Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

Naguib Mahfouz never constructed his own protection, took the risk of the writer’s naked activity, refusing the lie, even when writing of politicians, in the times he lived and wrote through.

Place; task; meaning.

Meaning is what cannot be reached by the immediacy, the methodologies of expert analysis. If witness literature is to find its place, take on a task in relation to the enormity of what is happening in acts of mass destruction and their aftermath, it is in the tensions of sensibility, the intense awareness, the antennae of receptivity to the lives among which writers experience their own as a source of their art. Poetry and fiction are processes of what the Oxford English Dictionary defines the state of witness as ‘applied to the inward testimony’ — the individual lives of men, women and children who have to reconcile within themselves the shattered certainties which are as much a casualty as the bodies under rubble in New York, Madrid and the dead in Afghanistan.

Kafka says the writer sees among ruins ‘different (and more) things than others’ … it is a leap out of murderers’ row; it is a seeing of what is really taking place.’ 125

This is the nature of witness that writers can, surely must give, have been giving since ancient times, in the awesome responsibility of their endowment with the seventh sense of the imagination. The ‘realisation’ of what has happened comes from what would seem to deny reality — the transformation of events, motives, emotions, reactions, from the immediacy into the enduring significance that is meaning.

If we accept that ‘contemporary’ spans the century in which all of us here were born, as well as the one scarcely and starkly begun, there are many examples of this fourth dimension of experience that is the writer’s space and place attained.

‘Thou shalt not kill’: the moral dilemma that patriotism and religions demand be suppressed in the individual sent to war comes inescapably from the First World War pilot in W. B. Yeats’s poem: ‘Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love.’ 126A leap from murderers’ row that only the poet can make.

The Radetzky March and The Emperor’s Tomb — Joseph Roth’s peripatetic dual epic of frontiers as the Scylla and Charybdis of the twentieth-century breakup of the old world in disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — is not only inward testimony of the ever-lengthening host of ever-wandering refugees into the new century, the Greek chorus of the dispossessed that drowns the muzak of consumerism. It is the inward testimony of what goes on working its way as a chaos of ideological, ethnic, religious and political consequences — Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia — that come to us though the vision of Roth.

The statistics of the Holocaust are a ledger of evil, the figures still visible on people’s arms; but Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man makes extant a state of existence that becomes part of consciousness for all time. Part unavoidably of the tangled tragic justifications made behind the violence perpetrated in the Israeli — Palestinian conflict.

The level of unflinching imaginative tenacity with which the South African poet Mongane Wally Serote witnessed the apocalyptic events of apartheid amid which he was suffering and living goes into territory beyond the concepts of justice. He writes: ‘I want to look at what happened;/That done,/As silent as the roots of plants pierce the soil/I look at what happened … /when knives creep in and out of people/As day and night into time.’ 127

In an earlier age, Conrad’s inward testimony finds that the heart of darkness is not Mistah Kurtz’s bedecked river station besieged by Congolese, but back in the offices in King Leopold’s Belgium where knitting women sit while the savage trade in natural rubber is efficiently organised, with a quota for extraction by blacks that must be met, or punished at the price of their severed hands. 128

These are some examples of what Czeslaw Milosz calls the writer’s ‘fusing of individual and historical elements’ 129and that Georg Lukács defines as the occurrence of ‘a creative memory which transfixes the object and transforms it … the duality of inwardness and the outside world.’ 130

No writer sums up the lifetime experience of the creative memory which ‘transfixes the object and transforms it’, the long journey of the writer, the impossibility of escaping, as Mahfouz reveals exquisitely in Dream 5 of his late work The Dreams .

I am walking aimlessly without anywhere particular to go when suddenly I encounter a surprising event that had never before entered my mind — every step I take turns the street upside-down into a circus. The walls and buildings and cars and passers-by all disappear, and in their place a big top arises with its tiered seats and long, hanging ropes, filled with trapezes and animal cages, with actors and acrobats and musclemen and even a clown. At first I am so happy that I could soar with joy. But as I move from street to street where the miracle is repeated over and over, my pleasure subsides and my irritation grows until I tire from the walking and the looking around, and I long in my soul to go back to my home. But just as I delight once again to see the familiar face of the world, and trust that soon my relief will arrive, I open the door — and find the clown there to greet me, giggling.

There’s no respite for the great writer to evade searching the meanings behind the circus that is the world, the ‘nauseating age of slogans’ a father speaks of in the days of the Sadat regime, the era of Mahfouz’s The Day The Leader Was Killed , and which applies as aptly to our own. An era when ‘Between the slogans and the truth is an abyss’ literature must struggle out of, bearing inward testimony.

I have spoken of the existential condition of the writer of witness literature in the way in which I would define that literature. The question raises a hand: how much has the writer been involved in his or her own flesh-and-blood person, at risk in the radical events, social upheavals for good or bad ends — the threats to the very bases of life and dignity? How much must the writer in the air or on earth be at risk, become activist-as-victim? No choice of being just an observer. In other terrible events — the wars, social upheavals — like anyone else the writer may be a victim, no choice. But the writer, like anyone else, may have chosen to be a protagonist. As witness in her or his own person, victim or protagonist, is that writer not unquestionably the one from whom the definitive witness literature must come?

Albert Camus believed so.

Camus believed that his comrades in the French Resistance who had experienced so much that was physically, mentally both devastating and strengthening, appallingly revealing, would produce writers who would bring all this to literature and into the consciousness of the French as no other form of witness could. He waited in vain for the writer to emerge. The extremity of human experience does not make a writer. An Oe surviving atomic blast and fallout, a Dostoevsky reprieved at the last moment before a firing squad; the predilection has to be there, as a singer is endowed with a certain kind of vocal cords, a boxer is endowed with aggression. Primo Levi could be speaking of these fellow writers as well as of himself, as an inmate of Auschwitz, when he realises that theirs are stories each to be told ‘of a time and condition that cannot be understood except in the manner in which … we understand events of legends …’ 131

The duality of inwardness and the outside world: that is the one essential existential condition of the writer as witness. Marcel Proust would be regarded by most as one among great writers least confronted by public events. But I accept, from Proust, a signpost for writers in our context: ‘the march of thought in the solitary travail of artistic creation proceeds downwards, into the depths, in the only direction that is not closed to us, along which we are free to advance — towards the goal of truth’. 132Writers cannot and do not indulge the hubris of believing they can plant the flag of truth on that ineluctable territory. But what is sure is that we can exclude or discard nothing in our solitary travail towards meaning, downward into the acts of terrorism. We have to seek this meaning in those who commit such acts just as we do in its victims. We have to acknowledge them. Graham Greene’s priest in The Comedians gives a religious edict from his interpretation of the Christian faith: ‘The Church condemns violence, but it condemns indifference more harshly.’ And another of his characters, Dr Magiot, avows, ‘I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.’ There are many, bearing witness in one dictionary definition and another who remind the world that the United States of America, victim of ghastly violence, has had on its hands the water of indifference to the cosmic gap between its prosperity and the conditions of other populations — a recent survey showed the richest 10 per cent of 25 million (plus) Americans had a combined income greater than the combined income of the 43 per cent poorest of the world population.