4 In a 1982 interview with Eugene Goodheart, Oz adds more terms to the father’s prescription: ‘The new Israeli: simple, blond, cleansed of Jewish neurosis, tough, gentile-looking’, Partisan Review, 49/3 (1982), p. 359.
5 Under This Blazing Light, p. 169.
6 Ibid., pp. 169, 170.
7 The Hill of Evil Counsel: Three Stories, trans. Nicholas de Lange (London: Fontana, 1980), p. 150.
19 Naguib Mahfouz, The Harafish
1 Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West (London: Saqui Books, 1992), pp. 64, 60.
2 See Roger Allen, ‘Naguib Mahfouz and the Arabic Novel’, in Michael Beard and Adnan Haydar (eds), Naguib Mahfouz (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993), p. 32; Salma Jayyusi, ‘The Arab Laureate’, in ibid., pp. 11–13.
3 ‘Naguib Mahfouz Remembers’, in ibid., pp. 42–4.
4 Review in New Republic, 7 May 1990, pp. 33–4.
5 See Allen, ‘Naguib Mahfouz and the Arabic Novel’, p. 35.
6 Salih Altoma, ‘Naguib Mahfouz’, International Fiction Review, 17/2 (1990), pp. 128–9; C. Nijland, ‘Nagib Mahfouz and Islam’, Welt des Islams, 23–4 (1984), pp. 136–55; Menahem Milson, ‘Najib Mahfouz and Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir’, Asian and African Studies, 23 (1989), p. 6.
7 Altoma, ‘Naguib Mahfouz’, p. 131; Samia Mehrez, ‘Respected Sir’, in Beard and Haydar (eds) Naguib Mahfouz, pp. 65–8; Michael Beard, ‘The Mahfouzian Sublime’, in ibid., p. 100.
8 Mehrez, ‘Respected Sir’, pp. 67–8; Ghosh, New Republic, p. 36.
9 See Roger Allen, ‘Najib Mahfouz’, World Literature Today, 63/1 (1989), p. 7.
10 Altoma, ‘Naguib Mahfouz’, p. 131; Mehrez, ‘Respected Sir’, p. 76; Allen, ‘Naguib Mahfouz and the Arabic Novel’, p. 31; Anton Shammas, review in New York Review of Books, 2 February 1989, pp. 19–21.
11 See Adnan Maydar and Michael Beard, ‘Mapping the World of Naguib Mahfouz’, in Beard and Haydar (eds), Naguib Mahfouz, pp. 6–7.
12 Miriam Cooke, ‘Men Constructed in the Mirror of Prostitution’, in ibid., pp. 124–5.
13 See Beard and Haydar, ‘Mapping the World of Naguib Mahfouz’, in ibid., p. 5.
14 By Nijland, ‘Naguib Mahfouz and Islam’, p. 137.
15 Naguib Mahfouz, The Harafish, trans. Catherine Cobham (New York: Doubleday, 1994), p. 63.
16 Galen Strawson, review in Times Literary Supplement, 27 April 1990, pp. 435–6.
21 The Poems of Thomas Pringle
1 Ernest Pereira and Michael Chapman, eds., African Poems of Thomas Pringle (Durban: Killie Campbell Africana Library; Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1989).
22 Daphne Rooke
1 Daphne Rooke, Mittee (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 59.
23 Gordimer and Turgenev
1 ‘A Writer’s Freedom’, in The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (Johannesburg: Taurus; Cape Town: David Philip, 1988), pp. 87, 89.
2 Ibid., p. 89.
3 Ibid., p. 91.
4 ‘Relevance and Commitment’, in The Essential Gesture, pp. 114, 115.
5 ‘Living in the Interregnum’, in ibid., p. 224.
6 ‘The Essential Gesture’ (1984), in ibid., p. 247.
7 Ibid., p. 247.
8 See Richard Freeborn, Turgenev: The Novelist’s Novelist (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), p. 15.
9 ‘Belinsky was just as much of an idealist as he was a social critic; he criticised in the name of an ideal . . . Belinsky devoted himself entirely to the service of this ideal; in all his sympathies and all his activity he belonged to the camp of the Westernists . . . The acceptance of the results of the Western way of life, the application of them to our own life . . . – that was the way in which we could, in his opinion, finally achieve something distinctively Russian, an idea which he cherished considerably more than is generally believed.’ Quoted in ibid., p. 14.
10 In ‘A Writer’s Freedom’ Gordimer does, however, give the puzzling impression that she reads Bazarov as standing for Turgenev himself: ‘The radicals and liberals, among whom Turgenev himself belonged, lambasted him as a traitor because Bazarov was presented with all the faults and contradictions that Turgenev saw in his own type, in himself, so to speak.’ (p. 90) The faults and contradictions of the anglophile dandy Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov are surely Turgenev’s as much as are the faults of Bazarov.
11 In ‘Living in the Interregnum’ (1982), p. 229n, Gordimer paraphrases an unmemorable phrase by Chernyshevsky. Again one has the impression that invoking Chernyshevsky’s name and reputation is more important to Gordimer than his actual words.
12 Turgenev: Fathers and Sons ‘deprived me, for ever . . . of the good opinion of the Russian younger generation’. Literary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments, trans. David Magarshak (London: Faber, 1959). pp. 168, 169.
13 ‘Fathers and Children: Turgenev and the Liberal Predicament’, in Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), pp. 19–20.
14 Berlin, ‘Fathers and Children’, p. 37; Joe Andrew, Russian Writers and Society in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 33.
15 Freeborn, Turgenev, p. 134.
16 ‘All my story is directed against the gentry as the most important class’, he wrote in a letter to K. K. Sluchevsky, 1862. Letters, ed. and trans. A.V. Knowles (London: Athlone Press, 1983), p. 105. Freeborn’s gloss: ‘He was acknowledging the moral superiority of the raznochintsy as a class.’ (p. 100)
17 Letters, p. 106.
18 ‘My conscience was clear . . . My attitude towards the character I had created was honest . . . I have too great a respect for the vocation of an artist, a writer, to act against my conscience.’ (Literary Reminiscences, p. 169) ‘I started with no preconceived idea, no “tendency”; I wrote naively, as if myself astonished at what was emerging.’ (Letter to Saltykov-Shchedrin, 1876, quoted in Berlin, ‘Fathers and Children’, p. 26.)
19 Quoted in Berlin, ‘Fathers and Children’, p. 35.
20 For discussion, see Andrew, Russian Writers and Society, pp. 8–9.
21 Freeborn, Turgenev, p. 46.
22 A Norwegian writer who met Turgenev in about 1874 records him as saying that the first image of Bazarov that came to him was of a dying man. Ibid., p. 69.
23 ‘Fathers and Sons: Fathers and Children’, in John Garrard (ed.), The Russian Novel from Pushkin to Pasternak (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 77–8.
24 Berlin, ‘Fathers and Children’, pp. 51–2.
25 ‘I am . . . determined to find my place “in history” while yet referring as a writer to the values that are beyond history. I shall never give them up.’ (‘Living in the Interregnum’, p. 233) Gordimer is taking up a challenge from Camus: ‘Is it possible . . . to be in history while still referring to values which go beyond it?’ (quoted ibid., p. 231). For a highly critical account of Gordimer’s position here, see Dagmar Barnouw, ‘Nadine Gordimer: Dark Times, Interior Worlds, and the Obscurities of Difference’, Contemporary Literature, 35 (1994), pp. 252–80. ‘Her work . . . can be read as a case history of the writer’s powerful, indeed religious belief in the redemptive potential of high-cultural fictional discourse.’ (p. 278)
26 It is ‘in the nature’ of the artist ‘to want to transform the world’. In that sense he is ‘always moving toward truth, true consciousness’. ‘Relevance and Commitment’, p. 118.
27 ‘The Essential Gesture’, pp. 243, 241. Gordimer’s source is Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 47.
28 There may have been more intimate reasons as well for Gordimer’s sense of kinship with Turgenev. There is a striking similarity between Turgenev’s expressed attitude toward serfdom and Gordimer’s toward racism. ‘There are two absolutes in my life,’ wrote Gordimer in 1982. ‘One is that racism is evil – human damnation in the Old Testament sense, and no compromises, as well as sacrifices, should be too great in the fight against it.’ (‘Living in the Int
erregnum’, p. 231) Compare Turgenev: ‘I could not breathe the same air or remain close to what I hated so much . . . In my eyes this enemy took a definite form and bore a particular name: this enemy was – serfdom. Under this heading I gathered and concentrated everything against which I had decided to fight to the bitter end, with which I had sworn never to come to terms . . . This was my Hannibal’s oath.’ Quoted in Freeborn, Turgenev, p. 6.
29 In Writing and Being (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995) Gordimer revises her position on the category of nonfictional writing she calls testimony. Whereas in the 1970s she had criticised testimony for lacking a ‘transforming imagi-native dimension’, for dealing only with ‘the surface reality of experience’, for amounting often to no more than ‘thinly disguised autobiography’, she now (1995) says that her ‘approach . . . is different’. She celebrates testimony as ‘witness’, as part of ‘the struggle against forgetting’ and therefore as part of the creation of a history. (pp. 22–3) Some pages later, however, she returns to the contrast between testimony and imaginative literature. In Homer, she points out, the poetry continues to ‘carry the experience’ long after the history on which it was based has vanished from awareness. Thus in Homer ‘the Greek experience definitive for humankind lives on among us’. (p. 41) Again the question of a double standard looms.
24 The Autobiography of Doris Lessing
1 Under my Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 29–30, 15.
2 The Grass Is Singing (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 372.
3 Though the whole project is billed as an autobiography, in the text Lessing refers to the second volume as ‘memoirs’. (p. 358)
25 The Memoirs of Breyten Breytenbach
1 A Season in Paradise, trans. Rike Vaughan (New York: Persea Books, 1980), p. 156.
2 True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1985), p. 280.
3 Return to Paradise (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), pp. 31, 201, 215, 214. The book appeared in Dutch before it appeared in English. The Dutch text is considerably longer. Passages cut include reminiscences of bohemian life in the Cape Town of the 1950s and of Breytenbach’s travels in Africa.
4 Dog Heart: A Memoir (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), p. 180.
5 The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution (London: Faber, 1996), p. 105.
26 South African Liberals: Alan Paton, Helen Suzman
1 Towards the Mountain (Cape Town: David Philip, 1980), p. 272.
2 Cry, the Beloved Country (New York: Scribner, 1948), p. 80.
3 ‘Alan Paton: The Honour of Meditation’, English in Africa, 10/2 (1983), p. 4.
4 Save the Beloved Country, ed. Hans Strydom and David Jones (Melville: Hans Strydom, 1987; New York: Scribner’s, 1989), pp. 255–6, hereafter referred to as SBC. The statement dates from 1953.
5 In No Uncertain Terms: A South African Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 18.
27 Noël Mostert and the Eastern Cape Frontier
1 Noël Mostert, Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People (New York: Knopf, 1992), p. 358.
28 Photographs of South Africa
1 Mona de Beer and Brian Johnson Barker, A Vision of the Past: South Africa in Photographs, 1843–1910 (Cape Town: Struik, 1992).
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Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999 Page 36