Catherine du Toit

Ageing in the Twenty-First Century

From the depths of life,

a power suddenly appears,
which says that being is
being against death.1
— Paul Ricœur2

In the twenty-first century, this age of technology and control where eve-
rything appears possible and where the fountain of eternal youth seems
increasingly accessible due to astounding scientific advances, several ethical
complexities are added to the stakes when it comes to ageing. Biomedical
interventions as well as tangentially related research in, for example, cloning,
have created an ambivalent discourse of ageing. As a source of ethical and
aesthetic challenges, writing about ageing remains more than ever before
an endeavour to make sense not only of the changing present, but also of
the past and the future; a struggle to remain alive until death. In what way
does contemporary fiction represent existing and changing perceptions
and figures of ageing?
According to World Health Organisation statistics, the world popula-
tion aged 60 and over will more than triple from 650 million to 2 billion
by the year 2050. By 2030, half the population of Western Europe will be

1 I dedicate this article to my father, Heinrich du Toit.

2 ‘Du fond de la vie, une puissance surgit, qui dit que l’être est être contre la mort’,
extract from a note Ricœur sent to Marie Geof froy, a former student, a few weeks
before his death (2007, 144).
280 Catherine du Toit

older than 50.3 Understandably, the question of ageing has rapidly become
one of the major challenges of the twenty-first century. Several factors
inf luence this demographic transition. In developed Western countries,
the first wave of the Baby Boom generation, born between 1946 and 1964,
is nearing retirement. 1 January 2011 of ficially marked the entering into
retirement of the first so-called Golden Boomers. Bearing in mind that
in Britain alone 17 million births were recorded during this period, one
understands the dramatic consequence that over the next two decades the
country’s population of old people will reach its highest level ever. In addi-
tion to this phenomenon, population ageing worldwide has been af fected
by significant changes in life expectancy over the past twenty years. The
number of centenarians is increasing at 7 per cent per year worldwide.4 Not
only do people live longer, the so-called disability-free life expectancy or
healthy life expectancy has also increased considerably, linked to improved
nutrition and health care. (Even so, recent statistics highlight inequalities
in mortality between the wealthy and the poor in Europe, possibly exac-
erbated by the 2008 economic crash.5 Population ageing is of course also
af fected by downtrends in fertility. But one should add that this trend
appears to be somewhat moderated in a few European countries by higher
fertility among some immigrant groups.6 Since 2001, births across Britain
have climbed 17 per cent, whilst 18 per cent of births in England, Wales
and France in the early 2000s were to immigrant women.7

3 World Health Organisation, ‘Ten Facts on Ageing and the Life Course’, <http://
www.who.int/features/factfiles/ageing/en/index.html> accessed 21 March 2011.
4 Mark Forster and Denis Calthorpe, ‘Mortality following surgery for proximal femoral
fractures in centenarians’, Injury. International Journal of the Care of the Injured 31/7
(2000), 537.
5 Anthony McMichael and Martin McKee et al., ‘Mortality trends and setbacks:
global convergence or divergence?’, The Lancet 363 (2004), 1155–9; Bethan Thomas,
Danny Dorling and George Smith, ‘Inequalities in Premature Mortality in Britain:
Observational Study from 1921 to 2007’, BMJ 341:c3639.
6 Jean-Paul Sardon, ‘Évolution démographique récente des pays développés’, Population
61/3 (2006), 225.
7 Coleman, David, ‘Immigration and Ethnic Change in Low-Fertility Countries:
A Third Demographic Transition’, Population and Development Review 32/3
(2006), 406.
Ageing in the Twenty-First Century 281

Despite the mitigating ef fect of immigration, the negative ef fects of

population ageing remain unprecedented. And yet, the concept of age and
ageing has also become more complicated. Because of the changes in life
expectancy, general improvement in health and increased autonomy and
activity of the elderly, chronological age does not necessarily correlate with
received notions or perceptions of old age. Can you be considered ‘old’ at
sixty if your average remaining life expectancy is twenty years? Redefining
the parameters of ‘old age’ would also imply that the notion of population
ageing should be seen in a dif ferent light.
Over the past ten years increased awareness of population ageing
has led to a proliferation of research in various disciplines. In 2001, the
Oxford Institute of Ageing was established to examine societal ageing and
demographic change. Research at the Institute comprises a wide range of
academic disciplines, including sociology, gerontology, economics and
medicine. There have also been other cross-disciplinary initiatives, such as
the International Symposia on Cultural Gerontology, that encourage the
discussion of ageing from sociological, psychological, political, religious
and literary perspectives. The 7th International Symposium on Cultural
Gerontology which took place in Maastricht in October 2011 hosted the
inauguration of the European Network in Ageing Studies (ENAS), a
research partnership which intends to facilitate sustainable international
collaboration so as to develop research that would bridge perspectives on
ageing from the social sciences and the humanities. In the field of literature
specifically, the former Centre de recherches sur les littératures modernes
et contemporaines at the Université Blaise Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand
organized a number of seminars around the question of ‘writing about
ageing’ between 2003 and 2008 and also published proceedings, edited
by Alain Montandon.8 A few recent collective publications contain refer-
ences to contemporary works of fiction that deal with ageing, including:
The Polemics of Ageing as Ref lected in Literatures in English, published in
2004 by the University of Lleida; and Was ist Alter(n)? Neue Antworten
auf eine scheinbar einfache Frage [What is Old Age/Ageing? New Answers

8 Alain Montandon, ed., Écrire le vieillir (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires

Blaise Pascal, 2005).
282 Catherine du Toit

to an Apparently Simple Question] published by the Heidelberg Academy

of Sciences and Humanities in 2008.9 Despite these research activities, it
would appear that works of fiction published in the twenty-first century
have received little attention in this specific context. Authors commonly
studied include Gide, Colette, Thomas Mann, Proust, Beckett, Camus and
the ubiquitous Beauvoir.
Reflecting on old age is hardly a new theme in world literature. Between
the classical period and the eighteenth century, the main approaches to lit-
erary representations of old age appear to vacillate between the Aristotelian
condemnation of physical and moral decrepitude and Cicero’s appreciation
of the greater wisdom and the freedom from physical desires gained through
ageing. The literary portrayal of old age in the Age of Enlightenment is
characterized by greater optimism and more consideration for the elderly
and their active participation in society. According to Vincent Caradec
in Sociologie de la vieillesse et du vieillissement, this may be explained by
demographic factors such as the decline in mortality, the growth in the
elderly population and cultural aspects such as increased individualism
and secularization.10 The nineteenth century and particularly the realist
and naturalist movements, introduce a more nuanced consideration of
old age – not adhering exclusively to either a pessimistic or a rose-tinted
view. Victor Hugo, for instance, combines seemingly conf licting portrayals
in several of his elderly characters, associating the suf fering of a frail and
weakened body with a serene and wise character: ‘Rien n’était touchant
comme de le voir tendre au blessé une tasse de tisane avec son doux trem-
blement sénile. […] Ses cheveux blancs ajoutaient une majesté douce à la
lumière gaie qu’il avait sur le visage. Quand la grâce se mêle aux rides, elle
est adorable. Il y a on ne sait quelle aurore dans la vieillesse épanouie’ (1862:
14–16) [‘Nothing was more touching than to see him with his gentle, senile
palsy, of fer the wounded man a cup of his cooling-draught. […] His white
locks added a gentle majesty to the gay radiance of his visage. When grace
is mingled with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an indescribable aurora
in beaming old age’ (Hugo 1887, 23)]. Representations of old age during

9 Details? MAH.
10 Vincent Caradec, Sociologie de la vieillesse et du vieillissement (Paris: Armand Colin,
2010), 27.
Ageing in the Twenty-First Century 283

this period start taking into account new economic realities as well as the
inf luence of political and social change. In ‘Les Petites vieilles’, Baudelaire
depicts the cityscape as an immense, chaotic and hostile space in which
frail old women scurry along like mere shadows of the mothers, lovers or
wives they used to be. ‘Honteuses d’exister, ombres ratatinées, | Peureuses,
le dos bas, vous côtoyez les murs; | et nul ne vous salue, étranges destinées’
[‘Ashamed of existing, shrivelled shadows / Frightened, with bent backs,
you raze the walls / and no one greets you, strange fates’ (my translation)]
(103). Urbanization with its often harsh and alienating ef fect on the elderly
remains a recurrent theme well into the twentieth century as reflections on
ageing in literature once again appear to be dominated by more negative
perceptions. There are, however, notable exceptions, for instance, Hermann
Hesse’s general conception of old age as portrayed in the volume of essays
Vom Wert des Alters [On the Value of Old Age] and Ernest Hemingway’s
dignified portrait of the old fisherman Santiago in The Old Man and the
Sea. Depictions of old age in film, perhaps the quintessential medium of
the twentieth century, more often than not defy negative representations.
David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999) is quite typical in its portrayal of its
elderly protagonist as an eccentric, fiercely independent and morally upright
person, misunderstood by other (younger) people but ultimately impressive
in his steadfastness and generosity of spirit. Jean-Jacques Beineix’s IP5: L’île
aux pachydermes (1992), showcasing Yves Montand in his last role, tells a
very similar story of an old man’s quest and his intense engagement with life,
through which he inspires characters of a much younger generation who
feel equally marginalized by society. Conversely, literary representations
of the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first
century contain few such idealized representations of old age. In general,
ageing is brutally equated with decay and hopelessness. Helmuth Kiesel
identifies two factors as being responsible for this tendency: the continuing
inf luence of the expressionist aesthetic of ugliness and medical and demo-
graphic developments of old age as an overwhelming social phenomenon.11

11 Helmuth Kiesel, ‘Das Alter in der Literatur’ in Staudinger, Ursula and Heinz Häfner,
eds, Was ist Alter(n)? Neue Antworten auf Eine Scheinbar Einfache Frage (Springer:
Heidelberg, 2008), 186–7.
284 Catherine du Toit

There is, indeed, no shortage of contemporary works of fiction that

deal with questions surrounding ageing and old age. A number of novels
in French and English, all published between 2000 and 2011, were selected
for the purposes of this study.12 The novels under discussion range from
works that deal with population ageing, such as the description of decrepi-
tude and the ultimate decay of an entire community in Pierre Jourde’s
controversial novel Pays perdu [Lost Country], to intimate ref lections on
the process of ageing and social satire against, for example, youthism. The
intention is to examine the ways in which old age and ageing are ref lected
in a world which often appears to value beauty and youth above all else, a
world, on the other hand, where people generally live longer. Would one,
barely a decade into the new century, already be able to discern typical
twenty-first-century representations of ageing in literature?
All the novels in question appear to incorporate established images
of ageing. David Lodge, for example, uses the familiar notion of seasonal
change to frame his narrative in the 2008 novel Deaf Sentence. A loosely

12 They are: Pays perdu (2003) by Pierre Jourde, Slow Man (2005) and Diary of a Bad Year
(2007) by J.M. Coetzee, Trois jours chez ma mère (2005) by François Weyergans, La
Possibilité d’une île (2005) and La Carte et le Territoire (2010) by Michel Houellebecq,
Everyman (2006) by Philip Roth, Deaf Sentence (2008) by David Lodge, Hommes
qui ne savent pas être aimés (2009) by Yasmina Reza, Ève s’évade, La Ruine et la Vie
(2009) by Hélène Cixous. With the exception of Coetzee and Roth, all the authors
represented here are native Europeans, including the English David Lodge. However,
the works of both Coetzee and Roth have been translated into many European lan-
guages, and are widely appreciated in Europe. The South African born Coetzee, who
now resides in Australia, has himself asserted that his ‘intellectual allegiancies are
clearly European not African’ (Coetzee and Atwell, 2003). Roth, who has lived for
extensive periods in Eastern Europe and the United Kingdom, may also be considered
to be intellectually in sympathy with European traditions. Evidence for this may be
found in at least three European film / TV documentaries: France’s Philip Roth sans
complexe (2011), England’s Philip Roth: My True Story (1994), and Germany’s The
Roth Explosion/Mein Leben als Philip Roth (1998). Some literary theorists have, in
fact, been arguing that the implications of globalization may dictate rethinking the
purely geographical classification of literatures. ‘Europe has de-territorialized; that
is, it has moved to a limbo located between a real that has weakened and an imagi-
nary, or perhaps an imaginal, that could prefigure the real of tomorrow’ (Bertrand
Westphal, quoted and translated by Lucia Boldrini 2006, 19).
Ageing in the Twenty-First Century 285

structured diary novel, the protagonist’s first entry is dated 1 November –

All Saint’s Day and the beginning of autumn – and the story ends in March,
after the death of his father: autumn, through winter, representing old age
and death. Likewise, François Weyergans in Trois jours chez ma mère [Three
Days at My Mother’s] places the novel under the auspices of winter right
from the start by means of a reference to a ‘Purcell song interpreted by
Klaus Nomi’ (13). This can only refer to the famous Frost Scene from the
third act of King Arthur where the Cold Genius complains: ‘See’st thou
not how stif f and wondrous old, | Far unfit to bear the bitter cold, | I can
scarcely move or draw my breath? | Let me, let me freeze again to death’
(Purcell and Dryden 1691 [1979], III, ii, 26). Using the recurrent seasonal
cycles as a metaphor for the human life course dates back to the dawn of
civilization. Perceived as a cycle, life acquires transcendent meaning and
a sense of continuity; a pertinent issue in both these novels that deal with
filial relations and loss. One could argue that the timing of major life events
in the twenty-first century is no longer predictable, that the life course
has become disorderly and no longer follows a natural pattern. A woman
may have her first child well into her forties or may be a grandmother
in her thirties; fewer people follow a single linear career; the retirement
age has become extremely f luid. Even so, the metaphor remains relevant.
Particularly since seasonal cycles have become equally unpredictable due
to climate changes with, for example, changes in the timing and duration
of rainy seasons and f luctuating temperatures. However, the idea of cycli-
cal repetition and renewal remains.
Contraction or shrinking is another recognizable figure of ageing
which is adapted to contemporary conditions. Brought about by the physi-
cal inability to move, the reluctance to abandon a familiar setting, the
decay of the senses or the progressive loss of contact with the world out-
side, the ageing subject finds himself in a shrinking space. Paul Rayment in
J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man says, ‘The universe has contracted to this f lat and
the block or two around, and it will not expand again. A circumscribed life.
What would Socrates say about that? May a life become so circumscribed
that it is no longer worth living?’ (26). In Deaf Sentence, the protagonist,
Desmond Bates, suf fers from age-related hearing loss. His narrowing world
is most poignantly illustrated by a description of Francisco Goya’s painting
286 Catherine du Toit

The Dog which shows a small black dog, everything but its head enveloped
in a sandlike substance, gazing into the emptiness above it as if hoping for
some divine intervention: ‘There are lots of theories about what the pic-
ture means, Bates says, like the End of the Enlightenment, or the Advent
of Modernity, but I know what it means to me: it’s an image of deafness,
deafness pictured as an imminent, inevitable, inexorable suf focation’ (86).
The image of shrinking becomes a central theme in Ève s’évade [Eve Escapes]
with Hélène Cixous’ intertextual reference to La peau de chagrin by Balzac,
which is, of course, a classic text about ageing and the desire for longevity.
More than a gradual depletion of life-force, Cixous sees in the figure of
rétrécissement [shrinking] the suf fering of loss that accompanies the decline
in mental acuity; the loss of memories, of faces and especially the loss of
words. The painful condition of aphasia that shrinks the ability to relate
to the world, to relate the world.
Nul ne peut décrire la douleur de rétrécissement. On peut seulement la souf frir. Le
Rétrécissement est un Fantôme Géant. On ne sait pas s’il est intérieur ou extérieur.
On souf fre de l’Objet perdu, de l’étendue perdue, on souffre d’une souf france fuyante,
de maux perdus, de rabougrissements des orifices de la mémoire […] on le sent, on
a comme une contraction des conduits, des tempes. […] On ne peut s’empêcher de
rechercher le morceau de moiperdu. On est sûr de ne jamais le retrouver. (83)

[No one can describe the pain of shrinking. One can only bear it. Shrinking is a
Giant Phantom. One doesn’t know if it’s inside or outside. One suf fers from the
lost Object, the lost space, one suf fers an elusive suf fering, lost ills, the shrivelling
up of memory’s orifices […] one feels it, one has something like a contraction of the
canals, of the temples […] One can’t keep from looking for the piece of selfgone.
One is sure never to find it]. (my translation)

The contraction of the ageing subject’s world without exception represents

an involuntary and painful relinquishment in the novels in question. There
is no suggestion of a voluntary retreat or a positive retirement from active
life to a reduced stripped sanctuary. No greater wisdom or virtue gained
is acknowledged in exchange for the loss suf fered. Any notion of positive
ageing or a Hermann Hesse-like exaltation of the vita contemplativa and
its ‘ungestörte Andacht vor dem Ewigen’ [‘undisturbed contemplation of
eternity’ (my translation)] (1994, 275) appears to be absent from these texts.
Ageing in the Twenty-First Century 287

The figure of shrinking can also be linked to the notion of isolation

or abandonment that has come to characterize many contemporary rep-
resentations of old age. The contraction of space becomes confinement,
whether self-generated confinement or the solitary confinement of the
institutionalized elderly – an incarceration that becomes murderous in La
Possibilité d’une île [The Possibility of an Island] as Michel Houellebecq’s
narrator describes ‘l’agonie des vieillards entassés dans des salles communes,
nus sur leurs lits, avec des couches, gémissant tout le long du jour sans que
personne ne vienne les réhydrater ni leur tendre un verre d’eau’ (92) [‘the
agony of old people, crammed into communal rooms, naked on their beds,
in nappies, moaning all day without anyone coming by to rehydrate them
or even to give them a glass of water’].13
The ageing body itself is also subject to physical contraction.
Degenerative diseases such as osteoporosis cause shrinkage in height. In
Alzheimer’s disease, parts of the brain atrophy as neurons and synapses
die. This ‘process of reduction’, as Philip Roth calls it in Everyman (92)
transcends the physical, and the experience of ageing, whether accompa-
nied by physical suf fering or not, is often expressed as diminishing and
belittling. This awareness seems to have more to do with ageing than with
old age; with becoming old rather than being old. It depends on the way
in which the subject relates his life, on the way he conceives the relation
between the past and the present and whether he sees his present condition
as part of a continuous development or as a sudden and disturbing break
with the past. How we are seen and treated by others largely determines
our own impression of becoming old. At 47, Daniel 1, the protagonist of
Houellebecq’s La Possibilité d’une île states: ‘J’avais beau faire l’élégant;
j’étais en train de me recroqueviller comme un vieux singe; je me sen-
tais amenuisé, amoindri au-delà du possible; mes marmottements et mes
murmures étaient déjà ceux d’un vieillard’ (164) [‘Try as I might to play
at being elegant, I was shrivelling like an old monkey; I felt myself worn
down, diminished beyond redemption; my mutterings and murmurs were
already those of an old man’].14

13 The Possibility of an Island, trans. Gavin Bowd (London: Phoenix, 2005), 75.
14 Gavin Bowd translation, 138.
288 Catherine du Toit

A contemporary figure of ageing, linked to contraction but taken to

such an extreme that it seems to become its dynamic opposite, is that of
fragmentation and dispersion – followed by dissolution and an almost
ecological re-absorption in a greater whole: ‘mourir de se dissoudre’, as
Jacques Brel puts it in the song Vieillir. Jed Martin experiences such a fall-
ing apart at the end of La Carte et le territoire [The Map and the Territory]
by Michel Houellebecq: ‘Ce sentiment de désolation, aussi, qui s’empare
de nous à mesure que les représentations des êtres humains qui avaient
accompagné Jed Martin au cours de sa vie terrestre se délitent sous l’ef fet
des intempéries, puis se décomposent et partent en lambeaux, semblant
dans les dernières vidéos se faire le symbole de l’anéantissement généralisé
de l’espèce humaine. […] Le triomphe de la végétation est total’ (428) [‘That
feeling of desolation, too, that takes hold of us as the portraits of the human
beings who had accompanied Jed Martin through his earthly life fall apart
under the impact of bad weather, then decompose and disappear, seeming
in the last videos to make themselves the symbol of the generalised anni-
hilation of the human species. […] The triumph of vegetation is total’].15
Vladimir Jankélévitch describes ageing as a becoming inevitably ending in
death,16 a becoming which is paradoxically directed towards non-being, the
gradual dissolution of the organ-obstacle. A few months before his death,
Paul Ricœur feels the need to ‘become capable of dying’ and experiences
this inevitable last phase of ageing as a ‘process of disappearing’.17
Ageing as alienation, as a process of becoming other, whether in the
ageing subject’s own perception of himself or in interaction with others,
is a recurrent figure in the discourse of ageing. ‘La vieillesse est particu-
lièrement dif ficile à assumer parce que nous l’avions toujours considérée
comme une espèce étrangère: suis-je donc devenue une autre alors que
je demeure moi-même?’ asks Beauvoir in La Vieillesse [Old Age] [It is

15 The Map and the Territory, trans. Gavin Bowd (London: William Heinemann, 2011),
291.
16 Vladimir Jankélévitch, La Mort (Paris: Flammarion, 1977): ‘un devenir inévitable-
ment borné par la mort’, 186.
17 Ricœur, Paul, Living up to Death, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009), 95.
Ageing in the Twenty-First Century 289

particularly dif ficult to accept old age because we have always considered
it as an alien species: have I then become another while remaining myself ?
(my translation)] (301). The othering invariably results from some sort of
physical confrontation; the sudden awareness of a discord between body
and mind, between projected image and reality, between self-image and
the perception of others. This awareness can be stimulated by illness, a
handicap or an unexpected physical event. Yasmina Reza’s novel Hommes
qui ne savent pas être aimés [Men Who Do Not Know How To Be Loved]
(originally published as Adam Haberberg) recounts a night in the life of the
forty-seven-year-old protagonist, Adam Haberberg, who is plunged into a
neurotic spiral of self-doubt following the diagnosis of a macular degenera-
tion of the left eye: ‘[…] cette sensation de dislocation je l’éprouve dans mon
existence même, comme si les éléments qui la composaient n’étaient plus
reliés entre eux, ni à moi unique, comme si un de mes fragments pouvait
à tout moment et n’importe où, partir à la dérive vers les lointaines péri-
phéries où je suis perdu’ [‘I feel this sense of dislocation in my very being,
as though the elements it consists of were no longer connected, neither
to each other, nor to me, as if one of my fragments could, at any time and
anywhere, go drifting of f towards the outer reaches where I am lost’ (my
translation)] (65). In Everyman, the feeling of ‘otherness’ appears to arise
from the feeling of betrayal experienced by the ageing subjects as they are
increasingly confronted with bodily weakness and degeneration. They no
longer recognize or want to recognize themselves in the diminished and
needy body they have become. They need comfort, need care, but resent
the very need: ‘The dependence, the helplessness, the isolation, the dread –
it’s all so ghastly and shameful. The pain makes you frightened of yourself.
The utter otherness of it is awful’ (91). Paul Rayment, in Slow Man, covers
the bathroom mirror ‘not just to save himself from the image of an ageing,
ugly self ’ but because he no longer identifies with his own image: ‘Thank
God the day will come, he thinks to himself, when I will not have to see
that one again!’ (164). He denies the reality of his condition, refusing, for
example, to use a prosthesis to replace the limb he had lost, further under-
mining continuity in relation to the past. Rayment’s lack of an internal
sense of cohesion is echoed by the uncertain levels of reality in the novel.
290 Catherine du Toit

However, alienation is not limited to the self-perception of the senes-

cent subject. The narrator in Pierre Jourde’s Pays perdu progressively trans-
forms the ageing inhabitants of a tiny Cantal hamlet into foreign beings,
insisting on their primitive and anachronistic living conditions and stressing
the animal-like filth in which they appear to subsist. This dehumanizing
point of view ironically underscores the pertinence of the incipient ques-
tion Beauvoir poses in La Vieillesse: ‘Les vieillards sont-ils des hommes?’
[Are old people human? (my translation)]. The narrator returns to his
father’s native village, ostensibly to sort out administrative issues surround-
ing a house that had been bequeathed to his brother by a deceased cousin.
However, the true reason for the visit is to see whether the elderly bachelor
cousin had not secreted a treasure somewhere in his grime-covered lair. The
same deception colours the way he relates to the old villagers. He presents
himself and is welcomed as one of them. Subsequently, he proceeds to
steal images, intimate moments, privileged secrets and to present these in
an increasingly negative and distorted light, relishing, it seems, the repul-
sion these descriptions seek to inspire:
Il coupait des grosses tranches de jambon cru, et les saisissait à pleines mains pour
les porter à sa bouche. La chaleur faisait fondre le gras du jambon qui coulait entre
ses doigts, emportant la crasse, formant des rigoles brunes qui se perdaient dans ses
manches. […] Le vieux avait tenu à dévisser lui-même d’antiques canettes de bière.
Du fumier collait à ses doigts. (Perdu, 50)

[He cut thick slices of cured ham and stuf fed fistfuls in his mouth. The fat melted in
the heat and ran down his fingers along with the dirt, disappearing in brown streaks
in his sleeves. […] The old man insisted on opening some ancient beer cans himself.
Shit clung to his fingers.] (my translation)

The dichotomy that emerges encompasses more than an urban / rural

conf lict. The decaying, anachronistic village becomes a metaphor for its
ageing, decrepit inhabitants: ‘D’ailleurs, dans la vieillesse et l’usure générale
des choses, tout finit par se confondre’ [Besides, in the oldness and gen-
eral wearing away of things, everything gets jumbled up (my translation)]
(140). Eventually, inhabitants, dung heaps, legless frogs, f lea-ridden dogs
Ageing in the Twenty-First Century 291

and crumbling cottages merge into one shapeless mass, the old peasants
reduced to objects as defunct, useless and faintly outlandish as the obsolete
agricultural implements that clutter the yards.
Anachronism accompanies Hélène Cixous’ othering in Ève s’évade
when the contemplation of her mother’s face ‘[son] visage tout vieux où
brille l’éternelle jeunesse’ (2009. 9) [[her] old face radiating eternal youth
(my translation)] in turn projects her into the future of her own ageing or
draws her back to her past where her mother’s face and words and habits
become her grandmother’s. Facing this new ‘maman omifiée’ she finds her
own identity vacillating as she alternates her selves as granddaughter and
as daughter. ‘Ces accélérations me galvanisent le cerveau. […] Me voir avec
Omi pour maman, c’est avoir la canne de vieillesse pour être’ (2009, 12)
[‘These accelerations galvanize my brain. […] Seeing myself with Omi as
mummy, is having the cane of old age for being (my translation)].
The relationship between elderly children and their parents appears to
be a new and increasingly prevalent theme in twenty-first-century novels
that deal with ageing. This ref lects the upheaval population ageing has
caused in intergenerational family relations. According to Andreas Hoff of
the Oxford Institute of Ageing, ‘[the] combination of an extended lifespan
and the existence of fewer family members have resulted in a narrowing of
the more recently born generations and a verticalisation of family struc-
tures (‘beanpole families’) in which individuals may grow older having
more vertical than horizontal linkages in the family’.18 As filial relations
rarify, more enduring ties might lead to increased intimacy between chil-
dren and their parents or serve instead to accentuate any conf lict between
them as the need for caretaking becomes more pressing. Looking after their
physically frail and needy parents, the children, who are themselves in late
mid-life or even older, are compelled to anticipate their own future, to
imagine their own death, as Paul Ricœur puts it in Vivant jusqu’à la mort,
published posthumously in 2007, ‘cette image du mort que je serai pour

18 V.L.Bengtson, C.J. Rosenthal, and L.M. Burton, ‘Families and Aging: Diversity and
Heterogeneity’, in R.H. Binstock and L.K. George, eds, Handbook of Aging and the
Social Sciences (3rd edn) (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1990), 263–87.
292 Catherine du Toit

les autres qui veut occuper toute la place avec sa charge de questions: que
sont, où sont, comment sont les morts?’.19 But at the same time, the nature
of the caregiving relationship may transport the child to the past, either
because he recalls his own parental function as he takes care of his parent
as though he were a child or through remembering being cared for in his
own childhood. The relationship thus becomes a source of memory, of
reliving past experience. In Deaf Sentence, Desmond Bates has to overcome
his profound apprehension of physical intimacy to help taking care of his
father: ‘It was an extraordinary experience, which took the reversal of the
infant-parent relationship through the taboo barrier. Basically I was help-
ing to change a nappy on an eighty-nine-year-old man, but he happened
to be my father’ (282).
Weyergans’ Trois jours chez ma mère tells the story of a helpless,
depressed fifty-something novelist suf fering from writer’s block who puts
of f visiting his eighty-eight-year-old mother until he has finished writing
his current novel which is supposed to be about her, a book his father, also
a writer, would have written had he not died. The relationship with his
mother is explicitly linked to his writing and it would seem that he fears
the finality of actually finishing this book because it would constitute a
final separation: ‘Je me disais qu’on n’écrit que pour sa mère, que l’écriture
et la mère ont partie liée, qu’un écrivain dédie ses pages non à celle qui a
vieilli quand il est lui-même en âge d’écrire et de publier, mais à la jeune
femme qui l’a mis au monde, à celle dont on l’a séparé le jour de sa nais-
sance’ [I said to myself that one wrote only for one’s mother, that writing
was connected to the mother, that a writer dedicated his writing not to the
woman who has become old when he himself is old enough to write and
to publish but to the young woman who gave birth to him, to the woman
from whom he was separated on the day of his birth (my translation)]
(257). Several mise en abyme narratives replicate the original narrative voice.

19 Paul Ricœur, 2007, 38; ‘this image of the dead person I will be for others that takes
up all the room, with its load of questions: what are, where are, how are the dead?’,
Living up to death, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2009), 9.
Ageing in the Twenty-First Century 293

From the original narrator, called François Weyergraf, we move to François

Graf fenberg, François Weyerstein and François Weyerbite. But all these
fragments only remove him further from the reality he fears while accen-
tuating the impossibility of completion. The finality arrives when he has to
confront not her death but her mortality. His mother is hospitalized after
suf fering a stroke and he finally goes to her, his own anxiety about ageing
relativized by a greater fear: ‘J’avais écrit des mots comme ‘hyperanxieux’
ou ‘désemparé’ sans me douter que je serais un jour un fils qui aurait peur
de la mort de sa mère’ [I had written words like ‘hyper-anxious’ or ‘helpless’
without suspecting that I would one day be a son who would be be afraid
of his mother’s death (my translation)] (257). He spends time with her,
with her frail body, her wavering mind, f leshing out the narrative with her
own words. The last paragraph contains a moving paradox: ‘Ce soir, j’aurais
aimé lui envoyer un fax, j’aurais aimé lui écrire que je viens de mettre le
point final à un livre que j’ai décidé de terminer quand, après sa chute, j’ai
passé trois jours chez ma mère’ [Tonight, I would have liked to send her
a fax, I would have liked to write to her that I have just completed a book
I decided to finish when, after her fall, I spent three days at my mother’s
(my translation)] (263). The conditional stands in contrast to the perfect
tense. The writing, in spite of being fragmented, incomplete, has created a
work. The life, that which has always been, the fixed point of reference in
the life of the child, has come to an end. What we are left with is, as Paul
Ricœur reminds us, ‘un temps intermédiaire entre le temps immortel de
l’œuvre et le temps mortel de l’existant vivant’.20
The fusional relationship between mother and daughter forms the
very fabric of Cixous’ Ève s’évade. Several intertextual references shape the
contours of the relationship. A reference to Aeneas conjures up the image
of the hero carrying his old and infirm father on his back, away from the
ruins of Troy. Much more explicitly told is the story of Myco and Pero.
Cixous includes one of Rubens’ paintings of the legend first told by the

20 Paul Ricœur, 2007, 96; ‘an intermediary time between the immortal time of the work
and the mortal time of the living, existing being’, Living up to Death, trans. David
Pellauer, 2009, 60.
294 Catherine du Toit

historian Valerius Maximus of Pero, who breastfeeds her elderly father,

Myco, in prison where he has been unjustly abandoned to die of hunger
and thirst. Keeping death at bay indeed appears to be Cixous’ main con-
cern with regards to her mother, Ève. ‘Je meurs de ta vieillesse. Ce que me
donne ta vieillesse: une Jeunesse terrible. Je vis de ta vieillesse. Je la suis.
[…] Dans l’allée tout naît. Invitation à être. Moi cependant je marche avec
ta mort sur les talons’ [I am dying of your old age. What your old age gives
me: a terrible Youth. I live on your old age. I follow it. […] Everything is
born in the passage. An invitation to be. But I walk with your death at my
heels (my translation)] (47). Nonetheless, the relationship is seen as mutu-
ally caring, the daughter needing the abundance of her mother’s love or
simply the fact of her mother’s existence as much as her mother needs to
be taken care of: ‘je me sustente de ce qu’elle est […] riche en siècles, sans
amertumes, et je tète, pensant: aujourd’hui encore je ne manque de rien,
mais demain’ [I take sustenance from what she is […] rich in centuries, with
no bitterness, and I suckle, thinking: today still I want for nothing, but
tomorrow (my translation)] (78). Finality and resignation merge with hope-
ful open-endedness as the narrator purchases a concession in a cemetery
and then asks her mother if she would be willing to live to a hundred and
ten, a number that suddenly acquires a mystical weight of certainty. The
mother’s bemused answer (‘Si on peut on fait’) heralds the start of a new
life, literally a new lease on life: and the act of writing this book for and
about her mother becomes a borrowing of time, a reprieve. Writing is no
longer a separation, time stolen from life but becomes a bulwark against
the butchery of time.
Almost all the novels contain references to writing and many of the
protagonists are engaged in writing as a professional or leisure/therapeutic
activity; authors, copywriters, academics, diarists… Writing can be con-
strued as an attempt to root oneself in the present, in other words, to con-
firm one’s continued presence in the world by creating an existence that will
allow a certain appropriation of time through the iterative remembering
the reception of a text brings about. Suf fering from writer’s block, the once
promising but now failed author, Adam Haberberg (Hommes qui ne savent
pas être aimés) feels time slipping away: ‘Mon Dieu, pense-t-il, aidez-moi
à convertir l’existence en littérature! […] donnez-moi le pouvoir d’exister
Ageing in the Twenty-First Century 295

en dépit et au-delà du réel. […] J’ai voulu, je ris de la formule, occuper une
place dans notre temps. […] Je pense à mon âge et les secondes glissent
dans le vide’ [‘My God, he thinks, help me to convert existence into lit-
erature! […] give me the power to exist in spite of and beyond reality. […]
I wanted to – now the phrase makes me laugh – make my mark in our life
and times. […] I think of my age and the seconds slip into oblivion’ (my
translation)] (113). Writing is also an attempt to manipulate language so
as to ref lect the chaos of existence, to capture and recreate the significance
of lived reality. The written word is a lived word and writing therefore
becomes a proof and a record of active living and a double af firmation of
the life behind the text. In an unpublished poem cycle, ‘Vieillir’ (1994),
Guillevic expresses the intimate and necessary relation between ageing,
language and writing: ‘Il ne suf fit pas | De vieillir, | Encore faut-il | Savoir
et se dire | Que l’on vieillit | Pour vivre avec lucidité | Son vieillissement’
[It is not enough | To grow old, | One must also | Know and tell oneself |
That one is ageing | To experience one’s ageing | With lucidity (my transla-
tion)] (16). In his introduction to the collective volume, Écrire le vieillir,
Alain Montandon explains the importance of creating meaning through
writing about ageing. ‘Car ce dont souf fre avant tout la vieillesse est bien
un déficit de sens. Parler, écrire, décrire le vieillissement, c’est emprunter
le cheminement d’un récit historique – une histoire de vie. Construire ce
sens est se bâtir un rempart contre l’inéluctable’.21
As we saw earlier, the alienating ef fect of ageing stems from conf lict
between physical degeneration and the subject’s inner conviction of immu-
tability. ‘All old folk become Cartesians’, concludes C in J.M. Coetzee’s
Diary of a bad year (2007:181). The progressive falling apart of the body has
always been associated with representations (and the obsessions) of old age.
The famous last line of Jaques’ ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech summarizes
this gradual decay: ‘Last scene of all | That ends this strange eventful history

21 Alain Montandon, 2005, 10; [For that which ageing suf fers from most is a lack of
meaning. Speaking, writing, describing ageing is to move towards a historical narra-
tive – a life story. Creating this meaning is to create a rampart against the unavoid-
able] (my translation).
296 Catherine du Toit

| Is second childishness and mere oblivion | Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste,
sans everything’ (As you like it, Act II, scene vii). A medical approach to the
representation of old age in literature developed in the nineteenth century,
inf luenced by the rise of clinical observation and advances in pathological
quantification, particularly in the realist / naturalist writings of Balzac and
Zola. All the twenty-first-century texts examined here, however, take the
representation of ageing as pathology much further to a level of detailed
scientific discourse. In Trois jours chez ma mère, François Weyergraf reads
medical treatises on transient global amnesia and other medical conditions
related to ageing: ‘J’ai besoin de créer un personnage de femme âgée […]
Je suis devenu assez calé sur l’incontinence urinaire des personnes âgées et
sur les détériorations mentales de la sénilité’ [I need to create an old female
character […] I have become quite an expert on the urinary incontinence
of the elderly and on the mental deterioration of dementia (my transla-
tion)] (75). Reza’s Adam Haberberg consults doctors and dictionaries to
come to grips with his hyperhomocysteinemia. He reads all the inserts for
the medication he takes and desperately needs to believe in the power
of pills. ‘Supprimer le Veinamitol docteur, c’est admettre of ficiellement
qu’il n’y a rien à faire, ni pour cet œil, ni pour l’autre […] ni pour aucun
endroit de mon corps où il plairait à un vaisseau de s’obstruer’ [Stopping
the Veinamitol, doctor, would be admitting of ficially that there’s nothing
to be done, not for this eye, nor for the other […] nor for any part of my
body where a blood vessel may wish to become blocked (my translation)]
(67–8). Desmond Bates in Deaf Sentence fights a battle between the vagar-
ies of his hearing aid and dealing long-distance with his father’s progres-
sive dementia. Having helped his terminally ill wife to die at home with
a concoction of diamorphine and analgesics, he may now have to decide
about turning of f his father’s life support system. Philip Roth decided to
construct the narrative line of Everyman as a record of the protagonist’s
medical history, starting with the hernia surgery he had as a boy. The title
of the novel is, of course, a reference to the fifteenth-century morality
play in which ‘Everyman’ is summoned by death to give account of his
life in this world before God, but Roth discards any reference to religion
or allegory, wanting his protagonist to face bodily decay and death with-
out the comfort or consolation any belief system may bring. Peritonitis,
quintuple bypass surgery, defibrillator implantation, renal stents, carotid
Ageing in the Twenty-First Century 297

endarterectomy are just so many stations that mark the course of his life.
A life he would describe as ‘The life and death of a male body’ were he to
write an autobiography (51).
The expansion of medical authority into the domains of everyday exist-
ence is known as medicalization22 and the extensive use of medical termi-
nology in all these literary texts underscores not only the preponderance
of the body and its af f lictions but also the fact that knowledge information
systems in the twenty-first century appear to present new opportunities
to the layman to claim control over medical perception and even assume
a more active role in decision-making.23 The use of medical terminology
constitutes a labelling process and creates an impression of active control.
It seems, however, that such pathologizing only brings about greater frag-
mentation and consequently a greater alienation of self and body. If ageing
is primarily seen as a medical problem, medical fixes are expected to cure
the diseases that accompany ageing, failing which, the patient may well
feel betrayed. The fictional Houellebecq in La Carte et le territoire, dirty,
ageing and smelling a little of f (but less so than a cadaver) rages against
the abandonment of orthodox medicine: ‘J’ai des mycoses, des infections
bactériennes, un eczéma atopique généralisé, c’est une véritable infection,
je suis en train de pourrir sur place et tout le monde s’en fout, personne
ne peut rien pour moi, j’ai été honteusement abandonné par la médecine,
qu’est-ce qu’il me reste à faire?’ (164; 177) [‘I’ve got athlete’s foot, a bacte-
rial infection, a generalized atopic eczema. I’m rotting on the spot and no
one gives a damn, no one can do anything to help me. I’ve been shamefully
abandoned by science, so what’s left for me to do?’].24 The medicalization
of fictional representations of ageing can be understood in the larger con-
text of bio-medical discourses of ageing, where ageing is on the one hand
described as an inevitable biological decline and on the other hand as a
curable pathology with the global life extension and anti-ageing market

22 Jonathan Metzl and Rebecca Herzig, ‘Medicalisation in the 21st century: Introduction’
in The Lancet 369 (2007), 697.
23 Nancy Tomes, ‘Patient Empowerment and the Dilemmas of Late-Modern
Medicalisation’, The Lancet 369 (2007), 698.
24 The Map and the Territory, trans. Gavin Bowd, (London: William Heinemann, 2011),
114. (2011, 114)
298 Catherine du Toit

predicted to reach $274.5 billion in 2013 (with the ‘appearance’ and ‘dis-
ease’ subdivisions growing at more or less the same rate). Nanotechnology,
stem cell research, genetic modification, cloning and cryonics are some of
the proposed life extension strategies, fuelled by the conviction that age-
related diseases are preventable, treatable and reversible (as the American
Academy for Anti-ageing medicine says on its webpage).25
As the idealized notion of eudaimonia (human f lourishing or well-
being) gains ground in contemporary Western society, being well, healthy,
happy and youthful is increasingly considered an obligation. Conversely,
being old or not at the very least masking the visible signs of ageing is
anathema, a disgrace. ‘Dans le monde moderne on pouvait être échangiste,
bi, trans, zoophile, SM, mais il était interdit d’être vieux’ (Houellebecq,
Possibilité, 213) [In the modern world you could be a swinger, bi, trans,
zoo, into S&M, but it was forbidden to be old’].26 A closely related theme
is life-extension or longevity and the medicalization of death. The death
taboo of the late twentieth century has given way in recent literary repre-
sentations to a dif ferent kind of sequestration: death through technological
manipulation. The semblance of medical control over the moment and the
circumstances of death creates the perception that death itself may be cur-
able. ‘Controlling’ death in the form of euthanasia is a theme that recurs
in a few of the novels. Michel Houellebecq argues that medically-assisted
euthanasia amounts to relinquishing control:
En choisissant de se faire euthanasier, ne consacre-t-il pas l’emprise de la technique
sur la dernière partie de notre humanité? Nos sociétés, notre civilisation, ne savent
pas quoi faire de leurs morts. Dans le roman, je raconte cette coutume malgache
d’exhumation des corps des défunts et de fête avant de les inhumer de nouveau.
Cette pratique heurte profondément nos sensibilités. Il y a là, pourtant, l’intention
de protéger le mort dans le fait de lui donner une sépulture particulière.27

25 American Academy of Anti-Ageing Medicine, <http://www.a4m.com/certifications-

home-a4m-cme-unit.html>.
26 The Possibility of an Island, trans. Gavin Bowd, (London: Phoenix, 2005), 182.
27 Michel Houellebecq, ‘Je ne cherche pas la vérité humaine dans l’écriture’, in Le
Magazine Littéraire, Interviewed by Joseph Macé-Scaron (2010b), 93–7.
Ageing in the Twenty-First Century 299

[In choosing to be euthanized, does he not recognize the hold of technology over
the last part of our humanity? Our societies, our civilization do not know what to
do with their dead. In the novel, I talk about the Malagasy custom of exhuming the
bodies of the dead on feast days and burying them again afterwards. This tradition
deeply of fends our sensibilities. And yet its purpose is to protect the dead in giving
them a special burial]. (my translation)

The desire for eternal life is treated with equal scepticism. La Possibilité
d’une île contains a clear indictment against youthism and aspirations of
immortality. Cloning does not bring about eternal youth but only indif fer-
ence and numbing repetition while voiding the part death plays in giving
direction and meaning in life. And yet there is no room for old age beyond
the boundaries of the utopic/dystopic world of the clones either. The
remaining human clans that roam beyond the neo-human compounds
slaughter and devour the elderly members of the tribe.
Literary representations of ageing and old age in novels of the con-
temporary extreme appear to ref lect all the incongruities and uncertainties
of the cultural landscape. While not attempting to resolve the inherent
conf lict between our very human desire to live happily ever after and our
equally human bodily decay, they ref lect the astonishing contradiction
in contemporary society where longevity is seen as desirable but old age
scorned or at best pathologized. The tension between these two entities
creates a weft on which the complex narratives of lives can be woven; writ-
ing about ageing as a multifaceted interaction between contemporary
social, psychological, ethical and biological factors and about old age as a
moment between the expanding possibility of time running into infinity
and the shrinking dispossession, ‘laying bare of mortal time in the sadness
of having-to-die’.28

28 Paul Ricœur, Paul, Living up to Death, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2009), 60.
300 Catherine du Toit

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