Children in Postcolonial Narratives: A Study of Nadine Gordimer's 'Once Upon a Time', Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Children in Postcolonial Narratives: A Study of Nadine Gordimer's 'Once Upon a Time' e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! “Once Upon a Time” Rizzardi Apartheid was officially abolished in 1991, the same year in which Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Price for Literature. This sequence of dates, and the coincidence of the publication date along with the ground work laid for the abolition of apartheid, that is, the hope of the renewal of freedom, cannot but prompt us to reflect on the success of literature as a political act, or at least an objective the writer herself aimed at: that of a change in mentality. In order to overcome this abyss of omertà and ignorance, in “Once Upon a Time” Nadine Gordimer tackles the most contentious of fictional themes, that of infanticide. Said observed that for a great many late 19 th century early 20 th century writers, choosing characters who could not have children is a metaphor for a generalized condition of sterility, which affected all of society and the culture of the time. There are significant predecessors in the Victorian novel, bit it is above all in Modernism the state of absolute sterility Said was referring to takes a firm hold in English-language literature. As far as the USA are concerned, it is noteworthy how the attention of writers from North America has concentrated more on adolescence than childhood. It is precisely the myth of adolescence that seems to authorize the identification of the USA with “the West, future of the past”. It was to be the task of the children from the literary terrain of the former colonies to help the adults come to terms with the fragmentary nature of existence, to live in a world of broken mirrors, of which many of the shards have been lost, thus making it impossible to retrieve a vision of the past and of history (both individual and collective) in its entirety. The children of the postcolonial narrative not only retrace the deeds and feats of the nations they belong to, filtering them through their childlike eyes; above all, like imperfect figures of innocence, which is a positive sign, they place themselves in contexts filled with future foreshadowings that are often, however, decidedly negative. And so it is that, around the time of the passage from the second to the third millennium, in Britain children are appearing more and more in literature as elusive or distant creatures in a world populated by adults who are too caught up by their own fear of growing up, to accept them, yet in postcolonial narrative children represent at one and the same time both hope for the future and the paradoxical repositories of historical memory, re-experienced through a fantastical re-elaboration of other stories and/or the memory of past events re-elaborated through the eyes of a child, even at the cost of their own life. Jeanne Colleran underlines a recurring theme in Gordimer’s collection “Jump and Other Stories” : “as a kind of intellectual montage where real elements operate as part of the discourse, and signifiers, selected and charged, are remotivated within the system of new frames, the stories in “Jump” appropriate figurally – that most obsessive image of recent South African history, the dead child. Dead children – or tortured or damaged children – as the shredded little boy of “Once Upon a Time”. From “Midnight’s Children” by Rushdie to “The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith” by Peter Carey postcolonial children, to a greater or lesser extent are often fairy-tale children. Italo Calvino reminds us that: “fairy tales are true. Taken as a whole, and in their continually repeated yet ever varied cross-section of human experiences, they amount to a general explanation of life; they are a catalogue of the destinies that humankind may encounter, the persecution of the innocent and the possibility of redemption as the terms of an internal dialectic within every life”. “Once Upon a Time” consists of 2 parts and begins with a first- person account in which the author explains that she has been asked to write a short story for children to be published in an anthology; but she refuses as she has the artistic right to write only what she wants. Next moment, as she is lying in bed, she is horrified to be awakened by a sound that she thinks might be a burglar or a murderer, but she then realizes that her fear was nothing real, since the sound was just a creaking sound in the house. To call herself down, she starts to tell herself a bedtime story. The second part of story is narrated in the third-person and describes a family consisting of a father, mother, a little boy, a trustworthy housemaid and a gardener. Since the family is living in a suburb where burglaries and riots are frequent, they try to enhance the security system of their house. Despite having a sign on their gate that reads “YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED”, the wife is still very scared as she wants to be sure that their house is safe from the homeless, the thieves, and the crooks that roam their street. As unemployment rises, the housemaid and the wife beg the husband to increase the level of security. The family decides to have rolls of razor wire from a company called “DRAGON TEETH” installed along the top of their wall and now the house looks much safer, so that they can once again aspire to live “happily ever after”. That evening the mother reads a bedtime fairy tale to the boy. The next morning, the boy pretends to be the Prince from the fairy tale, and tries to make his way through the razor wire (“Sleeping Beauty”). But he bleeds heavily and by the end, when the adult manages to cut him out and carry him to the house, he has died. The death of their child is thus the “cost” of his parents’ attempt to safeguard their fairy-tale existence against the transient, marauding blacks, It is the story’s most terrifying irony that what was meant to keep blacks out, kills the white child within. The title of the story immediately brings to mind 2 aspects: first of all, it acts as a warning for the reader, who is alerted, even before getting into the text, that they are about to read a fairy tale (it has the same function as the notice put on the gate of the happy family). Furthermore, the title creates distance in terms of time and place, which removes the story from contingency, signifying the transposition of a structure into the imagination that is reproduced in every life. In the English-speaking world, the re-writing of fairy tales is widespread, above all by women. As occurs elsewhere, in Gordimer fairy tales – minor myths that cross our lives – provide an opportunity to investigate oneself and experiment with mythobiography, that is, a type of narration that explores the events surrounding the search for meaning, where the telling creates its own sense. In “Once Upon a Time”, Gordimer is the opening narrator who invents and tells the fairy tale, thus placing herself on the edge of the narrative. In this case she appears both as a character and as the author, and so is simultaneously the object of a rhetorical plot and the subject of another – both insider and outsider with respect to the action – and thus perhaps a suitable allegory of the position of the white South African writer. In the first part the writer creates the setting, not of the narration, but of the state of mind necessary to the reader in order to read the second part, which is not typographically separated from the first except for a white space. A silence, an omission, perhaps. The initial situation from which the fairy tale sin the second part is generated, can be read from the point of view of a white South African living during those years; that is, a woman who is forced to experience her femininity in terms of victimhood; and from the point of view of a writer. Regarding this last aspect, the message is clear: a writer cannot be forced to write in a certain genre. When this happens, as the end of the story demonstrates, the situation is overturned and what was a fairy tale becomes a nightmare. Fear leads the woman, the writer, to rapidly regress into childish terror: the child is afraid of the night just as the adults are scared of death. In order to cope with this fear, fairy tales are invented. The writer starts the narration as a way of giving pleasure and suddenly the fairy tale turns into a magnetic field where inexpressible secrets from her life and that of the others come flooding in from all sides, taking shape as figures. In fairy tales, the catalyst for the action is always something that represents pure beauty, yet clearly also represent something else. Beauty and fear, the tragic poles of the fairy tales, are together the terms of contradiction and reconciliation. The more material fears do not manage to distract the protagonists of the fairy tale from the more unreal beauty, and the nature of the mad quest is revealed through the nature of the tests that they have to overcome. The parental couple functions as one, solid protagonist. Indeed, the characters do not have names and are “a man” and “his wife”. They are attracted to beauty but they are ensnared by fear. The parental couple is required to be simultaneously in two worlds: that represented by the happy oasis of their home, and the outside world, made up of people of “another colour”, of riots, violence and danger. The price of their happiness increases in proportion to the growth of their fear of others, of the Other. Defence strategies are intensified until the final, fatal safety measure is reached. That the nameless hero, the Different one, the Chosen one, is their little boy is demonstrated by the way in which the boy experiences the adults’ fears and their safety measures from the very beginning of the story to its end. He observes the installation of the electronic security devices and is fascinated and uses it as a walkie-talkie. Similarly, the boy sees the barbed wire on the house as a dragon to be fought, with briars to be destroyed in his passage through them in order to reach his longed for goal. In Gordimer’s text good and evil exchange masks, and that the security measure then transforms into a lethal dragon only becomes apparent in the unthinkable dimension that the fairy tale leads to. The child lives in a world of upside-down mirrors. And with what assistance does the young mortal creature pass