Writing the Cancerous Body and Reconstructing the Ethical Embodied Subject: the Body Narrative in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron

Abstract

: The body in pain figures prominently in Coetzee’s novels. It has been traditionally maintained that the body is used as a literary trope in Coetzee’s novels to demonstrate that the substantial or the real represented by the body resists to be contained in the discourse, especially the dominant discourse. Based on a detailed analysis of the cancer narrative of Age of Iron, this paper, however, argues that scars, wounds, pain, and diseases are highlighted in Coetzee’s oeuvre for other reasons. At the surface level, the body in pain is the living witness to the suffering inflicted on the body by the oppressive social system. Ontologically, the damaged bodies are described in Coetzee’s novels to reveal the fact that the subject’s existence depends on its corporal vulnerability to the other. In this way, Coetzee’s body narrative challenges the idea of autonomous subject and probes for an ethical self-other encounter that might be made possible through cultivating an awareness of the inter-corporeal relation.