Racism is one of the most pernicious problems of the human society. It sustained on the prejudices of the whites. Racial hierarchy has come to be maintained with the rise of the modern world system

Another historical fact depicted in the novel is the May Day riot of 1950. In order to protest against Suppression of Communism Act African National Congress called for mass ‘stay at home’ on 1^st May. In reaction to that the government banned all the meetings and sent police force to confront the marchers lest there be any trouble. Despite that the protest went on and the police opened fire on the protestors killing 18 and wounding 30 people (Sian, Mcgregor and Walt; “ANC calls”). Gordimer has captured it in all its gory details towards the end of the novel:

At dusk, reports of bloodshed and violence followed in rapid succession. At Orlando, Sophiatown, Alexandra, Moroka, Jabavu, White City, Mariastad….

The police got out of their cars and fired….At Atherton location, a large crowd defied ban on the public meetings, refused to disperse, and were charged by the police with fixed bayonets. Then the police fired, and three people were killed on the spot….

On that night, eighteen natives were killed, thirty wounded. Two of the dead had suffocated in the burning cinema, sixteen were shot by the police. (LD 328-29)

Gordimer’s whites are liberal in attitude. They suffer and sympathize with the condition of blacks. But they are torn between the artificial world they are born into and the real world around them which is conflicting in nature. Neither they are able to leave their world, nor can they remain untouched by the sufferings of the teeming millions. They seem to be helpless or so is the case Gordimer depicts in The Lying Days which is one of her earliest. Helen and Paul are the two noteworthy characters in this regard.

Paul Clark works as the welfare officer in the Native Affairs Department, a state administrative institution that looked after (controlled and regulated) the black life. In this way he is able to access the otherwise inaccessible world of blacks. He lives a sort of double life, implementing the so-called government orders and also collaborating with his black friends in ANC. However, after 1948 elections his double life becomes conflicting in nature. He is disturbed by the farce of welfare. Getting frustrated he exclaims, “My job….will not give a single African an education, a skilled job, a voice in the way his people are to be disposed of, or even the right to build a house for himself when he hasn’t anywhere to live…”(293). Paul begins to be torn apart by the inherent contradictions of his job. He is well aware that it is just a means of systematic oppression. On the other hand, the growing African nationalist tendencies among blacks made them to distrust the motives of the whites. In their opinion Paul or any other white cannot possibly ameliorate their condition so they reject Paul’s collaboration. As a result, Paul suffers from bouts of depression which mars his relationship with Helen. In this sense the novel impresses upon the fact of how the broader political changes can affect the most intimate conduct of people’s lives.

Observed closely, Paul is torn between the two powerful forces confronting each other viz. African nationalism and Afrikaner nationalism and Paul is torn between the two. He represents white supremacist apartheid by virtue of his association with the government but he sympathizes with the black cause which he cannot join because of his complicity with the former. All this results in Paul’s experiencing of what can be termed as ‘historical exclusion’. As Helen puts it, “He cannot lose, and he cannot win. He scarcely knows any more what to hope for…” (300).Through Paul, the novel explores the demise of the ideology of ‘trusteeship’; the ideology with which Paul justifies his profession. Under the Nationalists however, this ideology is replaced with that of the baasskap.

On the other hand, Helen also sympathizes with the condition of blacks, and due to this reason she leaves the artificial world of her parents to confront the more basic realities of South African life. But unlike Paul who is in some sense still an ‘actor’, she remains a mere ‘spectator’. There are numerous instances which reveal Helen’s inability to do anything .When she observes Paul’s underlying fruitlessness of the job she thinks that “he should give it up” (293). The feeling of historical exclusion becomes all the more apparent during the May Day riot which was one of the tests of strength between the new government and the ANC. In The Lying Days the incident reveals to Helen her own essential irrelevance. On May Day, fearing Paul’s safety she goes with Laurie (a white friend) to a native township where she finds herself in the midst of riots. She keeps sitting inside her car and watches with horror the killing of a black rioter by the bullet of the police and who falls to the ground in front of her eyes and dies. It forms the central symbolic incident in the novel. Sitting inside the car symbolizes her privileged and secured position where nothing happening outside can affect her. At the same time she is also alienated from her environment which reveals her historical exclusion. Unable to take it anymore she decides to leave South Africa. Her decision to leave the place becomes the culmination of her being unable to identify with her environment. She resigns herself, giving up on the reality that surrounds her which she wants to but cannot change. Her feeling of helplessness is visible when she utters: “I can’t stand anymore of it. If I can’t be in it, I want to be free of it….” The life in South Africa seems to her like “…having a picnic in a beautiful graveyard where the people are buried alive under your feet…”(366).It can also be argued that her decision to leave South Africa is incumbent upon her failure of relationship with Paul, but even that is due to the political conditions prevalent in the country. According to Dominic Head, the relationship failed because of the “impossibility of purposive political action” (40). Head’s remark inevitably supports the argument.

Stephen Clingman has described the novel as “fairly conventional Bildungsroman-a novel of education and learning” (41). On the other hand, Head maintains that the protagonist’s inability to decide a course for herself which should not be in a bildungsroman gives the novel a complex structure which “… mirrors the state of character as well as the conclusions that Gordimer is able to offer about the state of liberal consciousness at this early stage in the history of modern South Africa” (36). The above observation is pertinent but at the same time it can be pointed out that Helen’s state of disillusionment with her own idealism and optimism is welcomed as the new beginning for her.

Viewed from a different angle however, the historical concern in The Lying Days is also the portrayal of South African environment through Helen’s growth, both physical and intellectual. Her early childhood in Atherton a mining town, her romantic escapade with Ludi Koch at the sea near Natal and finally her encounter with love and politics in the hectic Johannesburg. In this way the novel seems to present “ the history from the inside”(Clingman 27).The description of the mining town of Atherton is at times image to image same as Springs, the place where Gordimer spent her childhood which gives this novel, as mentioned in the beginning, an autobiographical stance. In Gordimer’s own words:

We who were born into the Twenties and Thirties opened our eyes not so much on God’s creation as on our fathers’ bold rearrangement of it. This was very different from the hedgerows and fields that domesticate the earth. This was a making of mountains and waters. There was even a smell to it all, a subterranean pollen-scent of chemicals, as of the minerals flowering underground. The forms were as austere as Egypt’s; but these pyramids of tailings entombed no lost civilization. (qtd. in Witelac 101)

The above description of the landscape by Gordimer at once reflects the “yellow ridged hills of sand” and the “chemical-tinted water” giving the “false promise of a river” as described by Helen in the novel (LD 91).

Another aspect of racism that can be noticed in the text is the racism within whites. Helen’s friendship with Joel Aaron a Jew is looked down upon and is discouraged by her parents whereas her friendship with Paul Clark is welcomed. He is thought to be a suitable boy for Helen as he belongs to Natal which in itself is a “guarantee of pure English blood and allegiance to England…” (LD 247). If one marries an Afrikaner the “disappointment would never be swallowed” says Helen. But according to the English ideology the lowest rung was occupied by Jews, hence if “one’s daughter went so far as to marry a Jew… one would get the awe and sympathy with which people regard aberration”(248). It is noteworthy that there is no mention of marriage with blacks because they are totally outside the white purview. In this way The Lying Days reveals, in the words of Stephen Clingman, how “… ‘exclusive’ white South African racism has been, in so far as it literally excludes blacks from its consciousness; but also it gives an indication of the degree to which ‘racism’ has existed within the white world itself ”(28).

Elsewhere also the novel suggests the internal racism. The mine itself is English- owned. There are English people in the commanding position. Afrikaners work under them and the lowest of them-the Jews run the concession stores or as Helen’s mother puts it, “…filthy kaffir stores…in heaven knows what dirt and disease,…”(8).These facts go on to prove the need for Afrikaners to claim their supremacy in South Africa which indeed happened after 1948 elections.

Another aspect that the novel explores is the experience of a non-conformist white growing up in the South African situation. With centuries of white domnation both whites and blacks came to think of this arrangement as a naturalized, eternally immutable and God-given order. It was thought that whites were born masters and blacks were born servants. Nadine Gordimer signifies that there exists a possibility to break this historical mould. This becomes a possibility when a rebirth happens-a rebirth in the form of ‘second consciousness’.

In fact the question of ‘rebirth’ becomes a specific aspect in the novel with Helen acquiring a deeper understanding of her surroundings and attaining a second level of awareness. She realizes at one point that she had been a total stranger to the place and its people. She remarks, “… I had grown up, all my life among strangers: the Africans, whose language in my ears had been like the barking of dogs or the cries of birds” (185). Describing the language of blacks as the cries of animals signifies equating blacks with the nature itself and hence meant to be exploited as any other resource of nature. The question of inversion of social and natural categories, as it shall be seen, will be dealt by Gordimer in The Conservationist. Non- conformist as she is, Helen begins to see “…the natives all around not as furniture, trees, or the casual landmarks of a road through which [her] life was passing, but as faces; the faces of old men, of girls, of children; ever since they had stepped up all around [her], as they do, silently, at some point in the life of every white person who lives in South Africa…” (212).

Despite the realization she is unable to overcome her paternalistic behavior when she comes in contact with Mary Seswayo whom she is unable to accept simply as another human being. In order to get away from her ideological confinement Helen deliberately and consciously tries to overcompensate just because Mary happens to be black. Helen wants to but cannot accept Mary as her equal. She says, “…I wanted her to say: I hate your saintliness. Don’t be saintly. But we were not equal enough for that; for all my striving to rid myself of what was between us, I did not respect her, accept her enough to be able to quarrel with her. I still made a special consideration of her for that” (203). Helen accepts that she was still acting from within the confines of racial discrimination. In The Lying Days it remains unresolved to be taken up again in The World of Strangers. For Helen it becomes a “corrosive guilt” that she claims every white in South Africa suffers (LD 212). If Helen could accept Mary as a human being that would have been a triumph over apartheid. Nevertheless it represents a white liberal feeling that definitely makes The Lying Days, a liberal novel. Under no circumstances it can be described as a radical novel because life for radicals in 1948 would have been very difficult. Nonetheless it is very straightforward in its assertion that in opposition to apartheid their commitment should be towards black liberation.

Unable to cope with the existing situation, Gordimer’s heroine although is shown to leave the country but her exit is not permanent. She remarks, “Whatever it was I was running away from-the risk of love? the guilt of being white? the danger of putting ideals into practice?-I’m not running away from now because I know I’m coming back here”(376). Helen decides to come back because South Africa is her own country. She belongs to the crust, to the surface, not being able to connect with the deep down to what lay beneath the surface. But the beginning has been made by her.

It can also be compared with the trajectory of Nadine Gordimer’s writing. With her first novel the young writer is trying to find her voice, her place in the literary world. Like her protagonist, Gordimer’s fiction makes its first decisive, though incomplete move towards consciousness in history, which in a way paves the way for what is yet to come. To conclude in all these ways The Lying Days gives a precise image of the rise to consciousness of South African liberalism, but Gordimer’s journey does not end here. With this novel Gordimer has found her place. As it will be seen her writing will lock the time of her society in a more radical way in her later works. In The Lying Days a beginning has been made to her long lasting battle against apartheid and like her heroine she will also come back with a better understanding of the situation.

Helen Shaw of The Lying Days goes out and Toby Hood of A World of Strangers docks in. The novel seems to pick up from where the earlier one ended. There is a movement from the personal realm of the former to the social realm in the latter. A World of Strangers (1958) captures the world of Johannesburg in the fifties. The novel begins with the protagonist Toby Hood landing on the shores of South Africa from England as a representative of his family’s publishing company.

With this novel Gordimer signals her development as a writer which definitely has resulted in a better understanding of the situation in South Africa for she has shifted the focus from the inner world to the more outer world in the present novel. It can be seen through Toby’s interaction and involvement with all the classes and races which is a more objective study of the South African society. Johannesburg, which was exclusively a white city in the making in The Lying Days has evolved to become completely a white world in A World of Strangers, where whites and blacks are complete strangers to each other or so does Toby observes. It can be said that the problem of apartheid in this novel is conceived at a social level and has been attempted to be solved at a social level which makes this text fall in the category of liberal humanism albeit in its last days in the novels of Gordimer.

Gordimer reveals that for many whites coming to South Africa was like visiting some exotic place filled with a mystery of its own. The moment Toby sets his foot in the country he observes that whatever privileges whites have are “gained by discrimination and exploitation” (WS 35). Blacks are sidelined and marginalized, so much so that they are removed entirely from the cities (meant exclusively for whites) to the periphery. Blacks are allowed only in the capacity of the servants. Toby notes that there “seemed to be a great many more white people than black….a black man wearing a dustcoat and a cap with the name of a firm in celluloid letters across it swooped to pick up a cigarette someone had dropped, and put it behind his ear…” (38-39).

Relegating blacks to the condition of extreme poverty, the policy of Apartheid deprived them of their rights as a citizen. Gordimer has brought forth very vividly the monotonous life of blacks in A World of Strangers when Toby, while taking a round of his workplace in the city of Johannesburg notes:

Down to my left, along the town bank of the cutting, I saw a thick queue sheltered under a tin roof …. And I saw that it was a bus queue; the people in it had the tired, unimpatient faces of those who wait in the same place at the same time every day. They were all black.

These faces in the Johannesburg bus queue bore all the marks of initiation into western civilization; they were tired by city noise, distasteful jobs, worries about money, desires for things they couldn’t afford….(43)

Further with Toby’s subsequent visits to black town ships and white suburbs Gordimer gives a picture of extreme contrast in the living condition of the whites and the blacks:

On a rough stone gateway, white-painted iron letters spelt THE HIGH HOUSE. The drive was lined with round limbed, feathery trees; hydrangeas grew in green cumulus, billowing beneath them. I saw a tennis court, a swimming pool with a rustic changehouse, lawns green without texture, a lily- pond, a bank of irises, and then the house, built on a green mound. A large house, of course, rather like a bloated cottage, with a steep thatched roof curling up over dormer windows, thick white chimneys, and a balcony and abutting porch extending it on the two sides I could see. (48)

Further the reader finds a description of the lavish

…long, mushroom- coloured room there, with gleams of copper and gilt, flowers and glass. In the hall there was a marquetry table under a huge mirror with a mother-of-pearl inlaid frame. Further back, the first steps of a white staircase spread in a dais; carpet seemed to grow up the stairs, padding the rim of each step like pink moss….and through a large living- room full of sofas and chairs covered in women’s dress colours, that led to veranda. If you could call it that; a superior sort of veranda…. The entire wall of the room was open to it, and it was got up like something out of a film, with a bar, a barbecue fireplace, chaises longues, glass and wrought-iron tables, mauve Venetian glass lanterns and queer trailing plants. (49)

Hence it can be perceived that whites lived a luxurious life away from the daily rigors in a private world of their own secured with high walls and tall trees. On the other hand,

….an African township looked like something that had been razed almost to the ground. The mass of houses and shacks were so low and crowded together that the people seemed to be swarming over them, as if they had just invaded a deserted settlement. Every time I went to a township I was aware of this sudden drop in the horizon of buildings and rise of humans; nothing concealed, nothing sheltered-in any but the most obvious sense-any moment of the people’s lives. A blinding light of reality never left them. And they lived, all the time, in all the layers of the society at once: pimps, gangsters, errand boys, washwomen, schoolteachers, boxers, musicians, and undertakers, labourers and patent medicine men-these were neighbours, and shared a tap, a yard, even a lavatory. (130)

At one point in the novel Toby compares the way to the black township that is rutted to the “smooth driveway” of the white areas which is like a “tunnel of feathery green and flowers” (195). Each and everything was segregated in the name of apartheid. Neither blacks could enter the white world nor whites into the black. This is precisely the reason why Toby is stopped by the police and asked to report to the charge office because he “had no permit to be in the location” (194).Such was the state of obliviousness and separation that most of the whites didn’t even know that such locations or ‘townships’ existed. It becomes clear when Toby tells Cecil about his visits to the township and her reaction is “‘Where? What townships?’ It was clear that she had no idea what I was talking about” (140).

Blacks were hardly considered humans by the whites. They were deliberately deprived of all the rights a citizen should have. Anna Louw, a white lawyer in A World of Strangers, works for the blacks trying to make them aware of their rights. Ironically, they didn’t have any rights, only rules which proscribed them from a normal life. The culmination of the white atrocities is revealed to the reader by the William episode. Cecil Rowe, Toby’s white friend, hears a sound of cry outside her house and finds that it is William, her floor cleaner. “‘William! Cecil called. ‘William!’- the voice of authority and reproof that never failed to bring him to the kitchen door….She felt the threat of a disaster she had never heard of, the dread of the discovery of some human sorrow unknown to her”. The man, she is told has been smoking dagga a kind of drug. The only way to forget the pain they (blacks) suffer. It can be easily interpreted that their life was like a hell from which there was no escape for them. No matter how hard they tried, they were trapped from all sides. Theirs was “an unspeakable anguish of alienation, lostness, the howling of the wolf of the soul in waste” (199, 200).

When considering the novel from the historical perspective it would be worthwhile to throw some light on the political scenario of the dominant regime during that time. As it is known that racial segregation had been practiced and resisted in South Africa since the late 1650s, but prior to 1948 racism was similar to what was practiced in many other countries. It was only after the National Party victory in 1948 that segregation was constitutionalized. A specific ideology took the form of rigid and inflexible laws. In 1950, Prime Minister Dr. Daniel Malan “had parliament pass the two enabling laws that were essential preconditions” for apartheid (Lapping 105).The first was Population Registration Act (1950) which “provided the machinery to designate the racial category of every person” (Thompson 190) and second the Group Areas Act, “empowered the government to mark off areas for residence, occupation and trade by the different ‘races’ and then to move each race into its ‘own’ area, by force if necessary” (Lapping 105). Along with the two above mentioned laws the government also passed The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and Immorality Act (1950) which “created legal boundaries between the races by making marriage and sexual relations illegal across the colour line...”(Thompson 190). Anna’s breakup of marriage with Hassim, an Indian, was a direct result of this Act although it has not been mentioned in explicit terms by Gordimer.

Hendrik Verwoerd was appointed the Minister of Native Affairs in 1950 and oversaw the passage of the Bantu Authorities Act in 1951 which provided salaries and privileges to the conservative African chiefs who complied with government policy and the Bantu Education Act (1955) which “transferred control of schools for Africans from provincial councils” to the government, in an attempt to “ counter the influence of missionaries and others whose attitude to education was too liberal” (Lapping 109). All of Verwoerd’s policies were guided by his belief that there was “no place” for Africans “ in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour” (qtd. in Lapping 109).

In A World of Strangers however, Gordimer has drawn a vivid picture of the world of fifties in South Africa. African National Congress was founded in 1912. In 1952, it joined forces with Indian and coloured resistance organizations. During that time multi-racialism was the dominant political policy followed by those who were opposed to apartheid .While African National Congress was for blacks, non-black supporters could join South African Indian Congress, the Coloured Peoples Congress and the (white) South African Congress of Democrats which together formed the Congress Alliance- a multiracial organization (Ross 122).The idea behind such an alliance was that the segregationist tendencies of the ruling government could be countered successfully only by the integration of various races for the common goal, in other words, by putting a multiracial front. There could be number of reasons for this. Firstly, ANC could not have sustained itself in its effort to uproot apartheid single handedly. Moreover taking into consideration the repressive policies of the regime a broader front was a necessity. Secondly it may be considered that multi-racialism was the result of ‘cause and effect’ phenomena. The ideology of apartheid caused its opposite i.e. multi-racialism into being.

Although it is worth mentioning that there came an internal difference regarding Africanism in ANC itself which led to Pan-Africanists secede from it. ANC considered Africanism as national chauvinism as that of Afrikaners and that white racism cannot be tackled with black racism, absolute control of one over the other seemed impossible to ANC during 1950s. A significant moment in the multiracial policy was the Freedom Charter declared during the Congress of the People (1955) where delegates from all races assembled to proclaim that South Africa belonged to those who live in it-whether black or white.

The Congress Alliance seemed to be a radical organization in so far as it proposed many significant economic, political and social changes, but the ideology of the Congress was that of non-violent struggle, parliamentary democracy, and multi racial cooperation which proved it to be a liberal organization, especially the belief in the ‘brotherhood of man’ as Gordimer herself remarked in one of her essays: “Men are not born brothers; they have to discover each other, and it is this discovery that apartheid seeks to prevent...”( Telling Times 62). It will be seen later that this brotherhood proved to be the crux of the novel in discussion. When the Liberal Party was formed in 1953, it had certain differences with the Congress Alliance as it thought that the congress is more influenced by the communist ideas. But later on the differences were reduced and during the Treason Trial liberals helped administer a fund for the same. In fact by the time A World of Strangers was published there was good deal of understanding between the ANC and the Liberal Party which definitely paved the way for a “democratic and humanistic multi- racialism” which forms the basis for the discourse in the novel (Clingman 49).

Besides the free encounter in politics, blacks and whites were also intermingling at a social level in the world of art, literature and music, which has been given a place in A World of Strangers. The era is described by Judie Newman as a “brief golden age” of fifties, when the social restrictions prescribed by apartheid suffered a little setback (15). But this liberal attitude was confined only to the black intellectuals and cultural elite working as journalists in the Drum magazine and Golden City Post in Sophiatown. They were able to gain access and mix with whites of similar calling in the city of Johannesburg. People like Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, Es’kia (Ezekiel) Mphalele, Todd Matshikiza absorbed the white world into their own. Sophiatown, a black township in that respect was an ethnically mixed vibrant cultural hub of the fifties, located on the borders of Johannesburg. In other words, it was a multi-racial world which can be considered a social counterpart of multiracialism in the politics.

A World of Strangers thus generated out of such political and social background. In fact this is one novel in which the social milieu of the text can be related to that of the author herself. In 1950s Gordimer involved herself in different aspects of Johannesburg life. She became friendly with many black writers, critics, and artists associated with Drum magazine like Lewis Nkosi, Todd Matshikiza, Bloke Modisane, Can Themba, and Ezekiel Mphalele. She became involved not only at social level but at political level also. During the Treason Trial, Anthony Sampson while writing a book on the same stayed in Gordimer’s house, which gave her a good deal of political education, as she herself remarked: “…it was often dinner and discussion into the small hours. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything; not only was it a fascinating experience, but it taught me more about the life of my own country than I could have learned in twenty years of ordinary living, within the ordinary social and conventional limits.”(Roberts 155).

The world of the 1950s as figured in A World of Strangers is more clearly discernible by the characterization. The characters seem to emerge out of the real people of that time. Anna Louw has more than a little to do with Bettie du Toit. Sam Mofokenzazi, the composer of the jazz opera in the text, bears resemblance to Todd Matshikiza a South African pianist and the composer of King Kong, the all-black musical (“Todd”). Steven Sitole draws on Can Themba, for Steven in the novel lived in the “House of Fame” (WS 134) and Can in real life lived in a house named ‘The Home of Truth’ in Sophiatown. In fact the most interesting correspondence is that of the central character Toby Hood who resembles Anthony Sampson, the editor of Drum magazine from 1951 to 1955. Sampson was an Englishman who came to South Africa on a publishing venture. Some incidents in the novel seem to relate quite closely to what actually happened. Sampson narrates about the narrow escape during a police raid on a party at Can Themba’s house, which reminds of Toby’s escape of a similar kind with Steven Sitole from a shebeen in the novel (Sampson 153-55). However it would be inappropriate to relate Gordimer’s characters on one to one basis, for her characters represent not specific but general. It is possible to relate her characters to specific people because they happened to be famous in their time but in doing so, those several common and unidentified populace cannot be ignored on whom she might have modeled her characters. Her characters go on “…to represent, as extreme condensations of more widely dispersed traits and possibilities, a feeling for the socially ‘typical’-those ostensibly essential features that represent a whole mood and the moment” (Clingman 52).

Very much similar to the characterization is Gordimer’s treatment of the social history in the novel which is far more inclusive than just pertaining to single incidents. Similar to The Lying Days in its observation of the social environment, A World of Strangers too explores the world of blacks and whites in Johannesburg. The life of Alexandra township, and the shebeens of Sophiatown are contrasted with the extraordinary luxurious world of ignorant whites in the High House which in fact represent the typical traits of the whites in South Africa-“…its vulgar wealth, its cultural alienation and banality, its aggressive ‘heartiness’ and…its internal brutalization and latent murderousness…”(Clingman 53).

Throughout A World of Strangers, like in The Lying Days Gordimer tries to prove that private life is impossible in South Africa. Private destiny is just inconceivable beyond its social integration which definitely brings in another level of historical and social consciousness in the novel-the self revealing aspects of it. Gordimer does it with none other than but her central character Toby Hood. Toby is apolitical and is determined to lead a private life. He sets aside the “bluebooks, the leaflets, the surveys, the studies” –everything he has read about South Africa and enjoys instead the “luxury” of sweet drinks and tropical warmth (WS 19, 21). Family and friends back home want to collect data and write newsletter and become in essence a “voyeur of the world’s ills and social perversions” but the idea leaves him hostile and irritated. He longs to “…shout, ridiculously: I want to live! I want to see people who interest me and amuse me, black, white, or any colour. I want to take care of my own relationships…and let the abstractions of race and politics go hang…” (36).

Quickly he finds how difficult it is to accomplish this seemingly simple goal in Johannesburg of 1950s, for habit, hate and law conspire to separate whites from blacks and create a ‘world of strangers’. Clingman has criticized the character for not making any contribution to bridge that gap himself. Toby on the contrary maintained the separated world of blacks and whites. He simply drifts between the exclusively white High House and shebeens of Sophiatown with an attitude of indifference and detachment. In fact he keeps the two worlds apart by not telling Cecil Rowe his beloved about his friendship with Steven Sitole, a black, for the fear of losing her which he is not prepared to. His quest for personal pleasure overrides any compunction of conscience. In fact Gordimer condemns his attitude especially with regard to women. He regards women as objects of desire. When he gets disturbed from a racist act in his office by one of his workers he finds himself unwilling to share with Cecil, his love interest. Rather he finds her a pleasurable distraction and ruminates: “I had, I supposed, an Eastern equation of women with pleasure; I fiercely resisted any impingement on this preserve” (Gordimer, WS 150). Treating women as an object for personal gratification is to be preserved according to Toby. Later in the novel when Toby witnesses a beautiful Indian girl singing at an Indian club he describes her as a creature “made to please” (192). He echoes similar thoughts towards the end of the novel, when rejecting the thought about marriage he says. “…for me, the exoticism of women still lay in beauty and self absorbed femininity, I would choose an houri rather than a companion…” (261). It is clear from Toby’s attitude that he has commodified and degraded women to the exotic ‘other’ meant for personal use. Taken as a metaphor Toby’s attitude can be compared with the attitude of whites towards blacks. It is precisely the way, whites viewed blacks- exotic others meant for exploitation. In that way, there exist “clear affinities between the psyche of Toby Hood and the institutionalized mind-set of the apartheid regime” (Head 49).

Toby lacked social commitment and in this approach he has a counterpart in the black world-Steven Sitole, who is sick of being a black man; a black man who experiences discrimination in all the quarters. He wants to live a reckless life, and refuses to care about “…this they’ve taken from us, that they denied our children, pass laws, injustice- agh, I’m sick of it. Sick of feeling half a man. I don’t want to be bothered with black men’s troubles…” (Gordimer, WS 102). A clearer picture of Steven emerges in Anna’s description:

You won’t catch Steven working with Congress or any other African movement….He never defied, either-I’m talking about the defiance campaign, the passive resistance movement of a year or two back. The only defiance he’s interested in is not paying his bills, or buying drink. He’s… embittered, devil- may-care African….He doesn’t care a damn about his people; he’s only concerned with his own misfortune…. (122)

Toby’s friend Anna Louw, the first of female characters in Gordimer’s fiction whose professional life is dedicated to radical political change, talks to Toby about his neutrality. Anna sees that Toby uses his status as a stranger to mix with both blacks and whites and avoids allegiance to the either group. She remarks: “… ‘You think you’ll keep free, with one foot here and another there, and a look in somewhere else, but even you, even a stranger like you, Toby- you won’t keep it up’…”(184). The image recalls Helen’s sense in The Lying Days that Paul’s loyalty to both the cause of African liberation and the Afrikaner government stretches him on a rack, a leg and an arm nailed to each side. Gordimer eventually reveals that this approach is not only illusory but deplorable. It is made evident very forcefully through the life and death of Steven. While Toby is out on a hunting expedition with the High House friends, Steven is killed like a hunted animal in a car crash while making an escape from a police raid on an Indian club. Irrespective of what Toby believed him to be, for the policemen who reported his death to him Steven’s identity remained to be that of a ‘kaffir’. Moreover, Steven’s death brings home some truths to Toby. He realizes that in the attitude of egocentrism and social indifference “…he was me, and I was him….”At the same time it also dawns on him that he (Steven) “was in the bond of his skin, and I was free; the world was open to me and closed to him…” (252). The attitude of self-centered indifference of Toby helped to constitute the social divide of the ‘world of strangers’ and the only redemption for Toby was a new social commitment. Gordimer tries to measure this commitment with the beginning of his friendship with Sam Mofokenzazi, which turns out to be more sober, with a deep new dedication. In fact the beginning of this new friendship marks the climax of the novel. Toby transforms from a mere narrator to a character by involving himself more deeply in the society in which he lives. Unlike the transformation in Helen of The Lying Days which is more of an internal nature, Toby’s commitment is more of an external nature which has a direct bearing on the society as is clear from the end of the novel. When at the station of Johannesburg Sam and Toby are departing for their respective ventures, Gordimer writes: “But at the bottom of the steps, where the train was waiting, he was there before me, laughing and gasping, and we held each other by the arms, too short of breath to speak, and laughing too much to catch our breath, while a young policeman with an innocent face, on which suspicion was like the serious frown wrinkling the brow of a puppy, watched us” (266). Sam and Toby both are able to transcend social barrier due to their humanistic conscience and succeed in interpersonal relationship.

Although it can be argued that the resolution Gordimer posits for such a massive problem of apartheid based on consciousness of an individual and interpersonal commitment is not only naïve but ideological in its approach but then by doing so she is adhering to the liberal ideologies persisting during the 1950s. Observed closely, Gordimer does criticize the naïve liberal humanism in the text, when Toby describes a fashionable liberal socializing: “It was inevitable, with all the books and newspaper reports being written about South Africa, that the forbidden fraternization should become, in a sense, fashionable….They were often people who had failed to secure attention in other ways….It began to be fashionable…to have at least one African friend. A pet-African…” (169).

Nevertheless A World of Strangers still holds its position as a liberal novel because the novel concludes with the recognition and understanding of the problem of apartheid that plagued South Africa. Throughout the text Toby observes as a narrator, the magnitude of the problem which culminates with the death of Steven Sitole. It is done, so that in his final commitment as a character he should not underestimate it. Stephen Clingman describing in the term of Roland Barthes called A World of Strangers a work of “classical realism” which means that it undertakes the task of presenting social reality as objectively as possible (60). But Toby cannot remain untouched by his observations of the divided society, and he is transformed from a mere spectator to somebody who enters the struggle. He realizes the necessity of his own personal engagement and the impossibility of his detachment from the same.

Hence in keeping with the ideology of the Congress Alliance of the 1950s the novel has shown that “the most objective of eyes will naturally and inevitably draw humanist conclusions from the facts of social evidence,” hence it emanates “moral positivism”(Clingman 61). It also indicates that any individual who has the capacity to think and reason must become socially engaged in the endeavour to produce a better society based on equality. This is what exactly South African liberalism preached. The novel proposes the idea that the barriers of apartheid can be overcome with education, rationality and sustained efforts. By doing so Gordimer did not deviate from the historical reality of her time because this so called ‘ideological’ liberalism was in fact the political reality of South Africa (in the quarters that were opposed to apartheid).The very formation of the Congress Alliance stands testimony to it. Irrespective of the internal differences between various congresses, together they achieved a moral transcendence of racial and economic differences. Moreover the congress’ belief in non-violent opposition further affirms its stand on morality. It believed that their struggle was for a just cause which no rational being in possession of evidence could deny. Hence the Defiance campaign which revealed the indignities of the repressive system and the demonstration of women in Pretoria against the extension of pass laws stand as an indicative to the dedication, dignity and vitality of an alternative South Africa.

Since Stephen Clingman used the term classical realism for the novel which meant the realistic representation of the world, it would be worth noticing that Gordimer portrayed the social reality by taking recourse to symbolism as one of the modes. At one point in A World of Strangers Toby describes a mining landscape on Johannesburg’s East Rand interpreting the heap of cyanide dump masquerading as hills which gives a false impression of being a natural landscape. It symbolizes the fallacy of the culture which has built it, that is, to think that South Africa belongs to them when actually it does not. Another more profound symbolism is inherent in the hunting scene towards the end of the novel, wherein the deepest truths emerge about the white South African world. As Toby describes it, the landscape takes on a symbolic significance. Its “low horizon” seems “to sink over the edge of the world.” The bushveld is violent, hostile: everything that grows there has “its particular weapon of thorn” (223).The branches maintain a “grim guard,” as if to protect from intruders what is native to the land. A shot at the edge of the bush rings “right round the sky, as if the sky were finite”. The shot was like “a message, beaten upon the four vast doors of the world, North South, East, West” (224). The white men come armed. Despite spikes, thorns, quills that tear and claw at their clothes and skin, they beat through the bush, following one of their kinds who commands impatiently, “‘Let’s go out and murder the bastards!’ ” (241). They bag fifty-eight birds. It gives a vivid picture of how whites in South Africa have ill treated and exploited both its men (the black servants who accompanied them) and nature alike. It implicates the underlying violence in South African society. Moreover, waking in the middle of his first night in the camp, Toby hears a frightening sound rolling “out over the stillness…a yowl from the entrails of desolation, the echo of a pack of nightmares…”which was more of an internal nature (240). It can be interpreted as the underlying fear among the oppressors that threatens the everyday realities of South Africa. Gordimer deals with this realm of subconscious more prominently in The Conservationist.

Toby links his hunting activity with the death of Steven like a hunted animal and thus his own complicity in his friend’s killing. If “he’d been a white man” it wouldn’t have happened to him (256). Hence Symbolism brings home harsh realities to Toby. It makes him understand the true picture surrounding him and his own stand in it. Ultimately it forces him to challenge those realities. It is through symbolism only that Toby is delivered back into the real world.

A World of Strangers is sometimes also regarded as a ‘frontier text’. Anna Louw, the white South African working for the upliftment of blacks is the frontier character in the text, who thinks that she is not “enough” to herself. She wants to “change things” because she hasn’t “got the divine selfishness” which definitely other whites got (211). Toby at one point thinks that in order to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable world of blacks and whites one must assume the position of Anna and “make for the frontier between the two” but which was “hard and lonely place yet sparsely populated” (203).

Anna is portrayed as a “real frontiersman who had left the known world behind and set up her camp in the wilderness…” (175). Like her A World of Strangers also attempts to bridge the gap between the two worlds .However it remained in the in- between world and did not cross the border. Although it has challenged the inherent apartheid in the South African society, no clear resolution to it has been offered besides Toby’s renewed social commitment which in itself is doubtful as Sam remarks at the end of the novel: “… ‘Who knows with you people, Toby, man? Maybe you won’t come back at all. Something will keep you away. Something will prevent you, and we won’t’…” (266) and then they are forced to use separate staircase (due to the laws of apartheid). But then it is so because Gordimer is depicting the political realities of 1950s. The opposition movements explored the frontiers of the existing reality without crossing any boundaries. Hence they wanted a reform within the given structure and not its total replacement. The Congress Alliance and particularly the African National Congress demanded a society based on partnership and sharing within the given social setup. The primary objective was “the winning of political and civil rights within the basic framework of South Africa’s existing parliamentary democracy” (Gerhart 45). Even the methods of opposition which included passive resistance, stay-at-homes, peaceful demonstrations and civil disobedience were ‘civil’ in nature and never an outright confrontation. Most of the methods were indeed due to the practical and political predicament of the congress.

But in response to that the government conducted raids and enacting further repressive legislation arrested 156 people on the charges of high treason in December 1956 (Thompson 209). In the novel, Anna Louw is arrested as a part of this sweep. It was only when the peaceful means and just demands were met with more repressive measures and outlawing the organizations by the government did the objective of the ANC changed completely that is to say from reformation to revolution. Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist registers this change in a very prominent way.

A World of Strangers celebrates Sophiatown, the vibrant and ethnically mixed township on the city border, but its destruction was already underway on the orders of the government under the Group Areas Act (1950), when Gordimer was writing this novel. Demolition began on “Toby Street” which marked the frontier between the black township and the white world of Johannesburg (Huddleston 118). “Sophiatown was rezoned for Whites and renamed Triomf (Triumph)…” (Thompson 194). After the destruction of Sophiatown, the government arrested and banned individuals and associations committed to the multi-racial ideals of the Congress Alliance and Freedom Charter. With this, the exuberance and optimism shown in A World of Strangers went away. The novel’s documentary detail, its pronounced realism, makes it a literary monument to a place and an ideal literally crushed by apartheid’s power, for A World of Strangers was banned by the state. Thus it indicates how deeply the present text has demonstrated the historical moment of its time. The novel also has embedded in itself the assumptions and visions of the period it represents.

In an essay published in 1959, the year following the publication and banning of the novel and the year the separatist Pan –Africanist Congress was founded, Gordimer asks, “Where Do Whites Fit in?” She answers: “Nowhere, I’m inclined to say, in my gloomier and least courageous moods…” (Essential Gesture 31). But she argues that “nowhere” is an answer “in the same category as remarks like What’s the use of living? in the face of the threat of atomic radiation. We are living,” she writes and then speaks for fellow South African whites, “we are in Africa” (32). Like Toby who cried, “I want to live! I want to see people who interest me and amuse me, black, white, or any colour,” she declares that whites who want to live in “the new Africa” want merely to be ordinary members of a multi-coloured, any coloured society”(WS 36; Essential Gesture 32).

Gordimer desperately longs to belong, to be accepted as an African among Africans. But belonging requires more than desire; it requires acceptance. And this, she recognizes may not come. She is scarred by black separatism and writes, “There is nothing so damaging to the ego as an emotional rebuff of this kind” (Essential Gesture 32). But that was before 1960, the year of Sharpeville, a year-she later wrote “…the South African revolution may be said to have begun…” (306). As police violence escalates, as Africans are evicted and relocated in wastelands, as thousands are detained without charge, Gordimer realizes that there is nothing so damaging to the ego as being born under the weight of white rule. The above mentioned thought echoes in her writing as well, as a marked change in her writing became clear after Occasion for Loving.

Nadine Gordimer’s third novel Occasion for Loving (1963) can be accorded the status of a transition novel for it definitely registers a change in the direction of political struggle from liberalism to radicalism, from reformation to revolution in the face of social failure. In the words of Dominic Head, it “explores a disillusionment with liberal strategies of opposing apartheid and for achieving black liberation” (62). It seems that Gordimer comes to “reject the liberal tenets of her earlier fiction” (Newman 26).

The novel focuses on an interracial love affair between a black man and a white woman which was prohibited according to the Immorality Act (1950) under apartheid laws. It ultimately failed and its failure brings forth the underlying realities of the apartheid ridden South African society. In an Interview with Studs Terkel in 1962, Gordimer talks of Occasion for Loving indicating that the novel explores “the inevitable discrepancy” between the “liberal attitude” and the impossibility of fruitful personal relations “in a society that is opposed to this sort of thing.” The liberal attitude simply “doesn’t work in a society where, in the general framework, people are judged by the color of their skin” (Bazin and Seymour 20). Not only this, the novel also brings about a change in Gordimer’s writing and themes in her later novels for she has visualized the futility of liberal humanism in the world of politically organized repression. “Its main theme” as Gordimer remarks in the interview, “is that the liberal attitude has become meaningless. We have to accept that we cannot live decently in a rotten society” (12).

The text opens with an epigraph from Thomas Mann: “In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms” (Gordimer, OL v). It is this fact that Nadine Gordimer tries to prove by portraying a failed relationship build solely on personal terms in Occasion for Loving. Ann Davis is twenty two when she arrives at the house of Jessie and Tom Stilwell, a liberal white couple in South Africa, to join her husband Boaz Davis, a musicologist indulged in a research on African instruments. She soon finds herself falling in love with Gideon Shibalo, a black painter, school teacher and Congress activist who “…won…a scholarship to work in Italy, but he hadn’t been able to take it up because the South African Government refused him a passport…” (95). Ann is portrayed as a beautiful free spirited girl who rushes “…into things with her hands out before her, like the little girls after dragonflies…” (29) but she is hardly aware of the repercussions of it. Jessie and Tom notice that the “rhythm of another kind of existence” comes from her (53). Ann tells Jessie that she wants to spend her time in South Africa finding new people and “new things”. The older woman replies: “Experience outside what you think you were meant for” (39).She gathers people the way she gathers wildflowers, picking them “with enthusiasm” and then letting them wither without realizing or intending any harm (133).When she can’t explain to Boaz why she’s sleeping with Gideon, he says “…it’s like a child picking daisies…”(142). Jessie is aware that “... the situation between Boaz and Ann was the same as the others-except that Gideon Shibalo was black, of course….making love to Shibalo was breaking the law…”(153). Even Gordimer affirms in the novel: “There are certain human alliances that belong more to the world than to the two people who are amusing themselves by making them…” (101). Nevertheless Ann continued with her relationship with Gideon which in itself proves that she hardly cares for the world that exists around her. But soon she realizes that there “was nowhere they could go together in town…” (133).They decide to escape from the city.

She runs away with Gideon but the experience she undergoes while travelling with him makes her realize that she is a white. When she can’t stay in a hotel with him or when while having tea at the petrol station she asks the lady to give one tea to the man outside, the woman shouts to the waiter “… ‘Take the coffee out to the madam’s boy’” (225).When Ann and Gideon go to stay with one of Gideon’s friend Mapulane, he allows them to stay but nevertheless he was scared of the repercussions of their liaison:

The small head on the tall body ,the glasses, neatly parted hair and frowning smile-the smile was one of tolerance, helplessness at something that couldn’t be enquired into; there went Gideon, landing up with this white girl, losing himself with a white girl on the way, the hard way that didn’t provide for any detours. Here Mapulane did not follow him; only regretted him. (231)

At the white man’s garage Ann again realizes that her relationship with Gideon is not normal. “‘Make yourself at home here’.” He reminded her of the hospitality of his office. ‘You travelling alone with the driver?’…” (238). Ann answers in the affirmative. She doesn’t have the courage to accept their relationship although she refers to Gideon as her husband earlier to the Afrikaner farmer but only when Gideon is not to be seen anywhere. Critic Dominic Head has interpreted the scene with the white farmer as suggestive of Ann’s discovery, an “…inner realization that there is nowhere to hide, that there is no space beyond the control of racial legislation…” (74).What does it mean? Does it mean all that decision of running away was taken in the heat of the moment? Time and again she realizes that whatever relationship she has developed with Gideon is ‘different’. Ann and Gideon are transformed from lovers to ‘madam and boy’. Boaz, Ann’s husband does not react the way a husband reacts when his wife abandons him for some other man. It’s just because the ‘other’ man here is a black man and Boaz “…cannot kick a black man in the backside” (Gordimer, OL 158). Boaz in fact is worried about one thing and “…the one thing that matters- the reality-gets flung aside by something external and irrelevant…”(216).The laws of apartheid takes precedence over human feelings and emotions. Boaz is unable to intervene in the affair because of the inbred patterns of guilt and overcompensation. Instead of being jealous he is scared that his wife might be caught for breaking the law and more than that about Gideon’s safety because blacks are always on “the receiving side”(162).

Even Jessie worries about Ann for she has not taken just Gideon as her lover but his entire world. Gordimer writes:

Taking Gideon, Ann was claimed by this, too, this place where people were born and lived and died before they could come to life. They drudged and drank and murdered and stole in squalor, and never walked free in the pleasant places. When they were children they were cold and hungry, and when they were old they were cold and hungry again; and in between was a brief, violent clutch at things out of reach, or the sad brute’s life of obliviousness to them. That was the reality of the day, the time being….among these men and women and children outcast for three hundred years…. (270)

The above lines, more than anything else, give a clear picture of the deplorable condition of blacks in South Africa. As Ann becomes restive within the constraints of her limited world she becomes anxious to have her affair resolved and finally declares: “I want to go” (268) and so she does. She leaves Johannesburg with her husband. She could do so because she was a white and hence free to do anything. The novel ends in despair, in a failure- a failure of human relationship in the face of external and irrelevant law. Gordimer finally reveals that:

A line in a statute book has more authority than the claim of one man’s love or another’s. All claims of natural feeling are over-ridden alike by a line in a statute book that takes no account of humanness, that recognises neither love nor respect nor jealousy nor rivalry nor compassion nor hate nor any human attitude whatever where there are black and white together. What Boaz felt towards Ann; what Gideon felt towards Ann; what Ann felt about Boaz; what she felt for Gideon- all this that was real and rooted in life was void before the clumsy words that reduced the delicacy and towering complexity of living to a race theory. It was not a matter of being a man or a woman, with a mind and a sex, a body and a spirit- it was a matter of qualifying for a licence to make use of these things with which you happened to be born….(216)

Gordimer ends Occasion for Loving with a negative conclusion. The pertinent question that arises is- why? In order to understand the causes for the failure in the novel its historical context is worth a discussion.

There were significant developments between mid-50s and early 60s, the time period in which the novel is written. Hence those developments have a direct bearing on the novel. To begin with, the status of multiracialism of the 50s became weaker than it was before. The multiracial ideology resulted in the secession within the African National Congress. With the formation of Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) in April 1959 the assumptions of multiracialism were opposed and challenged. In fact according to Robert Sobukwe, founder of PAC, the whites could not identify with the African cause because “they benefitted from the existing social order.” For PAC the oppression was simply the oppression of the black indigenous majority by the white settler minority. Hence the struggle against that repression should be a pure Africanist struggle against the whites. They believed that “…the alliance with the white dominated Congress of Democrats had impeded the ANC…”and hence a purely African movement dedicated to the freedom and emancipation of African population was required (Thompson 210, 209). Interestingly, Gordimer has also acknowledged this fact in the text when Jessie, witnessing the devastating condition of Gideon after he is abandoned by Ann says: “What’s the good of us to him? What’s the good of our friendship or her love?”(OL 272). It justifies the above mentioned fact. It is evident that Gideon’s trust on whites has been misplaced.

Although this premise is quite in contrast to what was declared in A World of Strangers but then Occasion for Loving generated out of a totally different socio-political environment. The political events and social changes that were effected in the late fifties and early sixties put in question the assumptions of the previous decade. The Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), as the name itself suggests associated itself with the Pan-Africanism movement in Africa in general. Kwame Nkrumah, the prime minister of Ghana declared on March 6, 1957, at the independence of his country that the independence was meaningless unless the entire African continent becomes independent. Edward Reynolds informs that in the All- African People’s Conference held in Accra in 1958 it was declared that by 1963 total liberation would be attained. Its effect was such that by the end of 1960 eighteen African countries had attained their independence. Going by the rising tide of achieving independence by other African countries liberation was anticipated in South Africa as well.

Unfortunately such anticipation suffered a tragic setback as the new decade commenced. On 21 March 1960 at Sharpeville (one of the black township near Johannesburg) police station, 67 Africans were killed and 186 were wounded when the police opened fire at the armless crowd gathered for a peaceful anti-pass demonstration and many of them were shot at the back (Thompson 210). This single event marked the change of mood in the South African history. The Sharpeville Massacre was followed by unrest in many parts of South Africa. From the areas of Langa and Nyanga around Cape Town, on March 30, Philip Kgosana a young man of twenty three, mobilized some 30,000 Africans and organized a march of protest to the centre of the city, near the parliament and could have held parliamentary capital to ransom, had he not been arrested (Ross 129). The government declared a State of Emergency and suspended habeas corpus bringing South Africa under martial law. On 8 April, ANC and PAC were declared illegal organizations under the Suppression of Communism Act (Mandela 1: 346,352).

After treating non-violence as its core principal for fifty years with no fruitful result, ANC finally founded Umkhonto we Sizwe (‘The Spear of the Nation’) an armed offshoot of ANC on 16 December 1961 and began its own campaign of sabotage. It made over two hundred bomb attacks on government buildings and industrial installations (Thompson 211). This transition from peaceful resistance to violent confrontation challenged the old assumption of moral struggle and peaceful inter-racial solidarity of the 1950s.

The Sharpeville Massacre “marked a change of mood…in Nadine Gordimer’s life” (Roberts 241). By the end of 60s Gordimer’s friends in ANC were either fleeing the country or were imprisoned. Its effect on her was just the opposite of what she felt in the 1950s. It would not be wrong to say that the state repression after Sharpeville incident had been slowly building even before the incident and hence the theme of Occasion for Loving has thus generated. Interestingly for a novel which began before Sharpeville and ended after Sharpeville there is no mention of the incident except for a passing comment about some march on page 178. In fact referring to the interracial socializing of the 1950s Verwoerd remarked that “…he would use an ‘iron hand’ to stamp out this subversion of state policy…” (qtd. in Clingman 75). He evidently did so. Sophiatown was completely destroyed and ‘triomf’ (triumph) was built in its place. All possible attempts were made to prevent the interracial mixing at any level. Native Laws Amendment Act (1957) and Group Areas Amendment Act were implemented to prohibit multiracial contacts in the white areas spanning the spheres of religion, health, education and entertainment (Landis, “Apartheid Legislation” 46).

The cultural sphere of South Africa which was most lively and active in terms of multiracial contacts was also attacked. By the mid 1960s almost all the writers associated with the Drum, with who Gordimer was associated so closely, were in exile. Hence Can Themba, Nat Nakasa, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Todd Matshikiza Alex la Guma had all left and their works were banned in South Africa (“Black South African”). Even in the world of music black musicians who had come forth in 1950s were ousted. The isolation that Gordimer felt along with the shrinking and fast disappearing political world of 50s became important for the historical awareness of Occasion for Loving.

In contrast to the positivism and rebelliousness of the 50s there was growing seriousness by 1960s that gave an indication that an era was drawing to a close. Gordimer registered this change in her own life. In an essay published in 1959 “Where Do Whites Fit In?” “Nowhere” she says and wonders if there would be a place for ‘whites’ in independent South Africa as “…it is a nationalism of heart that has been brought about by suffering…”(Essential Gesture 31, 33).Whites had no part in this suffering so they cannot share the bond of friendship and brotherhood this suffering has created. It can be perceived evidently by the essay that Gordimer herself was contemplating “the desire to be gone” from South Africa (34).

On one hand, if the multiracial world of 50s gave opportunity to the people of different color to fall in love with each other, on the other hand it also entailed a tragedy which takes the reader directly to the thematic concern of Occasion for Loving. It is likely that Occasion for Loving to some extent is based on Can Themba’s love affair with a young Englishwoman which Gordimer mentions in her letter to Sampson:

By the way, I suppose you heard that our friend Can had a terrific affair with that pretty Jean Hart? She ran away with him, as the saying goes-where one runs to in a colour-bar country where a couple like that couldn’t even sit in a bus together, I don’t know. Anyway, it all ended rather badly, specially for poor Can, for the girl was taken back by her long-suffering husband and has gone with him on a walking tour of Europe, while Can is left just where he was. (Roberts 150)

But it is clear that Gordimer is not inclined to repeat the real story rather she investigates the level of typicality the changed social and historical realities it emanates. Observed from this point of view the novel pays a close attention to political and historical context from the broadest to the most intimate patterns. Alistair Boddy-Evans in his article “Apartheid Legislation in South Africa” informs that in 1959, there was a lot of hostility towards Extension of Universities Bill which barred black students from getting admission in white universities and instead forced them to take admission in various tribal colleges. In Gordimer’s Occasion for Loving, Tom Stilwell is an academic who is involved in the campaign to oppose the Bill along with the students and is “…eager to see them kick up a real shindy, supported by the staff…” (63). Elsewhere (on pages 131-132) Gideon and Sol (blacks) are seen discussing the relative merit as well as objective of ANC and PAC, there is also a mention of All-African conference in Accra, and “Kgosana’s march on Cape Town” (177) is also mentioned. On the basis of above mentioned facts it can be said that the novel is far more politically aware than its predecessors and this is undoubtedly due to the effects of political developments during that time in South Africa and whole of Africa in general. When Tom Stilwell goes to attend a meeting held to discuss the Bill, a black man tells him that he can fight with the government if he wants “…but don’t think that anything you do really matters. Some of you make laws, and some of you try to change them. And you don’t ask us” (64-65). This change in the tone of blacks is different from what Gordimer has portrayed in The Lying Days and A World of Strangers.

Significantly enough, Gordimer’s conception of blacks and the nature of South African history has undergone a change. Although blacks lived in South Africa since time immemorial, the history was conceived of as white history. In the novel however, Gordimer acknowledges the fact that the history –past, present and future is black and not white. This change of conception in Gordimer might have to do with the extensive traveling she undertook in mid 50s, of the African continent. In 1959 she revisited Egypt only to find everything that was European- “sequestrated” in Cairo (Gordimer, Telling Times 43). She found a kind of “national confidence” which had nothing to do with “the braggart ‘Voice of Cairo’ or Pan-Arabism” but “an inner assurance that each man is a man measured against his own people” (45). On her visit to Congo in 1961, she realizes that, “The white man, as a power, is becoming extinct in Africa…”and Congo was reverberating politically and environmentally according to Gordimer (100).

This wider perspective gathered by Nadine Gordimer during her travels must be instrumental in bringing about a change and question the earlier liberal and colonial ideologies in her work. Hence, Tom Stilwell in Occasion for Loving is depicted not only as a lecturer but also a historian attempting to write a history “from the black point of view” which he considers the “historical point of view” (15). And Boaz is researching on ancient African musical instruments. Jessie, the protagonist of the novel, becomes the harbinger of Gordimer’s thought of pending African revolution when she thinks that this new magic belongs “…to those who held in themselves for this one generation the dignity of the poor about to inherit their earth and the worldliness of those who had been the masters…”(269).

It is definitely due to the changes that occurred at the end of 50s that the mood of extremities is vividly seen in the novel. Gordimer depicts a change in the internal world because the external world has changed. When Gideon is discussing ANC and PAC with his friend Sol he opines on guerilla politics:

So why should I, or anyone else with an eye on the real objective, the only thing that counts, stick with any crowd if I see that some other crowd is getting something done? What does another name and another slogan mean to me? I’ve got no ambitions to climb up a party ladder, Sol. I just want to see the blacks stand up on their hind legs, that’s all. I don’t care if they give the thumbs-up or bow three times to the moon. The chaps in the street have got the right idea, man…. (131)

Gideon’s words suggest utter frustration and bitterness of a black man augmented to an extreme level by his experience during the course of the novel when only ‘despair’ becomes his lot. It also brings forth another crucial feeling of the novel, that for blacks only political commitment can save them from destruction. It can be compared to the apolitical and bohemian attitude of Steven Sitole in A World of Strangers which ultimately results in his destruction. This parallel also reveals to the reader that this issue of political commitment is particularly close to Gordimer’s heart. Hence Gideon’s life becomes a testing ground for this conviction-as he has to choose between his dedication and commitment to political struggle and his apparent freedom for love and his own art. But as Callie Stow, one of the white characters in the novel tells him after he is denied a passport which barred him from availing his scholarship in Italy, that “It just seems to me that now you’ve had clearly shown to you that the only thing that means anything if you’re an African is politics….You don’t need philosophy; you’ve got necessity….You’ve got politics, that’s all…” (121-22). Thus when Gideon disregards his political involvement and chooses Ann over it he ends by being almost destroyed.

Gordimer explores the historical consciousness in various ways in the novel. The most prominent is the love affair between Ann and Gideon. The choice of this theme to reveal the reality is based on the fact that love and sexual relations across the color line became a concern in South African fiction. Though Gordimer treats the love affair not as a transgression or a sin but absolutely normal yet she is unable to change the result that this kind of affair entails in apartheid ridden South Africa. In other words, Gordimer puts to test the assumptions that underlay the vision of A World of Strangers .The cross-racial love affair fails and the reason why it fails is more important than the fact that it does so. According to Stephen Clingman it failed from “inside” which means that the external reality was internalized in the lovers. In the words of Clingman, Ann, “into the matrix of her own personality… absorbs the obsessions and fears of the society she once flouted….” In fact no “external sanctions” are required to break that relationship as the repressions of apartheid have become “psychologically inscribed.” And here it is the “prestructuring effects” of apartheid that finally matters (82). Jessie realizes this as she ponders over the fact that owing to their respective positions in the society Gideon suffered while the privileged Ann escapes. There is no greater “personal bond” than love. Apartheid penetrated the most personal, deepest and most intimate relations of human beings and “ …between lovers they had seen blackness count, the personal return inevitably to the social, the private to the political….So long as the law remained unchanged, nothing could bring integrity to personal relationships”( Gordimer, OL 279).

The above statement simply goes on to prove that in South African condition an occasion for loving does not and cannot arrive without certain changes. The inherent humanism that emerges as the winner in the earlier novel has become obsolete in the present one. Racially “…motivated state violence draws a stark line which necessitates the pursuit of black freedom by blacks for blacks….” (Head 63). Occasion for Loving challenges the ideology of liberal humanism of the earlier fictions of Gordimer. She has initiated an exploration of historical realism with absolutely no illusions. In other words, failure of a love affair marks the end of multi-racial cooperation but at the same time it gives a new hope if the positive aspect of that failure is perceived. The novel suggests that political progress requires acceptance of separation which represents a progressive diagnosis of historical situation.

When the present is rendered sterile by a certain inescapable condition, the natural course is to look forward to the future. It has already been mentioned that Occasion for Loving is more politically and historically aware than the previous of Gordimer’s work. Even in the treatment of other sub themes, Gordimer presents a transition towards a consciousness which is more historical in form and in turn is related to South Africa’s past, present and future.

Jessie Stilwell, Tom’s wife, is a twice married woman who struggles to come to terms with her own past and sees a connection between her own forgotten childhood and white repression of black history and culture, when she ponders while watching a dance performance how the blacks “sang and danced and trampled the past under their feet…” (37). Owing to the repression they have forgotten about their own culture that has been rendered a mere performance for others. Even Gideon Shibalo is aware of this when he says that the “…whites took away the African past… (151). Hence the personal quest of Jessie finally takes the shape of more impersonal reality of South African history. It becomes a political metaphor. Like Helen Shaw, Jessie moved from childhood in a mining town to her present situation in liberal bourgeoisie. During the course of the novel, she discovers the ironies of this situation as she is drawn into the experiences of Ann and Gideon. As a witness to this affair and its consequences, Jessie comes to understand the untenable nature of her and her husband’s liberal attitudes and behavior.

As the novel opens, Jessie stands in a “battered and mis-shaped garden”, the world already fallen. She “had taken to her heels long ago” and is “still running” (Gordimer, OL 9). Like Gordimer young Jessie is taken out of the school by her mother “at the age of ten or eleven” on the pretext of a nonexistent heart ailment (24-25). She is not allowed to play tennis and is deprived of a normal childhood like other children of her age. She is permitted to read any book but denied independence. She ends up becoming a “mother’s boon companion” (67) and an emotional ally in her mother’s unhappy marriage with Bruno Fuecht. She thinks that her identity in the present has no connection with the past: “I was; I am: these were not two different tenses, but two different people” (23). She is under an illusion that she has left her past behind but then she realizes that she has “never left her mother’s house” (9). She also discovers that “…there is no sum total of being; it flows from what has been, through what is, and so on to what is becoming…” (24). After eight years of her marriage to Tom she thinks that she will be able to unlock the doors and will know the true meaning in her life but that involves social betrayal just like in Ann’s case. When Ann and Gideon seek refuge in her seaside house at Isendhla, she resents their presence initially. But in her need to help them she becomes committed to their cause of love and is drawn from her isolation. Jessie is finally able to relate her past with the present. She also comes to understand the broader social meaning of her existence.

Another interesting observation where personal history carries a more poignant historical implication can be made through the relationship of Jessie with her mother. As a young girl, Jessie’s mother kept her out of school to fulfill her own selfish reasons. She created an emotional ally in Jessie and thus prevented her maturity in the outside world. Jessie’s mother acted as a ‘trustee’ out to help her ‘ward’ who is unable to take care of her life in the outside world which in turn prevented her (Jessie’s) growth. It was based on false essentialism and a lie that Jessie suffered from a heart disease and so by nature was unfit to take charge of her own life. This relationship structure becomes a parallel to the relationship of the colonizers and the colonized throughout the world and South Africa in particular. The oppressive regime cultivated this ideology on the goodness of the oppressed not to rebel as Jessie says that she accepted “…a dwarf’s status in the world of men and women…” (OL 67). Jessie used to feel that she was dependent on her mother but actually it was her mother who was dependent on her. In the same way as whites who believed that blacks were dependent on them actually were dependent on the labor of the blacks to prosper and maintain their power.

The novel’s attempt to explore the historical reality does not merely end with the failure of a love affair. Rather, through Jessie it has been taken to a more crucial level. Jessie, as it has been observed, finds a new social commitment at the end and it is she who discovers the futility of humanistic values in the face of apartheid laws. It can be said that Jessie is in a high state of awareness but still there is a discrepancy between her consciousness and her possibilities. Jessie starts to feel personally close to Gideon after Ann leaves him. She believes that she understands his position and thus in turn shares a common consciousness with Gideon. But when she meets him at a party and approaches him, Gideon in a state of drunkenness is unable to recognize her. He mumbles, “White bitch- get away” (288). Gideon’s remark makes clear the fact that there can be no personal relationship in South Africa as long as the laws of apartheid persisted. For Gideon, Jessie ceased to exist as an individual. He sees a ‘white bitch’ who can be substituted for any white. It proves that the relationship between Gideon and Jessie has gone from personal to impersonal. Here Gordimer seems to indicate that before any personal relations are built they have to be tackled at a social level first.

Nadine Gordimer also portrays the futility of the liberal ideology through Jessie and Tom. She writes: “The stilwells’ code of behavior towards people was definitive, like their marriage; they could not change it. But they saw that it was a failure….” Liberal values are no longer effective in bringing about a change but then it does not mean liberal values should be abandoned. However, a more radical means should be adopted to achieve them. Hence “perhaps, in time” Jessie would help someone “in blowing up a power station” (OL 279). It might be taken as a reference to the acts of sabotage that had already begun but again for Jessie this appears to be a possibility which she might take up in some future time. To some extent it shows that although liberal humanism has been rejected nothing has been put in its place. The novel thus stands on the border.

Occasion for Loving is a subtle and a complex novel for it represents a moment of profound transition when a dominant philosophy broke under the strains of its own assumptions, and as it was about to take up the next. The novel challenges the Forsterian philosophy of “only connect” of Howard’s End. It is indicated when Jessie, on a Christmas holiday, observes a mad woman “…sewing without any thread in the needle. It flashed in and out of the stuff, empty, connecting nothing with nothing” (Gordimer, OL 44). Jessie cannot connect with Gideon at a psychic level in the face of legally enforced segregation. She can only connect in terms of their public identities.

The last line of the above paragraph also explains the change in Gordimer’s writing. Occasion for Loving marks the end of subjectivity as the mode of writing for Gordimer. She has dealt with subjectivity in all of her previous novels but it has been subjected to political realities. The personal cannot deal effectively with the impersonal reality. Thus only impersonal commitment can tackle impersonal history. This impersonal approach is adopted by Gordimer in her later novels.