“[S]he Has a Knife in [Her] Hand”: Writing/Cutting in Nadine Gordimer’s Short Stories

This paper focuses on some of the key gestures which give Gordimer’s stories their disruptive power. Across the years and from one grave to another (“Six Feet of the Country”/“The Moment Before the Gun Went Off ”), Gordimer’s text both exposes the failures of the symbolic and fends off the threat of the abject. Paying particular attention to the punctuation/punctures of the stories at the strategic point of closure, the article also traces, in the more formally complex stories of Jump, the way in which voice becomes the instrument of the dislocation of the narrative.