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

‘Professor of Desire’. One may so name Philip Roth, writer, without disrespect and in admiration, with an epithet that was the title of one of his earlier novels. Roth has proved by the mastery and integrity of his writing the difference between the erotic and the pornographic, in our sleazy era of the latter. The premise of his work is that nothing the body offers is denied so long as it does not cause pain. With rather marvellous presumption he seems unknowingly to have written the Kama Sutra of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He asserts the joy of loving sexual intercourse, the splendid ingenuity of the body. His men are not disciples of de Sade, though it may be difficult to accept (in The Dying Animal ) the man licking a woman’s menstrual blood off her legs as not exploitation of the privacy of a bodily function, quite different from the evocation of ‘the simplicity of physical splendor’ which is manifest in sexual desire, and beautifully celebrated for all of us in his latest novel.

If Portnoy has never been outgrown, only grown old, he is, in his present avatar, an everyman whose creator makes the term ‘insight’ something to be tossed away as inadequate. What Roth knows of the opposition/apposition of the body and the intellect is devastatingly profound and cannot be escaped, just as Thomas Mann’s graffiti on the wall of the twentieth century cannot be washed off: ‘In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms.’ Roth has dealt with this other great theme in human existential drives — politics — as searchingly as he has sexuality. Roth’s people, whether politically activist or not, live in our world — and the bared-teeth decorum of academe is its gowned microcosm — terrorised by fear of the Other abroad and state authoritarianism at the throat at home. His superbly matchless work, The Plot Against America , has the power of political fantasy moving out of literature into the urgent possibilities of present-day reality. With that novel he conveyed the Then in the Now. Hero-worship of Charles Lindbergh makes it feasible that he becomes President of the United States, despite his admiring embrace of Hitler; Bush never embraced Nazis, but the enthusiasm he elicits, through instilling fear in Americans who voted him into power and whose sons have come back in body bags along with the gruesome images of Iraqi dead, is no fantasy. And Lindbergh’s anti-Semitism foreshadows the fundamentalisms that beset us in 2006.

One comes away from the strong political overtones in Everyman with the open truth that subservience, sexual connotations aside, is a betrayal of human responsibility. The strength of resistance derives from even further back within us than the drive towards freedom. Terminal Everyman’s memory of a sensuous experience, relived, invokes the glory of having been alive even while ‘eluding death seemed to have become the central business of life and bodily decay his entire story’.

Was the best of old age … the longing for the best of boyhood, for the tubular sprout that was then his body and that rode the waves from way out where they began to build, rode them with his arms pointed like an arrowhead and the skinny rest of him following behind like the arrow’s shaft, rode them all the way in to where his rib cage scraped against the tiny sharp pebbles and jagged clamshells … and he hustled to his feet … and went lurching through the low surf … into the advancing, green Atlantic, rolling unstoppably toward him like the obstinate fact of the future.

Another ecstasy. Not to be denied by mortality. Philip Roth is a magnificent victor in attempting to disprove Georg Lukács’s dictum of the impossible aim of the writer to encompass all of life.

2006

Although I was involved in the struggle against apartheid as an active supporter of the banned African National Congress, I should like to concentrate on another aspect of war: that of the war against writers. War against the word. My own personal experience as a writer and the continuing war, much graver, deadly, as it threatens the very lives of journalists and writers in current conflicts. Recently, journalists have been taken hostage in wars in a number of countries, particularly that of international involvement in Iraq. Before this, a journalist was killed in one of these countries after an unspeakable ordeal as hostage.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech last year, laureate Harold Pinter said ‘a writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed.’ There is, of course, a long history from ancient times of action against writings judged as religious heresy. The Catholic proscribed list continues to exist. But in modern times the banning of books generally has been on grounds of sexual explicitness, while heresy has been invoked as a transgression against political correctness. Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley’s Lover come to mind immediately on the first count — sex — and may I be forgiven for recalling a personal experience as a footnote among the fate of many books banned on the second ground, political heresy. On this ground the South African apartheid regime banned three of my novels in succession.

Works banned on political counts, preventing their distribution and sale, and more drastically those outlawed by public burning, apparent acts of reason, are in fact actions perpetrated by faith of another kind — not religious but ideological. An ideology passionately held becomes a faith by which its adherents live and act. Hitler’s purity of race, Stalin’s pursuit of elimination of a class — only two examples of the means of eliminating freedom of expression in the name of political ideologies, exalted to a faith. Each self-appointed as salvation against the existence of the other in humankind. Faith and reason: one had become accustomed to acceptance that these apparent opposites were in fact one, a symbiosis in the bannings of literature decreed by oppressive political regimes. You have only to read the country-by-country reports by PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee.

Then came an action against a writer inconceivable in modern times: our time. An edict of death was pronounced on a writer. Salman Rushdie. The grounds were religious heresy in a novel. ‘I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until religion came after me’, Salman Rushdie says. ‘Religion was part of my subject, of course … nevertheless … I had to confront what was confronting me and to decide what I wanted to stand up for in the face of what so vociferously, repressively and violently stood against me. At that time it was difficult to persuade people that the attack on The Satanic Verses was part of a broader global assault on writers, artists, and fundamental freedoms.’ 136The faith that authorised this assault was a religious one: Islam. Nothing on the scale of a death fatwa has been invoked in respect of other writers who have been declared offenders on charges of religious or political heresy, sexual explicitness, though banned or imprisoned. Actions outrageous enough. The death sentence pronounced upon Rushdie was indelible writing on our wall by the hand of fundamentalisms that in our contemporary world threaten and operate not only against freedom of expression, but in many other areas of contemporary life.

How is one to approach, not specific conflict-by-conflict, depredation-by-depredation, the causes deeper and beyond these acts of fundamentalism in its hydra-head manifestations? And what guidance can one contemplate towards a possible solution? Amartya Sen offers a convincing analysis, with the consequence of a guidance for us to consider, in what he cites as