ABSTRACT
Susanna Zinato’s chapter valorizes J.M. Coetzee’s several allusions to and familiarity with the conceptual ‘grammar’ of Attic tragedy, contending that the implication of the Greek paradigm is particularly strong in connection with the issue of shame and of the shameful plight suffered by those who are born into their Fathers’ crimes, unwillingly complicit with a system of oppression and violence. The critic’s main contention is that Magda and Mrs Curren, the white South African protagonists of In the Heart of the Country and Age of Iron, respectively, are tragic embodiments of those Coetzeean lost subjects that, while accepting the burden of living with the polluting shame of their gènos’ hubris, rage against it, cursing their Fathers’ curse. Passing through self-alienation and abjection they embrace the identitarian recreation that shame can lead to. Magda’s ugliness, Elizabeth’s cancerous body, and the alleged madness of both are read in the light of the tragic motifs of inherited guilt, defiling curse, ate, and hamartia. The transformative power of shame is then seen in connection with the characters’ ethos and Bildung, which entails Zinato’s conclusive reflections on the relevance assumed by the generation theme and by the interrogation on the humanistic stance in the two novels.
