Beyond Liberalism

Gordimer, who died in 2014, is the author of fifteen novels and dozens more short stories and essays written over a seventy-year period. Her earliest short stories were well-reviewed in both the South African and US press, and by 1951, she had a contract with the New Yorker. After publishing three books that strained against the liberal conventions of the South African novel, Gordimer’s work became increasingly radical. The South African authorities banned her 1976 novel, Burger’s Daughter.

The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991 consolidated her international reputation as a fierce opponent of apartheid. Yet she would go on to publish five novels after this, and her writing is animated by more than the issue of racial segregation. Despite her obvious commitments, Gordimer always insisted she was not a “political” writer, let alone a propagandist for organizations with which she was involved, such as the ANC or the South African Communist Party (SACP).

The abiding concern of her fiction, during and after apartheid, is a critique of liberalism — a set of ideas about the freedom and equality of all individuals within a market system. Although novels like The Conservationist and Burger’s Daughter attack the racist ideology of Afrikaner minority rule, Gordimer also lays bare — as early as the 1947 short story “Is There Nowhere Else We Can Meet?” — the self-deluding attitude of some white South Africans that all races remained fundamentally equal under apartheid.

Such platitudes obstruct a structural analysis of racist political economies, such as segregation in the United States or various forms of apartheid in South Africa and Israel/Palestine. Gordimer’s fiction throws light on links between South Africa’s role in the world economy and inequalities of race and class.

Pressing on the Sore Spots

While Gordimer always insisted that she would have become a writer regardless of where she had been born, the peculiar pressures of South African society shape her work in unique ways. According to the Marxist sociologist Harold Wolpe, the system of apartheid sought to reproduce “traditional” African communities from which black workers were drawn, but where they would largely be cared for between jobs. This meant black workers could be “paid below the cost of their social reproduction,” creating a cataclysmic racial wealth disparity.

When the ANC finally came to power in 1994, however, its leaders sought to align themselves with neoliberal economic imperatives, thereby exacerbating the country’s inequalities. The bizarre trauma of the end of racist rule compounding rather than alleviating poverty, environmental destruction, and endemic violence is the blast furnace in which Gordimer’s strangest and most powerful work is formed.

In Get A Life (2005), for example, a young ecologist has to isolate from his family after becoming radioactive from cancer treatment. Given space for contemplation, he discovers a sense of dissatisfaction with his life, and links begin to emerge between his cloistered bourgeois existence and the wetland destruction that he has observed in his research.

The evocative weirdness of the climate scientist contaminating his environment; the cure killing the patient; the dependence of the bourgeois family on forms of isolation; the illness that provides insight — all this is shaped by, and explores, the topsy-turvy world of South Africa’s entwined economic, AIDS, and climate crises.

Gordimer’s novels press on the sore spots of society. This painful confrontation of social reality hasn’t always been easy in South African literature. Roberto Schwarz remarked that there were novels in Brazil before there were Brazilian novelists. Yet as she embarked on her writing career in the 1940s, Gordimer had to contend with the fact that the writers she admired — Marcel Proust, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad — wrote in Europe, using cultural forms that had been shaped there.

South African writers who came before her, such as Olive Schreiner, author of The Story of an African Farm (1883), had grappled with the apparent mismatch between the formal conventions of the novel and the conditions of settler-colonial society. What kind of critical social insights were really possible in a bildungsroman — a narrative of apprenticeship where a rebellious young man is ultimately reconciled to his society — that was set amid racial segregation, for example? Or a comic novel in which public struggles are dissolved by private marital bliss?

Authors who opposed colonial segregation and later apartheid attempted to use the realist novel to offer a full panorama of South African society, ranging across oppressed ghettoes and privileged reefs. Yet works such as Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) represented black people merely as survivors of a colonization that destroyed their civilizations, and who now required help from the “benevolent white people.” This was how liberalism was articulated in South Africa from the 1940s onward, and Gordimer gradually sought to escape from this ideological prison house though her writing.

Bridging the Gap

Gordimer’s first novel, The Lying Days (1953), depicts narrator Helen Shaw’s first tentative forays into the world of ramshackle Jewish market stalls and huddled black workers clustered around the fringes of a mining town. Helen comes of age as the legislation of apartheid is set in place, with the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949), the Group Areas Act (1950), and the Bantu Education Act (1953). The novel captures the sense of dismay at this slide into white supremacist rule.

In defiance of this ossified architecture of separateness, Helen attempts to cultivate “interracial” friendship. But this fails and she settles down with a boy from a stolid colonial family. Although The Lying Days may seem to be a conventional novel in which its hero is ultimately reconciled to their society, we can detect early signs of Gordimer’s mature critique of liberalism in the disconsolatory tone of this settlement.

Here Gordimer follows other southern African authors such as Doris Lessing and Laurens van der Post in representing these white bourgeois communities as fragments of nineteenth-century Europe grafted onto Africa. Her novels are attentive to the alienation of these colloquia from their actual surroundings.

From the 1950s, Gordimer herself sought to bridge this gap by engaging with black cultural life in Johannesburg. She was a close friend of Es’kia Mphahlele, the author of Down Second Avenue (1959), with whom she worked at DRUM magazine. Publishing short fiction and essays by black authors, DRUM introduced Gordimer to the likes of Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, and Lewis Nkosi.

This gesture of collaborating with black cultural institutions became a way for white authors to resist the racial siloing of culture, and hold space for a multiracial idea of South African society. In the 1950s, Gordimer’s friend Anthony Sampson edited DRUM, while in the 1980s, Ivan Vladislavić worked at Staffrider, another important literary magazine.

Despite her lifelong insistence that culture and politics were fundamentally separate concerns, both Gordimer’s activism and her fiction grew more daring as apartheid intensified through the 1960s and ’70s. At a writers’ convention at Wits University in 1956, Gordimer met William Plomer, whose novel Turbott Wolfe (1925) she considered to be a serious, non-propagandistic attack on the racism of South African society.

Plomer’s gentle encouragement for Gordimer to speak out against apartheid alongside her fiction began her shift toward what her biographer calls “reluctant” activism. This reluctance faded in the wake of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre. Police murdered ninety-one people, including twenty-nine children, at a peaceful protest against “pass laws,” the apartheid legislation that forced so-called non-white groups to carry documentation.

The Way of the World

Despite subsequent economic sanctions, the state developed fiscal strategies for propping up apartheid — helped in the 1980s by politicians like Margaret Thatcher who sought liberal trade agreements with South Africa. The liberal view of the apartheid state, according to which it was a kind of semi-capitalist fiefdom whose architecture of segregation would be corroded by the free market, grew to seem as insidious as the open defense of that state over the following decades. This was the discursive environment in which Gordimer wrote two of her most daring novels: The Conservationist (1974) and Burger’s Daughter (1979).

In an extraordinary fictional move, Gordimer makes the principal character of The Conservationist — the person whose thoughts are most fully and even sympathetically articulated by the third-person narrative consciousness — a pro-government farmer called Mehring. He is frequently impatient with his liberal lover’s platitudinous attacks on the ethics of state-mandated racial separateness.

In the novel, the ex-industrialist buys a farm as a tax write-off but is quickly frustrated by the complexities of managing the land. Mehring’s relationship with the farm manager, Jacobus, who knows the land and how to work it far better than his employer, features prominently. Mehring is shrewdly and cynically aware of the dependence of his property and business on the black workers who must return each evening to the state-sanctioned area where they live just beyond the farm.

Yet he frequently ruminates on how this is just the way of the world:

To keep anything the way you like it for yourself you have to have the stomach to ignore — dead and hidden — whatever intrudes. Those for whom life is cheapest recognize that. Up at the compound, Jacobus and his crowd. The thousands in that location. Face down under the mud somewhere, and cows trample and drop their pats overhead, the dry reeds have fallen like rushes strewn to cover, it’s all as you said when you suggested: Why not just leave it as it is?

This is a complete and coherent articulation of an incomplete view of the world. Here Gordimer brings the “unreliable narrator” — a technique developed in the work of Dostoevsky, Machado de Assis, and Samuel Beckett, which explores the repressions and absurdities of a particular worldview — to South African literature. In Mehring, Gordimer creates not a caricature of a belligerent racist but an unsettlingly sympathetic figure who is acting according to the logic of imperial expansion.

As with the figure of David Lurie in J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace (1999), we come away from The Conservationist feeling that is it useless to confront these characters with ethical arguments. As long as there are political economies based on territorial expansion and the exploitation of labor, there will arise a Mehring who feels they have a right to the land and cheap labor, and who can come to terms with the murder of children. The critique in The Conservationist takes aim at both apartheid and its ineffective malcontents, and could not be more salient as countries like the UK and Germany aid Israel’s genocide in Gaza today.

After the Flood

At the end of The Conservationist, the dead body that was found on Mehring’s estate is washed to the surface by floodwaters from Mozambique. This anticipates a tide of anti-colonial successes with the victory of Frelimo over Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique in 1974, followed by the end of minority rule in Zimbabwe in 1979.

Increasingly isolated, the South African government became more paranoid and violent as apartheid became untenable. Long before it became a familiar line in media commentary, Gordimer quoted the words of Antonio Gramsci in the epigraph of July’s People (1981): “The old world is dying and the new struggles to be born.”

After decades of struggle, apartheid ended in the 1994 elections that brought the ANC to power. The new South African constitution was (and still is) perhaps the most progressive in the world, thereby popularizing the discourse of the “Rainbow Nation.” Yet the ANC-led government privatized public assets and liberalized trade, in many cases deepening rather than ameliorating the inequalities of apartheid.

Against this backdrop, Gordimer’s 2001 novel The Pickup has the privileged Julie fall in love with an undocumented migrant worker, Ibrahim. After Ibrahim is threatened with deportation, Julie’s attempts to help — first with legal counsel, then by moving with him to his unnamed homeland — exacerbate his problems.

Ultimately she attempts to draw on family wealth to invest in desert irrigation infrastructure (which is, as Ibrahim tries to explain, a front for an arms smuggling enterprise). The benign, “tolerant” attitude of the new South Africa, enthusiastic about globalization, merely deepens the social and ecological crises around it.

Gordimer’s writing is full of vivid and real characters who provide access to much broader ways of seeing the world. Because her work takes as its object of critique vast historical dynamics, rather than individual governments, her novels continue to help us apprehend the crises facing the world today.