The Power Of a Well-Told Tale

By PAUL GRAY and BRUCE W. NELAN Nadine Gordimer

Last week Nadine Gordimer, 67, became the first woman in 25 years to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The announcement of the award pleased readers and critics of her 20 volumes of fiction, including 10 novels, and prompted an interesting response in South Africa, where she was born, where she has lived all of her life, and where three of her books were once officially banned. President F.W. de Klerk congratulated Gordimer for what he termed "this exceptional achievement, which is also an honor to South Africa."

Such praise from a South African head of state would, not so long ago, have been unthinkable. For nearly 40 years, Gordimer has spoken out against apartheid, that crazy quilt of laws and restrictions that enabled the white minority to control and suppress the country's black majority. She has done so in her fiction, although subtly and without tub thumping; she portrays the strains of racial divisiveness and oppression by monitoring their effect on individual characters, recognizable lives. As a private citizen, Gordimer has often engaged in more direct opposition to her government's policies.

Although she dislikes having her novels and story collections considered as political statements, Gordimer acknowledges that the scene of most of her fiction -- South Africa -- made politics a subject she could not ignore. On tour in the U.S. when she received word of her award, the author talked to about her writing and the dramatic changes now occurring in her native land.

Q. As a writer, you inherited a vivid subject in South Africa. Has it sometimes seemed as much a burden as a blessing?

A. No. I think you're thinking of my subject as Apartheid, capital A. That's not my subject. My subject has been living in that country and the people who live there.

Q. Literature can change individuals. But do you think your books, or anyone's books, have had an impact on the public changes now under way in South Africa?

A. I think that our books have influenced the understanding of people outside South Africa. This can't be done in daily newscasts. There you get the peek, you get the riots, you get the extreme situation. And then the TV turns to the next event. Whereas the fiction writer invents, from his or her own observation, the experience that led up to that moment of crisis and, then, what's going to happen to these people afterward. That's what fiction deals with: how people's lives are affected permanently.

Q. Are you concerned that the literate public is actually shrinking because of things like television and other distractions?

A. Well, I think there is a curious paradox in South Africa. We've had television for only about 12 years now, which is really very short compared with the rest of the world. But, of course, it is the most powerful medium in the world, and you'll find in South Africa now television aerials sticking up from shacks in the poorest black townships. In that context, books would come low down on the list of priorities. On the other hand, because there are many people who really are not book literate, there is an immense hunger. There are so many very intelligent young people who would like to be not only more equipped to read but would like the opportunity to do so. You must remember that libraries have only recently been desegregated. I think that there's a great big crowd waiting out there to read popular entertaining books in African languages. The opportunities for publishing and distributing them truly don't exist yet in South Africa.

Q. How do you see your role as a white artist in what will someday soon be a society governed by blacks?

A. I think that I have two roles -- that sounds a bit schizophrenic, but I'm convinced I have them. I don't think that a writer like myself, an imaginative writer, should put whatever talent he or she has at the service of a revolution, no matter how much you believe in it yourself. And I believe passionately in it. But I think that if you distort whatever little talent you've been given, that's wrong, because talent is the one thing you have and it should be used faithfully in dealing with the world around you.

In practical terms, this means that because I am a member of the African National Congress I must not then in my fiction suggest that everything members of that organization do is right or that there's never any dissension. In My Son's Story, my latest novel, there's a lot of jealousy and strife portrayed among characters who are supposed to be in a branch of the ANC, and they are portrayed because these are the realities of life.

Q. You're saying, then, that an unflattering truth is preferable to the cosmetic distortion?

A. Yes, of course. I have been privileged enough to know people who are real heroes; there're not many left in the world, but there are some. The ones I've known aren't perfect human beings. They're immensely brave, brave beyond any dreams that I or perhaps you could ever have, and their view of life is so incredibly self-sacrificing. But they are not always saints in their love life, in their life as parents or as children of parents, or even in the friendships of normal life. In other words, they are human and full of faults, and I think that doesn't make the political intensity any less or the heroism any less.

Q. As you say, you have joined the ANC. Is it possible for you to separate that particular action from your artistic life?

A. Yes, because in my commitment and in my heart I have for many years virtually belonged to the ANC; this has been my allegiance. Now it's a matter of carrying a card. I finally joined because this is the first political organization or party that I wanted to identify with. From a personal view, as a human being and citizen, it's very nice to feel at last that there's something that I can belong to.

But this has nothing to do with my writing. If I have resisted so far any pressures to use my fiction as propaganda, I'm certainly not going to start now.

Q. How do you feel about the current progress in South Africa? Is it going well?

A. There are tremendous problems, but I don't think that Nelson Mandela or the ANC has been deflected from the course to be followed.

I am constantly staggered by Nelson. He's an amazing phenomenon; we really didn't think he was ever going to come out of that prison alive. When he did come out, we went through that period of tremendous euphoria, which I think people certainly deserved after all those years of frustration. But for myself and many others, we couldn't be naive enough to imagine that all was going to go smoothly. And obviously, so far, it hasn't.

Q. In spite of that, do you remain hopeful about the way things are going?

A. Oh, absolutely. I really feel that what has happened so far cannot ever be put back; it is irreversible. That does not mean that the white regime will not try to stall as long as possible. But having gone so far already, I simply cannot see how this process can be arrested or turned back. The sad thing is that, in order to bring it to its conclusion, more trouble may lie ahead.

Q. Do you think that these dramatic changes that are currently taking place in South Africa will alter what you do or the literature that is now coming out of your country?

A. I don't think it'll change what I'm doing or what other writers are doing. But the things we see and write about, which have always been complex in my country, are going to be even more complex. I've already noticed that there's a strange feeling of being lost in a new milieu. Maybe a person has great expectations of getting out of a ghetto and then, once free of it, experiences the sense of not belonging somewhere. As we move away from race, we are beginning to see how strong the factor of social class can be.

Q. In your fiction you have written from inside the consciousness of characters who are male, female, white, black. Increasingly, members of specific genders or races are objecting to being portrayed by those who come from outside their groups. How do you feel about this?

A. I think such complaints arise out of a kind of astonishment, a puzzled feeling, about what writers do. Whatever writers write, they are always inventing personalities, unless they are writing an autobiography. What about James Joyce's Molly Bloom soliloquy in Ulysses? Here's a man who described the most intimate feelings of a woman; in my opinion, none of us, none of the women, have ever approached this. We have to grant that it's just an extraordinary, inexplicable faculty that writers have if they're any good. I really appeal to people and say, if they appreciate literature at all, they should take such imaginative extensions as a gift of insight that writers are trying to pass on to other people.

Q. Will the Nobel Prize change anything for you?

A. No, not really. I suppose this will die down. In a few days there'll be some other sensation, and I'll go home to South Africa and start writing again in peace.