Abstract

When read in what were perhaps South Africa's darkest decades, the 1970s and 1980s, Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist seemed to be a rather apocalyptic novel. But the fear-stricken, history-bound protagonist who walks right into his own trap shows only one side of reality. The other side is referred to by his two antagonists who are—as a dead man who has yet to be buried and a woman becoming a diviner—both in the middle of an existential transformation; a rite of passage that implies not only change, but also the temporary acceptance of phenomenological chaos, before a new order can be formulated. Gordimer seems to hold the (future) reader responsible for completing the rite of passage: identity and destiny of the characters will eventually depend on the viewpoint and intertextual input of the reader.

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