Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Autobiographical
- Part I Critics and criticism
- Part II Contemporary culture in conflict
- Part III Writing in America and elsewhere
- 13 The New Country: Stories from the Yiddish About Life in America
- 14 Three Novels, by Daniel Fuchs
- 15 The demonic charm of Bashevis Singer
- 16 The thirties revisited: Meyer Liben's Justice Hunger and Nine Stories
- 17 Bernard Malamud's A New Life
- 18 Ralph Ellison's Shadow and Act
- 19 William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner
- 20 Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father
- 21 Raymond Carver's Cathedral
- 22 Saul Bellow's Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories
- 23 The claustral world of Nadine Gordimer
23 - The claustral world of Nadine Gordimer
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Autobiographical
- Part I Critics and criticism
- Part II Contemporary culture in conflict
- Part III Writing in America and elsewhere
- 13 The New Country: Stories from the Yiddish About Life in America
- 14 Three Novels, by Daniel Fuchs
- 15 The demonic charm of Bashevis Singer
- 16 The thirties revisited: Meyer Liben's Justice Hunger and Nine Stories
- 17 Bernard Malamud's A New Life
- 18 Ralph Ellison's Shadow and Act
- 19 William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner
- 20 Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father
- 21 Raymond Carver's Cathedral
- 22 Saul Bellow's Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories
- 23 The claustral world of Nadine Gordimer
Summary
Nadine Gordimer's novels with one exception are set in the Union of South Africa. The narratives describe the consequences – in the lives of whites and blacks – of apartheid, the dominant institution in the country. The characterization of Tom and Jessie Stil well, the central couple of Occasion For Loving (her third novel), applies to the condition of most of the white liberals in the novels.
They believed in the integrity of personal relations against the distortions of laws and society. What stronger and more proudly personal bond was there than love? Yet even between lovers they had seen blackness count, the personal return inevitably to the social, the private to the political. There was no recess of being, no emotion so private that white privilege did not single you out there.
If “white privilege” is an aggressive intruder into the integrity of personal relations, then any effort to live out one's personal life free of politics is self-diminishing. The apolitical view, even the illusion of one, is possible only if one is free to constitute one's own personal realm: for instance to have and enjoy one's black or white friends, to intermarry. The answer to “white privilege” must be politics of another kind. To live apolitically even in the interest of the “integrity of personal relations” then is to accept implicitly the injustice of society.
The political life for the black and his white liberal friends in South Africa is inchoate.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Pieces of Resistance , pp. 171 - 180Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987