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

Why, the municipal library; and I could use the library because I was white—and so for me that also was part of the middle-classexperience. No black could use that library; in the concommitance of class and colour a young black person of my age was thus doubly excluded from ‘reading’ Proust’s Meseglise and the Guermantes Ways: by lack of any community of cultural background, and by racist material conditions . . .
    Hermeneutic differences between writer and reader are still extreme in our world, despite the advance in technological communications. There is a layer of common culture spread thin over the worlds, first, second, and third, by satellite and cassette. The writer could count on the ‘signifier’ ‘Dallas’ or ‘Rambo’ to be received correctly and fully by any reader from Iceland to Zimbabwe, and almost any other points on the map culturally remote from one another. But the breadth of this potential readership paradoxically limits the writer; producing, it would seem, something close to the generic reader, it confines the writer to a sort of primer of culture, if he expects truly to be ‘read’. It excludes signifiers that cannot be spelt out in that ABC. The writer’s expectations of readership have diminished in inverse proportion to the expansion of technological communications.
    And the effect of extreme differences in material conditions between writer and reader remains decisive. Such differences affect profoundly the imagery, the relativity of values, the referential interpretation of events between the cultural givens of most writers and, for example, the new class of industrial workers, emancipated by the surplus value of leisure earned first by mechanisation and then computerisation. Writers, longing to be ‘read’ by anyone who reads them, from time to time attempt to overcome this in various and curious ways. John Berger has experimented by going to live among peasants, trying to enter into their life-view as formed by their experience. He writes about their lives in a mode that signifies for us, who are notFrench peasants; we ‘read’ him with all our experience we share with him of literary exoticism, of life-as-literature providing the necessary layers of references. He doesn’t say whether the peasants read what he writes; but remarks that they are aware that he has access to something they don’t have, ‘another body of knowledge, a knowledge of the surrounding but distant world’. A recent review of one of Bobbie Ann Mason’s books sums up the general problem: ‘She writes the kind of fiction her characters would never read.’
    In South Africa there has been demonstrated recently an ostensibly wider potential readership for writers within our population of 29 million, only five million of whom are white. Politically motivated, in the recognition that the encouragement of literature is part of liberation, trade unions and community groups among the black population have set up makeshift libraries and cultural debate. Now, I do not believe that one should ever underestimate the powers of comprehension of anyone who is literate. I don’t believe anyone should be written down to. (Had I been confined in this way I certainly never would have become a writer.) Once the love of literature ignites, it can consume many obstacles to understanding. The vocabulary grows in proportion to the skills of the writer in providing imaginative leaps. But these must
land
somewhere recognizable; and most writers share no givens with the kind of potential readership I have just described.
    In Africa and many places elsewhere, John Updike’s beautifully-written genre stories of preoccupation with divorces and adulteries could touch off no referential responses in readers for whom sexual and family life are determined by circumstances of law and conflict that have no referents in the professional class of suburban