Town and country lovers nadine gordimer pdf

Introduction to the Short Story

“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.”

—Flannery O’Connor, American writer

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Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following: • Describe early forms of storytelling and their cultural contexts. • Identify and differentiate features of the short story, and analyze their use in particular

stories. • Analyze the themes and concepts in "Country Lovers." • Successfully complete academic assignments that involve writing about and analyzing

short stories.

How Stories Began Chapter 3

From the time we are very young, we see the world and understand our lives through stories. We learn from them long before we can explain what a story is. Research shows that young children can identify which is the story when presented with an unfamiliar five-minute narrative about a boy with magical powers and a five-minute presentation written humorously to describe how to play a children’s game (McAdams, 1996). The recognizable pattern of a story is as old as human existence; we have always been storytellers.

3.1 How Stories Began Your environment and personal experiences influence your response to stories. Whether you are aware of it or not, the lens through which you envision a story is filtered by insights you have gained from family traditions, religious beliefs, and critical life issues. Thus, interpretations of a story vary based on the reader’s age, breadth of experience, and emotional connection. Likewise, interpretations differ from culture to culture. For example, stories that once grew out of particu- lar political controversies continue to be told long after the original political context has been for- gotten. The familiar nursery rhyme “Rock-a-bye Baby” is a classic example. In late 17th-century England, when there was a struggle for political power between Catholics and Protestants, King James II, who had converted to Catholicism, came to power. The “Rock-a-bye Baby” narrative is thought to reflect the rumor that the son born to him and the queen was not their child—but a boy hidden and secretly exchanged, giving them a Catholic heir to the throne—until, at some point (“when the bough breaks”) the truth would be known. The Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes provides extensive background information about the stories that became known as nursery rhymes with the publication of John Newbery’s book Mother Goose’s Melody in mid-18th-century England.

The earliest stories in every culture are its myths, anonymous stories through which primitive people sought to explain the world around them, including the mysteries of divinity, creation, truth, and death. Literature often retells myths, using them as literary patterns. Because Greek and Roman myths are the ones most closely related to our culture, their patterns turn up often in other literature.

Prometheus had a prominent role in Greek creation mythology. He was a Titan who enjoyed pleasures that humans lacked. In a bold move, he stole fire from the sun and brought it to earth as a gift to humanity. Zeus, father of the gods, was offended by this defiant action. Because he was quarrelling with Prometheus at the time, Zeus arranged a horrible punishment: Prometheus was chained to a remote rock where an eagle tormented him constantly by tearing at his liver. Zeus set up conditions for ending the torment, but it did not happen for a long, long time. This myth addresses the risk that may accompany efforts to improve human conditions, espe- cially if the action defies the established order of things.

Prometheus has a counterpart in British literature. Matching the pattern of the original myth to a large extent, novelist Mary

◀ After giving fire to humanity, Prometheus was chained to a rock as punishment by Zeus.

Nicolas Sebastien Adam/The Bridgeman Art Library/Getty

Features of the Short Story Chapter 3

Shelley introduces readers to Dr. Victor Frankenstein, an eccentric scientist who manages to create “new” human life. However, the man he creates does not possess the kind of human refinements he hoped to achieve. Instead, his experiment produces a grotesque monster that torments Dr. Frankenstein and eventually kills members of the doctor’s family. In the subti- tle of her novel, Shelley identified Frankenstein as “The Modern Prometheus” (Shelley, 1818). Both Prometheus, the ancient Titan, and Frankenstein, the modern scientist, saw themselves as champions of humanity; both acted boldly and risked reversals, which came; and both suffered lasting pain as a result of their actions.

Other early story forms include the legend, the fable, the parable, and the tale. All are short and, like myths, provide reflections on human experiences. Legends often are traditions as well as stories. They are rooted in history and have fewer supernatural aspects than myths do. Fables are stories that often feature animals as characters, although people and inanimate objects may also play a key role, and always offer a moral or lesson. Parables also illustrate a moral or lesson, but the details of these stories carefully parallel those of the situation surrounding the moral. Tales, told in an uncomplicated manner, are anecdotes about an event.

3.2 Features of the Short Story The short story, as we know it, is a fictional narrative with a formal design. More stylized than a simple anecdote or narrative sketch, the short story form was developed in the 19th century. Two American writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, were highly influential in creating the short story genre. In 1842, Poe was the first to define the genre formally, calling it an artistic composition controlled to produce a single unified effect—something he achieved brilliantly in his stories that explored themes like vengeance and fear of death. Beginning in the 20th century, short stories tended to focus more and more on real-life situations. In the early 20th century, O. Henry popularized the surprise ending as a short story technique. You will find one of his stories in Chapter 4.

Generally, a short story has the following features:

• a plot (a series of actions, events, or developments) • conflict (opposing actions, ideas, and decisions that hold the plot together) • a setting (the place where the action occurs) • a clear time frame (usually a relatively short period of time) • characters (fictional individuals who initiate the action and create the conflict) • a point of view (the particular perspective or slant through which the story is presented) • a theme (the underlying idea that the story illustrates or represents) • particular stylistic features, including tone, irony, and symbolism

Detailed discussion and illustrations of each of these elements are included in the next few chapters.

Stories also reflect culture. The term culture refers to common characteristics of a group or a region. Culture is never static; it is a changing phenomenon, constantly reconfigured by human behavior, language, laws, events, patterns, products, beliefs, and ideals. To put it simply, culture refers to a way of life, an ethos. Writers often reflect a particular culture through the setting of a story or the spirit of the characters’ lives—providing insight, for example, into Southern culture,

Features of the Short Story Chapter 3

post–World War I culture, or global culture. In this way, stories preserve culture: They freeze moments in time and create cultural awareness.

As you read “Country Lovers,” you are faced with interracial issues, which are explored through the character development, actions, and personal dilemmas of a privileged white boy and an ulti- mately powerless black girl. Notice how the author pulls you into an awareness of the culture in which the action happens. Also, look for the characteristics of the short story listed above; each one is important. (A number of common words in the story, such as “labourer” and “honourable,” may appear somewhat unfamiliar because they are spelled using the British and South African conventions rather than American ones.)

Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923)

Nadine Gordimer has lived in South Africa since birth and, except for a year spent in university, has devoted all her adult life to writing—completing 13 novels and 10 short story collections, works that have been published in 40 languages. Her strong opposition to apartheid, the socioeconomic system that oppressed the majority black population in South Africa (1940–1994), is a dominant theme in her writing, with her later works reflecting challenges accompanying the changing attitudes in the country toward racial relation- ships. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.

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Country Lovers Nadine Gordimer (1975)

A story about forbidden love on a South African farm.

The farm children play together when they are small, but once the white children go away to school they soon don’t play together any more, even in the holidays. Although most of the black chil- dren get some sort of schooling, they drop every year farther behind the grades passed by the white children; the childish vocabulary, the child’s exploration of the adventurous possibilities of dam, koppies,1 mealie lands,2 and veld3—there comes a time when the white children have surpassed these with the vocabu- lary of boarding-school and the possibilities of inter-school sports matches and the kind of adventures seen at the cinema. This use- fully coincides with the age of twelve or thirteen; so that by the time early adolescence is reached, the black children are making along with the bodily changes common to all, an easy transition to adult forms of address, beginning to call their old playmates mis- sus and baasie little master.4

1 Koppies, a small village in South Africa. 2 Mealie lands, maize fields. 3 Veld, wide-open, rural spaces. 4 Baasie little master, a way of addressing a young white male.

Setting: The first three paragraphs describe the

setting of the story, intro- ducing the reader to a rural environment in South Africa

where white children and black children share some

common childhood experi- ences, but, their customs,

expectations, and roles become distinctly different

as they grow up. For exam- ple, only the white children leave the Kraal, or village,

to attend school in town.

Features of the Short Story Chapter 3

The trouble was Paulus Eysendyck did not seem to realize that Thebedi was now simply one of the crowd of farm children down at the kraal,5 recognizable in his sisters’ old clothes. The first Christmas holidays after he had gone to boarding-school he brought home for Thebedi a painted box he had made in his wood-work class. He had to give it to her secretly because he had nothing for the other children at the kraal. And she gave him, before he went back to school, a bracelet she had made of thin brass wire and the grey-and-white beans of the castor-oil crop his father cultivated. (When they used to play together, she was the one who had taught Paulus how to make clay oxen for their toy spans.6) There was a craze, even in the platteland towns like the one where he was at school, for boys to wear elephant-hair and other bracelets beside their watch-straps; his was admired, friends asked him to get similar ones for them. He said the natives made them on his father’s farm and he would try.

When he was fifteen, six feet tall and tramping round at school dances with the girls from the “sister” school in the same town; when he had learnt how to tease and flirt and fondle quite inti- mately these girls who were the daughters of prosperous farmers like his father; when he had even met one who, at a wedding he had attended with his parents on a nearby farm, had let him do with her in a locked storeroom what people did when they made love—when he was as far from his childhood as all this, he still brought home from a shop in town a red plastic belt and gilt hoop ear-rings for the black girl, Thebedi. She told her father the missus had given these to her as a reward for some work she had done— it was true she sometimes was called to help out in the farmhouse. She told the girls in the kraal that she had a sweetheart nobody knew about, far away, away on another farm, and they giggled, and teased, and admired her. There was a boy in the kraal called Njabulo who said he wished he could have brought her a belt and ear-rings.