Nadine Gordimer and the possibility of desire
GET A LIFE. By Nadine Gordimer. 208pp. Bloomsbury. Pounds 16.99. - 0 7475 8175
4. US: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $21. - 0 374 16170 4
Nadine Gordimer is a political writer, but her politics usually operates through the consciousness of her characters. The raging drive of Left politics, present in much of her work as a deeply antagonistic relationship to the apartheid regime in South Africa, is diffused through individual perceptions.
What existed outside the apartheid-era novels as an inviolable truth -that the South African system could not, should not, be sustained -becomes a more complex realityin the minds of the people she writes about. Mostly members of the privileged white middle class, their relation to the momentous upheavals of society and nation is tangential and often evasive. Even when a glancing blow demonstrates how close the outer tumult is to their carefully arranged interiors, they are likely to resist the implications.
As a consequence, thought and language become the primary form of agency for Gordimer's characters. They are creators of a grammar of doubt and hesitation, no matter where they belong on the scale of progressive politics. Mehring, the Afrikaner in The Con- servationist (1974) who finds a corpse on his farm, says to his black herdsman: "You'd better not touch him. You're sure nobody here knows him? It's got nothing to do with any of you here?". In Burger's Daughter
(1979), Rosa questions the very tradition of social justice to which she has been raised as the daughter of white Communists. Considering her cousins, people who have never given any thought to the system on which their comfortable lives have been built, Rosa reflects:
Even animals have the instinct to turn from suffering. The sense to run away.
Perhaps it was an illness not to be able to live one's life the way they did with justice defined in terms of respect for property, innocence defended in their children's privileges, love in their procreations, and care only for each other. A sick- ness not to be able to ignore that condition of a healthy, ordinary life: other people's suffering.
It is, of course, impossible for Rosa to sustain this line of reasoning for long.
