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

Georg Büchner’s character in the play Danton’s Death makes a chilling declaration: ‘Terror is an outgrowth of virtue … the revolutionary government is the despotism of freedom against the tyranny of kings.’

Where does the despotism of terrorism begin to grow in our contemporary world; why? And where will it end? How? This is the mined territory of meaning, in the crisis of the present, from which the writer’s responsibility cannot be absolved. ‘Servitude, falsehood and terror … Three afflictions are the cause of silence between men, obscure them from one another and prevent them from rediscovering themselves.’ 133That is what Camus found in that territory. It is a specification within Milan Kundera’s credo: ‘for a novelist, a given historical situation is an anthropological laboratory in which he explores the basic question: What is existence?’ And Kundera goes on to quote Heidegger: ‘The essence of man has the form of a question.’ 134

Whether this question is unanswerable, just as final truth is unattainable, literature has been and remains a means of people rediscovering themselves. Which may be part of the answer to terrorism and the violent response it evokes. Literature has never been more necessary, vital, than now, when information technology, the new faith, has failed to bring this rediscovery about.

Is there inevitably a loss of artistic liberty for the writer in inward testimony as witness?

A testy outburst not from a writer, but a painter, Picasso, replies, vis-à-vis their creativity, for artists in every medium. ‘What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has nothing but eyes if he is a painter or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he is a poet … quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly aware of what goes on in the world, whether it be harrowing, bitter or sweet, and he cannot help being shaped by it.’ 135Neither can the art. And there emerges Guernica .

Witness literature is not anathema to, incompatible with experiment in form and style, the marvellous adventures of the word. On the contrary, when writers, as André Pieyre de Mandiagues asks, ‘have been given a disaster which seems to exceed all measures, must it not be recited, spoken?’

There is no style and form ready-made for witness literature. If it is to be a poem, it has to be found among all the combinations of poetics, tried or never tried, to be equal to the unique expression that will contain the event before and beyond the event ; its past and future. As Yeats did with his pilot at war. If witness is to be a story or novel, that final demand — the expression of the event before and beyond the event — is the same. Among all the ways of plumbing meaning, existing and to be, this has to be discovered. Julio Cortàzar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Kenzaburo Oe, Octavio Paz, José Saramago, Günter Grass, Naguib Mahfouz, … these are writers who discovered it unsurpassably for their own people, own countries, and by the boundlessness of great writing, for the rest of us who see the same responsibility of discovery to be pursued in our own countries.

I have had my own experience as that of a writer given evidence of a disaster which seemed to exceed all measure. In South Africa racism in its brutally destructive guises, from killing in conquest to the methodology of colonialism, certified as divine will by religious doctrine, took the lives of thousands of Africans and stunted the lives of millions more; systematically . I grew up in the Union that came out of wars for possession between the British and descendants of the Dutch, the Boers. The Africans had already been dispossessed by both. I was the child of the white minority, blinkered in privilege as a conditioning education. But because I was a writer — for it’s an early state of being, before a word has been written, not an attribute of being published — I became witness to the unspoken in my society. Very young, I entered a dialogue with myself about what was around me; and this took the form of trying for the meaning in what I saw by transforming this into stories based on what were everyday incidents of ordinary life for everyone around me: the sacking of the back-yard room of a black servant by police while the white master and mistress of the house looked on unconcerned; later, in my adolescence during the Second World War, when I was a voluntary aide at a gold mine casualty station, being told by the white intern who was suturing a black miner’s gaping head wound without anaesthetic, ‘They don’t feel like we do.’

As time and published books confirmed that I was a writer and witness literature, if it is a particular genre of my circumstance of time and place, was mine, I had to find how to keep my integrity to the Word, the sacred charge of the writer. I realised, as I believe many writers do, that instead of restricting, inhibiting, coarsely despoiling aesthetic liberty, the existential condition of witness was enlarging, inspiring aesthetic liberty, breaching the previous limitations of my sense of form and use of language through necessity: to create form and sense anew.

Aesthetic liberty is an essential of witness literature if it is to fulfil its justification as meaning. And the form and use of language that will be the expression for one piece of work will not serve for another. I wrote a novel in the 1970s; it was, in terms of witness literature, an exploration of inward testimony to revolutionary political dedication against apartheid, invoked as a faith like any religious faith, with edicts not to be questioned by any believer, and the consequences of this, the existential implications handed down from father to daughter, mother to son. Witness called on aesthetic liberty to find the form and language, in order for the narrative to be fulfilled in meaning. Modes of lyricism and irony that had served best for some of my other fiction would not serve where a daughter’s inner survival of personality depended on fully recovering her father’s life of willing martyrdom, his loving relationship with her and its calculating contradictions in the demands his highest relationship, political faith, made upon her; his actions, motives, other personal attachments, which the condition of revolutionary clandestinity perforce made a mystery. A novel where, indeed, actual documents must be encompassed to be deciphered in terms of inward testimony. Through aesthetic liberty I had, so to speak, to question this story in many inner voices, to tell it in whatever I might hope to reach of its own testimony submerged beneath public ideology, discourse and action.

This is the search for Zaabalawi.

In his short story of that name the genius of Naguib Mahfouz sends a man to seek the saintly sheikh, Zaabalawi; everywhere to find always he has just missed the one who has the answer to the questions of being, personal, political, social, religious — the inward testimony. Zaabalawi knows the human mystery is revealed not alone in high places — he frequents Cairo bars, and the man is told he will be found at a particular haunt. Wearily waiting there for hours, the man falls asleep. When he wakes he finds his head is wet; others in the bar tell him Zaabalawi came while he was sleeping and sprinkled water on him to refresh him. Having had this sign of Zaabalawi’s existence, the man will go on searching for him all his life — ‘Yes, I have to find Zaabalawi.’ Yes, we writers have to find the inward testimony our calling, literature, demands of us.

A writer who did is Naguib Mahfouz.

In Khufu’s Wisdom , an early novel in which Mahfouz’s brilliant creativity was already evident, Pharaoh Khufu leaves the palaces of worldly power and takes to the pyramid he had built as his tomb; there, he has decided to write ‘a great book guiding the souls and protecting the people’s bodies with knowledge’.