Nadine Gordimer's South Africa

...Other characters who recite the Party line are immediately satirized, and the dense, poetic language of the narrative serves to set the simplifications of the Party line against the complexities of life in South Africa...

...she will do so by instinct, almost by blood-like a black...

...They were blocked by an old vocabulary, "rural backwardness," "counter-revolutionary pockets," "failure to bring about peaceful change leading to civil war"-She knew all that, she had heard all that before it happened...

...Early in the novel a corpse is discovered, a black man from the nearby location, murdered and dumped on Mehring's riverbank...

...That "creature" is their feeling for each other, still alive in spite of the years of bloodshed and hate...

...And it is true that her artistry is -impressive: Her prose has the extraordinary power to invade our minds with the intensity of lived experience, then linger not as words but as perceptual memory...

...Her fourth collection of stories, which appeared in 1965, contains a new departure: a white character who gains our sympathy without harboring a single objection to apartheid...

...To the extent that she is free, she can either heed or not heed the moments of revelation, depending on her courage, honesty, or other virtues...

...If Gordimer had stayed with it, she might never have written novels that compare with her short stories...

...The words were not there...

...Yet the political moments are always illuminated by the intense observation of people and places-tiny details precisely and lovingly described-that brings every incident to life and that gives Miss Gordimer's writing such universality...

...As long as Gordimer stays with the victims of apartheid, her task is a straightforward one: to set the humanity of her characters against the arbitrary precepts of a dehumanizing ideology...

...But unlike the whites in the stories, they go on perceiving it...

...To the extent that we agree with both pronouncements, we must acknowledge a contradiction...

...Certainly not the hardline Communism embraced by Lionel...

...Critics have good reason to be confused, especially if they do not know the rest of her work...

...Eventually it emerges that for Rosa, Communism is not an ideology so much as a memory of genuine contact between the races...

...This short story represents the germ of Gordimer's solution to the problem of racial melodrama, brought to fruition in her 1975 novel, The Conservationist...

...Humble and hardworking, the woman believes '' that there was a place for them...

...In "Happy Event" a servant woman who has killed her own baby rather than lose her job becomes the subject of a courtroom discussion on "the physical stamina of the African...

...As long as the woman goes on believing she has no one to trust, the actuality of her trust in Jack will affirm both her humanity and his...

...But he doesn't...

...Because of her father, she is automatically a nonperson in the eyes of the regime...

...Gordimer's most "political" novel, Burger's Daughter, seems to be about a white character making the correct political decision...

...Yet Rosa resembles Mehring in that her conscious rationalizations are foiled by the accumulation of her past and present experience...

...We feel for them because the system encroaches on them no matter what they do...

...The conversation is excruciating to the exact degree that it is personal-that the cause he accuses her of betraying is not the revolution in the abstract, but the bond that once existed between their families...

...The assumption behind such distinctions seems to be that a writer is obliged to cover his political commentary with a certain amount of art, so it doesn't show up too nakedly...

...Gordimer knows this, but to some degree refuses to acknowledge it, so caught up is she in using the subsequent outlawed status of the Party as a way of putting Rosa in the same boat with the blacks...

...He appears almost entirely as a figure of protest, helpless in the clutches of the authorities, and by page 62, he is dead...

...It is also an effect so easy to achieve that it sometimes occurs inadvertently, any time a character's ideas are juxtaposed with his physical flaws...

...To move the rest of the way across that line, Gordimer would have had to continue reversing the priority of particular over abstract until a set of political ideas took precedence over the richness of her own perceptions...

...Satire has the further limitation of depending, for the most part, on the presence of a witness, a sympathetic major character who is not himself satirized...

...But as a doctrinaire formula in literature, it is just as stultifyingly predictable...

...It is almost as though Gordimer were making not only a political statement, but also a literary one: that her fictional powers can be used to detract from ideology, but not to support it...

...Yet this makes the same problem worse, because the more developed the character's ideas, the greater the pitfalls of inadvertent satire or irony, as his physical faults or manner of living will appear to detract from them...

...Angola will go, and Mozambique . . .It's coming at last...

...Ideology, defined as a coherent body of ideas attached to definite social and political institutions, may encroach more or less on the lives of those who live under its sway...

...Not with the means they had satisfied themselves with...

...They meet at a fund-raising party in London, after which Baasie telephones Rosa in the middle of the night to give her the tongue-lashing of herlife...

...Whatever the amount of sympathy or nostalgia Gordimer may feel toward the Left, specifically the South African Communist Party, it is safe to say that her own grip on words-and experience-is far too strong to allow her to structure her fiction according to the dictates of its ideology...

...Gordimer's first four novels contain protagonists who are like the sympathetic whites in the short stories, in that they perceive what is wrong with the social order...

...Driven by fears he cannot admit, he begins to fantasize about befriending Jacobus, the aged herdsman who is elder and arbiter to the other blacks...

...The short story form is well suited to this, kind of development: It enables Gordimer to amass the details, produce the moment, and then stop...

...To varying degrees, all four of these early novels are racial melodramas, tracts in the sense that they stack the deck-pit the warm vitality of black communal life against the cold, desiccated manipulations of whites...

...The woman and her husband are hindered at every turn: by poverty, and by a political system that dictates every aspect of their lives-from work and education to family and identity itself-according to its ideology of white supremacy and racial separation...

...The task remains straightforward because fiction in general counters the abstract with the particular, insisting that experience has meanings not reducible to intellectual constructs of any kind, including political ideologies...

...Nor does the process stop with physical idealization...

...By trying to sustain them as witnesses to injustice, Gordimer puts herself in the awkward position, for a novelist, of preferring the abstract to the particular-of locating virtue above and beyond the array of details she so keenly observes...

...Most unlikely...

...All of Rosa's rationalizations for a safe, comfortable life in Europe are shattered by this phone call...

...That she can protest, but not prescribe...

...But on a deeper level of his mind, he becomes obsessed by the thought of that shallow grave and its lonely occupant...

...With these figures more than with any white character, Gordimer succumbs to the temptation of idealization...

...That she can continue to liberate her characters from apartheid, but not deliver them into the hands of a new dogma...

...Because she is white, her life is not nearly as encroached upon as that of a black...

...Poke as they will, they cannot quite kill it...

...And the statement it makes is profoundly political: Gordimer at her best, setting up yet another contrast between the ruling ideology of her country and a human reality too rich, complex, and mysterious for it...

...it is simply that the woman can't help noticing Jack's obvious good nature and intelligence...

...The greater development is the gradual accumulation of experience leading up to a moment of rupture, when the assumptions and prejudices of the character fall like scales from his eyes...

...In "A Chip of Glass Ruby" an Indian husband disapproves of his wife's protest activities on behalf of the blacks, until it becomes clear that the increasing repression applies to Indians as well-even those, like him, who try not to get involved...

...Yet ironically neither she nor Jack can acknowledge the existence of their mutual regard, or the fact that he may very well have saved her life...

...After the momentary shock and humor of seeing the contrast between thinker and thought, we lose interest in both...

...In creating the sort of character who benefits from apartheid, Gordimer occasionally relies on the same dynamic of abstract versus particular, only this time within the character itself...

...Yet caricature can only go so far...

...it's not only that it's not safe to walk about alone at night because of the natives, this whole town is full of people you can't trust...

...To adorn interracial contact with special beauty is to suggest that such contact is an abstraction removed from the particularities of life-an ideal to be sought, rather than a reality to be affirmed in the face of arbitrary denial...

...Yet such is the effect of prolonged ironic contrast between their attitudes and their lives...

...The story ends with the final comment: That fellow [the drifter]'s never bothered me again...

...Yet while her fiction deserves praise, it also deserves explanation...

...If true, such praise would be damning, because it would mean that Gordimer had crossed the line between commitment and doctrinairism-a movement in which the physical idealization of a politically correct character is only the first step...

...For personal relationships with black people is the one freedom whites do not have...

...Sometimes a novelist will try to improve a carping character by turning him into a politically correct character-the kind with all the answers...

...In its mixture of curiosity, fury, and insult the transformation is nothing short of profound...

...But that is not the whole story...

...not a share in the White Man's place...

...The situation of the novel seems to cry out for some sort of prescriptive statement, some response to the South African version of' 'What is to be done...

...It is scarcely a love story: more like an old silent feud finally forced out into the open-a feud each has with himself as much as with the other...

...For a brief moment, Mehring yearns to ask that shrewd face for help...

...and Luke Fokase in The Late Bourgeois World, toward whose "immense charm" Elizabeth Van Den Sandt turns as naturally as a flower toward the sun...

...Accumulations of details, especially if they are rich and vivid, suggest to our minds that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any philosophy...

...In the case of a writer like Nadine Gordimer of South Africa, critical praise often takes the form of claiming that she has added plenty of artistry to what might otherwise have been a stark political statement: It is the combination of political authenticity with sensuous awareness that makes this novel [Burger's Daughter] so powerful...

...This inclination to supplement revolutionary politics with an extra dose of good looks or sex appeal may be one reason why a number of critics have tended to praise Burger's Daughter in terms that make it sound like a dressed-up political tract (the noble example of Rosa Burger picking up her father's fallen standard), and regard the complexities and convolutions of both the language and Rosa's psyche as so much ornament added to make the basic message more artistically palatable...

...As forbidden fruit, it has tempted Gordimer more than once to romanticize the slightest contact between the races...

...The dangers inherent in this difference are exemplified in the character of Elizabeth Van Den Sandt, who spends most of the fourth novel, The Late Bourgeois World, perceiving the faults of her husband, his family, his political associates, the headmaster of her son's school, her son, her aged grandmother, her current lover, and the American astronauts orbiting in space...

...any shift from a character's cherished beliefs to the slightest detail of his imperfections has the effect, willy-nilly, of appearing to discredit the beliefs...

...Nor is the treatment confined to conservative whites...

...Instead of writing the kind of fiction that suggests a heaven and earth beyond any philosophy, she would have had to write the kind that reduces heaven and earth to a mere illustration, however well ornamented, of the philosophy she thinks is correct...

...Then he jumps back to direct Rosa's car out of the driveway, and Gordimer gives us a glimpse in the rearview mirror of "his old man's legs, slightly bent with the effort at the back of the knees, the safari jacket lifted over the behind...

...For a writer who has successfully combined politics and literature has accomplished a task that is far more complex and demanding than the mere dressing up of a message...

...Her character obeys the same dynamic as that of the liberal white: The depths, the texture of her experience stand in ironic contrast to her conscious beliefs...

...July's People gives us the transformation of South Africa not as ideology brought to life, but as the wonderfully subtle emergence of black July and white Maureen Smales, who have known each other for fifteen years exclusively through the ritual of houseboy and mistress, into a new relationship where they must treat each other as equals...

...Her ways of doing this are as infinitely variable as her characters...

...a place of their own...

...Paradoxical as it may seem, this prejudiced white woman gains our sympathy because she is prejudiced...

...Gideon Shibolo in Occasion for Loving, who combines artistic genius with sexual powe'r...

...In art, however, we do not require such excess to get the point...

...And now that it had happened, it was an experience that couldn't be forethought...

...It lands in the forest on the far side of the river, yet before its occupants can make contact with the people of the homestead, the novel ends...

...Perhaps because the ideology is less systematic than Marxism-and much less embodied in institutions-we notice it less...

...his brother-in-law by taking part in an act of sabotage, with the consequence of breaking up the family and driving his sister into madness and exile...

...Increasingly estranged from his liberal son and mistress, as well as his conservative business associates, Mehring spends more and more time on the farm, alone except for the blacks who manage the place...

...Proof of Gordimer's unwillingness to propagate the ideology of the Left may be found in her most recent novel, July's People, * which gives us the imagined scenario of South Africa in the midst of a successful black revolution...

...Growing up with black playmates, one of whom was as close as a brother, she is a strange phenomenon: a white South African for whom the element of choice does not exist...

...In "Six Feet of the Country" a black migrant dies of pneumonia, and because he lacks identity papers, the local officials don't bother to keep track of his body, sending the grieving relatives another corpse to bury...

...In fact, the more imperfect they are, the more impressed we are by the discrepancy between even their greatest faults and the treatment they receive at the hands of the authorities...

...How can we say on the one hand that literature ought to make political statements, yet warn on the other that it cannot do so without sacrificing artistic integrity...

...An example of this inadvertent satire would be the aging ex-Communist in Burger's Daughter, Dick Terblanche...

...She need not concern herself with what the enlightened white character does afterward...

...And when she gets involved with a white drifter, an unsavory type who is clearly taking advantage of her and may even prove to be dangerous, she can't help relying on the same qualities in Jack to help her escape the situation...

...At one point they reflect on the contrast between what they are living through and the political abstractions they once found so meaningful: He struggled hopelessly for words that were not phrases from back there, words that would make the truth that must be forming here, out of the blacks, out of themselves . . . But the words would not come...

...Writers who succeed with both forms are rare, yet Gordimer has done so-perhaps by using the short stories as a laboratory in which to experiment with different kinds of characters...

...This leads her to join a mild protest, and when she is arrested she has the rest of the epiphany: . . . she looked up and saw the faces of the African onlookers . . . And she felt, suddenly, not nothing, but what they were feeling at the sight of her, a white girl, taken-incomprehensibly, as they themselves were used to being taken-under the force of white men's wills, which dispensed and withdrew life, imprisoned and set free, fed or starved, like God himself...

...As a literary device, this is extremely clever, because it enables Gordimer to create a white character whose virtues and choices don't make a bit of difference...

...The naive liberal who patronizes blacks in "Which New Era Would That Be" is described as "a determined woman" with a too-correct voice, a too-bright smile, a too-revealing blouse...

...Steven Sitole in A World of Strangers, whose charisma wins adoration from both black and white...

...And because of her upbringing, she need not adopt any particular political line to come into conflict with the system...

...Taken by surprise when the liberation forces start shelling their Johannesburg suburb, the Smaleses and July drive several hundred miles north into the bush, where in exchange for the use of their jeep, July offers the Smaleses a refuge in his family homestead...

...The satirical contrast may be not only a device, but also a pitfall...

...We sympathize with her according to her choices, not her fate...

...More popular, and more compelling for Gordimer, is the doctrine of reverse racism, black nationalism taken to the extreme of ideological belief in black cultural and moral superiority...

...The same comparison could be made between a possible tract projecting the glories of the coming revolution, and July's People...

...Like an eggshell with something alive pecking its way out, the brittle ritual cracks off in pieces...

...Like satire, epiphany is brief...

...It is no accident that the main component in both these characters' experience is strong emotion toward someone who is black...

...And the fact that he doesn't is what makes him such a fascinating and successful creation...

...There is no reason, given the rest of what we see of Dick Terblanche, to think that Gordimer intends to satirize his faith in the revolution, but that is the effect...

...As a political statement, however, the character of Rosa Burger is misleading...

...Like the woman in "Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants," Mehring refuses to learn from his experience-enabling Gordimer to deepen and sustain the revelations of that experience over the length of a novel...

...The South African Communist Party was still aboveground in the fifties, and insofar as its members behaved in a brotherly fashion toward black people, they deserve to be remembered...

...but not no place at all, either...

...Even in Burger's Daughter, a greeting between Rosa and the wife of a long-imprisoned black comrade becomes an occasion for rhapsody: To touch in women's token embrace against the live, night cheek of Marisa, seeing huge for a second the lake-flash of her eye, the lilac-pink of her inner lip against the translucent-edged teeth clearing from saliva as shells gleam from the sea, to enter for a moment the invisible magnetic field of the body of a beautiful creature and receive on oneself its imprint- breath misting and quickly fading on a glass pane-this was to immerse in another mode of perception...

...Some of us will still be around when it happens...

...She would have had to build up the figure of Lionel to heroic proportions, then make sure every detail in the narrative fell into place around his advanced formulations...

...In the weeks that follow, the white couple undergo a frightening and disorienting loss of trust in themselves and in their host...

...Fiction has a natural tendency to set the descriptive powers of language against the analytic, with the all-but-inevitable result of seeming to detract from the analysis...

...The excess of apartheid has inspired in Gordimer a similar excess: to glorify that which is unfairly debased...

...I never breathed a word about it to anybody-as I say, that's the trouble when you work alone in an office like I do, there's no one you can speak to...

...Rather lonely, with no family and few friends in the area, the woman feels a bit sheepish about getting along as well as she does with the black employees at the service station, in particular "the boss-boy, Jack.'' There is nothing sexual about the relationship...

...The critic then judges the work on whether the covering is adequate...

...Not long now, Rosa," he says...

...The point is that Gordimer need not give such characters any particular virtues in order to command our sympathy...

...As any good satirist knows, it doesn't take much...

...The climax of July's People is the arrival of a military helicopter, presumably full of victorious liberators-whether from Russia or Cuba or Mozambique, no one knows...

...She wanted them to have it and she wanted them to stay there...

...It is not her intention to undercut these characters' disapproval of apartheid, or to make it look hypocritical...

...We are used to hearing two different pronouncements on the subject of politics in literature: first that writers should be committed to protesting social injustice, and second that they should avoid making political comments for fear of becoming doctrinaire...

...Despite her early reputation as an exotic author providing European and American readers with vicarious travel to faraway places like the Transvaal, the River Zaire, and the Kalihari Desert, she has always been political in the sense of dealing unflinchingly with the injustice of apartheid...

...In Gordimer's early novels especially, there is a kind of character who stands in diametric opposition to the carping and self-righteous white: the absolutely wonderful black...

...In fact, it is counterproductive, because as we have seen, idealization is the recourse of a fiction writer trying to sell an idea...

...As the story unfolds, we see that even this modest aim is too high...

...It is a form of rebuttal more devastating in its way than argument- especially when employed by a writer whose eye for detail is as sharp as Gordimer's...

...There is Sipho in The Lying Days, whose death spells the end of idealism for the young white protagonists...

...The depths of her being literally rise against her as she hangs up, vomits, weeps, and returns to be placed in preventive detention...

...In "Some Monday For Sure" a black youth tries to impress...

...Ah, Woe is Me," a story in her first collection, published in 1952, describes the travail of an African woman trying to raise her three children...

...Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants" is narrated in the cheerful, oblivious voice of a perfectly ordinary South African racist, a middle-aged woman who manages a service station in suburban Johannesburg...

...There can be no doubt that Gordimer has heeded the first'pronouncement...

...Because this occurs regardless of the novelist's intentions, he may feel tempted to ensure against it by selecting only those details that support or enhance the character's ideas-in short, to idealize...

...On a conscious level, he tells himself he couldn't care less what a bunch of thick-headed Boer cops do with a nameless black hoodlum...

...An ideology that is contradictory, limited in scope, and embodied in only a few institutions is easier to ignore than something like apartheid-which for blacks and others who are not white approached the totalitarian...

...She herself is "a gay one, strongly made-up, with a small waist and wide jelly-hips.'' Or Gordimer combines the smug materialism of the Afrikaner couple in ' "The Night the Favourite Came Home" with vulgar manners, and in the case of the wife, legs that are "muscular and heavy-boned and shapely as a wrestler's...

...Gordimer comes close to doing this with the figure of Paul Clark, the young activist in her first novel, The Lying Days, who possesses not only brains and political idealism but "a quick blood-attraction of sex on him like the gloss on the plumes of a bird.'' And as recently as her much-acclaimed Burger's Daughter, Gordimer gives us mild idealization in the potent, leonine figure of the martyred Communist Lionel Burger...

...His one speech in the book is eloquently anti-apartheid, only sporadically Marxist...

...Early stories like "The Catch" and "The Train From Rhodesia" end on such moments of sudden revelation...

...Yet rather than attempting to answer that question, July 's People removes us from it...

...Negotiating over seemingly petty matters such as possession of the keys to the jeep, the two of them go through an odd and passionate contest of Wills, each trying to seize the advantage in a game neither knows how to play...

...Throughout the fifties and sixties, as more and more laws and exclusionary policies were put into effect, Gordimer was writing fiction that reflects the massive encroachment of apartheid by showing how apartheid constantly interferes with the simplest efforts of nonwhite South Africans to make a living, express an opinion, or retain a shred of dignity...

...It is the story of Mehring, a wealthy Johannesburg industrialist who scorns liberal hypocrisy while taking pride in the honesty of his own motives, which are to live for what money can buy-such as a 400-acre farm north of the city he uses for a weekend retreat...

...The three main characters are basically apolitical-a vaguely leftist white couple, Maureen and Bam Smales, and their black house servant, July...

...But in the case of Burger's Daughter, what philosophy would that be...

...It is this argument more than the evidence that clinches the case, and we are left feeling that the woman has been judged racially rather than morally or legally...

...Casting a satirical eye at other whites is part of this process, but only part...

...A slightly later story, "The Smell of Death and Flowers," contains two such moments, the first occurring when a white girl dances with a black man for the first time, and is astonished that she feels neither revulsion nor excitement, but "nothing...

...Apartheid does not automatically deny her humanity, so her humanity does not automatically defy apartheid...

...his mind, his anger, had no grip...

...Eventually, these fears and fantasies combine in a near-epiphany in which Mehring's prejudices give way to a perception of the shrewd face of Jacobus beneath the foolish one shown him as master...

...It may of course be either, but the art of fiction is simply better equipped to perform the latter function- as becomes clear when we compare this '' token embrace'' to the power of the scene whece Baasie telephones Rosa, and they argue "as if poking with a stick at some creature writhing between them...

...When Rosa decides to return to South Africa from exile in Europe, she does so not out of acquired political convictions, but because of an encounter with the black companion of her childhood, Baasie Vulindlela...

...But remembering the good old days of friendship between the races is a far cry from endorsing the Third International...

...But of a native woman, I should say yes-yes, it would be possible...

...In a scene where Rosa, the daughter of his old comrade Lionel Burger, is about to leave his house, Terblanche makes a quiet but impassioned speech about the coming revolution...

...Anthony Sampson, New York Times Book Review) It is true that Gordimer is a fascinating example of a writer in a highly politicized environment who has consistently dealt with that environment on her own artistic terms...

...The doctor replies: "Were the woman in question a European, I should, of course, say this would be most unlikely...

...Individually, such moments might come off as satire or epiphany, but collectively, they come off as carping-for the simple reason that Elizabeth has a choice...

...In Gordimer's short stories this tends to be a young person who emerges from a sheltered upbringing and encounters the harsh facts of his society...

...She satirizes certain white attitudes by incarnating them in less-than-perfect flesh...

...The problem with her and the other white protagonists of the early novels is that they choose to go on living comfortably in the society they claim to abhor...

...Recurring throughout the stories are Afrikaner policemen with ugly haircuts and thuggish faces...

...The African Magician," for instance, contains a sketch of a white police officer's wife who believes that Africans are "just like monkeys...

...The white magistrate asks the white doctor whether the woman would have been capable of bearing the child, murdering and disposing of it, then doing her employer's laundry the following day...

...Yet because those beliefs are wrong and foolish, Gordimer is free to develop that depth and that texture...

...The embrace is occurring in public, before the disapproving face of a society that forbids and denies the reality of such contact...

...Marxism is only one of several ideologies afoot in South Africa today...

...Critics and reviewers often deal with this contradiction as though it were a matter of proportion, distinguishing between works that are "political" and those that are "too political...

...It just shows you, a woman on her own has got to look out...

...Because of Gordimer's psychological motivation, we can understand why this passage waxes so purple...

...The local police bury it lackadaisically on the spot-the way they would bury an animal-and for some reason, Mehring can't forget it...