GETTING ESTABLISHED

Given the facts of Gordimer's childhood publishing career, it was not difficult to get started as a writer. Several figures were influential in launching her literary career, first and foremost Amelia Levy, publisher of a magazine run by the Society of Jews and Christians, who encouraged Gordimer in the early stages of her career. (Doris Lessing was another of Levy's protégées.) Then Uys Krige, the Afrikaans poet, suggested that one of her stories should be included in an anthology. Silver Leaf, a small, new publishing house in Johannesburg, brought out the first collection of her stories. The non-literary nature of the society into which this collection was launched is suggested by the account of the publisher's party, in “Amelia's Column” in the Star on 5 September 1949. The column opens with an account of preparations for a ball celebrating the golden jubilee of the famous regiment, the Imperial Light Horse. The ball, with its links to the traditions of empire, is clearly much more interesting than the publishing party. The second item describes the party at which “those who had not previously met Miss Gordimer were surprised to discover that the author was quite the youngest-looking person in the room.”¹ As this report demonstrates, the local press tended to treat the writer as a social phenomenon, and there was a gossip column approach. Reviewers and interviewers repeatedly note that Gordimer is young, dark, and slim, and mix social information (in this case erroneous in its description of Gordimer's children) into literary assessments. “In private life, Miss Gordimer, short, dark, and slim, is Mrs. Reinhold Cassirer with two daughters and three dogs.”²

Gordimer, however, was beginning to be treated seriously outside South Africa. When Krige suggested she send her work overseas and found her an agent, her stories began to appear in American magazines, beginning with the Yale Review in 1950, with the Virginia Quarterly Review and Harper's following shortly afterwards. In 1950 the New Yorker bought “A Watcher of the Dead”; Gordimer was thrilled to receive proofs with the famous editor Harold Ross's comments on them. After his death her editor at the New Yorker was Katharine White, the wife of E. B. White. She became close friends with both of the Whites. The New Yorker offered her a contract for first refusal of any short story she wrote. Gordimer has also paid tribute to her agent, Sidney Satenstein, who looked out for her in her early years as a writer. By the age of twenty-nine Gordimer was a divorced mother with a small child. Satenstein, a colorful figure who enjoyed gambling, golf, and cigars, had no children and had a fatherly attitude to Gordimer. He enjoyed sending her French perfume and throwing large parties for her. When her first collection of short stories was accepted in America, it was on the understanding that she would also write a novel. Simon and Schuster commissioned her first novel, The Lying Days, but it was Satenstein who got her enough money to live on while she wrote it.

There were nonetheless false starts. An early unfinished novel dating from before 1946 (untitled) concerns Sam Karanov, a former concessions store keeper and now a successful company director, who learns, as the novel opens, of the deaths of his brother and all his family in Poland at the hands of the Germans.³ The contrast between business success in South Africa and misery in war-torn Europe was one which Gordimer also exploited in her only play, The First Circle (1947), which offers a similar contrast between rich and poor in South Africa as that in the unfinished novel. A second unfinished novel, dating from about 1951, concerned middle-class marriage. The only other novel she abandoned became the short story “Not for Publication,” which used the first chapter of the intended novel as its basis. Gordimer realized as she wrote that she did not know enough about growing up in a black township to write from the perspective of the black protagonist.

When asked how she found time to write, Gordimer replied that she simply sacrificed her social life. Gordimer has an intensely disciplined approach to her craft, writing every morning for four hours uninterrupted, often for months at a stretch. Burger's Daughter took four years to write. She is never at home to anyone before 2 p.m. Indeed she describes the solitude of writing as quite frightening.⁴ (She broke this routine for the first time after the shock of the Sharpeville massacre.) Nobody is ever allowed to enter the room in which she works in her home in Parktown, an old residential suburb of Johannesburg. Nor does she show her work to anyone before it goes to the publisher.

For Gordimer, a good day's work might be 1000 words. She rereads what she has written before going to bed. She has never written by hand—she used a typewriter from the start—and keeps very few notes. A Guest of Honour, a long book, evolved from some six pages of jottings. For A Sport of Nature she had ten pages of notes. Names come early in the process of writing, but she often begins with only the first sentence in mind. She revises very little. There is often a single original draft with minor changes only, none of them structural. Indeed she has argued that there is a moral problem in revising, as for example when making a selection of short stories for a collection. “In revising I feel disloyal to myself, it feels like cheating to make corrections and improvements on what one has written a long time ago.”⁵

She rarely suffers from writer's block, though she had a difficult few days getting beyond the Brandt Vermeulen episode in Burger's Daughter. For short stories she has to have the title in mind, as a kind of distillation of the tale. Publishers are not allowed to interfere with her titles. She carries out careful research—on trade unions in the case of A Guest of Honour, or the Communist Party for Burger's Daughter—and keeps notebooks. The notebook for My Son's Story contains quotations from Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, together with newspaper clippings concerning political events.

TECHNIQUES

For Nadine Gordimer technique is always intimately related to the content of her work. Asked whether she used a specific technique she responded:

For me it is a matter of finding the approach that will release the most from the subject. The form is dictated by the subject. In some people's writing you are very conscious of the writer—the writer is between you and the subject all the time. My own aim is to be invisible and to make the identification for the reader with what is being written about and with the people in the work—not to distance the reader.⁶

Finding the appropriate way of telling the story is part of the story itself. Terribly marginalized by being white, female, and South African, Gordimer sets out in her fiction to synthesize formal innovations with political motivations, seeking narrative forms that combine European and indigenous cultures. Major concerns in her novels include racism, the crisis of Liberal values, the nature of the historical consciousness, and sexual politics. As a result, individual novels repeatedly pose the question “Whose story is it?” by means of a multiplicity of narrative strategies: by establishing a counterpoint between male and female protagonists, white and black interpreters; by employing double plots that readjust the relation between social context, text and subtext; by the reconstruction of the implied reader; and by challenging the unstated values embedded in the language of South African writing. Eurocentric concepts of the novel are progressively subverted, as Gordimer develops away from Liberal meliorism and towards a Marxist recognition of the historical situation as dynamic. High modernist notions of the novel are questioned as she follows Georg Lukács in condemning their ahistoricism and subjectivism, and moves towards fiction that is increasingly politically committed. Gordimer is also prolific in other forms, with their own technical and formal demands, the author of short stories, essays, literary criticism, and travelogues, and a collaborator in photographic studies. As an outspoken opponent of apartheid and champion of black majority rule, she has had to write in the face of declarations by black writers that the white writer is irrelevant, and that the same is true of the language and conventions within—or against—which her voice is raised. And when apartheid ended, she had to face a fresh challenge as the agenda for writers came under renewed scrutiny, as the international audience began to wonder if writers in South Africa had a subject, once they were no longer in opposition.

Although Gordimer commented in 1986⁷ that she felt that she had been neglecting the short story, as the themes which interested her grew increasingly complex, some two hundred stories offer eloquent testimony to the achievement of a writer whose command of the form is unrivalled in the contemporary period. Her first literary efforts were short stories. In addition she has recognized the crucial importance of the influence of Katherine Mansfield in convincing her that she, too, could take a colonial world as her subject matter. One of her finest stories, “A Company of Laughing Faces,” constitutes both an act of homage to her literary foremother, and a politicization of her themes, collapsing the action of Mansfield's “The Garden Party” and “At the Bay” into a tale of rebellion against female acculturation. Like Mansfield, Gordimer employs the “summer colony” of a holiday resort as a colonial microcosm, and a locus for the encounter with the deathwish it engenders. Gordimer has commented on her obsessive return in her stories to certain themes, prominent among which are the relations of parents and children; the nature of power; violence as communication; and the dangers of paternalism. Yet, as she herself recognized in the introduction to her Selected Stories, her development as a writer may also be traced through the chronology of the tales, which reflect both alterations in social attitudes and her own evolving apprehension of change.

The chronological order turns out to be an historical one. The change in social attitudes unconsciously reflected in the stories represents both that of the people in my society—that is to say, history—and my apprehension of it; in the writing I am acting upon my society, and in the manner of my apprehension, all the time history is acting upon me.⁸

For Gordimer, writers are selected by their subjects; in her case, the consciousness of her era. In broad terms, critics have discerned an overall development in the techniques of the stories, with the early work tending to be individualistic, realist, and essentially Liberal in its poetics, marked by a strong authorial presence. As more topical political themes come to the fore, the later stories reduce the authorial presence in favor of entry into the consciousness of the characters, by means of interior monologue, or stream of consciousness. Realism yields to the awareness of the perception of “reality” as itself problematic. While earlier stories move towards individual, psychological illumination, later ones feature typical or representative characters, in thrall to historical forces, and the progression is not so much towards a Joycean epiphany, or moment of transcendent realization and insight, as towards the point at which understanding dissolves, where, as David Ward has suggested (Chronicles of Darkness, 1989), readers understand that they fail to understand. Gordimer has also drawn attention in her critical writing to the political potential of the short story form. Where Lukács saw the novel as intrinsically bourgeois, implying the living room, the armchair, and the lamp, and thus essentially the product of conditions of leisure and privacy, Gordimer envisages the short story as a fragmented, restless form, suited to modern consciousness. As opposed to the false coherence and consistency of the traditional novel, it is

more like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short-story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one can be sure of—the present moment.⁹

In an influential declaration, Frank O'Connor has argued that the short story best flourishes in unstable or developing cultures, and that it has an outlaw tendency towards social criticism on the part of the exiled or isolated.¹⁰ Gordimer's celebrated early story, “Is There Nowhere Else Where We Can Meet?” is an example which supports O'Connor's view, translating “Little Red Riding Hood” into a world of racial and sexual tensions, as a young girl recognizes that she can encounter her black alter ego only in conditions of fear, economic exploitation, and brutality. A complex parable of isolation, desire, and repression, the tale functions as sexual, political, and historical allegory. A story published almost thirty years later, “The Termitary,” constructs a similarly emblematic situation—that of a white house undermined by a termite queen, which simultaneously represents and challenges the authority of the mother, and reveals to the daughter the secrets concealed below the public facade of the culture of white supremacy. Descending into the underworld of the termite queen, located immediately beneath the middle class drawing room with its Steinway, the child uncovers both the ambivalence of her relation to the mother, and that of the South African colonial world to the motherland.

Similarly in Gordimer's stories the interaction of personal and political occurs at every level, often with unforeseen circumstances. Irony is situational. Mrs Bamjee, the conservative Muslim housewife of “A Chip of Glass Ruby,” commits herself to the liberation struggle, not as part of an espousal of modern values but as a consequence of her traditional concern for the extended family, and thus for a wider humanity. Polite manners and the observance of conventional social civilities propel the heroine of “A Smell of Death and Flowers” to act in a civil disobedience campaign. She is too polite not to. In “Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants,” a male protects a white woman against a sexually predatory invader from across the border—but the male in question is black, the woman a deluded racist. In “A City of the Dead, A City of the Living,” a black woman betrays the freedom fighter who is hiding in her township home, largely because his presence threatens to disrupt her traditional domestic role, and opens her eyes to the real horrors of her day-to-day existence in the location. Other stories draw their ironies from the broader sweep of history—the aftermath of liberation in a former colony (“At the Rendezvous of Victory”); the disjunction between ersatz European communities and the surrounding African world (“Friday's Footprint,” “Livingstone's Companions,” “The African Magician”); the education and politicization of an African political leader (“Not for Publication”); and the fate of a group of guerrillas in exile (“Some Monday for Sure”). Some stories reveal almost no trace of their African context, such as Kafka's father's fictional riposte to his son (“Letter from His Father”) or accounts of marital betrayal (“Sins of the Third Age,” “Terminal”). Others, such as the two, paired stories of interracial sex (“Town and Country Lovers One and Two”), could only be South African in theme, if not in genre.

Finding a genre is the major concern of Gordimer's early novels, The Lying Days and A World of Strangers. The one a female, the other a male Bildungsroman, or “novel of education” (like Virginia Woolf's The Voyage In, or D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers), each interrogates the notion of “development” in a society in which the systematic underdevelopment of the black majority is the norm. While the theme of Eurocentric cultural domination is the major focus of A World of Strangers, in The Lying Days it is dwarfed by the formative influence of gender. Helen Shaw's trajectory reveals the problematic nature of Bildung (education) for women in a patriarchal culture. Progressively infantilized by parents, Liberal friends, and lovers, Helen eventually recognizes the need to pursue her own life, independent of the male, when political violence impinges upon her. Her own horrified witnessing of the shooting of a black in a riot is immediately taken over by a male friend, who tells the story for her, substituting his own skilful narrative for her personal account. Her experience is thus narrated by the male to the point at which she begins to feel that she was hardly present at the event at all. If the episode implicates the fashion in which men select and appropriate the significance of female experience, it also exposes the potential emptiness of focusing on technique in isolation from content. Helen's earlier friendship with a black woman, Mary Seswayo, had alerted her to the possibility that for a woman cooking mealie porridge on an open fire the study of the English novel was of dubious relevance. Just as Helen's personal relationships are interrupted (a vestigial political parallel in the conjunction of the failure of Helen's love affair with the Nationalist victory of 1948), so narratives under patriarchal domination are frozen in form. At the close, poised in limbo between Africa and Europe, Helen lays claim to her own story as a series of disjunctures, which she refuses to reorganize into a false coherence.

Where Helen's “voyage in” ends in a voyage out of Africa, A World of Strangers takes up almost where Helen left off, as Toby Hood docks at Mombasa, en route to Johannesburg and a British-owned publishing business. Internal relationships are the major focus, as the novel takes its narrator into the world of the townships (the urban areas where blacks live), in the brief golden age of multiracialism associated with Sophiatown in the mid-1950s. This was the period when Gordimer's involvement with Drum magazine brought her into contact with a large group of black writers, artists, and critics (Es'kia Mpahlele, Lewis Nkosi, Can Themba, Nat Nakasa, for example), most of whom had gone into exile by the mid-1960s. It was in reaction to the silencing of an entire generation of black writers that Gordimer began a concerted campaign against censorship, linking cultural and political repression in a battery of essays and speeches, and eventually producing in The Black Interpreters a pioneering study of indigenous African writing.

In A World of Strangers, Toby's friendship with Steven Sitole, founded on their shared desire to escape from the orthodoxy of Liberal opposition into an apolitical private life, crashes on the rocks of apartheid. Steven's death in a car-crash during a police chase following a raid on an illicit shebeen is a direct consequence of his color. Toby himself has contributed to the maintenance of separate worlds, carefully concealing his friendship with Steven from his prejudiced white mistress and living a double life between the mansions of Johannesburg and the townships. He is thus forced to recognize the deficiencies of a life lived only in terms of personal and erotic gratifications. Toby's limitations are explicitly connected to his tendency to view South Africa through a Eurocentric literary lens, treating external reality purely as a means to self realization, so that Africa is mediated second-hand through ready–made concepts. Readers are therefore warned off from any similar approach by a series of intertextual references to Sinbad, Charles Dickens, Somerset Maugham, and especially E. M. Forster. Toby's identification with Steven and with the aesthetic and human vitality of Sophiatown is reminiscent of Forster's Italians and the lure of the exotic “Other.” In a fragile indication of hope, Toby's story is shadowed by that of Anna Louw, a radical Afrikaner who sidesteps the delusions of his world. Though Anna ends up imprisoned, Gordimer's attack on the separations fostered by apartheid that make all South Africans strangers to each other, is simultaneously a critique of the values of the Forsterian fictional paradigm as connections break, friendships fail, and individual realization is dwarfed by political determinism. Primarily diagnostic, contesting metropolitan values, the novel is nonetheless unable to propose a political or aesthetic remedy. Toby, in his turn, departs for Europe at the close.

It is only with Gordimer's third novel that sexual and racial themes conjoin and that the life lived only for personal goals is fully satirized. In Occasion for Loving, Gordimer draws upon her childhood experience—the fictional heart problem—to transform personal trauma into political metaphor. Jessie Stilwell spends much of the novel undertaking a retrospective reconstruction of her past, a process that runs in tandem with her husband Tom's attempts to write an impartial history of Africa, which will present the African people as a historical subject in their own right rather than as a subset of European history. Jessie's memories of apparently Oedipal fears and longings are revealed as essentially bogus, together with the inefficacy of her quest for individual integration through a past conceived in terms of Eurocentric psychoanalysis. The catalyst for her self-exploration is provided by her friend Ann's affair with Gideon Shibalo, a black painter. As vibrant alter ego and image of a younger self that might have been, Ann reveals to Jessie the prestructuring effects of apartheid on her own psyche. Ann's affair ends, not because of state intervention (the 1950 Immorality Act) but because the repressions of apartheid have become psychologically inscribed. Jessie realizes that her own mysterious childhood fears were not of the father (as the European psychological fiction would have it) but of the black man. Jessie has been constructed by an African past. Her traumas are historicized, not as the individualistic product of bourgeois repressions, but as stemming from political and social conditions.

A surrogate artist, Jessie, locked in subjective ahistorical and psychological enquiry, had romanced her life in a fashion which evaded its horrors. The novel therefore turns away from the illegitimate timelessness of the Freudian paradigm to historicize desire and to impel a realization of the relationship of love to power. The South African state withdraws Gideon's passport, annulling his future just as European historians have wiped out his past. Jessie realizes that her mother had used the fictional heart complaint to perpetuate a relationship of dependency—in which her mother was the true dependent—just as whites in South Africa treat blacks as children while depending in reality upon their labor. In this context of repression there can be no occasion for loving between white and black; the traditional values of the Liberal novel with its emphasis on the primacy of personal relationships in opposition to the facts of cultural and social difference are called into question. The Stilwells realize that:

even between lovers they had seen blackness count, the personal return inevitably to the social, the private to the political … So long as the law remained unchanged, nothing could bring integrity to personal relationships.¹¹

Gideon, his scholarship withdrawn by the state, cannot connect to European traditions, but is equally alienated from the tribal music which Boaz researches. Gordimer's ambivalent awareness of the need to adapt the novel form to African conditions, to avoid exercising a white proxy in the arts, finds its expression in the characterization of Ann and Jessie as surrogate artists. Ann can dance to any rhythm, play any instrument, but thus reveals a facile adaptability to dominant cultural conventions. Jessie, locked into individual psychological enquiry, romances her life to evade its horrors. Reading at the beach, confronted with Gideon and Ann, Jessie suddenly discovers that her book, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, is no longer an old-fashioned novel of character and furniture, but a terrifying descent through the safety of middle-class trappings to the individual anarchy and ideological collapse at their heart. The parallel is with Gordimer's own fiction, foreshadowing the next phase of her technical development, in which bourgeois conventions come under attack and the necessity of a fully historicized aesthetic is explored.

Gordimer's two subsequent novels, both profoundly influenced by Marxist thinkers, may be read as fictions of a revolution which failed. The Late Bourgeois World chronicles the unsuccessful efforts of a naive white revolutionary against the background of the crushing of South African opposition in the 1960s, while A Guest of Honour examines the theme in broader terms in a hypothetical African state. Both works pair male and female protagonists, the one beginning with the death of Max Van Den Sandt, who is remembered by his ex-wife over the course of one day, the other concluding with the death of James Bray, leaving the heroine to continue into the future. Quite overtly, each moves towards a more committed social aesthetic, with The Late Bourgeois World forming something of an artistic manifesto. The novel takes its title (a description of the twentieth century) from The Necessity of Art by Ernst Fisher, a Marxist critic who argued that art represents the freedom of the spirit and is therefore automatically on the side of the oppressed.¹² For Fisher, all art is conditioned by time and represents humanity as it corresponds to the ideas and aspirations of a particular historical situation. Art has its origins in utility and evolves towards a transformative social function. Fisher thus envisages socialist art as a means of going beyond contemporary isolation, reuniting the individual with communal existence, and fostering change, as opposed to late bourgeois art which can only reflect a decaying and dehumanized world, in which mystification and mythmaking offer a way of evading social decisions.

Max's death reveals to Liz that time is change. Although his life was an apparent failure (ineffectual sabotage, prison, betrayal of associates), he was at least motivated by a desire for community with blacks in reaction against the atomized individualism of his bourgeois background. Even in death, Max remains more alive to her than the inhabitants of the becalmed, cloistral world of South Africa, represented here by her senile, amnesiac grandmother. When Luke Fokase asks Liz to use her power of attorney over her grandmother's bank account to channel funds to an underground political organization, Liz recognizes him as an Orpheus come to fetch her from her underworld limbo. Gordimer ironizes a myth here, transforming Luke, a member of the political underground, into Liz's rescuer from the terminal white laager, in an implicit reference to Jean-Paul Sartre's “Black Orpheus,” the essay which marked the first attempt to come to terms with negritude as a historical and aesthetic force, adapting African myth to radical ends. Though Gordimer leaves Liz's future social decision open, the novel ends on a suggestive note. Awake in the dark, Liz has no clock in her room but finds that her heart now supplies the temporal beat. Human time is emphasized, in rhythmic prose, as Liz finds the thought of the bank account growing within her “like sexual tumescence,”¹³ an image which indicates the awakening of her deadened emotions and anticipates the central concerns of the novel to follow.

In an interview Gordimer said of A Guest of Honour, “I tried to write a political novel treating the political theme as personally as a love story,”¹⁴ a comment which suggests a marked development from the anaesthetized coolness of style of its predecessor. Again two stories are interwoven, that of Bray, a Liberal white returning to an unnamed African country, and that of his lover Rebecca. For most critics Bray's is the story of the novel, while Rebecca's is merely tangential. The novel therefore immediately provokes the question, “Whose story is it?” That of a newly liberated colony sinking back into neocolonialism and authoritarian structures? That of a Liberal individual torn between personal and collective demands? Or that of a love-relationship, to which the minutely observed sociopolitical detail is only a backdrop? In deliberately fostering this uncertainty of focus between collective, individual and relational stories, Gordimer sets out to interrogate the connections between the political and the sexual. The set of sexual relationships at the heart of the narrative is used to investigate the psychological causes of authoritarianism and of failed revolutions. Drawing on Wilhelm Reich's Freudo-Marxist theory of repression (The Mass Psychology of Fascism is a point of reference in the book),¹⁵ Gordimer sets up the procedure through which the family structure internalizes the authority of ideology and shows how characters cannot escape it in their Liberal social or linguistic practices. Reich argued that by liberating the instincts one could create the condition for an irrevocable liberation of human society. In his view, revolutions will fail if they are only political and economic, and do not extend to the repressive morality of everyday life. For Reich, repression is the product of authoritarian patriarchy, as individuals are created with a character structure that renders them submissive to authority and willing to be ruled. Revolutions fail because rebels see authority figures subconsciously as their own fathers. However radical the revolution, as long as the family model persists, authority creeps back. Rebellions of sons against fathers therefore permit the return of the father in the character of the son.

Reich's ideas inform several of Gordimer's novels, but particularly A Guest of Honour, in which national liberation reverts to authoritarianism (the British army is invited back by a dictatorial president to suppress revolt). Bray is a Liberal whose creed is insufficient to the demands of a period of dynamic social conflict, and Rebecca, instinctually erotic, moves beyond traditional family structures. Bray has to choose both between his wife Olivia and his mistress, and between Mweta, the fatherly president for whom he feels considerable affection, and the less likeable Shinza, who encapsulates radical and phallic power. Mweta and Olivia are continually associated in his mind through plot parallels and a set of letters exchanged concurrently with each, but are eventually abandoned in favor of Rebecca and Shinza. Mweta's political choice of economic gradualism supported by foreign investment, as opposed to Shinza's brand of African socialism, is aligned with the choice of money over people, in a reference to Julius Nyerere's Arusha declaration (1967): “We have made a mistake to choose money. … The development of a country is brought about by people, not money.” When Mweta's authority is challenged by a coup, whipped up on the accusation that he lacks the strong arm to control Shinza and the unions, the political history of the state becomes a conflict between fathers and sons. Mweta had previously viewed Shinza, his mentor, as a father figure. Now he evolves from son back to father, replicating authoritarian structures in a preventive detention act. The initial state commitment to sexual equality also falters, as women are barred from the party congress. Rebecca's affair with Bray, however, is not such a clear-cut choice of people over money. Bray smuggles her savings out of the country for her, bleeding settler capital from an impoverished country for personal reasons. He is murdered when en route to Europe, both to raise funds for Shinza and to take Rebecca to safety. Rebecca escapes in the company of a currency smuggler and his prostitutes, an image that appears to equate liberated sexuality with mere whoredom. At the close Bray is written off by the Western press as a “martyr to savages”¹⁶; Rebecca's story seems to be merely a tale of erotic exploitation.

A second major concern in the novel, however, introduces a corrective perspective, raising a question central to Gordimer's later work, that of the adequacy of the novel form to the articulation of African realities. From the outset Bray is situated in a world marked by selective storytelling and a struggle for interpretive control of events. Gordimer's interrogation of the relation between ideology and psychology finds extension in linguistic terms. If, as linguists have argued, patterns of thought echo the systematizations of language, which carry cultural values, if a particular language conditions the life of an individual, then what of the work of literature, itself a specialized language act with its own omissions and biases? In A Guest of Honour Gordimer draws attention to the process of omission, so that at the end, as Bray's life story is submerged in a wash of journalistic mendacity, the reader has been alerted to the possibility of absent stories and of silences in the text. Rebecca's story dramatizes the awareness that the recreation of sexuality in language, its rescue from repression, must also resist language, with its preexistent cultural codes. The silences in Bray's letters to Olivia and Mweta contrast with his dual recognition, that Rebecca's is the story that counts, and that Shinza is a speaking presence to him. Teaching Rebecca an African language, he finds that the lesson (which concerns kinship terms) also instructs her in alternative familial structures, and reveals how a new language, a new cultural context, gives their story its direction, and changes its course. Bray dies with the realization that he has been interrupted, his last words unsaid. Gordimer nonetheless avoids translating the African experience into conventional literary or political terms, aware that Africa needs an articulated consciousness other than that of newspaper headlines and Western political rhetoric. It was a point to which she would return in her next novel, which expands the awareness of the relationship between linguistic and political realities.

The Conservationist, Nadine Gordimer's story of an African farm, exposes the colonialist biases of her predecessors, Olive Schreiner and Karen Blixen, through the self-incriminating interior monologue of its central character, Mehring, a pig-iron industrialist whose international entrepreneurial activities contrast with his weekend pose as would-be farmer and conservationist. Despite his origins in Namibia, Mehring is a thoroughly representative South African type, his story offering a classic example of the “complicity plot.”¹⁷ In this often-occurring plot of recent South African fiction, individual whites seek lives of relative harmlessness, separation, and privacy, only to find themselves unable to maintain any such separate peace. In The Conservationist the return of the politically repressed is symbolized by the slow rising to the surface of an imperfectly buried black body, accompanied by the repossession of the land by blacks, in symbolic and politically proleptic terms. Influenced by the Black Consciousness Movement, which emphasized a return to black cultural roots and traditions, Gordimer employs Zulu myth to create a buried logic of fictional events, a subtext which slowly comes to obliterate the social text of public culture. The major events on the farm—drought, the dead man, the attack on Solomon for debt, fire, the spirit-possession of Phineas's wife, flood and finally reburial of the black body as the cycle of the seasons completes itself—are specifically related to patterns of Zulu myth, as represented in the novel by interpolated quotations from Henry Callaway's The Religious System of the Amazulu (1878).¹⁸ Thus the attack on Solomon for debt connects with the non-payment of a cultural debt to the “Amatongo” (ancestors) in the cursory burial of a black brother. Rainmaking practices, mediumship, and spirit-possession articulate a different set of values to those of white society. In addition the feminine empowerment of these black cultural practices contrasts with the masculine colonialism and latent sexual fascism of Mehring's world. Phineas's wife's spirit-possession shapes the life of her surrounding community, whereas the white female characters are almost without exception sexually exploited and repressed. The point is dramatized in Mehring's airborne molestation of his flight-neighbor, a young girl, in a scene in which the identification of woman with the land allows sexual guilt to function as a surrogate for colonial lusts.

It may be objected that this mythological anchoring of the novel involves resorting to an archaic and pre-industrial basis for African values, rendering the tale both apolitical and ahistorical. Gordimer is, however, careful to demystify the content of religious symbols as such, concentrating on their potential power as carriers of political change. Thus, when floods follow the activities of the rainmakers, the weather comes from the Mozambique channel, near the Portuguese territory which was soon to claim its independence. The regeneration of the land by fire and flood, a mock-apocalypse, offers a vision of Africa without the white man, as Mehring's laborers take over the farm in his enforced absence. When the black body is reburied the reader learns that “he had come back,”¹⁹ invoking the ANC rallying cry “Afrika! Mayibue!” (“Africa! May it come back!”). The refusal to address political issues is more properly that of Mehring, a thoroughly modernist character through whose consciousness the entire narrative is filtered. Mehring's colonialism extends to the whole of reality. His interior monologue creates the impression of consciousness functioning in a void, dissociated from the world about him. Just as his relationship with the young girl involved surreptitious contact beneath a pretense of physical separation, so his society is presented as a set of circumscribed codes and worlds which communicate only crudely, underhandedly, or with violence. Mehring's willful refusal to recognize his place in history, his botched attempts to communicate across the race and class lines, and his solipsistic blindness to events in the black community culminate (in a highly ambiguous ending) in a mock death and final abandonment of his claims. As a result The Conservationist offers a prophetic image of a different South African future, in the best tradition of the visionary political novel. In formal terms, Gordimer throws into sharp relief the connections between conventional representations of realism and the imposition of colonial structures on the land and landscape of Africa. By rendering an internal reality (Mehring's), progressively divorced from the reality outside it, and ultimately replaced by an alternative social text (the black story), Gordimer refuses to grant final narrative or political authority to her white center of consciousness, and avoids translating events into the realism of a materialist society. Modernist Mehring is “displaced,” in more than one sense, in favor of a socially-led aesthetic in which conservation equates with community, and possession with prophecy.

There are those, however, who have argued that the white South African novelist is automatically corrupted by privilege, that Gordimer's audience can only be other whites, and that the products of her imagination must be intrinsically a part of a racist society. With the growing influence of Black Consciousness in the 1970s, whites (including white writers) were increasingly sidelined as irrelevant by black activists intent on seizing their destiny in their own hands. Gordimer followed The Conservationist with Burger's Daughter, a more overtly political novel designed to examine the accusation that the white artist can produce only solipsistic art. As the daughter of a white, Afrikaner communist hero, Rosa Burger may be defined in terms of race, sex, and position in the class struggle, and therefore encapsulates the warring explanations of South African racism. A figure in an ideological landscape, she is assumed simply to reflect her father's views, thus confining her to a hall of mirrors, as an object in the eyes of others, whose internal reality is unknown. The disjunction between internal and external realities, rendered formally in the alternation of first- and third-person narratives, creates a tension between external image and internal voice, representative stereotype and personal fantasy, so that the novel is able both to present the fantasies of the white subconscious and to undermine its power. (Many of the central images of the novel draw upon an informed awareness of theories of racism as a product of sexual repression.) Ironically, to assert her independence, Rosa can rebel only against another rebel. Her father is fighting political repression, so to contest his psychological influence is to join with the forces of political repression. Infantilized and desexualized in the role of faithful daughter, Rosa eventually defects from the struggle, in a belated act of sexual assertion, to live a narcissistic and self-gratifying life in France, presented here as a world of art and of female sensuality. Nonetheless Rosa does return to South Africa, where she is imprisoned on suspicion of abetting the schoolchildren's revolt. In so doing she refuses to be an object of display, a figure in an erotic or political iconography. While in South Africa she had been desexualized, in France she had merely adopted an alternative mask.

Rosa's progress to autonomy involves coming to terms with the mythical masks men have fastened over the female face, whether desexualized or erotically reified. In addition, in a bruising encounter with Baasie, her adopted black brother, Rosa learns that just as her father infantilized her, so she had deprived Baasie of adult identity, projecting her own fantasies of black brotherhood onto him. As a result, Rosa commits herself anew, her own schoolgirl rebellion now a part of the Soweto Rising, a revolt against paternalism which is not the creation of white fantasy, but a product of black brotherhood, and a political and historical reality. At the close the third-person view is reemphasized as Rosa cedes her place to a Soweto Students Representative Council statement, as the political voice of actual blacks takes over the story. By deliberately including this intertextual material, Gordimer transgressed the rules prohibiting its reproduction, and therefore effectively converted the entire novel into a political act. In throwing the gauntlet down in front of the South African authorities, she was not disappointed; the novel was promptly banned but reinstated a month later after a huge international outcry. The voice of Soweto, the black location where the 1976 uprising began, was finally expressed through a technical device

Just as Rosa projected her own fantasies onto Baasie, in a relationship reminiscent of Crusoe's with Friday or Prospero's with Caliban, so Maureen Smales, the protagonist of July's People, discovers how little she knows of her servant July, to whose rural village Maureen and her husband Bam flee, refugees from a future war-torn Johannesburg. In July's People, however, the focus shifts from psychological to economic determinants. In a period of interregnum between the Republic of South Africa and some future, independent “Azania,” Maureen comes to realize the traits she admired in July were not his essential character, but merely the product of her mental image of him. As social roles explode, Maureen also discovers that her own values are context-bound and relative; her morality is dependent on her means. She steals (medicine) out of necessity; her husband kills for food. Just as July's two-year migratory labor pattern led him to take a mistress in town, while providing economically for a wife in the village, so the Smales, deprived of the privacy and luxury of the master bedroom, find the pattern of their sexual activities changing. As July replaces Bam as economic provider, Maureen looks increasingly to him to supply her wants. The deconstruction of socially ordained gender roles is accompanied by a delineation of the interdependence of meanings and means. Changes in economic status transform the culturally inscribed values of language, and literature comes into question. (Maureen is now quite unable to read the European novel.)

More specifically, July's People draws attention to the problematic relation between narrative and cultural authority, implicitly signaling the need to cede interpretive control, to deconstruct the authority of the white “teller” in both economic and literary terms, as teller of the tale and as the one who makes the reckoning, financial or moral. Between Maureen and Bam the battle for interpretive control centers upon the past. Maureen's assumption that she is always the one addressed, that it is for her to interpret between Bam and July, founders on her absolute inability to read the realities of July's world. A series of confrontations rising in verbal violence between Maureen and July exposes Maureen's desire to translate July into her own cultural terms, and to interpret their relationship in ways pleasing to her own self-image. Now she realizes, in a memorable sentence, “The present was his; he would arrange the past to suit it.”²⁰ In the climactic scene, when July bursts forth in his own language, no translation follows: the reader shares Maureen's realization that her standards of interpretation are irrelevant. If the novel ends in characteristically open fashion, as Maureen runs towards an unmarked helicopter, which may contain saviors or killers, it indicates that Maureen's story will be defined by others and will make sense only in terms of an as yet unimaginable future.

If July's People looks to an apocalyptic future, the novella “Something Out There” acts to demystify the past. Two plots are interwoven, in a sequence of alternating scenes, that of a group of four terrorists planning an attack on a power station, and that concerning another outlaw and fugitive, a mysterious ape who plunders the suburbs of white Johannesburg. The two plots evolve in tandem, the ape disappearing from view at the same time as the terrorists, his attack on a white South African juxtaposed with the terrorists' attack on the power station, the ape's death reported coincidentally with the death of a saboteur. Ape and man are identified in a provocative parallel which questions whether the terrorist is merely a brute, and more generally whether man is essentially only and always a naked ape. Gordimer draws here upon a series of debates in ethology, the science of animal behavior, with special reference to apes and Africa, in order to propose a mock-ethological study of the South African police state. The novella proceeds by a structured comparison of ape and man; its dominant imagery is territorial (parodying Robert Ardrey's concept of the territorial imperative) and “aping”—mimicry, parody, imitation, subterfuge, and disguise—is central to theme, structure, and language. Paradoxically, although the animal's progress through the action recapitulates the popular account of human evolution, it is the white South Africans who are portrayed (often hilariously) as territorial and killer apes, with their Eurocentric copycat lifestyles, their concern for land and prey, and their exculpatory fantasy of an unchangeable animal nature.

In contrast, where Gordimer draws the parallel between ape and black man, it is to establish the exploited condition of the latter. Wandering without title to a home, an unrecognized presence in his own land, the black contract laborer at the mercy of Influx Control is explicitly compared to the ape (in fact, a native species of baboon). The four terrorists, however, offer a fragile image of a better future, in contrast to the brutalist image of man. Though forced to mimic the oppressor (the two whites act as master and mistress) and the oppressed (the two blacks who mastermind the mission act the roles of laborers), theirs is a conscious imitation in order, as endangered species, to survive under cover. As the symbolism establishes, their association is less with the territorial ape than with the ape-gods of African antiquity, particularly the Egyptian sacred baboon, attendant upon Thoth, the god of writing. Imagistically, therefore, the settler ape yields to an African sacred ape, indicating that the comparison of man to ape is suspect, and that man can be a creature of ideals and of culture as well as of aggression. At the close of the tale, the two blacks, concealed in a cave, appear to have regressed to savagery. With their occupation, however, history asserts itself over myth, for the cave is actually an ancient mine, dug thousands of years before by blacks. The novella therefore ends with an image of a past black culture, independent, in a territory all its own, which is about to be reclaimed. The alternatives of real history replace the mystifying myths of “naked apery.”

Myths can, nonetheless, be productively employed, as the epic sweep of A Sport of Nature demonstrates. In a novel that embraces most of Africa and extends in time from the 1950s to an independent black South Africa in the near future, Gordimer returns to several key concerns, notably the repudiation of reformist Liberalism, and the innately radical nature of sexuality. The picaresque form is a new departure, however. From the beginning of her career, Gordimer has proceeded from a recognition of the interaction of gender with genre. In A Sport of Nature, as a corrective to literary and political readings of empire that concentrate exclusively upon the male hero, she creates a female adventuress, rewriting the term in order to include sexuality within a positive hypothesis. Hillela, the heroine, is described as a sport of nature, “a plant, animal, etc. which exhibits abnormal variation or departure from the parental stock” (Oxford English Dictionary). A spontaneous mutation, she outrages her middle-class, Liberal family's norms by her sexual behavior, notably quasi-incest with her cousin Sasha, and embarks on a series of adventures (as go-go dancer, beach bum, mistress of a Belgian diplomat, widow of an assassinated black freedom-fighter, wife of the President of the Organization of African Unity) in a trajectory that moves from South Africa to Tanzania, Ghana, Eastern Europe, America, and back to South Africa for its independence celebrations. Throughout Hillela is seen from an external point of view, with the narrator piecing her history together as if researching the biography of a public figure, tracking an evanescent subject through multiple identities as she changes according to the forces of history. The technique registers the crisis of the Liberal view of the subject, with its accompanying assumptions of the organic coherence of the individual, transcending social conditions.

In addition, the pattern of events conforms to the paradigm of the myth of the hero. A strong mythical undertow runs as a subtext in the novel. Just as black writers had sparked off a resurgence of interest in black heroes of the past, in order to answer a need for myths to feed fervor, so Gordimer eschews apolitical mystification in the choice for mythical subtext of a Xhosa hero-god, Qamata, associated in modern times with revolts in the Transkei and with Poqo, one of the largest black clandestine organizations of the 1960s. The project appears to be Utopian: to compose a futuristic ending in order to inspire just such an ending to the contemporary Republic of South Africa. Throughout the novel, however, occasions for fervor are accompanied by occasions for irony. The reportorial voice of the narrator lends the novel a mock-historical tone, with the emphasis alternating between history and mockery. Hillela offers the reader a choice of stories, that of a quasi-mythical revolutionary heroine, and (in the ironic reading) that of a sexual adventuress who is at best the passive handmaiden of revolution. In addition, the fate of her lover Sasha tells a less reassuring tale. Caught in the tragic repressions of his family, Sasha remains within history, rather than utopian mythmaking. Despite becoming a real hero to blacks for his unflamboyant political service, he fails to participate in the visionary futurity of the closing pages, with Gordimer leaving only time to tell which of the two, Hillela or Sasha, is the sport of nature, and which the representative hero.

Gordimer's next published novel, My Son's Story, exemplifies both continuity of theme (the nature of heroism, the interaction of language and politics, psychological conflicts in the revolutionary family) and major innovations. The narrator is not only male but “coloured” and the story draws its ironies as much from the consequences of liberation as from the struggle against repression. For the first time since The Lying Days Gordimer returns to the mining town environment of her youth, and to a central character, Will, whose writing career begins in trauma: he catches his father Sonny, a political activist, leaving a cinema with a white mistress. Ironically it is only because the cinema is desegregated that this event can occur, and only because of hard won reforms that Sonny can pursue his affair with Hannah in hotels without the threat of prosecution. As a result Sonny is eventually sidelined, painfully, by the very freedoms which he helped to win. His daughter Baby becomes a political exile, after a suicide attempt; his wife Aila is caught hiding terrorist arms; his mistress leaves.

Unsentimentally Gordimer spells out the consequences of incipient liberation, not all of them welcome. For the writer, also, coming out of battledress poses new problems of identity and purpose. Will narrates the novel (which is divided between omniscient third- and first-person narration) in such a way as to pose the question of the relevance of the activity of the writer to political action. Named for Shakespeare, he is his father's son. Sonny was a schoolteacher who corrected the spelling and grammar on his students' political posters, warmed to Hannah through her letters, used literary phrases as passwords, and became a skilled orator. For the men, words are power. Aila's silence is equated by Sonny with submission, not with the secrecy of her own purposes. Yet Will and Sonny's conspiracy of silence about the latter's adultery eventually sets the women free. Their silence emerges as more powerful than the patriarchal word. Baby, Hannah, and Aila all move on; father and son remain. The Shakespearean echoes of the text (Will as Hamlet to Sonny's Claudius and Baby's Ophelia) reveal that words take meaning only from action. Sonny had happily quoted Shakespeare until he discovered what it was to almost lose a daughter and to be hated by his children. In set piece speeches Sonny can animate the shop-soiled phrases of revolutionary rhetoric, only as long as they fuse with his experience. Aila jumps bail in order definitively to silence Will, who intended to testify at her trial. As the title implies, the story may appear to be owned and appropriated by the father, whose son is Will, but Will is also the son of his mother, who keeps her story to herself for excellent strategic reasons. When Will ends the novel with the words, “This is my first book—that I can never publish,”²¹ he pays tribute to the strength of female-inspired silence, and substitutes female for male heroism. As that conclusion implies, Gordimer is both brave and clear-sighted enough to recognize that her own time and place will pass judgment on her, that the verdict upon the white South African writer may be a harsh one, and that the fate of being eventually silenced in favor of black writing is that to which her own activity may tend. Yet there is little doubt that her writing fulfils to the highest degree the demands of social responsibility, imaginative creativity, and historical witness.

Gordimer's subsequent work clearly reflects her sharpened awareness of the role of the arts in the transformation of South Africa, first, in a collection of stories which span the repressive years of the 1980s and early 1990s (Jump), offering an examination of the relationship of literature to the struggle for freedom; then, in a novel published as the perestroika years culminated in a new social settlement (None to Accompany Me), proceeding to an analysis of the problems of the process of transformation. Although Gordimer was actually on a lecture tour promoting Jump when she received news of the Nobel award, the collection itself was received as something of a disappointment, more the product perhaps of a “cultural worker” than of a Nobel-winning artist. Reviewers tended to detect a hectoring tone, an excess of political gesture or humorless parable, and in particular a tendency to unbalance a tale by final sentences which spelled out a moral or added an O. Henry “twist.” In “The Moment before the Gun Went Off,” for example, the last sentence reveals that the young black accidentally shot by the Afrikaner was not his “boy” but his illicitly-conceived son. “Some Are Born to Sweet Delight” concludes as a terrorist bomb blows a plane—and the reader's illusions—to smithereens. “Once upon a Time” ends as a white child is ripped to shreds on the razor wire designed to safeguard his fairy tale home. Conversely, however, critics noted a reflexive quality in these apparently too obvious stories—a narrator-as-character, candidly admitting to the invented nature of the tale (“Once upon a Time,” “A Journey”), or the deceptive nature of the facts presented (“My Father Leaves Home”); double narratives (“Amnesty”) or angles of vision (“A Journey”); and formal jumps or shifts in tense, temporal location and voice. For some readers, this multivocal form demonstrates a laudable attempt to end cultural monopoly by a full representation of the other in a variety of perspectives and narrators, so that the voice of the white bourgeoisie no longer fills up the artistic space of the collection. For others, however, the volume simply failed to cohere.

Gordimer's critics had missed a vital dimension of the collection—and one which makes it one of the most interesting of Gordimer's formal experiments—the explicit connection between story and physical action indicated in its title. In Jump, Gordimer plays with one particular genre of the short story—the jump story, in which the tale ends abruptly in physical contact with, and consequences for, the audience, usually as the storyteller tickles, grabs, or pounces upon a listener. Jump stories tend to be macabre (Gordimer's are no exception), orally performed by a storyteller, often in a group situation (hence Gordimer's emphasis on the storyteller as performer, and the sense of a varied group or collective narration), and today are probably most often animal stories told to children (a dominant presence in the tales). The collection emphasizes predation with its repeated images of the hunt (“Spoils”) or the sexual chase (“A Find”), and of children caught, seized, or abducted (“Jump,” “Once upon a Time”), or vulnerable to wild beasts. In “The Ultimate Safari,” children fleeing a RENAMO raid cross the Kruger Park in almost equal terror of white police, bandits, and prowling beasts, huddling together by night in a squirming mass lest a lion jump onto them. “Spoils” ends as a black man leaves a major part of the slaughtered zebra meat behind, believing that if he takes too much the lions will come in their turn to carry off his children. Other stories emphasize the costs involved—especially for the young—of prioritizing the armed struggle over other needs (“Comrades”). Physical activity is thematically important—trekking to safety, parachute jumps, jogging, journeys—as is the suggestion that children's games have suddenly turned to brutal reality—jogging turned to desperate flight, a safari becoming a struggle for survival, a child's toy transformed into a cache of plastic explosive.

By demonstrating how a story can turn into an event, Gordimer implicitly problematizes the connection between fiction and action. Some stories culminate as the reader is seized, physically inscribed in the experience narrated, as the O. Henry “twist” almost becomes a physical pounce. Others show a narrator annulling the tale at the close, sending the real back to the realms of fiction. The dangers of too easy a continuum between fiction and action are demonstrated in “Once upon a Time,” in which the child acts out the tale of Sleeping Beauty, impaling himself on twists of razor-wire thorns, rather than on a rose hedge. In “Jump,” the turned-RENAMO prisoner, forced to relate his story again and again to his interrogators, looks ahead at its close to one final jump, suicide from his upper-story window. Jumped on and imprisoned by blacks for taking an illicit photograph, promptly politicized, he had used his contacts in a parachute club to become a counterrevolutionary mercenary, changing sides only when he saw the fate of black children, seized, abducted, maimed, and raped. One pounce upon him has impelled counterrevolutionary action; the sight of others who have been seized impels him to its opposite. Hunters and hunted also cross over in “My Father Leaves Home” as the father, a child of thirteen, flees pogroms in Europe only to become a member of an oppressive racist regime, in which he is one of the beaters in the global hunt. In “Some Are Born to Sweet Delight,” a lover saves the life of his unborn child (from threatened abortion) only to blow-up fetus and mother with a terrorist bomb. As these two stories indicate, in their non-South African settings and closeness to real historical events, the emphasis in the collection on political rapacity extends well beyond the national borders of South Africa and its near neighbors to other “liberation” struggles, more ambiguous morally than the fight against apartheid. In the West, a jump story may still seem to be a game for children. Gordimer's achievement is to reveal the impossibility of any safety for the child—African or other—as long as political injustice is condoned and perpetuated. If the collection demonstrates the importance of action in the pursuit of justice, it also constitutes a searching inquiry into the ethics, and the aesthetics, of such action.

But what of the artist when active service ends? The loss of apartheid as the essential South African subject poses questions for the South African writer—and offers new narrative possibilities. As the concept of the writer as cultural worker disappears, readers have wondered whether there was to be merely a return to the individualistic norms of bourgeois fiction, or whether the South African writer could construct a different form of subject. In 1993 Gordimer had been elected member of a board of trustees charged with overseeing a foundation for arts and culture concerned with the process of cultural reconstruction in South Africa, under the wing of the ANC's department of arts and culture. In None to Accompany Me, paradoxically written as the country left the imposed isolation and institutionalized self-enclosure of apartheid behind, questions of individual homelessness and isolation come to the fore. In her lectures, Writing and Being, Gordimer had discussed three writers, Naguib Mahfouz, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Oz, for whom the domination of their society by an outside power had made home a vexed term, and produced resistance to the occupation of the national personality. For them, as for Gordimer, “The truth is the real definition of ‘home’: it is the final destination of the human spirit beyond national boundaries.”²² The notion of the complexities of home becomes a running thread in the lectures and illuminates None to Accompany Me, a novel in which “home”—the intersection of the politics of place with the notion of personal identity—is the central focus. On the one hand the self is irremediably altered by the events of history, as social changes produce fluid identities. A corrupt churchman becomes an accepted figure in the movement because he represents a politically useful constituency; a rural squatter becomes a power in finance. Change is inevitable, as returning exiles discover to their discomfort. On the other hand, only a belief in a core self will allow such characters as the returned heroic exile or the ANC torturer to be either celebrated or held responsible for their past actions. (Characteristically, the two figures coalesce in Gordimer's Didymus Maqoma, one of her most complex and human fictional creations.) Honor has to be paid to the past—yet the individual who remains in it ossifies, as in the case of Didymus's opposite number, Bennet Stark, trapped by his love for his wife. Vera Stark moves from a European sense of self, a bourgeois identity resisting national self-definition only privately, in sexual freedom, to find herself confronted eventually with a stark truth: “Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self.”²³

As a colonial, Vera cannot construct herself out of European culture. The construction of her own consciousness must take place without coherent references or models of how to proceed, in all the ambiguities of geopolitics. As Vera works for the Legal Foundation, redistributing land, examining claims, and touring Afrikaner farms, rural squatter camps, urban townships, and white bastions, the problems of a just relationship between self and society in South Africa are laid squarely before the reader. Inevitably, perhaps, Vera betrays Bennet, appalled by his conformity and dependency, and seeks a home in a person rather than a place. Gordimer has frequently envisaged sexual activity as a route to freedom. In Writing and Being she includes it as a form of rebellion against social domination, “the display of sexual energy as a force that has not been, cannot be, touched by alien authority.”²⁴ For Didymus and his wife, for example, frequently homeless and always in transit, their relationship is their only home. Wherever the couple is in exile, they come home together in each other's arms. Once back in South Africa, however, they find home less comfortable. Didymus is sidelined, tainted by his past, while his wife Sibongile is promoted to a prominence that guarantees they become vulnerable to assassination threats from right-wing extremists; their daughter, Mpho, comes home geographically and sexually, and experiences the fate of the location-dweller: teenage pregnancy. Her lover Oupa seduces her at least in part because his wife is absent, confined to a home in a resettlement area. A love nest named for a European battle (121 Delville Wood) offers Vera and her lover a sheltered space for their sexual activity, a separate peace in the middle of a battlefield. They are quite unaware of the huddled black servants in their makeshift “rooms” on the roof. When black reclamation allows Oupa to take over the apartment, it offers him a place to seduce Mpho. Eventually, however, he cannot resist the claims of other blacks to a share of his space (particularly those of a fellow veteran whose claim is also based on a place shared, when imprisoned on Robben Island), although the result is vandalism and squalor as the wheel turns full circle and the space becomes embattled once more. Significantly, perhaps, at the close Vera gives up her physical home (and husband) to move into the annex of a black comrade's house, relinquishing a claim to domination while establishing her right to a place in the new society. She finds a home, if a temporary one, in a person—but that person is herself. The novel (organized into three books entitled “Baggage,” “Transit,” and “Arrivals”) leaves Vera still in process towards the truth of self and a more truthful society; her journey has not ended, although it has reached a new stage. Implicitly here Gordimer recognizes that the South African artist now faces what Flaubert called “the most difficult and least glamorous of all tasks: transition.”²⁵ It makes None to Accompany Me perhaps the rarest of fictions: the novel of a revolution which was successful—and which continues.

Gordimer's novel The House Gun, which focuses on a murder trial, extends her range into the fields of literature as law and law as literature. Technically the novel has the fierce concentration of the courtroom drama, its cast made up of a trio of triangles: mother, father, and son; male lover, woman, her other male lover (a triangle complicated by preceding homosexual attractions between the two males); and murderer, detective, victim. The Oedipal theorizations of the detective story have rarely been so thoroughly engaged. Despite the apparently narrow focus on a personal crime of passion, ostensibly apolitical, and rooted in the mysteries of the psyche, the novel has a clear political agenda. Gordimer had been struck on a visit to Ghana by the relative safety of the city of Accra. Despite poverty and social misery, the city was safe by night, unlike any city in South Africa. For Gordimer, the explanation lay in the lack of a prolonged liberation struggle in Ghana, which never had the level of state violence with which South Africans had to contend for so long. The sense of a “climate of violence” came to her as she was writing.²⁶ The murder weapon, the house gun, is there because of past violence in South Africa, and when Duncan discovers his girlfriend in flagrante delicto with one of his friends, it is conveniently at hand. A spare novel, The House Gun explores the deepest recesses of the private mind as the public world suddenly impinges upon it. In a reversal of the preceding relationships of dependency, Harald and Claudia have to rely on a black lawyer to defend their son Duncan, who has admitted the murder. As the facts of the case are endlessly rehearsed and debated, the novel reveals the inefficacy of such factual probing, the necessity of understanding the past and its violence in terms of deeper human motives, and of recognizing that, in the structures of personal relationships, apartheid's effects live on. Just as in Gordimer's first novel, a specific example of genre is used to question the underlying social assumptions of genre in general—in this case the assumption in the classic tale of detection that by unraveling cause and effect, finding and punishing the criminal, a benevolent order can be reasserted, and the past essentially erased.

The relevance of the novel to the activities of the South African Truth Commission is implicitly suggestive. Telling a full and detailed story, confessing and repenting, may bring the rewards of a lighter sentence, amnesty, or safety. Telling the right story, therefore, involves packaging and selling the past, obscuring the fundamental mystery of killing. The reader realizes that this is not a fictional depiction of the workings of the law, so much as a recognition that the law itself depends upon fictional and narrative processes for its operation. Gordimer's narrative carefully avoids the cut and dried narration of the documentary and factual, by shifting from present to past tense, sliding in and out of the point of view of different characters, and allowing direct and indirect speech to mingle, thus creating a sense of action taking place always within a context, a thickly-textured moral, social, and political atmosphere. As Stephen Clingman has noted, each perception is modulated simultaneously through the eyes and voice not only of the self but also through the eyes and voices of others as the self might expect them to see or speak. A flow of consciousness and time envelops us all and at a moment of sudden social transition the edges of self and other fragment and overlap in startling ways, making each of us “responsible for each other's reality.”²⁷ Understanding is no longer a question merely of rationality, but shades into the ethical. In its conditionality the novel's style undercuts any idea of a rationalist solution. In a sense the opening sentence, “Something terrible happened,” is also where the reader concludes the novel.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Using the term “reception” for Gordimer's work gives a misleadingly polite impression of the ways in which it has been received or rejected. Three of her novels were embargoed and silenced by the South African state. Bannings apart, Gordimer's literary reception has also undergone shifts of focus. Heralded at first for her acute, almost lyrical sensitivity, richness of style, and detail, she also attracted adverse comment for her lack of narrative muscle and the coolness of her tone. She herself noted that she had begun as a short story writer and had made a conscious change to the novel because “the vehicle was too delicate to carry what I had to say.”²⁸ Finding her voice, the struggle had then been not to lose sensitivity, precision, and delicacy, even when dealing with harsh themes. She has acknowledged, “My narrative gift was weak in my early novels—they tend to fall into beautiful set-pieces.”²⁹ As political detachment fell away, attention focused on Gordimer's ability to sustain a tense dialectic between the personal and the political.

The events of the 1990s have provided a compelling context for new readings of her work. Almost simultaneously the world has witnessed the end of apartheid in South Africa, with the concomitant rise of new dangers in the politics of nationalism and ethnicity, both on the white right and in black neo-tribal groupings. For the South African writer, the question of the future, or of the many possible futures, has devolved from the allegorical level to the realistic novel. In addition, as the writer comes out of battledress into purely literary commitments, problems previously subordinated to single issue politics have surfaced anew.

Dissatisfaction with Gordimer's work has been developing some critical impetus in South African academic circles, with the charge increasingly leveled that she is over-didactic or politically naive. Understandably perhaps, given the circumstances, her work is read almost entirely in relation to its South African context, rather than in terms of international developments in the form and technique of the novel. Comparative criticism has also had a misleading effect. The tendency to set up J. M. Coetzee and Gordimer as opposite types of writers, with Coetzee as the intellectual Sherlock Holmes to Gordimer's more pedestrian Dr. Watson, has led to a caricaturing of Coetzee as apolitical but fictionally inventive, with Gordimer as politically worthy but stodgily realistic. The political tables were turned in 1988 when Coetzee objected to the decision by COSAW to cancel a public appearance by Salman Rushdie, following death threats, and Gordimer was forced to defend her actions. Gordimer's relationship to Alan Paton has also been a difficult one. Gordimer declared in forthright terms to the Times, “I am a white South African radical. Please don't call me a Liberal. Liberal is a dirty word. Liberals are people who make promises they have no power to keep.”³⁰ Alan Paton, who had been leader of the Liberal Party before it disbanded in 1968, took exception and a furious row broke out in the South African press with an exchange of letters between Paton and Gordimer in which neither gave ground. André Brink weighed in on Gordimer's side (arguing that the meaning of the term Liberal had changed) but no reconciliation appeared to take place.

When Gordimer's seventy-fifth birthday became the occasion for a celebratory volume, however, it was a rare occasion for unity among South African and international writers. Coetzee has described her as “a visitor from the future,”³¹ as someone who does not wait for liberation, but enacts it in her fiction, and he contributed a piece of his own to the volume. Tributes spanned the range of her career. Albie Sachs described how reading The Lying Days had made him feel like the discoverer of his own continent, its familiarity stripped away by her prose. Günter Grass wrote of his admiration and enthusiasm for The House Gun. Seamus Heaney offered an image from Beowulf, in her honor, introducing twenty more poetic tributes, followed by fictional pieces and a play, from both well-established writers and younger talents. André Brink praised the tense interaction between personal and private in her work. Even in this celebratory collection, however, there was a dissenting voice. Lewis Nkosi argued that though her early work had been a stunning exploration of the white psyche, her later work had become too intricate and rococo, self-consciously labored. (Nkosi and Gordimer had angry exchanges in 1989 over his view that the white writer could not represent township life.)

Gordimer's reception has of course been both domestic, inside the borders of South Africa, and international. Internationally there is a growing tendency to read her work within the context of postcolonial writing, understood as any literature emanating from a colony or former colony, whether of conquest or settlement, with some loss of specificity as a result. The criticism of outsiders, sometimes less than familiar with South African politics and history, can be ill-informed, though it is generally celebratory. American critics, in particular, tend to categorize the writer in very loosely defined ways as “liberal” or “left-leaning.” When a critic is unaware of history, characters and situations can be easily misread. Gordimer, for example, puts the words of the banned Steve Biko into the mouth of a character, or inserts a real historical document into a novel, not merely as tending towards verisimilitude but as a direct political act. The reader who analyzes the references to family relationships in Burger's Daughter without knowing that “the family” was the code for the banned South African Communist Party, will not appreciate the full ironies. American critics have always tended to see Gordimer as a spokesperson against apartheid, but without much sense of what other South African readers and critics have said. Literary theory has sometimes been applied to her work in a homogenizing and globalizing fashion, without much understanding of the very different ways in which race, for example, may be construed outside the United States.

On the other hand, well-informed South Africans have a variety of their own axes to grind, ranging from residual distaste for her abandonment of Liberal ideas, or unwillingness to be “represented” by a white writer, to condemnation of her as too left wing or too middle class. Much has been made of Gordimer's art-dealer husband, large old house, and the Utrillo in the living room, as if Utrillo-burning were a necessary precondition for social responsibility and artistic creativity. When the Nobel prize was announced almost the only hostile voice came from within South Africa, where Stephen Gray, a poet, professor, and playwright, condemned her roundly. In Gray's view, Gordimer's work had been commodified and promoted as a South African “brand name,” despite the deterioration in quality he detected in My Son's Story.³² Jillian Becker's bitter attacks are a similar case of a South African critic condemning on political grounds, rejecting Gordimer's socialism. On the other side of the fence, a review by “Z. N.” in the African Communist in 1980, began by arguing that Burger's Daughter was welcome as a discussion of the relationship between the Communist Party and the ANC, the Mineworkers Strike of 1946 and the Comintern, but went on to regret the readability of the novel which eclipsed any revolutionary content, and sullied its doctrinal purity.³³ The review of The Conservationist in the Johannesburg Sunday Times argued just the reverse; that the novel was very hard going and that the punctuation (dashes instead of conventional quotation marks) added to the general confusion of the writing. As Rowland Smith has indicated,³⁴ discussing the reception of Gordimer's work in the South African papers, her relationship with the South African press and its reviewers has not been a friendly one.

Paradoxically, while some critics objected to political involvement, a more frequent criticism has concerned the nature of Gordimer's detachment. As early as 1969 Dennis Brutus argued that Gordimer lacked warmth and feeling and merely observed in a dehumanized fashion entirely typical of South African society.³⁵ In an early essay, Christopher Hope (1975) was also dismissive, emphasizing the dreariness of the landscapes of her novels and detecting a sententious tone.³⁶ Ursula Laredo agreed, but saw this detachment as a strength, reading the work from an essentially Liberal viewpoint.³⁷ Both Laredo and Hope were émigrés and may well have been influenced by the view that to remain in South Africa in the 1970s was to be tainted by the material and political situation. Gordimer, however, has stuck it out in South Africa in the belief that “to go into exile is to lose your place in the world” (Jean-Paul Sartre). In 1989 David Ward returned to the question, to argue that the nature of Gordimer's detachment hinges upon her ability to produce a narrator as “Other,” quite distinct from any possibility of being perceived as the author's mouthpiece, so that it is essentially a technical virtue. Critics who have focused on Gordimer's ironic effects and her ability to set up a dialectic in her fiction have applauded the multivocality and variety of viewpoint for which a degree of detachment is a prerequisite. The visual politics of the fiction, often enacted through portrayals of landscape and photography, depends upon the ambivalent and problematized detachment of the camera eye. Gordimer herself clearly sees detachment as strategic and contributory to an emotional effect. She has several times repeated Kafka's dictum: “A book ought to be an icepick to break up the frozen sea within us.”

Battle has also been joined, perhaps predictably, over Gordimer's relationship to feminism as her credentials as a woman writer have become a focus for concern, with her representation of women seen as fixed in outmoded and sexist paradigms. Critics can be unaware of their own assumptions in this area. Bruce King (introducing The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer, 1993) trod on most women's toes when he set up a dichotomy in her writing between the public, masculine, rational world, and that of the feminine, instinctual, and personal. At a more sophisticated level of criticism, Gordimer is sometimes envisaged as a feminist writer because her characters step outside stereotypes; at other times she is derided as uncritically sexist. In many cases there is a lack of understanding of the intellectual roots of Gordimer's discussions of gender, in the Freudian and Marxist analyses of the family by Wilhelm Reich and Frantz Fanon. (Intellectual contexts are rarely given enough prominence in the discussion of women writers.) Unrepressed sexuality has always played a major part in Gordimer's writing, often as a force for radical individual and political change. For Gordimer, sexuality was clearly not restricting or oppressive, but liberating, the way out from the white family into social freedom. Given her childhood experiences, she was never likely to idealize maternal love, or any essentialist form of feminism. Although Gordimer famously described feminism in South Africa as “piffling,”³⁸ Karen Lazar's essay in the Bruce King volume makes it clear that what Gordimer was targeting was the type of “liberal feminism” that separates issues of gender from those of race. In the context of apartheid, attempts by white women to insist on being allowed entry to white male clubs did not seem a high priority. Andrew V. Ettin (1993) goes some way towards meeting the anti-feminist accusation. Gordimer's denunciation of Olive Schreiner is persuasively read by Ettin as the product of her firm socioeconomic grasp, her sense that Schreiner's wronged sense of herself as a woman was a secondary matter given her historical situation. In consequence, Gordimer envisages feminism as elitist, arising from the bourgeois white intellectual's refusal to face up to her true position of power. Feminism becomes a surrogate protest; the racial situation is the real.

Gordimer was attracted to Roland Barthes's definition of writing as the writer's essential gesture. Critics have highlighted the role of the physical and sensuous in the fiction, calling attention to Lawrence and Whitman as influences. Barbara Temple-Thurston (Nadine Gordimer Revisited, 1999) has highlighted Gordimer's ability to catch the implications of even the smallest gesture or nuance, and to trace its connections to broader social and political arenas, offering a kind of Freudian psychopathology of the everyday. In an interesting recent approach, Louise Yelin has argued (From the Margins of Empire, 1998) that there is a sense in which Gordimer contributes to dialogical criticism, in exposing the terms “race” and “class” which are occluded in Mikhail Bakhtin's work. In the work of contemporary critics, the earlier straightforward opposition between art and politics is becoming a much more sophisticated and interesting account of the various intersections of race, class, and gender which operate in Gordimer's work. Because South African society offers such binary oppositions of black and white, body and mind, art and politics, Europe and Africa, male and female, Gordimer's fiction has to avoid playing in to the same sorts of division and categorizations. Debates over the dialectical nature of her fiction have now moved on towards a criticism more concerned with hybridity, border states, and transitionality. My Son's Story, with its focus on a “Coloured” family, appeared to support this vision of Gordimer as focusing on areas where divisions were not so clear cut.

On a more purely “literary” front, critics have assessed Gordimer's writing as profoundly intertextual, alluding to, and quoting from, other texts in a creative spirit of adaptation. For some (Kathrin Wagner, for example), the very existence of references to the great writers of the metropolitan tradition has been enough to position Gordimer as a Eurocentric writer. For others, such as Dominic Head, Gordimer is dedicated to producing a hybrid fusion of African and European cultural forms. In a powerful reading, J. U. Jacobs has argued that the intertextual qualities of My Son's Story interact with the hero's interstitial position, mediating between white and black, wife and mistress, leadership and followers.³⁹ For Jacobs, the full South African story is to be told between black and white texts, rather than from the inside, or from the outside.

Notes

1. Rowland Smith, ed., Critical Essays on Nadine Gordimer (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), p. 10.

2. Smith, p. 11.

3. Stephen R. Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), Chapter One.

4. Jannika Hurwitt, “The Art of Fiction LXXVII: Nadine Gordimer,” Paris Review 88 (1983): 122.

5. “Nadine Gordimer Interview,” with Johannes Riis, Kunapipi 2, no. 1 (1980): 22.

6. Pat Schwartz, “Pat Schwartz talks to Nadine Gordimer,” New South African Writing (Johannesburg: Lorton, 1977), p. 75.

7. Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour, eds., Conversations with Nadine Gordimer (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990), p. 258.

8. Nadine Gordimer, No Place Like: Selected Stories (London: Penguin, 1978), p. 13.

9. Nadine Gordimer, “The International Symposium on the Short Story: South Africa,” The Kenyon Review 30, no. 4 (1968): 459.

10. Frank O'Connor, The Lonely Voice (Cleveland: World, 1962).

11. Nadine Gordimer, Occasion for Loving (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), p. 279.

12. Ernst Fisher, The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach (London: Penguin, 1963).

13. Nadine Gordimer, The Late Bourgeois World (London: Penguin, 1982), p. 86.

14. Diane Cassere, “Diamonds Are Polished—So Is Nadine,” Rand Daily Mail, 27 July 1972, p. 4.

15. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (London: Penguin, 1970).

16. Nadine Gordimer, A Guest of Honour (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 525.

17. Lars Engle, “The Political Uncanny: The Novels of Nadine Gordimer,” Yale Journal of Criticism 2, no. 2 (1989): 101–27.

18. Henry Callaway, The Religious System of the Amazulu (London: 1878).

19. Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist (London: Penguin, 1978), p. 267.

20. Nadine Gordimer, July's People (London: Penguin, 1982), p. 96

21. Nadine Gordimer, My Son's Story (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 277.

22. Nadine Gordimer, Writing and Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 45.

23. Nadine Gordimer, None to Accompany Me (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 306.

24. Nadine Gordimer, Writing and Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 53.

25. Writing and Being, p. 134.

26. Andries Walter Oliphant, ed., A Writing Life: Celebrating Nadine Gordimer (New York: Viking, 1998), p. 420.

27. A Writing Life, p. 14.

28. Diana Loercher, “South African Political Novelist Nadine Gordimer,” Christian Science Monitor 21 (21 January 1989), p. 21.

29. Hurwitt, p. 100.

30. Smith, p. 15.

31. A Writing Life, p. xii.

32. David Beresford, “Caught in the Chain of Idealism,” Guardian, 18 June 1992, p. 25.

33. Z. N., “The Politics of Commitment,” African Communist 80 (1980): 100–1.

34. Smith, p. 13.

35. Smith, p. 5.

36. Smith, p. 8.

37. Smith, p. 7.

38. Robert Boyers et al., “A Conversation with Nadine Gordimer,” Salmagundi 62 (1984): 20.

39. J. U. Jacobs, “Nadine Gordimer's Intertextuality: Authority and Authorship in My Son's Story,” English in Africa 20, no. 2 (1993): 25–45.