Nadine Gordimer - Living in Hope and History - Notes from Our Century

To be aware that the lie also can transform the world places an enormous responsibility on art to counter this with its own transformations; the knowledge that the writer’s searching and intuition gain instinctively contradicts the lie.

We page through each other’s faces

We read each looking eye . .

It has taken lives to be able to do so

— writes the South African poet Mongane Wally Serote. We may refuse to write according to any orthodoxy, we may refuse to toe any party line, even that drawn by the cause we know to be just, and our own, but we cannot refuse the responsibility of what we know. What we know beyond surface reality has to become what — again in Serote’s words—‘We want the world to know’; we must in this, our inescapable relation with politics, ‘page for wisdom through the stubborn night’.

At its crudest and most easily identifiable, the stubborn night is politically-inspired censorship, and yet, in some countries where no writer is locked up or his writings banned, and censorship is minimal and open to challenge by the law, fiction remains threatened by the power of the lie. Orwell alerted us to the insidious destruction of truth in the distortion of what words mean; but 1984 passed years ago, and he is remembered more for the cute cartoon movie of an Animal Farm than for a prophetic warning about the abuse of language. Harold Pinter spoke recently of ‘a disease at the very centre of language, so that language becomes a permanent masquerade, a tapestry of lies. The ruthless and cynical mutilation and degradation of human beings, both in spirit and body. . these actions are justified by rhetorical gambits, sterile terminology and concepts of power which stink. Are we ever going to look at the language we use, I wonder? Is it within our capabilities to do so?. . Does reality essentially remain outside language, separate, obdurate, alien, not susceptible to description? Is an accurate and vital correspondence between what is and our perception of it impossible? Or is it that we are obliged to use language only in order to obscure and distort reality — to distort what is —to distort what happens —because we fear it?. . I believe it’s because of the way we use language that we have got ourselves into this terrible trap, where words like freedom, democracy and Christian values are still used to justify barbaric and shameful policies and acts.’

The writer has no reason to be if, for him or her, reality remains outside language. An accurate and vital correspondence between what is and the perception of the writer is what the fiction writer has to seek, finding the real meaning of words to express ‘the states of things’, shedding the ready-made concepts smuggled into language by politics.

All very fine in theory, yes — but how would you refer, in a novel, to the term ‘final solution’, coined by the Nazis; the term ‘Bantustans’, coined by a South African government in the sixties to disguise the dispossession of blacks of their citizenship rights and land; the term ‘constructive engagement’ coined by the government of the U.S.A. in the seventies in its foreign policy that evaded outright rejection of apartheid — how would you do this without paragraphs of explanation (which have no place in a novel) of what their counterfeits of reality actually were?

The false currency of meaning jingles conveniently in our vocabularies; but it is no small change. It becomes accepted values, for which writers bear responsibility. Every fiction writer has to struggle to expose them by discarding them, for the reader, in favour of the reality of the ‘states of things’, since generally journalism — supposed to be ‘fact’ as opposed to ‘fiction’—won’t. Here, on the primal level of language itself, by which we became the first self-questioning animals, able to assess our own behaviour, is where fiction finds its footing in relation to politics.

My own country, South Africa, provides what can be cited as the paradigm of problems of the full development of the relationship: the wild affair between fiction and politics, with its embraces and repulsions, distress and celebration, loyalty and betrayal. Perhaps echoes of the debate at present in progress over what post-apartheid fiction will be, ought to be, have relevance for the outside world. Of course, the very term ‘post-apartheid’ fiction reveals the acceptance that there has been such an orthodoxy as ‘apartheid’ or, more accurately, ‘anti-apartheid’ fiction. In the long struggle against apartheid, it has been recognized that an oppressed people need the confidence of cultural backing. Literature, fiction including plays and poetry, became what is known as ‘a weapon of struggle’. The current debate among us now is between those who, perceiving that the cost was the constraint of the writer’s imaginative powers within what was seen narrowly as relevant to the political struggle, think the time has come for writers to release themselves if they are to be imaginatively equal to the fullness of human life predicated for the future, and others who believe literature still must be perceived as a weapon in the hands and under the direction of the liberation movement come to power in a future democracy.

The revolutionary and writer Albie Sachs, with the undeniable authority of one who lost an arm and the sight of one eye in that struggle, has gone so far as to call, if half-seriously (not even the car-bomb was able to damage his lively humour), for a five-year ban on the slogan ‘culture is a weapon of struggle’. But, of course, there are some writers who have been — I adapt Seamus Heaney’s definition to my own context—‘guerrillas of the imagination’: in their fiction serving the struggle for freedom by refusing any imposed orthodoxy of subject and treatment, but attempting to take unfettered creative grasp of the complex ‘states of things’ in which, all through people’s lives, directly and indirectly, in dark places and neon light, that struggle has taken place.

Since I am bound to be taken to account about this in relation to my own fiction, I had better answer for myself now. As a citizen, a South African actively opposed to racism all my life, and a supporter and now member of the African National Congress, in my conduct and my actions I have submitted voluntarily and with self-respect to the discipline of the liberation movement.

For my fiction I have claimed and practised my integrity to the free transformation of reality, in whatever forms and modes of expression I need. There, my commitment has been and is to make sense of life as I know it and observe it and experience it. In my ventures into non-fiction, my occasional political essays, my political partisanship has no doubt shown bias, perhaps a selectivity of facts. But then, as I have said before, and stand by: nothing I write in such factual pieces will be as true as my fiction.

So if my fiction and that of other writers has served legitimately the politics I believe in, it has been because the imaginative transformations of fiction, in the words of the Swedish writer Per Wastberg, ‘help people understand their own natures and know they are not powerless. .’

‘Every work of art is liberating,’ he asserts, speaking for all of us who write. That should be the understanding on which our fiction enters into any relationship with politics, however passionate the involvement may be. The transformation of the imagination must never ‘belong’ to any establishment, however just, fought-for, and longed-for. Pasternak’s words should be our credo:

When seats are assigned to passion and vision

on the day of the great assembly

Do not reserve a poet’s position: