Nadine Gordimer’s Strangely Uncanny Realistic Stories: The Chaos and the Mystery of It All

This paper purports to study and develop an aspect of Gordimer’s fiction which has often been overlooked. Uncanny elements may be identified all along her career constituting a kind of return of the repressed. Insects, animals, landscapes, unidentified threats and fears loom large in the background and constitute a menace for the white population most of the time. The black population is confronted with even more direct brutal problems. Thus in an indirect way, an allegorical one in the sense of the etymological “speaking other,” “the situation” under the state of Apartheid is addressed and denounced. Gordimer’s so-called realistic short stories turn out to contain eerie uncanny features. The geography and the history of this African country are called upon to testify to a violent past inscribed on the landscape by mapmakers