40 Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. On e side will have to go.
45 Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
Th e sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
50 Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
1977 1977
NADINE GORDIMER
b. 1923 Nadine Gordimer's fiction has given imaginative and moral shape to the recent history of South Africa. Since the publication of her first book, The Lying Days (1953), she has charted the changing patterns of response and resistance to apartheid by exploring the place of the European in Africa, selecting representative themes and governing motifs for novels and short stories, and shifting her ideological focus from a liberal to a more radical position. In recognition of this achievement, of having borne untiring and lucid narrative witness, Gordimer was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Born to Jewish immigrant parents in the South African mining town of Springs, Gordimer began writing early, from the beginning taking as her subject the pathologies and everyday realities of a racially divided society. Her decision to remain in Johannesburg through the years of political repression reflected her commitment to her subject and to her vision of a postapartheid future. In the years since apartheid was dismantled in 1994, Gordimer has continued to live and write in South Africa, and her recent novels, such as The House Gun (1998) and The Picku-p (2001), retain an uncompromising focus on the inhabitants of a racially fractured culture.
In her nonfiction Gordimer self-consciously places her writing within a tradition of European realism, most notably that defined by the Hungarian philosopher and critic Georg Lukacs (1885-1971). Her aim?as shown in her incisive and highly acclaimed novels of the 1970s, The Conservationist (1974) and Burger's Daughter (1979)?is to evoke by way of the personal and of the precisely observed particular a broader political and historical totality. This method gives her characters, and the stories in which they reside, their representativeness. As Gordimer has famously said,
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THE MOMENT BEFORE THE GUN WENT OFF / 2575
'politics is character in South Africa.' Yet throughout the long years of political polarization in that country and the banning of three of her own books, Gordimer has distanced herself from polemics and retained a firm humanist belief in what she variously describes as the objectivity and the inwardness of the writer. Although she has referred to an engagement with political reality as imperative and explores permutations of the question of engagement in novels such as Burger's Daughter and July's Peo-ple (1981), she nevertheless asserts the autonomy of the writer's perspective, 'the last true judgment.' Narrative for Gordimer helps define and clarify historical experience. Her keen sense of history as formation, and as demanding a continual rewriting, has ensured that her novels can be read as at once contemporary in their reference and symbolic of broader social and historical patterns, as in the paranoia
surrounding the case of the buried black body on a white farm in The Conservationist, or in the psychosocial portrait of Rosa Burger in Burger's Daughter.
Gordimer has drawn criticism both for her apparent lack of attention to feminism in favor of race issues and for the wholeness and unfashionable completeness of her novels?their plottedness, meticulous scene paintings, fully realized characters. However, the searching symbolism and complexity of her narratives generally work against such judgments. As the following short story shows, a prominent feature of her writing is to give a number of different perspectives on a situation, in some cases most poignantly those of apartheid's supporters, and in this way to represent the broader anatomy of a diseased politics and, more generally, of the human being in history.
The Moment before the Gun Went Off
Marais Van der Vyver shot one of his farm labourers, dead. An accident, there are accidents with guns every day of the week?children playing a fatal game with a father's revolver in the cities where guns are domestic objects, nowadays, hunting mishaps like this one, in the country?but these won't be reported all over the world. Van der Vyver knows his will be. He knows that the story of the Afrikaner farmer?regional Party leader and Commandant of the local security commando?shooting a black man who worked for him will fit exactly their version of South Africa, it's made for them. They'll be able to use it in their boycott and divestment campaigns, it'll be another piece of evidence in their truth about the country. The papers at home will quote the story as it has appeared in the overseas press, and in the back-and-forth he and the black man will become those crudely-drawn figures on anti-apartheid banners, units in statistics of white brutality against the blacks quoted at the United Nations?he, whom they will gleefully be able to call 'a leading member' of the ruling Party.
People in the farming community understand how he must feel. Bad enough to have killed a man, without helping the Party's, the government's, the country's enemies, as well. They see the truth of that. They know, reading the Sunday papers, that when Van der Vyver is quoted saying he is 'terribly shocked,' he will 'look after the wife and children,' none of those Americans and English, and none of those people at home who want to destroy the white man's power will believe him. And how they will sneer when he even says of the farm boy (according to one paper, if you can trust any of those reporters), 'He was my friend, I always took him hunting with me.' Those city and overseas people don't know it's true: farmers usually have one particular black boy they like to take along with them in the lands; you could call it a kind of friend, yes, friends are not only your own white people, like yourself, you take into
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257 6 / NADINE GORDIMER
your house, pray with in church and work with on the Party committee. But how can those others know that?
