Archive of Apartheid: Nadine Gordimer’s Short Fiction at the End of the Interregnum

Abstract

All of Nadine Gordimer’s fictional projects could be described as working to construct an archive of apartheid, a record which as an artist she is bound to keep, transcribing the ‘consciousness of her era’ (Selected Stories, p. 15), however much that consciousness is inevitably limited by the machinery of apartheid itself. Now after ten novels and eight collections of short stories, much can and has been said about this archive: its emphasis, primarily, on the strained sensibilities of white South Africans, its appropriation of real historical figures and events, its growing, now committed alignment with identifiable political movements, its attempt to serve instrumentally as an agent for social change. The problems confronting this archival effort have been articulated most eloquently by Gordimer herself, but whatever form these obstacles have taken — whether bannings, censorship, political disenfranchisement, or the ‘split’ historical position from which Gordimer must account for her word¹ — they have been met, and therefore the archive exists: a monumental task of monument-making for all those who have suffered under apartheid, struggled against it and work toward its demise.

It is obvious that the archive of a society… cannot be described exhaustively… on the other hand it is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from these rules that we speak… it emerges in fragments.

Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge