Crossing lines: the novels of Nadine Gordimer with a particular focus on Occasion for loving and The pickup

Abstract

Novelist, playwright, short-story writer, polemicist and activist, Nadine Gordimer (1929), received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991. She is an implacable opponent of apartheid, which she opposed through her imaginative writing as well as through essays and polemics. The end of apartheid was heralded by the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, and officially ended with the first democratic elections that were held in April of 1994. Gordimer has produced fourteen novels to date: ten falling clearly within the apartheid period, and four novels that can be classified as falling within the postapartheid period. There is evidence of several general and interrelated shifts in her novels since the demise of apartheid. The previous emphasis on the community and communal responsibility has to some extent been replaced by a relatively greater emphasis on the individual, that is, a move from a stress on public identity to private identity. Local, South African concerns are succeeded by more global concerns. This article discusses these developments, with a specific focus on “Occasion for loving” (1963) and “The pickup” (2001).