The unfinished reading of Nobel Laureate Gordimer

The death of Nadine Gordimer on July 13 sparked a flurry of tributes paid to a writer whose place in African literature remains somewhat uncertain.

While most of the tributes paid to Gordimer were glowing, a look at the critical responses from South Africa to her works reveals a largely accusatory tone and vocabulary.

Cold, impersonal, detached are a few of the adjectives used to describe an author who, despite winning the highest literary award in the world, somehow remained less acknowledged than other writers of her standing.

One wonders whether the relative ease with which her works were dismissed was because she was a white woman.

Or was it because of ideological differences between her and the predominant socio-political positions of the time? What does this say about the relationship between the artistic independence of a writer and the demands of their society?

COLD AND DETACHED

In a sense, Gordimer’s predicament suggested in these questions is shared by virtually all writers who occupy double or multiple political, racial and geographical marginal spaces, because works by such marginalised authors tend to attract their own marginality in the prevailing world of criticism.

We recall that Ama Ata Aidoo has complained variously that her works do not attract as much critical attention as those of Ayi Kwei Armah who, according to Aidoo, raises similar concerns in similar ways. And she attributes this to the simple fact that as a woman, she does not stand a fair chance in a male dominated world of literary criticism.

Could this, too, be the same explanation for the disproportionately lesser critical attention paid to Gordimer relative to Wole Soyinka and John Maxwel Coetzee, two other Literature Nobel Prize laureates from Anglophone Africa?

It could be this and much more, significantly her ideological prevarication on the Manichean divisions of liberalism versus radicalism during the Apartheid South Africa, when her most successful works were authored and set.

Despite Gordimer’s public pronouncements that she was not a liberalist, there is ample evidence in her writings that she was inclined in that direction.

Reading her works from Face to Face to July’s People, perhaps the most famous in Kenya, one notes a continuous shift from a general humanism driven by a liberalist vocabulary, through which she imagines a post-Apartheid, non-racialist South Africa.

The problem with this approach, and for which Gordimer has been severely criticised, is that liberalism did little to disturb racial privileges of whiteness; nor did it seek to better the individual life of the Blacks, but instead advocated for awareness, integrity, rationality, and the inquisitive drive that did little to subvert a morally corrupt political system.

In a way, this position explains her shifting portrayal of Black characters in her works.

From the well developed Black characters in A World of Strangers (1958) and Occasion for Loving (1963), we encounter animal-like voices of Black farm labourers in The Conservationist (1974) and a hardly communicating July in July’s People (1981). Yet again, she observes these characters in a cold, detached manner.

But this Africanist reading of Gordimer’s works perhaps understates the true extent of her contribution to African literature because labelling her work as ‘liberal’ in itself constitutes an act of marginalising her works.

ULTIMATE REALITY

Indeed, Sora Dimitriu’s suggestion that Gordimer’s work is ‘trapped in the middle-class codes of the white sub-urbanites who form the subjects of her novels’ draws some legitimacy from this anti-racist racist logic of moral blackness and immoral whiteness.

This reason may also explain the tendency by critics to focus on her novels that centre on group political dynamics in Apartheid South Africa, more than her short stories that, largely, deal with the implications of racial political contests on the individual’s emotional and psychological stability.

Gordimer wrote in and of an ever changing society, which she described, after Antonio Gramsci, as an interregnum, and which placed her in the mid-point of ‘insecure structures and values.’

This concern with values, as an expression of the personal, non-political concerns, is intensely captured in Gordimer’s short stories, some of which were published early on in The Soft Voice of the Serpent and Jump.

Yet, the very concern with the personal, apolitical themes in the short story somewhat emphasised Gordimer’s ambivalence towards the idea of an author’s commitment to the common cause of the majority, or the personal autonomy of a writer who chose to subordinate the collective aspirations to personal concerns.

This is not, in itself, a bad thing. In fact, one can convincingly argue that Gordimer’s ambiguity is part of her creative richness.

She sought, through deliberate ambiguity, to signal her preoccupation with experiences in doubly marginalised spaces, for instance those between the majority Blacks whose subversive struggles created fixed Black-White categories associated with victimhood and aggression, respectively, opposed to a violently oppressive White authority propelled by fear of and hatred for Blacks. 

Plainly, Gordimer’s ambiguity enables her to keep distance from binaries that, as we know, tend to simplify rather complex issues.

Some of these issues relate to how individuals experienced the collective; how, for instance, individuals experienced violence and psychologically wrestled with the Apartheid regime’s legislation on movement, intimacy, political expression, and personal aspirations.

These, according to Gordimer, constitute the ultimate reality that by far outlives and outstretches the overtly political concerns about which she has been accused of ambiguity.

In this way, Gordimer gives us, in The Soft Voice of the Serpent, what Joseph Sachs calls ‘stories of being’, in which she confronts some of the existential concerns that preoccupy her characters and audiences.

Her earlier admiration of philosophy permeates her short stories, in which she creates some characters who, rather than using introspection and contemplation to escape from the near-overwhelming developments in their immediate outside worlds, actually use them to psychologically resist the oppression in such worlds.

For Gordimer, then, psychological realism and political commitment had to meet mid-way at a moment that is yet to come, but which is expected.

This waiting, as a trope, is found in many of Gordimer’s short stories, notably in A Commonplace Story that captures the Sysiphal repetitiveness of life patterns of a teacher who, in a self-deprecating tone, declares: “Once a music teacher, always a music teacher.”

The story narrates the banality of life that tends towards despair when the teacher realises that, after a long spell of self-serving sense of importance, he is not much more than a nobody.

This sense of absurdist failure is seen in The Amateurs, whose theme is failed professional aspirations as a marker of failed life, and The Prisoner, whose concerns relate to different forms of confinement such as domesticity and captivity.

In all, Gordimer captures a sense of death-in-life that is a philosophical, almost obsessive preoccupation with stasis in lives diminished by the racist, oppressive conditions that were prevalent in her times. 

In post-Apartheid South Africa, and indeed after her death, we can look at Gordimer as a prisoner of histories and geographies of being in South Africa, and as a victim of dominant ways of reading that de-emphasised the deep philosophical aspects of her works, or her other side, especially her short stories.

As her memorable narrator in 'The Prisoner' emotionally declares: “Nothing has changed .... What is dead and dry lives on forever and is forever dead.” 

MORE INFORMATION

The chronicler of apartheid

The daughter of a Jewish watchmaker from Latvia and middle-class woman from Britain, Gordimer started writing in earnest at the age of nine and produced 15 novels as well as several volumes of short stories, non-fiction and other works.

She was published in 40 languages around the world. Her literary gaze was unsparing on both white minority rule and the governing African National Congress (ANC).

— Courtesy, The Guardian (UK)