GORDIMER, Nadine

Nationality: South African. Born: Springs, Transvaal, 20 November 1923. Education: A convent school, and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Family: Married 1) G. Gavron in 1949; 2) Reinhold Cassirer in 1954; one son and one daughter. Career: Visiting lecturer, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Washington, D.C., 1961, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969, Princeton University, New Jersey, 1969, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 1969, and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1970; adjunct professor of writing, Columbia University, New York, 1971; presenter, Frontiers television series, 1990. Lives in Johannesburg. Awards: W. H. Smith literary award, 1961; Thomas Pringle award, 1969; James Tait Black memorial prize, 1972; Booker prize, 1974; Grand Aigle d'Or prize (France), 1975; CNA award, 1975; Scottish Arts Council Neil Gunn fellowship, 1981; Common Wealth award, 1981; Modern Language Association award (U.S.), 1981; Malaparte prize (Italy), 1985; Nelly Sachs prize (Germany), 1985; Bennett award (U.S.), 1986; Royal Society of Literature Benson medal, 1990; Nobel prize for literature, 1991. D.Lit.: University of Leuven, Belgium, 1980. D.Litt.: Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1985; City College, New York, 1985; Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, 1985. Member: Honorary member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1980; honorary fellow, Modern Language Association (U.S.), 1985.

Publications

Short Stories

Face to Face: Short Stories. 1949.

The Soft Voice of the Serpent and Other Stories. 1952.

Six Feet of the Country. 1956.

Friday's Footprint and Other Stories. 1960.

Not for Publication and Other Stories. 1965.

Livingstone's Companions. 1971.

Selected Stories. 1975; as No Place Like, 1978.

Some Monday for Sure. 1976.

A Soldier's Embrace. 1980.

Town and Country Lovers (story). 1980.

Something Out There. 1984.

Crimes of Conscience. 1991.

Jump and Other Stories. 1991.

Novels

The Lying Days. 1953.

A World of Strangers. 1958.

Occasion for Loving. 1963.

The Late Bourgeois World. 1966.

A Guest of Honour. 1970.

The Conservationist. 1974.

Burger's Daughter. 1979.

July's People. 1981.

A Sport of Nature. 1987.

My Son's Story. 1990.

None to Accompany Me. 1995.

Harold, Claudia and Their Son Duncan. 1996.

The House Gun. 1998.

Plays

Television Plays and Documentaries:

A Terrible Chemistry (Writers and Places series), 1981; Choosing for Justice: Allan Boesak, with Hugo Cassirer, 1985; Country Lovers, A Chip of Glass Ruby, Praise, and Oral History (all in The Gordimer Stories series), 1985 (U.S.); Frontier series, 1990 (U.K.).

Other

African Lit. (lectures). 1972.

On the Mines, photographs by David Goldblatt. 1973.

The Black Interpreters: Notes on African Writing. 1973.

What Happened to Burger's Daughter; or, How South African Censorship Works, with others. 1980.

Lifetimes: Under Apartheid, photographs by David Goldblatt. 1986.

The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics, and Places, edited by Stephen Clingman. 1988.

Conversations with Gordimer, edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour. 1990.

Writing and Being. 1995.

Our Century. 1996.

Editor, with Lionel Abrahams, South African Writing Today. 1967.

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Bibliography:

Gordimer, Novelist and Short Story Writer: A Bibliography of Her Works by Racilia Jilian Nell, 1964; Nadine Gordimer: A Bibliography edited by Dorothy Driver, 1993.

Critical Studies:

Gordimer by Robert F. Haugh, 1974; Gordimer by Michael Wade, 1978; Gordimer by Christopher Heywood, 1983; The Novels of Gordimer: Private Lives/Public Landscapes by John Cooke, 1985; Gordimer by Judie Newman, 1988; Critical Essays on Gordimer edited by Rowland Smith, 1990; "Feminism as 'Piffling'? Ambiguities in Some of Gordimer's Short Stories," in Current Writing 2, 1990, and "Something Out There/Some-thing in There: Gender and Politics in Gordimer's Novella," in English in Africa 19, May 1992, both by Karen Lazar; The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside by Stephen Clingman, 1993; The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer edited by Bruce Alvin King, 1993; Rereading Nadine Gordimer by Kathrin M. Wagner, 1994; Nadine Gordimer's One Story of a State Apart by Rose Pettersson, 1995; Nadine Gordimer by Dominic Head, 1995.

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Nadine Gordimer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, is well known as a novelist. Her first published books, however, were short story collections, and she has continued to produce internationally acclaimed short fiction. Gordimer's short stories constitute a detailed guide to her development as a writer. Many of the broad themes of her novels received their first airing in short story form, as in the case of the relationship between "Six Feet of the Country" and The Conservationist. The evolution of the social and political content of Gordimer's writings in particular may be seen taking place in the successive volumes of her short stories. In addition, although Gordimer has remained a somewhat conventional novelist, relying to a considerable extent on the assumptions of nineteenth-century realism, this is not quite the case in her short fiction. Later collections like A Soldier's Embrace and Jump reveal a greater imaginative and formal range than her longer works.

Gordimer's sense of the short story as an articulation of the art of the present moment has been visible from her earliest efforts in the form. Inevitably and invariably, the present moment consists of the vicious ironies of life among and between the races in South Africa. Technically accomplished from the first, Gordimer's early stories such as "Is There Nowhere Else We Can Meet?" and "Ah, Woe Is Me" tend to take place at points of intersection between the races and to rely on the juxtaposition of the issues and ironies arising out of the muffled collisions of such meetings. What is underdeveloped in, for instance, The Soft Voice of the Serpent is a sense of the characters' social and cultural identity within the context of South Africa as a whole.

It is precisely this social component that Gordimer's later short stories develop. One of the ways the author goes about the task of enlarging her imaginative territory is to convey the intensely bureaucratized nature of South African society, an instance of which informs one level of "Six Feet of the Country," as well as the human, or dehumanizing, costs of such a system. Narratives that not merely identify barriers between citizens but that also represent attempts to dismantle or override them are not only obviously political. In a more fundamental sense they provide for both the author and her creations a keen sense of moral engagement with reality. And moral energy is frequently allied to being imaginative. The white couple in "Six Feet of the Country" ultimately fail to imagine what the family of the dead African must go through in order to reclaim his body. This inescapable intersection of the moral and the imaginative in the author's mind functions as a reproach to her society for legislating against the degree of humanity that such a coalition of psychological and cultural forces might potentiate.

A further development in Gordimer's embattled anatomy of her country's ills is the increasingly multiracial cast of characters in her stories. This broadening of range is consistent with stories that deal more directly with political struggle and with public engagement with the apparatus of apartheid. While continuing to dissect the mentality of white South Africans in such stories as "The Night the Winner Came Home" and "The Bridegroom," her short fiction begins to focus with increasing complexity on her nonwhite fellow countrymen and on issues of consciousness, purpose, and action under oppressive conditions. "Not for Publication" is a particular case in point. Gordimer is also careful to caution, as in, for instance, "The Smell of Death and Flowers," against a facile identification on the part of naive whites with the black struggle. By writing stories with a multiracial group of characters, Gordimer herself engages in a political act, at least on the cultural level, since she confers on her nonwhite characters a visibility, significance, and presumption of equality that apartheid denied them.

The politically radical dimensions of the enlarged world of Gordimer's stories are confronted in such works as "Some Monday for Sure" and the title story of Livingstone's Companions. In the latter story an emergent black African state remains prisoner to a tenacious, meretricious white economic presence that thereby reveals the new regime to be the ineffectual heir to colonialism. The title novella of Something Is Out There is a comparable, though more elaborate, account of colonialism's fate in a South African context. Taken together, "Something Is Out There" and "Livingstone's Companions" offer a comprehensive view of Gordimer's efforts to install large themes of geopolitics and social destiny in her short fiction.

In A Soldier's Embrace and the two collections of stories that succeeded it, Something Is Out There and Jump, Gordimer's tone and perspective changes again. Consistent throughout her career for the probing nature of her prose, she now begins to use it not merely to represent the legislative theory and social practice of apartheid but also to explore its spirit and the ways in which that spirit insinuated itself into the intimacies of existence. Stories such as "Town and Country Lovers" and "A Journey," though exhibiting the author's keen grasp of texture and located within a clearly defined moment, also have a spareness and objectivity that gives them an air of allegory, an air that occurs in the far-reaching "Teraloyna." Gordimer's restatement of her abiding themes by means of an intensification of her formal practices is a considerable achievement. As a result, the late collections of stories possess a depth and searching intelligence that give them the kind of standing that chamber music has in a composer's body of work.

Gordimer's short fiction as a whole is distinguished by sharp characterization, attentive and patient description of the natural world, and a sophisticated moral awareness of the elaborate workings of South African society, particularly as observed in Johannesburg, where the author has spent her working life. In addition to its obvious courage, her work is notable for the objectivity of its intelligence. This latter quality is evident not merely in the interest Gordimer exhibits in the nature of ideas and their impact on the lives of her characters. More fundamentally, through her intelligence she brings a sense of impassioned cerebration to her confrontations with the anomalies, vicissitudes, challenges, and heartbreak synonymous with her time and place.

—George O'Brien

See the essays on "Something Out There" and "The Ultimate Safari."