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

Another vital question: What will be the various African states’ official attitude to culture, and to literature as an expression of that culture? We writers don’t know, and have every reason to be uneasy. Certainly, in the twentieth century of political struggle, state money has gone into guns, not books; literature, culture, has been relegated to the dispensable category. As for literacy, so long as people can read state decrees and the graffiti that defy them, that has been regarded as sufficient proficiency. As writers, do we envisage, for example, a dispensation from a Ministry of Culture in South Africa to fund publishing in African languages, and to provide libraries in rural communities and in the shanty towns which no doubt will be with us, still, for a long time? Would we have to fear that, in return for subvention, writers might be restricted by censorship of one kind or another? How can we ensure that our implicit role — supplying a critique of society for the greater understanding and enrichment of life there — will be respected?

Considering all these factors that stand against the writer’s act of transforming literature in response to a new era, it seems that we writers have, however reluctantly, to take on contingent responsibilities that should not be ours. We’ll have to concern ourselves with the quality and direction of education — will our schools turn out drones or thinkers? How shall we press for a new policy and structure of publishing and distribution, so that writers may write in African languages and bring pleasure and fulfillment to thousands who are cut off from literature by lack of knowledge of European languages? How shall we make the function of writers, whose hand held out to contribute to development is in the books they offer, something recognized and given its value by the governing powers of the twenty-first century? We have to begin now to concern ourselves with the structures of society that contain culture, and within which it must assert its growth.

And there is yet one more problem to be faced by the naked power of the word, which is all we have, but which has proved itself unkillable by even the most horrible of conventional and unconventional weaponry. Looking back, many well-known factors inhibited the growth of a modern African culture, an African literature, in the century whose sands are running out through our fingers. One hardly need cite the contemptuous dismissal of all African culture by frontier and colonial domination; the cementing-over of African music, dance, myth, philosophy, religious beliefs, and secular rituals: the very stuff on which the literary imagination feeds. The creativity of Africa lay ignored beneath the treading feet of white people on their way to see the latest Hollywood gangster movie or to pick up from the corner store a comic with bubble text in American. And soon, soon, these were joined by black people in the same pursuit, having been convinced, since everything that was their own was said to be worthless, that this was the culture to acquire. The habit of chewing cultural pulp is by now deeply established among our people. And it is so temptingly cheap to be bought from abroad by our media, including the dominant cultural medium of our time, television, that literature in Africa not only has to express the lives of the people but also has to assert the beauty and interest of this reality against megasubculture — the new opium of the people. .

Surely the powers of the imagination of our writers can be exerted to attract our people away from the soporific sitcom, surely the great adventures that writers explore in life can offer a child something as exciting in image and word as the cumbersome battle between Japanese turtles? We in Africa don’t want cultural freedom hijacked by the rush of international sub-literature into the space for growth hard-won by ourselves in the defeat of colonial culture. That is perhaps the greatest hazard facing us as we turn the page of African literature and write the heading: twenty-first century.

— UNESCO Symposium

Harare, Zimbabwe, 1992

When I am asked that interviewer’s stock-in-trade, ‘For whom do you write?’, I reply irritatedly, ‘For anyone who reads me.’

The question is crass, giving away the media’s assumption that a writer, like itself, presumes ‘readership potential’. It seems typical of the anti-art tenet of commercialism: give the public what they know. But writers — artists of all kinds — exist to break up the paving of habit and breach the railings that confine sensibility; free imaginative response to spring up like grass. We are convinced that we are able to release the vital commonality of the human psyche, our reach limited only by the measure of our talent. After all, isn’t this what we ourselves have received at the touch of other writers? If we are not manufacturing for Mills and Boon, if we are not writing political tracts disguised as works of the imagination, we do not have in mind a shadow company of heads out there, the chat-show groupies or the Party supporters.

But for some time, now, I have felt a certain unease when I snap, ‘Anyone who reads me.’ The echo comes: ‘Oh really? My, my!’ I begin to think there is a question to be asked, but it is not ‘For whom do we write?’ It is ‘For whom can we write?’ Is there not such a thing as writer potential, perhaps? The postulate reversed? And may I dismiss that one high-handedly? These doubts — or more accurately suggestions — have come about in my particular case less from readings in literary theory over the years than as a result of experience out there in the world among — not ordinary people, to a writer no-one is ordinary — among non-literary people. Which does not imply that they do not read, only that their reading does not take place in the matrix of culture most literature presupposes.

And here there must be a self-correction again. The suggestions are raised as much by the contradictions between literary theory — which, of course, is concerned with the reader’s perceptions as well as the writer’s conscious and subconscious intentions — and the actual life experience of the man or woman on the receiving end of all these deliberations: the generic reader. For the generic reader surely must be the one I have in mind when I answer that I write for ‘anyone who reads me’?

More than twenty years ago, we were all entranced by or sceptical of (or both at once) the discoveries of structuralism and its analysis of our art and our relationship to the reader. The Freudian explanations we had gone by seemed simplistic and speculative by comparison. The subconscious was ectoplasm in contrast with the precise methodology of a work such as, say, Roland Barthes’ S/Z, published in 1970 on the basis of work done in the sixties. The whole emphasis of literature passed from writer to reader. Barthes’ goal was ‘to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text’, of ‘what can be read but not written’. The novel, the short story, the poem, were redefined as a ‘galaxy of signifiers’. As Richard Howard sums up, Barthes’ conviction of reading was: ‘What is told is always the telling’. And Harry Levin wrote: ‘To survey his [the writer’s]; writings in their totality and chart the contours of their “inner Landscape” is the critical aim of current Structuralists and Phenomenologists. All of these approaches recognize, as a general principle, that every writer has his own configuration of ideas and sentiments, capacities and devices.’

Barthes’ brilliance, with its element of divine playfulness, made and makes enthralling reading — for those of us who share at least sufficient of his cultural matrix to gain aesthetic pleasure and revelation from his cited ‘signifiers’. It’s a detective game, in which the satisfaction comes from correctly interpreting the clue — elementary, for Sherlock Holmes, but not for my dear Watson. Barthes, in the structural analysis of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine , is the Sherlock Holmes who, deducing from his immensely rich cultural experience, instantly recognizes the fingerprints of one cultural reference upon another. The reader is Watson, for whom, it may be, the ‘signifier’ signifies nothing but itself, if there is nothing in the range of his cultural experience for it to be referred to . It is a swatch that does not match any colour in his spectrum, a note that cannot be orchestrated in his ear. So that even if he is told that Balzac’s clock of the Elysée Bourbon is actually chiming metonymic reference to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and from the Faubourg Saint-Honorè to the Paris of the Bourbon Restoration, and then to the Restoration as a ‘mythic place of sudden fortunes whose origins are suspect’—there remains a blank where that reader is supposed to be reading ‘what is not written’. The signifier works within a closed system: it presupposes a cultural context shared by writer and reader beyond literacy. Without that resource the reader cannot ‘read’ the text in Barthean abundance. ‘Words are symbols that assume a shared memory’, says Borges. The Faubourg Saint-Honoré is just the name of a district, it has no elegant social/intellectual associations, either as an image conjured up from visits to Paris or as a symbol described in other books, visualized in paintings. The Bourbon Restoration brings no association as a ‘mythic place of sudden fortunes whose origins are suspect’ because the reader doesn’t know the place of the Bourbon Restoration in French political and social history. The polymath interchange of the arts, letters, politics, history, philosophy, taken for granted by Barthes, is not the traffic of that reader’s existence.