The Politics of the Couple in Nadine Gordimer's Jump and Other Stories: "More important than anything we could ever have to say to each other when we're alone"
Résumé
Despite Gordimer’s radical engagement with the politics of South Africa, her fiction denotes a somewhat ambiguous relationship with the liberal views expected from her. The first section of Writing and Being immediately undermines the readers’ wish to see her as a political writer when she asserts “the right to declare with Ibsen – the book is not about, it is” (Gordimer 1995, 6). An overview of the criticism published on Gordimer’s work reveals that she is never where critics would like her to be situated: some find that her work does not fit into the postcolonial paradigm (Dimitriu 2006, 164); some praise the influence modernism had on her writing (Huggan), while others regret the persistence of this aesthetics as a point of reference when South African writers have started exploring voices of their own (Byrne). Karen Lazar refers to Gordimer’s “paradox” regarding feminism and gender issues that she is renowned to have neglected (Lazar 784), while others note a gradual change in the place of women, through the years, especially after the publication of Jump (Driver, qtd in Lazar 784). Gordimer’s interest in gender issues surface in her work in a covert fashion that is best expressed by what happens in the intimate relationships of couples, where the questions of women’s place and roles can be probed.
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