SOURCE: "Archive of Apartheid: Nadine Gordimer's Short Fiction at the End of the Interregnum," in The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer, edited by Bruce King, St. Martin's Press, 1993, pp. 237-45.

In the following essay, Colleran discusses the ways in which socio-political conditions in South Africa inform Gordimer's work.

It is obvious that the archive of a society . . . cannot be described exhaustively . . . on the other hand it is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from these rules that we speak . . . it emerges in fragments.

Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge

All of Nadine Gordimer's fictional projects could be described as working to construct an archive of apartheid, a record which as an artist she is bound to keep, transcribing the 'consciousness of her era' (Selected Stories), however much that consciousness is inevitably limited by the machinery of apartheid itself. Now after ten novels and...