Nadine Gordimer's "Burger's Daughter": role/ character of Conrad

 

Conrad is a white student whom Rosa meets at the trial. In the trial scene, Conrad the voyeur is compared to a Chinese mandarin who watches the proceedings through non-committal eyes. It is significant that he is introduced as a character in the very scene in which Burger's trial holds central attention. Occasionally Gordimer, subtly shifting her narrator's voice from observation to character-specific intrusion, makes remarks such as: "But this boy [Conrad] was of interest to no one; let him look at them all if the spectacle intrigued him: revolutionaries at play, a sight like the secret mating of whales".

As Rosa withdraws from anti-apartheid politics after her father’s death in prison, she becomes involved with the moody, self-absorbed lover Conrad, who has adopted an egocentric form of individualism. As Dominic Head argues, ‘his egocentric world-view’ stands in contrast to ‘the sterile commitment of the Burger family’. Conrad says, “I don’t give a fuck about what is ‘useful’. The will is my own. The right to be inconsolable. When I feel, there’s no ‘we’, only T’.”

Conrad is the surrogate brother with whom Rosa enjoys childish erotic freedom. When the Burger family home is sold after her father’s death, the rented cottage Rosa had shared with Conrad is flattened under a freeway. Her friendship with Conrad may have begun as a sexual tryst, but they soon stop making love, “aware that it had become incest.” Conrad ‘frames’ Rosa’s house in his own words and reveals Lionel’s ideology to be a discursive construct.

His own petty brand of humanism, with his self-indulgent emphasis on sex and death, takes him on a journey in a ship destined for failure, since his ship is built and landlocked in an enclosed yard. He may travel the world, but he is paralysed by his ideological stasis. Karen Halil suggests: “Conrad adheres to an ideology that privileges his own desires and domestic world.” Conrad’s perspective is entirely individualistic. He tells her that her family response to personal tragedy is formulaic: “Among you, the cause is what can’t die.... A cause more important than an individual is another.... You didn’t cry when your father was sentenced. I saw. People said how brave. .. But it’s conditioning, brain-washing: more like a trained seal, maybe.”

Conrad is a catalyst in Rosa’s growing fatigue. Indulging in her own version of Conrad’s selfish individualism, Rosa leaves South Africa for the Mediterranean coast of France. In this novel, we find Conrad’s Freudian existentialism. For Conrad, the significant dynamic is “the tension between creation and destruction in yourself”. He is convincing as a ‘type’ rather than an individual.

Conrad's gaze, while recognising the danger of political commitments excluding other areas of the surrounding life, must simultaneously be critically 'placed' in its lack of social involvements: Conrad is depicted as a voyeur who is morbidly attracted to those who are different from himself, while he hesitates to reach out. As Rosa intuits: "you never got beyond fascination with the people around Lionel Burger's swimming pool; you never jumped in and trusted yourself to him, like Baasie or me, or drowned, like Tony".