Intertextuality As a Subversive Force in Nadine Gordimer's Burger's

“What I say will not be understood”: Intertextuality as a subversive force in Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter. Susan Barrett In 1963 the South African government passed The Publications and Entertainment Act which made it possible to ban not only works which were considered blasphemous or obscene but also any work which “brings any section of the inhabitants into ridicule or contempt, is harmful to the relations between any sections of the inhabitants; is prejudicial to the safety of the State, the general welfare or the peace and good order” (Essential Gesture, 61). Under this act almost 9 000 works were banned including, predictably, all those which made any mention of communism and most of the works of Black South African writers in exile. The censorship laws were further tightened by an amendment in 1974, so that by the time Nadine Gordimer’s seventh novel Burger’s Daughter was published in 1979, some 20 000 titles were prohibited in South Africa and the list was being updated weekly. Burger’s Daughter, was published in London in June 1979 and the following month banned in South Africa because, according to the Censorship Board, amongst other things: The book is an outspoken furthering of communism […] [it] creates and fosters a sense of grievance which is most undesirable in a political situation where there are racial situations [sic] […it] doesn’t possess one particularly positive quality – of creation, insight, style, language or composition – which can save it as work of art or as contribution to the public welfare. […] The effect of the book on the public attitude of mind is dangerous in all aspects. (Dugard 15) The board justified its position with a number of quotations which it felt were particularly offensive. However, in an unprecedented move, the Director of Publications appealed almost immediately against the ban his own committee had imposed and appointed a panel of literary experts to evaluate the literary merit of the novel. They accused the committee of “bias, prejudice and literary incompetence” (Dugard, 41) but then went on to say that “the book is difficult to read and will therefore not become a popular book” (Dugard, 57), before finally concluding that because of “its limited readership [… and] as a result of its one-sidedness the effect of the book will be counter- productive rather than subversive” (Dugard 39). The ban was consequently lifted in October 1979. Throughout the apartheid period, Gordimer regularly published essays and articles condemning censorship. She was fully aware that the Censorship Board could deprive her of her South African readership, her novel The Late Bourgeois World had been banned in the sixties, and she also knew that it was a criminal offence, punishable by a prison sentence, to quote from a banned book or even to publicly name a banned person. Although self-censorship is rarely discussed, in places such as apartheid South Africa it undoubtedly plays a role in the creation of literary works. Gordimer was not trying to write a propaganda text but she was very aware of the ideological role of the writer in South Africa. In her seminal essay “The Essential Gesture” she wrote: “The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it. […] the white writer’s task as ‘cultural worker’ is to raise the consciousness of white people, who, unlike himself, have not woken up” (285- 6; 293). As the censorship board rightly pointed out, Burger’s Daughter is a complex novel but what they, as “non-literary” readers, failed to appreciate was the role intertextuality could play in writing a subversive book. This paper considers three different ways in which Gordimer uses intertextuality. First, as a means of making a political statement, secondly as a way of questioning English literary hegemony and finally as a means of creating a new way of communicating by incorporating visual art forms into a literary text. Within his general term of transtextuality, Genette gives a very precise meaning to the word intertextuality, defining it as “the actual presence of one text within another” (Allen 101). In her defence of Burger’s Daughter, Gordimer deliberately played down the existence of actual political statements within the text, insisting that she was a writer of fiction and not of propaganda. Nevertheless, it was immediately obvious to South African readers that the character of Lionel Burger was based on the Afrikaner activist Bram Fischer who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1966 and released only when it was clear he was dying of cancer. Although as he was a banned person it was prohibited to name Bram Fischer or to quote him, it was not an offence to write a novel based on a Barrett, Susan. “‘What I say will not be understood’: Intertextuality as a subversive force in Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s 115 Daughter.” EREA 2.1 (printemps 2004): 115-21.<www.e-rea.org> real-life character. In fact in her defence of Burger’s Daughter Gordimer argued that the Board’s criticism of the remark, “his life sentence was served but the State claimed his body,” was unjustified because “the family of Abram Fischer was refused permission to bury him and his body was claimed by the State” (Dugard 31). What Gordimer did not tell the censors, but which many of the novel’s first readers did notice, was that Lionel Burger’s defence speech contains long passages from Bram Fischer’s defence speech. These passages are not differentiated in any way from the surrounding text – there are no quotation marks, no introductory verbs and Fischer is never named. Technically therefore, as far as the Censorship Board was concerned, Gordimer could argue that they were not quotations but in fact Gordimer was taking considerable risks. Max du Preez, the author of a non-fiction work who used a similar technique but whose “quotations” were recognised by the censors, was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment (De Lange 84). Bram Fischer is not the only person whose words Gordimer incorporates in this way. Stephen Clingman has noted extracts from Marx, Lenin, and Steve Biko but argues that Joe Slovo’s essay “South Africa- no middle road” provided most of the political statements in the novel. The absence of any textual markers for all these “quotations” raises the problem of the reader’s capacity to identify the hypotext or inter-text, to return to Genette’s terms. So complex are the references that Clingman calls them “quotational gymnastics.” To give two examples “a statement by Marx, given in a footnote in Slovo’s essay, appears in unattributed quotation marks as a central sentiment in Lionel Burger’s speech from the dock” (Clingman 187). The fictional character Duma Dhladhla quotes Steve Biko “because we cannot be conscious of ourselves and at the same time remain slaves” but Biko himself was in fact quoting Hegel (164). Genette argues that although a text can be read for itself, the meaning of hypertextual works is linked to the reader’s knowledge of the hypotext. I would like to argue that in Gordimer’s case, the aim of the novel is to arouse people’s consciousness and being aware of the origins of the hypotexts is of little importance. When Burger’s Daughter was published, none of the works quoted could be obtained legally within South Africa. The aim of using intertextuality was thus not to stimulate comparison but to disseminate ideas, to encourage people to think and thereby to lead them to question the status quo. Intertextuality becomes an even stronger political statement when we consider the longest example of intertextuality in the novel: the text of a pamphlet distributed by the Soweto Students Representative Council. This tract, which reminds blacks of what happened on June 16th 1976 and encourages them to continue the fight, is reproduced in extenso, complete with spelling mistakes. Its presence was picked up by the Censorship Board, although, curiously, when they unbanned the novel they claimed that they did not know whether this was a copy of the prohibited document or not. Gordimer on the other hand, has drawn attention to its status as a genuine document on several occasions: I reproduced this document because my stylistic integrity as a writer demanded it: it is a necessary part of the book as a whole. I reproduced it because it is sometimes essential, for the total concept of a work of fiction, to incorporate blunt documentary evidence in contrast to the fuller, fictive version of events. […] I reproduced the document exactly as it was […] because I felt it expressed more eloquently and honestly than any pamphlet I could have invented, the spirit of the young people who wrote it (Dugard 30) Her gesture becomes all the more politically important when the novel is replaced in its historical context. The Black Consciousness movement refused all collaboration with whites and criticised them for speaking in the place of the blacks. White writers therefore found themselves caught in a double bind. As Michael Chapman puts it, “should they enter the black consciousness they will stand charged with colonial appropriation: should they permit the black figure its silence as Coetzee did in Foe […] white Africans will stand charged with perpetuating the myth of the empty land” (398). In Burger’s Daughter Gordimer solves this problem in a unique way by withdrawing completely and allowing blacks to speak in their own voice. Burger’s Daughter also contains examples of what Genette terms metatextuality, that is to say a work which “unites a given text to another, of which it speaks without necessarily citing it (without summoning it), in fact sometimes even without naming it” (Allen 103).

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