Nadine Gordimer Retrospective: Review of Life and Works

Lecture 4&5https://nadinegordimer2015.wordpress.com/

Course code: 140359

Derek Barkerwww.derekbarker.info

Dr.Derek.Barker@gmail.com

Structure of Lecture 3

• Question from Lecture 3• Summary of “The Sea” (section 3 of the

novel)• Key themes• Critical Reception

Question from last lecture

What is your favourite passage?

Questions

• What does Helen see in Paul? What attracts him to her?

Questions

• How does the public sphere impact upon the private sphere?

Questions

• How strong are the men of the novel compared to the women?

Questions

• When Paul succeeds in getting a football field for blacks to play on, how is this perceived by Sipho?

The Lying Days

•The Mine p. 11•The Sea p. 45•The City p. 205 - 367

SummaryAs “The City” opens, Helen is sharing an apartment with John Marcus and wife Jenny, a young, intellectual couple with a small baby. He is Jewish and she is Christian, yet they appear to have overcome prejudice, receive visits from nonwhite friends, and live a careless bohemian life centering on the arts.

SummaryAt John and Jenny Marcus's apartment Helen meets Paul Clark, who has been brought up on a farm in Natal, is fluent in Sesutu and Zulu, and is now working for the Native Affairs Department. Paul has been in Rhodesia on a research trip, getting material for his doctorate in anthropology, and now works as a welfare officer in native locations

SummaryHelen is attracted to him both physically and intellectually. After an evening at Marcel's Cellar, a self-consciously bohemian café modelled on European originals, she begins a prolonged affair with him, moving into his apartment while allowing her parents to believe that she is staying at her sister's home

SummaryPaul's attractiveness for Helen is at least in part based on his apparent engagement with social problems. The National Party is now in power, mixed race couples are being arrested in their beds, and the whole panoply of apartheid legislation is slowly unrolling.

SummaryHelen's colonialist parents, newly returned from Europe and displaying their cheap souvenirs, appear unreal to her, and she proudly reveals that she is living with Paul, with the predictable consequences of an ugly row and familial estrangement.

SummaryThe difficulties of maintaining an intimate sexual relationship in a patriarchal culture are not to be underestimated, however. Helen is trying to break away from the racial and sexual stereotypes of her background, to get closer to black Africa, but she cannot get any closer than living with an anthropologist and do-gooder.

SummarySlowly she evolves into the role of a wife, typing for Paul and cooking his meals. The relationship begins to founder, partly as a result of the climate of sexual and racial repression created by the apartheid state, which slowly corrupts even the most private of relationships, and partly because Paul's political position becomes quite untenable.

Summary

Sipho, a black friend, does not rejoice when Paul secures a sports field for the people of a black township. A separatist, Sipho organizes a boycott instead, on the grounds that blacks want freedom and equality, not patronizing kindness.

SummaryPaul is also swamped by the housing crisis: there are twenty times more people than homes on the location. He and Helen begin to go out more often with friends, to make love only for physical gratification, and to quarrel. Helen leaves her job at the welfare agency, which she had taken to be near Paul, and they recognize that they will never marry.

SummaryWhen she is contacted by her father, Helen returns home for a visit, and an uneasy peace is struck with her parents. At the mine, mention is made of a forthcoming strike, although the white world seems unperturbed and fundamentally unchanged.

SummaryOn May Day, however, violence breaks out all over South Africa. Helen goes looking for Paul, and eventually she and her friend Laurie find themselves involved in a riot in the African township, where, from the safety of their car, they witness the death of a black man who is shot by white police. Eighteen people die, one of them Sipho.

SummaryShocked, Helen retreats into apathy for a period and then suddenly realizes that she must leave South Africa for Europe. As she waits for her boat to depart, she bumps into Joel, who is bound for a new life in Israel, and they spend two days together, shopping, visiting the beach, and dancing.

SummaryJoel declares his love, but Helen knows that they have missed their chance to get to know each other, hindered by the barriers of class and ethnic origins. In a sense, in saying goodbye to him, she parts from her earlier self, with all her former idealism and optimism.

SummaryHelen welcomes disillusionment as a form of new beginning, and the novel closes, ambiguously, as she listens to the songs of black street-singers. Though she has lost the first bloom of her youth and simplicity, she knows that her departure is only temporary and that she will return to her roots in South Africa.

Question

How did you like the ending?

Themes

What are the key themes?

Themes• Interaction between personal and

public (individual versus collective) • Economic and social basis of African /

European Racism• (Un)bridgeability of ethnic

differences / cultural / racial divides• The lie(s) of apartheid• Etc.

Critical ReceptionTypically read as a bildungsroman, with its mining background, a dominant mother, and the theme of liberation through sexuality, the novel bears strong resemblance to D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. However, Gordimer's achievement is not to make this Paul's story but that of the daughter and her lovers and to make the lovers eventually redundant to the heroine's development.

Some early reviews

Reviews• “Fighting Talk”• “New Statesmen”• “Standpunte”• “Commonweale”

Critical ReceptionFighting Talk (radical journal) in 1954 said: “With The Lying Days South African Literature has come of age,” commending the brilliant powers of description and the feeling for atmosphere in the novel, the ruthless insight into South African society (particularly urban middle class whites and the alienated lives of rootless young intellectuals), together with the welcome absence of sociological details or sermonizing, in a vividly realized personal story.

Critical ReceptionIn the New Statesman (1953), Walter Allen was equally complementary, describing The Lying Days as the best novel from South Africa for a very long time and unusual as a novel that did not deal with race relations (then called the colour bar) but with a young girl growing up and “discovering what for her constitutes reality. To read it is to grow up in South Africa at the present day in the company of a very distinguished mind eager for experience but resolute to separate the false from the true.

Critical ReceptionStandpunte, Anthony Delius (1953) noted her “sharp, terrier-like observation” and admired the description of Helen's relationship with Mary Seswayo, but considered the plot and structure inadequate, reducing the novel to “merely a congerie of nervous events, which fail to establish any other than a fortuitous unity.” Delius argued that the book was really a series of short stories about the mining town, Ludi, Mary, race relations, and bohemians in Johannesburg. He voiced one of the most enduring critical charges made against Gordimer: her chilly lack of emotion.

Critical ReceptionDelius also regretted the accounts of sexual activity, fearing that “Miss Gordimer might at any moment fall victim to the same subdued female hairy-chestedness that took Miss Doris Lessing in Martha Quest so near to becoming a half-hearted Hemingway or lacklustre Henry Miller.”

Critical ReceptionRichard Haynes (Commonweal 1953) found Helen immensely touching in her clumsy groping toward adulthood, saying that “In Miss Gordimer's drawing of her shy response to the character and pleasure of the sensuous, physical world, the novel achieves a kind of hazy bloom of perfection which cannot but be called masterful.”

Critical ReceptionPlotting was not recognized as one of Gordimer's skills. James Stern doubted whether the book could rightly be called a novel, as that it is “Written in that most difficult of all forms, the first person, it has no plot, no denouement. It is a biography.” Yet, he was impressed by the sense of doom pervading the book, the panoramic view of South Africa, and the underlying terror of the society.

Think a moment

The early reviews – your first thoughts?

Questions

• Is Helen’s mother worried that Helen will marry a black man?

• Does the novel question and undermine stereotypes?

• Are racism and sexism equated in the novel?• Does Helen use men?• Does the novel, in your opinion, lack emotion?• Is the novel coherent?

Four critics

• Robin Visel• Dorothy Driver• Kolawole Ogungbesan• Judie Newman

Critical ReceptionRobin Visel (Ariel, 1988) draws upon Simone de Beauvoir's contrasted descriptions of the roles offered to girls and to blacks. Because white girls, unlike blacks, are offered a privileged place in society, they are tempted to collude in their own exploitation. Exploring Gordimer's portrayal of the white South African woman, alienated from her own society, yet barred from black Africa, Visel explores the double bind of racism and sexism as it impacts upon the relationship between Helen and Mary.

Critical ReceptionFor Visel the optimistic ending of the novel is contrived, with Helen's phantasmagorical rediscovery of sea, sex, and blackness a false resolution of the issues Gordimer raises for her heroine, whose real discovery in the novel is of defamiliarization, of seeing herself as the stranger in Africa. White South Africa is a false paradise, as Helen discovers as she digs beneath the lying surface of her country.

Critical ReceptionDorothy Driver (1983), writing on the politicization of women in Gordimer's work says her writing deserves to be singled out as of special interest. Even in her first novel, Gordimer staked a claim to Africa as her legitimate subject matter and interprets the decision to depict a society that had not been documented before as a deliberate political act.

Critical ReceptionDriver is particularly astute in her reading of the role of sexuality in the novel. Gordimer refuses to explore experience only through sexuality. Yet, Helen gains access to political experience through participation in a male world, and the male world is accessed through sexual relations. Helen, however, takes a pride in remaining one step ahead of the men.

Critical ReceptionHelen is considerably better read than Ludi, for example. She does not get her reading matter from men. She also vigorously rejects Joel's suggestion that she would be happiest married. When Joel observes Helen as if she were merely a sex object, she reacts angrily to the “faintly insulting recognition of the pure female, discounting me, making of me a creature with no name” (201).

Critical ReceptionIn retaliation, Helen promptly assumes the right to do the same, to observe Joel “not as Joel but as a young man alive and strange beside me.” As Driver demonstrates, Gordimer's concern in the novel is to retain for women the right to be sexually attractive and vital beings, without being therefore classed as merely feminine. Isa, the programmatic feminist of the novel, is portrayed ironically.

Critical ReceptionDriver concludes: Gordimer frees herself to use sexuality as a device through which to give her female characters social mobility … and also to reveal to them the ‘fullness of life and the hidden’ (The Lying Days p. 183) but particularly the life under the surface of things. If she draws on sexuality as a common bond between men and women, she draws on gender as a common bond between women

Critical Receptionshe also explores through sexuality the notion of a private life, so complex a concept in South African society and she is able to set up a reverberating metaphorical relation between sexism and racism that has important implications regarding her political stance. Above all the device of sexuality is a crucial component of her didactic voice and also of her ironic mode.

Critical ReceptionKolawole Ogungbesan reads it as a novel of the quest for identity, of the need to know oneself, dramatizing the sense of a young intelligence, cocooned in conventions, breaking out and trying its wings. The pattern of the novel is a series of searches for emotional fulfilment, leading to disillusionment and a fresh quest.

Critical ReceptionGordimer, however, never suggests that individuals can compensate for the inadequacies of their society by personal ethics. Highlighting the repeated question, “Where are you going?” Ogungbesan focuses upon the manner in which Gordimer dramatizes the underlying direction being taken by South African society, through the character of Helen (and thereby questioning that direction)

Critical ReceptionStructurally, the novel is constructed around three crises of the heroine's youth: 1) the initial attempt to break free from parents, 2) the successful departure for Johannesburg, and then the attempt to fashion a different way of life for herself culminating 3) in her eventual choice of exile. Helen's ending, in disillusionment, is nonetheless very much her new beginning, in which Ogungbesan detects a note of hope and optimism.

Critical ReceptionNarrative voice, is a distinctive feature of Judie Newman's Nadine Gordimer (1988), a study that respects the precise specificities of narrative structures, arguing that Gordimer’s novels subvert Eurocentric conventions and pose the question “Whose story is it?” quite variously:

Critical ReceptionFor example: by establishing a counterpoint between male and female protagonists, white and black interpreters; by employing double plots, which readjust the relation between social context, text, and subtext; by the reconstruction of the implied reader; and by interrogating the linguistics of the South African cultural voice.

Who is right?

• Robin Visel• Dorothy Driver• Kolawole Ogungbesan• Judie Newman

More critics• Robert Green• Stephen Clingman• Abdul R. Janmohammed• Andrew Vogel Ettin• Rose Pettersson• Kathrin Wagner• Dominic Head• Michael Wade

Critical ReceptionRobert Green argues that Gordimer is writing something of an artistic manifesto and that the opening is about what it means to write fiction in South Africa in the 1950s. To write seriously means to question and abandon stock literary responses and conventions, to leave the white compound, and to risk isolation and loneliness.

Critical ReceptionIn going to the concession stores, the black world, Helen Shaw also appropriates the right to look through a black window into a black world—the world displayed in the stores—and to seize material, even if ugly and previously ignored, as the stuff of her art. When Helen returns from the stores to the white club, the tennis players suddenly appear as if they were merely figures in a picture, with the club as the unreality, a frozen and lifeless tableau.

Critical ReceptionJust like Helen, Gordimer, a member of a dominant white minority, will spend her artistic career attempting to enter the world of black experience. The Lying Days thus demonstrates just how difficult it is to back out of the white world and the extent to which individual lives are predetermined by the constraints of apartheid.

Critical ReceptionIn The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (1992) Stephen Clingman reads Gordimer's life and work largely in terms of the conditioning force of South Africa, situating her novels in relation to social and ideological codes and charting their response to the history of their society.

Critical ReceptionClingman relates The Lying Days tellingly to its historical moment. Though the major emphasis falls on the relationship of consciousness to class, Clingman is also adept at spotting the silences of the novels, such as Gordimer's omission of the African Mineworkers' strike of 1946.(other silences?)

Critical ReceptionAbdul R. JanMohamed reads the novel politically, as dramatizing the struggle between liberal bourgeois values and the horrors of apartheid. Helen's problems are thus a comment on the social malaise around her, and the mine world symbolizes the fact that substantial feelings and desires are located in subterranean darkness, while life on the surface is shallow and ritualized into a petty bourgeois routine.

Critical Reception

The relationship with Ludi provides an education in lack; his absence becomes the occasion for Helen's growth and for her understanding that her desire for him (and her desire in general) can never be satisfied by South African culture.

Critical ReceptionAndrew Vogel Ettin says Gordimer has always been telling the same story, a tale full of betrayal and deception, revolving around the politics of the family, the ambivalent relation of the individual to home, sensuous experience, and issues of social self-identity. The pursuit of patterns of imagery and theme initially appears old-fashioned, but it yields some valuable results

Critical ReceptionEttin reads the novel as dramatizing the problem of accepting that one is part of a societal context even when one is alienated from it. Helen's well-meaning attempts to find a place for Mary to study expose her to irony.

Critical ReceptionThe notion of a white person trying unsuccessfully to make a place for a black person in a white home is suggestive of Helen's angle of political vision, which sees the country as white, with the black majority remaining on the fringe of white consciousness.

Critical ReceptionRose Pettersson (1995) understands the fiction as growing out of two warring imperatives: the deep abhorrence of apartheid and the resistance to an orthodoxy of opposition. For The Lying Days she highlights the theme of subjugation and exploitation, the descriptions of a ravaged countryside, and the pathos of the image of the minedancers, no longer able to dance in native costume, reduced to dusters and dishcloths instead.

Critical ReceptionPettersson calls attention to the frequent image of a shout or cry from the black world, reverberating in Helen's ears, and also to the persistent graveyard imagery: Mrs. Koch shelters from the sun under a funeral tree; black miners invade a garden where mounds of lilies appear to honour a grave. Living in South Africa is “like having a picnic in a beautiful graveyard where the people are buried alive under your feet.”

Critical ReceptionFor Pettersson, drawing on sociological arguments, there are strong correlations in the fiction between the state of the family and the state of South Africa, with the state of the family functioning as a paradigm of the state of the nation. Above all, the early novels expose in painful detail the relationships between mothers and daughters and the compulsion to return repeatedly to the injustice of a deprived childhood. Pettersson sees both Gender and Race as central themes.

Critical ReceptionKathrin Wagner (1994) is avowedly revisionary, setting out to examine the survival in the novels of cultural and ethnic stereotypes of a conservative Eurocentric (or settler) nature, stereotypes that conflict with the intended ideological message.

Critical ReceptionShe concludes that Gordimer encodes at subtextual level the mental perspectives and mindsets that underlie the prejudices she overtly rejects. Along the way Gordimer is convicted of antifeminism, liberalism, idealization of blacks, ignoring class realities, emotional coldness, and various forms of thoughtcrime.

Critical Reception

Wagner implies that the idea that history is the product of submerged guilts, fears, and repressions. Wagner seems to be measuring Gordimer against some impossibly pure ideal of uncontaminated literary purity.

Critical ReceptionWagner nonetheless makes an interesting case for the novel as demonstrating Gordimer's awareness that fascist and anti-Semitic prejudices flow from one source. Joel and Mary are linked positive influences on Helen's departure from home, the one Jewish, the other black, each an image of the “Other.”

Critical ReceptionDominic Head (1994) emphasizes the focus on ideas of space and of the body. Head defends the novel's concern with personal experience, which is, in his argument, not so much a withdrawal from political and historical engagement but a means of suggesting a micropolitics, as Helen learns that the individual body is the smallest identifiable site of both political repression and political growth.

Critical ReceptionHead notes bodily postures that betray a subtext, for example, the hysterical unease of the braying laughter at the tennis club or Helen's stiffened walk and clenched buttocks after her visit to the stores. Spaces are also politicized. Helen meets Mary in a cloakroom at the university, one of the few examples of toilet facilities available to blacks in Johannesburg.

Critical ReceptionJoel, an architect-to-be, is studying the provision and organization of social space; Mary lives in a township where there is none. Joel can draw an imaginary map of a different world (145) with the best of Africa, America, and Europe included. He and Helen can leave South Africa. Mary is confined and constrained.

Critical ReceptionMichael Wade argues that the novel is structured on a pattern of reversal of appearance and reality. In a society where the value structure is based on appearances, Helen has to leave the “real world” of the mine (actually an unreality, a shining surface artificiality) to go on holiday where, paradoxically, she enters a world of genuine feeling.

Critical ReceptionIn the contrast of the hinterland mine and the holiday coast, the inland experience is challenged by a broader horizon. Wade also explores the motif of “Europe in Africa,” arguing that a major theme of the fiction is the collapse of the romantic hero, as whites in Africa who do not give themselves to Africa become increasingly irrelevant.

Critical ReceptionIn his more recent study White on Black in South Africa(1993), he explores the tendency of the white South African community to discover its own identity in relation to the “Other,” whether Afrikaner or African. Gordimer's writing over a thirty year period marks a major change in the psychic functioning of white South Africa, demonstrating a clearer understanding of its own identity. For Wade there is an unwritten, repressed, Jewish theme in Gordimer's writing, which also impacts upon her construction of the “Other.”

Think

Who is right?

Homework

Read 1/3 of “July’s People”

Answer the question: what would you do if you were a victim of Apartheid and had the opportunity to take revenge?