ABSTRACT

Social theory and social theorizing about Africa has largely ignored African literature. However, because writers are some of the continent’s finest social thinkers, they have produced – and continue to produce – works which constitute potential sources for the analysis of social thought, and for constructing social theory, in and beyond the continent.

This comprehensive collection examines the relationship between African literature and African social thought. It explores the evolution and aesthetics of social thought in African fiction, and African writers’ conceptions of power and authority, legitimacy, history and modernity, gender and sexuality, culture, epistemology, globalization, and change and continuity in Africa.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.

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The writer as social thinker

ByWale Adebanwi

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It is important, at the outset, to specify that secular spirituality should not be confused with institutional religion. While religion demands a faith-based commitment to an institutionalised set of beliefs, “spirituality is that dimension of our existence which enables us to experience ourselves as part of a greater, sense-making totality” (Prozesky 2006: 132); in other words, an embodied “passion for the well-being of our world here and now” (Prozesky 2006: 136). Further-more, ‘secular spirituality’ is distinct not only from religion, but also from ‘secularism’ (as the latter term is usually employed in positivistic philosophies, or, indeed, in materialist analysis). Here we touch upon a ‘postmodern holism’ that is sweeping through the global collective con-sciousness: a centripetal force not primarily concerned with material acquisition, but attempting to unify various forms of spiritual experience and fulfilment, “whether traditional or modern, theistic, pantheistic or atheistic” (Raman 2005: 3). This secular-spiritual turn, or secular spiritual-ity, is, paradoxically, therefore, “post-religious” (Prozesky 2006: 138), for it attempts to overcome the pernicious dualism of matter and spirit as the mark of conventional religious discourse. It is when perceiving secular behaviours as spiritual (and, vice versa, when perceiving the spiritual as rooted in everyday life) that people today may speak of “a sense of the sacred without allegiance to religious doctrine” (Botha 2006: 100). It is precisely this sense of the sacred in secular contexts, and specifically the sacred as an embodied experience, that is my concern here. Lakoff and Johnson attempt to describe the notion of secular spirituality as “embodied spirituality”, for it “is the body that makes spiritual experience passionate, that brings to it intense desire and pleasure, pain, delight, and remorse. Without all these, spirituality is bland” (1999: 568). Furthermore, Lakoff and Johnson view such an involvement as going beyond the self: “embodied spirituality is more than a spiritual experience. It is an ethical relationship to the physical world” (1999: 566). Embodied/secular spirituality covers various aspects of physicality, ranging from ecology, city life, sickness, to “sports, gay/lesbian and gender issues [including] childbirth, distress, sex” (Kourie 2006: 82; 87). Such understandings of secular spirituality go beyond the Cartesian division between mind/spirit and body, and offer human sexuality a new space of exploration. Current research on sexuality as expression of secular spirituality reveals that what were previously considered to be non-spiritual activities (sport or sex) are now viewed as manifestations of the sacred. Prior and Cusack (2008), for example, analyse “sexual explorations through the lens of secular spirituality”, arguing that today’s “transformed religio-spiritual climate makes it possible to characterise sexual exploration as a spiritual identity quest” (271). These various expressions of the spiritual turn have not escaped literary criticism, and arewell captured in the title of the book, Spiritual Identities: Literature and the Post-Secular Imagination (Carruthers and Tate 2010). But let us pause. Is secular spirituality that new?Not really. If secular spirituality suggests a “modern diffusion of a spiritual impulse that has survived [Modernity’s] disenchantment” (Mousley 2010: 98), its influence can be traced to what Walter Benjamin in the 1930s referred to as profane illumination: a sporadic immanence, or the ‘auratic power’ of ordinary existence. Benjamin’s concept of “weak Messianic power” (1973a: 246) suggests a dif-fused theology: a theology that, unlike Martin Luther King’s unambiguously scriptural, ‘strong’ messianism, has lost its doctrinal grounding and gestures instead towards sporadic glimpses of sacredness within the mundane. The image of the writer/poet as “ragpicker” is Benjamin’s (1973b: 79) favourite metaphor for suggesting the capacity of the literary imagination to retrieve and re-assemble shards of experience; its power to give the shards a fresh, revelatory, ‘auratic’ power; its effort in “salvaging the concealed significance of phenomena from the ‘throw-away’ mentality of consumer capitalism” (Mousley 2010: 107). This conception of ‘weak theology’ has been revived in current critical thinking, in which an investment in ‘presence’ privileges the aesthetic moment. Outside the structures of intellectual meaning-making, the sacred is glimpsed as an affective experience, an ‘embodied meaning’,

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a ‘sacred presencing’. The tendency is to resist “the tradition [of] attribution of meaning [as] core practice of the humanities” (Gumbrecht 2004: 3). Rather, the sacred is captured in epiphany, the significance of which inhabits not moral or ethical intellection, but the symbolic realm of imagi-native recuperation, or that of spiritual secularity. As I have suggested, the potential of secular spirituality finds illumination, unexpectedly, in recent writings byNadine Gordimer, and has provoked JMCoetzee to refer to “a spiritual turn in her thought” (2007: 244–56). What Coetzee does not pursue, but what is a key issue, is whether to a greater or lesser degree the spiritual has always been present, albeit unnoticed, in the socio-political grid through which Gordimer’s anti-apartheid credentials have been interpreted. We might say that the element of the sacral has become increasingly evident in her texts, or that a spiritualising reading, ‘after apartheid’, reveals unexpected hints of what has been present throughout her career. I cannot engage in a re-reading of Gordimer’s entire oeuvre. Instead, I offer a provocation. In identifying a spiritual turn in her work, I am aware that I am applying a spiritualising interpretation. My general turn is from Gordimer’s pre-1990 invocation of large historical events to a more recent reconstitution of a civil imaginary. To sum up the earlier sociopolitical interpretation, writers were to an extent deemed to be ‘written’ by the circumscribing event. Qualifying Marxist materialism with linguistic deconstruction, ideology critique superseded the possibility of affective, or aesthetic, impact. Despite the voices of a revitalised Black Theology, the lit-erary-critical enterprise remained Western-focused in a secularism that had little interest in the spiritual. Gordimer’s own insistence on the personal life as the salient artistic subject was seen to be constrained by the motor force of history. Individuals were typified, so that the subtitle of Stephen Clingman’s influential study was, appropriately to its time, “history from the inside” (Clingman 1984). (For a sociopolitical reading of Gordimer see also Wagner 1994). Gordimer’s more recent novels, in contrast, have favoured subjects who display a marked ‘individual’ autonomy in the explorations of their inner lives. Startingwith her first post-apartheid novel, None to Accompany Me (1994), and continuing in The House Gun (1998), The Pickup (2001), Get A Life (2005) and in her two collections of short stories, Loot (2003) and Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black (2007), her characters show a profound interest in the exploration of potentially freer civil spaces in post-ideological times. They vindicate their individual selves in action and choice: as psychological and spiritual, as well as social, beings. Have I shifted from the text to an interpretative emphasis? Partly. Yet after the demise of large structures of power, one may be more alert than hitherto to the fact that human agency is, almost simul-taneously, both free and constrained. However, the shift does not denote a return to a naı¨ve mimesis of lived experience. At the same time as I shift the interpretative frame, I may note that the Gordimer text in its inner dynamics is itself amenable to a spiritual reading. Yet even as I say this, I am aware that the latest novel, No Time like the Present (2012), might qualify my last observation. I shall return to this novel. The thrust of my argument – towards a secular-spiritual dimension – is worth pursuing and will be illustrated in my reading of The House Gun, to which I now turn. The House Gun (1998) is particularly pertinent to my purpose. A spiritual dimension infuses the text, but has hardly featured in critical commentary.Most commentators utilise the liberation/ resistancemodel of criticism as had its function in the political trauma of the 1970s/1980s. Crime and criminality are seen in this novel as a social blight on contemporary, transitional South African society. But this is not Gordimer’s own focus. The story, in brief, has the son of a liberal, middle-class couple arrested and gaoled for the murder of his female partner’s casual lover, who was also his lover and best friend.

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Given the bare bones of the story, some commentators (e.g. Lenta 2001) have highlighted the legal implications of Gordimer’s stance vis-a`-vis crime and the death penalty; the death penalty having been abolished in themid-1990s, under the new dispensation. Other critics have commen-ted on a major change in Gordimer’s way of handling social issues after the end of apartheid. Clingman, for one, has noticed a more nuanced approach to theme and character through what he refers to as “oscillations” and “triangulations”’ (2000: 149). Such narratological devices, however, do not tempt Clingman to turn away from the social dynamics of the text; he continues to focus on Gordimer’s ‘history from the inside’, any spiritual intimations remaining outside his purview. Be this as it may, most critics agree that The House Gun signals a rupture in Gordimer’s tra-jectory; the novel being a departure from her “earlier [macropolitical] portraits of political resist-ance” (Lewis 1999: 72). Several critics have explored various ‘micropolitical’ connections as linked to gender identity, and particularly to bisexuality. While some (e.g. Fick 1998: 12) have done so in order to criticise the novelist for her incomplete understanding of queer politics, others have gauged a deeper significance. Cheryl Stobie (2007), for example, sees the trope of bisexuality in this novel as organically linked to the realities of social transition: “the variably con-ceived trope of bisexuality is typical of representations of interstitiality which are prevalent in current South African literature” (64). Despite their innovative responses, the above-mentioned critics link the novel centrally to crime and criminality in the new South Africa, whether from a legal, narratological, postmodernist, or gender perspective. The concept of secular spirituality, in whatever formulation, does not enter their arguments. Yet one may detect elements of Benjamin’s weak theology (as mentioned above), which – as several critics have elaborated – views God as a radical stirring prompted by the unconditional call of an A/alterity: “a call rather than a causality; a provocation rather than a determinate entity” (Caputo 2006: 8). The concept prompts one to explore significantmoments of psychologi-cal/spiritual illumination in The House Gun. Crime in the aftermath of apartheid, or criminality bred of poverty, is not the driving force. At the heart of the novel is a private story of murder and loss, of a family (father, mother and son) struggling with the loss of innocence after the son’s crime of passion. Yet even murder, crime and the legal consequences form only the backdrop. The focus is not on the son, Duncan, but on his mother and father. As I briefly suggested, Duncan Lindgard is imprisoned for shooting his own one-time lover, Carl Jespersen, after the latter had sleptwith his girlfriend,Natalie. His imprisonment, however, is not presented as an end stage in his life, but as a spiritual rebirth, death-as-soul-birth. Prison as an ascetic’s cell – in the literary tradition of “prison as metaphysical cell”, a place of profound soul-searching and “transformation of themeaningless into themeaningful” (Davies 1990: 256) – is a well-worn literary motif. Yet it is the first time that Gordimer has used the prison experience as a pretext for exploring deep psychological and spiritual truths. In the 1970s and 1980s – inBurger’s Daughter (1979), for example – she employed the image of the prison in its political dimension. Thus for Rosa Burger (the revolutionary of the 1970s), prison is an inescapable part of the Struggle. Duncan Lindgard, a protagonist of the 1990s, in contrast, lands in prison because of a deeply private act: his murdering his rival is not motivated by any explicit social or political cause. Rather, life is seen as an existential incarceration inwhich imprisonment, whether physical or mental, has the potential to provoke a life-changing process. It is a process that engages all the characters, but mainly the mother and father, with the son Duncan only obliquely present in the story; this is an angle that most critics have ignored. It is only towards the end that Gordimer grants Duncan a voice, his mature, adult voice. He learns how to forgive both lovers who had betrayed him, and also how to forgive himself for his act of murder; or, as Derrida might phrase it, to forgive the unforgivable, for “forgiving, if it is possible, must only come to be as impossible” (Derrida 2007: 449).

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The observation also befits the parents in their confrontation with good and evil, murder and forgiveness. Mother and father – the principal subjects of this novel – attempt to tackle the unfolding drama of their son’s imprisonment from opposing perspectives: Claudia seeks strength in pragmatic solutions; Harald, in Christian faith. Here, we witness Gordimer wrestling with a tension, possibly in herself, between ‘secular’ and ‘spiritual’ humanism in dealing with an extreme situation; in this case, how to be the parent of a murderer. In confronting their past, the parents search for the root causes of their son’s horrific act. This is what Kristeva would call ‘the abject’ (1982: 2): that disturbing sense of fear and loathing for something that is simultaneously outside and inside one’s body/self. Such overwhelming feelings forceDuncan’s parents to reflect on how eachmight have contributed to their son’s predisposition to violence. As they painfully begin to reflect on their parental responsibilities, they traverse a spiritual wilderness. As Imentioned earlier, several critics have remarked on a new indeterminacy in Gordimer’s recent work; however, most have linked their observations to the social realm. My spiritualising reading, in contrast, points this indeterminacy towards the protagonists’ mental processes amidst extreme circumstances. The parents undergo a painful inner journey, which comes to an end upon their having acquired a deeper understanding of their own repressed acts and rigid beliefs. Immersed in the tragedy that has struck the family, they commence a private rite of passage, a stage that Victor Turner would refer to as liminality, or the rite’s second, “betwixt-and-between state” (1974: 233).Harald andClaudia are forced to visit their past alone-together, the previous tri-angle of the family completed nowby the spectre of their imprisoned son. The three form an invis-ible community (communitas of liminal personae), “where the initiand is structurally, if not physically, invisible in terms of his culture’s standard definitions and classifications” (Turner 1974: 232). In the case of Harald and Claudia, it is the culture of middle-class, liberal suburbia. Havingbeen turned into ‘outcasts’ in the eyes of their associates,Harald andClaudia are “shackled together, each solitary, in the inescapable proximity that chafes them” (Gordimer 1998: 102). The intolerably silent containment of dread, however, forces each to burst into painful confes-sion about their particular role in their son’s upbringing. It is as if their “voice [were] paradoxi-cally released through ‘the wound’” (Caruth 1996: 2). They now reproach each other for having glossed overDuncan’s early childhood fears and insecurities. They also come to acknowledge and search for early signs of their son’s bisexual orientation (Gordimer 1998: 121), about which they had been in denial in the past. Fresh revelations about Duncan’s homosexual liaison with theman he had slain – that is, the lover of his girlfriend – transforms this awareness into another “return of dread”, no less devastating than “the dread that came with the pronouncement of the first message [of Duncan’s murder], that night; that Friday” (23). The reference to the particular day of the week when the disaster had struck – a Friday, the day of Jesus’ Crucifixion – is insis-tent throughout the novel. Theirs becomes a truly spiritual journey, especially so in those instances of prolonged conver-sation in which father and mother explicitly confront their divergent views on religion. Gordimer here returns to a theme initiated in None to Accompany Me (1994), where the atheist, Vera, is drawn to the believer, Zeph. Whereas in the earlier novel, Gordimer only hints at this tension between secular and spiritual humanism, in The House Gun (1998) she dedicates whole sections to the issue (e.g. 95–105). Believer and atheist are pushed to the edge; their confrontations test the limits of their divergent beliefs. The spouses’ confessions of secretly held beliefs are ritualisations that verge on the religious in their attempts at making visible (by naming), and thus controlling, the repressed. According to Hervieu-Le´ger in Religion as Chain of Memory, religious belief is a mobilisation ofmemory, “by recalling a past which givesmeaning to the present and contains the future. The practice of anamnesis, of the recalling to memory of the past, is most often observed as a rite” (2000: 125).

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The ritualisation, the recurrence of ‘non-secular’ image and allusion, in summary, moves the novel fromwhatmight have been themore familiar expectations ofGordimer’s fiction: that is, the story of a white, middle-class family, once privileged by the enclosed world of apartheid but now exposed to black lawyers and a predominantly black prison environment. (Interestingly, race is not mentioned in the parents’ visits to the prison.) Hurled into their family drama together, Harald and Claudia develop different ways of speak-ing aboutwhat to themhad been unspeakable: to be the parents of amurderer. By repeating and so ritualising the painful past, they transform the brute experience into a spiritual journey, albeit a harrowing one. We may recall Kristeva, for whom “the powers of horror” that need to be trans-gressed are part of spiritual pursuits and their various rituals of purification (1982: 17). Sites of horror and spiritual pollution are transgressed by being made visible and thus controllable through processes of ritualisation (1982: 17). Harald’s way of ritualising trauma is by sublimating it through his Catholic faith: “He has an inviolable privacy.He is praying” (Gordimer 1998: 27).Although a devout churchgoer, he is not a literalist believer in transcendental powers. Harald’s beliefs could be referred to as secular spiri-tuality, or weak theology: that is, he believes in the power of mindful awareness, “the experience of the divine for oneself [. . .] in contrast with the unthinking pre-digestion of ecclesiastic dogma” (Kourie 2009: 190). In free indirect speech, the narrator presents Harald’s unorthodox views on prayer:

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had brought them together. [. . .] Harald doesn’t pray any more” (Gordimer 1998: 128–9). Although Harald’s ‘dark night of the soul’ evokes Gordimer’s considerable attention, we find hardly a mention of it in commentary on The House Gun. Harald is shown as struggling with the impact of psychological horror through internal dialogues with his God (his ‘talking cure’); horror in its physical manifestation, however, is mostly shown through Claudia’s eyes. As a medical doctor, she is used to the materiality and dread of physical pain, and the couple’s first contact with the prison world is vividly seen, felt and smelt by her: “dread was a drug that came to them not out of something administered from her pharmaco-poeia” (6). On entering the prison, the couple are struck by its hostile, institutional smell: “The very smell of the place was that of a foreign country to which they were deported” (7). Sitting on hard wood, “nothing could be more remote than this present” (8). Claudia at this stage cannot express her horror: being the mother of a murderer, but can only attempt to elim-inate it from her system: “There was no warning; trooping out with all those other people in trouble, part of the anxious and stunned gait, she suddenly felt the clenching of her insides and knew what was going to come. [. . .] [She] ‘[v]omited her heart out’” (10). This is a power-ful picture of physical loathing and abjection. For Kristeva, abjection – as I have indicated – is an expression of profound rejection: the physical loathing of one’s own helplessness in the face of an unspeakable menace to self (1982: 2). Having expressed (purified) her sorrow in this way, Claudia continues to work through her dread of the unknown by translating abstractions into the corporeality of material things. The unpresentability of dread is reflected through gestures of involved presence and attention to physical detail. On seeing her son, now a prisoner, Claudia has an urge to touch him, which he refuses: “his mother’s clasp just catches the ends of his fingers as he goes” (Gordimer 1998: 9). The focus on Duncan’s hands is insistent. Sometimes during visiting hours he “puts out a hand, the hand of a drowning man” (62). Claudia and her son communicate non-verbally; through their bare ‘presencing’, psychological pain is expressed physically, thus being made tolerable. The concept of ‘presence’ – as mentioned earlier – suggests one’s coming to terms with the world outside structures of meaning, via absorption in intimate details of everyday life, beyond the entrapments of language, and uncluttered by metaphysical beliefs or logical interpretation. While Harald sublimates his pain through praying, Claudia attempts literally to come to grips with her own pain. Seeking ‘embodied’ solutions to the ‘unspeakable’ that has ‘polluted’ her existence, she finds meaning in contact with her own body and its vital rhythms: “Claudia was dancing [. . .] an assertion of life. The [. . .] dancers wove about in relation to one another with the unconscious volition of atoms” (174–5). She is letting her visceral wisdom guide her, as she learns to accept this rite of passage to another stage in her life. This is a brief reminder of Heidegger’s concept of ‘being’, as explored in Being and Time (1962): that sense of being pro-foundly, albeit non-rationally, mindful of one’s interconnectedness with other beings/things in the here and now. Simply being and letting things be requires the composure to put language aside: “It [also] means being attentive to the world, allowing the inexplicable, sublime beauty of the ordinary to emerge outside structures of meaning [or] belief” (Ashcroft et al. 2009: 28). Gordimer herself is familiar with the Heideggerian concept of ‘being’, as can be gleaned from her essay collection, Writing and Being, in which she is “look[ing] for the real Home to be attained on the Concealed Side, away from normally lived experience” (1995: 7). Through her intense identification with the here and now, Claudia finds ‘embodied’ solutions to the tragedy that has befallen her family. Such solutions are at their most eloquent with regard to the sexual journey that parallels the more overtly spiritual journey of each protagonist. We note that early in the novel – in the immediate aftermath of their son’s crime – Claudia and Harald have become sexually incapacitated: “It was not possible for them. [. . .] [T]here was a witness,

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from a prison cell, closing her body, making him impotent” (Gordimer 1998: 51). This lack of physical intimacy reflects their divergent psycho-spiritual relationship with the abject, with the ‘unspeakable’. Just as they are unable to articulate to each other their hidden fears, so they are now unable to express themselves intimately. The couple are also unable to overcome their hidden resentment of their son. As a solution, there arises the unshared thought that “[t]here is a need to re-conceive, re-gestate the son” (63). With the thought focalised through Harald’s consciousness, the reader is led to share his percep-tion: for him, to re-gestate the son means to find “a new relationship with his God, the God of the suffering he could not have had access to, before” (279). He is shocked to hear, therefore, that Claudia has harboured an apparently similar, yet utterly dissimilar, desire. Hers is a literalist understanding of re-gestation: “Perhaps we should try for a child. [. . .] I’m not menopausal yet” (279). The sexual trope of re-gestating the son is a pithy concentration of Harald’s and Clau-dia’s joint, yet separate, spiritual journeying through the liminality of extreme emotional uphea-val. While Harald is taming his pain through internal dialogue (a more recognisably ‘spiritual’ path), Claudia is trying to take hold of her pain in a different way: through moments of simple presencing, whether through touch or smell or sex, or by literally trying to conceive another child. These are her private ways of getting a grip on loss and grief. Harald interprets Claudia’s simple statement (“Perhaps we should try for a child”) as an equivalent – albeit, expressed in a different language – of his ownpainful search for solutions. “That she should allowherself to turn to this illusion, a doctor, forty-seven years old [. . .] Hewas tumescent with her pain, hemade love to her anyway, for the impossibility” (279). This moment is a turning point in the couple’s spiritual-cum-sexual journey. As Harald and Claudia open up to the other’s pain, intimacy returns: “It was the first time since the messenger entered the townhouse, and it was unlike any love-making they had experienced in their life together, a ritual neither believed in, performed in bereaved passion” (279). Spirituality is trans-lated into sexuality, and sexuality is allowed to reveal itself as another form of the spiritual: an instance of secular spirituality. Through a gradual self-emptying and self-exceeding, Harald and Claudia, in private ritual, move out of the liminal world of ‘anti-structure’. This is Turner’s stage of re-aggregation (1974: 255), the third stage of any rite of passage, when the initiands are re-integrated in society as changed people.After their son’s trial formurder is over, “[t]herewas a decompression, a collapse of the nerves, a deep breath expelled [. . .] but this coming full circle, as it were, expel-ling the breath of relief ” (274). They emerge out of regression quite suddenly and unexpectedly: “There was no conception for a forty-seven year old. But there is a child” (291). The child in question is the product of the bisexual triangle: Duncan-Natalie-Carl, a childwhose father is uncertain, but whomDuncan from his prison cell wishes to have taken up in the larger family. By juxtaposing the desire for another child – the desire to “re-conceive, re-gestate the son” (63; 279) – with the fact of a surprise ‘grandchild’, Gordimer strongly suggests that, after having gone through the purgatory of self-examination and forgiveness, sexuality can be sublimated; the need to give affection can be opened up to embrace radical difference. Harald and Claudia are now prepared to support Nata-lie’s child, whether their own son or Carl is the father, for “children belong, never mind any doubts about their origin, in the family” (290). Such sentiments are handed to them by Khulu, Duncan’s African friend. By reaching out to the child, the couple succeed in sublimating their primary sexuality, a climactic moment on their spiritual journey. At the same time, they manage to go beyond their unquestioned prejudices regarding bisexual relationships, thus healing their relationship with their own son.

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The couple’s spiritual journey is paralleled by the son’s journey. In the remote location of his prison cell, Duncan too has undergone an inner transformation. He is now able to integrate the previous conflicts of his bisexuality. By taking responsibility for previously separate mind-states, he is able in his mind to go beyond the tragedy of the murder. His new-found emotional independence, which he has gained through the suffering of self-examination and remorse, sen-sitises him to the ‘grace’ that, according to Simone Weil, exposes us to a profound awareness of our vulnerabilities (1974: 88). It is from the fertile ground of this kind of grace that, in TheHouse Gun, reconciliation becomes possible: parents forgive each other and their son; son forgives lovers and himself, and – in both real and symbolic culmination – he convinces his parents to help raise Natalie’s child, the child of the bisexual triangle: “It does not matter whether or not anyone else will understand: Carl, Natalie/Nastasya and me, the three of us. I’ve had to find a way to bring death and life together” (1998: 294; my emphasis). In this way The House Gun sublimates the horror of the ‘unpresentable’ through soul-search-ing and remorseful reparation. Duncan and his parents regain control of their lives: the spiritual in the secular gives to each the insights and quiet strength of sympathetic responsiveness towards those unlike one’s self, even when bound by the conventions of family. As I have suggested, The House Gun (1998) both reflects the author’s invocation of the spiri-tual and lends itself to a spiritualising re-reading. I return to my earlier question as to whether the spiritual is a new preoccupation forGordimer orwhether it is symptomatic of our reading through a new interpretative frame. The question – I hope to have shown – is not reducible to either/or; it may be applied with value, nonetheless, to Gordimer’s other more recent works. There are certainly ‘gleams of transcendence’ in None to Accompany Me (1994), a novel depicting a gradual stripping of old selves, which have become a burden in Vera Stark’s quest to redefine a role for herself. What is noteworthy is that the new role pertains not only to the new South Africa, but also to the new stage of her private life: a stage of material disinvestment (Vera leaves behind a suburban life-style, to live in a garden annexe), while her focus turns to intimations of spiritual presencing. Vera’s process of material disinvestment includes – after a life-time of intense social and sexual involvement – her embarking on a close, Platonic relation-ship with Zeph Rapulana, the man on whose property she now lives as a tenant. In The Pickup (2001), too, Gordimer takes us on a journey of inner discovery. This is a story of emigration from South Africa with the protagonist, Julie Summers, overcoming the confinements of old boundaries as she attempts to start a new life in a faraway North African country. The nameless desert is presented as a place of spiritual communion and life-changing epiphanies. The desert grows into a real presence for Julie, and gradually comes to replace the increasingly sterile (although sexually satisfying) relationship with her husband, Abdu. In Get a Life (2005) Gordimer also seeks to find moments of epiphanic insight into the con-cealed significance of phenomena salvaged from the neglected spaces of everyday living. The novel tells the unexceptional life-story of aman, PaulBannerman,who is forced by a life-threaten-ing disease to undergo a private review of feelings of insignificance, both private and public, feel-ings that takehim throughacts ofanamnesis.BothPaul andJuliehave intenseglimpsesofmeaning and purpose amid the everyday scramble for survival.While Julie communeswith the desert, Paul retreats to the family garden as a place that facilitates his life-changing spiritual introspection. Paul thusmanages to regain his health, and later, the sexual intimacywith hiswife; the novel concludes, symbolically, with the birth of a son. These new socio-psychic spaces – the desert, the garden – functionas formsof sacredspace in theKristevansense: ascontainersof “themysteryofemergence of meaning” (Kristeva and Clement 2001: 13). Yet this “mystery of emergence of meaning” can hardly be granted to Gordimer’s most recent novel,NoTime like the Present (2012).With the characters rarely going deeper into their personal

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lives than perplexities and anger aboutwhat has befallen a once idealistic liberation culture, Steve – awhitemanmarried to anAfricanwoman, both being ex-struggle participants – grasps at sex in a one-night stand while at a conference in England, and discussion remains at the level of news-paper reportage on the end of political idealism. If spirituality is present, it is by an inversion of presencing: the time of the present in South Africa suggests a spiritual wasteland! But, then, the journeys in Gordimer’s fiction from the public to the private, or, indeed – as in The House Gun – to integrate sexuality with spirituality, have not been without their own struggles. The artist, Gordimer might say, does not avoid complexity. For Nadine Gordimer, as for all of us, to touch the spiritual amid themateriality of life is an ongoing and testing experience. Benjamin’s metaphor, after all, was that of a ragpicker! References

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African being and cultural project

ByLeonard Stone

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