Nobel Winner Rests on Laurels

You almost feel that if the Nobel Prize were conferred on Jacques Derrida, hed start talking like Bill Cosby on Picture Pages. Laureates become the public faces of literature, and they start acting like publicizers instead of writers and scholars: what results can be something as banal and clichŽ-ridden as Nadine Gordimers regrettable new release, Living in Hope and History.

Gordimer appropriates for the title of Living, a compilation of some of her non-fiction essays and speeches, the corniest line in fellow Nobel-laureates Seamus Heaneys corniest poem: Once in a lifetime/...hope and history rhyme.

The kind of cheap inspiration imparted by this excerpt from the weakest section of The Cure at Troy is perfect for earnest and boring lightweights like Doubletake Magazinewhich takes the same quote as its mantrabut one would really expect more substance from Gordimer, whose fiction breathes with implacable moral force.

Throughout her career, Gordimer has been a paragon of authorly virtue: a white writer in apartheid South Africa, she stood staunchly with what she always calls the liberation movement. Her fiction exposes the bleeding heart of South African society, and her eye is precise and unflinching. This is not to say that her fiction is nakedly ideological: rather, it speaks complex truths about human relationships and social realities. It shocks the reader with its honesty.

In sad contrast, there is almost nothing of a revealing and striking honesty in Living in Hope and History. In most of her speeches and essays, Gordimer settles for platitudes and truisms rather than incisive commentary. Of course, in two or three of these selections, we do get some flashes of the uncompromising clarity of moral vision that is apparent in her best fiction: but these glimpses of Gordimer at her best only serve in this context to accentuate the readers disappointment in the rest of the compilation. In 1959: What is Apartheid?, a transcript of a seminar given in Washington DC, we see the Gordimer who we know and admire. Her prose rings pure and true, like good crystal: simple and clear, but heavy with a kind of unexpected weight. This is the Gordimer who spoke because her words demanded to be heard, and these words deserve reprinting because they bear deeply the watermarks of authenticity and tragedy. They are not as eloquent as her fiction, but they evidence the beauty of courage and conviction.

Unfortunately, there is very little in this compilation to rival 1959. Instead, there is a miasma of literary criticism and historical analysis: in both genres, Gordimer chooses summary over insight. In References: The Codes of Culturemaking fun of the title would be shooting fish in a barrel we come to the hardly surprising realization that There is no generic reader, out there; in Our Century, Gordimer is a long distance from shocking us with the information that The mushroom cloud still hangs over us, and the unbearably trite corollary question: will it be there as a bequest to the new century?

The great thing about Gordimers fiction has always been her success in stripping away the layers of pretense and denial and dishonesty that are built up around contemporary lives and societies. She shows the reader universal truths that are nonetheless elusive: her talent is to unveil revelation. In the nonfiction in this volume, it is Gordimers practice to reveal truths that are painfully obvious to most anybody. The subtitle of the volume is Notes from Our Century, and Gordimer makes a case study of historical progress out of her native South Africa, taking us from the world of apartheid through redemption to the post-apartheid era. But her words begin to sound false: not the falseness of lies, but of emotional untruth.

Gordimer herself begs pardon, in this collections first essay: nothing I write in such factual pieces will be as true as my fiction. What is appropriately important to her is emotional truth, words that somehow resonate inside the reader. Hemingway used to assure himself that if he could write one true sentence, he was on the right track: it is this kind of truth that is meaningful to the writer of fiction, truth to the spirit. The problem is, this is also the kind of truth that needs to be important to the writer of the kind of nonfiction which Gordimer attempts. It is almost pointless to write journalism about the future of literature, or about the evolution of a truly democratic South Africa, that does not somehow strike a new chord in the reader. Gordimer manages to cover the most emotionally intense period in her countrys histo-

ry in a way that is factually true, but emotionally false: she repeats the necessary mantras about transformation, progress and unity, without any real attempt to get under the skin of the new country.