A Novel Perspective on an Old (Short) Story: Nadine Gordimer’s “The Train from Rhodesia” at the Theoretical Crossroads

Abstract

Nadine Gordimer, at almost eighty-eight, is the prolific grande-dame of South African literature, the author of a substantial oeuvre, and the winner of a Nobel Prize for Literature (1991). Gordimer has been writing for more than sixty years, and one short story, “The Train from Rhodesia” (1947), shows that, even as a young writer, she understood and was poised to reflect an understanding of the important cultural, intellectual, and political impulses that manifested locally and globally in the late 1940s.

This paper rereads Gordimer’s early publication by examining it through the lenses of Freudian psychoanalytic, Marxist, feminist, and post-colonial theory. It argues that “The Train” sits at an important theoretical crossroad and that engaging the story through the four bodies of theory crystallizes complex theoretical concerns and exposes nexuses between major critical approaches. This recognition offers a novel perspective on an old (short) story by a thoroughly contemporary writer.

The study draws on general and applied theory and literary criticism in tandem with close reading of the fictional text. It contributes to the body of scholarship on Gordimer and her work by taking as its subject a petite, pithy, but under-discussed publication that was almost precocious given the author’s age and experience—while the study may be of interest to a variety of literary scholars and contemporary critical theorists, it would be of special use to those seeking to begin a retrospective of Gordimer’s work.