Abstract
In her essay ‘Living in the Interregnum’ (1983) Nadine Gordimer introduces her discussion with an apparently self-invalidating confession: ‘nothing I say here will be as true as my fiction’.1 The idea is to say the least paradoxical: not only was the essay originally given in the personal voice, as a speech, but it also contains probably Gordimer’s most intensely individual account of the implications of living as a white and a white writer under apartheid — especially during the period of rising revolutionary tempo of the early 1980s in South Africa when the speech was given. The statement might be read as a conventional defence of the superior value and priority of fiction as against non-fiction, but at least partly because of the context, the tone and the subject matter of the speech, it does not seem to be offered in a conventional way. Instead, taken in context, it reads as a candid admission of the impossibility of reaching any adequate degree of depth in non-fictional writing; depth, that is, adequate to Gordimer’s situation and priorities as a writer.
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Notes
In Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, ed. and with an Introduction by Stephen Clingman (London: Cape; New York: Knopf; 1988), p. 264. All of Gordimer’s essays cited in this discussion to be found in this volume; all further page references given in parentheses in the text to EG.
Interview with Anthony Sampson, Sunday Star (Johannesburg), 5 April 1987, p. 17.
‘Living Legends’, New York Review of Books, 16 July 1987, p. 9.
See Stephen Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (London: Allen & Unwin; Johannesburg: Ravan; 1986), esp. Ch. 7.
See ‘Chief Luthuli’ (1959). In A World of Strangers there is passing reference to ‘sculptural’ figures very much in the Luthuli mould; there are evidently complex recapitulations between the fictional and the non-fictional in Gordimer’s work.
Nadine Gordimer, A Sport of Nature (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), p. 209. All further page references are to this edn, and are given in parentheses in the text.
Judith Thurman, ‘Choosing a Place’, New Yorker, 29 June 1987, p. 89.
This idea of understanding through the body — especially of the impact of apartheid — has been a constant motif in Gordimer’s work. Cf., early on, Toby in A World of Strangers (1958; London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), p. 238, who only understands the full significance of Steven’s death when it hits deep in his body: ‘To my bones, I understood’.
See John Cooke, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: Private Lives/Public Landscapes (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), esp, pp. 14–21, which explores the impact of Gordimer’s early life on some of the fundamental themes and motifs of her fiction. Also see Michael Wade’s chapter in this volume; I should like to pay tribute here to the memory of Michael Wade, who did so much to open up Gordimer studies.
Jeremy Cronin, ‘Motho Ke Motho Ka Batho Babang’, in Inside (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983), p. 18. Cronin was a political prisoner in South Africa from 1976–83.
The character is Cecil Rowe, in A World of Strangers, p. 157. Cf. also Rosa Burger’s comments to Clare Terblanche in Burger’s Daughter (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), p. 127, which combine the biological and the political: ‘They live completely different lives. Parents and children don’t understand each other.… Some sort of natural insurance against repetition.’
Nadine Gordimer, interview in Sophiatown Speaks, eds Pippa Stein and Ruth Jacobson (Johannesburg: Junction Avenue Press, 1986), p. 26. See also Gordimer’s short story, ‘My Father Leaves Home’, New Yorker, 7 May 1990, pp. 40–43, which approaches the same topic through indirection.
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (Harper & Row: New York, 1988), p. 29. Gordimer has been drawn to Kundera’s fiction for some time, and quotes him in ‘Living in the Interregnum’, though there is no necessary question of influence here.
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© 1993 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Clingman, S. (1993). A Sport of Nature and the Boundaries of Fiction. In: King, B. (eds) The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22682-5_12
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