Nadine Gordimer's "Burger's Daughter": Conrad-Rosa relationship

 

An important perspective - a 'critique' of revolutionary enthusiasm - is provided by Conrad, the prototypical liberated man of the 1960s, whose name is probably meant to suggest that of Joseph Conrad, the author of the psychological abyss. Depicted as Rosa's spiritual twin, Conrad is able to utter words and thoughts that are taboo to Rosa's political conditioning in the world of her father's commitments. Ironically, their sexual relationship lasts only until both of them are capable of articulating the deep, almost incestuous, closeness between them. Rosa tells Conrad: "And you know we had stopped making love together months before I left, aware that it had become incest".



Conrad talks to Rosa about his Oedipus complex, thus opening Rosa's eyes to the Electra complex behind the necessary gesture of her being Burger's daughter. Whereas the relationship between Rosa and her father may be described as 'incestuous' in terms of Rosa's emotional dependence on the father figure, Conrad's teenage existence has been marred by his knowledge that his mother had had two lovers: "What does Oedipus do about two rivals?", he ponders. Rosa feels similarly oppressed by her father's moral commitment. It is only on his death that she realises the relief of her liberating herself from him. Her words, "Now you are free", are repeated twice in the novel and are addressed to Conrad: "It came to me when I was with you; it came to me from being with you".

Whereas the parental relationship has led to Rosa's psychological and social constriction, her relationship with Conrad is characterised by highly articulate self-expression. Conrad provides Rosa with a good listening ear, and represents her need for an audience to her thoughts: "One is never talking to oneself, always one is addressed to someone". Conrad may be regarded as an embodiment of Rosa's need to connect to her deeper self: the deep consciousness and conscience within her. Thus, Gordimer utilises Conrad as one of Rosa's many inner voices. Shortly after Conrad disappears at sea - his image is reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's Decoud, who sinks out of the moral and social hurly-burly of material life - Rosa engages in an inner dialogue in which she expresses her fusion of mental planes: “The yacht was never found. I may have been talking to a dead man: only to myself.”



Just as Conrad dies in an indescribable nowhere, without boundaries, so he had lived: without boundaries or commitments of a societal nature. He had conducted his relationship with Rosa where it "was safe and cosy as a child's playhouse and sexually arousing as a lovers' hideout. It was nowhere". Conrad inhabits a space, prior to dying in a space that resembles his deeper self: amorphous, open-ended, committed to nothing but its own inclination. Within the design of the novel, it is from this 'non-committed' space and through Conrad's non-political eyes that the stature of the committed Lionel Burger is placed under qualificatory scrutiny. More precisely, it is through conversations between Rosa and Conrad, or else through Rosa's own inner dialogues with Conrad, that Lionel Burger emerges for the reader as a more complex point of reference than a liberation hero to whom one is expected to pay unqualified obeisance. It is the perspective through which Gordimer casts doubts on total ideology, which has little time or concern for the personal challenges of Rosa's young womanhood.

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