Cosmopolitanism and Material Ethics 83social context in which Barton and Friday live. Such a context
subsumes their roles into a master-slave relationship simply by vir-
tue of their ethnic differences, forcing the former to pretend that
Friday is her slave rather than the recipient of her help: “We make
a strange sight, the barefoot woman in her breeches and her black
slave” (p. 99). Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to conclude that
this mode of interaction is pretence alone, because the unequal
power dynamics of their relationship is established very early in
the narrative (p. 14). Indeed, perhaps the signal achievement of the
novel lies in Coetzee’s success in connecting Barton’s seemingly
reluctant actions toward Friday with the pressures of the social
context in which she exists, displaying how the character’s envi-
ronment has an overbearing influence on how she treats the Other,
irrespective of her ethical instincts. One of the crucial contextual
factors Coetzee highlights in this regard, and with particular force,
is language.
Language impedes cosmopolitan conciliation between the char-
acters in a number of ways, the starkest of which is Friday’s physical
incapacity to speak due to the loss of his tongue. This reduces the
(already unidirectional) communication between the two to imper-
ative commands on the part of Barton: “ Watch and Do : those are my
two principal words for Friday [... ] There are times when benevo-
lence deserts me and I use words only as the shortest way to subject
him to my will” (pp. 56–60).
Similarly, in Age of Iron, Elizabeth Curren’s attempts to bridge
the widening ethnic divisions in her native South Africa are frus-
trated by (among other causes) the racist political climate in which
she lives. Like Barton, the relationship Curren tries to develop with
a black homeless man is impeded from the start by virtue of the two
characters’ sociopolitical distance (as defined by their “racial” iden-
tity). Indeed, very early in the novel, it becomes clear that Curren’s
stilted attempts to bond with Vercueil are restricted by the para-
digms of social relations, which appear to influence her approach to
the relationship. Echoing Barton’s automatic designation of Friday
as her servant, Curren tries to hire Vercueil as an informal laborer to
help her about the house as she becomes increasingly incapacitated
by the cancer that is killing her.^20 Eventually, a relationship of sorts