Nadine Gordimer's July's People

A Routledge Study Guide

Brendon Nicholls

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134718788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Nadine Gordimer is one of the most important writers to emerge in the twentieth century. Her anti-Apartheid novel July's People (1981) is a powerful example of resistance writing and continues even now to unsettle easy assumptions about issues of power, race, gender and identity.

This guide to Gordimer's compelling novel offers:

• an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of July's People
• a critical history, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publication to the present
• a selection of new and reprinted critical essays on July's People, providing a range of perspectives on the novel and extending the coverage of key approaches identified in the critical survey
• cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism
• suggestions for further reading.

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Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of July's People and seeking not only a guide to the novel, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Gordimer's text.

1

Text and contexts

Nadine Gordimer: life and works

The South African writer, Nadine Gordimer, was born in Springs in the province of Transvaal (now Gauteng) on 20 November 1923. Gordimer’s parents, Isidore and Hannah (Nan) Gordimer, were Eastern European Jewish and Anglo-Jewish immigrants. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this ethnic heritage has occasionally featured in Gordimer’s fiction – as with Hillela’s Jewish ancestry in the novel A Sport of Nature – but it has never formed the central focus. The immediate struggle for racial equality in South Africa always exerted a greater claim upon Gordimer’s sympathies than the turbulence of events in the Middle East. As Gordimer’s biographer has somewhat glibly expressed the matter, ‘Gordimer was always more a race-woman than a Jewish nationalist, let alone a Zionist.’¹ Andrew Vogel Ettin adds that in Gordimer’s fiction, ‘we might expect a more conscious engagement with a Jewish milieu or issues of Jewishness than we do find.’² Curiously though, Gordimer refuses to recognize that Israeli policy on Palestine is a form of Apartheid, although she is a long-standing critic of Israel’s military collaboration with Apartheid governments.³ We might say that Gordimer’s criticisms of Israeli policies have been confined to their complicity with Apartheid, rather than their structural similarity with Apartheid; yet Gordimer has also insisted that she defines herself as a South African, rather than as a South African Jew.⁴

Similarly, Gordimer has never identified with the feminist movement, in either its international or local forms. As Ronald Suresh Roberts succinctly puts it, ‘Gordimer saw keenly that black women under Apartheid were oppressed primarily by race and only secondarily by gender, so that colourblind women’s activism during Apartheid, even at its most well-intentioned, receives devastating treatment in her work.’⁵ Gordimer has even refused to meet with women-only groups on book tours in the United States, and asked for Bloomsbury publishers to withdraw her nomination for the women-only Orange Prize, saying ‘I’m not a woman writer, any more than a man is a man writer … I think women do themselves a disservice by perpetuating, selfimposed, any form of exclusion by gender’.⁶

One could justifiably conclude from this evidence that the wellsprings of Gordimer’s inspiration reside not in private investments in biology, ancestry or heritage, but in public investments in place and politics. In this respect, the symbolic geography of her hometown, Springs, has proven to be a rich resource. During Gordimer’s childhood, Springs was a mining town and it had substantial deposits of both coal and gold. Unlike the father of her heroine, Maureen Smales (born Hetherington), Nadine Gordimer’s father was not a shift boss, but her town of origin furnished her with the understanding necessary to represent Maureen’s mining origins in July’s People. The mine is an important image in Gordimer’s novel. It evokes the rich mineral deposits that were one of the key drivers of Apartheid economics, and the exploitation of black migrant labour upon which Apartheid thrived. But it is also a much richer image than simply this, since the idea of mining suggests the more abstract processes of self-investigation and creative inquiry that any writer must undertake. As Gordimer’s biographer, Ronald Suresh Roberts, suggests:

Gordimer’s way of thinking about depth is tied to where she was born. Nadine’s Witwatersrand landscape, with its subterranean fires, industrial ugliness and precarious fusion of edifice and precipice – this landscape supplied the very metaphors, the meta-language, that she would always use afterwards to describe the bumpy ride of her changing art, growing self and turbulent society.⁷

Gordimer’s sensitivity to place is the basis of her art, her self-scrutiny and her analysis of wider political ills in South Africa. The introspective character of Gordimer’s fiction was shaped by her early experiences of isolation. Like Maureen Hetherington, the young Nadine Gordimer yearned to be a dancer, but following a problem with her thyroid her mother was convinced that she had a heart illness and kept her off school and at home.⁸ To this we might add that the mining town of Gordimer’s origins provided her with an imaginary landscape through which change might be grasped; especially the kinds of change that July’s People describes. In her important essay, ‘Living in the Interregnum’ (1982), Gordimer herself has claimed:

I was a coward and no doubt shall often be one again, in my actions and statements as a citizen of the interregnum; it is a place of shifting ground, forecast for me in the burning slag heaps of coal mines we children used to ride across with furiously pumping bicycle pedals and flying hearts, in the Transvaal town where I was born.⁹

These words indicate the extent to which Gordimer’s writing is attentive to and engaged with locality. The landscape created by exploited labour – in this instance, the slag heaps that are byproducts of coal mining – is destabilized by revolutionary energies during the interregnum (a word which means the state between an old order and a new one). There is something like a neglected human surplus in this history of exploitation that quickens and enlivens the revolutionary underground. But while these burning and shifting sands endanger Gordimer’s childlike wayfarers who pedal their way towards the new order against seemingly insurmountable odds, we should also notice the flying hearts contained within them. We might even liken these ultimately transcendent ‘child-citizens’ with ‘flying hearts’ to Maureen’s perilous ‘flight’ towards the helicopter and citizenship of some nameless new order at the conclusion of July’s People.

Gordimer’s early period of sequestration from the world was filled with reading, and it laid the foundations for her lifelong immersion in literature. She published her first short story in 1937, while she was still in her teens. While it is true that Gordimer’s sheltered upbringing within a white enclave and her later schooling in the Catholic Convent of Our Lady of Mercy (followed by private tuition until the age of 15 or 16)¹⁰ might suggest that her early development was marked by insularity, this would be an unjust assessment of the keen capacity for observation and scepticism with which she is gifted. Gordimer’s characteristic detachment belies her analytical engagement with her protagonists and her society. In fact, Gordimer’s insistent measurement of the overlappings and faultlines between the private and the political might be said to demonstrate the very impossibility of insularity.

Gordimer completed her formal education with a year’s study at the University of the Witwatersrand. She married her first husband, Gerald Gavronsky, in 1949, and this year also saw the publication of her first collection of short stories, Face to Face. This collection showed early promise, and Gordimer received the encouragement of Alan Paton,¹¹ who was at that time the most acclaimed South African writer. Gordimer’s daughter, Oriane, was born in 1950. A second collection of short stories, The Soft Voice of the Serpent, was published in 1952, the same year in which Gordimer divorced her first husband. Her first novel, The Lying Days appeared in 1953 and Gordimer married her second husband, Reinhold Cassirer, shortly afterwards in 1954. Their son, Hugo, was born in 1955.

The Lying Days established Gordimer as a serious novelist on the South African literary scene, and it brought her into contact with other important voices. For example, Gordimer was introduced to the writers and journalists at Drum magazine, who were key voices in black South African literature during the 1950s: Bloke Modisane, Casey Motsisi, Arthur Maimane, Lewis Nkosi, Can Themba, Henry Nxumalo and Nat Nakasa. Along with Gordimer’s longstanding friend, Es’kia Mphahlele, this talented generation of black writers placed Gordimer’s own literary endeavours in contact with a key movement in the black cultural scene of the 1950s. Gordimer repaid their friendships and the insight that they provided with her own dedicated and lifelong sponsorship of black South African writers. For instance, she played a key role in obtaining funds for the poet Mongane Wally Serote to go to Columbia University in New York¹² and she was a formidable advocate of the international publication of black South African poetry.¹³ As a writer from a comparatively privileged background, Gordimer also benefited from the criticism these writers offered on the basis of their own very different perspective on South Africa. For instance, Mphahlele later critiqued Gordimer for using black characters to reflect elements of the white protagonists’ personalities or situation, rather than measuring the effect of white attitudes upon black characters in her fiction.¹⁴ While Gordimer’s experience and artistic objectives may have been worlds apart from those of her black contemporaries in the mid 1950s, it is also true that her interactions and occasional collaborations with them were atypical for the time and did much to progress her thinking about the ways in which literary fiction might address the inequalities of Apartheid policy.

From this point onwards, Gordimer’s novelistic career blossomed. The Lying Days was followed by A World of Strangers (1958), whose paperback version was banned by the Afrikaner Nationalist government. This event and the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 served to further radicalize Gordimer, who was – unusually for this time – already committed to universal suffrage in South Africa.¹⁵ As the 1960s heralded the era of ‘high’ Apartheid, Gordimer became progressively more committed to interrogating the deep structures of white privilege and the conditions of black oppression in novels such as An Occasion for Loving (1963) and The Late Bourgeois World (1966). A Guest of Honour (1971) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and The Conservationist (1974) was the joint winner of the Booker Prize and also received the prestigious CNA Prize in South Africa. With these two latter triumphs, Gordimer had entered the major phase of her career, and they were succeeded by Burger’s Daughter (1979, winner of the CNA Prize), July’s People (1981, winner of the CNA prize), A Sport of Nature (1987) and My Son’s Story (1990): novels that highlight the tensions between the private and political lives of their protagonists in the context of Apartheid. The crowning achievement of this period was Gordimer’s receipt of the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature. Gordimer’s post-Apartheid phase has seen the publication of None to Accompany Me (1994), The House Gun (1998), The Pickup (2002, winner of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for the Best Book from Africa), and Get A Life (2005).

In addition to her accomplished career as a novelist, Gordimer is a prodigious exponent of the short story. Her most important collections include: Six Feet of the Country (1956), Friday’s Footprint (1960, winner of the 1961 W. H. Smith Literary award), Not for Publication (1965), Livingstone’s Companions (1971), Selected Stories (1975), A Soldier’s Embrace (1980), Something Out There (1984), Jump and Other Stories (1991), Loot (2003), Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black (2007). Beyond her fictional output, Gordimer has written two volumes of essays – The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (1988) and Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century (1999) – as well as an influential account of African literature, The Black Interpreters: Notes on African Writing (1973).

Over the years, Gordimer’s writing has won her considerable acclaim. She has won a Ford Foundation Fellowship to lecture at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Washington D.C. (1961) and has been a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University (1969), Northwestern University (1969) and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, 1970). She has held visiting professorships at Columbia University (1971) and Barnard College (1975). Gordimer has won the French Grand Aigle d’Or Prize (1975), the Officier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1986) and the Commandeur dans L’Ordre des Arts et Lettres (1991), along with the Italian Premio Malaparte (1985) and the German Nelly Sachs Prize (1986). She was awarded Honorary Membership of the American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters (1979), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1980). She has won a Scottish Arts Council Neil M. Gunn Fellowship (1981), the American Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature (1981), a Modern Language Association Award (1982) and the Brockport Writers Forum International Award (1986).¹⁶

Gordimer is remarkable not only for her voluminous output or for the considerable international acclaim that she has been afforded. She is the very model of a committed writer. The ideological journey that she has undertaken in her writing begins with privileged private origins within an insular white culture, and it culminates in a public, political position of racial inclusivity and social egalitarianism. It is for this reason that many Gordimer scholars (among them, Robert Green; see ‘Critical readings’, p. 84) view her as having moved away from an orthodox liberalism in the 1950s towards the increasingly engaged and committed positions that were ideologically aligned with Marxist nationalist elements of the African National Congress during the 1980s. This evolution in the disposition of Gordimer’s ideas was prompted by what Gordimer has termed ‘the failure of the liberal attitude, the impossibility of maintaining private standards within a hostile society.’¹⁷ In other words, Gordimer came to see very early on that Apartheid’s racial engineering of the social was all-pervading, and was intrusive at the very deepest levels of personal belief. In such conditions, it made no sense to her that white South African liberals could somehow subscribe to elevated private moral standards that were separable from the wider public immorality according to which they lived and prospered. As Teresa Dovey has outlined, protagonists in Gordimer’s early novels exhibit liberal sentiments:

These sentiments and attitudes may be summarized as: belief in the power and efficacy of the judiciary system; belief in ‘civilization’ and the continual progress of humankind; an abhorrence of violence, accompanied by an attitude of tolerance and rationality; a capacity for fairly ruthless self-scrutiny and a sense of guilt which can be incapacitating; and, more significant than all of these, a belief in individual autonomy and in the freedom of choice.¹⁸

What could be wrong with these seemingly laudable values? Why should Gordimer have come to realize that they were inadequate values for a writer to espouse in her protest against Apartheid? To comprehend the ineffectiveness of liberal attitudes during Apartheid, we need to undertake several small acts of translation. Firstly, the belief in the judiciary system – and in the rule of law more generally – could never be a sustainable belief in a racially discriminatory society, whose laws oppressed the black majority and whose justice system served the interests and demands of the white minority. Secondly, belief in ‘civilization’ and the ‘continual progress of humankind’ was misplaced in a barbaric white public culture that justified itself by claiming to be more evolved than the black cultures co-existing alongside it. Thirdly, the ‘abhorrence of violence, accompanied by an attitude of tolerance and rationality’ ignores the fact that only overwhelming collective force could overthrow a system as entrenched as Apartheid, especially since Apartheid itself regularly deployed violence against black South Africans on the irrational basis that their superficial differences in appearance supposedly amounted to large differences in their humanity and abilities. Fourthly, the belief in ‘individual autonomy and the freedom of choice’ was totally inappropriate in a society in which large numbers of people – both black and white – were denied the freedom to choose on a daily basis and at any number of levels. Individual autonomy was also a ruse that denied white South Africa’s reliance upon and involvement in black South Africa’s exploitation, poverty and dehumanizing treatment. Considering the white English-speaking liberal consensus against the backdrop of Apartheid conditions, we can see that it was an entirely inadequate and dishonest political orientation. It could never be effective in dismantling Apartheid, and Gordimer realized this in the early 1960s. Of course, following a realization...