"Ah, what an age it is, when to speak of trees is almost a crime" : national landscapes and identities in the fiction of Nadine Gordimer
In this study, I will explore the ways in which Nadine Gordimer engages with the natural world in three of her novels: The Conservationist (1974), July's People (1981), and No Time Like the Present (2012). I argue for the importance of the relationship in her work, between the natural landscapes of South Africa and the responsibility of the author in 'meaning-making:' this is a literary study that brings elements of postcolonial ecocriticism into play. In particular, I will explore how and why she chooses to "speak of trees" at all. Gordimer demonstrates that there is a definitive agency in the non!human world that presses against the reductive binary of 'human' versus 'natural' environments. Her fiction highlights the fact that flattening the natural world into a series of symbols is overly simplistic and does not engage sufficiently with the political: a responsibility that she takes upon herself. In this study I will be arguing that Gordimer achieves a profound political meditation by creating meaning from a variety of natural landscapes, making use of images rather than symbols. I am particularly intrigued by the ways in which Gordimer imagines the landscape as a series of sign systems, whose various shifts and changes reflect and illustrate wider systemic shifts in South Africa. In the novels that I will examine, Gordimer demonstrates, by way of physical, visceral engagement with various landscapes, that historical and contemporary systemic shifts must be taken into account in order truly to understand the complexity of national identities in her country. The image of the trees ties poetry, politics and the environment together, in particular to witness a distinctive shift in political sign systems, and the identity crises that occur as a result. In The Conservationist, Gordimer takes issue with misplaced obsessions with autochthony and heritage, whilst simultaneously investing in the lexical field of botanical names and a fine delineation of literary ecology: the novel both takes apart and preserves a sense of how the landscape can be entwined in a cultivation of identity. In my examination of July's People, I will consider the matter and poetics of the interregnum via the question of "the bush": the environment, landscape and ecosystem contained or in fact uncontained by this term are at the heart of the shift in sign systems that plays out in the novel. The bush in July's People is a heterotopia: an 'other' place that signifies many different meanings, but simultaneously signifies, in the novel, a shift in an entire system of signs. In my final chapter, on No Time Like the Present, I will be continuing to examine the 'language' of trees in Gordimer's work! particularly noting the terminology of trees and plants to signify, and add value to the study of identity and the indigenous versus the alien
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