Gordimer's Marxism

A GOOD novelist is also a social historian; the operative word there is also. Like all good writers are, and have always been, Nadine Gordimer has been concerned with the individual costs of the events she describes. Because she has had a long career and has been prolific, producing to date over 12 novels and 10 collections of short stories, her writing creates a kind of a record of South African history in the 40 years of apartheid rule. You could turn to historians and even primary sources like newspapers and letters, yet it would be hard to find a more direct experience of the times through which South Africa has passed than in the intimate portrayals Gordimer has given us, particularly in her classic, Burger's Daughter. In discussing the novel, Gordimer drew an example from Russian literature.

"If you want to read the facts of the retreat from Moscow in 1812, you may read a history book, if you want to know what war is like and how people of a certain time and background dealt with it as their personal situation, you must read War and Peace." This is precisely what Gordimer has done in Burger's Daughter - taken an imaginative leap beyond formal records. The novel is a work of historical consciousness, of a history as a sense of the past. It is an investigation of Lionel Burger, Rosa Burger's father. For, both positively and negatively, Rosa's career is measured in relation to that of her father's; and her father was a man with a significant, though fictional, personal history. Born as an Afrikaneer of Staunch nationalist stock, Lionel Burger has "betrayed" his people by becoming a member of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) in the late 1920s. Involved in the ideological swings of the party at that time and in the decade following, and in the campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s, Burger had remained a member of the central committee when the party dissolved itself in the face of the Suppression of Communism Act and went underground.

Captured in the mid-1960s and sentenced to life imprisonment, he died in the early 1970s. His fictional career has, therefore, coincided with most of the major developments in the revolutionary opposition in South Africa in the 20th Century. So the figure of Burger acts as a bridge in the novel between fact and fiction, past and present, as the methods of the novelist and a more orthodox historian coincide.

We begin, as we must, with Lionel Burger who dominates the novel. He dominates because Rosa Burger cannot help thinking of him and measures what she does by his example. Lionel is both an activist and a patriarch, a sower of the seeds of disorder and a stable centre around which numbers of people gather to discover where they are to go. He is, or seems to be, that most tiresome of radicals: a genuinely good man who believes in what he is doing and forgives even those who betray him. We have virtually no sense of him outside Rosa's memories and reflections but we accept without hesitation that he was what his daughter says. Had Lionel chosen differently he would have made a first-class prime minister.

What Lionel does, in effect, is to insist that South African Blacks and Whites together make a revolution based, apparently, not on terrorist activities but on strikes, fellowship meetings, and an open refusal to accept the colour bar. The image we get of him is of a kindly patriarch, cooking barbecues over an open fire and serving them to a collection of Black and White radicals, their sprawling families, and a number of fellow-travellers. Or, seeing him in a courtroom or a soap-box, eloquently attacking feudal social forms and capitalist exploitation. He is almost too good, too right, to be true for the cut and thrust of revolutionary politics that has never been a picnic party. But the images are moving and believable because of the freshness with which they are presented. "The South African communists of Lionel's generation made a communism for 'local conditions". The political activities and attitudes of that house came from the inside outwards. Not ideological purity and narrow-mindedness but character made Lionel the man he was and moved others to follow his lead."

Although Lionel Burger dominates the novel, it is not about him but his daughter, Rosa. It is through Rosa that Gordimer examines the predicament facing the inheritor of a revolutionary tradition in the context of South Africa in the 1970s - or for that matter elsewhere. The basic theme of the novel is the whole idea of political or historical commitment and how they can be carried through. In an interview Gordimer gave in 1979 soon after the publication of the novel, she said: "You can say on the face of it, Burger's Daughter is about White communists. But to me it is about something else. It is about commitment. Commitment is not merely a political thing. It is part of the whole ontological problem of life. It is part of my feeling that what a writer does is to try to make sense of life ... It is seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvellous profligate character of life ...".

Of course, it is a political novel but it is politics as it affects the personalities of people under extreme political pressure. "I am dealing with people who are changed and shaped by politics," she said. So, the actual circumstances of South African politics have much to do with Rosa's evolution. Two crucial events - Soweto and Sharpeville - changed her, the first, dating from March 1960 occurred when Rosa was just 12. The demonstrations mounted on that occasion and the carnage that followed had a great impact on the Burger family though Rosa recalled "she did not understand what it meant."

Though Soweto and Sharpeville are merely incidental to the main narrative and more a point of reference than an actual topic or crux, it is part of the air that Burger breathes. It is a vivid proof of the rottenness of the system and the necessity for change. It also gives rise to the Black Consciousness movement with its militant overtones. There is now a clear divide between radical Whites and Black Consciousness' activists as explained by one of its members.

"He does not live Black, what does he know what a Black man needs? True, a white man may, like Lionel, go to jail to protest against the treatment of Blacks but he goes for his ideas about me. I go for my ideas about myself ... To speak of common goals is nonsense in a country where the white rule not as a 'ruling class' but as a 'colour'. In fact, to fight for equality with Whites is to accept the Marxist reading of class conflict and to ignore the primary fact of South African society which is colour." Class analyses that was discussed in the study sessions are dismissed by Black radicals now.

"This and this should happen because of that and that. These theories do not fit us. We are not interested. You have been talking this shit before I was born."

The movement begins to splinter but the political message of Soweto is brought home to Rosa by an incident that drives her out of South Africa. During one day, on an unmapped road, she sees an old Black man brutally beating the donkey pulling his cart.

As she watches, frozen in the seat of her car, she sees that "the infliction of pain (has) broken away from the will that creates it... torture without the torturer, rampage, pure cruelty gone beyond control of the humans who have spent thousands of years devising it". and this spectacle of pain and the infinite pointless suffering calls to her mind "the camps, concentration, labour, resettlement, the Siberias of sun or snow, (the lives of South African revolutionaries) gull-picked on the island, Lionel propped wasting to his skull between two warders," and so on. But though Rosa sees the horror of this punishment inflicted on this dumb beast there is noting she can do about it.

So she goes away to a comfortable European setting to live among persons for whom politics is an occasional topic of conversation rather than a matter of life and death. The contrast between a turbulent South Africa and a laid-back France is stark. Nothing really matters in the abundance of affluence. She comes across Parisian hippies "drinking wine in the clothes of guerillas surviving in the bush on a cup of water". The effects of the juxtaposition between South Africa and France and the sheer hypocrisy of it all, was to send her back home.

Rosa again becomes "Burger's daughter" at the end of the novel, accepting her family identity and linking up with her father's tradition. She does not become politically re-engaged in exactly the same terms as her father - for her the fact of suffering is paramount rather than any question of ideology:

I don't know the ideology. 

It's about suffering.
How to end suffering.
Pure and simple, Marxist humanism.

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