Innocence
When Coetzee set out to write Age of Iron, he wrote early drafts from the perspective of a politically conscious, white South African son to his dying mother. In the early drafts, the novel was far more autobiographical and the point-of-view of the narrator recognizably resembled Coetzee, himself. As drafting continued, Coetzee located Mrs. Curren's voice, who he would later characterize as having a "totally untenable historical position," but who is also gradually becoming more aware of her historical position as a white, middle-class South African (Attwell).
In his early notes for Age of Iron, Coetzee writes, "It [the novel] must be about innocence. Historical innocence. How my mother, belonging to her generation in SA, was nevertheless innocent" (Coetzee Papers). Despite the radical changes of perspective that the novel went through from early drafts to its final form, the concepts of historical innocence, ignorance, and shelteredness by virtue of one's birth remain essential elements of the novel's thematic landscape. In the very first pages of Age of Iron, Curren specifies that she is not scared of the nomads and growing homeless population in Cape Town—she rather fears the "roaming gangs" of "sullen-mouthed boys, rapacious as sharks, on whom the first shade of the prison house is already beginning to close." Here, she's referring to the non-white children of apartheid; she then contrasts these "gangs" with their "white cousins," who she says are "soul-stunted too." She describes the white children in terms of the privileges they enjoy:
Swimming lessons, riding lessons, ballet lessons; cricket on the lawn; lives passed within walled gardens gaurded by bulldogs; children of paradise, blond, innocent, shining with angelic light, soft as putti. Their residence the limbo of the unborn, their innocence the innocence of bee grubs, plump and white, drenched in honey, absorbing sweetness through their soft skins. Slumbrous their souls, bliss-filled, abstracted. (p. 7)
Curren returns to this "grub" metaphor throughout the novel. The "grubs" take on a new life as Curren's perspective shifts. While, from the beginning, the "grub" metaphor denoted a "slumbrous" ignorance, the metaphor takes on an insidious, toxic connotation later in the narrative. When characterizing her bone cancer, Curren likens it to "insect eggs laid in the body of a host, now grown to grubs and implacably eating their host away" (64). Then, as Curren is driven through Guguletu and witnesses the fires, chaos, and misery there, she writes to her daughter, "Will we at least be allowed our Nirvana, we children of that bygone age? I doubt it. If justice reigns at all, we will find ourselves barred at the first threshold of the underworld. White as grubs in our swaddling bands, we will be dispatched to join those infant souls whose eternal whining Aeneas mistook for weeping" (92).
The "bee grub" metaphor for the historical innocence of liberal whites who ideologically oppose apartheid while, at the same time, benefitting from it, reaches a conclusion in Part 3, as Curren lays out on the sidewalk, driven from her home by the police who murdered John, soaked in urine and being prodded with sticks by little boys. Curren wonders how the skies and heavens have room for all of the departed souls, and then she cites Marcus Aurelius's hypothesis, that the souls all fuse together. "Death after death," says Curren. "Bee ash" (158).
In Part 4, Curren writes candidly to her daughter about her total absence of feelings for her grandchildren. She feels estranged from them, but moreover, she feels that their innocence, their shelter from their roots, will ultimately prevent them from attaining any sort of meaningful life. This shelter is symbolized by the orange floatation devices they wear in the photos her daughter sends her of her and her children swimming at a lake in the United States. Ultimately, Curren concludes that this "historical innocence" is not absolution: it is still complicity, but perhaps without intent.
Absolution
Closely related to the theme of innocence is that of absolution and salvation. While Curren's circumstances begin with a coincidence—she meets Vercueil on the same day that she learns she is dying—it is no coincidence that she spends the novel trying to locate her complicity in the oppression that's taken place in South Africa for more than a century. Curren is afraid to die without coming to terms with her own guilt, and before earning salvation she must, of course, understand what crimes she is guilty of in the first place. In "Classical Cultures and Languages in J.M. Coetzee's Age of Iron," Gillian Dooley argues that Curren "is profoundly influenced by ideas of salvation and the soul," but that Curren's version of salvation, while primarily Christian in character, is also informed by a doctorate and decades of study on classicism, and that "her consciousness is steeped in a discourse ranging across three thousand years of European culture, dating back at least as far as Hesiod, from whom the title originates" (102).
Curren's preoccupation with salvation and the notion of crossing over into an afterlife is clearly informed by several religions and traditions. She is not sure which will end up being true, if any. But she does allow the possibility of an afterlife to deeply inform her decisions at the end of her life. For example, she refuses to check into a hospital because she wants to cross a metaphorical river, an image evocative of the Styx, the river one must cross "into the pagan Underworld" (Dooley). On the other hand, Curren also refers to Nirvana and limbo, referring to the afterlives of countless Eastern religions and Christian purgatory. Curren refuses to check into a hospital because, she tells Vercueil, "they will put me to sleep. ... That way I will never cross. I cannot allow it to happen. I have come too far. I cannot have my eyes closed" (179). Curren holds out hope that by enduring the pain, by staying out of the hospital and dying at home, she will gain some sort of absolution or salvation that she otherwise would not.
Classics/Antiquity
Mrs. Curren is a retired professor of classics. Throughout the novel, she explicates etymologies, sprinkles in Latin phrases, and recites Virgil. In the throes of trying to convince John to abandon his cause and let go of his idea of "comradeship," which Curren insists is nothing more than a "mystique of death" (150), she cites Thucydides. She tells John that if he were to take her Thucydides class, he "might have learned something about what can happen to our humanity in a time of war. Our humanity, that we are born with, that we are born into" (80).
In "Mother: Age of Iron," David Attwell writes of Coetzee's 1988 revisionary progress, "Coetzee was now able to write himself into the voice of Mrs. Curren. No longer the grieving son but the intellectual and fellow humanist, Coetzee was able to develop Mrs. Curren's classicism ... giving cultural weight to her approaching death" (389). Curren's academic background aligns her with Western exceptionalism, which is why she so often refers to a constellation of Greek and Roman metaphors to make sense of the current situation in South Africa; the problem is, these metaphors continually fail her. 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). Clearly, Curren is unable to shake her worldview, even as she begins to understand its limits.
She often filters her experiences through the lens of Greek and Roman mythologies, most frequently referring to the Aeneid. When Curren moves through the mist, smoke, and chaos of Site C, the scene is highly reminiscent of Aeneas's journey through the underworld (Dooley). But, returning to her gradual understanding of the obsoletion of her classics background, when Vercueil asks Curren in the final scenes of the novel, "What is Latin," she responds simply, "A dead language ... a language spoken by the dead" (191). By the time the life leaves her body, Curren seems at least aware that Latin and Greek and Roman myths are of little use to the rising generation of South Africa.
Motherhood
Age of Iron is acutely concerned with parenthood and more specifically, motherhood. Through Curren, Coetzee tracks a lineage of women through the transference of consciousness, which Curren proposes is what motherhood is. Given that the novel originated as a personal exploration of Coetzee's, an attempt to come to grips with his own and his mother's social and historical position in apartheid South Africa, it is no surprise that Age of Iron dwells on the subject of motherhood.
When Curren shares with Vercueil her mother's story about camping under the stars by the Piesangs River, she tells him, "Years after my mother's death I visited Plettenberg Bay and saw the Piesangs River for the first time. Not a river at all, just a trickle of water choked with reeds, and mosquitoes in the evenings, and a caravan park full of screaming children and fat barefoot men in shorts braaiing sausages over gas cookers. Not Paradise at all" (18). But later, when Curren refers to the story to her daughter, she relates it to the letter she writes to her:
In this letter from elsewhere (so long a letter!), truth and love together at last. In every you that I pen love flickers and trembles like Saint Elmo's fire; you are with me not as you are today in America, not as you were when you left, but as you are in some deeper and unchanging form: as the beloved, as that which does not die. It is the soul of you that I address, as it is the soul of me that will be left with you when this letter is over. Like a moth from its case emerging, fanning its wings: that is what, reading, I hope you will glimpse: my soul readying itself for further flight. (129)
By retelling the story of her mother sleeping under the stars, Curren is able to keep her mother alive. In writing this letter to her daughter, Curren hopes that she, her daughter, will keep these stories with her as evidence of her, Curren's, being. In this way, Coetzee weaves motherhood into another important theme of Age of Iron, which is mortality and immortality.
Curren refers to her motherhood as a source of authority. When she tries to appeal to John to leave his cause, she says, "You do not believe in words. You think only blows are real, blows and bullets. But listen to me: can't you hear that the words I speak are real? Listen! They may only be air, but they come from my heart, from my womb" (145). And when she appeals to Florence to pull Bheki out of the movement, she appeals to her as a fellow mother—even as she grasps with the fact that her and Florence's experiences of motherhood vastly differ. Coetzee is interested in how individuals inherit their perspectives, and he draws these connections along matrilineal lines. Note the conspicuous absence of mention of Curren's husband. Florence's husband, William, is largely absent in Curren's understanding of Florence and her children because he is always away at work, slaughtering chickens, a job relegated to him by apartheid policies.
Mortality
It comes as no surprise that mortality is a major theme of a novel that begins with the protagonist receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis. From page one, Curren grapples with the grim notion of her own death. A major reason why she writes is to fight death, to leave parts of her behind to live on and be read, reread, and carried by her daughter long after she is gone. Through the lineage of motherhood, Curren proposes 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 between Curren's mother, Curren, and her daughter.
Curren explains to her daughter that one of the trade-offs of taking the pain medication, though it helps her sleep and gives her some relief, is that she can't write when she takes it. So, she alternately suffers pain to allow herself enough writing sessions to satisfy her need to preserve her thoughts for after she dies. In a way, Curren trades life for life after death, bartering pain for the chance to write. She tells her daughter:
Death may be the last great foe of writing, but writing is also the foe of death. Therefore, writing, holding death at arm's length, let me tell you that I meant to go through with it, began to go through with it, did not go through with it. Let me tell you more. Let me tell you that I bathed. Let me tell you that I dressed. Let me tell you that, as I prepared my body, some faint glow of pride began to return to it. (116)
Here, Curren refers to putting off suicide. She tells Vercueil that she had been considering lighting herself on fire and driving into a Parliamentary building. She tells Vercueil about her suicidal ideations, which are also tied in with her desire to leave a legacy emphatically on the right side of history, to distance herself from her legacy of benefitting from apartheid in a final, punctual demonstration. But every additional word she writes, she recognizes, is a contradiction to that action. As long as she continues to write, she is proof of her own procrastination. Either way, whether it is through writing or through making headlines with her suicide, whether through Pagan mythology, Eastern religion, or Christian constructs of the afterlife, Curren is concerned with mortality and immortality, and particularly her own.
Class
While class and race are closely intertwined in Age of Iron, and Curren doesn't spend much time discussing poverty among white South Africans, instead focusing on the privileged, white middle class to which she belongs, Vercueil becomes an important location for the novel to discuss poverty and nomadism in South Africa. Vercueil's race is never revealed or referred to, which, in a novel so deeply concerned with race relations, can be nothing other than intentional.
When Curren has her attack of hip pain in Part 1, and Vercueil helps her up and into the house, she tells him she has cancer. This is one of the first times they ever speak. And he responds, "This is a big house. ... You could turn it into a boarding house" (10). Vercueil looks into Curren's life and sees excess, affordances, and opportunities for use by himself and others in need. He sees in Curren a deficit of need—she has more than she can use. Shortly after this encounter, Curren offers Vercueil a job gardening for her. She tells him they cannot "proceed on a basis of charity," and he simply asks her, "Why?" She tells him, "Because you don't deserve it," and he replies, "Who deserves anything?" (21) This sets Curren off. She yells "take!" at him and thrusts her purse in his hands. He calmly removes thirty rand from it.
Another locus of tension in the novel is Curren's daughter's immigration to the U.S. But over time, the daughter's choice to leave South Africa is framed more in light of her privilege to do so, and less in light of a sacrifice to divest herself from cruelty and inhumanity of apartheid. In other words, if it weren't for her class, which benefits from the oppression perpetuated by apartheid policies, she wouldn't have been able to leave in the first place. So, her leaving is a luxury afforded to her as a middle-class white South African by apartheid.
Race
In a novel about a middle-class white woman at the end of her life, contending with her complicity in apartheid, issues of race, white supremacy, prejudice, segregation, and human rights figure into every word of the novel.
Curren rarely refers explicitly to Blackness. Florence and her family, John, Thabane, and anyone Curren encounters in Site C and Guguletu, are understood to be Black, and Curren may in passing refer to Florence's Blackness, but Curren does not consider or try to consider the Black perspective outside of the lens of her own white perspective. Instead, Coetzee explores the politics of "the Great Divide" by problematizing Curren's whiteness through her own reflections.
After returning from Site C and seeing Bheki's body laid out, murdered, Curren looks at photographs from her childhood. She stands in a meticulously landscaped garden with her family, and considers those omitted from the photograph the black workers who manicured the garden:
Year after year fruit and flowers and vegetables burgeoned in that garden, pouring forth their seed, dying, resurrecting themselves, blessing us with their profuse presence. But by whose love tended? Who clipped the hollyhocks? Who laid the melon seeds in their warm, moist bed? Was it my grandfather who got up at four in the icy morning to open the sluice and lead wayer into the garden? If not he, then whose was the garden rightfully? Who are the ghosts and who the presences? Who, outside the picture, leaning on their rakes, leaning on their spades, waiting to get back to work, lean also against the edge of the rectangle, bending it, bursting it in? (111)
Curren goes on to say how these photos have developed "further than one would ever have dreamed" and have "become negatives again, a new kind of negative in which we begin to see what used to lie outside the frame, occulted" (112). This is an important "we" for understanding Curren's perspective—a similar "we" to the one Curren, herself, notes in Florence's speech. When Curren accuses Florence of turning her back on her children, Florence responds, "These are good children, they are like iron, we are proud of them." Reflecting on the exchange, Curren quotes an excerpt of Florence back to her daughter—"'We are proud of them.' We. Come home either with your shield or on your shield" (50). When Curren says "we," she refers to the white middle-class South Africans like herself, her mother, her daughter, and the "we" doesn't register to her as noteworthy. When Florence says "we," Curren hears it as a loud and clear segregation of the white and Black population of South Africa; she even poses Florence as a "Spartan matron," filtering the Black African resistance through a comfortable reference point for her, a military nation-state of ancient Greece, further othering Black Africans by applying her classical metaphors.
