Abstract
Gordimer’s problematic status as spokesman or representative of the white view of reality, self and other led to an uneasy though dynamic relationship between herself and the literary community of the English-speaking whites. In the early period, particularly between the publication of The Lying Days (1953) and A World of Strangers (1958) she was targeted in three major pieces of writing (by the standards of the academic community at the time) by three leading university-based literary critics, or teachers of literature: Christina van Heyningen, W. H. Gardner and A. C. Woodward. (For an account of Gardner’s attack see note 22 to chapter 4). At the time, both van Heyningen and Gardner taught at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg, an institution whose historic and geographic provenance seemed to confer a special authority in matters connected to the white English-speaking community and the use of its language in South African cultural discourse. Woodward eventually taught in the English departments of Rhodes, Cape Town and Witwatersrand universities.
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Notes
See Michael Wade, Nadine Gordimer (London: Evans Brothers, 1978) pp. 29–30, and footnote to p. 30.
Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974).
Nadine Gordimer, Burger’s Daughter (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979).
Gordimer, Burger’s Daughter, p. 143. Gordimer shows her awareness of the pain of this situation for the artist in society in an address given in the year Burger’s Daughter was published — 1979 — at a conference on the State of Art in South Africa at the University of Cape Town. The address was published in New Society in a slightly different version (‘Apprentices of Freedom’, 24–31 December 1981, pp. ii–iv), but the text I am using is entitled ‘Relevance and Commitment’ and appears in Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, edited and introduced by Stephen Clingman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988). In the piece Gordimer writes: ‘For the black artist, the tendentiousness of the nature of art goes without question. He cannot choose the terms of his relevance or his commitment because in no other community but the predicated one which blacks have set up inside themselves are his values the norm. Anywhere else he is not in possession of selfhood. The white artist… can, if he wishes, find his work’s referent in an aesthetic or ontological movement within the value-system traditional to whites. White South African culture will not repudiate him if he does…. Yet for a long time — a generation at least — the white artist has not seen his referent as confined within white values. For a long time he assumed the objective reality by which his relevance was to be measured was somewhere out there between and encompassing black and white. Now he finds that no such relevance exists; the black has withdrawn from a position where art, as he saw it, assumed the liberal role Nosipho Majeke defined as that of the “conciliator between oppressor and oppressed”’ (p. 138). Nosipho Majeke was a pseudonym used by Dora Taylor, and the quote is from The Role of Missionaries in Conquest (Johannesburg: Society of Young Africa, 1952) p. 26.
See Stephen Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986) p. 184;
John Cooke, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: Private Lives/Public Faces (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1985) pp. 215–16; and most recent writers on Gordimer.
My own fuller statement on the passage is in Hedwig Bock and Albert Wertheim, (eds), Essays on Contemporary Post-Colonial Fiction (Munich: Max Hueber Verlag, 1986) pp. 136–8.
Nadine Gordimer, July’s People (Johannesburg: Ravan Press and Taurus, 1981).
J. M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1978).
This is not to say that Gordimer and Coetzee carried out these painful steps to group awareness on their own or in isolation. From the late 1960s a small but important crop of minor novels dwelt on the pathological aspects of white existence, interacting with works by Coetzee and Gordimer to change the climate of possibilities. These include Karl Schoeman’s The Promised Land (1976),
Julian Becker’s The Union (1967) and The Keep (1971), and Stephen Gray’s Local Colour. It is suggestive that several of these works have in common a quest journey in which the validity of the white mode of perception is tested against the indigenous landscape, with results sharply different from the conventional European colonial model, or from earlier South African developments of the same.
Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1883) and Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1897).
J. M. Coetzee, ‘Farm Novel and Plaasroman’, in White Writing, p. 65, and ‘Reading the South African Landscape’, ibid., p. 177; and A. E. Voss, ‘The Image of the Bushman in South African Writing of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in English in Africa, vol. 14, no. 1 (May 1987) pp. 21–40.
Nadine Gordimer, A Sport of Nature (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987).
Michael Wade, ‘Gordimer’s Rainbow’, Southern African Review of Books, vol. 1, no. 1 (July 1987) pp. 13–14; ‘Identity and the Mature Writer’, in African Literature 1988: New Masks, selected papers from the 1988 Conference of the African Literature Association, the University of Texas at Austin.
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© 1993 Yehudit Wade
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Wade, M. (1993). Nadine Vindex. In: White on Black in South Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22546-0_5
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