His own Chernobyl: The embodiment of radiation and the resistance to nuclear extractivism in Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life

Abstract

According to Gabrielle Hecht, nuclear energy in South Africa is mired in a wider history of colonial extractivism and racial oppression. Nadine Gordimer’s 2005 novel Get a Life critiques this politics of nuclear power and the way in which it extends the logic of colonialism to the exploitation of the non-human ecosystem in the interest of capital. However, the spatial and temporal scale of nuclear colonialism defy representation in discursive knowledge. This is because the threat posed by nuclear contamination, on both the non-human ecosystem and the people who have been exposed to radiation, is what Rob Nixon describes as a form of “slow violence”, dispersed across vast temporal and geographical scales that are unrepresentable within human understanding. In response, Get a Life marks a phenomenological shift in Gordimer’s strategies of engagement: through the ambiguities and contradictions of form, the novel demonstrates the reconfiguration in the human subject’s encounter with the non-human ecosystem following the impact of nuclear technology in neo-imperial contexts. Through the protagonist Paul Bannerman’s emerging radioactivity, the novel tentatively imagines a shared vulnerability of both human and non-human beings to nuclear catastrophe in a way that rejects the binary logic of human exploitation of the non-human landscape and characterizes what Donna Haraway terms “response-ability” towards the non-human. Through this embodied response-ability, Gordimer presents a new idiom that offers an alternative way of engaging with the unrepresentable scale of nuclear colonialism.

Introduction

Nuclear energy in South Africa is inextricably entangled within a history of settler-colonial mining and apartheid imperialism. The historian of nuclear power Gabrielle Hecht has investigated the connection between colonialism and nuclear power most prominently in her 2012 work Being Nuclear. Following the Second World War, she argues, nuclear power came to be regarded as the “white race’s superweapon”, as French and British leaders regarded the atom bomb as not only a “substitute for colonialism as an instrument of global power”, but also a “means of preventing their own colonization by superpowers” (2012: 252). Although construction of the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station began in 1976, Hecht considers that South Africa has been a nuclear state since the 1950s because it was a rich source of uranium (2012: 14; 2017: 251). By 1956, uranium production and exports to America and Britain were vital for the economy of apartheid-era South Africa, reflecting the industry’s complicity with colonial extractivism (see Hecht, 2017: 257). This extractivism also had a racial dimension: the mines provided no special protections from radiation for its black workers, who were not only exposed to radiation while mining using hand tools but also worked in precarious conditions and took transient jobs. Moreover, the meticulous apartheid-era system of record-keeping — which was an instrument of control used by white mine owners to surveil black mine workers — was used as evidence in medical research for determining a “permissible dose” of radiation, below which threshold exposure was deemed to be harmless. This notion of a permissible dose persisted until as late as June 2005, when an American National Research Council report concluded that there is “no threshold of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficial” (Hecht, 2017: 257). This logic of colonial extractivism is contiguous with the human exploitation of the non-human ecosystem in the interest of capital, as both shared an instrumentalist ideology through which, according to Val Plumwood, “the colonized Other is reduced to being a means to the colonizer’s ends” just as how “in anthropocentric culture, [non-human] nature’s agency and independence are denied, subsumed in, or remade to coincide with human interests” (2003: 59).

Nadine Gordimer’s 2005 novel Get a Life is embedded within the colonial and ecological politics of nuclear power. It follows the quarantine, recovery, and rehabilitation of its environmentalist protagonist, Paul Bannerman, after he becomes radioactive following treatment for thyroid cancer. Because of his irradiated state, he is kept in isolation at his parents’ home, where he spends most of his time sitting in the garden of their suburban, middle-class house, contemplating his condition and trying to work remotely. The narrative tracks his interior monologue, giving prominence to his existential reveries about being a radiation risk to his family, as the threat posed by his own nuclear toxicity mirrors the campaign against the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor in which he is professionally involved. Meanwhile, his wife Berenice, an advertising executive, represents the aspects of capitalist and industrial development that are responsible for irreparable damage to the ecosystem, which Paul terms “Development Disaster” (2005: 57). ¹ It is through these rifts in Paul’s relationships, like his isolation from the people around him and the ideological fissures in his marriage, that the novel attempts to find a new mode of engagement with the political and ethical challenges posed by the development of nuclear energy in post-apartheid South Africa.

As her penultimate novel, Get a Life can be considered an exemplar of Gordimer’s “late style”. I acknowledge that there is considerable debate amongst critics about precisely what constitutes late style as a concept and whether such a distinction can be made in the first place, with a spectrum of opinions on these questions from numerous critics (see Adorno, 1998; Hutcheon and Hutcheon, 2016; McMullan, 2007; McMullan and Smiles, 2016; Said, 2006). A detailed investigation of precisely what traits characterize Gordimer’s late style and which works best exemplify this shift would require a separate study. For the purposes of this article I will draw upon Graham Riach’s work on Gordimer’s late short stories and what he identifies as the salient characteristics of her late writing in response to the changed political realities of the post-apartheid dispensation. These defining traits are a sparse plot that seems to have neither a linear development nor resolution, uneasy vacillation between past and present, and the protagonists’ sense of confusion about their own identity and place within South African society (see Riach, 2016). Get a Life displays similar characteristics: Paul spends most of his time at home in a listless state; the narrative around nuclear energy in South Africa continues to be polarized by continuities with apartheid-era injustice; and there are difficult contradictions between Paul’s activism against ecological harm and the naive romanticism in his understanding of the wilderness that is the preserve of a liberal, middle-class elite. In addition to the stylistic features of what Riach describes as Gordimer’s late style, there is a further political shift in her late works that render them more tentative in their political conclusions. Compared to the formal innovation in one of Gordimer’s middle-period novels like The Conservationist (1974), which presented a symbolic reclaiming of the white settler’s land by black farm workers and a series of AmaZulu intertexts to disrupt the white colonist’s narrative, Get a Life does not seem to have any radical vision that supersedes the hierarchies of power that it opposes. Instead, it presents a mode of encounter that is circumspect about its internal tensions. The foregrounding of these tensions from Paul’s perspective through the way in which the novel focalizes through him represents what I call a phenomenological turn in Gordimer’s late style, one that is acutely conscious of the positionality of the white subject and the fissures in their understanding of their political environment. This phenomenological turn is a development of and a departure from what J. M. Coetzee describes as a “spiritual turn” that is key to Gordimer’s late works such as The Pickup (2001) and Loot: And Other Stories (2003) (Coetzee, 2008: 252), where Gordimer engages not just with a political project of emancipation but with a wider question of the basis of one’s ethics. Get a Life similarly considers the ways in which the struggle for a just dispensation is more than a political project but concerns a more fundamental ethical realignment; nevertheless, unlike what Coetzee emphasizes in The Pickup and Loot, it remains agnostic towards any transcendental basis for such an ethics, such as the soul or religion. Instead, its ethical thought derives from an interrogation of the way in which the self encounters and is constituted by its environment, depicted through stylistic features that Riach considers characteristic of Gordimer’s late works.

In this article, I will argue that this phenomenological turn in Gordimer’s late style allows for a representation of nuclear colonialism that is attuned to aspects of it that would otherwise be unrepresentable. To begin with, I consider how the vast temporal and geographical scale of nuclear catastrophe renders it as what Timothy Morton describes as a “hyperobject” that defies representation in human experience. In applying this concept of the hyperobject, I will examine the ways in which the ennui of Gordimer’s style characterizes what Joseph Masco describes as an aesthetic of the “nuclear uncanny”. In light of the impossibility of representing a hyperobject such as this, Get a Life presents an alternative mode of engaging with the vast scale of nuclear catastrophe through the drastic reconstitution of the self as it embodies nuclear contamination. Subsequently, I will examine how this shift in the protagonist Paul Bannerman’s understanding of his self and his relationship with a wider non-human ecosystem embodies a shared vulnerability with this ecosystem around him. This shared vulnerability forms the basis of a new mode of ethical thought — what Donna Haraway terms a “response-ability” to the non-human other — that serves to take further the ways in which we make sense of the complexities and contradictions of nuclear colonialism despite the limitations of discursive knowledge in representing them.

Ennui and the nuclear uncanny

The stylistic characteristics of Gordimer’s writing that Riach identifies as aspects of her late style are contiguous with a shift in ontological assumptions of her works in this period. Writing about The House Gun, Gordimer’s first novel published after the end of apartheid, Simon Lewis draws attention to a specific transition in Gordimer’s style from her apartheid-era novels to her post-apartheid works: he argues that the changes in the direction of her work have close corollaries with the political changes in the new post-apartheid dispensation (1999: 64n61). In particular, he elaborates, Gordimer’s post-apartheid works show a subtle shift in the conditions of knowledge during this transition. During apartheid, her works “accept[ed] a static, intransitive knowledge”, that “a knowable object, apartheid, is a bad thing, and one’s overriding political and personal obligation is to oppose it” (1999: 65). In Gordimer’s later fiction, there is a reconsideration of this kind of objective knowledge under the political and social conditions of an independent South Africa. If the freedom struggle was a truth around which Gordimer’s fiction organized its politics, the persisting social and political injustices called this truth into question. For Lewis, this shows up in Gordimer’s fiction as an understanding that “the object of one’s search will never be quite what one thinks it is and will change continually” (1999: 65). In response to this postmodern incredulity towards the metanarratives of the freedom struggle and liberation, Gordimer’s late works take a phenomenological turn in the way they emphasize the positionality of the white subject and the tensions in their apprehension of their political milieu.

These phenomenological concerns manifest stylistically in a prevailing mood of what Lewis describes as a postmodern melancholy. A similar mood of melancholy and uncertainty is evident in the ennui of the prose in Get a Life. The pervasive sense of ennui is central to the way in which its form presents a reimagining of political commitment. This ennui is clearest in the case of Paul as the novel frequently emphasizes the loneliness and listlessness of his quarantine. During his isolation, he contemplates ringing his wife at work but fails to do so because his mind is prone to what he describes as “haphazard ridiculous wanderings” (16). The novel is focalized through his interior monologue and follows his thoughts as they divert into tangents. The overwhelming listlessness of these haphazard wanderings are sharpest when he is kept in quarantine, where he is

allowed no purpose but something his mother has called “recuperate”. […] [I]n that university library, naturally, he’d read up everything about the thyroid gland, that hidden nodule in your neck he could put a hand up to feel for, if it hadn’t been removed. It is a vital factor in growth along with the pituitary, which is hidden behind your forehead, he wouldn’t have come to adolescence, physical and mental maturity, without it. […] So, demonstrably, the gland has an effect on emotions aside from its necessary physical manifestations if it decides to go erratic, an excess of thyroid gland production causes tachycardia, a rapid heartbeat. (20–21)

This passage, with its list of characteristics and functions of the thyroid gland, reflects Paul’s desperate attempt at learning as much as he can about his condition. The weighty syntax of the prose, with its numerous clauses and lists, is similarly frustrating, giving the narrative voice a laboured and listless feel. Paul is overwhelmed by this listlessness, leading him to a state of passivity and inaction: he feels infantilized when his mother does not allow him to do anything, and he fails to make the phone call to Berenice that he contemplated earlier in the novel, and when she does call he is unable to sustain the conversation beyond idle small talk, only saying, “I was in the garden” (23).

This kind of ennui is an important emotion for Timothy Morton. He describes the interaction of the human consciousness with a world greater than itself as existing as part of a “symbiotic real” (2017: 67). This is an inflection of the Lacanian notion of the real: that there is a reality that is external to the human imaginary which the subject can only access by way of a symbolic representation which is never adequate or exhaustive of the object. As such, the real is always known as an absence. However, this real is “symbiotic” insofar as the relationship between the subject and this reality is not one of separation — the real being beholden to the structures imposed by consciousness and symbolic representation — rather it is a reciprocal relationship in which nature is dependent upon itself, and the human subject is embedded within this nature. Because this “real” can only be apprehended as a negative, the ability of the human subject to know and represent the symbiotic real is always frustrated. The spectral presence of this symbiotic real within experience and the consequent awareness of the gulf between the subject and this real lead to what Morton calls an “evacuation” of affect that characterizes ennui.

While Morton’s account of ennui is illuminating, his suggestion that it is a mode through which a subject attunes with the symbiotic real seems to put the cart before the horse. To elevate ennui as a mode of encounter with the non-human would imply that the feeling of ennui itself serves an ethical purpose, as it is through feeling ennui one comes to know of this symbiotic real. However, one of the consequences of ennui is a disinclination from acting. Paul’s ennui during his quarantine renders him passive and overwhelmed, whereas his colleagues Thapelo and Derek are the radical activists carrying on with their political work. To accept ennui as an ethical encounter would license passive immersion in a listless state as a form of ethical engagement. Morton’s treatment of ennui as a form of ecological attunement is unsatisfactory, for it seems to confuse the emotional effect of encountering the symbiotic real with the phenomenological construction of the self and the other. It would be more accurate to characterize ennui as an existential and emotional state that attends to the frustration of failing to apprehend the symbiotic real. In Gordimer’s novel, then, ennui is not itself the mode of attunement with non-human nature that Morton suggests; rather, it emerges from Paul’s frustration in making sense of his condition. He exists in an irradiated state where his radiation is a prolonged and belated trauma that he suffers, and at the same time is threatened by an invisible and incipient harm to his family. His radiation has an intimate and physical effect on him and those around him while remaining imperceptible, evoking sensory absences and psychic confusion.

Moreover, the indulgence of ennui is especially problematic in the case of Paul Bannerman, for whom the ability to recover in quarantine is a privilege of his racial and class status. Anthony Vital notes the racial and class politics of this kind of environmentalism is “limited by being associated with the sort of person Paul represents, economically secure, educationally privileged, and as a family member concerned primarily with those closest to him, those who are of his kind”, for whom ecological consciousness is merely “one among a range of activities undertaken to bring about personal satisfaction” (2008: 93). Paul’s ecological thinking is deeply rooted in romanticist fascinations with nature as wilderness, or the garden as a recreational space, as the Bannermans remain oblivious to material circumstances of production and consumption within which their household and garden are situated (see Vital, 2008: 108).

Domestic spaces like his family’s garden are, as Rita Barnard argues, “ideological apparatuses” in the Althusserian sense which serve as the means by which hierarchical relations are reproduced (2006: 49). The garden presents a “dream topography” or a “certain wishful and often deceptive fiction about the world” (Barnard, 2006: 53) constructed by the hierarchies that are embodied in the physical enclosures. For Paul, “the garden is where the company of jacaranda fronds finger the same breeze that brushed the boy’s [his son’s] soft cheek, where caught in peripheral vision a cent’s worth of never-exterminated snail moves by peristalsis over a stone” (Gordimer, 2005: 54). James Graham notes that Paul’s isolation in his childhood garden in this passage evokes a consciousness of nature-in-itself that is unmediated by his professional and scientific language (2010: 199), thus eschewing a form of epistemic violence that reduces nature to the correlates of scientific jargon. Nevertheless, Paul’s allusion to childish innocence and his evocation of bucolic images like the jacaranda fronds and garden snail reinscribe a dream topography of the garden as a peaceful, suburban idyll. The ideological import of this is evident in the way that Paul’s environmentalism is silent about the social inequalities between rich and poor that are created by the forces of a colonizing modernity owing to his “luxury to be history’s observer” (Vital, 2008: 109). His suburban environment sequesters him from any real or immediate threat of the consequences of environmental degradation.

Meanwhile, for other characters, the campaign against the construction of nuclear reactors has more personal stakes: Thapelo was a member of the Umkhonto we Sizwe, the militant wing of the African National Congress, which had attacked and disrupted the construction of the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station during apartheid. The campaign against the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor represents a continuation of the freedom struggle in the form of a fight against ongoing capitalist extractivism, through what Paul describes ironically as “another kind of combat in the bush” (60). Unlike Paul, who pursues a white ideal of conservationism and environmentalism, Thapelo advocates for organizing indigenous resistance movements through the Amadiba Tribal Trust and by rallying the traditional leaders (85). Thapelo’s tactics are thwarted by financial incentives provided to these traditional leaders by the multinational corporations that are building these projects, forcing Paul to later organize his campaign by manipulating the narrative around it through an advertising campaign (146). Despite its overt lack of success, Thapelo’s perspective serves to decentre Paul’s insular and isolated engagement with the environment in the novel, and to contrast indigenous movements for environmental justice with what Graham describes as Paul’s eventual capitulation to the promotional culture of multinational capitalism and neoliberal economic development (2010: 203).

Vital draws attention to the novel’s self-awareness of the perspectival limitations of its narrative voice by virtue of the social position of its protagonist. He emphasizes the metafictional devices which indicate its agnosticism about endorsing its characters’ points of view. Perhaps the novel even pushes against their dominant narrative, as with the black figures of the street-sweeper and gardener who emphasize the blind spots in Paul’s awareness (2008: 94–95). In his thorough and exacting critique of Get a Life, Vital notes suggestively that one of the biggest limitations in Paul’s perspectives is that his “appreciation of nature’s otherness, his pleasure in feeling ‘decentred’, is inevitably tainted by his lack of imaginative interest in the ‘otherness’ of people, and ‘otherness’ that is the product of a shared national history” (2008: 100). Furthermore, Paul fails to represent in his inner life the experiences of black workers and environmentalists, or the damage to the non-human ecosystem. Vital’s critique of Get a Life as well as the limitations in the protagonist’s perspectives on class and race pose rather difficult questions about the novel’s modes of engagement. However, the ennui in the texture of the prose displays a further layer of self-awareness that goes beyond Vital’s critique, one which exposes the inadequacy the white liberal environmentalism that Paul represents. It characterizes Paul’s frustration with his present modes of engagement in a narrative driven by a desire for a different mode of understanding of the politics of nuclear contamination.

Paul’s state of existence, suspended as he is between trauma and threat, brings with it a sense of psychic confusion and anxiety that characterizes what Joseph Masco describes as a sense of the “nuclear uncanny”. Paul’s understanding of radiation reflects what Masco argues was a profound shift in the phenomenological understanding of death, disease, and health in Western society following the advent of nuclear technology. “Incipient death”, Masco argues, “has become a form of health itself, both normalized and rendered invisible as a new form of nature” because of how widespread catastrophic risks like instant mass death, individualized cellular mutation, and radiation-induced disease have become (2017: 339). These fears of nuclear catastrophe have “colonized psychic spaces and profoundly shaped the individual perceptions of the everyday” (2006: 28). This nuclear uncanny

exists in the material effects, psychic tension, and sensory confusion produced by nuclear weapons and radioactive materials. It is a perceptual space caught between apocalyptic expectation and sensory fulfilment, a psychic effect produced, on one hand, by living within the temporal ellipsis separating a nuclear attack and the actual end of the world, and on the other, by inhabiting an environmental space threatened by military-industrial radiation. (Masco, 2006: 28)

Masco’s analysis of the reconfiguration of existence because of the development of certain technologies is consistent with a broader understanding that the human self and its environment are both constituted by and apprehended through technologies that mediate their interaction. For Don Ihde, all technology belongs within a context of “some set of culturally-constituted values and processes”, which he terms a “context of involvement” (1990: 126). These contexts could include metaphysical assumptions about the world or phenomenological notions of the self and how it interacts with its environment. As a result, any transfer of technology to different regions represents not just a transfer of technological objects and a change in material circumstances, but also a change in the respective “contexts of involvement”. In other words, the transfer of technology to a new region brings with it a fundamental reconfiguration of the ways in which people experience the world because these technologies mediate their knowledge.

Paul’s experience of the nuclear uncanny, which Masco situates in the Western consciousness of nuclear power, then represents a specific response to the transfer of nuclear technology to South Africa in neo-imperial contexts. Nuclear projects such as the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor that Paul is campaigning against represent a reiteration of old colonial hierarchies in a capitalist world-system. While the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station is run domestically by the South African public utility Eksom, and most of the uranium is mined in South Africa, future nuclear developments projects announced by the South African government in 2014 and 2015 involve importing engineering and design from France, China, Russia, America, and South Korea (World Nuclear Association, 2017). This represents a continuing nexus between foreign capital and the national government. This is not to suggest that nuclear power is new to South Africa: Hecht’s history of nuclearity and its impact on black workers shows the opposite. Rather, it is the installation of a specific kind of nuclear technology — civilian nuclear reactors — that brings with it a threat of nuclear disaster that is perceptible to the social strata that Paul represents — the white, liberal elite.

For Ihde, the difference in technological development and concentration between the “first” and “third” worlds can be explained as a “massive failure to transfer precisely these aspects of a culture that would support furtherance of high technology” (1990: 132; emphasis mine). However, characterizing these unequal transfers as a “failure” neglects the often deliberate strategies employed to maintain hierarchical relations between “first” and “third” world regions, and to enforce distinctions between the human and non-human, or colonial self and colonized other, because of contiguous ideologies of exploitation. It would be more accurate to describe this as an unequal or asymmetrical transfer rather than a “failure of transfer”. If the transfer of technologies can bring about a transformation of values and conditions within a society, then regimes of technological exchange can in turn be used to shape or alter the values within these societies.

Get a Life’s focalizing through Paul and the novel’s emphasis on his ennui allows for close attention to the ways in which his exposure to radiation provokes a profound reconfiguration of his self and its interaction with his environment as a result of the development of nuclear technology in neocolonial contexts. Gordimer further imagines a new mode of engaging with the resulting reconfiguration of human relationships with the non-human environment. By following the shifts in Paul’s understanding of his self and his relationship with the environment, the novel reflects a burgeoning empathy with and understanding of the other that Paul develops through his irradiated state. In the subsequent section, I will examine how through the embodiment of vulnerability to nuclear fallout Gordimer’s novel examines the way in which the self is mutually constituted with the non-human nature.

Embodied vulnerability

The most revealing aspect of Gordimer’s depiction of radiation in the novel is that it is embodied through Paul and the risk he poses to his family. This sense of embodiment becomes the basis of his altered view of his self and his place within the greater-than-human environment, as well as the mutually-constitutive relationship between them. Nuclear catastrophe, for Paul, is no longer an abstract concept — one which he knows through a theoretical understanding of historic antecedents like the meltdown of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant — but becomes part of his lived experience, and thus an intimate part of his conception of his self. Ihde sketches a useful distinction between two different kinds of relationships connecting the human self and technology. The first is what he calls a “hermeneutic technics”, or a relation with technology in which a technological artefact transforms the world into a text which is then interpreted by a human subject (1990: 80). In Paul’s case, the civilian nuclear reactors that he surveys (and their risk of disaster), exemplify a hermeneutic technic that, as Masco argues, transforms the world into one where mutation and incipient death from radiation have become normalized. However, the catastrophe that is immanent in such a world is a hyperobject that resists representation in the human imaginary, which is where a hermeneutic technic proves inadequate. In contrast, Paul himself becoming radioactive represents what Ihde terms an “embodied technics”, or a technology that is integrated into the self such that it is undifferentiated from the observer when experiencing the world, as when “my glasses become part of the way I ordinarily experience my surroundings”, becoming a “symbiosis of artifact and user within a human action” (Ihde, 1990: 73). In this section, I will argue that Paul’s embodied technic of his own radioactivity forms the basis of a new and altered understanding of the human self and its place within the non-human environment.

The prevailing Cartesian view of the relationship between human society and non-human nature is one of dualism: capitalism extracts value from or exploits resources in nature and humanity is separated from it. In Plumwood’s critique of how the capitalist exploitation of nature is contiguous with a logic of colonialism, she argues that this logic is based on the hyperseparation of the human/white self and the non-human/black other that can be traced back to the dualism created by the European Enlightenment, one which is consolidated by the denial of coevalness between the self and the other and a subsuming of the other into an inert background of human exploitation (see Plumwood, 2003: 54–59). Paul’s irradiated state, however, presents an instance of mutuality between the self and the other that undermines these dualisms. As Jason W. Moore argues, a more sensitive history of capitalism reveals that rather than a dualism, capitalism and human society exist with non-human nature and the environment in a dialectic of “dual internality”, of an overlapping of the “humanity-in-nature/nature-in-humanity” and a mutually-constitutive relation between “nature” and capitalism (2015: 12, 42–44). The risk of nuclear catastrophe is one which is felt both by the environment around Paul as well as by himself and his family. His embodiment of this risk makes him sensitive to his place within this ecosystem. He develops an understanding of how the ecosystem affects and constitutes his sense of self and his actions upon the environment in the same way that his actions have consequences for the wider ecosystem.

What makes Paul’s changing sense of self especially powerful is his sensitivity towards a shared vulnerability between himself and a wider ecosystem that is vastly beyond what he can imagine. This realization is most prominent when he contemplates the wider impact of his radioactivity in a moment of reverie:

What is the threshold of risk to be decreed for different people — what about the paper plates touched by radiant saliva on spoons and forks, got rid of. Thrown away in the trash to lie on waste dumps picked over by kids from black squatter camps. What is “rid of” in terms of any pollution, it’s a life’s work to inform us that it’s not only what is cast into the sea that comes back to foul another shore, no matter whose it is. (60)

During this meditation, he is quarantined in his parents’ house as a way of keeping his family safe from his radiation, and he uses disposable crockery and cutlery to avoid contaminating members of the household and their domestic help. However, he becomes aware that the radiation risk he poses cannot be localized, and he poses a threat to other people who are remote to him. The change in his register, as he describes massive geographical features like the sea and the shore, contrasts with the physical confinement of his body, far exceeding the place where the novel is mostly set: a garden within a suburban, middle-class household and a space of relative domestic comfort. This reverie presents what, in Barnard’s view, can be considered a disruption to the dream topography that the garden presents. A wider ecosystem intrudes upon the domestic enclosure, thereby undermining the hierarchical structures that domestic spaces reproduce.

It is especially revealing that the people and places whom he describes are entirely abstract, such as “kids from black squatter camps” or “another shore, no matter whose it is”. While these people are alluded to, they remain for the most part an absence from the text. Black characters do not have voices within the novel, and like the man sweeping the streets at the start or like the Bannermans’ domestic help, they are rendered background figures. However, the oblique allusion to these figures within the narrative draws attention to their absence within the perspective through which the novel focalizes. It emphasizes the characters’ positionality as well as the limitations of their perspectives. These absent presences in Paul’s consciousness are evident in the language of the narrative as it focalizes through him. His realization that “it’s not only what is cast into the sea that comes back to foul another shore, no matter whose it is” is especially remarkable for its inability to name nuclear fallout for what it is, but describes it euphemistically, comparing it to the dumping of refuse in the oceans which then circulates across a transnational ecosystem. This intimates the impossibility of finding a metalanguage that is not contaminated by this hyperobject, as despite using sanitized euphemisms, the material risk faced by these remote regions taint the narrative. The lack of specificity in his language reflects the diffused nature of the contamination: there will always be regions that are unknown and unknowable that will be affected by nuclear contamination. The nature of this contamination is an unspectacular and dispersed form of what Rob Nixon describes as “slow violence” (see Nixon, 2011), whose large temporal and geographical scale resist the understanding of the human imaginary. Though Paul is aware of the material systems of ocean and wind currents that circulate refuse and nuclear fallout, the frustrating vagueness of his language gestures towards the ways in which aspects of the symbiotic real resist representation within the imaginary, and are instead only known through absence and evoke ennui. The ecosystem within which Paul is entangled is present in a state of perennial alterity, as it is never fully grasped by a human subject but exists in a state of otherness that eludes representation. This alterity of the ecological is characteristic of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak terms “planetarity”, as the planet is an entity that constantly eludes the subject’s grasp (see Spivak, 2015: 291).

Although the planetary, in Spivak’s terms, exists in a state of radical alterity, neither the idea itself nor its representation in the novel is to suggest the passivity of a non-human nature, or an anthropocentric need for representation and knowledge to a human subject. On the contrary, the implied awareness of the material process by which ocean currents circulate human refuse demonstrates a sense of autonomy and agency of the non-human ecosystem, one which is independent of but nevertheless deeply tainted by human activity. It is in light of this contradiction between an alterity that defies representation and a persisting sense of commitment and moral responsibility that Paul finds himself trapped and frustrated. He finds that his earlier vocabulary of liberal politics, scientific and conservationist jargon, and the prevailing critical responses to development projects through a materialist critique of the nexus of foreign capital, state power, and neoliberal ideology, are ill-equipped to grapple with the moral questions of his own radioactive contamination as well as ecological catastrophe at such a vast scale. The indeterminacy of his moral frames of reference reflects a subtle transition between different modes of thinking about human ecological impact.

This development in Paul’s ethical thought is most evident just before he leaves his quarantine. As Paul and Thapelo meet once again in the garden in his last week there, Paul notes that the way the two of them feel absorbed in their work in the gardens of the suburban quarter

informs their understanding of the world and their place as agents within it, from the perspective that everyone, like it or not, admit it or not, acts upon the world in some way. Spray a weed-killer on this lawn and the Hoopoe delicately thrusting the tailor’s needle of its beak, after insects in the grass, imbibes the poison. (83)

Paul’s understanding of his place within and the impact of his actions on the ecosystem is rooted in his lawn, making his experience in the garden especially formative in his ethical thought. He is himself aware of this, as he describes himself as “a conservationist […] one of those new missionaries here not to save the souls but to save the earth” whose “heresy is born of the garden” (94), and he further regards his immersion within it as being “a microcosm of the macrocosm’s marvel” (95).

In his reading of the novel, Byron Caminero-Santangelo draws attention to deep-seated contradictions in Paul’s understanding of his work as an environmentalist, as on the one hand, he develops a sense of his own place within nature and, on the other hand, he further experiences a sense of alienation from his professional identity (2014: 123). Although Paul’s embodiment of nuclear radiation presents a sense of a dual internality of his self with nature, he is nevertheless confronted by the limits of discursive knowledge of nature itself when he reflects on the vast scale of the Okavango Delta. He realizes that he had thought of the ecosystem “too abstractly, himself limited by professionalism itself, too little of the grandeur and delicacy, cosmic and infinitesimal complexity of an ecosystem complete as this” (90). Furthermore, he becomes sceptical of the professional and scientific jargon that mediates his knowledge of nature, which he derides as a “computerspeak label” (91). Caminero-Santangelo argues that by calling into question the certitudes of ecological knowledge through such contradictions in Paul’s thinking, the novel “embraces underlying principles of ecology” regarding the preservation of identity and life while further emphasizing the “necessary restrictions placed on the study of ecology by the forms of political organization and ideology that shape it” (129; emphasis in original). Further to Caminero-Santangelo’s reading of the novel, I argue that Paul’s immersion into the ecosystem through his embodied radioactivity in his garden — one which, as Graham notes, is unmediated by the computerspeak jargon of ecology — affirms the underlying principles of ecology by presenting an altered understanding of the human self as one that is embedded within its environment. This shift is not just an epistemological one, pertaining to the limitations of ecological knowledge, but a phenomenological one concerning the way in which the human self, the non-human nature, and their relationship are constituted. It is through the transformation of nuclear radiation into an embodied technic through Paul’s own becoming radioactive that the novel presents the human self and non-human nature as mutually constituted in a relation of dual internality, resisting the Cartesian separation of the human self from the non-human nature that underpins its exploitation within colonial extractivism.

Paul’s understanding of his place within the ecosystem and his shared vulnerability to catastrophe finds resonance with a wider conceptual shift in environmental thought about the form of relations between the human self and non-human nature. For Donna Haraway, the understanding of anthropogenic ecological change is caught between different conceptual paradigms such as the “anthropocene”, “capitalocene”, “plantationocene” and, a term of her own devising, the “chthulucene”. The term chthulucene, for Haraway, derives from the Greek word khthôn, meaning subterranean, and designates “a kind of timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a dying earth” (2016: 2). Her critique of the tension between the anthropocene and capitalocene in particular, and her strategic favouring of the chthulucene as a result, are analogous to Paul’s shift in his political alignments. For Haraway, the anthropocene and capitalocene “lend themselves too readily to cynicism, defeatism, and self-certain and self-fulfilling predictions, like the ‘game over, too late’ discourse […] in which both technotheolocratic geoengineering fixes and wallowing in despair seem to coinfect any possible common imagination” (2016: 56). In contrast, the chthulucene requires a certain degree of what Haraway terms “response-ability” — a pun on the notion of moral responsibility that places emphasis on the capacity to respond to and make kin with the non-human — which requires that human subjects attend to the fact that their lives “depend directly upon the ongoing integrity of these holobiomes [of the more-than-human world] for their own [that is, human] ongoing living and dying as well” (2016: 56). Her emphasis on the subterranean in her idea of the chthulucene highlights the embeddedness and mutual interdependence of these relations in contrast with the polarisation of the human and the environment as separate entities. This attention to the greater-than-human means, for Haraway, a sensitivity to live and die with the non-human through intricate and unusual forms of kinship.

Paul’s ennui represents the overwhelming dismay and defeatism inherent in the purely materialist critique of environmental catastrophe as characteristic of the capitalocene. Despite the ennui and listlessness from the inadequacy of his previous ways of thinking, and despite the indeterminacy and vagueness of his ethical positions, Paul strives to maintain an ethical obligation to the wider ecosystem. The vulnerability of remote holobiomes like the sea and other shores intrude upon his sequestered sense of being represented by the domestic spaces wherein the affluent elites exist in a comfortable obliviousness towards the wider ecosystem. The psychic tension between the security of his quarantine and the apocalyptic threat posed by radiation characterizes the sensory confusion of the nuclear uncanny. This apocalyptic vision manifests in Paul’s anxieties around extinction. His sense of the disaster is especially ambivalent, as he appreciates that “maybe we see the disaster and don’t, can’t live long enough (that is, through centuries) to see the survival solution” (93). His reflections on extinction are situated within the vast timescale of extinctions over millennia, such as the white rhino, dinosaurs, and mastodon (94). Paul’s sense of the enormous and dispersed temporal scale of this disaster, as well as its relative invisibility because of its constant nature, reflects slow violence, which defines the fundamental nature of what makes nuclear catastrophe especially uncanny.

These meditations on extinction nevertheless give Paul the impetus to affirm himself as a conservationist. In light of these fears, Paul sees himself, with some irony, as a “one of the new missionaries here […] to save the earth” and finds refuge in his activism that began in the garden (94). It is his intimacy with his environment that forms the basis of his ethical response to these fears of extinction, reconfiguring his mode of thinking of the non-human ecosystem and of the slow violence of nuclear contamination as something that is internal to his being rather than something he can separate himself from. His own irradiated state has turned nuclearity into an embodied technic, reflected in his use of possessive pronouns to describe his condition as “his own Koeberg experimental nuclear reactor” and “his Chernobyl” (60; emphasis mine). His confrontation with his illness and mortality affirms his vulnerability, a vulnerability which in turn opens him up to empathize with extinction within a larger ecosystem. This shared vulnerability presents what Graham describes as “an ethical awareness of the relation between endogenous environments and human-created nature” (198). It is precisely because this experience is embodied — articulated through his own irradiated state as he becomes a metaphorical nuclear reactor — that it enables him to develop a response-ability to radiation contamination of the non-human ecosystem across vast spatial and temporal scales, even though it is a hyperobject that defies his imagination.

What is most significant about Paul’s ecological awareness is that his political and ethical ideas are framed by his contemporary politics in the specific moment in South Africa’s history. The sense of drift and frustration that Paul experiences at the inadequacy of the earlier modes of engagement is further exacerbated by the persistence of colonial-era hierarchies and racial injustices in post-apartheid society. While it is true that Paul’s position as an observer of historical events and his freedom to sequester himself and reflect upon these issues in the comfort of his parents’ home are luxuries afforded to him by virtue of his position of racial and class privilege, his understanding of the ecological and ethical issues that shape his life does imply an emerging awareness of the wider colonial politics of nuclear technology. As a result, Paul embodies what Stephen Clingman terms a “split historical position” (1986: 218). During his reverie, Paul is conscious of the notion of the “threshold of risk to be decreed for people”: this alludes to the discourse of “permissible dose” which, as discussed earlier, Hecht argues was informed by the racial hierarchies of apartheid-era mine ownership. In addition, Paul’s quarantine parallels the separation of black and white bodies during apartheid, an analogy that Paul himself is aware of when he sees Thapelo’s lack of concern for exposure to radiation as resulting from an exposure to a much graver “quarantine of segregation” (61). When Thapelo hugs Paul in the garden, and subsequently continues to meet and drink with him, their proximity symbolically resists both the racial segregation of black and white bodies and the segregation of the infected body. It is especially revealing that Paul sees this hug as symbolic of a “freedom fought for together amongst black men” from during the freedom struggle (60). Contrary to Vital’s claim that Paul lacks imaginative interest in the lives of black people, his experience of exclusion and vulnerability form the basis of solidarity with black freedom fighters like Thapelo in the context of a shared struggle against neo-colonial extractivism, even if his ability to fully understand their position within anticolonial struggle is lacking within the framework of his historical consciousness.

Conclusion

Nuclear energy in South Africa is an industry that is entangled within its colonial past. It also foregrounds the hierarchical exploitation of non-human nature by human extractivism. Discourses of environmentalism and political opposition to nuclear energy based on a critique of capital are inadequate in apprehending the scale and reach of ecological catastrophe, manifested here as a form of slow violence that is dispersed over the massive geographical and temporal scales of nuclear fallout. Making such a hyperobject comprehensible requires the realignment of the phenomenology of the human self as mutually constituted by the non-human lifeworld. Get a Life imagines an embodied mode of engagement that can apprehend such complex entanglements and further makes them the basis of its ecological ethic. What makes Gordimer’s late style especially provocative is the way in which it stages the phenomenological challenge of being able to apprehend a sense of the nuclear uncanny that resists representation within the human imaginary. This is articulated in the form of the novel through the way in which it closely follows Paul’s internal monologue, conveying his predominant sense of ennui. Paul’s ennui and frustration indicate the inability to grasp either the hyperobject of nuclear contamination or the wider symbiotic real of the non-human ecosystem. Gordimer’s style draws attention to this resistance to representation by emphasizing absences, negative presences, and spectral effects of these others within the narrative. While the narrative is circumscribed by Paul’s positionality, it presents through his vulnerability a sense of openness to the wider ecosystem, an openness which characterizes an embodied response-ability towards the non-human other. This is most salient in the way in which the impact of nuclear contamination is manifested directly through Paul’s experience of becoming radioactive. This embodiment of a shared radioactivity makes what would otherwise be a hyperobject that resists representation understandable within the scale of human life. There is an acute awareness of the scope of these entanglements with the non-human world, particularly in Paul’s knowledge of the vast geographical and temporal reach of radiation and extinction. These reconfigurations of his self become the basis of his activism and his kinship with black characters who were otherwise rendered marginal in his perspective. What this novel presents, then, is a mutually-constitutive relationship between the human and the non-human, and a shared sense of vulnerability and mortality between them, that resists the ideological dualism between the human self and non-human other, laying the groundwork for ethical action and resistance.