TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101491/1014991.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.4 KB | 214 lines

                                                                                NOBEL PRIZE, Page 91

The Power Of a Well-Told Tale


South Africa's NADINE GORDIMER, awarded the world's most coveted
literary prize, talks about Mandela, violence and social change

By PAUL GRAY and BRUCE W. NELAN and Nadine Gordimer


    Last week Nadine Gordimer, 67, became the first woman in
25 years to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The
announcement of the award pleased readers and critics of her 20
volumes of fiction, including 10 novels, and prompted an
interesting response in South Africa, where she was born, where
she has lived all of her life, and where three of her books were
once officially banned. President F.W. de Klerk congratulated
Gordimer for what he termed "this exceptional achievement, which
is also an honor to South Africa."

    Such praise from a South African head of state would, not
so long ago, have been unthinkable. For nearly 40 years,
Gordimer has spoken out against apartheid, that crazy quilt of
laws and restrictions that enabled the white minority to control
and suppress the country's black majority. She has done so in
her fiction, although subtly and without tub thumping; she
portrays the strains of racial divisiveness and oppression by
monitoring their effect on individual characters, recognizable
lives. As a private citizen, Gordimer has often engaged in more
direct opposition to her government's policies.

    Although she dislikes having her novels and story
collections considered as political statements, Gordimer
acknowledges that the scene of most of her fiction -- South
Africa -- made politics a subject she could not ignore. On tour
in the U.S. when she received word of her award, the author
talked to about her writing and the dramatic changes now
occurring in her native land.


    Q. As a writer, you inherited a vivid subject in South
Africa. Has it sometimes seemed as much a burden as a blessing?

    A. No. I think you're thinking of my subject as Apartheid,
capital A. That's not my subject. My subject has been living in
that country and the people who live there.


    Q. Literature can change individuals. But do you think
your books, or anyone's books, have had an impact on the public
changes now under way in South Africa?

    A. I think that our books have influenced the
understanding of people outside South Africa. This can't be done
in daily newscasts. There you get the peek, you get the riots,
you get the extreme situation. And then the TV turns to the next
event. Whereas the fiction writer invents, from his or her own
observation, the experience that led up to that moment of crisis
and, then, what's going to happen to these people afterward.
That's what fiction deals with: how people's lives are affected
permanently.


    Q. Are you concerned that the literate public is actually
shrinking because of things like television and other
distractions?

    A. Well, I think there is a curious paradox in South
Africa. We've had television for only about 12 years now, which
is really very short compared with the rest of the world. But,
of course, it is the most powerful medium in the world, and
you'll find in South Africa now television aerials sticking up
from shacks in the poorest black townships. In that context,
books would come low down on the list of priorities. On the
other hand, because there are many people who really are not
book literate, there is an immense hunger. There are so many
very intelligent young people who would like to be not only more
equipped to read but would like the opportunity to do so. You
must remember that libraries have only recently been
desegregated. I think that there's a great big crowd waiting out
there to read popular entertaining books in African languages.
The opportunities for publishing and distributing them truly
don't exist yet in South Africa.


    Q. How do you see your role as a white artist in what will
someday soon be a society governed by blacks?

    A. I think that I have two roles -- that sounds a bit
schizophrenic, but I'm convinced I have them. I don't think that
a writer like myself, an imaginative writer, should put whatever
talent he or she has at the service of a revolution, no matter
how much you believe in it yourself. And I believe passionately
in it. But I think that if you distort whatever little talent
you've been given, that's wrong, because talent is the one thing
you have and it should be used faithfully in dealing with the
world around you.

    In practical terms, this means that because I am a member
of the African National Congress I must not then in my fiction
suggest that everything members of that organization do is
right or that there's never any dissension. In My Son's Story,
my latest novel, there's a lot of jealousy and strife portrayed
among characters who are supposed to be in a branch of the ANC,
and they are portrayed because these are the realities of life.


    Q. You're saying, then, that an unflattering truth is
preferable to the cosmetic distortion?

    A. Yes, of course. I have been privileged enough to know
people who are real heroes; there're not many left in the world,
but there are some. The ones I've known aren't perfect human
beings. They're immensely brave, brave beyond any dreams that
I or perhaps you could ever have, and their view of life is so
incredibly self-sacrificing. But they are not always saints in
their love life, in their life as parents or as children of
parents, or even in the friendships of normal life. In other
words, they are human and full of faults, and I think that
doesn't make the political intensity any less or the heroism any
less.


    Q. As you say, you have joined the ANC. Is it possible for
you to separate that particular action from your artistic life?

    A. Yes, because in my commitment and in my heart I have
for many years virtually belonged to the ANC; this has been my
allegiance. Now it's a matter of carrying a card. I finally
joined because this is the first political organization or party
that I wanted to identify with. From a personal view, as a human
being and citizen, it's very nice to feel at last that there's
something that I can belong to.

    But this has nothing to do with my writing. If I have
resisted so far any pressures to use my fiction as propaganda,
I'm certainly not going to start now.


    Q. How do you feel about the current progress in South
Africa? Is it going well?

    A. There are tremendous problems, but I don't think that
Nelson Mandela or the ANC has been deflected from the course to
be followed.

    I am constantly staggered by Nelson. He's an amazing
phenomenon; we really didn't think he was ever going to come out
of that prison alive. When he did come out, we went through that
period of tremendous euphoria, which I think people certainly
deserved after all those years of frustration. But for myself
and many others, we couldn't be naive enough to imagine that all
was going to go smoothly. And obviously, so far, it hasn't.


    Q. In spite of that, do you remain hopeful about the way
things are going?

    A. Oh, absolutely. I really feel that what has happened so
far cannot ever be put back; it is irreversible. That does not
mean that the white regime will not try to stall as long as
possible. But having gone so far already, I simply cannot see
how this process can be arrested or turned back. The sad thing
is that, in order to bring it to its conclusion, more trouble
may lie ahead.


    Q. Do you think that these dramatic changes that are
currently taking place in South Africa will alter what you do
or the literature that is now coming out of your country?

    A. I don't think it'll change what I'm doing or what other
writers are doing. But the things we see and write about, which
have always been complex in my country, are going to be even
more complex. I've already noticed that there's a strange
feeling of being lost in a new milieu. Maybe a person has great
expectations of getting out of a ghetto and then, once free of
it, experiences the sense of not belonging somewhere. As we move
away from race, we are beginning to see how strong the factor
of social class can be.


    Q. In your fiction you have written from inside the
consciousness of characters who are male, female, white, black.
Increasingly, members of specific genders or races are objecting
to being portrayed by those who come from outside their groups.
How do you feel about this?

    A. I think such complaints arise out of a kind of
astonishment, a puzzled feeling, about what writers do. Whatever
writers write, they are always inventing personalities, unless
they are writing an autobiography. What about James Joyce's
Molly Bloom soliloquy in Ulysses? Here's a man who described the
most intimate feelings of a woman; in my opinion, none of us,
none of the women, have ever approached this. We have to grant
that it's just an extraordinary, inexplicable faculty that
writers have if they're any good. I really appeal to people and
say, if they appreciate literature at all, they should take such
imaginative extensions as a gift of insight that writers are
trying to pass on to other people.


    Q. Will the Nobel Prize change anything for you?

    A. No, not really. I suppose this will die down. In a few
days there'll be some other sensation, and I'll go home to
South Africa and start writing again in peace.