Space and censorship in Nadine Gordimer : a literary geography

In South Africa, questions of space and censorship are inseparable. It is impossible to discuss one without discussing the other. The apartheid censors set themselves up as "guardians of the literary", purporting to create a protected space where a particularly South African literature could flourish. In this thesis, my argument is that to be a "guardian of the literary" meant to be a guardian of space in literature, the way it was represented and the way characters moved through it. In order explore this argument I have focused on the censors' response to one writer in particular, Nadine Gordimer. My argument will show that in Gordimer, some spaces seem to be more acceptable than others, as evidenced by the censors' response to her work. Six of her novels were submitted for scrutiny by the Censorship Board. Three were banned, and three were passed. In The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences, Peter McDonald asks "If all her novels ... engaged with the historical circumstances of apartheid South Africa in especially powerful and critical ways, then why were they not all deemed equally threatening to the established order?" My argument is that while it is difficult to provide a definitive answer, it is possible to make sense of the censors' decisions regarding her work by undertaking an analysis of the novels' literary geography. Focusing on the prevalence of certain spaces and the absence of others, and the way that characters move through these spaces, it is clear that they represent differing degrees of threat to the established order. In the censors' reports on Gordimer's work, crossing a physical boundary was the equivalent of crossing a moral boundary. Both the apartheid planners and the censors were fixated on boundaries and borders, on the importance of keeping some people in and more people out. My argument is that what the architects of apartheid tried to do in reality, the censors tried to do in fiction. Their attempt to police the borders of the imaginary meant that some spaces were more acceptable than others, that some stories were told while others were ignored. In my final chapter, I argue that the effects of this can still be seen in contemporary novels written about South Africa. The censors had such a powerful hand in "deforming" literature that their fingerprints can still be detected today. A close analysis of certain elements of Patrick Flanery's Absolution (2012) will show that the structure and form of the novel corresponds in interesting ways with the apartheid censors' ideas of what literature should do and be