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 Qualifying Marxist materialism with linguistic deconstruction, ideology critique superseded the possibility of affective, or aesthetic, impact.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.

DOI link for 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.

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.