Writing against the law: Nadine Gordimer's fiction (South Africa)

A native and life-long resident of South Africa, Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923) writes fiction unusually responsive to her own place and time. This dissertation chronologically considers the novels and stories by Gordimer published between 1952 and 1991.; The title phrase “writing against the law” reminds readers of apartheid South Africa's censorship laws. (Several of Gordimer's novels were banned.) The phrase refers as well to the content of Gordimer's apartheid-era fiction. Nearly all the major characters in the novels (and many characters in the stories) position themselves against the law. For some characters, the law is convention (or conformity). But for most, the law against which they live and act is the law that classifies each South African by the color of his skin or the texture of her hair and seeks to separate each from the other.; Beyond the facts of censorship and banning, beyond the stories of characters who are oppressed or restricted by apartheid law or whose lives are defined by their opposition to it, I argue that Gordimer's most interesting, original, and effective efforts to write against the law have to do with choices she makes about narrative form, voice, and perspective.; Gordimer's first three novels (conventional in form) attempt narrative authority even while they seek liberation from the constraints of convention and repressive law. But beginning with The Late Bourgeois World, Gordimer opens her novels to an increasing range of voices and perspectives and resists imposing closure on text. I suggest the real power of Gordimer's fiction (particularly the major novels from A Guest of Honour through A Sport of Nature) lies not in the characters' ideological commitments, but in Gordimer's attempts to write against authoritative discourse, the discourse of the apartheid canon.; The dissertation thus explores the ways Gordimer produces textually what she promotes politically: discourse fully open to all who wish to join it, freed of constraint, freed of convention, free to speak against the law.