Rethinking cosmopolitanism in Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist.(Critical essay)

Publication: College Literature

Publication Date: 22-JUN-06

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Most literature from the apartheid era examines a national identity in crisis, and its reception has highlighted issues of South Africa's unique political development. To apply current theories of cosmopolitanism and their emphasis on internationalism to a novel from the 1970s such as Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist is reading against the grain of the critical consensus, which takes as its focal point the internal situation in South Africa and, as argued by Stephen Clingman in the case of The Conservationist, "the immediate realities to which [the novel] responded in the moment in which it was produced" (1986, 136), My desire is to broaden the discussion of historicity in the novel not by diminishing the importance of the specific historical context but by directing our attention to Gordimer's historical method which, I believe, is cosmopolitan. Part of what Homi Bhabha has called the "'new' internationalism" in literature, Gordimer's work displays a "process of displacement and disjunction" as it translates the national into the worldly (1994, 5). More importantly, as Bhabha argues, the worldly is discovered through a process that transforms the home into the "unhomely" The Conservationist can be read as the story of failed domesticity which mirrors the national failure of South Africa. The novel anticipates Bhabha's theoretical term where the "unhomely is the shock of recognition of the world-in-the-home, the home-in-the-world" (2003, 366). The failure of domesticity and the estrangement of the notion of home uncovers the shared histories of South Africa's different constituencies so that a kind of internationalism from within asserts itself against apartheid's efforts to separate out and sever connections in its own historical myth-making.

There are several, contradictory threads to cosmopolitan theory chat reflect ongoing debate on the varying ways to define the local. Is the local, as Craig Calhoun argues, a primary reality or anchor, the only place where a meaningful community can be experienced? And consequently, is the local thus the origin of all ethical identification? For Calhoun an idea (or ideal) of the local must be preserved as an intimate, small scale community (2003, 88). What Calhoun fears is an "attenuated cosmopolitanism" that cannot mobilize people at the grass roots (90). Detractors of cosmopolitanism, such as Timothy Brennan, go further. He has argued that cosmopolitanism is not international, and only nationalism can be the basis for internationalism (2003, 41). The nation is the most meaningful manifestation of the local whether the nation is dominant and repressive, even imperial, or, alternatively liberating and resistant. The contributors to Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, on the other hand, foreground an already developed internationalism that permeates the nation as well as smaller scale communities. Although this internationalism is in place, it is not always fully conscious and needs analysis. This line of thinking stresses that people, economies and cultures, as well as environments and geographies, have achieved a degree of interdependence that is far ahead of the extent of our understanding, and hence cosmopolitanism is a way of theorizing these complex relations and, most importantly, of defining a politics (Cheah and Robbins 1998, 3-4).

To think of the local and the international as overlapping geographies is a useful way of thinking about Gordimer's critique of apartheid South Africa. If we see the "local" as corresponding to the separate identities (white, black, colored, Asian, etc) enforced by apartheid and the separate geographies created to maintain these identities, then Gordimer's thinking reflects a cosmopolitan critique by asserting the historical interconnectedness and the overlapping geographies of all groups. This is not an erasure of difference, but the recovery of shared space. To break down the enforced policy of racial segregation, Gordimer must reach for a universal humanity that is a moral imperative. This humanity is not an abstraction; it is tangible through an understanding of historical interconnectedness. "Cosmopolitics," as Bruce Robbins sees it, "striv(es) toward common norms and mutual translate ability" that is a necessary extension of the program of multiculturalism (Cheah and Robbins 1998, 12-3).Thus, as Amanda Anderson has argued, universality assumes the ability to detach from one's own place and see the humanity of the other: "cosmopolitanism endorses reflective distance from one's cultural affiliations, a broad understanding of other cultures and customs, and a belief in universal humanity" (1998, 267). Furthermore, Anderson states that twentieth-century cosmopolitan detachment is "defined against those parochialisms emanating from extreme allegiances to nation, race, and ethnos" (267).

To dislodge white identity from its self-centeredness, Gordimer deploys various motifs of disorientation where time and place, the cornerstones of realism, are defamiliriazed so as to force Mehring, the protagonist, to reclaim his historical identity more consciously. Mehring's reclamation is a failure; it does not significantly shift his position. Yet in the process, Gordimer rehearses a meditation on the scope of cosmopolitan identity, one that Mehring reaches for but fails to attain, that suggests a way to recommit to universalism from a changed historicism. Mehring may not succeed, but Gordimer hopes the reader will.

It is not enough, however, to look to Mehring for Gordimer's historical argument. Her narrative technique in the novel, which is often discussed by critics as evidence of her modernist aesthetics, enhances the kind of decentering that she has in mind. Her placement of the quotations from Rev. Henry Callaway's The Religious System of the Amazulu (originally published in 1870 but reissued in 1970) in between the chapters that form the main body of her narration places an added burden on the reader to integrate disparate histories across different narrative traditions, suggesting a method of reading that approximates cosmopolitan practice in the real world. The historian of South Africa is situated necessarily across cultures. Callaway's text is not fetis-chised as an authentic voice of Africa, but borrowed from a Zulu belief in translation. (1) It is the imperative of many types of translation, therefore, that underpins Gordimer's cosmopolitanism.

Much like the body of the dead African that stubbornly resurfaces throughout the novel, the quotations from Callaway's text interrupt the surface of the text, prompting the alert reader to seek an explanation of the quotations' relation to the text. But Gordimer provides no hint as to how to do this except in her placement of the quotations, which, as Stephen Clingman has noted, amount to a "collage" or rearrangement of Callaway's text (which is itself a collage of material garnered in interviews) to suit her purposes (1986,163). Through this arrangement of texts, Gordimer creates a horizontality that resists the usual model of reading in depth. To read the novel as a whole, we must relate the disparate parts across the text. The novel, in fact, is obsessed with competing forces of the horizontal and vertical throughout, and this is pivotal to an understanding of Gordimer's ideas of cosmopolitanism. History as a kind of verticality is not complete without an engagement across the horizontal. In apartheid South Africa, where fragmentation reflected a deliberate program of historical distortion, Gordimer insisted on reading horizontally across fragmented space. But history always also demands a verticality into the past; the challenge of the cosmopolitan historian is to integrate the two.

Gordimer's essays and interviews from the 1970s make explicit her commitment to a universal humanity as a weapon against racialism. It is, therefore, not as an internationalist that Gordimer should be seen as cosmopolitan but as a humanist. In her 1971 essay "Speak Out: The Necessity for Protest," which was addressed to white university students, Gordimer sought to redefine the place from which meaningful protest was possible by rejecting a black-white racialist vocabulary and embracing instead a universal humanity. Gordimer writes:

Our fundamental social problem remains daubed crudely black-and-white. But what is needed to approach it honestly now is a change of emphasis. We shall need to see our efforts not so much as attempts to right wrongs on behalf of blacks, as to sec our society free of the lies upon which it is built. The role of the proctor, honourable though it may have seemed, and great courage though it undoubtedly showed in certain individuals at certain times, is one of those lies. If you students are to go speaking out, it will be on behalf of yourselves, and that part of yourselves which exists tangled inextricably in human interdependence with the lives of those you live, among, whether or not on the surface of the skin it's their turn to reject you. (Gordimer 1989, 102; my emphasis)

The rejection Gordimer alludes to at the end of this passage is the exclusionary attitude of black consciousness, which she defends earlier in the essay when she urges white students to learn how to let blacks lead (1989, 101). Gordimer's claim is a direct endorsement of Steve Biko's critique of white liberals. Speaking in January 1971 at the student conference at the Abe Bailey Institute for Inter-Racial Studies, Biko sought to explain how the thinking of white liberals had infected and paralyzed black leadership because, under the guise of non-racialism, white liberals "defined to the black people what the latter should fight for" (2002, 64). Gordimer's appeal to a universal humanity urges both a recommitment to protest (protest she urges, 'not because you are white but because you are human") and a retrenchment from white identity. A recognition of one's commitment to nonracialism is a claiming of self (you are human, not white). In her rejection of the role of the "proctor," Gordimer suggests that whites should follow the lead of black activists and by doing so they will emerge as new historical subjects who are committing to the dismantling of "lies," or in other words to a new historiography. They must decline the kind of outreach that meddles in the agency and subjectivity of others and assume responsibility for the self Part of this responsibility entails a vigilant historicism that critically contextualizes and recontextualizes the meaning of current actions in many repeated and imperfect attempts. Because we are "tangled inextricably in human interdependence," this historicizing task must be performed across cultures setting up the conditions therefore for the emergence of a cosmopolitan subject.

One other dimension of Gordimer s thinking that is crucial to this cosmopolitanism is her particular understanding of South African nationalism. When she states in a 1981 interview about The Conservationist that: "our revolution is happening; our revolution started a long time ago, at least in the sixties, if not in the fifties, and we go from phase to phase inexorably" (Gray 1981, 268-69), she means a national revolution. For Gordimer, South Africa, although a nation-state, is not yet a nation; the overthrow of apartheid is a necessary step in a stymied process of decolonization. Descriptions of landscape in the novel problematize Mehring's relation to his national identity and bring us back to the competing tensions of horizontal and vertical movements: promontory views compete with close-ups of the flooding land to force a rethinking of Mehring's orientation not only to place but to his own subjectivity and humanity. Moreover, Mehring's changing understanding of the land, which is symptomatic of his conservationism, suggests a revised historicism, however incomplete.

1.The Reason of Feeling

Mehring's white privilege lends him the air of a more conventional cosmopolitanism: he travels, speaks many languages, goes to the right parties, and, perhaps most importantly, does not closely identify with his nationality. In Anderson's terms, Mehring's cosmopolitanism represents a "traditional elitism" which is at odds with the "egalitarianism" of more recent formulations of cosmopolitanism (1998, 273). He is neither English nor Boer but of German descent. His family emigrated first to the southwest, to Namibia. Thus Mehring's family history underscores South Africa's larger claims to the region of Southern...

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