Flinging Accusations into the Teeth of the Wind: J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron and Emile Zola’s J’Accuse

Abstract

Written during South Africa’s State of Emergency, Age of Iron remains relatively unique within J.M. Coetzee’s oeuvre due to its employment of a seemingly more conventional realist aesthetic. Through the efforts of the protagonist, Mrs. Curren, to communicate the truth of ‘how [she] lived in these times, in this place’ (130), the novel profoundly engages with questions of personal responsibility, complicity, and culpability in contemporary South Africa, anticipating and preempting the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in making ethical sense of apartheid. In a novel replete with literary allusions, it is ultimately Curren’s reference to Emile Zola’s J’Accuse that provides a key to interpreting Age of Iron by positioning Zola’s famous letter as an important precursor and model to which Coetzee ambivalently writes back. Through a protagonist who seeks to apportion blame for the prevailing state of affairs in the nation, Coetzee’s novel depicts a contemporary South Africa plagued by a condition of metaphysical guilt. Ultimately, Age of Iron dramatizes the dilemma of the writer-intellectual at the end of the twentieth century who, like Zola, attempts to hold his or her society responsible for an unjust state of affairs, even when, in the words of Timothy Bewes, it is ‘no longer clear who is guilty and who isn’t…who needs atonement and who doesn’t’ (The Event of Postcolonial Shame 65).