Why Does Placelessness Matter?: Nadine Gordimer’s “Teraloyna”

Overview & Synopsis

This article assesses the crucial role played by placelessness in the fiction of a writer who never allows her readers to lose sight of the referential coordinates and political implications of her stories. “Teraloyna” in Nadine Gordimer’s Jump exemplifies the growingly complex narrative strategies that she came to develop over time in her attempt to achieve a greater directness in her writing whilst putting stronger emphasis on the opacity of her medium. At first sight placelessness – whether it involves the fable, allegory, the intertext or metalepsis – seems to take us away from place to better return to it. But this odd tale invites us to think the “making it strange” of place further, against the dangerous temptation to lock everything into place.