Burying the Dead: Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist
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An important novel in the tradition of the South African antipastoral, Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist is a precursor of other apartheid and postapartheid critiques of colonial possession and dispossession of land. First published in 1974 during the apartheid era, it introduces themes of guilt, retribution, and lineage that many postapartheid novels are still addressing today. This paper considers The Conservationist as a modern revisioning of the traditional South African farm novel that glorified the farm as a place of white heroic struggle against the wilderness and as an object of the South African idyll. Gordimer's novel also reintroduces the trope of the dead African body introduced in Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm to examine the fundamental incongruity of white claims to the land of Africa. As a symbol of the oppressed black world, the corpse becomes the means of exposing the buried histories of injustice in Africa and ultimately demanding a new future. Gordimer's novel uses the trope of the dead African buried underground to expose the protagonist's colonial psyche as an exploiter of both land and female. Gordimer further refigures the pastoral farm novel by situating her antipastoral in the period of rapid industrialization of the 1970s. In so doing, she condemns the capitalist ethic that condones exploitation of land and black labor. Offering an alternative to a conventional colonial form, the book is an ambitious work that addresses multiple themes and ironies and interweaves the text of the protagonist's demise with the subtext of the Zulu mythology of return of the black African.
Abstract
An important novel in the tradition of the South African antipastoral, Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist is a precursor of other apartheid and postapartheid critiques of colonial possession and dispossession of land. First published in 1974 during the apartheid era, it introduces themes of guilt, retribution, and lineage that many postapartheid novels are still addressing today. This paper considers The Conservationist as a modern revisioning of the traditional South African farm novel that glorified the farm as a place of white heroic struggle against the wilderness and as an object of the South African idyll. Gordimer's novel also reintroduces the trope of the dead African body introduced in Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm to examine the fundamental incongruity of white claims to the land of Africa. As a symbol of the oppressed black world, the corpse becomes the means of exposing the buried histories of injustice in Africa and ultimately demanding a new future. Gordimer's novel uses the trope of the dead African buried underground to expose the protagonist's colonial psyche as an exploiter of both land and female. Gordimer further refigures the pastoral farm novel by situating her antipastoral in the period of rapid industrialization of the 1970s. In so doing, she condemns the capitalist ethic that condones exploitation of land and black labor. Offering an alternative to a conventional colonial form, the book is an ambitious work that addresses multiple themes and ironies and interweaves the text of the protagonist's demise with the subtext of the Zulu mythology of return of the black African.
참고문헌 (24)
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