Nadine Gordimer: getting a life after apartheid.

Dimitriu, Ileana

To suggest a method of interpreting Nadine Gordimer's fiction from a post-apartheid, post-2000 perspective, I shall start by posing the question: if Gordimer was so closely linked to the conscience of apartheid, what value does she have now, as society moves beyond the political struggle? I argue that Gordimer's comments in her key lecture of 1982, "Living in the Interregnum" (1989), mirror not only her practice in the years of struggle politics, but a yearning for a time beyond struggle, when the civil imaginary might again become a major subject. Throughout her career, she has made statements regarding the tension she feels between her responsibility to 'national' testimony, her "necessary gesture" to the history of which she was part, and her responsibility to the integrity of the individual experience, her "essential gesture" to novelistic truth (1989/ 1984: 285-300). "I admit that I am, indeed, determined to find my place 'in history'--Gordimer said--while still referring as a writer to the values that go beyond history. I shall never give them up" (278).

This tendency became evident in her post-1990 novel, None to Accompany Me (1994), and in the three other post-apartheid novels, which have increasingly foregrounded an element that resists the determining force of the event. She might well have preferred a more domestic literary climate for the expression of fiction: "I am not a politically-minded person by nature. I don't suppose if I had lived elsewhere, my writing would have reflected politics much. If at all" (1965:23).

This wish for independence from large historical events nonetheless needs qualification. It is true that Gordimer has always been interested in the private sphere. During the struggle years, however, she felt obliged to interweave the private with the public, to blend her "essential gesture" with her "necessary gesture". Prior to the 1990s, she made anti-apartheid pronouncements from the public platform, as well as through her fiction, and inevitably became associated with the role of anti-apartheid public intellectual, which formed part of the justification for her receiving the Nobel Prize in 1991.

Yet with the coming to power of the ANC government, Gordimer has apparently ceased to be a public interrogator of core national issues. She would say, no doubt, that the abomination of racism has been defeated and that her 'necessary gesture' may be allowed to yield to her 'essential gesture'. However, such a claim could also be interpreted as reneging on her responsibility to a changed socio-political agenda. The ANC government has shortcomings and contradictions: its Mbeki-era AIDS denialism; its reluctance to act against misconduct in its own ranks, its manipulation of the law (for example in the controversies around Jacob Zuma), to say nothing of its condoning of political hooliganism (the ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema's antics). The ANC has refused to condemn Mugabe's violations of democratic governance in Zimbabwe, has sabotaged high-profile international efforts to restrain dictators in Sudan and Myanmar, and has also refused to grant a visa to the Dalai Lama, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. On all of these issues, Gordimer has remained silent.

The question remains as to whether Gordimer is justified in refusing to take a stance against the shortcomings of the current dispensation, for a society--whether authoritarian or democratic--needs independent intellectuals who are prepared to speak out on behalf of those who are misrepresented, lied to, or silenced. Unsurprisingly, there are voices which are critical of Gordimer's post-1990 silence regarding abuses of power. Ulrike Ernst-Auga, for example, is disturbed by Gordimer's abdication of the public platform. Drawing on Manuel Castells's (1997) categories of "the resistance intellectual" vs "the legitimising intellectual", Ernst-Auga argues that in avoiding criticism of the post-liberation ANC, Gordimer is disavowing her role as public intellectual: "Gordimer became the tame critic of post-apartheid South Africa ... 'the legitimising intellectual'. Erstwhile resistance writer, Nadine Gordimer has become the 'state writer' of the ANC" (2003: 11) and, by implication, a 'silent' praise singer of the new order. Various writers interviewed by Ernst-Auga have also expressed concern over Gordimer's shift into public silence. Peter Horn, for example, considers that Gordimer is on the side of the victors: "Now she takes the side of the established government, those people who now hold power.... I do not have the impression that she is particularly critical of the current government, in those instances in which criticism would be necessary" (Ernst-Auga 2002: 49). Stephen Gray articulates harsher criticism: "I don't agree with her endorsement of ANC politics.... And I think that in a sense she has sold herself out. She should have stayed an independent writer" (2002: 73).

To contextualise, Gordimer is one of many intellectuals who have chosen to remain silent on the new dispensation's tendency to equate criticism with 'counter-revolutionary' behaviour. There are only few writers/ artists who confront the authoritarian streak in the ANC. Nise Malange, for example, states that "since 1994 [artists] have experienced self-censorship" for fear that should they speak out, the ANC would "start questioning your loyalty"; "anything that is critical has to be sidelined" (Ernst-Auga 2002: 110-14). There have recently been calls for Nelson Mandela, as an elder statesman, to speak out against the current dispensation's 'culture' of silencing its critics: "Sadly, Madiba, by his inaction, inadvertently joined the ranks of the many in the ANC who were cowed into silence" (Mgwaba 2009: 22).

Gordimer's post-apartheid public silence remains controversial: one could apply the above reference to Mandela also to Gordimer's public stance. As for her fictional work, the question is: Is one entitled to have expectations regarding what Gordimer chooses to say or to omit in her fiction? Is the artist required to be the social conscience? Under apartheid, Gordimer accepted the burden of national spokesperson; in her fiction, for example, the private was circumscribed by the demands of the struggle (even though Rosa Burger and others have their personal lives). In her post-1990 work, Gordimer permits a degree of freedom of the private from the political, at least in the weight granted to character interest in the narratives. As she said to fellow African writers in 1997:

   For writers, the drama of individual and personal relations was
   largely suppressed in the past, and ... now it surfaces
   again.... So we have lost the status of what one might call
   'national engagement'.... And I ask myself and you: do we writers
   seek, need that status, the writer as politician, as statesperson?
   Is it not thrust upon us, as a patriotic duty outside the
   particular gifts we have to offer?.... We have yet to be
   recognised with a status commensurate with respect for the primacy
   of the well-earned role of writer-as-writer in the post-colonial
   era. (1997)

Asked whether, in post-apartheid times, it is important for writers to foreground specific themes, Gordimer said: "You mustn't ask writers to become direct agents of change in this way. That is not our purpose. You are asking then for propaganda.... [W]riters must write what they want to write about" (2002: 144).

Gordimer's stance on writerly freedom is in step with current South African literary practice. The decades after the unbannings of 1990 have witnessed an outward move beyond the grand narrative of oppression and resistance. Gordimer, Coetzee, Fugard, Vladislavic, Mda--all of whom were writing during the transition to a new dispensation--have revealed a centrifugal, liberating impulse. Some critics even raise the question as to whether South African literature still exists, given that

there appears to be a shift from the vortex of a single obsession [to] a more liberating repertoire for the improvisation of individual identity. If we argue that the seam of compulsive identity formation under conditions of referential fracture has been undone, then the lines of affiliation are free to go where they like. (De Kock 2005: 76-7)

As Gordimer keeps reminding us: "I take the freedom to write what I want" (in Isaacson 2005). My concern here is with writing in more 'civil' times or, at least, in times when public events have not obscured the rhythms of people's daily lives, and I intend to draw attention to an aspect of Gordimer's work that has been under-researched: her preoccupation with the complexities of private life, presented as more independent of the public domain than in her previous works. This may strike some readers as unexpected since Gordimer is usually considered to be the representative voice of antiapartheid struggle in this country. Stephen Clingman, for example, in 1986, tended to perceive her writerly freedom as over-determined by social narratives. The approach was apposite for the 1970s and 1980s: behind Clingman's method lies the general movement from a New Critical discourse to structuralist Marxism, a hermeneutics of suspicion being a recurrent characteristic. But as South Africa moves beyond what Derrida referred to in 1985 as "this concentration of world history" (1985: 297), the insights of Njabulo S Ndebele become relevant. As racial issues become more tangential, literature may dwell less on "obscene social exhibitionism" and "the highly dramatic, highly demonstrative forms" of literary representation (1991: 37).

The shift in Gordimer's post-apartheid novels to a primary consideration of individual choice and responsibility does not mean that the political dimension vanishes. The effects of apartheid are felt in None to Accompany Me (1994), for example, in the violence which is always at the edge of the characters' lives. In her work in the Legal Foundation, Vera Stark, the protagonist, is involved in issues of land dispute and resettlement claims against a background of township violence and the return of the exiles. The House Gun (1998) engages with the ubiquity of social violence while questioning the illusion of individual security in a society that has not resolved the discrepancy between first-world affluence and third-world poverty. The Pickup (2001) tackles the issue of illegal immigration to a South Africa pictured as a land of plenty by many Africans to the north of its borders. In her most recent novel, Get a Life (2005), Gordimer discusses issues of ecology in relation to economic and political interests. Yet there is a subtle difference in Get a Life compared with the other post-1990 novels: the social issues are not central to the politics of nationhood, and the private life proceeds without dramatic irruptions beyond the 'family'. Get a Life will be the focus of my essay, but before I discuss it, let me offer an overview of Gordimer's practice in the 1990s.

There is a sense of existential homecoming in None to Accompany Me, which articulates freedom as a condition based on the transition from social rebellion to individual responsibility. The novel is unadorned in its style, suggesting the necessity to maintain a distance from the demands of people and events; Vera Stark's first responsibility is to herself. This is not to imply that the novel lacks a public dimension, offering as it does insight into the work of the Legal Foundation which supports democratic land policies. Yet how effective is Gordimer's resort to the public event in relation to its private counterpart? The quick response is that the two do not seem to be linked as dynamically as was the case in Burger's Daughter (1979), for example.

Ironically, one of the advantages of the 1970s and eighties was that there was no escape from the public/ private dialectic. In None to Accompany Me (1994), on the other hand, events often detach themselves from the intricacies of private life, and it is tempting to consider the work as two ill-fitting novels in one. We are presented with--the novel 'telling' us rather than 'showing'--various social realities in the build-up to the 1994 elections. The reader is subjected to discussions on economic or land policy, corruption in office, federalism, the education crisis and AIDS. Gordimer seems anxious not to disappoint those readers to whom she might still be the national spokesperson. Yet a private story operates within the public life, and occupies most of the author's attention: the inward journey of Vera Stark, a sixty-something lawyer, who is influential in the Legal Foundation that helps black people with land ownership. In a process of psychological house-cleaning, Vera, while remaining committed to her public duties, begins to free herself from commitments to other people and embarks on a kind of secular retreat. As her name suggests, she is the seeker of the stark truth, who can discard those stages of her life that have exhausted their significance. Gordimer summarises the theme: "Perhaps the passing away of the old regime makes the abandonment of an old personal life also possible" (1994:315).

Inner discovery links None to Accompany Me to The House Gun (1998), the latter novel seeming to offer an answer to Gordimer's preoccupation in the previous novel: what have we been able to leave behind? What will we take with us as we try to move house as a nation? The House Gun offers one answer to the question: violence has accompanied us; the new house contains a gun. Violence becomes an ominous character in its own right: the house gun, casually available, presents an invitation to take the law into one's own hands. Authorial meditations on the violence of transitional times and the collective effort needed to replace the old order with a new moral system constitute the 'public forum' of The House Gun, but the real point of interest is Duncan Lindgard's killing of his lover's casual partner in a fit of jealousy. The story-line follows Duncan's distraught parents as they attempt to come to terms with their son's act. In their effort to understand his life-style, which includes a gay lover and a sexual triangle, they become acutely aware of "the Other Side ... of privilege":

   everything had come to them from the Other Side, the nakedness to
   the final disaster: powerlessness, helplessness, before the law ...
   Neither whiteness ... nor money that had kept them in safety--that
   other form of segregation--could change their status. (127)

The parents' story powerfully connects private and public realms. The main thrust of the novel, however, focuses on Duncan's rebellion against middleclass convention. Like None to Accompany Me, The House Gun presents a juxtaposition of two apparently ill-fitting stories: the parents' story and their son's story do not interact with any sense of illumination.

The Pickup also represents a juxtaposition of separate stories. The public dimension is again reminiscent of 'pre-1990' novels (Burger's Daughter and My Son's Story, for example), in which the author explored the framework of the political underground. The Pickup offers a glimpse into another type of underground: that of post-1990 illegal black immigration to South Africa. Abdu, an 'illegal' from an Arab country in North Africa, seeks residence in South Africa. He picks up Julie Summers, a young white woman of means, who falls in love with him. Gordimer does not pursue the social causes of immigration; instead, she pursues the human story of Julie's following her deported lover to his desert country. Like Vera's, hers is another rite of passage, in sharp contrast with Abdu's trajectory: "There is a disjunction between Julie's privileged rejection of globalised culture and [Abdu's] thirst to embrace it" (Kossew 2003: 24-5) Expelled from South Africa, Abdu seeks another destination in the 'new world', whereas Julie finds contentment in the unnamed North African state. Is Gordimer's removal of the protagonists from the familiar South African setting an escape from engaging with the impenetrable post-1990 scenarios in this country?

Wherever we wish to place the emphasis, we encounter again a novel that tells two distinct stories: one 'public' (forced emigration), the other 'private' (discovery of self). It is the latter that in the end engrosses Gordimer's imagination. We enter a story of location or dislocation, a symbolic country of the soul, exile-as-home. Like Vera, who gives up social and personal dependencies, Julie gives up her material bonds, her new husband, and finally her desire to journey to another place. She will not accompany her husband to the land of his next opportunity, the USA, but chooses to immerse herself in the silence of the desert, her reward being the enhancement of self-knowledge.

Gordimer's latest novel, Get a Life (2005), marks a shift in her handling of the public/ private dynamic. Unlike its three predecessors, this novel does not seem to be two almost separate novels--one of the public and one of the private domain--in one. Get a Life focuses steadily on the private, on the life of a man and his family against a backdrop of ecological concern. There is a muting of the public sphere: Gordimer does not, as in the immediately previous novels, dutifully offer insights into crucial social issues. To introduce a green-peace discourse--in a time of AIDS, of high unemployment, pervasive criminality, failed service-delivery, violence, corruption, mismanagement and arrogance in high office--diverts the focus from the core challenges of the new democracy. To discuss ecology as Gordimer does in this novel, at the expense of the more central issues of a society in transition, could be interpreted as being 'silent'. Ernst-Auga would probably continue to point her finger at Gordimer as a "legitimising intellectual" of the regime. On the other hand, when charging Gordimer with having deserted the public platform, does Ernst-Auga offer the full story? Can the form of a writer's 'boldness' be decreed? I shall attempt an answer to these questions after paying close attention to the novel.

Via its central character, Paul Bannerman, a researcher working for an ecological foundation, the novel 'tells' us about interventions by ecological conservationists against high-level political drives for economic modernisation. Through stream-of-consciousness techniques--Paul, due to a life-threatening disease, is forced into 'solitary confinement' in his parents' home--Gordimer offers information on ecological activism in South Africa, while suggesting that there are no simple solutions to conservation in an ecologically-aware global consciousness. Such a public scene, however, is not Paul's centre of consciousness, while references to other social challenges facing the new South Africa are made in passing and are not even integrated into the story line. Corporate thinking, for example, is hinted at in descriptions of Benni's (Paul's wife's) dealings at the advertising agency where she is employed. Corruption (109, 145), as well as the pervasiveness of crime (56, 150), are alluded to by Paul's mother Lyndsay, a lawyer. But Gordimer does not develop these asides: we must read between the lines to fill in the social details. Unlike her practice in the previous post-apartheid novels (see Dimitriu 2001, 2006), the social issues here do not jar against Paul's 'family' story.

At the centre of the novel is the impact that thyroid cancer and the ensuing radiation treatment have on Paul's body and mind, as well as his enforced isolation from wife and child. His temporary return to his parents' home allows him to ponder personal and ecological commitments. As noted by Anthony Vital, the novel "writes ecology as only one thread in the full weave of life" (2008: 93), for the "full weave" includes Paul's private identity crisis, which involves his physical and emotional recuperation from a life-threatening disease. The public forum, although taken seriously, is treated here in laconic, open-ended, reportage style and granted less attention than issues of self-discovery and new understanding of his role as husband, father and son.

It is precisely this reversal of the public/private emphasis that has led Vital to bemoan that "[t]he significance the characters find in 'life' is, for the most part, deeply personal ... while the politics of nationhood, which in Gordimer's earlier fiction added crucial layers of significance to personal choice, seem peripheral" (2008: 92). (1) While appreciating Gordimer's turn to ecology, Vital regrets that she has filtered the environmental issue through the consciousness of white, middle-class people, whose "subjective appropriation of ecology" (104) seems to evade the national dimension. This is a class, the middle class, whom Vital criticises for having settled too unproblematically into the new dispensation: "With South Africa's political revolution realized, the characters appear to assume a nationhood with regular politics, and there is none of what Clingman saw in earlier fiction as an 'address to the future'" (92). In this respect, Vital's criticism has links to Ernst-Auga's argument, discussed above; Vital too believes that "Gordimer reflects a widespread inability to crystallize a sense of a better social future--apartheid is over, whither South Africa?" (95). In addition to Ernst-Auga's criticism, he attacks Gordimer's choice of a particular class of people as the purveyors of social concern. He takes issue with her "normalizing of middleclass discourse both through its inviting a sense of intimacy with its central characters, and by writing its central characters' discourse into national governing structures" (99). Although appreciating Gordimer's subtle play of closeness and distance vis-a-vis her characters, and her own questioning of "what a middle-class professional world comes to accept as normal" (104), Vital insists on what he perceives to be omissions in her novel, all of which are linked to the particular class under scrutiny. He finds it problematic that the characters do not explicitly engage with the country's colonial past (100, 105); that they do not take responsibility for their patterns of consumption, and are not directly involved in broad-based environmental work (109). Vital also insists on the subjective nature of Paul's "ecological thinking as profoundly ideological" (102), and suggests that Gordimer should have held it up to radical critique. The end of the novel is seen to be disappointing, for it does not offer closure: "no ideological resting place, no closing harmonies" (111). Briefly, Vital would have preferred Gordimer to produce a different novel, which, I suspect, would have promoted specific solutions to social and ecological problems. (2)

I agree with Vital: Gordimer has offered subjective insights into issues of ecology. But I also ask: Are not all acts of fiction inescapably acts of the subjective imagination? Are we as critics entitled to dictate to writers their terms of fictional engagement? In this case, are we supposed to condemn Gordimer for her focus on a certain class? If so, do we not then risk becoming ideologically prescriptive? The times of sloganeering, in which "culture [was] a weapon of struggle", need to be superseded by other challenges, as Albie Sachs reminded us in 1991. Is it not--'beyond 2000', almost 20 years into our democracy--legitimate to permit writers the freedom of their fictional choices to depict what they know most intimately? Is Gordimer's depiction of her own class, as Vital implies, too trivial to matter in the larger scheme of South Africa's national challenges? Or does this constitute 'boldness' of an unexpected kind?

Whereas The Pick Up ends with Julie Summers embarking on a journey of self-discovery in the desert, Get a Life starts with Paul Bannerman's soul-searching. The novel is centred on his evolution from a sense of alienation, through a gradual process of reassessing his priorities in life, to a full acceptance of life's complexity. The first part, "Child's Play", which occupies about a third of the novel, immerses the reader in Paul's retreat from his life as husband and father (because of radiation-therapy treatment for thyroid cancer, he returns to his parents' home). This is a new Gordimer trope: a young man forced to retreat from the world into illness and isolation. It is tempting to ask with Siddhartha Deb, "And what does Paul's illness signify, especially in the possible contamination he carries within him?" (2005: 19). What is the symbolism of Gordimer's 'chosen' disease for Paul? The organ affected by disease is the thyroid gland, which is considered from a spiritually-symbolic point of view "the seed and fruit of the Tree of Knowledge [so that] he who opens up this fruit has access to the Word and Knowledge" (De Souzenelle 1999: 333; my translation). According to interpretations of the body symbolism by eastern philosophies, (3) the throat-region/ chakra is also considered to be the seat of creativity and communication, "a point of entry to the innermost recesses of the spirit and self-knowledge" (Ozaniec 1995: 152; my translation). On several occasions, Gordimer mentions that something "had Paul by the throat" (3, 16), or that his "ability to communicate was stifled" (43). My assumption is that Gordimer's choice of 'dis-ease' is not haphazard: its bodily location has a symbolic value that needs to be placed in relation to the other literary conventions of symbols, themes and characters in the economy of the novel as a whole. Paul's constricted ability to communicate verbally with others, as well as the danger his radioactivity presents, keep him in physical and emotional isolation. When he is diagnosed with cancer, "he stood there, alone" (7). His "cutlery is kept apart" (14), "he's learning to be alone in his new way" (33); even the family dog avoids him (48). "The new leper, that's how he thinks of himself" (6). Throughout the first part of the novel, Gordimer makes use of leprosy as shorthand: Paul is a "litup leper" (33), "the emanation" (37), "the leper himself' (60), "an Untouchable" (42). She also highlights various 'states of being' associated with leprosy: a lack of purpose (20); a sense of entrapment (with Paul "inside ... the word for jail seems the right one", 82).

Gordimer's insistence on her protagonist's symbolic status as "the twenty-first century leper" (56) makes one wonder as to the wider significance she attributes to Paul. Does the physical disease suggest unease with the status quo? Is a young white male in the new South Africa 'the new leper'? As Mamphela Ramphele has recently pointed out:

   The legacy of authoritarian rule ... has conditioned South Africans
   to accept themselves as insignificant in relation to those in
   position of authority.... Insignificance frames relations of power
   at every level of our society: citizens and government; individual
   members and their political parties, etc.... We need a serious
   conversation about our identity crisis, our sense of
   insignificance. (2009)

Gordimer does not spell out such issues directly or from the public platform, as I have already pointed out. It is nevertheless worth investigating the social implications of this novel's symbolism. When she says that Paul's state is that of an 'untouchable' whose "emanation irradiates the hidden or undiscovered" (55), is she inviting levels of inference? She said in an interview that her "characters don't always explain everything ... I am interested in fiction that is demanding, that says to me I cannot tell you everything--you have to intuit for yourself things that are not spelt out" (in Isaacson 2005). Is Gordimer pointing to social realities she feels cannot be spoken from the public platform? Is her oblique style a new kind of oppositional stance?

Another unexpected novelistic device is the topos of the story's unfolding. Paul spends much of his 'retreat'--one third of the novel's length--in the family garden, which brings back childhood memories, and helps him reflect on his present condition. In many ways, the garden for Paul has a similar function to that of other new symbolic spaces in Gordimer's post-apartheid novels: the desert for Julie Summers; the cottage in which Vera Stark lives as a tenant; the prison cell for Duncan Lindgard. The garden becomes a place of introspection, a conversational partner, Paul's alter ego. Occasionally referred to as No-Man's-Land (30, 47), the garden is also hinted at in biblical terms: when Paul reflects on the possibility of separating from his wife, we are reminded that "it was in the Garden that expulsion came, once there was Knowledge" (58). Gordimer has chosen here to deploy the garden in the parabolic mode, though in a review in the 1980s she criticised J M Coetzee's novel Life & Times of MichaelK, claiming that for a writer to focus on "the idea of gardening" in times of emergency was an avoidance of politics and an abdication of the social responsibility to bear witness (1984: 1-6).

How then to explain Gordimer's symbolic choices in her 2005 novel? Is it simply an irony that she is foregrounding the garden symbolism after having vehemently criticised Coetzee's 'idea of gardening'? In a post-emergency society, is the writer free to meditate on ecology and gardens? Conversely, does a preoccupation with gardens necessarily mean an escape from history? I suggest that there has been a shift in Gordimer's writing, to what Coetzee, in his comments on her latest works, starting with The Pick Up (2001), has welcomed as "a spiritual turn in her thought" (2007: 252). Commenting on Coetzee's insight, Attridge holds that

   he is welcoming [Gordimer] into a domain he has inhabited, not
   always comfortably, for some time.... For if there are gleams of
   transcendence in Coetzee's [and, I would add, in Gordimer's] novels
   ... they are not only hints of a possible justice, but of justice
   animated, as well as tested, by a more obscure demand that the word
   'spiritual' can only gesture towards. (2007: xiv)

These comments are certainly at variance with what Vital has criticised as Paul's escape from reality--his "lack of imaginative interest in the 'otherness of people'; [his] freedom from social demands" (2008: 100). I suggest that Paul, forced by his disease, both physical and psychological, retreats into nature, but not in narcissistic adoration. He is accompanied by his own thoughts about his role in family and society. "The garden ... is both the place banished to ... and the place to be yourself, against orders" (49). Against enforced expectations, against emotional blackmail and feelings of insignificance, the garden acts as a facilitator of Paul's emotional housecleaning. It offers him the metaphorical vocabulary he needs for self-discovery, while mediating numerous internal dialogues: "The garden is where ... there is the wise presence that changes solitude of monologue into some kind of dialogue. A dialogue with questions; or answers never heard, in the elsewhere" (54). The garden becomes a conversation partner. It is in the garden, presented via stream-of-consciousness, that Paul gives cogency to his long-suppressed intuition regarding the incompatibility between his wife and himself in the way they relate to nature, institutions, and each other: an incompatibility between the ideals of environmental protection (Paul's) and the life-style of the advertising industry (Benni's). Benni, for example, wonders "why must her man take on the survival of the whole bloody world" (47). Paul becomes aware that

   while occupying the same bed, you don't occupy the same fundament:
   to know your conviction of being in the world ... How could he,
   whose work, reason-to-be is preserving life, live so long with an
   intimate, herself, who was successfully complicit in destroying it.
   Living in isolation, all along. Even when inside the woman. (59)

It is in the garden that Paul for the first time contemplates divorcing Benni, for "it was in the Garden that expulsion came once there was Knowledge" (58). Here Gordimer's biblical allusion helps set in sharp contrast the child's innocence and the adult's sharp awareness of compromise and self-deceit. Once having eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden; once having perceived the divide between his wife and himself, can Paul pretend to 'innocence' in his marital relationship?

The garden also intensifies Paul's preoccupations with his role as an environmentalist. It is the space where he receives his colleague, Thapelo, who reports to him the latest news about developments in the on-going tug-of-war between government and environmentalist pressure groups (59-60). At this stage in the novel, the conflict of interest between the power-holders and the ecologists seems insurmountable--an imminent "Development Disaster" (57), with government paying only lip-service to the environmentalists' research findings, so that the latter "have need of consultation with lawyers who know what loopholes ... must be anticipated and exposed" (25-6). Confinement sharpens Paul's awareness of the powerlessness of his position: the environmentalists' "findings can be given token attention, oh yes, the enterprise projects doctored up a bit as a concession--and the disastrous proceeds" (25).

Paul's sense of disempowerment is at its most acute in the scene where a nightly intruder in the garden is confronted by Lyndsay. The incident, a reminder of crime "among present living conditions" in South Africa (53), makes Paul feel "less than a man, less than himself, stoned out of his mind into impotence as an inability to take any action" (53). Throughout this first section, Gordimer suggests that Paul's 'impotence' is not simply physical, but affects him at a deep psychological level: helplessness is "blinding the brain" (54). As he faces his deepest fears and insecurities, marital/ sexual, professional, social, Paul distances himself from everyday understandings of 'ordinariness' (67), whether they be about what constitutes a happy marriage, professional significance or, indeed, the 'banality' of crime. Through Lyndsay's maternal eyes, Paul appears as "in confrontation with an unimaginable state of self. She sees it in his face ... [in] his choice of words, of what there is that can be said among all that cannot" (67). His state, however, is not that of a victim: "It's more than a physical and mental state of an individual; it's a disembodiment ... a state of existence outside the continuity of life (67). It is a spiritual assessment preparing the way for a new beginning. A new Gordimer trope?

Once having secured his insights, Paul, like the archetypal hero of the folk tale, returns from his retreat back into the world. As he recovers from his identity crisis, he slowly reconnects to his social roles as husband, father, middle-class professional, but not before having fully translated, through his own relentless thoughts, the significance of people and events in relation to his own understanding and acceptance of them. Accordingly, his earlier confinement to his childhood home--which to Vital appeared a complacent retreat from the world (2008: 98-9)--acquires new dimensions. It is shown to have been a necessary exercise in self-discovery, based on increased self-knowledge, acceptance and wisdom: it is neither a state of victimhood, nor of romantic nature worship, but an act of psychological introspection, of courageously making visible and naming one's "states of being", one's "states of existence" (Gordimer makes insistent use of these phrases throughout the novel: e.g. 30, 57, 68, 71, 76, 80, 127,139, 143, 161, 172). From inhabiting a 'state apart'--as signified by the frequent references to a leper colony--Paul comes gradually to understand that a return to his social roles beyond his parents' home and garden is only possible if he is able to assume responsibility for his choices.

The route back to health, to life beyond physical and psychological 'disease' lies in the realisation that his 'integrated self' is that of many professionals: a responsibility to family and occupation which may not be the stuff of the public forum or the newspaper headline, but has its own 'undramatic' purpose. Simply, Paul prepares himself to go home to wife and son: "he would leave home this second time to go home as an adult" (88). His quarantine in his parents' home acquires, from the vantage point of hindsight, the dimension of a regressus ad uterum (a spiritual womb to which the archetypal hero has to return, in order to grow into mature understandings). Once out of this retreat, in his new "state of existence", Paul stops thinking of himself as a leper. Rather, he meditates on the idea of the co-existence of diverse forms of life, energy and matter, a flow that accommodates contradictions and heals intolerances, and accommodates his connection to family and surrounding environment. Inspired by his recent research for the environmental foundation for which he works, and more specifically by a project for saving the ecological system of the Okavango Delta from both government and corporate developments (89-93), Paul meditates on the 'integrated' significance of eco-systems: "The Okavango Delta in co-existence with a desert is a system of elements contained, maintained--by the phenomenon itself, unbelievably, inconceivably" (91). Nature does not acknowledge geo-political frontiers, nor does it separate diverse processes and contradictions (92-3). Paul meditates at length on this: water brings seeds from afar, alien seeds grow into trees; waters bring sand from afar, sand leaching salt; the risk of salt contamination is managed by nature, and clean water continues to fertilise the land. He brings his ecological knowledge to bear on his life: "[W]e don't know how the salt is managed. It is ... we drink the water. This is what we should work on: how with the Okavango the balance between positive and negative is achieved ... as a spider's web is the most fragile example of organisation, so a delta is the grandest" (92, 94). Paul suggests that individuals should find inspiration from "this intelligence of matter [that] receives, contains, processes" (92). His insight helps him accept the doubts--"this heresy is born of the garden, as Evil was" (94)--that have arisen for him while in quarantine, especially regarding his marriage. The contradictions in personality (private) and profession (public) between his wife and himself no longer seem insurmountable:

   Return home; that's his loop in the thread from the spider's web to
   the Okavango system: Benni/ Berenice, small boy, Daddy! Paul! All
   the waterways and shifting sand islands of contradiction: a
   condition of living.

      Always find the self calling on the terminology of the wilderness,
   so unjudgmental, to bring to circumstances the balm of calm
   acceptance. The inevitable grace, zest, in being a microcosm of the
   macrocosm's marvel. Doubt is part of it; the salt content. (94)

On his return to wife and son, Paul is willing to accept Benni's urging to broaden his social circle beyond his environmentalist work fellows: "to move towards contact with others ... to come to life ["Get a Life!"] in the variety of friends and stimulating jostle of lively acquaintances" (103), including people from the advertising world, which he secretly used to scorn in the past. Environmentalists and advertisers, black and white, now allow one another to find common ground at the parties organised by Benni. A new social circle is being formed; Paul, "the new man, may need to bring a new kind of relationship into the old one (left in the garden) that served--the attraction of opposites" (111). Husband and wife also regain old intimacies. However, the earlier plans to have a second child still do not bear fruit: there is no second conception. Symbolically, Paul is still in a state apart: "He cannot trust his body. It remains the stranger that was made of it" (119).

Gordimer is determined, nevertheless, to allow her various protagonists to "get a life", or, to put it differently, to get on with what is 'authentic' in their lives. Paul's father, Adrian, leaves Lyndsay, his wife of many decades, to live with a new lover in Norway (126-34). Lyndsay knows that his is an exciting new "state [of being], even though it is alienation while it is fulfilment" (128), and accepts Adrian's decision: "We don't own one another. Men and women don't" (133). At the same time, Lyndsay realises that she is utterly alone in dealing with this new stage of her life. Her son, Paul, has his own new network of intimacies: "the generations can't help each other in the existential affront" (134) (a reminder here of Vera Stark's leitmotif, "none to accompany me"). Lyndsay adopts a black, orphaned, HIV-infected, rape-victim child. Getting a life, for Lyndsay, is not simple. The authorial voice asks rhetorically: "Is she punishing Adrian by showing she makes bolder choices than his, going all the way to the exhibition (no less) of extreme moral choices?" (155). Is Gordimer--in this 'politically correct' vignette--gesturing towards solutions for extreme states of human suffering in the new South Africa, towards co-existence with 'the other side of privilege'? A co-existence in diversity in an extreme key: the kind of dramatic intrusion which in the novels of the 1990s had an insistence that is lessened in Get a Life, where the unexceptional rhythms soon return us to the dominant, 'suburban' tone.

The most convincing case for the co-existence of opposites occurs in Paul's own process of 'getting a life'. In the last part of the novel (158-87), Gordimer elaborates a 'life-enhancing' solution for the integration of Paul's various 'states apart'. Having removed him from the parental home, as well as from the wilderness of his working life, Gordimer has him spend time with his entire family (wife, son, mother and her adopted black child) in a zone in-between: "half botanical garden ... half wildlife protection habitat" (160). It is a zone symbolically allowing the integration of diversity: of marital, professional, racial and generational interests. The eagle which Paul spots in this zone (162-3) embodies the ambiguous nature of freedom and imprisonment. He comes to understand that there is no absolute freedom either in nature or in society, and learns to accept such necessary 'accommodation'. He also learns to accept that nature can be as ruthless as human intrusions into the eco-system. On reading to his wife aloud from a tourist pamphlet, Paul reminds himself that eagles, in order to survive as a species, must allow their chicks to fight for their lives while still in the nest. There is only one winner, the fittest chick, who is wittily labelled "Cain" in ecologists' parlance:

   Romanticising what's too difficult to handle. Cain and Abel. The
   old Bible provides an object lesson here in the non-human, the
   creatures who according to evolutionary hierarchy go back too far
   to have developed a morality. Except that of survival. (168)

Gordimer develops this second biblical reference to help bring to some conclusion the moral dilemmas faced by Paul, the ecologist, vis-a-vis the social projects driven by both government and corporations:

   If you thrust a toll highway [through] a great botanical marvel,
   n'swebu, and you gouge ten million tons of minerals ... isn't that
   the morality of survival? [And] what is survival if not the end
   of poverty? ... And if Abel has to be thrown out from the nest by
   Cain; isn't that for the greater survival. The eagle allows this to
   happen ... Survival. (168)

Here Gordimer permits Paul to amend his previously held absolutist beliefs in his mission to save the earth. He now starts accepting more flexible solutions to major social problems, focusing not only on saving the earth, but also on helping the wretched of the earth; not only on nature's survival, but also on the survival of the most vulnerable of humans. At the base of this new, wider understanding lies his firm belief in nature's intelligence that "carries its own knowledge ... its means of renewal in time" (182). As Gordimer said in an interview in which she rejected suggestions that the novel pointed to resounding threats to ecology: "I see it as about survival" (in Isaacson 2005). It is at this stage in his re-evaluation of self that Paul learns from his wife that they are going to have another child. Conception becomes possible at the symbolic level as well: life goes on, another human being 'gets a life'. The novel ends with the birth, and the continuity--the survival--of those able to overcome the alienation of their 'states apart', as in Paul's full recovery from 'dis-ease'.

I have attempted to suggest in my analysis of Get a Life a subtle yet significant shift in Gordimer's recent fiction as compared with her first three post-apartheid novels. In the latter (although she turns to the private), the public domain still intrudes via 'spectacular' incidents: township crime and violence; middle-class parents dealing with their son's imprisonment; the traumas of immigration and emigration. These are core social issues, and they receive a prominent place in the novels prior to Get a Life. At the same time, the resolutions of personal issues strain credibility: these 'resolutions' do not ring true to the class parameters of Gordimer's characters. Rather, they are symbolic gestures within novels that primarily comply with the conventions of realism. These resolutions are reminders of what Gordimer in 1982 referred to as her 'necessary gestures' of goodwill and reconciliation in a divided society: Vera Stark lives as a tenant in the newly empowered black man's yard; her lesbian daughter adopts a black child; Duncan Lindgard in a bi-sexual triangle plans to adopt the child of the triangle; Julie Summers, the wealthy young woman, rejects her privilege to commune with the desert. Are these incidents meant to shock middle-class readers into an awareness of the need for some drastic change in their attitudes? The trouble is that one is tempted to interpret one's 'real' response to these solutions in the allegorical mode. (We are reminded of the Smales family's 'spectacular' resolution: the transportation from their comfort zone to an African rural community in July's People.)

In Get a Life, by contrast, Gordimer is grounded; her resolutions may be less exciting in speculative, literary ways, but they are more credible, and more likely to occur among the type of people on whom she focuses her story. The middle class is shown to have a life, and Gordimer is at last bold enough to be unapologetic about it. She may not be making the kind of bold public statements that would satisfy Ernst-Auga; she may not choose to write the South African saga as straddling all classes of the population (Vital's implicit expectation of a 'radical' Gordimer). Instead, she focuses on the class she knows best: her boldness embraces the 'small stories' and hesitant spiritual pursuits of suburban people. It is a shift that, to an extent, had also been signalled in her two most recent collections of short stories, Loot (2003) and Beethoven Is One Sixteenth Black (2007). The critic, I suggest, should be sufficiently generous to grant the author the value of her own impulsions, sufficiently generous to permit Nadine Gordimer, after apartheid, to "get a life".

References

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Notes

(1.) Several critics have remarked on the fact that Gordimer's post-apartheid novels show a focus on the personal at the expense of society's 'grand narrative'. O'Brien (2001), for example, is resolutely 'against normalization' in Gordimer's recent fiction. In detecting a sense of "postmodern melancholy" in the 'small histories' of Gordimer's post-1990 novels, Lewis (1999) echoes Head's (1994) reservations about Gordimer's recent interest in explorations of postmodern multiplicity at the expense of focused social investigation. These critics share a sense of disappointment in Gordimer's lessened interest in 'the politics of nationhood' and her inability, or unwillingness, to point to new visions for the collective future.

(2.) The reception of Get a Life has been controversial. Vital's ideological reservations are shared by Deb (2005), who also finds that the relationship of the characters to "the upheavals of society and nation is tangential and often evasive". Others have focused on Gordimer's style, deploring the novel's sketchy character development and its telegraphic discourse (e.g. Harrison 2006), while many others have been generous and offered appreciative remarks--e.g. Rose (2006), Isaacson (2005). I share Isaacson's insightful appreciation of Gordimer's existentialist-inspired delving into the characters' "states of being".

(3.) In Gordimer's short-story sequence, "Karma", from the collection Loot (2003), for example, she uses eastern mystical allusion.