Denise Brahimi has been a university academic in France and Algeria, and she has published widely on women writers who share the dual culture of the Maghreb and Europe. Also an author of books on painting and film, Brahimi has cast her net wide both thematically and geographically, researching North Africa, the Near East, France and South Africa.

Nadine Gordimer

Weaving together fiction, women and politics

By Denise Brahimi, Vanessa Everson and Cara Shapiro

Juta and Company Ltd

Copyright © 2012 UCT Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-920499-91-4

Contents

Acknowledgements,
Preamble,
Preface by Claude Wauthier,
Introduction,
Proust’s and Balzac’s Way,
Weaving Fiction,
Irony, Derision and Paradox,
1. 1958–1998: A Journey through History,
2. Forty Years On,
3. Man–Woman, Black–White: the Coexistence of Opposites,
4. Something Else Out There,
5. Conclusion: Betrayal and Irony,
Bibliography,
Translator’s Notes,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

1958–1998: A Journey through History

The aim of this journey is not to follow step by step, book after book, every work of fiction ever written by Nadine Gordimer. Although Gordimer does flash back to the past and cast projections into the future, it can be said that, grosso modo, her works follow the course of historical events in Africa in general and South Africa in particular. In this sense, Gordimer would in all likelihood espouse the theory of the novel as a reflection of reality, thereby endorsing a position shared by, amongst others, the great French writers Balzac and Stendhal. But one can also take from the journey travelled the idea that her writing is extraordinarily comprehensive, or, to use a cliché, ‘lifelike’ in that individuals and society, political structures and ways of life all occur simultaneously. Major transformations lie below the surface and cannot be pinpointed at any one particular moment, but well up like natural springs, to flow finally in their full force, and it is then that we can measure the distance that has been covered. In order to appreciate the way in which Gordimer’s novels are characterised by her awareness of history, we will consider two of her early books, already briefly touched upon as representing her initial concerns: A World of Strangers, which was published in 1958, and The Late Bourgeois World, published in 1966. Moving on to what is the culmination of her writing in 2000, we will examine two of her later novels, None to Accompany Me (1994) and The House Gun (1998) as testimony to a new state of affairs and people who, in more than one respect, present an inverted image of what is seen in the first two novels. As already stated, the main themes to be covered will be the so-called male/female divide and the relations between blacks and whites.

As it was in the beginning

‘Archbishop Desmond Tutu – he and I have discovered – as a child lived for some time in the black ghetto across the veld from the town where I, too, was growing up; there was as much chance of us meeting then as there was of a moon landing.’

A World of Strangers

A World of Strangers is a groundbreaking first book because its avowed main objective is to expose what is both essential and inconceivable in South Africa – the reality of the apartheid system. That is, not only the principle of apartheid and its set of laws, (in)famous for their iniquity, but also the way in which these laws underpin the everyday functioning of society. Gordimer’s constant repetition of the word ‘stranger’ serves to express this concept, and implies that the main social groups in the country, essentially the blacks and the whites, do not know one another and do not have any sort of relationship. It is thus that, even after having spent nearly a year in Johannesburg, the hero of the novel still s