Nadine Gordimer joined William Kentridge, Chris Van Wyk, Zoë Wicomb and Mark Gevisser last week at Wits University for a discussion on memory and creativity.
There was not a free seat to be found at the event, where this group of creative heavyweights discussed personal stories, collective memory, fictional interpretation, memoirs and the subjective nature of the truth.
Nadine Gordimer: On memory and creativity
The ultimate in literature of the relation between memory and creativity is surely La Recherche du Temps Perdue (In Search of Lost Time) by Marcel Proust.
For memory as the agent of creation in art is not passive recollection — oh I saw him yesterday — but the agent by which the processes of creativity are ignited, fired in the mysterious faculties of the human brain, We ‘imagine’ because we take off, however subconsciously, from something that exists or has existed in our subconscious.
Graham Greene brought this down-to-earth, or rather the queue at the movies, or the doctor’s waiting room, if not the couple at the adjoining restaurant table. A writer is born an eavesdropper, from childhood, actively hearing the undertone of a quarrel brewing, the cadence of a possible love affair on the way; the writer also reads body language, out of an acute awareness that is innate from birth, just as a future opera singer is born with the right kind of vocal chords. Greene says: the writer “creates an alternative life for the one glimpsed, momentarily overheard”.
There is always some connection between the spark of a memory and the flame of a fiction, the painting, the music composed, however distant or forgotten in the creator’s mind. In this sense we writers are always in search of time lost, past, even if conceiving a futurist post-everything novel. The discarded, overcome past is always there, in the wholeness, timelessness of creativity. A life force.
It’s sometimes, in some eras, more obvious than generalisation stands for. In our country, our present — what’s known euphemistically as a ‘moment in time’, although for most of us it’s two eras been and being lived, apartheid and post-apartheid — literature is seen in a very direct relationship between memory and the spark to attempt creation.
We welcome the many books from new writers; first novels which are really autobiographies disguised as fiction — the accounts of the many unspeakable individual experiences that were muffled by gags of racism. They are attempts at what Cavafy calls “recovering through art from the effort of creating it”. I think that defines perfectly the movement in ourselves to recognise the opportunity and necessity of nurturing the arts as important in developing the country and ourselves.
But the works tend to have a limited sameness, limited not alone to the experience.
In general it is the new playwrights, many actors themselves, who give us works that have depth and the rousing of fresh reactions: new understandings of those lives disinterred from the deadly past and full of human surprises, to themselves as well as their audiences, living in the present in all its jostling complexity, with more force than the novels.
There is a wonderful exception among the biographer-novelists. But he is not a new writer; one of our best-known poets and novelists. Mongane Wally Serote’s latest work, Revelations, is exactly what the title claims. An autobiography that takes the bold freedom to be a novel, a brilliant synthesis of the spark and its becoming many kinds of imaginative illumination. Bu then he is a poet—
Edward Said wrote: “I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents, like the themes of one’s life, that flow along during the waking hours.”
Memory and creativity occur like this, come in this synthesis within fiction writers.”
The themes highlighted at this even will also be the subject of über(W)unden – Art in troubled times, a conference that takes place at the Goethe-Institut in Johannesburg from September 7 – 11. For more information, see here.