?Where the Banalities Are Enacted?: The Everyday in Gordimer's Novels

Abstract

When Nadine Gordimer stated in 1974 that there is no country in the western world where the daily enactment of the law reflects politics as intimately and blatantly as in South she indicated that the rigidly defined power relations structuring her society manifested themselves even in the most minor circumstances (qtd. Engle, Political 105). Gordimer's novels, laden with political issues and catalogues of details revealing South African life in its mundane specificity, render accounts of the intrusions of the political into the everyday that arose from apartheid's microscopic definitions of criminal behavior. As a result, critics have speculated throughout her career that her concern with South African politics may have harmed her fiction. In an early critical study, Michael Wade refers to her technique of meticulous examination of detail in her tentative search just assessments of life in her home country, adding somewhat apologetically that it is possible to criticize her first novel, The Lying Days, for being weighed down by evidence [by] an unusu? al quantity of detail in the life and growth of Helen Shaw (5). The pow? erful level of particularity (31) Wade admires does not necessarily translate into a sense of immediacy her readers since Gordimer's aim seems to be a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, the promotion of a complex awareness by portraying aberrant conditions within a surface normality, not the provocation of outrage by recounting evil deeds in a tone of anger or lament.1 International praise her abilities as a novelist has far outweighed scattered reviewers' accusations of banality and impersonality in her style (qtd. Smith 4-5), but Gordimer's The Conservationist and July's People, likej. M. Coetzee's In the Heart ofthe Country, Life & Times ojMichaelK, and Age oflron, do convey a sense of the tedium and waiting (Coetzee, Foe 83) that characterized the South African interregnum, Gordimer's name apartheid-era South Africa, which she envisioned not as a war zone but as a static space between two decisive orders of existence. Insisting on dullness at the very moment of liberation in South Africa, Michael Kandjuly 's People depict the anticlimax white liberals feared would accompany the longanticipated revolution and reflect a fetishistic entrapment of South African whites in the syndrome of waiting (Lazarus 133) an apocalyptic future: these novels transform a state of civil war into the boredom ofthe barely lit? erate, the grunginess of the unwashed body, the vapid communications of the long married. In Coetzee's novels, great human issues, such as eco? nomic disparity, are figured as kitsch?Anna K's fawn plastic handbag? or reduced to absurdity, as when terminally ill Elizabeth Curren screams in anger at the horde of cats in her yard demanding to be fed. Summarizing the unreal, prosaic quality of everyday life and literary endeavors in South Africa as portrayed in recent fiction, Pauline in Gordimer's A Sport of Nature muses, There's something about a colonial society that trivializes (57).