Decoding ageing in Age of iron by J.M. Coetzee

Mohammed Ahmeduddin

Decoding ageing in Age of iron by J.M. Coetzee

Authors
Mohammed Ahmeduddin

Abstract
John Maxwell Coetzee is an important South African writer of fiction and nonfiction and a Noble laureate. The present article tries to decode ageing, a very significant aspect of human life in the novel Age of Iron written by J.M. Coetzee. Age of Iron is the sixth novel by Coetzee published in the year 1990. The novel is set in late 1980s and deals with the Apartheid system and the atrocities committed on blacks by the whites. Mrs. Curren is both the protagonist and the narrator of the novel. Ageing studies can help us a great deal to understand the postcolonial condition as well as the tensions between the colonizer and the colonized. Mrs. Curren on the one hand is physically deteriorating into infirmity but on the other hand there is a moral rejuvenation or rebirth. Coetzee is successful in mixing two processes going on simultaneously in the life of Mrs. Curren. Through the character of Mrs. Curren, Coetzee seems to propose that the unavoidability of physical deterioration in ageing does not necessarily suggest a lowering of moral vision. Physical deformity can’t be a hurdle in political engagements for right reasons. Coetzee seems to suggest that ageing, far from being a process of moral degeneration, is rather a time of awakening to moral consciousness.

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