"Where the Banalities Are Enacted": The Everyday in Gordimer's Novels

When Nadine Gordimer stated in 1974 that “there is no country in the western world where the daily enactment of the law reflects politics as intimately and blatantly as in South Africa,” she indicated that the rigidly defined power relations structuring her society manifested themselves even in the most minor circumstances (qtd. Engle, “Political” 105). Gordimer’s novels, laden with political issues and catalogues of details revealing South African life in its mundane specificity, render accounts of the intrusions of the political into the everyday that arose from apartheid’s microscopic definitions of criminal behavior. As a result, critics have speculated throughout her career that her concern with South African politics may have harmed her fiction. In an early critical study, Michael Wade refers to her “technique of meticulous examination of detail in her tentative search for just assessments” of life in her home country, adding somewhat apologetically that “it is possible to criticize” her first novel, The Lying Days, “for being weighed down by evidence [by] an unusual quantity of detail in the life and growth of Helen Shaw” (5). The “powerful level of particularity” (31) Wade admires does not necessarily translate into a sense of immediacy for her readers since Gordimer’s aim seems to be a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, the promotion of a complex awareness by portraying aberrant conditions within a surface normality, not the provocation of outrage by recounting evil deeds in a tone of anger or lament. ¹

International praise for her abilities as a novelist has far outweighed scattered reviewers’ accusations of “banality” and “impersonality” in her style (qtd. Smith 4–5), but Gordimer’s The Conservationist and July’s People, like J. M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country, Life & Times of Michael K, and Age of Iron, do convey a sense of the “tedium and waiting” (Coetzee, Foe 83) that characterized the South African “interregnum,” Gordimer’s name for apartheid-era South Africa, which she envisioned not as a war zone but as a static space between two decisive orders of existence. Insisting on dullness at the very moment of liberation in South Africa, Michael K and July’s People depict the anticlimax white liberals feared would accompany the long-anticipated revolution and reflect a “fetishistic entrapment of South African whites in the syndrome of waiting” (Lazarus 133) for an apocalyptic future: these novels transform a state of civil war into the boredom of the barely literate, the grunginess of the unwashed body, the vapid communications of the long married. In Coetzee’s novels, great human issues, such as economic disparity, are figured as kitsch—Anna K’s “fawn plastic handbag”—or reduced to absurdity, as when terminally ill Elizabeth Curren screams in anger at the horde of cats in her yard demanding to be fed. Summarizing the unreal, prosaic quality of everyday life and literary endeavors in South Africa as portrayed in recent fiction, Pauline in Gordimer’s A Sport of Nature muses, “There’s something about a colonial society that trivializes” (57).

Gordimer and Coetzee present daily life under an authoritarian government in South Africa as both dull and deeply politicized, a situation that implies a cheapening of personal relationships and an exhausting urgency for significant, even heroic activity on the part of ordinary citizens. Foregrounding the low and the common in their fiction seems an attempt to avoid the aesthetic banality Gordimer calls “agitprop,” a typical artistic overreaction to a state of tyranny whose character and strategies resembled Nazi-era Germany (“Living” 276). Fascistic politics, a source of aesthetic and moral banality and cultural kitsch in Germany, may have contributed to the “deadening, and even deadly, binary opposites” and the omnipresent “crudeness and reductiveness of racial thinking” that have constricted South African art throughout this century (Huggan and Watson 3). The term “petty apartheid,” ironic in the context of systematic, state-sanctioned oppression, hints at a persistent banality that attaches itself to representations of South Africa under apartheid, and, sensing the state’s trivialization of public and personal life, Gordimer has long decried apartheid’s infantile restrictions on citizens’ daily lives...