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Volume 15, Number 2 (1991) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum Justice in the Interregnum? Law, Politics and Society in Selected Novels of Nadine Gordimer THOMAS PATRICK GANNON* The Center for Law and Health Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in thisIn her 1982 James Lecture at the New York Institute of the Humanities, "Living In The Interregnum,"2 South African writer Nadine Gordimer declared that her country was in the midst of an ongoing revolution. Gordimer's pro- nouncement upon what she considered the moribund state of nineteenth-centu- ry colonialism in Africa marked the culmination of a long shift in her thinking, a shift which began in the years following the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. Essentially she had come to reject liberal reformism as a solution to apartheid. White South African liberals, Gordimer told an audience of university students in 1971, had failed historically in two significant ways: by unsuccessfully mus- tering support among the whites who alone held (and still hold) political power and by paternalistically acting as surrogates for black interests.3 Using the words of Nosipho Majeke, Gordimer asserted that the South African liberal had been cast in the role of "conciliator between oppressor and oppressed."4 Gordimer's rejection of liberalism entailed a radically new way of looking at social, and thus legal, relations. And these new attitudes in turn had implications for her work beyond those of a narrowly defined political sort. As a writer who had considered herself to be temperamentally non-political and attracted to personal themes early in her career, Gordimer remarked in 1974 that "the creative imagination, whatever it seizes upon, finds the focus of even the most private event set in the overall social determination of racial laws."5 Every aspect of South African life had become intensely politicized. The private and political became dialectically linked in Gordimer's work in a Lu- kacsean sense.6 Apartheid is, of course, much more than a set of legal rules. The "color bar" (that innocuous sounding metaphor used to describe the legal/social struc- ture of segregation) acts both as a literal and psychological barrier between the "paradise" of privileged white South African society and the nearly thirty million non-whites who make up the great majority of its population. The unintended and ironic corollary of apartheid, however, is the extent to which the white South African guardians of racial purity - and, indeed, all those with white skins - have themselves become prisoners within this supposed sanctuary. Although she is white and middle class herself, Gordimer has conscious- ly attempted to reject the privilege of her social position. Much of her work has been preoccupied with the question of how whites, in solidarity with black aspirations, can "fit in in the New Africa." One overwhelmine problem, Gor- dimer recognizes, is white consciousness itself. She has remarked that "[t]he hierarchy of perception that white institutions and living habits implant throughout daily experience in every white, from childhood, can be changed only by whites themselves, from within."7 Gordimer's comment nicely captures the paradox of hegemony and raises a number of questions about the relationship between a society's legal attitudes and its legal order. According to Antonio Gramsci's original concep- tualization, hegemonic domination involves more that the sheer application of force or ideological imposition by the ruling classes. As theorist Raymond Williams explains consciousness is not simply reducible or tantamount to any set of formal beliefs, class outlook or worldview. Consciousness and the relationship between subordination and domination involve "a saturation of the whole process of living."8 In effect, hegemony is the process of lived experi- ence of domination and subordination; it is an internalization of these social relationships which regards them as "natural" and immutable. Gordimer's personal and artistic attempt to break free from the con- sciousness of her social position must necessarily depend on her success in creating a counter- or alternative-hegemony. This attempt has special signifi- cance with respect to her emerging legal attitudes. I propose to explore Gordi- mer's nascent counter-hegemonic legalihinking by first examining the author's life and then several of her earlier novels, making reference as needed to her other novels and to her essays. I shall attempt to show that her view of the law has evolved from a positivistic legal emphasis to a natural law position, a shift analogous to that undergone by post-World War II German thinkers such as Gustav Radbruch. H.L.A. Hart observes that before the Nazi regime Gustav Radbruch believed that "the validity of a law could not be disproved by showing that its requirements were morally evil or even by showing that the effect of compli- ance with thq law would be more evil than the effect of disobedience."9 Hart understood Radbruch's renunciation of legal positivism to mean that every lawyer and judge should denounce statutes that transgressed immoral or wrong but as having no legal character, and enactmentsI shall demonstrate that Gordimer's embrace of a Radbruchian natural law philosophy is not only a necessary development in her work but also a liberat- ing one, especially within the highly positivistic legal context of South Africa. The South African legal system, an artifact of colonialism, is a hybrid of Roman, Roman-Dutch, and English law. England's occupation resulted in the prevailing use of British legal forms. The most significant legal importation, however, was the positivist legal philosophy, of Austin and Bentham, coupled with a rejection of natural law theory. John Dugard, Professor of Law at the University of Witwatersrand, writes that "[i]n present-day South Africa the austere doctrine of the imperative nature of law and the rigid separation of law and morality still flourish in their pristine Austinian purity."11 Reinforced by its system of legal education, South Africa's jurisprudential atmosphere has been relatively uninfluenced by twentieth-century developments, and Dugard unflat- teringly compares South Africa's entrenched positivistic legal milieu to that of Germany's between the World Wars. Nadine Gordimer: Life & Work Gordimer's personal history is well documented. She was born, in 1923, in the small gold-mining town of Springs, about 30 miles east of Johannes- burg, the youngest of two daughters of Isidore Gordimer, a Jewish-Lithuanian emigrant. Gordimer, an atheist, states that her father was a "mystery" to her. In her Paris Review interview, she says that he "went through the whole Jewish pogrom syndrome," and wonders whether this "timid" man did not burn himself out while emigrating.12 Gordimer, whose early desire was to become a dancer, attended an all- girls convent school, but her ambitions ended at age ten after a fainting spell brought on, she later learned, by a mild thyroid condition common among pubescent girls. When Gordimer was eleven her "unhappily married" British mother, Nan Myers, removed her from school completely and forbade any physical activity. Having already written a patriotic poem at age nine eulogiz- ing then South African President, Paul Kruger, Gordimer most likely became a writer during this convalescence. After that she "read tremendously" from the local library - all the European and American classics (including Gone With the Wind, and Pepys' Diary).13 Of her mother's decision to isolate her Gordimer says, "I retreated into myself, I became very introspective. She changed my whole character."14 "I simply lived her life."15 Gordimer spent much of her time around adults and recounts that this made her incapable of relating to children her own age. She provided entertainment at the adult get-togethers to which she was dragged by doing apparently devastating impressions of one absent set of her parents, friends after another. Gordimer acknowledges that her mother was sympathetic toward the black miners in town, but failed to take her concern beyond charity work: "She didn't realize that it was the social order that was responsible for the condition of the people whom she pitied."16 As for Gordimer's own political views she says "[i]t was Upton Sinclair's The Jungle [which she read at age fourteen] that really started me thinking about politics: I thought, good God, these people who are exploited in a meat-packing factory - they're just like blacks here."17 Already published at age fifteen, Gordimer received some tutoring and eventually enrolled (c. 1945-46) in a few general studies courses at the Universi- ty of Witwatersrand. The University's post-war milieu exposed Gordimer to leftist, existentialist and black nationalist politics; she even had a "youthful spell in the Communist Party."18 But she was not really interested in politics: "I felt that all I needed, in my own behavior, was to ignore and defy the colour bar. In other words my own attitude toward blacks seemed to be sufficient action."19 Gordimer rejected white racial dominance, but "through the appar- ently esoteric speleology of doubt, led by Kafka rather than Marx."20 While she has always publicly disavowed any political ideology, Gordimer today describes herself as "socialist" in outlook. During the 1950s Gordimer became friends (through her work on Drum, a literary journal) with the leading black and white artists, critics, and writers of Sophiatown, a formerly multiracial township outside Johannesburg. The 1950s were the halcyon days of South African liberalism, artistically and politically, when many believed they'were scaling the color bar, when many forms of peaceful protest had not yet been outlawed, and before the govern- ment rezoned Sophiatown for white use and renamed it Triomf (Triumph). Her first two novels, The Lying Days (1953) and A World Of Strangers (1958), reflected the belief, shared with her contemporaries, that the color bar could be crossed by human contact with blacks. This brand of humanistic liberalism across class divisions echoed the informing principle of E. M. For- ster's novel Howards End, a sentiment with which Gordimer associated herself when she said, "during the 1950s, we believed very strongly in the personal relationship, in the possibility that in changed circumstances blacks would view us as fellow human beings... the Forsterian 'only connect' lay behind what we believed in."21 The intractable political situation of the late 1950s and 1960s - the bannings, detentions, treason trials, imprisonment - ended all that. Many of Gordimer's friends went into exile. Gordimer herself became increasingly isolated and marginalized throughout the 1960s and 1970s as the Black Con- sciousness movement reached its height - a "healing" development which she concluded was necessary, however personally painful. That movement espoused a political philosophy that sympathetic whites had no place in the struggle for liberation, or rather, that whites must find their own means to fight apartheid. Her resolve to remain an observer in her country and find some meth- od of solidarity with blacks led her to adopt a self-described "radical" stance in 1974. In that year, she and South African Liberal Party member, the writer Alan Paton, best known internationally for Cry, The Beloved Country (1947), engaged in a terse epistolary exchange in the Johannesburg press.22 While Gordimer expressed approbation for the sacrifices made by Paton and others, she explicitly rejected the "liberal" label, arguing that liberals could not give blacks what they wanted. Gordimer was, perhaps, proven sadly correct two years later when the South African police gunned down hundreds of Sowetan schoolchildren who began protesting the enforced use of Afrikaans in their schools. Gordimer disdains the label "white writer," preferring instead to be called an African writer. While her novels are essentially centered around the white middle class to which she belongs - particularly liberal whites who oppose apartheid - she writes about blacks she encounters as well. Some black critics charge that as a white person she is not able to write convincingly or legitimately about blacks. Gordimer dismisses these criticisms as unfair since limited opportunities do exist for the races to meet and learn about each other - even in such a rigidly segregated society. Several of her novels at one time or another have received the backhanded compliment of being banned as "sub- versive" or threatening to state security. In fact, the banning of her most critically acclaimed novel, Burger's Daughter (1979), became the subject of a pamphlet she wrote assailing the often blundering, but effective, censorship system.23 A recipient of numerous literary prizes, Gordimer has produced a prodigious collection of fiction, as well as nonfiction. She has published ten novels, twelve volumes of short stories, and several television plays based on some of these stories. She has also written dozens of essays, reviews, uncollect- ed short stories, produced a volume of criticism on African literature, and collaborated with South African photographer David Goldblatt on two collec- tions of photographs for which she wrote the accompanying text. Several themes emerge in Gordimer's novels, the most prominent of which involves the dialectic between the private and the political worlds, the way politics impinges upon the private. This insight is typically played out within the stifling confines of the liberal, white middle class family. She also details the conflicts between conscience and the struggle for power which life under apartheid entails: power between parents and children, sexual power, psychological and economic power. Another theme permeating all of Gordimer's work is the necessity for, and often tragic inability of, her characters to undergo social, individual, and - by extension - legal transformation. In the imagined revolutionary period of July's People (1981), for example, the liberal couple, Maureen and Bamford Smales, having escaped to a rural village with the aid of their black servant July are unable to adjust to the death of white power. Dispossessed of both personal property (the gun and automobile they brought with them) and psychic proper- ty (sense of place, identity, ability to speak the same language), the Smales are living in the Gramscian interregnum, incapable of rebirth. Gordimer's later novels, including July's People, are highly interesting from a law and literature perspective and deserve fuller treatment, but the present task is to demonstrate her emerging natural law views. Nadine Gordimer's Literary Work Only Connect Gordimer's second novel, A World Of Strangers (1958),24 is written from the perspective of a 26-year-old Englishman, Toby Hood. The son of activist liberal parents (his father struggled against Franco in Spain; his mother brings home refugees), Hood journeys to South Africa to replace a literary agent at Aden Parrot, his family's publishing house. Toby leaves England partly to escape his parents' house, "a house where it was considered sinful not to take a stand." (34) His choice of destination, a former colony and defiant child of British imperialism, may also be a symbolic act of unconscious resent- ment against the politicization of his childhood: Toby recalls the social embar- rassment and shock his mother felt when, before a group of her friends, he asked to display his grandfather's Boer War mementoes (a sword and citation for heroism Toby discovers buried in the attic). Toby's mother and her friends think South Africa will be a great place for him to take up the liberal causes of his family, but Toby has no intention to become "a voyeur of the world's ills and social perversions." (36) Instead, as Toby puts it, he simply wants "to live." He later remarks: "I've always thought there are two kinds of people, people with public lives, and people with private lives." (122) A World of Strangers is , in one sense, Toby's Bildungs roman, the story of his political education and development; as a foreigner, he is also the kind of outsider through whom Gordimer can explore, expose and then offer an analysis of South African society. In Johannesburg, Toby is first introduced into the wealthy High House set of Hamish Alexander, a hedonistic and neo-colonialist milieu, quintessen- tially represented by Cecil Rowe, an attractive woman to whom Toby is sexually attracted. (In the essay "Multi-racialism or A World Of Strangers," 25 critic Stephen Clingman notes that Cecil Rowe suggests the name of that imperialist par excellence, Cecil Rhodes.) Because of his background, Toby can move through this group with the social ease of a peer; but he maintains a critical distance which becomes progressively irreconcilable throughout the novel. Toby next meets the High House's white antithesis, Anna Louw, a Legal Aid Bureau Lawyer. Anna Louw comes to Toby's office one day requesting that Amon Mofokeng, one of Toby's African employees, be allowed some time off to help his mother. Anna is representing Amon's mother in a test case: Mrs. Mofokeng has been evicted from a freehold estate in a native location and forcibly reset- tled in another location with only a leasehold estate as compensation. Anna, whose advocacy of African rights is now bourgeois and positivistic (she is a former Communist disillusioned by Stalinist atrocities), serves as an uncom- fortable reminder of the committed liberals Toby has left behind in England. Her serious nature, understandably brought on by the personal consequences that anti-miscegenation legislation has wrought on her interracial marriage, makes him feel "embarrassed and inadequate," but he enjoys her company. Anna takes Toby to a mixed race party in Sophiatown, where Toby meets Steven Sitole, a black man who, like Toby, has sought psychic refuge from social demands through individualism. Steven takes Toby to a shebeen (an illegal black drinking house) in one of the townships where they narrowly escape a midnight raid by the police, a victory celebrated in "swaggering, schoolboy triumph." Toby identifies with Steven's attempt to live for himself and ignore the color bar. He describes Steven's "nature" admiringly: Feckless, aimless, like creatures flopping in sand in evolution fromToby later defends Steven when Anna tells him that Steven is being sued for failing to make payments on a camera and woman's watch he bought on an installment plan. Anna says, "[t]he girl[friend] ran away with the watch, and the camera had a faulty lens, anyway - so he felt it was justice all around if he didn't finish his payments. (121) Anna argues that Steven's attitude is a romanticized, "Robin Hood code," a form of lawlessness that could justify gangsterism - it is a view she attributes to the unromantic quality of his "loca- tion life." Nevertheless, what really concerns Anna is not Steven's roman- ticism, which she thinks is necessary in some way, but that he is wasting his energy solipsistically instead of through the type of liberal collective action in which she herself is engaged. "He doesn't care a damn about his people; he's only concerned with his own misfortune in being born one of them." (122) She thinks Steven should fight for his freedom. Toby defends him. Toby argues, "[t]he private liver, the selfish man, the shirker, as you think him - he's a rebel. He's a rebel against rebellion. On the side, he's got a private revolution of his own; it's waged for himself, but quite a lot of other people may benefit." (123) Toby and Steven's rebellious individualism presup- poses the underlying notion that the individual is philosophically autonomous, that society is nothing more than a collection of atomized self-sustaining units. If others benefit, so much the better. Toby's outburst suggests the tension between the personal and political, the individual and social, about which Gordimer herself felt ambivalent in the 1950s. For Toby, the color bar is "man-devised legislation." It is irrelevant; "restrictive" but "meaningless." By ignoring it, or as whim strikes, by merely defying it on a selfishly personal level - the logical conclusion to his individu- alist outlook - he evades responsibility for the philosophical issue which lies beneath. An example of the vacuity of this stance occurs when Toby invites some African friends to his apartment, a violation of both the law and his lease. When the landlady complains, Steven tells Toby: "You have no right, Toby. look in your lease and you'll see.' (217) It is a nice irony that these two "rebels" feel suddenly compelled to take note of "the law," and it reveals the inadequacy of their philosophy as an effective challenge to the dominant legal order. A fourth major character, the African Sam Mofokenzazi, a "decent bourgeois," does not appear until midway through the novel. Sam thinks that "Steven is just a white man in a black man's skin," (161) and, in contradistinc- tion to Anna's assessment, he believes Steven's loss is individual, not collective. Sam wants to see all his people become middle class; it is Sam to whom Toby turns when he realizes the emptiness of his philosophy. After a prefigurative hunting trip with the High House group, Toby returns to discover that Steven has been killed like an animal while fleeing a police raid on an Indian club. Toby thinks: What had I known of Steven, a stranger, living and dying a life I could Toby's insight, however, is only half-realized: he still believes he is "free" in this world of strangers. At the novel's close, Toby is leaving Johannesburg for a month-long business trip to Cape Town. In his pocket he carries a letter requesting to stay on indefinitely and two newsclippings: one lists Anna's name among those recently jailed for treason and the other is a society column photo of Cecil at a charity benefit. Seeing Anna's name on the list gives Toby a feeling of "dispossession, where the prison record is a mark of honour, exile is home, and family a committee of protest - that world I had watched, from afar, a foreign country, since childhood." (265) Anna's name, juxtaposed in his wallet against Cecil's laughing smile, sets him "in a curious way, ... at peace." Toby has now cast off his former ways and is ready to return to the fold. Sam meets Toby at the crowded train station where the segregated faci- lities and constant flow of people make their conversation difficult. The setting supplies a fluid metaphor for the uncertain currents of social change. Sam symbolically asks Toby to be the godfather of the child his wife is about to bear; he is anxious that Toby will not return. Toby reassures Sam that he will be back in time, but Sam accuses, before they are swept down their separate stairs by the crowd, "[w]ho knows with you people, Toby, man?" Brought to- gether again before the waiting train, however, they clasp arms, laughing, under the suspicious, puppy-like frown on the innocent face of a young policeman. Stephen Clingman, who reads A World Of Strangers in light of the complicated and uniquely South African liberal optimism of the 1950s, writes that the novel ultimately rests its moral and historical vision on the assumption thatClingman correctly points out that Toby and Sam's commitment to forge a newly transcendental "moral class" at the close of the novel was, for Gordimer, an ideologically ambiguous "recuperation of liberalism."27 Clingman cites historical evidence for the proposition that, during the 1950s, the Congress Alliance (a coalition of groups, including the ANC, which represented a united, multi-racial front opposed to apartheid) partly espoused a liberal outlook, and was determined as a "moral class" itself to reform the existing system by appealing to reason, education, and bourgeois notions of morality."28 "From a philosophical or theoretical point of view," Clingman argues, the flaw in the novel, and perhaps the movement which it reflected, "might be seen as an idealism: conceiving apartheid as a problem of conscious- ness, a triumph of consciousness is offered to overcome inaccurately analysed material relations."29 The solution which Gordimer presents Toby - a relationship with Sam which will transcend the legal structure - fails to confront directly the violent positivistic legal lesson which Steven's death held. For Toby and Sam, the Law, reified in the presence of the young policeman, is literally and figuratively marginal to their embrace. While the narrative contains an oblique acknowl- edgment of latent canine viciousness in the policeman's skeptical face, that possibility is undercut, at least for now, by his puppy-like naivete. The potential force of the law is minimized. Gordimer's hope, based on the Fors- terian "only connect," seems to suggest that change will come through interra-. cial contact before South Africa's guard dogs know what has happened, perhaps under their very noses. Only Anna, whose principled stance Gordimer clearly admires, address- es the legal questions which pervade the novel. Although this is undoubtedly due in part to the fact that, as a lawyer, Anna is a convenient fictional device through which to discuss these questions, it is also because legal issues are subsumed within Gordimer's sociopolitical philosophy, relegated to a marginal status. Yet even Anna's decision to risk going to jail for acting in a private legal capacity as advisor to a group of African women has seriously positivistic implications. Although her liberal reformist work represents a challenge to the dominant legal order by appealing to Western notions of justice, her position is tempered by her insistence on defining herself in relation to that order - a subtle form of legitimation. Occasion For Discovery Gordimer's third novel, Occasion For Loving (1962).30 continues where A World Of Strangers left off. Jessie and Tom Stilwell are dedicated, white, South African liberals. They are attempting to live "decent" socially connected lives despite the legal strictures of apartheid. The novel's title comes from one of three epigraphs Gordimer chooses to emphasize its themes. The first is from Pasternak: "We have all become people according to the measure in which we have loved people and have had occasion for loving." The second epigraph, by Thomas Mann, reveals Gordimer's growing recognition of the complex relationship between the private and the political: "In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms." A quotation from Camus links the first two: "... servitude, falsehood and terror ... these three afflictions are the cause of'silence between men, obscure them from one another and prevent them from rediscovering in themselves in the only value which can save them from nihilism - the long complicity between men at grips with their destiny." A history professor, Tom Stilwell is writing a book on the "African subcontinent that would present the Africans as peoples invaded by the white west, rather than as another kind of fauna dealt with by the white man in his exploration of the world." (14) Through his university connections, Tom invites ethno-musicologist Boaz Davis and his wife Ann (an English couple originally from South Africa and Rhodesia, respectively) to stay in their subur- ban Johannesburg home while Boaz studies African instruments. But Tom's wife Jessie is apprehensive: "I don't want any observers," she revealingly blurts out. (11) She relents, however, and the Davises move in. Because Boaz spends most of his time in the field, he is home infre- quently. Ann, whose failure to work surprises and dismays Jessie, eventually creates a job for herself displaying African art at native schools. At one of these schools Ann meets Gideon Shibalo. Gideon is an embittered, and ex- tremely talented, black painter who had once received a scholarship to study in Rome, but was forced to refuse it since the government would not have let him return. Ann and Gideon fall in love and have an affair, the illegal nature of which forms the core theme of the book. It is not clear early in the novel, from Jessie's perspective, whether Ann and Gideon really love each other. Jessie is not sure if Ann, who appears to be genuinely "color blind," is merely searching for some "African adventure." Moreover, Gideon has had a series of love affairs with white women - perhaps a way of achieving in private what South African society will not let him achieve in public: Every contact with whites was touched with intimacy; for even the most casual belonged by definition to the conspiracy against keeping apart. It was always easier to be drunk than sober, to exchange a confession than have a chat; even, [Gideon] found, with amusement rather than surprise, to have a love affair rather than a friendship. (120) Despite Jessie's early reservations about Ann and Gideon's real feelings, Jessie is ostensibly unconcerned about the racial difference between them. She thinks that the only difference between their affair and an affair between two white people is that when Ann and Gideon make love they are breaking the law - an irrelevancy. As the relationship progresses, however, Jessie begins to see that her sympathetic liberal attitude is not what she thought. In the guise of her con- cern for Boaz, Jessie is troubled by the fact that Ann lets Gideon freely use the car which Boaz bought her. Jessie discovers that the instilled cultural codes of her childhood, for example, her sexual fear of "the black man," have never been fully erased but merely written over like a palimpsest. Racism is especially problematic for Boaz. Although he is dedicated to preserving African culture and really likes Gideon, race complicates the seemingly straightforward issue of adultery for him: in a drunken and frustrated moment, he mumbles, "filthy black cock." Jessie and Tom's realization that their liberalism has failed them comes as a painful shock. In a long passage towards the end of the book, its useless- ness is exposed: They came again and again to the stony silence of facts they hadAlthough Jessie comes to support Ann and Gideon's relationship in the end and helps them flee the country, it is Ann who ultimately cannot get past her own feelings about Gideon's blackness. As critic Judie Newman succinctly describes it, after Ann and Gideon leave Johannesburg by car, Ann is forced to play the role of "master" to Gideon's "servant," when they have car trouble.31 Ann's role-playing forces her to realize that Gideon is a black man in South Africa, something she had only romanticized, or not completely realized, before. Because Ann cannot deal with this fact or her guilt, she leaves Gideon and returns to Boaz. Gideon's bitterness about Ann's departure with Boaz forces him into an old habit - drinking. One evening, in the novel's penultimate scene, Jessie attends a party. She sees a drunken Gideon and thinks that surely any hard feelings he may have about the Stilwell (Still well?) household are gone. She approaches him: "[s]he spoke to him ... , and his gaze recognized something, though perhaps it was not her. He mumbled, 'white bitch - get away.' " (238) Several months later Jessie runs into Gideon again, though apparently Gideon has no recollec- tion of what he said that night. "So long as Gideon did not remember, Jessie could not forget." (238) In Occasion For Loving, Gordimer has forsaken her faith that liberalisin, as set out in A World Of Strangers, can overcome what she identifies here as the private/political dialectic. Gordimer wrote in 1974 that "apparently transcen- dental private relationships are in fact pretty meaningless, trappedin political determinism."32 Although Gordimer clearly identifies the law as the primary impediment to Ann and Gideon's relationship, Stephen Clingman has suggested that it is not the "external sanctions" which cause the break-up but the fact that "the repressions of apartheid have become psychologically inscribed. In this regard it is the prestructuring effects of apartheid that count."33 Law, then, is not just an external statute, but an internal code as well. Gramsci's concept of "hegemony" suggests that "the most effective kind of domination takes place when both the dominant and dominated classes believe that the existing order ... is satisfactory, or at least represents the most that anyone could expect, because things pretty much have to be the way they are."34 Occasion For Loving is a transitional novel with respect to Gordimer's legal attitudes. She has grasped the insight that the external legal-power struc- ture of apartheid ineluctably intrudes upon the individual, and thus, collective, unconscious. The law cannot be ignored. The Prison Gates of "Paradise" If Jessie Stilwell's frustration with the law in South Africa suggests to her the possibility of violence as a solution, Liz Van Den Sandt, the central character in Gordimer's fourth novel, The Late Bourgeois World (1966),35 is not quite prepared to take it up. It is, rather, Liz's ex-husband Max, frustrated by his society's inability to transform itself, who decides to bomb a post office. The novel opens with Liz and her lover, Graham Mill, an activist law- yer, having breakfast in Liz's apartment. Liz receives a telegram revealing that Max has drowned in a car in Cape Town harbor. Liz, however, knows that Max's death was no accident: Max, a failure in life and as a revolutionary, has committed suicide. The rest of the novel, which takes place on a single day, concerns Liz's attempt to understand Max's death, and what her own role as a white opposed to apartheid can be. These themes are exemplified in the no- vel's two epigraphs. The role for Liz is posited in the question by Kafka: "There are possibilities for me, certainly; but under what stone do they lie?" And the quotation from Maxim Gorky suggests an epitaph for Max (his symbo- lic namesake? or is it Marx?): "The madness of the brave is the wisdom of life." By the 1960s, South Africa had become a garrison state. In response to the government's outlawing of non-violent protest as a means of dissent, and the events at Sharpeville, the ANC formed a military wing known as Umkhonto we Sizwe (The Spear of the Nation). The barriers whites erected to keep out blacks had become so psychologically internalized that, in one sense, white South Africa had imprisoned itself. Critic Kolawole Ogungbesan observes that The Late Bourgeois World, like Kafka's The Trial and Camus' The Stranger, makes use of the metaphor of imprisonment as its central symbol for the uman condition. The white suburbs in which the story is set constitute 'the hite laager,' as claustral as any gaol."36 As a young woman, Liz's marriage to Max Van Den Sandt was compli- cated by his familial relations. Max's father was an M.P. in line for a cabinet position when Max was arrested for defying segregation laws in 1952 - a stigma which resulted in Mr. Van Den Sandt's resignation from Parliament. The Van Den Sandts' worldview represents the epitome of the dominant power strutructure: When Mrs. Van Den Sandt spoke of "we South Africans" she meant theThe Van Den Sandts are tolerantly sophisticated when told about the accidental pregnancy which leads to their son's marriage. They explain away Max's stu- dent protest days as "youthful Bohemianism." But when their son is arrested for sabotage - a public injury, the only kind that counts for them - Max is dead as far as they are concerned. Only Mrs. Van Den Sandt attends Max's trial, and Liz remembers her to have been perfectly attired, as if dressed for a funeral, head cast in shame. In the corridor, Mrs. Van Den Sandt demands: "What have we done to deserve this!" Liz's answer to her is explained later in a thought she has the day Max kills himself. As Liz drives to her son Bobo's school (itself a "prison") to tell him of his father's death, she thinks: "Max had driven his car into the sea and gone down with it; as Max had once burned his father's clothes, and yes, as Max, three years ago, tried to blow up a post office." (10) Ogungbesan calls Max's life and suicide a gesture of "love" against the prison of white civilization. observing her "civilization" engaged in its ritual of consumption, Liz sits in a shopping mall and contemplates his death: I saw them give their children pennies to drop into the S.P.C.A. collec- tional action to themselves alone, commend it to others as the onlyLiz counts herself among these people, the living dead. Only Max is truly dead. She is aware of the need for, but is incapable of, self-resurrection. She fantasizes about someone killing the Prime Minister with a symbolic "silver bullet," and thinks, "[o]nly madmen do such things. But can any white man who wants change really be all there? It's a comforting thought." (28) Max was such a madman. His life is complicated by the conditioning of his whiteness and by the exhaustion of his liberalism: Max is antiheroic. After his arrest, he becomes the state's witness against his accomplices in the sabotage attempt. Liz tells Bobo that at least Max had "the courage even to fail at trying to change" his society. (18) Liz thinks that he "may have been just the sort of hero we should expect." (19) Ogungbesan contends that Max's incarceration is the ultimate symbol of the futility of communion in hisHowever failed Max's attempt may have been, Liz must craft her own strategy for opposing the system she despises. It does not lie in her "decent" relationship with Graham, who "defends many people on political charges and is one of a handful of advocates who ignore the possible consequences of getting a reputation for being willing to take such cases." (36) She thinks, "[i]f I want- ed a man, here, at this time, in this country could I find a better one?" (37) Nor does it lie in her work (like Graham's, color blind and non-capitalistic), analyzing lab samples: "thank God blood and shit are all the same, no matter whom they come from" (37) - a rejected possibility which perversely symbol- izes bourgeois humanism. Her strategy reveals itself when Luke Fokase, an underground, African activist and old friend, asks Liz to help him get rebel aid money into the country. Liz imagines Luke as an "Orpheus" to her "Eurydice." Critic Abdul R. JanMohamed suggests that Gordimer makes ironic use of this underworld myth: in Liz's "use of the myth, the political 'underground,' the black world of Luke, is the substantial, real, human world, and the 'pure,' 'civilized,' white bourgeois culture of South Africa becomes the repository of evil - the actual hell."38 Liz at first does not want to help Luke even if she could. But then she recalls her 86-year-old, senile grandmother whom she visited at a nursing home earlier in the day. The old woman, who symbolically represents their mori- bund, white culture, has a bank account which receives international funds. Although Luke does not know it, Liz has power of attorney over her grand- mother's bank account. She would like to ask Graham how to go about using the account without getting caught, but decides against it since "Graham has defined the safe limits of what one can get away with - 'a woman in your position'." (93) She has withheld information from Graham before: that Max had called her the night before he planted the bomb. Liz decides to appropriate the law, her power of attorney, for her own use, to turn it against itself - a symbolic blow to capitalism as well. Liz wrestles with the idea of helping Luke, questioning why she should do it. In bed that night she provides the reason: "[i]t seems to me that the answer is simply the bank account. I can't explain; but there is the bank account. That's good enough; as when Bobo used to answer a question about his behaviour with the single word: 'Because." (94) There is also the possibili- ty of Luke, the possibility that he will make love to her. Liz has cast her lot with Africa itself. She thinks, "[w]ho's to say it shouldn't be called love?" (94) Lying awake in bed, she listens to an internal clock, her heart, ticking off the beats: "afraid, alive, afraid, alive, afraid, alive ..." (95) The Late Bourgeois World is a pivotal novel for Gordimer with respect to her legal attitudes. In A World Of Strangers, Toby and Steven ignore the law because it stands in the way of their hedonism, their individualist philosophy. Later, Toby and Sam marginalize the law - it is outside their embrace. Anna's choice is subsumed, as impossible a choice as Cecil's, and both safely tucked away in Toby's wallet. The law is irrelevant because it is external - their social connection will transcend the legal order of apartheid. While this gesture shows great contempt for the law as an external social barrier, it ignores the positivistic lessons which Steven's death held. In Occasion For Loving, Jessie discovers that the law has coercive ele- ments beyond her conscious control because it permits the reification or inter- nalization of racist attitudes. Until the law, the external, is changed, she thinks, her society cannot break free from the insidious effects of apartheid. Jessie and Tom think there might be more sense in blowing up a power station, destroy- ing the fuel supply on which their society runs. Liz Van Den Sandt, however, realizes that her culture is already dead, a prison inhabited by zombies. Bombs can bring down the prison walls, but only a magic silver bullet can kill the monster - the act of a madman. Gordimer seems to say that only by simultaneously rejecting the exter- nal code, by breaking the law, and rejecting the internal code can one hope to be free of the beast. Liz has to reinvent herself through action, and by reclaim- ing the moral authority to decide what the law is. By not telling Graham what she plans to do, or about Max calling, she has symbolically distanced herself from "authority" and complicity with the positivistic system. She has also internalized her "power of attorney" in order to turn it outward, against the law as it is. A statement Gordimer made to white university students in 1971 about the need for protest, especially in the face of their increasing alienation, reveals her emerging belief about the need to reclaim the moral authority to decide the law: The margin of safety white South Africans feel they must claim forIndeed, from her essay, "Living in the Interregnum," Gordimer offers a poi- gnant remark she overheard a black woman make: "I break the law because I am alive."'40 A Fire In The Mind Unlike Gordimer's other novels, A Guest Of Honour (1970),41 for which she won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, is not set in South Africa. The novel takes place in a fictional African country. "Imagine," Gordimer says, "a place somewhere between Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Rhodesia, and Angola - you know, just make a hole in the middle of Africa and push it in - that's where it takes place."42 It deals with the themes of post-independence and African nationalism, and demonstrates Gordimer's pan-African interests, as well as her increasing interest with leftist thinkers, including Franz Fanon. James Evelyn Bray, a former English colonial administrator, was forced out of this fictional country ten years earlier because of pressure exerted by the white colonists who despised Bray's support for the natives' political aspira- tions. Adamson Mweta, the country's new president, in England for diplomatic reasons, visits Bray and asks him to come back as a guest of honor for the Independence celebrations. He considers the newly liberated country Bray's home, and he wants to offer Bray a position in the new government. The crux of the novel is whether Bray will end up supporting Mweta who has taken the country on a capitalistic path with the aid of foreign inves- tors, or Edward Shinza, Mweta's former mentor (an intellectual who believes the new country should adopt an organic, African socialism). Gordimer choos- es two epigraphs that exemplify the choice Bray will make. The epigraph from Turgenev emphasizes the double meaning of the novel's title: "An honourable man will end by not knowing where to live." The quality of Bray's choice is brought out in an epigraph taken from Ernesto "Che" Guevara: "Many will call me an adventurer - and that I am, only of a different sort - one of those who risks his skin to prove his platitudes." The novel opens as Bray wakes up in Africa, having returned for the celebrations. Before long, the 56-year old Bray renews his old friendship with Roland (Roly) Dando, a Welshman whom Mweta appoints to be the new Attorney-General. When he and Bray discuss the new regime over drinks, Dando expresses reservations about his job and what it will inevitably entail. He tells Bray, "[t]he day will come when I'll have deportation orders to sign that I won't want to sign. Warrants of arrest or worse." Bray responds, "[a]ny- one who's stayed on is a fool if he hasn't thought about that." (18) Clearly, at this point, Bray is the fool since he believes that Mweta and Shinza will be able to work things out if they just compromise. Dando, who has already aligned himself with Mweta, is cynical about the political aspect of his legal work and knows what lies ahead in his new job. He predicts that the new regime will be as bad as the old colonial one. In an intoxicated flourish he toasts himself for what he knows he will do - when he will be able to call those South African and Rhodesian judges who "feel confident they'll never have a black man on the Bench to give a verdict as biased as a white man's - My colleagues, Tencher Teal, and Williamson and De l'Isle!" (19) Dando's character reveals an understandably growing cynicism in Gordimer's own legal attitudes. Given the fascist regime under which she writes, she cannot expect any justice from the legal apparatus. That is not to say she does not believe that justice could exist - just not for the present. Gordimer's cynicism emerges from Dando later on in the novel after he helps draft an emergency Preventive Detention Bill which will allow Mweta to imprison any "trouble-makers." He tells Bray: That's how I'd define the function of the law in any country you'd like Roly inserts a clause in the bill requiring it to be repassed annually. He tells Bray, "[i]t's my conscience clause, laddie. I put. it there. The temptation of virtue, justice, if anyone should like to fall to it." (177) Gordimer's most interesting and direct exploration of the positivist/nat- ural law debate appears in a long section which takes place after the new House has debated the Preventive Detention Bill. (Its provisions are already being carried out by Mweta's thugs.) A visiting American legal scholar passing through on his way from South Africa, Roly Dando and Nell Bayley, a former university professor who has stayed on, discuss legal philosophy at the Silver Rhino, a tavern. Graspointner, the American, is baited into giving an opinion about justice in South Africa: "Well, I must say that I found the conduct of the court unex-The question raised by this passage, unusual for a piece of fiction in the directness it focuses on legal philosophy, becomes: which of these voices is the artist's Bayley's or Dando's? Arguably the most "authentic" voice is Bayley's His anger and moral indignation are the most consistent with Gordimer's own previous views. Gordimer has said that she believes that racism is "evil - human damnation in the Old Testament sense."43 Yet clearly she realizes that the law is used as a weapon for the interests of those in power. Does her ambivalence make her a cynic? As Bray says: "Cynical people will please themselves by saying independence solves nothing. People like us should always have known that independence only begins to solve anything. The moment it's achieved it's no longer an end." (452) Dando, then, ends up on the wrong side of the equation with respect to Bray's, and Gordimer's, choice. After the celebrations, Mweta appoints Bray to a position in education planning for the country. Bray's job is to write a report outlining what is needed. As Bray soon discovers, the remote Lake District is in terrible condi- tion; many are starving. Mweta has ignored the needs of the masses in order to attract capital investment. With Mweta's assistance, industry has assembled a private police force to quash worker demands for higher wages and to prevent them from organizing. Shinza meets with Bray from his secret base in the bush and tells him that Mweta is attempting to usurp control of the trade union Congress. Shinza reminds Bray of a passage from Fanon: The people find out that the iniquitous fact of exploitation can wear aBray begins to realize that there is no mediating position between Mweta and Shinza. At the Independent Party's Congress, Bray aligns himself with Shinza by trying to line up votes with certain tribal factions. Although he succeeds, there are too many divisions, and Shinza loses. Shinza retreats to the bush where he crosses the border to seek financial aid and materiel. When Bray returns to his outpost in Gala he finds that Gandhi Hall, Shinza build a genuinely independent country. He must leave in order to raise the funds Shinza needs. Bray and Rebecca leave Gala by car. While driving Bray wonders if he has made the right decision and "concludes": it seemed to him he had come to understand that one could Not long after this thought, reminiscent of Holmes' dictum about the illusion of certainty in life and the law, they come upon a tree in the road. They get out of the car to remove it but are attacked by an unidentified group of men wielding "sticks and stones and bits of farm implements." (469) Bray's final thought is, "I've been interrupted, then - " (469) As Bray predicts, other people will interpret the significance of his decision. Gordimer presents two distorted and contrasting viewpoints: some say that Bray "got what he deserved," or cynically, like Dando, that Bray "was a rnartyr to savages." (503) Alternatively, a British monthly devoted to "The Decline of Liberalism" says that Bray was one who had "passed over from the scepticism and resignation of empirical liberalism to become one of those who are so haunted by the stupidities and evils in human affairs that they are pre- pared to accept apocalyptic solutions, wade through blood if need be, to bring real change." (503) The real irony, however, is that only Bray's blood has been spilled. Finally, Mweta labels Bray a "conciliator," and in perverse fashion expropriates Bray's papers to be published as the Bray Report. The "real" importance behind Bray's choice is that he chooses to act at all. Bray has not passed over skepticism - he has embraced it; that is, Bray has assumed the moral burden of his decision. The only person who truly captures Bray's personal torment is Hjalmer, a Jewish friend who had fled the Nazis. "Hjalmer had made a remark, one of the nights when they had watched the township burning from the garden: 'The fire's in the minds of men, not in the roofs of houses' - it came from somewhere in Dostoevski." (466) The metaphor reveals Bray's inability to escape the ultimate existential risk and responsibility of choosing, the act of ideological alignment and thus salvation which haunts both Dostoevski and Gordimer. One can pretend that the fire happens elsewhere: "if people kill in a cause that isn't mine, there's no blood on my shoes; therefore stand aside." (464) Bray's "obituaries," however, seek to obscure the relationship between the personal and the political. The liberal notion that one can remain pristinely unbloodied on the battlefield of ideas - and life itself - is false. Conclusion Nadine Gordimer is a moral writer, in the broadest sense, but one who is fully aware of the limits of epistemological certainty. (Recall her "esoteric speleology of doubt.") Remarkably, she has remained hopeful in a century characterized by despair, steadfast in her single absolute moral stance - that racism is utterly unjustifiable, evil. Her work is a warning to those who would separate morality from law. As a character from her recent novel, A Sport Of Nature (1987), 44 says: "There's only the evidence: if over hundreds of years you distort law and order as repression, you get frenzy. If you won't attempt to do justice, you cut morality, human feelings, pity - you cut the heart out. it (342) To see the problem, however, is only half the solution. Gordimer's artistic task also requires her to imagine a radically refashioned society and its relationships. There is an important and larger message here: we are living in a state of global interregnum. Gordimer makes this point explicitly in her essay "Living in the Interregnum, " and the epigraph she chose for July's People, the same quotation which appears at the beginning of this article. The old forms of domination and subordination (legal, political, social, cultural, etc.) must be trashed. This process is always tempered, of course, by hesitation, longing for the pseudo-stability of existing relationships, the failure of imagina- tion to create something new, something workable, and ultimately, charged with a bittersweet sense of despair that new forms of domination may take their place. But one must at least try, one must take a chance. This is the counter-hegemonic process itself. Gordimer begins by ignoring the law. The law is an irrelevancy, something to be sidestepped. The law is indeed coercive, and its alteration may affect social relationships, but not apparently in any significant psychosocial fashion. Deep-structured, racist attitudes can only be exorcised through human contact, only then will the law reflect social reality. The danger in Gordimer's position is that it implicitly espouses a positivistic legal outlook: the law simply is, and it does not matter. This attitude might be termed the complicit- positivist stance. The complicit-positivist, in danger of being clubbed over the head or worse, begins to see how really effective law and order can be. "Apparently transcendental private relationships are in fact pretty meaningless," as Gordimer says, "trapped in political determinism."45 The external, the positivist law, it is supposed, has become internalized. Perhaps these laws were "always" there, inscribed on the heart, only to find a home in endless statutes and code books. A dialectical relationship exists - the heart affects the law, which in turn affects the heart, and so on. Law has a distinctively moral quality whose immanence cannot be ignored: this is the emergent natural-law stance. But how does one change "the law"? One option, Gordimer suggests, is a few well-placed bombs, or should one say, a few more well-placed bombs. It is madness, yes, but ... . Another option is to recapture fully and existen- tially what you did not know you had given up, perhaps did not know you even possessed: the absolute right to decide what the law is, your moral power of attorney. In the Radbruchian sense, the individual must decide the moral character of a law - not merely denounce immoral laws, but determine if those laws even have a legal character. To give an immoral "law" any legal weight or authority is to engage in an insidious complicity. This is the natural-law position which Gordirner ultimately adopts. Gordimer's distrust of the law and lawyers in South Africa is under- standable. It emanates from an utter failure of liberal reform to effect meaning- ful change. Liberalism has become part of the problem. Again, a passage from A Sport Of Nature is illuminating. Pauline and Joe, a white liberal couple op- posed to apartheid, are arguing, when Pauline bitterly tells her lawyer husband: Everything's going to come right through the loopholes you manage toGordimer's weariness with the ineffectuality of well-intentioned legal maneuver- ing, displayed here, underscores her belief that real change in South Africa will not come from them - there is no hope for real justice within the system. As Sasha, Pauline and Joe's son, says: "The main other thing was changing, the thing far more important than laws, in the end. Blacks of all kinds and ages were deciding what had to be done and how to do it." (320) |
