Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  This is not a matter of misreading or misunderstanding. It is the substitution of one set of values for another, because the reader cannot conceive of these otherwise.

  Yet not politics but class most calls into question the existence of the generic reader, the ‘whoever reads me’. And by class I mean to signify economics, education and, above all, living conditions. The cultural setting from laws to latrines, from penthouse to poor-house, travelled by jet or on foot.

  I grant that the difference between the material conditions of life signified in the text and those of the reader must be extreme, and manifest in the dogged daily experience of the reader, if the writer cannot be ‘read’ by him. And the powers of the imagination should never be underestimated. They sometimes can produce miracles of what, in the complexity of the work being read, is the most limited of referential links. As the seventeen-year-old daughter of a shopkeeper in a small mining town in Africa, I was able to ‘read’ Remembrance of Things Past. Why? Because, although the lineage Proust invented, so faithful to that of the French noblesse, genuine and parvenue, could not ‘signify’ much for me, the familial mores from which the book sets out, so to speak, and are there throughout – the way emotions are expressed in behaviour between mother and child, the place of friendship in social relations, the exaltation of sexuality as romantic love, the regulation of daily life by meals and visits, the importance of maladies – all this was within the context of middle-class experience, however far-flung.

  And, by the way, where did I get the book from? Why, from the municipal library: and I could use the library because I was white – and so for me that also was part of the middle-class experience. No black could use that library: in the concomitance of class and colour a young black person of my age was thus doubly excluded from ‘reading’ Marcel Proust: by lack of any community of cultural background and by racist material conditions …

  Hermeneutic differences between writer and reader are still extreme in our world, despite the advance in technological communications. There is a layer of common culture spread thin over the worlds, first, second and third, by satellite and cassette. The writer could count on the ‘signifier’ Dallas or Rambo to be received correctly and fully by any reader from Iceland to Zimbabwe, and almost any other points on the map culturally remote from one another. But the breadth of this potential readership paradoxically limits the writer: producing, it would seem, something close to the generic reader, it confines the writer to a sort of primer of culture, if he expects to be ‘read’. It excludes signifiers that cannot be spelled out in that ABC. The writer’s expectations of wider readership have diminished in inverse proportion to the expansion of technological communications.

  And the effect of extreme difference in material conditions between writer and reader remain decisive. Such differences affect profoundly the imagery, the relativity of values, the referential interpretation of events between the cultural givens of most writers and, for example, the new class of literate peasants and industrial workers, emancipated by the surplus value of leisure earned by mechanisation and computerisation.

  Writers, longing to be ‘read’ by anyone who reads them, from time to time attempt to overcome this in various ways. John Berger has experimented by going to live among peasants, trying to enter into their life-view as formed by their experience. He writes about their lives in a mode that signifies for us, who are not French peasants: we ‘read’ him with all the experience we share with him of literary exoticism, of life-as-literature providing the necessary layers of reference. He doesn’t say whether the peasants read what he writes, but remarks that they are aware that he has access to something they don’t have: ‘another body of knowledge, a knowledge of the surrounding but distant world’.50 A recent review of one of Bobbie Ann Mason’s books sums up the general problem: ‘[She] writes the kind of fiction her own characters would never read.’51

  In my own country, South Africa, there has been demonstrated recently a wider potential readership for writers in our population of 29 million, only 5 million of whom are white. Politically motivated, in the recognition that the encouragement of literature is part of liberation, trade unions and community groups among the black majority have set up libraries and cultural debate.

  Now, I do not believe that one should be written down to. (Had I been confined in this way, I certainly never should have become a writer.) Once the love of literature ignites, it can consume many obstacles to understanding. The vocabulary grows in proportion to the skills of the writer in providing imaginative leaps. But these must land somewhere recognisable: and most writers share no assumptions with the kind of potential readership I have just described.

  In Africa and many countries elsewhere, Updike’s beautifully written genre stories of preoccupation with divorces and adulteries could touch off few referential responses in readers for whom sexual and family life are determined by circumstances of law and conflict that have very little in common with those of the professional class of suburban America. Their domestic problems are children in detention, lovers fleeing the country from security police, plastic shelters demolished by the authorities and patched together again by husband and wife. The novels of Gabriel García Marquéz, himself a socialist, presuppose an answering delight in the larger-than-life that can find little response in those whose own real experience outdoes all extremes. The marvellous fantasies of Italo Calvino require assumptions between writer and reader that are not merely a matter of sophistication.

  Life is not like that for this potential readership. Books are not made of other books, for them. Furthermore, the imaginative projection of what life might be like is not like that. These texts cannot be ‘read’ even for the aspirations they suggest.

  Surely this is true of most of us who are serious writers, in and from most countries where material conditions do not remotely correspond with those of the potential reader. It is most obvious in South Africa. White writers, living as part of an overprivileged minority, are worlds away from those of a migratory miner living in a single-sex hostel, a black schoolteacher grappling with pupils who risk their lives as revolutionaries, black journalists, doctors, clerks, harassed by the police and vigilantes around their homes. The gap sometimes seems too great to reach across for even the most talented and sensitive power of empathy and imaginative projection.

  I am not saying, nor do I believe, that whites cannot write about blacks, or blacks about whites. Even black writers, who share with these readers disaffection and humiliation under racist laws, generally acquire middle-class or privileged, if unconventional, styles of living and working concomitant with middle-class signifiers, as they make their way as writers. Often it is only by a self-conscious effort of memory – using the signifiers of childhood, before they joined the elite of letters, or drawing on the collective memory of an oral tradition – that black writers can be sure they will be ‘read’ by their readers. Freedom of movement – weekend trips, stays in hotels, choice of occupation – which punctuates the lives of many fictional characters, signifies nothing to the migratory worker whose contract does not allow him to stay on in town if he changes jobs, and whose ‘holiday’ at the end of eighteen months down a mine is the return home to plough and sow.

  The cosseted adolescent who rebels against the materialism of philistine parents signifies nothing to the child revolutionaries, an increasing phenomenon in Latin America as well as South Africa, often precociously intelligent, who have abandoned parents, never known home comforts, and taken on life-and-death decisions for themselves. Even among white-collar readers of this milieu, ‘existential anguish’ – Sartre’s nausea or Freud’s discontents – finds no answering association where there is a total preoccupation with the business of survival. The Spoils of Poynton cannot be read as the apotheosis of the cult of possession by someone who has never seen such objects to covet, someone whose needs would not correspond to any attraction they are presupposed to have – that given attraction taken as read, by the
writer.

  You might well object: who expects a poorly educated clerk or teacher to read Henry James? But, as I have tried to illustrate, many signifiers that are commonplace, assumed, in the cultural mode of the writer find no referents in that of the potential wider readership.

  What can the writer count on if she/he obstinately persists that one can write for anyone who picks up one’s book? Even the basic emotions, love, hate, fear, joy, sorrow, often find expression in a manner that has no correspondence between one code of culture and another.

  The writer can count on the mythic, perhaps. On a personification of fears, for example, recognisable and surviving from the common past of the subconscious, when we were all in the cave together, when there were as yet no races, no classes, and our hairiness hid differences of colour. The prince who turns into a frog and the beetle Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into are avatars of the fear of being changed into something monstrous, whether by the evil magic of a shaman or by psychological loss of self, that signify across all barriers, including that of time. They can be ‘read’ by anyone, everyone. But how few of us, the writers, can hope ever to create the crystal ball in which meaning can be read, pure and absolute: it is the vessel of genius, which alone, now and then, attains universality in art.

  For the rest of us, there is no meta-culture. We ought to be modest in our claims. There is no generic reader, out there. The kiss of the millennium when art shall be universal understanding shows no sign of being about to release us from our limitations.

  1989

  Censorship – The Final Solution

  The Case of Salman Rushdie

  Riots, book-burning, the demand that a work shall be banned worldwide, publishers boycotted, the threatened toppling of a prime minister, five dead – has ever a book been the pretext for such a frenzy of righteous barbarism?

  Reviled, sentenced to death by a religious authority, a price offered for his head, forced to flee his home and live under police guard – has ever a writer been persecuted as Salman Rushdie is? Victor Hugo, Flaubert, D.H. Lawrence and others may have suffered public opprobrium or exile. Milan Kundera, forbidden to write, had to earn a living cleaning windows. In Stalin’s Soviet Union writers were banished to the Gulag. In South Africa, some writers have been forbidden to publish. Many books have been banned; some writers banned from any form of publishing their work. Even in the most repressive regimes, none – although they had offended public morals or political orthodoxy – was condemned to a double death: Rushdie’s book to be expunged from world literature for ever, his life to be forfeited.

  And this bloodthirsty baying comes from a pack of millions, not one fraction of one per mille of whom have read the book. That is clear from the simplistic reduction in which it is arraigned as being literally ‘about’ the Prophet Mohammed – and nothing else. Whereas anyone who actually has read, and been sufficiently literate fully to understand, this highly complex, brilliant novel knows that dominant among its luxuriant themes is that of displacement. Mohammed and the Muslim faith are the novelist’s metaphors for, among other human dilemmas, spiritual displacement in the reversal of a process which brought imperialists to adjust themselves among the populations they conquered, and in our age brings people from those populations to reconcile the dichotomy between their own culture and the world of the West that has set them apart from that culture without granting acceptance in return.

  The method being used by the Muslim leaders and communities against Salman Rushdie is (literally) a murderous refinement of the unchanging principle of censorship, which was and is and always will be to harness the word to the tyrant’s chariot. The tyrant may be a dictator, a regime, moral or religious bigotry. For me, the Rushdie affair has revealed how any of these agents of censorship can advance, in collusion, its gains against freedom of expression. I am no stranger to censorship, living in South Africa. At various times,52 three of my own books have been banned, and for several years, now, the press and media here have been grimly restricted under successive States of Emergency imposed to stifle opposition to apartheid. Yet it was an ugly revelation to find, in my country where the government outlaws freedom of expression, where all who use the written word are fighting against the Publications Control Board and its ancillary laws, where individual Muslims have a proud and brave record in the liberation movements, that local Muslim extremists rose in fanatical response to a proposed visit by Salman Rushdie last November.

  He had been invited to speak on censorship at a book week dedicated to that theme. The story is one that has become familiar: rabble-rousing meetings outside mosques, threats to burn bookshops, death threats not only to Rushdie but to those, including members of the Congress of South African Writers, involved in the invitation. And all this, of course, by people who had not read the book.53 I know, because I had the single copy in the country, a proof sent to me by his American publisher. No matter; it was easy for the Muslim extremists to get the book banned, at once, in absentia. A word to the Publications Control Board (no doubt) from some member of the Muslim community with influence in the House of Delegates (the segregated ‘house’ of Indian collaborators in our apartheid tricameral parliament that excludes Africans), and it was done. We writers had the alternative of risking Salman Rushdie’s life for our principles of freedom of expression or cancelling the visit. Now, with five dead in Pakistan, it can be seen that we made the only possible choice. But through religious thuggery the state has gained an ally in repression of the word, here.

  I admit I have no religious sensibilities, of any faith, to be offended by a work of fiction. But I accept and respect that others have. Numerous books, plays, films have appeared in which Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, God himself, have been satirised, fictionally divested of divinity, and cast as imperfect mortals. The Christian faith remains unshaken. Surely Islam cannot be threatened by the fantasy of a single novel? Satan has taken a hand, all right, in the affair of The Satanic Verses. I can’t believe that anyone’s Divinity could sanction what is being done to a writer. Religious fanaticism has discovered censorship’s Final Solution for that enemy of darkness, the word. I write that with a shudder.

  1989

  The African Pot

  My collection of African pots were bought at roadsides and village markets under trees. They were viewed at no vernissage, but among little pyramids of tomatoes, onions, bananas and mangoes. They have no provenance beyond my memory of where I found them. They are unsigned and I do not know if the artists are living or dead.

  What is the relation of ownership to appreciation, I wonder? Since the great private collections of works of art must belong – because these people can afford to pay for them – to the rich, we jealously dismiss their appreciation as acquisitiveness. Because the shrewd and affluent middle class buy works of art as investment we decide pleasure doesn’t come into it; they have price tags hanging on their walls. As democrats we assert the honest way to enjoy art is at the humble cost of a museum entry ticket. Art ought to belong to everybody, and this is the closest society can get to making it available to all, as a right, while preserving it for the benefit of all. (And, of course, some museums are free.) There’s a moral convention that ownership must be punished by an inability to receive what the work of art has to offer.

  But, looking at my pots, I realise that the special relationship I have with them doesn’t come because I own them – ownership implies a market value or prestige, of which qualities they are innocent. It comes because I have the luxury of looking at them again and again, days without number, from the different perspectives of my daily life, in the objectivity of the different qualities of light that fall upon them, and in the subjectivity of my own moods. Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks is a painting I might choose as my favourite picture; but what chance do I have to drop in to the National Gallery in London more than once a year to renew my sense of the divine in her face?

  Seen from the top of the stairs my pots strike me
as a sort of keyboard – resonators of a musical instrument – where they are ranged on their low table. Or a choir. Their round apertures are open mouths, and the different circumferences of these, according to the size of the pot, suggest that they are actually mouthing, soundlessly, in close harmony: WAH wah WAHWAH wah-h … If I were to become sensitive enough to them, through long association, I might even be able to begin to hear it with my eyes and transpose the notation to my ears. Seen differently, at eye level, as you enter by the front door, the pots are pure volume; round, round-round, the elipses of their sides – but they have no sides, their spheres simply curve out of sight! – seeming to spin immobilely away from one another. They are ranged close but however clumsily I might shift them about they cannot be arranged faultily, so that they jostle: their roundness ensures that they touch only lightly, at their fullest diameter.

  How can I write about one among my pots? In the anonymity of their creation – unattributed, traditional, functional in origin – they are, in a sense, all one pot.

  Unlike other works of art, they do not attempt to recreate something in another medium: pigment on canvas creating a language of line and colour that stands for shape, space and light; marble standing for flesh. They are the earth they are made of. They are its colours – the colours of fields, swamps and river beds. Their common material is mediated only by fire, and on many of them fire has painted the only decoration, cloudy green-black shadings and inspired black brush-strokes sparse as those of Japanese masters. The fire is not the controlled one of a kiln, but the same open-air one where the cooking pots bubble. They are shaped not on a wheel but by hands; their surface texture has the faint striations of human skin. When you put your hand against my pots you are palm-to-palm with the unknown artist.

  They are all as perfect, removed from their function, as they are for their function – which would be to hold water, maize, porridge or beer. They simply are. Their form can take on many concepts, material and abstract. Globe of the world/planet Earth; I twirl the large ones slowly. Hunger/repletion; I look down the inner maw or follow the promise of plenty in their calm rotundity. The big one I bought in Lesotho I held on my lap coming home by plane, thighs spread for its weight and arms round it for protection; a pot grand as a full womb. Then there is the little one that comes from Swaziland, blackened with the application of graphite from local outcrops, with its unique moulded ear-shapes in low relief. There is the one I found in Venda, with its incised curving bands, delicate as the veins on a leaf; and there’s the very old one, its mouth not at the apex but obliquely tipped in balance, below, and its pale, grave-clay tints.