Age of Iron as a Cultural Text: The Question of Apartheid and the Body

Abstract

This paper examines the interrelationship between the body and politics in J. M. Coetzee's 1990 novel Age ofIron from a cultural studies stand-point. Coetzee uses cancer as a trope for apartheid by way of suggesting theobscenity and fatality of such a system of segregation. Mrs. Curren, dying of cancer, metaphorically stands forthe social and cultural cancer of South Africa under apartheid. Coetzee's work, our argument is, turns out to berelevant not only because of its approach to the socio-historical realities of South Africa under apartheid, butbecause of its cultural conception of the body within a postmodern frame. The body is metaphorically treated asa trope for the body politic. This way, Coetzee establishes a strong relationship between the body and apostmodern, popular culture whereby the body becomes a text inscribed with cultural meanings and servingsociopolitical ends. Against Susan Sontag’s argument that illness is not a metaphor and that metaphoric thinkingis not healthy for the sick in her book Illness as Metaphor, we argue that metaphoric thinking about illness,untruthful as it might be, is still an apt means of sociopolitical commentary since we look at cancer and otherdiseases through an unavoidable metaphorical lens.