The Essential Gesture as Transnational Gesture in Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup

Abstract

This article engages Nadine Gordimer's 2001 novel The Pickup and her earlier essays on the writer's “essential gesture” in order to demonstrate that The Pickup marks a continuation of Gordimer's apartheid-era investment in writing fiction as a creative yet socially committed act. Drawing upon recent scholarship on the transnational, it argues that in The Pickup the heart of the essential gesture takes form as the transnational gesture, as the novel traces transformative interaction across borders: the border between bodies, the border between subjectivities, the border between national material conditions, and the border between representation and reality. By linking Gordimer's earlier essays and the novel to elaborate a method of reading characters' bodily gestures, the essay shows that the characters' embodied interactions provide one way to register Gordimer's transnational sense of the essential gesture in response to an increasingly globalised world, challenging the dominant critical partition of Gordimer's career as apartheid and post-apartheid. More broadly, the critical practice of close reading of characters' gestures offers a methodology for transnational literary scholarship.