The Queen
When it comes to memorable imagery in this collection of short stories, it is almost beyond dispute which is the most disturbing on a visceral level. “The Termitary” commences its peculiar brand of, well, ickiness with its slightly off title. Okay, it’s profoundly off title. But that is just a warm-up for the big show: the revelation of the termite queen:
“We all gazed at an obese, helpless white creature, five inches long, with the tiny, shiny-visored head of an ant at one end. The body was a sort of dropsical sac attached to this head; it had no legs that could be seen, neither could it propel itself by peristaltic action, like a slug or worm. The queen. The queen whose domain, we had seen for ourselves in the galleries and passages that had been uncovered beneath our house, was as big as ours.”
Anti-Imagery
A common literary tool utilized for the purpose of imagery is onomatopoeia. This is the term for words that seek to replicate a particular sound. Imagery in this example from the story “A Lion on the Freeway” actually takes an example of this tool to task for its failure to reproduce aural reality:
“Roar is not the word. Children learn not to hear for themselves, doing exercises in the selection of verbs at primary school: `Complete these sentences: The cat ...s The dog ...s The lion ...s.' Whoever decided that had never hastened to the real thing. The verb is onomatopoeically incorrect just as the heraldic beasts drawn by thirteenth- and fourteenth-century engravers at second hand from the observations of early explorers are anatomically wrong. Roar is not the word for the sound of great chaps sucking in and out the small hours.”
Alcoholism
“The Need for Something Sweet” is a story about the innocence of youth told from the perspective of knowing better in the distant future. The fifty-something narrator recalls a brief period of insanity that occurred in the unworldly state of sheer ignorance about reality that is being twenty-one. It is a tale about attempting arguably the most impossible task people can put before themselves: trying to cure an alcoholic.
“I was also beginning to understand that drinking divides people up inside themselves—peculiar, it is—so that they become several different people, all different stages of life, in the one body. All these different girls and women in that woman put the blame on each other for what she was. What was done to her and what she had done were the same, to her.”
Point of View
Much of the imagery in these short stories are inextricably linked to the perspective of the narrator. Gordimer excels in using imagery to paint portraits of how one person sees another or how these people see the world from their very unique and particular circumstances. This gift attains the point of extremity in the opening paragraph of “For Dear Life” which is told from the perspective of a fetus still inside its mother womb:
“Swaying along in the howdah of her belly I make procession up steep streets. The drumming of her heart exalts me; I do not know the multitudes. With my thumb-hookah I pass among them unseen and unseeing behind the dancing scarlet brocades of her blood. From time to time I am lurched to rest. Habituation to the motion causes me to move: as if the hidden presence raps testy impatience. They place their hands to read a sign from where there is no cognition of their existence.”
