The Late Nadine Gordimer

Towards the end of her writing life, Nadine Gordimer’s style became increasingly marked by characteristics that Theodor Adorno and Edward Said have attributed to ‘late style’: syntactic and interpretational difficulty, structural fracture, and a heightened degree of self-reflexivity. I discuss some of the critical formulations that have developed around late style, then analyse Gordimer’s individual late style in the titular stories from her three transition and post-apartheid collections: Jump (1991), Loot (2003), and Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black (2007). While examining the technical characteristics of her late style, I argue that she invokes a trinity of renowned late stylists – Samuel Beckett, William Shakespeare, and Ludwig van Beethoven – to determine the aesthetic co-ordinates of her work. Gordimer’s stylistic experimentation in these stories builds on and revises her prior strategies for political writing, showing the temporal contingency of forms of engagement, and laying down the gauntlet of political authorship to those who write in her wake.