Living in Hope and History

by Nadine Gordimer

  Japan re-created itself, up from the twisted wreckage, as an economic success rivalling that of the country that devastated it, and Japan has accepted as part of normal public health services the care of people skinned by atomic burns and children born with missing limbs or faculties, and the long-term effects of radiation sickness.

  The signing of a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is brokered among nations, and the threat of an atomic war, which for forty years depended on the press of a button in the Pentagon or the Kremlin, is complacently half-forgotten since one protagonist in a Cold War is hors de combat. But the French, on the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan, tried out their nuclear capacity, as if these loathsome apocalyptic weapons were now old toys a safe world can play with reminiscently.

  T. S. Eliot’s prediction was that we would end with a whimper; ours is that we could go out with a bang. The mushroom cloud still hangs over us; will it be there as a bequest to the new century?

  The strange relation between the forces of Good and Evil has been part of the mystery of human existence since we evolved as the only self-regarding creatures in the animal world. The relation has been codified through successive civilisations in mythical, religious, or secular philosophical terms, without arriving at an explanation that could satisfy all three.

  In our century, with its great leaps into what was formerly beyond human experience, the relation surely has become profoundly relevant and more inexplicable than ever.

  Our time has produced genius beyond imagining: Albert Einstein was such a one. This shaggy, gentle scientist, a good man exiled from his home country by a force of evil, Nazism, deciphered one of the greatest secrets of nature, split the atom. What was intended to enrich humankind with an extension of knowledge of its cosmic existence, as a consequence produced out of Good the malediction of our time: atomic capability, in whomsoever’s hands it remains or passes to.

  I am not proposing, nor would it be acceptable to me personally, the equation of Manichaeism. A God or gods on one side inevitably implying a balance with the Devil or devils on the other—that’s too easy to serve as an explanation for all the nuances of moral complication we know around and within us. What is more puzzling and far more troubling is what appears to be a kind of symbiosis. Good and Evil pass from one into the other through some transparency we, bewilderedly, cannot fathom. Or they share ganglia in systemic energy we cannot separate; or which perhaps cannot be separated. We try to apply moral precepts to processes that function according to quite other laws, laws in which this human construct of ours, morality, does not exist at all.

  A sober contemplation for an age characterised by revolutionary scientific discovery.

  If we turn away slightly, at an angle, from the absolutes of opposing Good and Evil as we see them, and must see them while human values are to survive, we come to the lower level—of paradox.

  We have made spectacular advances in discoveries that have made life more bearable for some and more pleasurable for others.

  We have eliminated many epidemics and alleviated much pain with new drugs; we have raised the dead in a real sense, by taking the vital organs from the dead and planting them to function again in the living; a symphony may be heard by means of a small disc thin as a crêpe Suzette; aircraft has revolutionized the possibility of physical presence. The bundle of telecommunications—computer, fax, e-mail, cellular phone—has speeded up communication by the spoken and written word; we have built towers that penetrate the clouds, we have lifted the burden of manual workers and housewives by machines programmed to do onerous tasks; with other machines we have brought music and moving images into every house.

  We are the century whose inhabitants passed in one lifetime from riding in a horse-drawn cart or catching a train to as unremarkingly boarding a plane; the first to look upon the world from 10,000 metres, from the angels’ realm, the sphere of the heavens. Most of us have enjoyed some of these embellishments of life.

  The Italian Futurist painters in the early decades of our age depicted in their imagination this world, which is now ours, as a world of sleek cars whirling unhampered through streets, planes buzzing like happy bees gathering the nectar of a new age between sky-scrapers and rainbows in a radiantly clear sky. Their paintings look to us now like the work of a Grandma Moses of industrialization; yet we shared this innocent ignorance of pollution, lacked with these artists the true vision of the future, which was that we would begin to choke on our technological progress, suffocate in our cities in our own foul breath of fumes and carcinogenic vapours. We have achieved much, but we have not always stayed at the controls of purpose.

  It is also intriguing to observe in ourselves how technology has intervened in the intangible, telescoping our emotions. Those antipodean states, dread and anticipation, have been out-dated. Our nineteenth-century forefathers and mothers would have to wait weeks or months for any exchange of true minds by post—the telegram was too perfunctory and public to serve for anything more intimate than news of death or wars.

  In our century, the ordeal of dread is banished by instant full communication from anywhere to anywhere. And as for anticipation, that becomes instant gratification. So, not for the first or last time, the advances of technology contradict theories of human satisfaction expounded by the savants of that other kind of advance in knowledge that has dramatically distinguished our century, psychoanalysis. Apart from its purely sexual application, Freud’s deferred gratification as a refinement of emotional experience does not compare, for us, with the immediate joy of hearing a lover’s voice, or getting a friend’s reply to a letter, at once, by e-mail. Ours is the Age of Impatience that does not look forward to something: wants it now. Expects to have it, and gets it, so far as technology can provide it.

  Even adventurism has been transformed by technology. The intrepid of the Euro-Russo-American world walk on the moon and dangle in space instead of ‘discovering’ jungles and rivers the indigenous inhabitants have known as home since their personal creation myths explained their presence there. The new adventurers actually experience, by weightlessness, extinction while still alive, become phantoms whose feet do not touch earth. They are the successors to the angels we, alas, no longer believe in because we have probed outer space and found no heaven.

  What has been the impact on the arts, in our century of unprecedented technological development?

  Perhaps only the twenty-first century will be able to assess this; we are too involved. We hear too much, we are brain-washed and conditioned by the areas of culture that have been made over by technology, or we struggle too obstinately against what surely has brought some benefits.

  Technology is the means by which one of the positive consequences of the revolutions of the century—bloody or peaceful, failed or surviving—the determination to break open the elitism of the arts, has been made practical. It has brought into practice the challenge to the middle-class idea that you have to rise from the working or peasant class, somehow exceed your supposed natural disadvantages, become gentrified, to deserve and be able to enjoy the arts. This idea—of the upper classes, of course—always failed to note that the contemporary working and peasant classes had artistic values and activities of their own from which the middle-class were cut off by their self-imposed limitations in recognizing no creativity other than that of their own kind.

  As for the great art of the past of what were known as indigenous (read ‘inferior’) peoples, from Mayan temples to Egyptian tombs—while that was greatly admired and even acknowledged as a useful inspiration for new forms (think of Picasso’s debt to West African sculpture), it had long been considered, even by the intellectual elite within the countries to which this great art belonged as national heritage, as something that was not within the range of aesthetic appreciation by the ordinary people, although in some instances it still served the purpose of religious worship. From the era of troupes of actors and art exhibitions travelling through the villages of Russia after the Oc
tober Revolution, to this decade of the nineties when villages and even squatter camps in Africa, in India, the Middle East, have transistor radios, and television sets are run on car batteries, culture in its most easily assimilable form—entertainment sugaring information—has been democratized. There has been a redistribution of intellectual privilege through technology.

  Of course there have been changes in the concept of culture; mass usage inevitably makes transformations.

  Pop, reggae, rock, rap concerts gather huge crowds, all over the world, which vastly exceed any audience that Bach and Mozart have brought together. This music is the only example I can cite which justifies the current wishful fantasy of the world as the ‘global village’—through radio, cassette and disc, democratic communication of the arts succeeds in unifying peoples, at least in vociferous, sometimes ecstatic appreciation, across bitterly-contested frontiers. Those who see the forms of the music itself, the nature of popular appreciation it arouses, as a limitation within the democratization of the arts, a deprivation chosen for themselves by the masses, at least must admit that discs, and broadcasts which may be heard on the humblest of radios, can provide glorious music for people who never have had the money or opportunity to attend a live concert or opera. And by the same means a recognition and appreciation of the musical forms of the East and of Africa, from the classical ragas of Ravi Shankar to the jazz of South Africa’s kwela and mbaqanga, have spread internationally.

  Yet the overwhelming cultural transformation has been brought about by television.

  Television has altered human perception. It has changed the means of knowing; of receiving the world.

  Of the five senses, sight now outstrips all others; watching is the most important form of comprehension. Although television speaks, it is its endless stream of images, out of which the child, the youth, even mature and old who have had considerable direct experience of life, construct reality. There used to be the concept of someone being ‘lost’ in a book, the fictional characters more live than those around the reader; this alternative construct of environment, human personality, situation, made out of the printed word, was flimsy in comparison with the visual other world renewed in palimpsest after palimpsest, day after day, night after night, for millions the last vision before sleep and the first wakened to in the morning.

  The influence of this vicariously visual experience on painting begins to overtake some of the other movements which have transformed art in our century, in which John Willet has noted ‘a plea for the revival of the imagination, based on the Unconscious as revealed by psychoanalysis, together with a new emphasis on magic, accident, irrationality, symbols and dreams.’

  Technological influence may exceed that of surrealism, abstraction, conceptualism. Indeed, part of television’s insidious impact is that it actually combines in popularism elements of all three: the expansion and contraction of space and the presentation of familiar objects in irrational aspects, the camera acting, for the benefit of a TV commercial, as the surreal imagination; the sensibility to abstraction stimulated by a speeded-up succession of images that blur the figurative into a swirl of light, colour, and line; the conceptual choice the images of television make in material by the medium’s necessity to present ideas in iconography. I know that every workshop of young painters in my country shows strikingly the imprinting of artists’ creativity by television’s imagery, television’s visual hierarchy of what is meaningful in our life.

  I am not forgetting that television is the luxuriant twentieth-century spawn of the aptly-named Lumière brothers, who invented cinematic art which democratized the enjoyment of leisure before television entered homes; founded an important industry in a number of countries; created a new pantheon of performer-gods and -goddesses in a new, substitute, religion of success-worship world-wide, and also proved itself a new medium for great creativity in the work of directors like Eisenstein, Buñuel, Fellini, Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Kurosawa.

  The fact is, television has empowered the visual far beyond the capacity of the cinema. Through this service of technology to art, developed in our century, we have produced a human mutation, a species that substitutes vicarious experience for the real thing.

  ‘One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, to speak the unspeakable, to ask difficult questions.’

  So writes Salman Rushdie, one of the interpreters of the real thing, while living through the most recent of its traumas; defining a credo for us.

  Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Ibsen began the century with questions we expected Marx and Freud to answer. Proust, Joyce, Kafka, followed by Lawrence, Genet, Mishima, spoke the unspeakable (the names in all categories are representative, not inclusive). Kafka was the one who went furthest, presaging in his story-telling genius what grim history had in store—fascism, Nazism, dictatorship. (Did he miss the return of the religious inquisition in a twentieth-century avatar? I have to reread him yet again . . . )

  With Thomas Mann’s intuition of politics as the meaning of destiny in our time, literature’s position as both a deeper and higher understanding of human striving than that in which politics operates, changes: literature becomes inexorably a medium through which that political operation is expressed at a deeper and higher level. If destiny is political, politics and literature cannot be kept hierarchically apart.

  Would Bertolt Brecht have known that ‘to speak of trees is almost a crime/For it is a kind of silence about injustice’ if he had not formed his creative consciousness in the years of Hitler’s creation, Nazism, and in the imperative of resistance to this fate?

  Would 1916 have the resonance, in the history of our era, without Yeats’s poem of that date whose line ‘a terrible beauty is born’ rings on down our years, tolling the awesome pain and exaltation of disparate struggles for freedom. You heard it in India, you heard it, on and on, in Cuba, in Vietnam, in South Africa.

  I can speak of literature and politics, pass from one to the other in one breath, so to say, because the former—literature—is created inescapably within the destined context of politics. Even literary style, which Proust defines as ‘the moment of identification between the author and his subject’, is also the identification between the author and this destined political context.

  We are not only children of our time but of our place. My own consciousness and subconscious, from which I write, come even in the most personal aspects of mind and spirit from destiny shaped by the historico-political matrix into which I was born. The unspeakable shame and horror of the Holocaust and Hiroshima: this heading to our century stands. Beside it, my personal sense of the defining events of our century is dominated by two: the fall of Communism, and the end of colonialism. And the two extraordinary developments are linked subjectively, even contradictorily, for me, since I was born a second-generation colonial in a capitalist-racist society and as I grew up I looked to the Left as the solution to the oppression of the poor and powerless all around me, in my home country and the world.

  Satyajit Ray the Indian film-maker and writer has said, ‘It is the presence of the essential thing in a very small detail which one must catch in order to expose larger things.’

  This principle I believe applies beyond art, to the general level of awareness of your world with which you were presented when you opened your eyes. The essential detail that exposes the larger things in my life begins very early. I was taken as a toddler to wave a flag at the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, on his imperial visit to the then British Dominion, South Africa. As I grew, I was told again and again of this momentous occasion, with a sense of values to be inculcated: loyalty in homage to imperial power, white man’s power.

  Nobody presented for the formation of my sense of values the fact that Mohandas Gandhi had lived in and developed his philosophy in and through the country where I was born and was to live my life; the man who was to leave behind in that country principles of liberation that were to be fundamental to the struggle for freedom by the black
people, my brothers and sisters unacknowledged by the values of the whites who took me to make obeisance to an English prince. The essence of the colonial ethos in which I was brought up is contained in a detail: the flag I was given to wave.

  South Africa raised an army to fight Nazism, which it did with distinction; and the same brave white men and women under the command of Prime Minister General Smuts came back to practise racism contentedly at home. In that war, South Africa had suffered neither invasion nor bombardment, but there was a shortage of nurses. As a seventeen-year-old Red Cross recruit, I was sent to a first-aid station at a gold mine in the town where I lived. There I saw the mine’s white Medical Aid worker stitch, without anaesthetic, the gaping wounds black miners had suffered from falling rock underground. He grinned and told me: ‘They don’t feel like we do.’

  Not the shootings at Sharpeville in 1960, the deaths in prison by torture and neglect, of Steve Biko and nameless others, or the herding of people from their homes with guns and dogs at their heels in the mass removals of black populations off land whites coveted, in the sixties and seventies, epitomise racism, for me, as does that single utterance at the mine.

  It has become a truism to shake one’s head in wonder at the end of apartheid and the emergence of a free South Africa the twentieth century has just seen.

  A miracle; and coming to pass at the time when a new miracle is yearningly needed to compensate for the miracle the first quarter of the century promised—now a fallen star, the red star, flickered out.