MILLICENT BELL
and the dog in misery. It was the sheep of affliction, the sheep of God.
It gazed at them knowingly, then gazed away again.
269
There is something visionary about this, but it does not fit into the gen–
eral tone of the novel which is governed by a flippant voice that constantly
intrudes to hold up to ridicule not only the characters but the narrative
process itself. Drabble may just intend to be modishly postmodern when
she invites the reader into the writing process. "Let us widen the circle. We
need a new character," she says as she welcomes us into her studio.
"Imagine David D'Anger," she says, "You say he is an impossibility, and
you cannot imagine him, any more than he can imagine the nature of the
revolution which would bring about the world he thinks he wishes to con–
struct. But you are wrong." She is not writing fiction but a
too-complacent essay-telling rather than showing-when she declares,
"So there you have them. The Middle Classes of England. Is there any
hope whatsoever, or any fear that they will change?"
Nadine Gordimer is a better novelist than Drabble, able to make us
feel the intense individuality of her characters, yet conveying in her best
work her acute feeling for the complicated social reality of her South
Africa. Her personal engagement in that reali ty is well known; she was a
member of the outlawed African National Congress during the apartheid
years and never chose, as a privileged white person, to leave her country
despite the fact that two of her novels were banned by its government.
When she was a young girl, she read Upton Sinclair's
The Jungle
and began
to think of wri ting about the plight of the miners in her own country. But
her loyalty to her art has kept her aware that the divisions of national life
have made her chief subject her own experience of the confinements of
those privileges. No one has written better description of Johannesburg
and its black townships than Gordimer did in
Burger's Daughter
(1979) but
the essential story of that powerful novel is its heroine's struggle to achieve
a difficult identity with the otherness of black South Africa. Thirty years
ago-at the start of her carreer--she wrote, "The white writer, perforce,
belongs to an Elite, and, from the day he is born
baas
to the day
he
is buried
in
his
segregated cemetery, cannot share the potential of experience of the
fifteen million on the other side of the color bar. I believe that white writ–
ers will have less and less to write about as their inside view of the total
society becomes more and more restricted. And so long as our society
remains compartmentalized, our literature will be stretched on the rack
between propaganda, on the one side, and, on the other, art as an embell–
ishment of leisure." But her pessimism has been refuted by the record of
the dozen novels and nine collections of short stories in which she has so
