|
COPYRIGHT 2007 Indiana University Press
ABSTRACT
When read in what were perhaps South Africa's darkest decades, the 1970s and 1980s, Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist seemed to be a rather apocalyptic novel. But the fear-stricken, history-bound protagonist who walks right into his own trap shows only one side of reality. The other side is referred to by his two antagonists who are-as a dead man who has yet to be buried and a woman becoming a diviner-both in the middle of an existential transformation; a rite of passage that implies not only change, but also the temporary acceptance of phenomenological chaos, before a new order can be formulated. Gordimer seems to hold the (future) reader responsible for completing the rite of passage: identity and destiny of the characters will eventually depend on the viewpoint and intertextual input of the reader.
Since South Africa has become fully postcolonial, the "problems of transmuting time into space, with the present struggling out of the past" (Ashcroft et al. 36) can finally be dealt with. Now that Apartheid's authoritarianism has ended, hidden perceptions and conversations people have had about meaning, power, and politics are being revealed, and they ask for new interpretations of historical and literary encounters. New facts and insights have inspired several researchers in history and literature to cautiously model new realities .2 These, however, more than ever turn out to be ambiguous. "How [...] do we write," Clifton Crais asked himself recently, "of 'the contact zone between African and western conceptions, perceptions and practices of power and authority?" In crosscultural encounters there is, he continues, "speech and communication and translation [...], but there is also, and very often simultaneously, misapprehension and misunderstanding" (Crais 6).
This exposed complexity and ambiguity of reality is mirrored in the reception of literature. Much has already been written about Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist (1974). Every few years it has been thoroughly reread and reinterpreted. Where Stephen Clingman and Judie Newman highlighted its portrayal of the unbridgeable gap between black and white, Lars Engle was the first to suggest that it also pointed to similarities. By making use of recent studies like David Chidester's work on comparative religion in South Africa, Crais's book on magic and politics, and Jean and John Comaroff's studies on colonial history, I will try to show here that The Conservationist is in fact doing two things at once. It reveals, firstly, the stalemate of the time, embedded as it was in inevitable inter-textual repetition of myth-while its writer was just as inevitable sharing its blindness. Simultaneously, however, it offers a way out, not by foretelling a political revolution or presenting a new social system, but by suggesting to the reader a method to free him or herself from the confines of the social and political reality-the confines, moreover, of reality as a text. The protagonist, fixed in his frame of reference and restricted by the author's text, seems to have failed to free himself, but in some future he, or the reader, might still do it.
The fact that throughout The Conservationist an anonymous black man lies shallowly buried on the riverbank of Mehring's farm is crucial for this interpretation. His uncanny presence changes Mehring. His crowded city life of money, success and superficial social life is beginning to repel him and, whenever he can spare a moment, he will take refuge on the farm. He likes to be alone, in the vlei, a stretch of low, sometimes swampy land near the river that is green and moist when everything else has turned yellow. Whenever he is there, he is always slightly aware of the shallow grave. To Mehring the dead man sometimes is a close friend; at other times he is like an enemy, dragging him down with him. But however shocked Mehring occasionally might flee from the vlei after some uncanny experience, the fascination remains, and he always returns, until finally, after a rainstorm, the corpse has turned up again with the flood. Mehring panics and leaves. The body receives a proper funeral.
The peculiar thing in this novel is that Mehring, as a central character, hardly acts. (3) Very few things happen to him. In fact, the reader learns little more about him than his memories, observations, thoughts, and movements. Instead of acting, he is always moving: from Johannesburg to his farm, and back, and from the farmhouse to the vlei, and back. His repetitive walks between farmhouse and vlei are particularly puzzling. What is he looking for, and why there? On the other hand, every crucial event in the novel happens anonymously. A man has been killed; the body has been hidden; it was "dis-covered" and buried. Neither killer nor victim is identified. Who did it? And why? And what is the relationship between victim / killer and the protagonist? As far as we know, Mehring has not caused any of the events, nor do the events bring any actual change to Mehring's situation. And yet, near the end of the novel, Mehring has changed from a rational, controlled, rather cynical man into someone who is close to losing his mind. What has happened?
As Stephen Clingman has observed before, part of the ominous meaning of this novel is generated not because of what is happening, but of what might happen (Clingman 167). A (doom) scenario unfolds itself mainly in the interplay between Mehring's observations while moving between city, farm house, and vlei and the reader's intertextual baggage. Most of The Conservationist's text is being focalized by Mehring. Looking closely at his observations of the vlei and the farm, it turns out that the space he is moving in, is mostly intertextual and often mythical space. Historical, Biblical, and Zulu myths are all part of the discourse of this focalization, a discourse that frames both Mehring's observations and the reader's interpretations 4 And since these myths all have their own dynamics, his mere being in the vlei and at the farm seems to determine what Mehring's story (or stories) will be like, and what his final destiny (or destinies) will be.
In this context, myth is defined as a story that aims to explain and often justify and prolong existing social and geographical boundaries. As Roland Barthes has said: -Myth has the task of giving historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal" (142). But myth is also alive and always changing; it is "not only a coding device in which important information is conveyed, on the basis of which actors can then construct society. It is also a discursive act through which actors evoke the sentiments out of which society is actively constructed" (Lincoln, Discourse 25). Therefore, myths can also be "effective instruments of struggle" (7). Either way, myth is a tool for the (re)construction of society; and a highly important tool in a time when fundamental changes threaten to undermine the...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
