NADINE GORDIMER AFTER APARTHEID A READING STRATEGY FOR THE 1990s by Ileana Sora Dimitriu Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PIDLOSOPHY in the Department of English UNIVERSITY OF NATAL, DURBAN 1997 ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to suggest, by selective example, a method of interpreting Gordimer's fiction from a 'post-Apartheid' perspective. My hypothesis is that Gordimer's own comments in her key lecture of 1982, "Living in the Interregnum", reflect not only her practice in the years of struggle politics, but suggest a yearning for a time beyond struggle, when the civil imaginary might again become a major subject. She claims that she has continually felt a tension in her practice as writer between her responsibility to 'national' testimony, her "necessary gesture" to the history of which she was indelibly a part, and her responsibility to the integrity of the individual experience, her "essential gesture" to novelistic truth. In arguing for a modification of what has almost become the standard political evaluation of Gordimer, my study returns the emphasis to a revindicated humanism, a critical approach that, by implication, questions the continuing appropriateness of anti-humanist ideology critique at a time in South Africa that requires reconstitutions ofpeople's lives. The shift in reading for which I argue, in consequence, validates the 'individual' above the 'typical', the 'meditative' above the ideologically-detennined 'statement', 'showing' above - 'telling'. I do not wish to deny the value of a previous decade's readings of the novels as conditioned by their specific historical context. The philosophical concept of social psychology and the stylistic accent on neo-thematism employed in this thesis are not meant to separate the personal conviction from the public demand. Rather, I intend to return attention to a contemplative field of human process and choice that, I shall suggest, has remained a constant feature of Gordimer's achievement. My return to the text does not attempt to establish textual autonomy; the act of interpretation acknowledges that meaning changes in different conditions of critical reception. 11 My study is not a comprehensive survey of Gordimer' s oeuvre. It focuses on certain works as illustrative of the overall argument. After an Introduction of general principles, Chapter One focuses on two novels from politically ' overdetermined' times to show that~ven in the 'years of emergency', Gordimer's commitment to personal lives and destinies had significantly informed her national narratives. Chapter Two turns to two novels from less 'determined' times as further evidence of Gordimer' s abiding interest in the inner landscapes behind social terrains. Having proposed a critical return to the 'ordinary' concerns of the 'civil imaginary', the study concludes by suggesting that the times in the 1990s are ready for a new look at the most intensely lyrical aspects of Gordimer' s art: her short stories. The specific examples culminate, at the end of each chapter, in brief observations as to how the reading strategy might apply to other works in Gordimer's achievement, as well as to an 'interior' as opposed to an 'exterior' accent in South African fiction as a whole. III DECLARATION I declare that this thesis, unless specifically indicated to the contrary in the text, is my own original work. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Professor Margaret Lenta, my supervisor, whose consistent and generous support has guided me in the preparation of this thesis. The financial assistance of the Centre for Science Development (CSD) towards the cost of this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed in this study are those of the author and are not necessarily to be attributed to the CSD. IV CONTENTS Introduction ........................................................... 1 Chapter One The Novel ofthe Political Underground ..................................... 22 , Burger's Daughter and My Son 's Story ~ , (The Conservationist, July's Peogk,..A Sport ofNature) -------~ ~----------- Chapter Two The Novel ofthe Civil Imaginary ........... .. ............................. 82 • NOJ]e to Accompgn Me and The Lying Days • (A World ofStrangers, Occasion for Loving, 'The Late Bourgeois World, A '---- Guest ofHonour) Chapter Three The Truth of Story Telling ................................ ............. 134 Jump and The Soft Voice ofthe Serpent (Selected Stories) Conclusion .................... .. .... ... ............. ............... 182 Bibliography ........................................................ 186 Appendix .......................... .... ............................. 203 1 / INTRODUCTION This study poses and attempts an answer to the question as to whether, after Apartheid, Nadine Gordimer's preoccupations in her fiction may --retain interest aruLsignificance. The question is a pertinent one, given that South Africa is moving beyond what Derrida, in referring to this country in 1985, called "this concentration of world history" (297). As racial issues become more tangential than in the past, it is possible that literature, to quote Ndebele, will dwell less on "obscene social exhibitionism" and move from "the highly dramatic, highly demonstrative forms" ofliterary representation to more "ordinary" concerns (1991a: 37). The question as to whether Gordimer's work will be of less relevance to South African life in the 1990s is, of course, a complicated one, particularly since she established her reputation during forty years of Apartheid as a spokesperson against racial oppression. To summarise: as Gordimer, the novelist, was a 'conscience of the time' under Apartheid, what is her position as a writer now that South Africa seeks to give substance to the notion of a civil society? Closely linked to the trajectory of her career is the fact that Apartheid began to be institutionalised in 1948, when the National Party government came to power and embarked on its programme of race-related legislation. Gordimer's first book of fiction, the collection of stories Face to Face, appeared in 1949. Since then, she has published eleven novels and eleven volumes of short stories, in which she has chronicled the life of a racially' deformed' society: a society that, notwithstanding, she has consistently refused to leave. Her target has 2 been the political, intellectual and moral condition of the privileged white middle class, in which her emphasis has been not on the Afrikaner, but on the English-speaking suburbanite. Even in the novels A Guest ofHonour (1970) and A Sport ofNature (1987), which focus on events outside South Africa, she places whites, in Africa, in a situation that is paradigmatic of transitions from white to black rule. In consequence, the South African experience is identifiable as a continuing subtext in the narratives. With the demise of Apartheid in 1990, Gordimer attempted, in None to Accompany Me (1994), to offer the first post-1990 noveLl , The success of her shift 'beyond Apartheid' will be considered in the course ofthis study. ~ In novels such as The Conservationist (1974), Burger 's Daughter (1979), and July 's People (1981), Gordimer struck the representative, almost prophetic, voice of South Africa's painful interregnum (a term she borrowed from Gramsci). She charted the climate of intolerance, injustice and cruelty that had characterised the 1970s and 1980s., It is in her depictions of the upward drive of increasingly urbanised and cynical whites that Gordimer, in contrasting scenes, begins to make the key point that whites, as a separate and oligarchic group, have no future in South Africa, while blacks are about to move back into the mainstream in post-Apartheid society. I have deliberately used the term 'representative' of her characteristic tones. It is upon this concept that Clingman based his influential study The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (1986), in which he makes the crucial point that, while Gordimer gives us the emotional contours of people living amid large historical events, she is also 'written' by the history of which she is a part. Despite her considerable novelistic imagination, she is overdetermined and limited in her writerly freedom. The approach was 3 apposite for the times: behind Clingman's method lies the general move from a New Critical discourse about the autonomy of art to the various forms of structuralist Marxism - ~ hermeneutics of suspicion being a recurrent characteristic - that would dominate the critical climate of the 1970s and 1980s in South Africa and abroad. Given large-scale political ' activities in South Africa - the rise of Black Consciousness (BC), Soweto 1976, the revival of ANC pressure under the guise of the United Democratic Front (UDF), the State of Emergency (1985, 1986), the collapse of National Party hegemony - it seemed appropriate to regard the historical event as having the right to dictate the fiction. It is possible, for example, to trace the events of novels like The Conservationist and Burger 's Daughter to actual happenings reported in newspapers. I shall keep to the fore the question of the relationship of artistic autonomy to the demands of the society. It is no surprise that critical studies of the recent past, such as Wagner's (1994), should also have adopted the 'deconstructive' approach. While Wagner's study challenges Clingman' S emphasis on the political event, she confirms a view of Gordimer as tightly confmed to a context. The intricacies and ambiguities that