Hybridity and ‘Time Lag’: Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People

In “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite”, Emmanuel Levinas asserts that the driving force
behind Western thought from Socrates to the present day has been the desire to produce a context
within which Western ‘thinking beings’ can feel free from the disturbance of difference and
alienation; a context in which they can feel always at home in the world. Levinas describes the idea
behind the production of such a context as ‘the Philosophy of the Same’ in which freedom is not
defined in terms of heterogeneity and the capacity to accommodate diversity but rather in terms of
monology and the capacity to resist diversity. This interiorised or narcissistic focus, which Levinas
(borrowing from Husserl) calls an egology, eschews the external encounter with otherness (and the
experience of shock and displacement which it entails), preferring instead to “dissolve the other’s
alterity” into “the network of a priori ideas, which I bring to bear so as to capture it” (97). This
approach to difference is typically achieved (or at least, maintained) by the avoidance or the
circumvention of proximity with the other and through the premature closure of dialogue.

Homi Bhabha asserts, inverting Levinas’s conception, that ‘emergent cultural identifications’
(“The Postcolonial” 178-179) are formed through proximity, at the edges of identity and at the
moment of the erasure of binary oppositions. This conception of a momentary erasure of difference
and cultural clash is described by Bhabha as ‘time lag’, a brief interruption or break in the influence
of dominant discourse (the discourse of the same) which exposes the subject to the subversive
effects of alterity (the discourse of the other). What ‘time lag’ might mean in terms of human
experience and the outcomes of this experience on emergent or hybrid human identity will be
explored in this paper through the cross-cultural encounters of Nadine Gordimer’s South African
novel, July’s People.

Epistemic control: the Other as Diversity

The contemporary shifts in theory away from the concept of presence or centrality (the existence of
transcendent signifieds) and toward the theorisation of dispersal and diversity have given the
appearance of providing greater cross-cultural interaction while, in fact, continuing to maintain
control over the definition of cultural discourses. Bhabha describes the postmodern adaptation to the
postcolonial shift in the relations of power as “epistemological” (177-178). The epistemological
represents for Bhabha the development of strategies for the control and containment of otherness
adapted to the ethical requirements of liberalism and the interrogations of postmodernity.
 According to this approach, Western cultural / political dominance is [re]asserted by the
containing effects of liberal tolerance that allow space for diversity, but always within the confines
of the ever-expanding scope of Western epistemology By this means the appearance of tolerance is
achieved and the threat of cultural difference is defused. This strategy Bhabha describes as the
sublation of difference. Bhabha suggests, in this regard, that “cultural diversity is the recognition of
pre-given cultural contents and customs; held in a time-frame of relativism it gives rise to liberal
notions of multiculturalism, cultural exchange or the culture of humanity “ (34). Thus, diversity is
celebrated while remaining the subject of Western observation and definition. The difficulty of
maintaining dominance in the context of postmodern dispersion is overcome by separating diversity
into self-contained epistemologies which never need to (or are allowed to) interact with each other
and which the centre is able to theorise rather than directly engage. This containment of the threat
of difference within the boundaries of the definable and ‘studyable’ paradigms of a celebrated
diversity represents a new strategy, a contemporary adaptation to the movement of history and
modern thought, which permits the West to once more sidestep the challenge of negotiating a
maturing otherness.

2. Enunciative Practices: The Other as Difference

The enunciative, on the other hand, represents a shift toward a more agonistic and negotiated
response to alterity. In his article “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern”, Bhabha attempts to
broadly define the meanings that he attaches to these terms:

The epistemological is locked into the hermeneutic circle, in the description of elements as
they tend towards totality. The enunciative is a more dialogic process that attempts to track
displacements and realignments that are the effects of cultural antagonisms and articulations -
subverting the rationale of the hegemonic movement and relocating alternative, hybrid sites
of cultural negotiation. (178)

In this form the other is perceived as an alternative other, another Symbolic Order that both
subverts and augments the values of the self. It is an alterity which is separated from the West, but
as an alternative to Western identity it is also the site of potential disruption and alienation. As
Bhabha suggests, “through the concept of cultural difference” we are able to “recognise that the
problem of cultural interaction emerges only at the significatory boundaries of cultures, where
meaning and values are (mis)read or signs are misappropriated” (“The Commitment to Theory” 34).
According to this view the enunciatory might be said to be metonymic or contiguous as opposed to
the epistemological which could be designated as metaphoric and substitutionary. Into this
conception of enunciatory engagement Bhabha introduces the idea of ‘time lag’ as a necessary phase
of liminal or metonymic engagement with otherness. An essential ingredient of ‘time lag’
experience is proximity which ties in with the Levinasian conception of genuine engagement as an
encounter with the ‘face of the other’( ).

In the course of examining July’s People from Bhabha’s theoretical perspective, I will
suggest that three features or prerequisites are, in fact, indispensable to the experience of a genuine
negotiation of cultural alterity not only because they realign the understanding and appreciation of
otherness but also have the capacity to contribute to the deconstruction of one’s own sense of
cultural authenticity and that one of these prerequisites is time lag.

The first prerequisite is a recognition of cultural meaning as an outcome of social production

and construction rather than the epistemological / metaphoric assertion of a priori principle, in other
words, a willingness to concede the relative and culturally contingent nature of meaning. This is a
shift to the surface, or discursive level, of meaning production (from the site of substitutive metaphor
to contiguous metonymy) which provides a looser, more relative context for cross-cultural
interaction, and with it the possibility of negotiated outcomes. This is Bhabha’s enunciative which
should not be seen as a product of the theorisation or thematisation of discourse but rather as the
outcome of encounter.

The second is a stress on the value of proximity or social engagement with the other, which
requires an often agonistic interaction at the borders of difference. This shift toward enunciatory
space introduces a multiplicity of alternative cultural meanings and temporalities into the region of
contestation and negotiation where cross-cultural alterities actually meet. More than a theoretical
deconstruction of the ‘authentic’, proximal engagement generates a genuine space and experience of
alienation and re-engagement (which are key components of ‘time lag’).

The final prerequisite of such interaction is what Wilson Harris called “material change”.
This refers to the motivation or sense of necessity that makes us willing to enter the space of acute
disorientation that occurs in the context of cross-cultural openness. Harris asserts that because of the
cultural and psychological displacement, and the enormous threat to self-identity that accompanies
such an interaction, it rarely occurs outside the context of extreme material pressure. Material
change, therefore, is intended to describe the pressure derived from altered material circumstances or
an inescapable cultural context which necessitates the negotiation of difference or, as is more often
the case, results in the decision to withdraw from it by imposing premature closure.

‘Time Lag’: Ceasing and Seizing / Unpicking and Re-linking

A useful literary exploration of this conception of cultural engagement is found in David

Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire under the heading “insubstantialization”. Spurr cites, among other
texts, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, as textual
enactments of this process. Lawrence’s intimate relations with the Arabs and “his effort to imitate
the Arab mentality” (148), according to Spurr, produced a bifurcation of his identity in which he
entered an intermediate zone in relation to his own sense of self. Lawrence writes of this experience
in terms that approximate Bhabha’s conception of the initial experience of ‘time lag’: “I had dropped
one form and not taken on the other” (148). Spurr describes Lawrence’s experiences as the
occupation of

a terrifying in-between state, no longer English, but not yet Arab either, in which the
foundations of reality and the motives for action suddenly lose their meaning. This absence
of any firm identity takes the form of a split in which his “reasonable mind” looks critically
upon the actions of his bodily self ; “sometimes those selves would converse in the void: and
then madness was very near, as I believe it would be near the man who could see things
through the veils at once of two customs, two educators, two environments”. (Emphasis
added, 148-149)

In Wilson Harris’s words, Lawrence had entered “the boredom and the horror of two
worlds: a community in which a transforming new vision (however dark and tortuous) is alive to
redress the balance of the old.” (24). Yet in this early stage of disorientation no redress, or
renegotiation of meaning, is possible (or even conceivable), only the displacement of certainties and
the intervention of metonymic alternatives. Lawrence’s entrance into the insecure space between
reigns and identities has something of Gramsci’s quality of the interregnum in which “the old is
dying and the new cannot be born”.

In Heart of Darkness both Marlow and Kurtz, in journeying toward the ‘darkness’, enter
this space between identity and alienation to differing degrees. For Marlow it is a passage into “the
dream sensation that pervaded all my days at that time” (105), a subjective weightlessness that
caused him to drift dangerously close to the madness that had already claimed Kurtz. Maureen, the
central character in Gordimer’s July’s People, enters a similar zone of displacement between
cultures.

The question that this raises is whether such an experience of disorientation can be
productive of useful cross-cultural outcomes? Normally the experience of ‘culture shock’ is seen as
a negative and ineffectual instance of cross-cultural encounter. Bhabha, in The Location of Culture,
however, suggests that the silencing in the “enunciatory present”, the momentary displacement of
metaphoric signification can, in fact, be highly productive of meaningful cross-cultural outcomes if
the typical tendency to impose premature closure is resisted. He argues that the experience of this
discursive fracture represents a “more complex possibility of negotiating meaning and agency
through the time-lag” (183).

This “time lag” represents a type of discursive absence, described by Lacan, in another
context, as a “third locus which is neither my speech nor my interlocutor”(173 ). It is a disjunction
which could be described, in the cross-cultural context, as the space between Symbolic Orders or
cultures, a zone of symbolic agonism which momentarily circumvents the repression of otherness.
Within this discursive space the metonymic is multiplied and the metaphoric diminished.

The approach taken by Gordimer’s novel reflects this stress on the value of liminality, of
cross-cultural agonism and displacement in the production of new, hybrid identities. July’s People,
centres on a white South African family (Bam and Maureen Smales and their three children) who
have escaped from Johannesburg during the long-expected black uprising with the help of their
servant, July, and are being sheltered in his village.1 Gordimer inverts the roles of servant and
master within the village context without initially changing the relationship behind those roles. Thus
the old attitudes continue into a context in which they make no sense. July suddenly finds himself
the host and provider for this white family and they his dependents. Gordimer sets up this social
reversal in order to explore the reactions and interactions of the participants as their identities
unravel in the face of extreme cultural and ‘material change’. As the prolonged nature of their exile
becomes more real through the heightening agitation of the white South African radio broadcasts
(and even more ominous when the broadcasts disappear from the air waves altogether), Bam
becomes progressively incapable of dealing with the extreme demands of cultural shift and gradually
retreats into total closure in relation to his surroundings and his family.2 Maureen, on the other hand,

1
These narrative events are, of course, set in (and written during) the period of white apartheid rule.
2
For Bam it is the loss of the symbols of his authority that cause him to feel the terror of his cultural
displacement and loss of identity, particularly, July’s gradual appropriation of the car and the theft of
the gun.
seems determined, in the face of this extreme disorientation, to persist in negotiating the challenges
to her values and identity in order to retain a sense of personal integrity and meaning.

Gordimer places the character of Maureen, and her troubled relationship with July, at the
heart of her novel. As July begins to challenge her assumptions concerning their past and present
relationship Maureen is gradually made conscious of the tremendous reversal in the balance of
power and dependence that has been brought about by the black uprising. Maureen has always
considered herself liberal and progressive in her treatment of July and has tried to encourage him to
think of himself as their employee rather than their servant. The ongoing exposure to Maureen of
her attempts to hide the truth of their relationship behind a morally acceptable veneer exemplifies the
writer’s attempt to peel back the seemingly endless layers of self-deception and cultural
misinterpretation, built up over generations, to reveal the complex nuances of alterity and hegemony.
Eventually, after a series of incidents involving July, Maureen begins to see her
past attitudes reflected back to her through July’s eyes. In order to avoid the implications that her
treatment of July and her involvement in anti-apartheid causes represents little more than a
camouflage of underlying paternalism, she returns to confront July on three separate occasions.

For Maureen, the crisis is also associated with a challenge to her sense of the truth of
fundamental human relationships. When she observes the way in which July maintains two wives,
one in the city and the other in his village, without any apparent sense of guilt, she is forced to
reassess her understanding of relational morality, which she had thought of as culturally universal.
This further unsettles the foundations upon which she has so long rested the axiology of her
existence.

The humane creed (Maureen, like anyone else, regarded her own as definitive) depended on
validities staked on a belief in the absolute nature of intimate relationships between human
beings. If people don’t all experience emotional satisfaction and deprivation in the same
way, what claim can there be for equality of need? There was fear and danger in
considering this emotional absolute as open in any way. . . (65)
This transition across resistance, the challenge to, or deferral of, essential values, is new to
Maureen and therefore deeply disorienting. July has long ago traversed the space into the hybridised
identity he has become. Driven from his tribal home into Johannesburg he had been confronted by
the “material change” of colonisation and therein been forced to negotiate otherness and the
subversion of his own cultural authenticity long before. Maureen, on the other hand, has been
allowed to engage with alterity according to the much gentler and selective rhythm of the coloniser.
She has never been required by material circumstances into the exposure and negotiation of her own
cultural “absolutes” (while, at the same time, she has maintained good conscience by celebrating and
championing its diverse existence). Now, thrust into this new and seemingly inescapable context,
“material change” has forced her into a proximity with the other which begins to challenge and
distort her own sense of cultural certainty.

When she tries, and fails, to justify her position to July (“If I offended you, if I hurt
your dignity, if what I thought was my friendliness, the feeling I had for you-if that hurt your
feelings', 'I know I don’t know') her liberal espousals of tolerance, her attempts to conceal (from
herself and the other) racist and hegemonic predilections, are gradually exposed. In the face of
this otherness she is confronted by the look, the returning gaze, of an alterity which can, in the
context of material change, refuse to submit to her discursive dominance. In this liminal context,
she begins to recognise that the language of political correctness (of racial equality and the
rejection of white hegemony) which had once seemed to her to be an enunciation her tolerance
has had less to do with defending the rights of black Africans than with protecting herself against
bad conscience.

Even her liberal construction of the idealised identity of the other, the fixing of the other into
an acceptable and laudable diversity, is denied her as a means of rationalisation or re-orientation.
When the Chief suggests that Bam should teach them to fight against the black rebellion (which he
sees in tribal rather nationalistic terms) by getting Bam to show them how to shoot with his gun,
Bam and Maureen’s idealised construction of black South African aspirations and identity is thrown
out of kilter. Bam remonstrates with the Chief

You’re not going to shoot your own people. You wouldn’t kill blacks. Mandela’s people…
(Would they have forgotten Luthuli? heard of Biko? Not of their ‘nation’ although he was
famous in New York and Stockholm, Paris, London and Moscow) -You’re not going to take
guns and help the white government kill blacks, are you? … The whole black nation is your
nation. (146)

Maureen was hearing Bam say “what he and she had always said, it came lamenting, searching from
their whole life across the silent bush in which they had fallen from the fabric of that life as loose
buttons drop and are lost.” (Emphasis added p.146) Faced by this dissipation of the discourse upon
which she had relied for meaning, Maureen begins to lose her bearings and with this loses the power
to speak meaningfully3:

3
She no longer even has a name for her husband, who she refers to in the last part of the novel
as the “blond man”
 She was not in possession of any part of her life… The background had fallen away; since
the first morning she had become conscious in the hut she had regained no established point
of a continuing present from which to recognize her own sequence. (170)

Thus, at the threshold of cross-cultural encounter a discursive lull, “an indeterminate

articulation” (179), opens up for Maureen, (as it did for Lawrence and Marlow) which is not
dominated by the repressive metaphors of cultural value but in fact goes “beyond theory” (Bhabha),
is “outside the sentence” (Barthes). Such a discursive interruption in the Western monologue of
domination is described by Bhabha as a “temporal break in representation”(“The Postcolonial” 183)
where the substitutionary power of the Western metaphor is emptied of its weight (its ability to crush
alterity) and the supplementarity of an alien metonymic is momentarily privileged. In this break in
the symbolic order, Maureen is exposed to the possibility of negotiation with alterity and her sense
of identity is made porous to the flow of hybrid articulations. Within this space in which the subject
is cut adrift from the world of ‘truth’ (the stability of the symbolic order), by the encounter with
alternate subjectivities “the sign ceases the synchronous flow of the symbol, it also seizes the power
to elaborate - through the time lag - new and hybrid agencies and articulations” (emphasis added
191-192). The essential nature of both the ‘ceasing’ and the ‘seizing’ in the process of making new
and hybrid cross-cultural meanings is stressed in Bhabha’s work.

It is the second and final stage of ‘relinking’ or ‘seizing’ that is required in order to
complete the work of ‘time lag’, but this must occur later. As Bhabha explains, because change or
cultural emergence is always silenced at the moment that such change occurs, signification can only
be retrospectively applied to describe the inarticulation of experience and the altered perceptions that
have resulted. This happens because the inability to speak or name the other is the central condition
for the negotiation of alterity. Bhabha writes “we identify ourselves with the other precisely at a
point at which he is inimitable, at the point which eludes resemblance” (184). We are able to enter
into the experience of the other only at that intersection at which we cease to be able to speak about
or position him. ‘Time lag’, in these terms, represents a temporal space in which ‘the articulation of
the tongue, not the meaning of the language” (180) causes us to resist the propensity for closure. It
is only in the moment after, that the hybrid outcome can be spoken or written aloud (184). Bhabha
describes this moment as:

The time between the event of the sign…and its discursive eventuality (writing aloud) which
exemplifies a process where intentionality is negotiated retrospectively... this liminal moment
of identification - eluding resemblance - produces a subversive strategy of subaltern agency
 that negotiates its own authority through a process of iterative ‘unpicking’ and
incommensurable insurgent ‘relinking’. (emphasis added 183-5)

This ‘unpicking’ emerges out of the experience of silence, the indeterminacy of the voice
of cultural certainty at the point of encounter with an ‘alternate egology’ (a legitimate other). By
this means closure is deferred (due to the lack of a suitable signifier) until the moment of discursive
repetition. Thus, it is only later with the reemergence of the signifier (the re-immersion into the
symbolic order) that meaning can be made of this experience retrospectively. This is Bhabha’s
conception of a relinking which generates a liminal hybridity, a metonymically altered ego. The
period prior to production of the signifier represents a ‘negotiating space’ in which the other is
approached, the edges of cultural identity are loosened, and subsequently, in the moment at which
the signifier is reintroduced, can be re-entangled in an emergent hybridity.

In the closing section of the narrative, when Maureen hears the sound of a helicopter, she
flees from otherness (forgetting even her husband and children) in order to escape the abyss of
disorientation and alienation into which she has fallen, but not before she has entered into a dialogue
of inarticulation which has left deep questions within her about her cultural values and the
foundations upon which they were based; questions upon which she will reflect in retrospect.

References
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Gordimer, N. July’s People. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981.

Lacan, J. Écrits: A Selection, transl. by Alan Sheridan, New York: W.W. Norton, 1977.

Harris, W. Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays. London: New Beacon Publications,
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