Age o f Bronze, State o f Grace: Music and Dogs i n Coetzee's Disgrace DEREK ATTRIDGE "The age of iron. After which comes the age of bronze. How long, how long before the softer ages return in their cycle, the age of clay, the age of earth?" (Age of Iron 50). Mrs. Curren, writing to her daughter about the South Africa of the mid-1980s in which she is slowly dying of cancer, views the grim panorama of devastated communities, callous authorities, and armed children through the lens of classical myth, Hesiod's account of the successive ages of men. She performs an odd reversal on the traditional sequence, however: she places the age of bronze after the age of iron in which she feels she is living, and which provides J.M. Coetzee with the title of his novel.1 Unlike every previous novel by Coetzee, Age of Iron is set entirely in his native country at the time of its composition, the years of emergency laws and township warfare which in retrospect we see as the death throes of apartheid but which then felt like a nightmare without foreseeable end. In the late 1990s, we find Coetzee at work on another compelling novel set in the South Africa of the time of composition.2 The struggle against the repressive, racist state is finally over, apartheid is a discredited policy of the past, and democratic government has finally been established. The age of iron is no more. Has South Africa re-entered at last one of those "softer ages" longed for by Mrs. Curren in her reinvention of Hesiod's creation narrative? The new novel, Disgrace, published in 1999, certainly suggests that the ten or twelve years that have passed since Mrs. Curren's dying days have indeed wrought a transformation in the country, but it's not easy to say what age we find ourselves in now. A time of rampant crime, inefficient police services, middle-classes barricaded into their fortress-homes: have we followed Mrs. Curren's inverted sequence and moved beyond iron only to reach bronze? I wish to thank David Attwell, Rachel Bowlby, Graham Pechey, and Mark Sanders for helpful comments and conversations. 1In Hesiod's Works and Days, echoed by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, the ages come in the order gold, silver, bronze, and iron (with the age of demigods coming between the bronze and iron ages in Hesiod's scheme). The men of the age of bronze, according to Hesiod, were "a terrible and fierce race, occupied with the woeful works of Ares and with acts of violence" (Works and Days, line 145). 2 We can date the events of Disgrace to 1997 or 1998. The main protagonist, David Lurie, who is 52 when the novel opens and whose age is given (presumably incorrectly) as 53 by the press, was born in 1945 (46).
