse with Florence, Florence says, "I cannot tell these children what to do.... It is all changed today. There are no more mothers and fathers" (39). Curren refuses to accept this statement. She cannot believe that an orphaned generation can rise. But Curren is clearly only interested in the maintenance of matrilineal lines. A main reason she begins her confessional narrative is to fight death, to leave parts of her behind to live on and be read, reread, and carried by her daughter after she dies. Through the lineage of motherhood, Curren believes a person can be preserved; and only through motherhood, as she suggests near the end of the novel: "You say you will have no more children. The line runs out, then, in these two boys, seed planted in the American snows..." (195). Though the boys could carry on a family name, they end the matrilineal line drawn from Curren's mother, to Curren, and on to her daughter. This is why Curren holds on to the story of her mother sleeping under the stars by the Piesang River: to do her part in preserving her ancestors.