Living in Hope and History by Nadine Gordimer Read Free Book Online Page A

of life, languages. Citizenship of the world is merely another acculturation, with its set of givens that may derive from many cultures yet in combination becomes something that is not any of them.
    Posing to himself the big question, Tor whom do we write?’, Italo Calvino wrote: ‘Given the division of the world into a capitalist camp, an imperialist camp and a revolutionary camp, whom is the writer writing for?’
    While—if he has any sense—refusing to write for any camp, despite personal political loyalties (and I think there are more of them than Calvino allows), the writer certainly writes from
within
one of them. And the reader reads from
within
one. If it is not the same as that of the writer, he is presumed at least to ‘read’ in the writer’s signifiers some relevance to his own, different cultural matrix. But frequently the reader does not find equivalents, in that culture, for the writer’s referential range, because he has not ‘read’ that range. He cannot. The signifying image, word, flashes a message that cannot be received by a different set of preconceptions. This happens even at apparently homogenous cultural levels. In reviews of your fiction and the interviews to which you are subjected, this process can hatch in your text like a cuckoo’s egg. What comes out is unrecognizable, but the reader, the reviewer, journalist, insists that it is yours.
    I experienced this when I came to the United States for the publication of a novel of mine entitled
Burger’s Daughter
. The daughter and other characters in the story were centred round the personality of Lionel Burger, exemplifying the phenomenon—and problem—of ideology as faith in the family of an Afrikaner who, through becoming a Communist, devotes his life and theirs to the liberation of South Africa from apartheid. In reviews, Burger was unfailingly referred to as a liberal; I myself perpetrated the unthinkable lack of deference to a famous talk-show personality when I contradicted his description of Burger as a noble white liberal.
    He’s not a liberal, he’s a Communist, I interrupted.
    But it was no good. None of these people ‘read’ me because in the ethos of mainstream American society a Communist could never be, no matter in what country or social circumstances, a good man. Yet it had to be acknowledged that Burger was a good man because he was a fighter against racism; therefore my signal must be that Burger was a liberal. This is not a matter of misreading or misunderstanding. It is the substitution of one set of values for another,
because the reader cannot conceive of these otherwise
.
    Yet not politics but class most calls into question the existence of the generic reader, the ‘whoever reads me’. And by class I mean to signify economics, education, and, above all, living conditions. The cultural context from laws to latrines, from penthouse to poorhouse, travelled by jet or on foot.
    I grant that the difference between the material conditions of life signified in the text and those of the reader must be extreme, and manifest in the dogged daily experience of the reader, if the writer cannot be ‘read’ by him. As the seventeen-year-old daughter of a shopkeeper in a small mining town in Africa, I was able to ‘read’
The Remembrance of Things Past
. Why? Because, although the lineage Proust invented, so faithful to that of the French noblesse, genuine and parvenue, could not signify for me, the familial mores from which the novel sets out, so to speak, and are there throughout—the way emotions are expressed in behaviour between mother and child, the place of friendship in social relations, the exaltation of sexuality as romantic love, the regulation of daily life by meals and visits, the importance of maladies—all this was within the context of middle-class experience, however far-flung.
    And by the way, from where did I get the book?