Once Upon a Time

Once Upon a Time

Nadine Gordimer – world-famous novelist, short story writer, essayist, won the Nobel Prize in 1991

• Born in South Africa in 1923
• Gordimer has written more than a dozen novels, several hundred short stories, and a few collections of essays
• Strong opponent of apartheid, which was the official South African policy of racial segregation
• Gordimer demonstrated, wrote, and spoke out against this unjust system

What’s a symbol?

• What symbols do you see in Once Upon a Time?
• What does the house represent?

“The house that surrounds me while I sleep is built on undermined ground; far beneath my bed, the floor, the house’s foundations, the stopes and passages of gold mines have hollowed the rock, and when some face trembles, detaches, and falls, three thousand feet below, the whole house shifts slightly, bringing uneasy strain to the balance and counterbalance of brick, cement, wood, and glass that hold it as a structure around me ...”

• “The house that surrounds me while I sleep is built on undermined ground; far beneath my bed, the floor, the house’s foundations, the stopes and passages of gold mines have hollowed the rock, and when some face trembles, detaches, and falls, three thousand feet below, the whole house shifts slightly, bringing uneasy strain to the balance and counterbalance of brick, cement, wood, and glass that hold it as a structure around me ...”
• What’s the literal meaning here of the gold mines underneath her house?
• What’s the symbolism here? What do the gold mines represent?

“So from every window and door in the house where they were living happily ever after they now saw the trees and sky through bars, and when the little boy’s pet cat tried to climb in by the fanlight to keep him company in his little bed at night, as it customarily had done, it set off the alarm keening through the house.”

• “So from every window and door in the house where they were living happily ever after they now saw the trees and sky through bars, and when the little boy’s pet cat tried to climb in by the fanlight to keep him company in his little bed at night, as it customarily had done, it set off the alarm keening through the house.”
• What feeling does the unjust, oppressive social and political system create in society?
• Does it solve anything or make it worse?
• How does it affect society?

“The whitewashed wall was marked with the cat’s comings and goings; and on the street side of the wall there were larger red-earth smudges that could have been made by the kind of broken running shoes, seen on the feet of unemployed loiterers, that had no innocent destination.”

• “The whitewashed wall was marked with the cat’s comings and goings; and on the street side of the wall there were larger red-earth smudges that could have been made by the kind of broken running shoes, seen on the feet of unemployed loiterers, that had no innocent destination.”
• The people have isolated themselves
• What does the wall symbolize?

What do you think about the way Gordimer portrays the themes of prejudice, fear, and isolation?

• Have you seen any examples in your personal life of these issues?
• Do you agree with her?

Tone in “Once Upon a Time” – o video

• Why would she title it “Once Upon a Time?”
• Can a fairy-tale world survive on prejudice and oppression?
• This is considered an “inverted fairy tale”

Foreshadowing

• The couple decides to protect themselves from any menace in their fairy tale world. They join the neighborhood watch organization:
• “which supplied them with a plaque for their gates lettered YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED over the silhouette of a would-be intruder”
• “YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED”
• What feeling does the use of this phrase create?

“The alarms called to one another across the gardens in shrills and bleats and wails that everyone soon became accustomed to, ...”

• “The alarms called to one another across the gardens in shrills and bleats and wails that everyone soon became accustomed to, ...”
• What device is she using? What feeling does it create?

“It was the ugliest but the most honest in its suggestion of the pure concentration-camp style, no frills, all evident efficacy. Placed the length of walls, it consisted of a continuous coil of stiff and shining metal serrated into jagged blades, so that there would be no way of climbing over it and no way through its tunnel without getting entangled in its fangs.”

• “It was the ugliest but the most honest in its suggestion of the pure concentration-camp style, no frills, all evident efficacy. Placed the length of walls, it consisted of a continuous coil of stiff and shining metal serrated into jagged blades, so that there would be no way of climbing over it and no way through its tunnel without getting entangled in its fangs.”
• the security company that installs the wire is called “DRAGON’S TEETH.” This is another instance of foreshadowing—it suggests the damage that dragon teeth can inflict.

Irony

• What is the purpose of the barbed wire?
• What does it really do?
• What does it symbolize?

The wire destroys their innocent child—symbol for hope and change in the social system

• What begins as a “bedtime story” to help the author sleep turns into a horror story we won’t soon forget. Do you think that was Gordimer’s intention all along?