Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  With the overthrowing of time values in Breytenbach’s writing comes a concomitant freeing from attachment to individual characters. If you are not going to be told what happens to them next, you don’t have any obligation to identify with Minnaar or Levedi Tjeling. As Breytenbach himself airily remarks (one of his mirrors is that of ironic self-regard), these two so-called characters ‘disappear from the story since they were never of any importance for its development, except perhaps as wraiths to be addressed …’ At first, for reasons of habit, one misses characters, word-skeletons to be dressed up in what happens to them ‘next’. But soon an exhilarating liberty like that of a Buñuel film is granted: if someone walks into a room where the characters are being ‘developed’, why not drop them and go off with him into his life? Here is a work in which all choices (as to which way it might go) are present.

  Is it, then, an alternative autobiography? (Breytenbach could have been, might be, all these people.) He writes of ‘liquidating the “I”’, but also of ‘an “I”, a departure’. He himself is the centrifuge from which all seeds are cast and sown again: the horror, the humour, the love, the knowing and unknowing, he has received from living in his world and era. Yet there is none of the self-obsession of a Henry Miller or a Céline. A world is not defined by self: he defines himself by a world – that world in which ‘white is posture, a norm of civilisation’. South Africa has produced in this writer an exacerbated self-consciousness, exactly what Stalin’s Russia created in Anna Akhmatova – what the English critic John Bayley has called ‘the power … to generalise and speak for the human predicament in extremity.’ Akhmatova wrote sublime lines about her husband’s death, her son’s imprisonment. She had been parted for years from the husband; her son had been brought up by his grandfather. The sorrow and anger of the poem were not for herself but for ‘somebody else’s wound’, for others who were suffering tragedies like these. Breytenbach has (has earned) this power to extrapolate suffering beyond what he has suffered himself. And as for responsibility for suffering, a one-and-a-half-page parable/parody entitled ‘Know Thyself’ will leave a share of that lodged within every reader.

  Writing in the English language, Breytenbach is a phenomenon of the Nabokovian rather than the Conradian order. (No space to take up what I believe is the fine difference here, except to say that Conrad is incomparably at ease in the language, whereas Nabokov’s performance is his achievement.) A native speaker of a minor language – Afrikaans, derived mainly from Dutch – Breytenbach has a few failures in making new English words out of a collage of old ones. By contrast, his imagery is so exquisite, chilling, aphoristic, witty, that one is reminded how that ancient and most beautiful attribute of writing has fallen into desuetude in prose. Someone ‘dons his trousers the way one would mount a horse’ and has a ‘thick black moustache tied like a secondary tie under the nose’; a rainy sky is ‘heaven with its grey beard’. In an all-existent, rather than a non-existent, urban complex Breytenbach puts ‘an artificial cherry orchard vibrating a wind’; of a prisoner sentenced to death (it’s done by hanging in South Africa), he says, ‘His life was to be reeled in with a cord.’ Aural and visual are combined: murmuring voices behind the walls sound ‘as if the whole prison were filled with fast-running water’. Visual and onomatopoeic: a ‘flock-a-flap’ of birds. Visual and visceral: the tide ‘withdrawn a long way, like a huge thirst’. And again and again Breytenbach strikes a spark by turning a cliché into something new while retaining the original image: ‘Life unfolds, gets folded, wrinkled.’

  If Breytenbach’s imagery is to be compared with anyone’s it is that of Czeslaw Milosz, with whom he shares an intense response to nature and a way of interpreting politically determined events and their human consequences through the subtleties of the physical world. Once more a fusion of the creative imagination makes reality out of mere facts. For the rest, I do not think one need look for comparisons to evaluate Breytenbach’s book. It is his own – perhaps the highest compliment any writer can earn.

  Exactly what Breyterbach’s politics are now is difficult to tell. The matter is not irrelevant; if it were, this beautiful and devastating book would be betrayed, since its chemistry is politics, that chemistry of man opposing man, of good struggling with evil, from which one sees – with a shudder – both mushroom clouds and works of art arise. Does Breytenbach, like Régis Debray (quoted by Walter Schwarz in the Guardian last March), regard himself as having been ‘essentially emotional, not noted for his discernment, locked in mythical conceptions of the external world which he recreates as the effigy of his own obsessions’?

  Breytenbach’s political conviction is no mythical conception of the external world; he had a conviction of the indefensible concrete cruelty and shame of white oppression of blacks, and the necessity to ally oneself with the blacks’ struggle to free themselves. His obsession was that to make this alliance it was necessary to jump the barbed fence between artist and revolutionary, what he calls ‘the contradiction between dreams and action’. He fell – how hard and humiliatingly one gets some ideas. But when he laughs at or mourns the spectacle of himself, this does not mean he disavows the truth on which the obsession was based: that South Africa is rotting in its racism, as much under a new constitution (which makes blacks foreigners without rights in their own country, and with which Ronald Reagan’s America chooses to be ‘constructively engaged’) as it was under the old name of apartheid.

  He writes from the underground that is exile. It is impossible, for his countrymen and for all of us, to stop our ears against the excruciating penetration of what he has to say.

  1984

  The Essential Gesture

  When I began to write at the age of nine or ten, I did so in what I have come to believe is the only real innocence – an act without responsibility. For one has only to watch very small children playing together to see how the urge to influence, exact submission, defend dominance, gives away the presence of natal human ‘sin’ whose punishment is the burden of responsibility. I was alone. My poem or story came out of myself I did not know how. It was directed at no one, was read by no one.

  Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of creativity. I should never have dreamt that this most solitary and deeply marvellous of secrets – the urge to make with words – would become a vocation for which the world, and that lifetime lodger, conscionable self-awareness, would claim the right to call me and all my kind to account. The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read, and comes to realise that he is answerable. The writer is held responsible: and the verbal phrase is ominously accurate, for the writer not only has laid upon him responsibility for various interpretations of the consequences of his work, he is ‘held’ before he begins by the claims of different concepts of morality – artistic, linguistic, ideological, national, political, religious – asserted upon him. He learns that his creative act was not pure even while being formed in his brain: already it carried congenital responsibility for what preceded cognition and volition: for what he represented in genetic, environmental, social and economic terms when he was born of his parents.

  Roland Barthes wrote that language is a ‘corpus of prescriptions and habits common to all writers of a period’.26

  He also wrote that a writer’s ‘enterprise’ – his work – is his ‘essential gesture as a social being’.

  Between these two statements I have found my subject, which is their tension and connection: the writer’s responsibility. For language – language as the transformation of thought into written words in any language – is not only ‘a’ but the corpus common to all writers in our period. From the corpus of language, within that guild shared with fellow writers, the writer fashions his enterprise, which then becomes his ‘essential gesture as a social being’. Created in the common lot of language, that essential gesture is individual; and with it the writer quits the commune of the corpus; but with it he enters th
e commonalty of society, the world of other beings who are not writers. He and his fellow writers are at once isolated from one another far and wide by the varying concepts, in different societies, of what the essential gesture of the writer as a social being is.

  By comparison of what is expected of them, writers often have little or nothing in common. There is no responsibility arising out of the status of the writer as a social being that could call upon Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison or John Berger to write on a subject that would result in their being silenced under a ban, banished to internal exile or detained in jail. But in the Soviet Union, South Africa, Iran, Vietnam, Taiwan, certain Latin American and other countries, this is the kind of demand that responsibility for the social significance of being a writer exacts: a double demand, the first from the oppressed to act as spokesperson for them, the second, from the state, to take punishment for that act. Conversely, it is not conceivable that a Molly Keane, or any other writer of the quaint Gothic-domestic cult presently discovered by discerning critics and readers in the United States as well as Britain, would be taken seriously in terms of the interpretations of the ‘essential gesture as a social being’ called forth in countries such as the Soviet Union and South Africa, if he or she lived there.

  Yet those critics and readers who live safe from the realm of midnight arrests and solitary confinement that is the dark condominium of East and West have their demands upon the writer from such places, too. For them, his essential gesture as a social being is to take risks they themselves do not know if they would.

  This results in some strange and unpleasant distortions in the personality of some of these safe people. Any writer from a country of conflict will bear me out. When interviewed abroad, there is often disappointment that you are there, and not in jail in your own country. And since you are not – why are you not? Aha … does this mean you have not written the book you should have written? Can you imagine this kind of self-righteous inquisition being directed against a John Updike for not having made the trauma of America’s Vietnam war the theme of his work?

  There is another tack of suspicion. The London Daily Telegraph reviewer of my recent book of stories said I must be exaggerating: if my country really was a place where such things happened, how was it I could write about them? And then there is the wish-fulfilment distortion, arising out of the homebody’s projection of his dreams upon the exotic writer: the journalist who makes a bogus hero out of the writer who knows that the pen, where he lives, is a weapon not mightier than the sword.

  One thing is clear: ours is a period when few can claim the absolute value of a writer without reference to a context of responsibilities. Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of works appearing in Index on Censorship. These are the rags of suppressed literatures, translated from a Babel of languages; the broken cries of real exiles, not those who have rejected their homeland but who have been forced out – of their language, their culture, their society. In place of Joyce we have two of the best contemporary writers in the world; Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera; but both regard themselves as amputated sensibilities, not free of Poland and Czechoslovakia in the sense that Joyce was free of Ireland – whole: out in the world but still in possession of the language and culture of home. In place of Joyce we have, one might argue, at least Borges; but in his old age, and out of what he sees in his blindness as he did not when he could see, for years now he has spoken wistfully of a desire to trace the trails made by ordinary lives instead of the arcane pattern of abstract forces of which they are the finger-painting. Despite his rejection of ideologies (earning the world’s inescapable and maybe accurate shove over to the ranks of the Right) even he senses on those lowered lids the responsibilities that feel out for writers so persistently in our time.

  What right has society to impose responsibility upon writers and what right has the writer to resist? I want to examine not what is forbidden us by censorship – I know that story too well – but to what we are bidden. I want to consider what is expected of us by the dynamic of collective conscience and the will to liberty in various circumstances and places; whether we should respond, and if so, how we do.

  ‘It is from the moment when I shall no longer be more than a writer that I shall cease to write.’ One of the great of our period, Camus, could say that.27 In theory at least, as a writer he accepted the basis of the most extreme and pressing demand of our time. The ivory tower was finally stormed; and it was not with a white flag that the writer came out, but with manifesto unfurled and arms crooked to link with the elbows of the people. And it was not just as their chronicler that the compact was made; the greater value, you will note, was placed on the persona outside of ‘writer’: to be ‘no more than a writer’ was to put an end to the justification for the very existence of the persona of ‘writer’. Although the aphorism in its characteristically French neatness appears to wrap up all possible meanings of its statement, it does not. Camus’s decision is a hidden as well as a revealed one. It is not just that he has weighed within himself his existential value as a writer against that of other functions as a man among men, and found independently in favour of the man; the scale has been set up by a demand outside himself, by his world situation. He has, in fact, accepted its condition that the greater responsibility is to society and not to art.

  Long before it was projected into that of a world war, and again after the war, Camus’s natal situation was that of a writer in the conflict of Western world decolonisation – the moral question of race and power by which the twentieth century will be characterised along with its discovery of the satanic ultimate in power, the means of human self-annihilation. But the demand made upon him and the moral imperative it set up in himself are those of a writer anywhere where the people he lives among, or any sections of them marked out by race or colour or religion, are discriminated against and repressed. Whether or not he himself materially belongs to the oppressed makes his assumption of extraliterary responsibility less or more ‘natural’, but does not alter much the problem of the conflict between integrities.

  Loyalty is an emotion, integrity a conviction adhered to out of moral values. Therefore I speak here not of loyalties but integrities, in my recognition of society’s right to make demands on the writer as equal to that of the writer’s commitment to his artistic vision; the source of conflict is what demands are made and how they should be met.

  The closest to reconciliation that I know of comes in my own country, South Africa, among some black writers. It certainly cannot be said to have occurred in two of the most important African writers outside South Africa, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. They became ‘more than writers’ in answer to their country’s – Nigeria’s – crisis of civil war; but in no sense did the demand develop their creativity. On the contrary, both sacrificed for some years the energy of their creativity to the demands of activism, which included, for Soyinka, imprisonment. The same might be said of Ernesto Cardenal. But it is out of being ‘more than a writer’ that many black men and women in South Africa begin to write. All the obstacles and diffidences – lack of education, of a tradition of written literary expression, even of the chance to form the everyday habit of reading that germinates a writer’s gift – are overcome by the imperative to give expression to a majority not silent, but whose deeds and whose proud and angry volubility against suffering have not been given the eloquence of the written word. For these writers, there is no opposition of inner and outer demands. At the same time as they are writing, they are political activists in the concrete sense, teaching, proselytising, organising. When they are detained without trial it may be for what they have written, but when they are tried and convicted of crimes of conscience it is for what they have done as ‘more than a writer’. ‘Africa, my beginning … Africa my end’ – these lines of the epic poem written by Ingoapele Madingoane28 epitomise this synthesis of creativity and social responsibility; what moves him, and the way
it moves him, are perfectly at one with his society’s demands. Without those demands he is not a poet.

  The Marxist critic Ernst Fischer reaches anterior to my interpretation of this response with his proposition that ‘an artist who belonged to a coherent society [here, read pre-conquest South Africa] and to a class that was not an impediment to progress [here, read not yet infected by white bourgeois aspirations] did not feel it any loss of artistic freedom if a certain range of subjects was prescribed to him’ since such subjects were imposed ‘usually by tendencies and traditions deeply rooted in the people’.29 Of course, this may provide, in general, a sinister pretext for a government to invoke certain tendencies and traditions to suit its purpose of proscribing writers’ themes, but applied to black writers in South Africa, history evidences the likely truth of the proposition. Their tendency and tradition for more than three hundred years has been to free themselves of white domination.

  Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors? And there is some evidence that it ceases to. What writer of any literary worth defends fascism, totalitarianism, racism, in an age when these are still pandemic? Ezra Pound is dead. In Poland, where are the poets who sing the epic of the men who have broken Solidarity? In South Africa, where are the writers who produce brilliant defences of apartheid?

  It remains difficult to dissect the tissue between those for whom writing is a revolutionary activity no different from and to be practised concurrently with running a political trade union or making a false passport for someone on the run, and those who interpret their society’s demand to be ‘more than a writer’ as something that may yet be fulfilled through the nature of their writing itself. Whether this latter interpretation is possible depends on the society within which the writer functions. Even ‘only’ to write may be to be ‘more than a writer’ for one such as Milan Kundera, who goes on writing what he sees and knows from within his situation – his country under repression – until a ban on publishing his books strips him of his ‘essential gesture’ of being a writer at all. Like one of his own characters, he must clean windows or sell tickets in a cinema booth for a living. That, ironically, is what being ‘more than a writer’ would come down to for him, if he were to have opted to stay on in his country – something I don’t think Camus quite visualised. There are South Africans who have found themselves in the same position – for example, the poet Don Mattera, who for seven years was banned from writing, publishing, and even from reading his work in public. But in a country of total repression of the majority, like South Africa, where literature is nevertheless only half-suppressed because the greater part of that black majority is kept semi-literate and cannot be affected by books, there is – just – the possibility for a writer to be ‘only’ a writer, in terms of activity, and yet ‘more than a writer’ in terms of fulfilling the demands of his society. An honourable category has been found for him. As ‘cultural worker’ in the race/class struggle he still may be seen to serve, even if he won’t march towards the tear gas and bullets.