Revisiting South African History: Multiple Perspectives in the Novels of Nadine Gordimer

Rosalía Baena Molina

doi:10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.199511675

Authors

Rosalía Baena Molina University of Navarra

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.199511675

Abstract

Narrative perspective is a particularly relevant prism through which the relations between literature and history can be viewed. Nadine Gordimer’s novels have often been analyzed as historical artifacts that give insight on South African historical situations, and the players in the drama. This paper suggests that a narratological study of point of view and the examination of diverse perspectives in the different novels sheds light on an understanding of the conflicts enacted in her fiction. The flexibility in her manipulation of point of view is observed in particular in four novels: A Guest of Honour (1971), The Conservationist (1974), Burger’s Daughter (1979), and My Son’s Story (1991). Her novels thus pose in acute form the question of whose story will be told and who will tell it. The multiplicity of voices and the corresponding shifts in focalization evident in her novels provide ways to explore the nature of both the creative act and the connection between the personal and the political.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

BAL, Mieke. 1985. Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 1980. Trans. Christine van Boheemen. Toronto: U of Toronto P.

CLINGMAN, Stephen. 1986. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside. London: Allen and Unwin.

COLES, Robert. 1991. "My Son's Story. A Different Set Of Rules". The New York Times Book Review 21 October: 1.

COOKE, John. 1985. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: Private Lives/Public Landscapes. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP.

DONAGHY, Mary. 1988. "Double Exposure: Narrative Perspective in Gordimer's A Guest of Honour". Ariel 19.4: 19-32.

FLOWER, Dean. 1991. "Not Waving but Drowning" (Review of My Son's Story). The Hudson Review 44. 2 (1991): 3, 315-325. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/3851925

GORDIMER, Nadine. 1970. A Guest of Honour. New York: Penguin. Abbreviated as GH.

---. 1974. The Conservationist. New York: Penguin. Abbreviated as TC.

---. 1979. Burger's Daughter. New York: Penguin. Abbreviated as BD.

---. 1990. My Son's Story. New York: Penguin. Abbreviated as MSS.

GREENSTEIN, Susan M. 1993. "My Son's Story: Drenching the Censors —the Dilemma of White Writing". In The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer. Ed. Bruce King. London: Macmillan: 191-209. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22682-5_13

HUTCHEON, Linda. 1989. The Politics of Postmodernism. 1988. London: Routledge.

KING, Bruce. 1993. "Introduction: A Changing Face". In The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer. Ed. Bruce King. London: Macmillan: 1-7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22682-5_1

MAGAREY, Kevin. 1974. "Facets of Art in Nadine Gordimer's Short Stories". Southern Review 7: 3-28.

SMITH, Rowland. 1991. "Nadine Gordimer: Truth, Irony and Commitment". In International Literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers. Ed. Robert L. Ross. New York: Garland. 172-78.

SMITH, M. Van Wyk. 1991. "Waiting for Silence; or, The Autobiography of Metafiction in Some Recent South African Novels". Current Writing 3: 91-104. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.1991.9677876

TEMPLE-THURSTON, Barbara. 1991. "Nadine Gordimer: The Artist as A Sport of Nature". Studies in 20th century Literature 15. 1: 175-184. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1272

THORPE, Michael. 1990. "The Motif of the Ancestor in The Conservationist". Critical Essays on Nadine Gordimer. Ed. Rowland Smith. Boston: G. K. Hall. 116-123.

VAN DONGE, Jan Kees. 1982. "Nadine Gordimer's A Guest of Honour: A Failure to Understand Zambian Society". Journal of Southern African Studies 9. 1. (October): 74-92. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/03057078208708051

VOSS, A. E. 1992. "Reading and Writing in the New South Africa". Current Writing 4: 1-9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.1992.9677885

WADE, Michael. 1978. Nadine Gordimer. London: Evans.

WAGNER, Kathrin M. 1990 "History from the Inside? Text and Subtext in Some of Gordimer's Novels." In Crisis and Conflict. Essays on the Southern African Literature. Ed. Geoffrey V. Davis. Essen: Die Blaue Eule. 89-108.

WARD, David. 1989. Chronicles of Darkness. London: Routledge.

WEINHOUSE, Linda. 1993. "The Paternal Gift of Narration: Nadine Gordimer's My Son's Story". Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39.2: 66-76. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/002198949302800207

WHITE, Jonathan. 1993. "Politics and the Individual in the Modernist Historical Novel: Gordimer and Rushdie". In Recasting the World. Writing after Colonialism. Ed. Jonathan White. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. 208-240.