Nadine Gordimer Retrospective: Review of Life and Works

Lecture 3https://nadinegordimer2015.wordpress.com/

Course code: 140359

Derek Barkerwww.derekbarker.info

Dr.Derek.Barker@gmail.com

Structure of Lecture 3• Question from Lecture 2• Review of cast of characters and first two

parts of the book• Coming to consciousness/ Imagining the

lives of others• Apartheid timeline• Apartheid 1957• Where do whites fit in?• Liberalism – are you a liberal?

Question from last lecture

How to live / how to act, in a time/place of gross injustice?

The Lying Days

•The Mine p. 11•The Sea p. 45•The City p. 205 - 367

SummaryThe Lying Days is divided into three books: “The Mine,” “The Sea,” and “The City.” “The Mine” is a short section concerning Helen's childhood. “The Sea” covers the events of her adolescence away from her family, including her experience of first love and the beginnings of an independent intellectual life.

Summary“The City” is a longer section about the university, radical bohemians in Johannesburg, Helen's first sexual experiences, and urban and racial questions.

SummaryAs “The Mine” opens, Helen Shaw refuses to accompany her parents to the white recreation club in the small South African mining town of Atherton and instead walks by herself to the neighboring concession stores. The mining company has granted concessions to storekeepers—often recent immigrants—

Summaryto run stores on company land in order to provide a shopping area for the black miners, who come from all over Southern Africa, speak different languages, and are unused to an urban environment. A detailed description of this black world follows, with its smeary shop windows, chickens underfoot, rotting oranges,

Summaryflies, disorder, and vitality. Helen is surprised to see a white boy who appears to be at home there. (Later the reader learns that he is Joel Aaron.) She is drawn to the life and energy of the stores but retreats back to her parents' world when she sees a mineworker urinating in the open.

SummaryBack at the club, Helen arrives just in time for tea in the sterile world of the colonial enclave. The men and women operate in different social spheres, the women's tea parties always ending abruptly when the father comes home. Helen spends her time with her mother, dressmaking, shopping, and coveting various objects in the stores of Atherton.

SummaryThe family lives in a company town, with life organized around the mine whistle. When the whistle blows on this day, a Sunday, it signals an event outside the normal routine: a strike by the black workers over their diet. A large crowd of mine workers invades the lawns of the manager's garden but is swiftly dispersed

SummaryThe whites enjoy more tea and scones, and Helen skips home to a lavish cooked breakfast. The unthinking life of adolescence—the first dance, the first corsage, and, as World War II impinges, boys in uniform at dances—unrolls before her.

Summary

“The Sea” transports the seventeen-year-old Helen to the farm of Alice Koch and her son Ludi on the Natal coast, where she is visiting her mother's old friend for a holiday. On one side is the lush, green jungle, on the other the pounding waves. In this paradisal, natural environment Helen finds an alternative mother in Mrs. Koch, who is similarly white and middle class but demonstrative and sentimental where Helen's own mother is cool and reserved.

SummaryThe sense of a release of natural feelings is enhanced by the depiction of the sea as beauty, freedom, and fecundity, and by an emphasis on the steamy warmth of the climate. When Helen visits the local store this time, it is to have tea with the shopkeeper and his wife, who are friends of Mrs. Koch.

SummaryFriendship swiftly develops between Helen and Ludi, a Thoreauvian character scornful of the narrow life of small-town South Africa and resentful over his enforced military service. His leave over, Ludi prepares to return to the army, only to find that a bridge has collapsed because of heavy rains, and he cannot catch his train.

SummaryHe gains a short extension of leave, almost courtesy of nature itself, and enjoys an erotic (though unconsummated) idyll with Helen. Somewhat awkward on the first kiss, Helen blossoms in the warmth of Ludi's affection, and Gordimer evokes the full enchantment of first love.

SummaryDisillusionment is not far off, however. Ludi has described sleeping with another woman, and Helen intuits that it is Maud, a neighbour who is unhappily married to a much older man. For all his grand dreams of sidestepping small-town society, Ludi later ends up running a small store.

SummaryLudi's first letter, read and reread by Helen back at home, is something of a disappointment, though she goes on for some time in a dream, imaginatively immersed in a secret world with him. Helen had previously decided not to attend college, but halfway through the academic year, with Ludi now fighting on the Italian front, she changes her mind and registers for a course in arts at the university.

SummaryShe goes on living at home, travelling each day by train to nearby Johannesburg along with the other commuters. One of these, Joel Aaron, becomes a close friend. A Jewish student who is training to be an architect, Joel opens Helen's eyes to painting and art, takes her to exhibitions and concerts, and is as hungry for access to culture as she is.

SummaryWhereas Helen is estranged from her parents, whose casual anti-Semitism appalls her, Joel accepts them as they are, just as he accepts his own immigrant parents, with all their shortcomings. Helen and Joel fall out, however, over race relations, specifically the condescension Helen's mother shows to the family's black gardener, Paul, and servant, Anna.

SummaryJoel maintains that her mother's attitude—chatting about minor domestic matters, children, and family to servants she has known for fifteen years—is more natural than Helen's abstract love of humanity. The possibility of something more than friendship between Joel and Helen hovers but never materializes.

SummaryWhen she becomes friendly with Mary Seswayo, a black student, Joel accuses her of tokenism, of having a black friend on principle as a kind of liberal trophy. Helen's attempt to bring Mary home to her parents' house to give her a comfortable place to study undisturbed provokes a furious argument with her mother and propels Helen out of the family home.

Cast of charactersHelen ShawJoel AaronMary SeswayoAnna (servant of the Shaws)Paul (messager of Mr Shaw)Mrs ShawMr ShawThe Aarons

Basil TatchetIan PetrieLindsay TheunissenLudi KochAlice KochJohn and Jenny MarcusCharles BessemerIsa WelshEdna SchillerSipho

Question 1

What do you think about the book so

far?

Homework

Find a favourite sentence / passage

Think

How can we know the self? When did you first realize “ah-ha! – it’s me!”

Imagination / coming into consciousness

It is amazing on how little reality one can live when one is very young. It is only when one is beginning to approach maturity that achievement and possession have to be concrete in the hand to create each day;

Imagination / coming into consciousnesswhen you are young a whole liveable present, elastic in its very tenuousness, impervious in its very independence of fact, spring up enveloping from a hint, a memory, an idea from a book. On this slender connection, like a tube of oxygen which feeds a man while he moves in an atmosphere not his own, it is possible to move and breathe as if your feet were on the ground.

Think

How can we know others?

Imagining the lives of othersThere was no way of knowing, no way of knowing. And sitting in the physical reality of the heat that tacked my mind down to consciousness of every part of my body, sweating or touching in discomfort against the encumbrance of cloth,

Imagining the lives of othersI had an almost physical sensation of being a stranger in what I had always taken unthinkingly as the familiarity of home. I felt myself among strangers: the Africans, whose language in my ears had been like the barking of dogs or the cries of birds.

Imagining the lives of othersAnd this feeling seemed to transmute itself (perhaps by a trick of the heat, altering the very sensibility of my skin) to the feeling Mary must have, trying to oppose the abstract concepts of her books against the overwhelming physical life crowding against her. What a stranger it must make of her. A stranger to herself.

Apartheid timeline 1948 Apartheid begins after the 1948 general election.

Hoping to get votes from the white Africans, the National Party promises to make laws severely restricting black rights if they win the general election. The National Party defeats the United Party and apartheid begins.

1950 Population classified by race. Group Areas Act passed to segregate blacks and whites. Communist Party banned. ANC responds with campaign of civil disobedience, led by Nelson Mandela.

June 1952

The African National Congress starts the Defiance Campaign.

Volunteers begin a peaceful resistance to apartheid by breaking the laws they think are wrong. The peaceful protests include black people sitting on benches marked for white people only and being out in the city after the curfew set for blacks.

1953 The Bantu Education Act is passed. A law is passed that creates a separate education system for blacks and whites. Blacks are trained to prepare them for a life as part of the working class since it is not expected that they will be allowed to do anything more than that.

Racial Classification0: White1: Cape Coloured2: Malay3: Griqua4: Chinese5: Indian6: Other Asian7: Other Coloured

Apartheid 1957

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOA66AOG52M

Question

Where do whites fit in?

Where do whites fit in?

“For a long time to come any white South African must expect to find any black man, from any African territory, considered by the black South African as more of a brother than the white South African himself. No personal bonds of loyalty, friendship or even love will change this; it is a nationalism of the heart that has been brought about by suffering. There is no share in it we [whites] can hope to have.”

Where do whites fit in?

“If one will always feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa. It would not be worth it for this.”

Your thoughts?

LiberalismLiberalism is a political philosophy or worldview founded on ideas of liberty and equality. Liberals espouse a wide array of views, but generally they support ideas such as democratic elections, civil rights, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, free trade, and private property.

Question 2

Are you a liberal?