The impersonal forces of disease and death in J.M. Coetzee's Age of Iron

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper draws on the work of Gilles Deleuze to explore the generative and nonorganic power of disease and death as forces that enable an individual to encounter an impersonality in J. M. Coetzee's epistolary novel, Age of Iron. In Deleuze's theorisations, the experience of disease leads to self-dissolution, whereby the self becomes cracked and fragmented, and is opened to the suffering of others. In Coetzee's novel, societal illness is produced and forged by a racially segregated politics, an unequal economic system, and strident messages in the context of apartheid South Africa, which intersect with the protagonist Mrs. Curren's personal disease. By stressing the associative lines between personal and societal illness, I examine how Curren's ailing body becomes cracked, yet transforms into an impersonal dimension, as it folds and unfolds into the deaths of black people. In the process of (un)folding their deaths along with her dying, Curren further enacts and multiplies the impersonal time of the past-future conjunction. I thus demonstrate, through Deleuze's theorisations, how the power of Curren's physical frailty eventually generates an impersonality beyond personal suffering, in which black and white people move toward an impersonal space beyond the bifurcated world.