Representations of “the Other Side” in Nadine Gordimer's The house gun

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article I examine ways in which Nadine Gordimer renders, in The house gun, a zone of alterity typified in the novel as the ‘Other Side’. The author represents such alterity, seen mainly as racial and cultural, as alien, even while her purpose is to illustrate the necessity for change in a new post-apartheid political dispensation. Further, her focus on the other Other Side, that of sexuality, is also riven with contradictions, particularly in her representation of the scandalous middle ground of bisexuality, which is paired with criminality in the form of murder. I examine the complex effects of these contradictions, particularly in the light of the ending of the novel. I argue that the figure of the bisexual in this representative text, one among many in this period which employs to significant effect a bisexual character, carries the burden of social anxieties and hopes about this interstitial phase in our collective history.