Nadine Gordimer: Dark Times, Interior Worlds, and the Obscurities of Difference

Abstract

T~ he Nobel Prize in literature has generally reflected a political as well as a (high-) cultural choice, but the impact of the former was particularly clear in Nadine Gordimer's case. At the same time, (professional) readers have been reluctant to examine critically the influence of South African politics on Gordimer's writing.1 Up to a point this is to be expected, given the overwhelmingly negative reaction to these politics and the formidable difficulties of Gordimer's position as a white, upper-middle-class, progressive writer in the South African culture of apartheid. But the absence of critical voices in this respect also suggests a curiously unquestioning support for the cultural status of the creative writer. I have been puzzled by Gordimer's consistent emphasis on the limitations of her nonfictional texts with respect to documenting the extraordinary problems of that culture, while claim1. See here the essays collected in King. My essay does not aim to represent the true Nadine Gordimer. Every reading is a complex symbiosis of presentational (constructing) and representational (reconstructing) activities, the result of interpretive perspectives, which inevitably shape the entangled relations among reader, reading, text, and author. Ideally these activities intersect in such ways and to such a degree that the result is a responsible reading that deserves other readers' consideration even where it clashes with their interpretations. My questions of Gordimer's texts concern the cultural status of (high art) fiction in late modernity, especially where the political difficulties of racial/ cultural difference are the issue. To readers who have not so far looked at her work in the