122 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
a number of instances in which disciplinary violence inflicted upon
human beings is juxtaposed with the violence visited upon animals.
One scene in Age of Iron provides a striking example. Visiting a
chicken factory in which her housekeeper’s husband works, Elizabeth
Curren is taken aback by the industrial methodicalness in which the
animals are killed. In spite of herself, she becomes morbidly fasci-
nated by the spectacle and recalls later that night the “smell of blood
and feathers” and the “uproar of outraged squawking” she had wit-
nessed (p. 41). This anthropomorphic use of the adjective “outraged,”
to describe the mental state of the chickens being slaughtered, clearly
places the animals within the realm of human morality, suggesting
that they feel a grave ethical wrong is being committed. Of course,
such a notion is purely fanciful on the part of Curren, whose prox-
imity to her own death forces her to examine profound questions
about life and mortality in entirely new ways. In this light, the “out-
rage” that she imagines is emanating from the chickens is a projec-
tion of her own moral reaction to the arbitrary violence to which
her fellow humans (and, more specifically, her compatriots) subject
animals.^69 Her subsequent use of italics to describe the factory as an
“ enterprise ” captures both the contempt she feels for the fact that the
slaughtering of living beings is embedded within an industrial sys-
tem of human trade and the fact that it is routinely expunged of all
association with violence (p. 41).
A few pages after the factory scene, Curren finds herself in
a “black” hospital waiting room, surrounded by a number of the
region’s victims of violence (being at the height of the anti-Apartheid
struggle). She takes note of the casualties arriving at the ward:
A man in white shoes and a rumpled black suit spat blood steadily into
a dish. A youth on a stretcher [... ] held a wad of sodden cloth to his
belly. Blood on the f loor, blood on the benches [... ] A country prodigal
of blood. (p. 57)In the very same train of thought, she then juxtaposes the images
she has seen in the chicken factory: “Florence’s husband in yellow
oilskins and boots, wading through blood” (p. 57). She ends this
macabre daydream by picturing the “dry earth soaking up the blood