When we read Age of Iron, Derrida’s discourse on gift is helpful because it enables us to read beyond the superficial scenario. The parcel of papers is significant because it is closely related to her death, and with Derrida’s remarks on the gift I intend to argue that it is a manifestation of a genuine gift. It operates as a gift of no reciprocity, a gift of infinite love, a gift of death, and a gift of sacrifice.
2.1
Applying Derrida’s theories of the gift to read Age of Iron, readers may find the letter can be viewed as a genuine gift, because the letter fails to be returned or taken back in any way. In contrast to the Maussian concept of the gift that implies a
reciprocity or exchange, Mrs. Curren’s papers are a gift which does not enter into the circuit of reciprocity.
First, coming to presence as her daughter’s inheritance, the letter is not going to be returned. It is a gift, packed up with Mrs. Curren’s words like a bottle full of
sweets. However, Mrs. Curren insists that the gift to her daughter be sent after her death.
This is the task she cannot accomplish by herself, and thus she asks Mr. Vercueil to mail the parcel of letter for her. Whenever the letter is sent, the gift giver’s
disappearance will violate the gift circulation of exchange, and it is not possible for her daughter to return the gift to her mother who has already passed away. That is, because of Mrs. Curren’s death, the daughter as a receiver is deprived of her opportunities to repay or show gratitude to her mother. Within this context, the gift from Mrs. Curren
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does not endow any debt on her daughter, neither in the symbolical nor in reality.4 Also, does Mrs. Curren’s daughter receive her mother’s letter eventually?
Because of her decision, Mrs.Curren can never know whether the letter really reaches her daughter or not, as one of many passages that could be quoted to show:
Will they [these papers] reach you? Have they reached you? Two ways of asking the same question, a question to which I will never know the answer. (32)
From Mrs. Curren’s words, it is not guaranteed that the letter will be sent to her daughter eventually. Mrs. Curren’s gift takes the risk of failing to reach the receiver in that Mr. Vercueil might not mail the letter; if it is so, then the receiver will be absent from the circulation of gift-giving. In this case, the receiver’s uncertainty of whether he/she may receive the letter will lead to the denial of Mrs. Curren as the giver and her daughter as the receiver. Mrs. Curren and her daughter are unable to be identified as the giver and the receiver who hold the symmetrical relationship of giving and taking, and thus the papers cannot be perceived as a gift in terms of the secular value. In a sense, when giving the papers, Mrs. Curren gives what she cannot have. Asking to mail the papers after death, she gives more time to her daughter to stay safely in a foreign country, the United States. The formulation of the gift sheds new lights on the given papers, since the belated gift generate more time that makes possible her daughter’s staying at a peaceful country.
Mrs. Curren’s daughter vows not to return to South Africa until “[the people who enact the apartheid system] are hanging from the lampposts” (75). Knowing her
4 According to Pheng Cheah, a genuine gift should not be identified as a gift by both the receiver or the giver, because “the former lead to indebtedness, the desire to repay, gratitude, and so on, and the latter leads to an expectation for repayment or at the very least, self-gratification, praise, or self congratulation for having been generous. ”
daughter’s resolution, Mrs. Curren never asks her back, despite she being ill with cancer. Under this circumstance, the private letter serves as the only way to faithfully reflect Mrs. Curren’s psychological condition at the same time eliminating any
possibility to let her daughter back. In other words, the parcel of letter, at the same time of communicating Mrs. Curren’s true condition, brings forth more time for her
daughter to live, perhaps permanently, in the United States “still, solid, alive, at peace”
(75). Neither Mrs. Curren nor her daughter can possess time, yet through Mrs. Curren’s giving, the daughter is given the time and the future of her life in America. Derrida remarks:
“[T]o give time” is not to give a given present but the condition of presence of any present in general …. To give time, the day, or life is to give nothing, nothing determinate, even if it is to give the giving of any possible giving, even if it gives the condition of giving. (Derrida 1992,54)
We do not know whether the daughter is willing to be given the gift of given time, but Mrs. Curren’s papers give her daughter the “condition” to continue the life she makes for herself. Such a gift of time, materially speaking, gives nothing nor takes anything;
thus it ruptures the economic reciprocity.
In terms of a genuine gift, if Mrs. Curren’s letter is the case, then it is also appropriate to view it as a gift of death, a gift given at the price of Mrs.Curren’s sacrifice for her daughter. While Abraham sacrifices his son to love God,
Mrs. Curren, bearing the same love like Abraham, sacrifices the very last chances to see her daughter, in order to consolidate a relationship of love between she and her daughter. Mrs. Curren’s death is inevitable, because she is diagnosed of cancer.
However, she chooses to live her remaining times bitterly and to pass away in such a lonely condition without her daughter’s accompany, even though her daughter is the
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closest person she turns to as soon as she learns she is dying. In the moment of gifting, a dissymmetrical relationship is built between Mrs. Curren and her daughter, since Mrs Curren is called to perform the love described by she as “ the love we have no alternative but to feel toward those to whom we give ourselves to devour or
discard”(9). Her willingness to renounce the chances of seeing her daughter in person manifests, as what Tata states, the “sacrificial nature of gifting” (49). Even though she does not “kill” herself, the determination to sacrifice her life, by removing the chances to see her daughter till her death, still makes the sacrificial action real, both in a
symbolic sphere or in reality. What she cannot sacrifice is the idea of sacrifice. For the rest in her private life, everything can be given up: “After I have cared for [my
daughter], there is little space left in my heart. The rest must, as they say, go to pot”
(197). The letter represents a consolidated bond between the dying Curren and her daughter, which is the only thing worth caring in Mrs. Curren’s private life, while in her public sphere, her caring will lie on the relationship between her identity as a white and the other black South Africans, which will be further discussed in the following two chapters. Sending the genuine gift to her daughter eventually denotes Mrs. Curren sacrifice of every standard of sanity: she exploits the daughter’s chance to learn her mother’s true condition, and she further violates the ethical rules.
How can we interpret Mrs. Curren’s concealing the truth from her daughter that she is dying? Mrs. Curren confesses that she conceals her illness from her daughter, and even though she has a chance to ask her daughter back, she decides not to reveal the truth of her condition: “She knows I was sick, she knows I had an operation; she thinks it was successful and I am getting better” (72).Through her death, Mrs. Curren offers her daughter a gift, giving her the “opportunity” not to return to South Africa, a deformed land because of the enactment of apartheid. In this sense, Mrs. Curren
sacrifices her life in exchange of her daughter’s opportunity to escape away from the hellish country: “This country […]. Thank God she is out” (60).
What is to be noticed is that such a sacrificial movement is undoubtedly from the mother’s immeasurable love to the daughter. For both Abraham and Mrs. Curren, the act to sacrifice is motivated by the boundless love to God/ the daughter. Abraham sacrifices in order to love God, while Mrs. Curren offers her own life in order to love her daughter. More than once, Mrs. Curren describes her daughter to be “flesh of [her]
flesh, blood of [her] blood,” the life coming from her own life (11). For Mrs. Curren, bearing a child can be understood as giving one’s life to the child:
When you bear a child from your own body you give your life to that child.
Above all to the first child, the firstborn. Your life is no longer with you, it is no longer yours, it is with the child. That is why we do not really die: we simply pass on our life, the life that was for a while in us, and are left behind.
(76).
The letter is sufficient in expressing Mrs. Curren’s sacrificial intention as well as her immeasurable love to her daughter. It is a gift of death.
Nonetheless, to give the infinite love to her daughter is never an easy task, as Mrs. Curren writes in her papers: “How easy it is to love a child, how hard to love what a child turns into” (57). In terms of Derrida’s remarks on the gift of death, the decision to conceal the truth can be interpreted as the will to sacrifice, while to live her remaining time alone can be viewed as her hatred for what she once loved most. Mrs.
Curren loves her life, but in order to sacrifice, she must hate what she loves. I propose the word hate, in Mrs. Curren’s case, is not to show hostility to her life, but to refuse to show any kindness to herself. Facing her impending death, Mrs. Curren should seize the last days of her time, fulfilling dreams she has never had the chance to do. Yet, she
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does not leave for her daughter, nor does she phone her daughter to tell her the true condition. Except writing her letter, Mrs. Curren cuts every connection between her daughter and her, which can be understood as a way to display no kindness to her own life, sacrificing her remaining time that she cherishes greatly. At the beginning of the novel, it seems Mrs. Curren is still struggling whether to hate what she loves, or to sacrifice what she cherishes: “we will be weaned from our body …. Yet this first life, this life on earth, on the body of earth – will there, can there ever be a better? Despite all the glooms and despairs and rages, I have not let go of my love of it” (13). Here, Mrs. Curren elucidates the difficulties to hate what she loves. However, with the linear proceeding of the novel, Mrs. Curren strengthens her resolve to hate her life: “how hard it is to kill oneself! One clings so tight to life! It seems to me that something other than the will must come into play at the last interest” (119). Despite her craving to meet her daughter, in her remaining time, she plans not to let this happen. Due to her being cruel to her life, she comes to hate what she loves.
One more reason that specifies Mrs. Curren’s letter as a genuine gift is that Mrs. Curren transgresses the ethical rules. In The Gift of Death, Derrida writes,
“secrecy is as intolerable for ethics as it is for philosophy or for dialectics in general.
[…] The ethics as such is the universal” (62). In terms of ethics and philosophy, the demand for manifestation, unveiling is imperative that there should be no secrets. In the story of Abraham and Isaac, Abraham is asked to perform an act which violates all the ethics and conventions in the society. In order to give a genuine gift to God, Abraham chooses not to tell the truth to Isaac and the other family members. From the story, Derrida concludes that one will put himself at the risk of transpassing the ethical rules if he keeps a secret, since “the manifest is given priority over the hidden or the secret, universal generality is superior to the individual; no irreducible secret that can
be legally justified” (Derrida 1995:63). Similar to Abraham, Mrs. Curren resists the desire to reveal her true feelings to the other people, including her daughter. She lies to Mr. Vercueil: “I have no intention of summoning my daughter back. I may long for her but I don’t want her here,” but at the same time, she cannot help but cry in her mind that “what a liar I am” (74). Not only to Mr. Vercueil, she also lies to her daughter. When phoning her daughter, Mrs. Curren says: “Tired but otherwise well […]. I am taking things slowly. Florence is a pillar of strength, as ever, and I have a new man to help in the garden” (126). But in reality, Mrs. Curren has not been physically and psychologically well since she fell ill. Florence has already left Mrs.
Curren’s house, and Mr. Vercueil cannot be viewed as a qualified helper. Mrs.
Curren fails to be ethically sincere in that she must give a pure gift to her daughter. In terms of the ethical rules, Mrs. Curren’s lies make her ethical duty violated.
In addition, the unilateral love to her daughter even urges Mrs. Curren to destroy the ethics of reciprocity. The rules of reciprocity are claimed by Mrs. Curren as
“[h]ome truths, a mother’s truth” that she has always pursued (5), since as a mother, she used to embrace her daughter in hoping she would be embraced in the future: “We embrace to be embraced. We embrace our children to be folded in the arms of the future, to pass ourselves on beyond death, to be transported. That is how it was when I embraced you, always” (5). Such a notion of reciprocity can be found relevant to the Golden Rule, a series of social/ethical/ religious practices according to which one should treat others as he wants to be treated (Wattles 107). However, her belief of reciprocity has always made her embrace morally inferior to the notion of unilateral love, and it is not until her nearing death does Mrs. Curren “begin to understand the true meaning of embrace” (5). Nearing the death she starts to stop the thought of reciprocity and reach a higher ethical phase – giving her infinite love without taking
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anything back. Such is her betrayal of ethics by which she can send a genuine gift to her daughter. As Tata suggests that “we transcend it in order to ascend to a higher phase, as with Kierkegaard’s concept of the religious, or we suspend it in order to return to it” (54), what Mrs. Curren wants to achieve is something that either overrides the ethical rules or returns to it. From the violation of the ethical rules, Mrs. Curren comes to realize the supreme principle of love. Violating the ethical rules, Mrs. Curren comes to send a genuine gift.
Such is Mrs. Curren’s gift that we find resonating the Derridean gift. The journey of writing for Mrs. Curren is a long process of giving, and her very secret of gift is inextricably linked to her impending death. We learn from Given Time that gift-giving is not about giving a gift at all. Derrida’s observation teaches us that what works beyond the give-and-take relationship is the human relation that nullifies the economy of reciprocity. This unilateral giving does not ask for a reciprocal debt. In
Age of Iron, Mrs. Curren’s letter is a key to the understanding of ethics and love.
Whether the gift is the possibility or the impossibility, what Mrs. Curren conveys in her letter will nourish her daughter. The time and love she bestows might be beyond the daughter’s awareness, but what flows to her daughter is fathomless. It is given by Mrs. Curren’s dedicating of herself, alongside with her total withdraw from her daughter. Mrs. Curren’s gift is about the reason she gives: love. However, in writing a letter which may never reach her daughter, Mrs. Curren in fact attempts to (re)build a relation to her unresponsive daughter, even though it is only a fantasy of union that cannot exist in reality. As she puts it that “no matter what the word, through it I stretch out a hand to you […] I must reach out to you,” a (re)built relation to her unresponsive daughter is what she searches in this unilateral way (9). But her daughter is not the only figure Mrs. Curren finds necessary to response, for in the journey of tracing truth
Mrs. Curren gradually finds herself exposed to the need to be responsible, to be hospitable. Having discussed Mrs. Curren’s letter as a gift lacking reciprocity, in my latter chapters I will proceed to examine the notions of responsibility and hospitality, as well as their intricate relation to Mrs. Curren’s impending death.
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