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This article examines the construction of otherness and the ethical dilemma it instigates during its encounter with the Self in J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron. The unexpected presence of the Other disrupts the tranquil and lonely life of Mrs. Curren, the protagonist-narrator, by triggering a whole process of ethical awakening that ends up with not only her recognition of her complicity with the oppressive white regime of apartheid in South Africa but also her disavowal of the binary logic inherent in Western Enlightenment legacy. During her first encounter with an outcast and homeless man named Vercueil, Mrs. Curren comes face to face with a figure of otherness that challenges the normative demarcations between identities and opens a hybrid space of inter subjectivity where mutuality between subjectivities is possible. However, it is her second encounter with the young black insurgents, which drags her to political dissent. After witnessing a violent scene in which two black boys are deliberately hit by a police patrol car, Mrs. Curren decides to undertake a perilous trip to Guguletu, a squatter camp for blacks, to discover the truth about the ugly and dark side of apartheid so long censored by the state-monitored mass media. After such a physical as well as metaphorical journey across the border between identities, Mrs. Curren evolves from mere sympathy to empathy towards the Other by becoming a witness to the crime of Apartheid. The theoretical framework in this study is twofold. First, the encounter with the other and its ethical impact on the Self in Coetzee’s text is examined from a Levinasian ontological perspective, which emphasizes the moral responsibility that the Self bears for the Other. Second, the paper tackles the issue of hybridization and its effect on identity construction from a postcolonial prism, namely, Homi Bhabha's theorization of the ‘Third Space,’ and Derek Attridge's notion of ‘irruption of otherness.’
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