"Each torpid turn of the world has such disinherited children, / to whom no longer what's been, and not yet what's coming, belongs," Rilke wrote in 1922, in a castle. In 1930, in a prison, a similar inspiration about the inconclusiveness of the modern age came to Gramsci. "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born," he wrote; and went on to add, in the manner of an intellectual, "in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." In 1981 Nadine Gordimer, whose work has married lyricism to criticism in a way that tempts you to talk of greatness, chose Gramsci's sentence for the epigraph of July's People, perhaps her most representative fiction; and in a lecture a year later, referring again to Gramsci (and casually to Rilke), she rigorously described the present period in South Africa, a country of a few castles constructed over many prisons, as an interregnum. It is a time, she said, in which white superiority has begun to crumble before "the black state that is coming." Into this gap this writer steps. Gordimer's work is classic in its debt to crisis and to change. From a decline in certainty comes a rise in clarity. (It did first in Isaiah 37:3 to whom all these moderns owe this metaphor of history's parturition.)

I have been asked to comment on "Something Out There." I have read some of Gordimer's novels and stories, but not nearly all. Like any situation in which evil is easy to spot, the South African situation is one I think I know; but I suspect that I don't. Enormity is not simple; it is merely large. It is hard for me to separate Gordimer, therefore, from the news that she brings. If I dwell more on her instruction than on her imagination, it is because evil has a way of embarrassing art, even the art that exposes it.

"Something Out There" is a rather simple story; a small band of terrorists, black and white, plan to destroy a power station, and destroy it, while the gentry all around live in terror of an escaped baboon, which is finally caught and killed. The protagonists are many, and there is not much effort expended to create their characters, though the terrorists are rather more fully drawn. This is in keeping, however, with the story's real subject, which is the tendency of things, not the tendency of men. You have the feeling about this story, as you do about the present history of South Africa, that its iterations are a matter of logic. There will be a climax, but there will be no release. If the work seems a bit too schematic, and the figures within it insufficiently made flesh, that is the price of its oppressive objectivity, of its air of a finality about which nothing can be done. The torture is in the structure—which may be said about South Africa as well.

In this novella, as in some of her other writings, Gordimer continues to describe the forms of corrupted consciousness that characterize the morally demented domain of apartheid. Her people may be divided into those that are aware of their corruption and those that are not; but all are corrupted. There are some things you cannot see and stay whole. Obviously this plays itself out differently in blacks and whites. About blacks, Gordimer is utterly unsentimental. There is nothing votive in her portraits of the victims, no sanctity about their suffering of the kind that would put an end to the activity of the analyzing mind. That hatred distorts the hater is commonly known; it must not be forgotten, however, that it distorts the hated, too. In the pathological relationship of power between blacks and whites, nobody is not crippled. There is no legal or political compensation for the experience of the loss of dignity; and it may be that the memory of that experience will doom the reconstruction of the country to an early era of destruction. Black terrorism in South Africa is growing more frequent, as it is in Gordimer's work, but even in South Africa, where terrorism would seem to make the most human sense, it makes no human sense. The fatuities of Fanon, for example, who made romance out of an earlier generation of African violence, and thought to settle the moral problem by calling healthy the innocently sick, are missing from Gordimer. She chronicles, instead, the steady inflamation of the blacks' inner lives, the full foul seething in their suffering souls. There emerges the impression of a class of victims that is obviously in the right, and turning to the wrong. Action is needed if evil is to go, but action sometimes costs; many of those who act will never forgive the agents of evil for leaving them no redress except the action that makes them guilty. The guilt of the innocent; that is the most profound plot of many liberation stories, slavery's last scar. Where there is logic, there are no heroes.

At which point I must hasten to distinguish Gordimer from Naipaul. Indeed, a large part of her achievement is to have refused the choice between the work of the mind and the work of the heart; to have banished sentimentality but not sentiment; to have detached herself from the scene for the purposes of understanding, but not removed herself from it completely. It is increasingly clear from Gordimer's recent work that this gifted writer is also a gifted intellectual. Ideas appear as the stuff of fiction—ideas are the most natural product of an interregnum and they are handled with rigor. Despite its sometimes showy surfaces, then, the fiction reveals a mind calmly at work, and aimed everywhere equally. The same may be said of Naipaul, of course. His, too, is a work of understanding; and he, too, is not deterred by the discovery that there are no heroes. But the similarity stops there. Naipaul is useless if you care about an outcome. Gordimer is quite useful. You can learn from her about the compatibility of the commitment to truth with the commitment to justice. You can learn that the activity of the mind does not always require you to live nowhere. In the reading of Naipaul there comes a point when you must accept his extraordinary distance or do without him. Never, in Gordimer. She sees that the fights for freedom have unanticipated consequences, but she does not become ironic. She sees that the story of masters and slaves is a great spectacle, but she does not become aesthetic. She plays it straight. And playing it straight is an old form of high seriousness, a method of work which honors the magnitude of the subject more than it honors even the most exquisite sensibilities.

It is not the blacks that Gordimer writes with most authority about, however, but the whites. She is the supreme chronicler of their awakening, or of the failure of their awakening. The process itself consists in a competition between fear and knowledge. Their society, it turns out, is not so obvious. Life in South Africa is a vast system of common ceremonies and unarticulated arrangements by means of which its gross social division endures. As this system comes cracked, its privileged few learn for the first time about their real position, about the position of moral, historical, and social weakness in which minority tyrants always find themselves. They discover that in the depths of their dictatorship they were dependent; moreover, that they knew almost not at all the population whose docility they needed for their delusions. These are the unforgettable findings of Maureen Smales in July's People, whose slow illumination in a black village must be one of the great demolitions in fiction of the colonial consciousness, which often does not know that it is colonial.

The epistemological condition of South Africa's whites—and Gordimer's theme is nothing less—is rather plainly revealed in "Something Out There." The terrorists and the baboon are the true danger and the false danger, and it is no surprise that it is the false danger that the whites in the story choose to fear. Not that the terrorists, and by extension the explosive political climate of the country, are not also unknown. But they are not uncanny, as are the mysterious forays of the animal, and it is the notion that the danger is normal that must be avoided above all. "Something Out There" is about an illumination missed, about the lengths to which people will go to believe in the durability (never mind the justice; it is late for that) of their form of life. As the terrorists misdirect their anger, the suburbans misdirect their fear. The consequence is a restored feeling of coziness in the middle of the great South African mendacity, and another government crack-down.

A word about Gordimer's style. It is the perfect instrument of her intention. The style sticks to you, like unwanted information. It is precise, indeed it is too precise, as it must be if it is to deliver an environment that is estranged. It is poetic, but it is awkwardly poetic, as it must be to communicate the spiritual state of living in the aftermath of ancient assumptions. Sometimes it reminds you of Virginia Woolf—there is a passage in this novella about a woman in a bath that recalls Clarissa Dalloway's sober spell of self-knowledge in her attic bedroom—but tougher, more persuaded of things that last, of the full measure of moral and historical gravity that an ordinary perception may hold. Gordimer's people have outer agonies to go with their inner agonies. She is a master of impressions, and of interiority; but she is (to paraphrase Gautier) a woman for whom the outside world exists. Presumably not much proof of the outside world is needed in such a place.

"Something Out There" is a document of a universe that has been permanently disrupted. Like other writings of Gordimer, it asks how it is possible to know such disruption, and how it is possible not to. Even radical evil, it seems, has details that are difficult to grasp. Particularly here; the fact that Gordimer writes in English should not lull us into a feeling of familiarity. She may as well have been translated.