Unspeakable Phrases: The Tragedy of Point of View in Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life

The fragmentary and interruptive style of Nadine Gordimer’s novel Get a Life has met some critical resistance. This article defends the continuity of Gordimer’s late-modernist writing and accounts for stylistic anomalies by invoking the narrative productivity of free indirect style. In Gordimer’s expert hands, this device serves the broader ideological agenda of dramatizing a plural consciousness ailed by dislocation, inertness, and unspeakableness. The novel thus unfolds as a tragedy of point of view, a vocal drama of moral representativeness climaxed in a “crisis of authority” (Gramsci). The centrality in the novel of the term quarantine attests to Gordimer’s enduring concern with the persistency of the South African interregnum, an exceptional sociopolitical condition hindering both utopian commitment and moral agency. Get a Life enacts this stasis through a verbal performance characterized by an unspeakable (yet readable) multivoicedness which however manages to yield the modernist hope of “another life.”