WRITING THE EVENT AND THE ETHICS OF LOVE IN J. M. COETZEE’S AGE OF IRON 1 At the heart of the unfreedom of the hereditary masters of South Africa is a failure to love. To be blunt: their love is not enough today and has not been enough since they arrived on the continent. 2 Abstract: The article places Age of Iron in the post-Beckettian trend that Andrew Gibson calls “vestigial modernism”, characterised by the attempt to give substance to the concept of an intermittent world, based on the philosophical notions of event and remainder. The article argues that Mrs. Curren’s writing/narrating of the letter to her absent daughter constitutes a rare event in Jean Badiou’s sense of the term, capable of putting an end to the stagnation and inertia of the remainder of apart- heid, and that her struggle to make sense of her life and times involves the aban- donment of her self-centred ideas and values for that sense of ethical responsibility for the Other that Emmanuel Levinas sees as the ontological function of woman/ the feminine, as opposed to the egoism, “which is not a bad failing of the subject but its ontology”. EVÉNÉMENTALITÉ, ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY AND THE REMAINDER OF APARTHEID In an article entitled “Thankless Earth, But Not Entirely: Event and Re- mainder in Contemporary Fiction”, 3 Andrew Gibson singles out four con- temporary novelists, Toni Morrison, J. M. Coetzee, W. G. Sebald and Or- han Pamuk as the most clear exponents of the kind of writing he terms “vestigial modernism”, which he defines as the attempt “to write a com- paratively representational fiction” while simultaneously “fleshing out DOI 10.1515/angl.2011.008 1 The research carried out for the writing of this essay is part of a research project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) (code HUM2007-61035). 2 J. M. Coetzee, “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech”, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Atwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992) 96–99, 97. 3 Andrew Gibson, “Thankless Earth, But Not Entirely: Event and Remainder in Contemporary Fiction”, “On the Turn”: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English, ed. Bárbara Arizti & Silvia Martínez-Falquina (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007) 3–19. Brought to you by | University of Connecticut Authenticated Download Date | 5/23/15 2:55 AM