From apartheid to the planetary present: breaching time in Nadine Gordimer’s “Something Out There”

ABSTRACT

A central problem in the Anthropocene, according to Rob Nixon, is the representational difficulty involved in rendering forms of injustice legible across different scales of time. This paper argues that Nadine Gordimer’s work can be read as a sustained narrative experiment with dissonant temporalities, and hence that it lays the groundwork for a social critique that extends beyond the limits of apartheid South Africa into the disjunctive planetary present. Her novella “Something Out There,” which intertwines the story of a baboon on the loose in 1980s Johannesburg with a revolutionary plot to blow up a power station, is the focus of my essay. I draw on Homi Bhabha and Benedict Anderson to describe the temporal paradigm of white suburbia in Gordimer’s Johannesburg, and read the baboon as a figure of social critique amid that peculiar modern timescape. The part of the narrative concerning the revolutionaries, I argue, advances the critique by pointing to alternative structurings of time in materialist or more-than-human terms. Perspectives on temporality from Gareth Dale, Michael Hanchard and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others, sustain my conclusion that Gordimer’s stylistic accommodation of alternative timescales gives her work a compelling resonance in our uncertain and unequal planetary present.

KEYWORDS:

• Nadine Gordimer
• South African literature
• temporality
• materialism
• ecocriticism
• deep time
• postcolonialism

Acknowledgments

This article was produced as part of the Andrew W. Mellon funded project on “Rethinking South African Literature(s)” in the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape. I am extremely grateful to the Mellon Foundation for its financial support of the broader project of which this is a part. The opinions expressed here are my own and are not necessarily attributable to the Mellon Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Fick does not mention the author by name, but the picture of her accompanying the story – even though the top part of her head has been cropped – unmistakably identifies Gordimer as the “Nobel laureate” in question (2019).

2. The gravity of such a future is prominent, for example, in Gordimer’s novel Burger’s Daughter ([1979] 2000), in which “the Future” (with a capital ‘F’) is repeatedly invoked as compensation for sacrifices made in the struggle against the apartheid state.

3. “Her essays of the period show her struggling inconclusively in the toils of the question of what it means to write for a people – to write for their sake and on their behalf, as well as to be read by them,” J.M. Coetzee observes (2007, 256).

4. A “laager” is a circular encampment of waggons. It refers here to the trekking practices of the Dutch-descended settlers who left the British-ruled Cape Colony during the nineteenth century to seek their own fortunes in the hinterland of South Africa. As such, it connotes the defensive mentality that would flourish among the Afrikaner-led apartheid state.

5. The first sighting, reported in a Sunday newspaper, describes the animal simply as a “predator” or “wild animal” (Gordimer 1984, 118). On the next page, a veterinarian concludes that the teeth marks found on a dead pet had to have been made by a “wild cat” (119). A pet shop owner opines that the animal is most likely someone’s escaped “vervet monkey,” but eyewitnesses hold firm that it is a “larger species” of ape (119). Subsequent impressions of the creature include “monkey” (120), “dronkie” (or drunk vagrant, 126), “ape-like creature” (131), “white man,” “cat” (142), “poor old lonely monkey” (143), “chimpanzee” (147), “beast” (147), Afrikaans “spook” or “kitchen ghost” (148), “big grey monkey” (194), and “orang-outan” (sic, 200).

6. John Vorster Square is the previous name of what is today the Johannesburg Central Police Station. It is notorious as a headquarters for the Special Branch of the South African Police during apartheid. Numerous anti-apartheid activists met grisly ends there, and John Vorster Square lives on in the public imaginary as a brutal space of torture and death.

7. In a recent account linking the parataxis of Gordimer’s “late style” (see Riach 2016) with stylistic features in her earlier work, Clingman remarks on the signature complexity of her sentences, describing an oscillation between “subjective and objective polarities” at the level of syntax that accords with the hybrid perspective I am identifying here (2019, 11). Louvel also discusses the syntactic complexity of Gordimer’s writing, mentioning the “superimposition” of perspective she achieves by breaking up the flow of her sentences with a variety of grammatical devices (2019, 48).

8. In Gordimer’s description of these elemental processes of world-making among the saboteurs, there is perhaps an echo of Frantz Fanon’s observations, in “Concerning Violence,” of the muscular tensions and bodily possessions that accompany the rejection of bourgeois colonial individualism, and of the social reorganisation of the oppressed according to the galvanic forces of violence (1963, 52–58).

9. Clingman (2019, 18) notes the persistence with which such subterranean or underground realities rupture the surface in Gordimer’s oeuvre. The most striking example is perhaps the re-emergence of the “shallowly” buried black body in The Conservationist.

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Eckard Smuts

Eckard Smuts is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English at the University of the Western Cape. He is interested in the overlaps and (dis)continuities between postcolonial and ecocritical thought. Currently he is working on a project that investigates the narrative treatment of time in a range of Southern African novels.