Drawing "Lines Of Flight" Through "Becoming" A Deleuze-Guattarian Reading Of Nadine Gordimer's Characters

Nadine Gordimer is a South Africa writer who was not only a laureate of the 1991 Nobel Prize in literature,but also an anti-apartheid activist devoting her lifetime to the country where she spent most of her time and to the people she lived with.She restages South Africa in apartheid and post-apartheid from the lenses of individuals.Following her forerunner James Joyce,Gordimer makes many of her novels psychological documentaries of an individual's transformative trajectory from a conformer to a revolutionary.This self-transformation is not random but inevitable in their contacts with blacks,or in Deleuze's words,constant associations with the other skin usher characters into the course of becoming-black.Though copious research on Gordimer's writing has been conducted by scholars,the unconsciousness where becoming comes into play draws rather little academic attention.Therefore,the theory of schizoanalysis proposed by Deleuze and Guattari,which emphasizes the immanent potential of the body to withdraw from established subjectivity and construct a more flexible one through becoming,is employed to investigate Gordimer's three works:The Conservationist(1974),My Son's Story(1990)and None to Accompany Me(1994).Mapping the changing mentalities in racial encounters,this thesis intends to examine what kind of responsive individual is required to live through turbulent Africa and how an individual breaks with his accustomed subjectivity through becoming,though some transformations are one-off and transitory whereas others are constant,to better fit in South Africa.Racial issue has,as always,been confined to the boundary of dichotomy:blacks are either like their white masters or different from them.Becoming,however,offers a feasible approach to tackle this issue outside the framework of duality.Deleuze indicates both whites and nonwhites should enter into the course of becoming-black and re-configurate the established subjectivity,in which way they are transformed into new creatures undefinable in traditional sense and deviants incomprehensible to others.This is not only to decenter the whiteness but also to deconstruct the long-established black identity.The listed novels depicts three types of individuals:the paranoid defender for the apartheid system Mehring who refuses to change in The Conservationist,the non-conformer Sonny who has transformed into a black activist but is still white in heart in My Son's Story;the post-racial cooperator of black movement Vera in None to Accompany Me.Mehring,for fear of black retaliation,is instantly pulled back to the accustomed subjectivity after transitory becoming.Sonny,having transformed from a conformer to a revolutionary through becoming-black,still resorts to his white lover for political recognition.Therefore,the transethnic eroticism as such,which is their identity exploitation to invigorate involvement in politics,only reinforces the current social structure and corrupts people within.Vera,through constant self-transformations to her changeable perceptions of post-apartheid reality,finally reaches the common ground with blacks:moving beyond ancestral evildoing and committing to liberation movement as a political cooperator,a relation transcending both race and sex.Thus,each individual,with his or her potential of self-deterritorialization through becoming,can open himself to transformations and thus better fit in African reality.When in constant becoming,an individual is also decentered and introduced into himself diversity of others,which makes unworkable skin color as the defining characteristic in judging people.This thesis is divided into five chapters.Chapter One briefly introduces Nadine Gordimer and her writings,sketches out the literary criticism,brings forward the research questions and the theory of schizoanalysis.Chapter Two probes into The Conservationist and explores reasons behind the fact that both the white and colored are dehumanized by the apartheid nonetheless paralyzed to change the status quo.Chapter Three offers a reading of My Son's Story,in which Sonny,though deterritorialized,is reterritorialized by his white supremacism.Chapter Four brings to light how Vera in None to Accompany Me,uproots the impositions through constant derritorialization,and finally draws her lines of flight.Chapter Five concludes that each individual,through becoming-black,is decentered and diversified,which makes it possible that whites and non-whites can embrace the whole nation as the new collective based on diversity and differences.