Dispossession and Dislocation in J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron

Written during some of the darkest years of the apartheid regime, Age of Iron, Coetzee’s sixth novel, presents us with a radical experience of dispossession and destitution to which the main character and narrator subjects herself in response to the advanced state of decomposition of her country. As she is led to offer ‘unconditional hospitality’ (Marais, Derrida) in more respects than one, Elisabeth Curren experiences a form of dislocation through which she in turn becomes a stranger and a homeless within her own home. Dispossession dislodges the subject from a situation of mastery but also places her in the position of object and reject—an experience which is lived in the flesh, but which is also at the heart of language. It is within the textual space she weaves that the narrator must also practise ‘unconditional hospitality’, facing the permanent exposure and displacement involved in the act of speaking and in the attempt to ‘bare something’ to an addressee she might never reach. While the will to ‘let go’ reflects the despair that permeates the book, dislocation is nevertheless also felt to be a condition to shift imaginary barriers and allow a remapping of the body—whether it be organic, textual or politic