The Desire of Nowhere– Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter in a Trans-cultural Perspective
The Desire of Nowhere– Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter in a Trans-cultural Perspective

Summary/Abstract: The article marks an attempt to read the book Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer through the idea of the “desire of nowhere” addressed by the author in one of her early essays and conceptualized here in a transcultural perspective. Gordimer is one of the most famous South African novelists and an active antiapartheid activist. Although the local political situation of South Africa is an important background for her book, the article’s main focus is to rethink the possibility of creating a space of individual freedom located beyond cultural and societal attachments. Tat effort resembles a transcultural endeavor, yet it introduces a slightly different approach, conceptualized in the article as the “desire of nowhere”. Expression of the space beyond culture is a problematic venture, as the primary tool of a literary text – language – is firmly embedded in human cultural experience. Tus, transcultural literature, just entering the sights of literary research, displays creative strategies of undermining language in literary creation, i.e. the pluralization of narrative voices, the introduction of the unreliable narrator, extensive use of irony, multinational settings of the storyline. The article tries to detect other literary strategies for creating space beyond words and culture. The analysis of the book Burgers’s Daughter underlines how the use of visual strategies helps to decenter the narrative voice and to actuate the text into the transcultural movement. It also exposes the performative process of distancing from oneself – appearing to the self as “a place where things happen”. Finally, the article detects the crucial gestures – moments of increased narrative tension that lead beyond the text to the experience of “life itself”, using the motifs of blood, agony, and death.

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