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

Just as there is a ‘power failure’ between Liz and her lover, there is a kind of submission to the power as well. Elizabeth is shown taking a neutral stance but neutrality, in effect, supports the status quo. Critic Judie Newman has remarked on the neutral stance of Liz pointing that Luke Fokase comes as a “means of escape from this becalmed Limbo” (38). The novel thus attempts to seek a valid code of action which lies neither in the distorted adoption of the terms of bourgeois world (as in Max’s case which results in failure) nor in their absolute rejection (as in Elizabeth’s case) which produces inaction, but in their actual and material transformation. An intelligent denouement towards the end of the novel shows how the terms of ‘the late bourgeois world’ can be transformed. Liz is approached by Luke Fokase, an underground Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) member who asks her to use her power of attorney over her grandmother’s account to channel funds to the PAC. Liz’s action will help transform the morality underlying her grandmother’s position (that of a bourgeois). Historically, bourgeois practice had been to appropriate money for private use, but here Liz turns that practice against itself by using a private bank account for a social and revolutionary purpose. In this way the white privilege, power, and wealth are transformed and Liz makes use of all of them to undo them.

During the encounter of Liz and Luke, the personal terms of the bourgeois are changed as well as the political and the erotic are united. It is hinted that Luke will probably make love to her “Oh yes, and it’s quite possible he’ll make love to me, next time or some time….” But she is prepared to accept this because a “sympathetic white woman hasn’t got anything to offer him-except the footing she keeps in the good old white Reserve of banks and privileges. And in return…it’s all he’s got to offer me. It would be better if I accepted gratefully, because then we shan’t owe each other anything, each will have given what he has…”( Gordimer, LBW 94).This fact introduces a new kind of hope towards a more racially egalitarian society. Further, through the entire development in the last part of the text, as mentioned above, Gordimer unites the political and the erotic.

Gordimer presents Luke’s political request as seduction. Liz recognizes Luke as “an expert at conveying what one might call sexual regret: the compliment of suggesting that he would like to make love to you, if time and place and the demands of two lives were different…” (82). In fact the new political awakening of Liz is presented in sexual terms when Liz feels that the thought of grandmother’s account grow “like sexual tumescence” inside her (86). It also indicates the “reawakening of Liz’s deadened emotions” (Newman 39) which in turn gives the reader a strong implication that she will definitely tread on the uncharted path though Gordimer has left Liz’s future decision open ended.

Liz transforms the material realities of the bourgeois world. She is ready to transcend their previous limits and this fact has been made evident by a long musing in which Liz engages after Luke leaves. Liz compares her situation with that of astronauts who happen to be circling the world and beyond at that moment. Gordimer writes:

Isn’t it the same old yearning for immortality, akin to all our desires to transcend all kinds of human limits? The feeling that if you bring such a thing off you’re approaching the transcension of our limits of life: our death….They are alive, up there.

The very scene of operations is significant. We call the nothing above me ‘the sky’; and that way it’s become the roof of our environment, part of our terrestrial and finite being,…But we know that that ‘nothing’,…is space. Twin of time, the phrase goes. I hear it in Graham’s voice: together they represent, in the only conception we’re capable of forming of it, infinity.

If that man over my head can get out of ‘the sky’ into space, step from his man-devised, man –controlled casing into an environment beyond man’s,…can he really be still mortal? If God is the principle of the eternal, isn’t he near God, tonight?....After all, religions teach that kingdom of God, of the spirit, is not of this world,….Space is not of this world, either, and yet you can walk about alive in it, up there….Is there anything surprising that there should be a deep connection in our subconscious between the eternity of God and the infinity of space?...nearly all believe that there is some identity, at least, between religious myths and the evolutionary drive towards higher forms of life.

What’s going on overhead is perhaps the spiritual expression of our age, and we don’t recognize it….Could any act of worship as we’ve known such things for two thousand years express more urgently a yearning for life beyond life- the yearning for God? (91-92)

At one level this comparison takes the reader to the outer reaches. Liz sees her attempt to help and astronauts’ attempt to move beyond the finite world as an expression of the archetypal, mythic and religious quest to go beyond the known barriers of existence and reach its source i.e. God. The conquest of space is viewed as an eternal desire for immortality and the yearning to transcend every human limit including death.

However, observed from a different angle the analogy that Liz uses, clearly states her own position- like the astronauts she is also going to enter another world, transcending the limits of her previous existence by advancing into an unchartered political realm in which the terms of bourgeois world are to be overcome. Though she is a bit doubtful because she is aware that PAC would probably construct, as one of Max’s African colleague remarks: “A black capitalist country…” (45). She says, “Am I going into politics again, then? And if so, what kind? But I can’t be bothered with this sort of thing, it’s irrelevant…” (94). But this doubt is of hardly any use as she makes it clear that under such circumstances various ideologies have been abandoned as the government itself does not differentiate between various revolutionary movements.

It can be mentioned that by the time The Late Bourgeois World ends Liz has not actually taken her decision to channel money to help PAC although there’s a strong possibility of it. It recapitulates the epigraph of the novel “There are possibilities for me, certainly; but under what stone do they lie?”(Franz Kafka). It seems Liz has found the stone, which Max was unable to, “There were possibilities, but under what stone? Under what stone?” (54). In this regard Judie Newman opines that due to the fact “of an eventual recognition of the historical condition as transformative” the story becomes that of Liz’s (36).The point noted by Newman goes on to prove that Liz’s decision will change the course of struggle against apartheid. Her radical act will define the new terms on which whites can participate in their fight against racism after shedding their liberal mould.

A great change can be noticed about Gordimer’s writing here. She seems to be working on a new female role in her novel. Besides that she has also portrayed sexuality being politicized, as political engagement takes on a sexual quality. Gordimer’s females will become more engaged with politics as it shall be seen in Burger’s Daughter and July’s People, as politics transforms sexuality. Commenting on her trajectory as a writer, Gordimer who began with traditional female concerns of love, marriage and family has undergone a substantial change under the pressure of history.

It was this pressure of the history that took the form of a prophecy in Nadine Gordimer’s sixth novel The Conservationist (1974). It marked a complete transformation of Gordimer’s stance as a writer for she forayed into the world of myth and symbolism in order to express the predicament of the troubled society. One cannot help but admire Gordimer’s prescience in The Conservationist. The novel, in the words of Newman, “offers the reader another form of articulated consciousness, simultaneously addressing the problems of South African politics”. She adds further that The Conservationist “renders an internal reality progressively divorced from the reality outside it, the reality of political and ontological consensus” (55). Judie Newman however examines the text from the point of view of Zulu myth as portrayed in relation to the plot. She also explores the central character Mehring with respect to the female characters in the novel.

The protagonist of the novel is Mehring, an industrialist, a weekend farmer and a conservationist who embodies in himself the typical white colonizer intent upon preserving his possession, the farm. Despite his origins in Namibia, Mehring is a thoroughly representative South African type: an individual white who seek a life of relative harmlessness, separation, and privacy, only to find himself unable to maintain any such separate peace. Very early in the novel he laments that “Soon there will be nothing left” which serves as a prophecy that white colonial days are soon to be over in apartheid ridden South Africa (OL11, 20). An attempt however has been made to examine the text against the backdrop of apartheid in South Africa and how the novel reveals the historical realities of its time through the modernist technique of stream of consciousness.

Commenting on the narrative style employed by Nadine Gordimer, Dominic Head opines that “the novel-through its style-is an enactment of political transition, a decolonization presented as an historical inevitability, and articulated in a ‘decolonization’ of the novel’s form” (99). This is true because Gordimer, in this text, has employed the Zulu myth through a series of references to Zulu mythology as represented in the novel by interpolated quotations from Henry Callaway’s The Religious System of the Amazulu (1870).

In the interviews conducted in 1979 and 1980 for The Paris Review, Gordimer is of the opinion that because she wrote A Guest of Honour (1970) as “a conventional narrative,” she needed to make clear “certain objective entities relating to and acting upon the character’s life.” But when she turned to the The Conservationist, she “chose to ignore that one had to explain anything at all” (Bazin and Seymour 148). Things happen in the course of the novel, but its real action is the making of meaning, a process undertaken by Mehring, by the community of Africans who live and labor on the farm, and by the reader, as well. The text deliberately refuses to provide a single thematic summation. It offers “a choice of explanations” for the events it chronicles, and thus requires the reader to animate and enagage in the dialogue that begins on the printed page (149). Nadine Gordimer describes the novel’s dominant narrative method as “interior monologue”. Although she has made clear the distinction between Mehring and a “narrator” positioned “outside” Mehring’s consciousness, “It’s not always Mehring speaking. But the line between when he is and when he isn’t is very vague” (147).

The plot of The Conservationist is symbolic in nature wherein Mehring, representing a typical white colonialist is sitting on so many boards and has amassed a lot of wealth. He has attained such certain success that he can turn away additional high paying offers. But he becomes increasingly isolated, withdrawn from any companionship or community. The Africans who live on the farm and neighboring location have nothing. Deprived of material possessions and civil liberties, they lack even the basic right to look for work. But their voices cannot be suppressed; like the black body dumped and carelessly buried in the third pasture, they are “always there”(Gordimer 251).The return of the politically repressed is symbolized by the slow rising to the surface of an imperfectly buried body, accompanied by the repossession of the land by blacks, in symbolic and politically proleptic terms.

Taking into account the ‘possession of land’ factor, Nadine Gordimer exposes the colonialist biases of her predecessor, Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) which can be considered a prototypical South African colonial novel. It treats the question of land appropriation as theme and takes it entirely for granted. In fact in an essay titled “English-Language Literature and Politics in South Africa” (1976), Gordimer, commenting on the novel says: “this is a book that expresses the wonder and horror of the wilderness, and for the indigenous inhabitant that wilderness is home. The novel exists squarely within the political context of colonialism” (Telling Times 240). It can be argued then, that The Conservationist which came out after almost a gap of ninety years is addressed to The Story of an African Farm. For if Schreiner’s work, drawing from the past, relates the uneasy settlement of a colonial order then Gordimer’s work, prophesying the history of the future, represents the dissolution of that colonial order. Therefore, the crucial question of land possession comes into being; the African farm that Schreiner settled is claimed by those who were dispossessed of it and along with it the material and the mental hold of Europeans on Africa is loosened, as the land comes back to its people and they to it.

The underlying reason as to why the shift appeared in Gordimer’s novel was due to the immediate realities of the moment to which the novel responded. This fact makes the discussion of those realities assume prime importance. A two-fold assessment of the situation is made. When The Conservationist appeared in 1974, revolution in South Africa seemed to be a possibility as against the silence put by the state in the late sixties. Mehring, whose name sounds Afrikaans, is probably German in origin. He speaks English which possibly represents a class alliance fostered due to the disappearance of previous internal conflicts of Afrikaners and English. Mehring is a “…prominent industrialist associated with the economic advancement of the country at the highest level…” (264). Moreover in his international ventures he sells pig iron to the Japanese. All this definitely represent the unification of white South Africa, its increased economic advancement and better international penetration of its capital which indeed was the reality in South Africa of 1970s. There developed a strong relation between the state and capital because of two reasons; firstly, because the Afrikaner capitalist had a serviceable ear of the government and secondly because the mechanism of profit and power were complementary to each other (Trapido 317). Hence it can be said that Gordimer presents Mehring as a structural pillar of the South African political economy and in exploring him Gordimer explores the entire building that he supports.

However, while representing one aspect of South African reality, Nadine Gordimer, through Mehring also brings to the fore another reality very poignantly and i.e. that the foundations of white South Africa in all its unity have already begun to crumble. In South Africa itself the first signs appeared in South West Africa (Namibia) over which South Africa exercised control. In Namibia, a massive strike occurred against the contract labour system in 1971-72 which almost brought the region to a standstill (Moorsom 224-29). Besides, Namibia was also a site of dispute between South Africa and United Nations. The UN Security Council asked South Africa to withdraw from Namibia in 1969 followed by the orders from International Court of Justice in 1971 (Moorsom 220; “UN Security Council”). In fact the contract labour strike has been explicitly mentioned in the text and Mehring is shown to respond agitatedly on the issue as he discovers the ground of his origin slipping away. Further the year 1973 “marked the beginning of a wave of strikes with demands of higher wages and improved working conditions” in South Africa itself (Thompson 212).

At the same time, Black Consciousness Movement was gaining grounds in South Africa amongst the black students which signaled an end to the silence that pervaded after black political organizations were banned. Developed on a “set of ideas” described as “Black Consciousness”, it “urged a defiant rejection of apartheid” (“Black Consciousness”). Students who refused to join white-controlled National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) grouped together to form South African Students Organization (SASO), an exclusively black organization. Steve Biko, the leader of SASO, wrote in 1971:

Black consciousness is in essence the realization by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their subjection-the blackness of their skin-and to operate as a group in order to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude. It seeks to demonstrate the lie that black is an aberration from the “normal” which is white….It seeks to infuse the black community with a new- found pride in themselves, their efforts, their value systems, their culture, their religion and their outlook to life. The interrelationship between the consciousness of self and the emancipator programme is of paramount importance. Blacks no longer seek to reform the system because so doing implies acceptance of the major points around which the system revolves. Blacks are out to completely transform the system and to make of it what they wish. (qtd. in Thompson 212)

The movement set the context for the great challenge offered to the state by the Soweto Revolt of 1976. The Conservationist in all its probability has responded to this revived resistance after a long silence and registers the impact of the movement. However, it can be argued that the novel responds more deeply to the developments in the rest of Africa, more so because it was regional developments that foretold the end of white supremacy. Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland were already independent by 1965. In 1974, Portuguese rule in Angola and Mozambique collapsed after being faced with guerrilla wars in both the colonies (Ross 140). This was of symbolic significance to South Africa as it threatened their (whites) survival because these countries gained independence after an armed resistance. Mozambican independence seemed a prophecy for South African liberation.

It is clear from the above paragraph that balance of power was demonstrably swinging in the favor of blacks, regionally if not still in South Africa. This, precisely, is the understanding of The Conservationist. At the end of the novel a storm coming from Mozambique channel symbolizes this and drives Mehring away from the land. Though he does not die literally in the end but he and whatever he represents does meet a historical death. The novel however, was published in 1974 which means it must have been completed sometime before Mozambique gained independence; hence the coup that occurred in Mozambique was definitely outside the knowledge of Gordimer while the novel was being written. Therefore, it can be argued that the text is infused with a remarkable sense of history.

Through Mehring, the central character of The Conservationist, Gordimer has presented the white capitalist world, the white attitude and its exploitative tendencies. He holds the highest status and shares it with those few rich, white Europeans as “the whole world is theirs” (266). In his farm the black workers live a life of deprivation as the farm is not very productive. They are contemplating a move to the city for better prospect but “a farm labourer has no papers for town” (63). For Mehring the farm serves as a monetary security as “ the losses are deductible from income tax” and this explains the “hankering to make a contact with the land” (22). Moreover Mehring originally buys the farm to be used “as a place to bring a woman” (42). Gordimer also brings to the fore the internal stratification among whites as Mehring is shown to keep a distance from his neighbor Mr. De Beer who is a boer and vice-versa which becomes clear when the De Beers talks to him in English “which demarcates the limit of his acceptance” of them (49). But they have a common cause in protecting their properties, at times resorting to extreme violence, making the most they can from African labor and African loot. Elsewhere, though he finds the local Afrikaner police exasperatingly inefficient, he hides his derision, “snorts a laugh, softly,” after speaking to the sergeant, “so that Jacobus shall not hear” (18). It clearly shows that although there may be internal differences yet all whites are complicit when it comes to dealing with blacks. The vast difference in the standard of living of Mehring and his black farm workers has been observed very poignantly by Irene Gorak. She remarks that while Mehring makes luxurious trips to Japan, America and Australia, his farmworkers’ only luxury is to ride in his tractor and “to wear his son’s cast off sweaters”. She further notices that the difference becomes more evident:

in the scenes where Mehring looks with distant distaste on his farmworkers’ quarters. His own farmhouse, unused during the week, has sanitation, electricity, cooking facilities, and furniture. The concrete he provides for his workers boasts none of these. In a powerful synecdoche for European colonization it protects them from one element (rain) even as it subjects them to another (cold). (246-47)

Mehring’s exploitative nature is also brought out clearly into focus by his sexual rapaciousness. In his conversation with his mistress Antonia he admits that “…there’s a special pleasure in having a woman you’ve paid” which is described as “sexual fascism” by Antonia (Gordimer, Conservationist 77,102). Similar feelings of sexual exploitation arise in his mind at a party when looking at the young daughter of the dinner hostess he thinks that it is she whom he desires and wants to “undress in a hotel room”(31) or elsewhere when he meets another young girl in a coffee shop and tries to seduce her (187-91).Towards the end when Mehring is lured by a female hitcher, he fears of being robbed or trapped by anti-miscegenation squad as he is not sure of the woman’s ethnic origin. As he plans to escape he thinks of leaving the woman to be raped or robbed because “coloured or poor-white, whichever she is, their brothers or fathers take their virginity good and early” (264). His outright condemnation of other races and class denotes his supremacist attitude and a constructed racial difference between him and ‘coloureds’ and ‘poor whites’ besides his selfish impulse to self preservation.

However the most important incident of this kind occurs when Mehring, on his way back to South Africa from a business trip, sexually exploits a young Portuguese girl. This incident co- relates Mehring’s exploitative tendencies in relation to both land and women. The critic Judie Newman has commented on this incident thus: “Female exploitation and exploitation of land are linked; sexual guilt functions as a surrogate for colonial guilts” (59). The image of landscape in his mind is soon overtaken by his sexual advancement towards a girl of sixteen or seventeen years and both are intertwined: “…the feel of flesh is experienced anew, as the taste of water is recognized anew in the desert…” (Conservationist 128). Another significant aspect of this incident is that throughout the sexual probing the girl does not speak, only “Now and then quite naturally, he encountered the soundless O of the little mouth that made no refusal…” (130).The quietude of the girl is indicative of powerlessness. It signifies that the narrative, indicating the power, belongs to Mehring but as it will be seen eventually the supposedly powerful is reduced to nothing.

Besides Mehring, there is another profoundly powerful character in the novel albeit an unusual one and that is the figure of the black body buried shallowly beneath the surface of Mehring’s farm. Although it is dead and lifeless it becomes the major antagonist to Mehring in the novel. Ironically enough, the body triumphs in the end. Nadine Gordimer has clearly marked out the personal and social relationship between Mehring and the body. The body seems to be of a man murdered either on his way to or from the location that borders Mehring’s farm. In some way perhaps Mehring is responsible for his death, for the location which houses the blacks in inhuman conditions serve the white owned industries. Mehring enjoys the peace and serenity at his farm at the cost of institutionalized violence by the state which keeps the location politically subdued and quiet which in turn has resulted in the death of the man. Even the police have given an improper burial to the body, in order to save themselves from the trouble of investigating yet another murder connected with the location.

It can be pointed out at this juncture that just as Mehring represents the white world, the black body represents the black world symbolizing the systematic oppression, exploitation and abuse suffered by blacks under the apartheid society. The black body in that sense takes on a persona of ‘everyman’ who continuously haunts Mehring’s consciousness and in the end, revived by the storm from Mozambique comes back to claim its land. In its wake, Mehring leaves the farm in terror and crisis. The novel gives an explicit indication if it. Referring to the body, Gordimer writes: “…he had come back. He took possession of this earth, theirs; one of them” (266).These lines in the text echo, as Gordimer herself has pointed in an interview, the “ slogan of the biggest banned liberation movement,…the African word ‘mayibuye’ which means, “Africa, come back”” (Bazin and Seymour 150).

The Conservationist also presents a powerful critique on liberals, the so called outdated version of whites in the eyes of Gordimer by the time the novel was written. In fact it is the most lacerating presentation of liberalism. This is brought to understanding by the portrayal of Antonia, a liberal white and mistress of Mehring. Although she is the one who forewarns Mehring about his future when she says “you think you are inviolate” (107) “That four hundred acres isn’t going to be handed down to your kids, and your children’s children” (177) but that is her only final virtue. For the fact that she is Mehring’s mistress presents her in league with the capitalist white society. Further, it can be pointed out that the above presentation is conducted through Mehring’s stream of consciousness. The important feature of her liberalism lies in its artificiality or as Mehring puts it, she is always “promising what you can’t give” (136). Elsewhere when Mehring purchases his farm she insists to “leave it just as it is” (70) and when she is caught by the police for engaging in what is considered unlawful, she flees the country ‘leaving it as it is’. Liberalism, as presented here, seems to flourish with the help of capitalist society and is dependent on it. The fact that Antonia is Mehring’s mistress and seeks the services of his company lawyer in the wake of her capture by the police itself stands testimony to the above argument. This, ultimately, is her collusion. Depiction of Antonia coincides with the artificial liberal whites in A World of Strangers; the fashionable, posturing kind, more prone to empty talks than to any significant gesture. Probably this was the only tradition remained by 1970s as the Liberal Party was banned in 1968 under the Prohibition of Political Interference Act 1968 which banned any non-racial party ( Reed 147).

In fact all the white opposition has been neutralized by the government by 1970s. A general discomfiture within the white opposition is noted by Gordimer which is broken by gradual attrition and is working in connivance with the structures and discourse of white power as elicited by the statement from Antonia: “I want to change the world but keep bits of it the way I like it for myself. If I had your money…” (Conservationist 71). Gordimer’s own disillusionment with liberalism can be seen since the Occasion for Loving. That disillusionment can be attributed to the development taking place in the form of Black Consciousness, for it reserved some of its deepest anger against white liberals evident from the following statement made by Steve Biko. He said that blacks “could not rely on whites, no matter how well meaning, as allies in the struggle against apartheid: ‘White liberals vacillate between the two worlds [of black and white] verbalizing all the complaints of the blacks beautifully while skillfully extracting what suits them from the exclusive pool of white privileges’”(Clark and Worger 80).

It is clear that even those white liberals who proclaimed not to be the part of white world in general nevertheless lived in conditions of privilege. Thus, in becoming champion of the underdog, and speaking ‘for’ them instead of ‘to’ them the white liberal had merely repeated the assumption of white supremacy. The effect of this was quite undesirable in the sense that while acting on behalf of the blacks they prevented blacks from acting for themselves and hence the bottom-line for black consciousness became the exclusion of white altogether. In The Conservationist Mehring makes this point when he tells Antonia that blacks “…wouldn’t want to have you on their side, they’d want you to be a white bitch…” (Gordimer 199). The premise on which Black Consciousness worked, further proves the point made earlier regarding the unitary nature of the white world in the novel, for this was exactly Black Consciousness saw it at that time.

It would not be incongruous to discuss Mehring’s relationship with the farm because the entire action takes place on it. The farm acquires significance because it serves as a measure for man’s relationship with the environment, man and animal. The farm becomes important due to another reason as well: it is a significant site of origin since the early white colonial expansion and it is the farm and agriculture to which the early struggles for possession and dispossession are related. Farm, indigenous in nature, also is a way to measure cultural relationship. In this respect Mehring’s relationship with his farm is a sham. To him the farm serves as a place for assignation, a medium for tax relief in case of losses and a place for relaxation.

But Dominic Head argues that Mehring also shows “concern for and understanding of agricultural and environmental needs” (100). He is of the view that “-No farm is beautiful unless it’s productive-” (Gordimer, Conservationist 70). He tries his best to make it productive although it also depicts his capitalist profit making psyche. He also displays concern for the ecology and flaura and fauna after the fire break in the farm which his black workers are unable to understand (94, 97). Not only this, he also plans to plant Oak trees in his farm (146) and also European chestnut trees though besides conservation the planting of non indigenous trees is also emblematic of “colonization”(Head 100). Head contradicts her own observation by putting Mehring’s act of conservation as ambiguous in itself and as it has been analyzed before his desire for land go hand in hand with his exploitative tendencies in economic and sexual spheres. It can be seen clearly that his act of conservation is at the expense of the people who work for him in the farm and industry. He thinks that these people are “used to anything, they survive, swallowing dust, walking in droves through rain, and blown, in August, like newspapers to the shelter of any wall…” (Conservationist 249). Owing to his political and economic privilege he has a privileged relationship with nature which makes him alienated from the South African culture and nature. Gordimer’s apparent message here is that social oppression seems to be the root cause of this alienation for as long as there is no social affiliation there cannot be any natural affiliation as well.

Throughout the novel then, there is a sense of replacement; replacement of the existing order of the white world by the parallel existence of the black world. As depicted, its hold on the land is stronger than Mehring’s. When Mehring is cut off from the farm due to the flood it’s the farm workers (especially Jacobus) who control the farm effectively. Jacobus enters the house “…in a way he had never done before; he opened the cupboards as possessions must be sorted after a death…” (238). They think that it was Mehring’s car which is swept away in the flood. In running the farm the black workers consider it as naturally theirs which is clear by the way Jacobus vaccinates the cow suffering from mastitis. Without Mehring the black community enjoys a harmonious relationship with the farm and the readers are told: “all-all might have been theirs” (172). It indeed seems to become a reality when the farm workers finally bury the black body in the end.

However Dominic Head posits that this independence of blacks is impossibility as suggested by Gordimer, at least if considered at a more realistic level. Although Jacobus is portrayed as taking care of the farm, he does so on the lines of his white masters. He “drives the other black workers to make repairs about the farm” and merely imitates the white veterinary doctor while administering the vaccine to the cow (101; Conservationist 239). “There is no real suggestion”, she opines, “of an incipient black self-sufficiency, rather this is a working unit which pulls through to fulfil white requirements” (Head 101). But in making such an observation Head seems to ignore the fact that black population in South Africa was forcibly uprooted from its own culture to serve the economic motives of the white colonizers.

Gordimer also has explored the inherent exploitation within the black community itself. The Indian family has a store in a white area (according to the Group Areas Act) and hence they can be evicted by the white officials any time. In their effort to collect the money for bribing the officers they exploit the blacks who work for them. These blacks are privileged in the sense that they have a job and a place to live but they are shown to have constructed a fence “…for their employers, to keep the [other] blacks out….” ( Conservationist 35) as these blacks are under the threat from those who do not have a job. Elsewhere when Bismillah finds that a fence is broken he instructs his black men to mend it and they “…did so with satisfaction. Now no one could get in. They were safe against their own kind, all others who had nothing of right and would take anything” (114). This also indicates a hierarchy based subjection: the subjection of Indians by whites and the subjection of blacks by Indians. Thus it can be seen that within the black world there existed a chain of exploitation. Those who were excluded from privilege were forced to exclude others in order to hold onto whatever little possessions they had. Stanley Trapido has characterized it as being “the desperate self interest of the severely deprived” (310).This was one of the most pernicious effects of apartheid. Gordimer brings to the fore the hopelessness of these blacks when Dorca’s husband, lacking money to pay his subscription fees to a Christmas club loses rest of the money he had paid to the club as he tears all the receipts.

In The Conservationist Gordimer visualizes historical transfer albeit prophetically, which places this novel at a point where white history ends and the black resumes. In order to achieve this end Gordimer employs one of her most used technique of irony which infact is the basis of the novel. Mehring’s relationship with the farm is ironic in nature. He, supposedly the master conserver, has to clean up after the servants and ought to do tasks to be done by his servants (155). Further as it is understood in the novel that ancestorship is important, ironically, Mehring’s son Terry seems to be a homosexual indicated by the discovery of a book related to homosexuality (150-51), Mehring’s own line might be unlikely to continue.

Even the language is complicit in the ironic structure wherein ‘nothing’ and ‘no’ are used as pun in the novel. When the black body is first discovered in the third pasture, Jacobus says: “Nothing for this man” (16). In a sense it is right because nothing is there for a black man in the white world. But the perpetual repetition of nothing finally takes the form of ‘something’ as the story unfolds. The words used by Mehring have sub-meanings indicative of his future fate. When he says, in relation to his farm: “Time to let go, as the saying has it. It’s agreed that’s what a place like this is for…” the reader finally gets to know that through these words Mehring unknowingly predicted his own future (156).

Even the black body is also encompassed in irony. The more Mehring tries to suppress its significance in his mind the more it comes to haunt his psyche. A political analogy can thus be drawn: the more relentlessly the whites suppress the black world the more certain is its eventual return. Elsewhere when Mehring flees the farm he encounters a woman who bids him to stop for a lift (252) to which Mehring’s mind answers ‘no’. He nevertheless stops the car and gives her lift repeatedly saying “No, no” (248-52) to his fate, but he is irresistibly drawn towards it and succumbs. Hence the ‘no’ of Mehring becomes ‘yes’ and ‘nothing’ for the black body becomes ‘everything’ while Mehring passes from having everything to nothing.

All this finally predicts the dénouement of the novel, summarized by the last internal monologue of Mehring:

And at last it will be in the papers, it will all come out, distorted, decayed, but just recognizable, a face with a-enough.-Trouble-you said: the prominent industrialist associated with the economic advancement of the country at the highest level who helped his leftist mistress to flee abroad. He tried to interfere with me…when as a young prospective immigrant girl I sat beside him in the aircraft. He propositioned me in a coffee bar, trying to persuade me to sit in the dark with him….he was caught with a black girl…. He’s going to leave her to them.…sell the place to the first offer.…He’s going to run, run and leave them to rape her or rob her. She’ll be all right. They survive everything. Coloured or poor-white, whichever she is, their brothers or fathers take their virginity good and early. They can have it, the whole four hundred acres. She’ll jump up and scream after him, sobbing and yelling, and they’ll come at him at the same time, that one will tackle him round the legs, grabbing him as he passes, holding fast from the ground like a fist out of hell, and bring him down to them…no no no. No, no, what nonsense, what is there to fear-shudder after shudder, as if he were going to vomit the picnic lunch, it’s all coming up, coming out. That’s a white tart and there was no intent, anyway, report these gangsters or police thugs terrorizing people on mine property, he’s on a Board with the chairman of the Group this ground still belongs to…No, no, no. RUN. –Come. Come and look, they’re all saying. What is it? Who is it? It’s Mehring. It’s Mehring, down there. (264-65)

The above lines reveal the extreme mental crisis of Mehring. In a moment of panic he recalls all his past doings. The woman, the black man, the body and the rubbish dump (where he takes the girl) all become one massive colonial guilt and take its toll on Mehring. His leaving the girl prefigures his abandonment of Africa. The last line of the above quoted passage is that of other people in Mehring’s head which reveals his symbolic death and changing places with the dead body, for the body has resurfaced to possess its land and is no longer ‘down there’. Throughout the text he addresses others and it is only in the end that he finds himself addressed. Eventually Mehrings subconscious rises to the surface like the dead body and takes him over. He flees in terror from the farm and succumbs to his fate, surrendering the land.

Another factor in the novel which represents the overall victory of blacks over whites is the use of Zulu myth as mentioned in the beginning. Judie Newman has shown how Gordimer, drawing on her cited reading of The Religious System of the Amazulu by Henry Callaway, has populated her novel with motifs from Zulu mythology. Ten quotations appear from the work without introduction or comment in the novel and are isolated from the text on an otherwise blank page. Newman argues that the “quotations are the organizing points for a subtext which slowly comes into the foreground,” as the story of the African farm workers (56). She believes, the “subtext, buried like the black man, rises to the surface of the novel and repossesses it, obliterating the ‘paper’ possession of Mehring and his story”(57). The Zulu passages, in Newman’s reading, authenticate the farm workers’ claim to the land, by linking present-day people and events with the African myth and history. It gives an indication that black culture repressed for centuries and overshadowed by the white culture has all the power to ‘come back’. The use of Zulu myth also implies the premise of Black Consciousness movement which strongly emphasized a return to black cultural roots and tradition.

From all the points therefore the novel indicates the dominance of what remained repressed throughout. Zulu myth gained control of the narrative; Mehrings consciousness has been overturned by his sub-consciousness and the black world threatens the white existence as Jacobus and others finally give the body a reburial in accordance with their culture. Although the man has no name and family yet there are people from his community to weep for him. Gordimer writes: “There was no child of his present but their children were there to live after him. They had put him away to rest, at last; he had come back. He took possession of this earth, theirs; one of them” (Conservationist 267). The entire depiction includes no white man for Mehring’s narrative ended before the last chapter. Unlike Helen of The Lying Days, Mehring goes to “one of those countries where white people go” never to come back (266).

The novel can also be compared with A World of Strangers at this point as the conclusion of the novel marks a definite shift in Gordimer’s own political understanding and South Africa’s historical reality. A World of Strangers was an urban based novel which worked within the framework of reality. Symbolism used towards the end of the novel goes on to signify just that reality. This pattern however corresponded with the dominant methodology of opposition to apartheid at that time which included extension of rights to the blacks within the existing order. The movements did not transgress any boundary while making such demands. The Conservationist in that sense is the exact inversion of A World of Strangers. The novel is set in the countryside with hardly a glimpse of any urban area. Further it can be observed that, symbolism in the latter reinforced the realist framework of Toby Hood’s future social commitment whereas symbolism in the former overthrows the realistic framework of Mehring’s culture. Finally, the most significant difference between the two is, whereas A World of Strangers accepts the existing reality The Conservationist dismisses it in totality.

The wider significance of The Conservationist therefore lies in the broader historical implications it embodies. By the time the novel was written it was evident that there was no question of improvement or interpretation of the existing reality on the political front. The need of the time was a revolution which in fact was put to silence by the government in the late 60s and early 70s. It was observed that there was no scope for change and a complete overturn of the existing reality was required. It was exactly this that the regional developments signified in the seventies. The white regimes were threatened by the liberation movements.

From the above point of view, a striking analogy can be formed with The Conservationist. The liberation movements in South Africa were outlawed politically, literally forced out of the South Africa’s framework of existing reality. Like the black body, they were forced to go underground by the repressive regime and work from within that condition. However, the body does not literally represents the opposition movement more than the ‘ideas’ that these movements implied and the idea being: the complete overthrow of the existing framework. Gordimer wanted to convey this reality although prophetically through The Conservationist. Although the novel is detached from the present yet what it prophesied was certain. But the ways and means to achieve it is still not clear. This fact however does not undermine the significance of the novel for it definitely suggests that there is an alternative reality that is coming. With the help of symbolism then, Gordimer is able to bring home the ultimate truth in the history of South Africa.

In Burger’s Daughter (1979) Nadine Gordimer emerges out from the subconscious world of Mehring to the realistic world of Rosa Burger. With this novel she also disapproves the accusation that white artists can only produce a solipsistic art. Rosa Burger, daughter of the white radicals Lionel and Cathy Burger, after the death of her father is left to decide a future for herself. Brought up in a politically charged environment she wants to lead a private life with a desire to ‘defect’ away from her father’s cause. But eventually, unable to ignore the grim realities of her motherland she ends up espousing the cause of her late father and becomes Burger’s daughter.

To describe in the words of Dominic Head: “In Burger’s Daughter Gordimer takes her examination of the committed white south African to a new plane: here she considers the ethical dilemmas and choices of someone effectively born into a tradition of white political resistance; or, more precisely, of someone whose commitment has been, and continues to be determined by a particular ideology” (111). The Conservationist left this question unexamined as there was no white character to respond to the question of revolution. Burger’s Daughter addresses the question whether whites can participate in the revolution predicted by The Conservationist.

In fact Burger’s Daughter is the most overtly political novel after The late Bourgeois World. It explores the South African situation in the most realistic term. This argument however gets strengthened by the fact that Lionel Burger is modeled on Abram (Bram) Fischer as admitted by Gordimer herself in a conversation with Marilyn Powell in 1984 (Bazin and Seymour 232). Gordimer’s admiration for Bram Fischer, a prominent leader with South African Communist Party (SACP), goes back to the sixties when she published an essay “Why did Bram Fischer Chose jail?” (1966) in which she reveals her high regards for Fischer as a man and as a champion for the cause of racial justice he embodied, mentioned earlier in this chapter (Essential Gesture 68-78). Many of the features associated with Fischer gets a reflection in Lionel Burger. Burger is a white Afrikaner who joins Communist party of South Africa (CPSA-later SACP) as a revolutionary and radical member of Communist party and fights for the non-whites. In doing so he betrays his own people. A doctor by profession, he is influenced by the communist ideology as a young boy of sixteen when he accepted Lenin’s thesis “…on the national and colonial question and the consequent task of ‘educating and organizing the peasantry and broad mass of the exploited’ ” (BD 88). He thus becomes a part of the Communist Party and its various campaigns in the 1940s and 50s. He remains the member of its central committee when the party is dissolved in the wake of the Suppression of Communism Act and went underground. Captured in mid 1960s and sentenced to imprisonment for life he dies of throat infection in the early 1970s.

In her own commentary titled “What the Book Is About” Gordimer has pointed out why people like Lionel Burger chose only Communist Party in case they disagreed with the South African situation. She says that in the 1920s Communist Party was the only legal party which considered blacks as “equals entitled to take part in the lawmaking and governing process of the country” (150). However there are points which reveal that Lionel Burger is not the exact copy of Bram Fischer. Bram Fischer was a lawyer by profession and joined the Communist Party later than Lionel Burger did. Besides this however, certain facts are rearranged for instance, Lionel Burger adopts Baasie, a black child of an ANC worker which corresponds to the adoption of a black girl child by the Fischers (“Bram Fischer”). Like the house of Burger’s, the Fischer house was also open for the “people of all races” (Gordimer Essential Gesture 77). Whereas Bram Fischer’s wife Molly dies by drowning into the pool (77), Lionel Burger’s son Terry dies by drowning in the swimming pool and Cathy Burger his wife dies of “multiple sclerosis” ( Gordimer, BD 11).

The point however is not to prove the similarities or dissimilarities between Bram Fischer and Lionel Burger more than the ‘spirit’ which Fischer emanated from his persona. Gordimer tries to capture that spirit in the character of Lionel Burger and in doing so typifies it. She wants to reveal the very best heritage in the white revolutionary tradition. In Burger’s Daughter Gordimer combines the past and present as well as the fact and fiction adeptly.

Touching upon this factor of the fact in the fiction the most glaring example is the inclusion of a pamphlet issued by the Soweto Students Representative Council (SSRC) in the aftermath of Soweto Uprising (BD 358-59). In fact Gordimer herself approved and cited it as one of the reasons for banning of the book (Bazin and Seymour 142). Here, it would be worthwhile to discuss the political context of the novel i.e., South Africa in the second half of the 1970s. As mentioned earlier Black Consciousness Movement was rampant in South Africa which penetrated the urban schools as well. But an incident in 1976 changed the course of the history of South Africa. On 16 June 1976, thousands of school children assembled at Orlando West Junior Secondary School in Soweto for a peaceful protest against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction which they considered as the language of the oppressor. The police reacted by open firing and killing Hector Pieterson, a thirteen year old boy which then resulted in a nationwide campaign (Clark and Worger 82-83; Ndlovu 341-44). The revolt spread rapidly to townships on Witwatersrand, Cape Town and Eastern Cape to which the government reacted brutally (Ross 143). According to an estimate, by February 1977, a total of 575 people belonging to black, white, and coloured origin were killed. The government banned South African Students Association (SASO) and arrested the major black leaders involved in the campaign. Steve Biko was arrested and died of brain damage due to injuries in the skull. The police had “transported Biko naked in the back of a van for 750 miles on the night before he died” (Thompson 213). After the events subsided the people either were sent to gaol or fled the country. As a result ANC gained more members and was resuscitated (Ross 143).The quiescence of the previous decade had ended and the tone for the coming change had been registered with Soweto Revolt becoming the landmark of resistance in the history of South Africa. In The Conservationist Gordimer takes the courage to predict an impending revolution on the basis of the perceived experience of Mozambique, Angola and later Zimbabwe, but Soweto incident and the ensuing reaction of the state made clear how tortuous the path to change would be. It even posed doubts on the radical whites.

In Burger’s Daughter however, it is Rosa Burger who is made to confront the black consciousness in a most direct way. During her stay in London, she meets Baasie, the black boy who lived in Burger’s household and with whom she has some good memories in a house where color bar was not practiced. She recognizes him but he doesn’t acknowledge her. Later that night he spits out all the venom he has for Rosa in particular and whites in general. He telephones her late in the night and tells her that he is not Baasie-his real name is Zwelinzima Vulindlela (zwelinzema meaning ‘suffering land’) and Rosa should attach no sentiment by virtue of his being brought up in the Burger’s house. He rejects what he knows as false brotherhood with Rosa which set him aside from the rest of his people as the name Baasie (little boss) suggests and at the same time denigrates him. He rejects the heritage of Lionel Burger himself; he says that there are hundreds of blacks who have died in prison (including his own father who is dead in the prison of an unconvincing suicide) but they are forgotten, their heroism remained untold. Instead men like Lionel Burger take away all the glory. He makes her realize that she is no different from other whites and its time blacks should “suffer” in order to achieve freedom from the whites (326-32).

He reflects the true sentiment of Black Consciousness when he says that his father “…was too busy to look after him…Too busy with the whites who were going to smash the government and let another lot of whites tell us how to run our country…” (328).This statement is a sharp criticism of the white paternalistic attitude as well as a child’s rejection of what his father believed which indicates a new found consciousness. The scene thus becomes very powerful in the context of 1970s. The works undertaken by whites with the best of intentions were rejected outright and that which deserved no gratitude at all. The concept of multi-racial harmony (as suggested by Burger’s household) was ripped apart under the weight of a new found consciousness under Black Consciousness Movement.

Burger’s Daughter generated out of this context. Just as Soweto Uprising was a revolt of children against their parents; parents who were considered passive and submissive in front of the state, in Burger’s Daughter Rosa revolts against her father. It brings in the fact that new forms of struggle were required for new circumstances and the older ones represented by the fathers must be evaluated and reformulated as depicted by Rosa in the novel. This argument is seconded by Dominic Head. He says, “the terms of political commitment cannot be accepted as a matter of unquestioned doctrine, but rather need to be rationalized and fitted to the individual’s personal and historical circumstances” (111). This can be considered the positive impact of the revolt but there is also a negative attached to it. As already discussed, Black consciousness posed a threat to the official policy of apartheid. It also cast doubts on the white liberals for it associated all efforts being made as paternalistic and hence a sign of white supremacy. Further, if Black consciousness challenged the white liberals in theory, the Soweto challenged them in practice for they could not do but watch helplessly the killing of innocent black children. The revolt proved the inefficacy of the whites in the struggle against the white supremacy.

But the novel concerns itself with Rose Marie Burger (Rosa Burger) more than Lionel Burger. Gordimer has constructed Rosa as a figure through whom the historical possibilities and necessities of a particular situation is explored. Dominic Head and Louise Yelin have observed a striking parallel between Rosa and the South African political situation. They contend that the birth of Rosa in May 1948 happens to coincide with the birth of apartheid in South Africa; her childhood and adolescence is punctuated with Treason Trial, Sharpeville Massacre and the banning of activists in 1960s. Her final acceptance of “mission as Burger’s daughter” comes in the aftermath of Soweto Uprising. Her life, like Gordimer’s publishing career, correspond with the key events during the apartheid regime (Head 112; Yelin 210). Rosa inherits a legacy of revolution by virtue of being born into Burger’s family where her parents are staunch supporters of struggle against apartheid in South Africa. For them, the cause of fight against racial injustice stands above their personal pursuits.

Through the journey both internal and external of Rosa’s life Gordimer gives a profound glimpse of apartheid-ridden society and attitudes of whites in Burger’s Daughter. If on one hand there are people like Lionel and Cathy Burger, Terblanches and Donaldsons who are struggling to free the society from the shackles of color bar, there also exist individualists like Brandt Vermeulen, a staunch supporter of white domination for whom people like Lionel Burger are traitor and who think that Lionel’s living as a communist was kind of “despair” (187).Vermeulen, according to Rosa’s father “…won’t scruple to invoke Kierkegaard’s Either/Or against Hegel’s dialectic to demonstrate the justice of segregated lavatories…” (194). In the person of Brandt Vermeulen, Gordimer portrays the views of the majority white population who only knows, as Gordimer has sarcastically put, long words like “ethnic advancement, separate freedoms, multilateral development, plural democracy” instead of the three simple words “Peace. Land. Bread” (196). These three words keep recurring in the text and can also be interpreted as: while whites had all of them blacks had none.

The world of blacks gets an equal observation in the works of Gordimer. In Burger’s Daughter she presents the way of living in townships of Soweto and Orlando in the 1970s, its “rutted roads” that led to “veld dumped with twisted metal” and the houses with “two-windows-one-door, multiplied in institutional rows” containing “the litter of twice-discarded possessions, first thrown out by the white man and then picked over by the black”. The township “with no electricity in the houses, a telephone an almost impossible luxury” looked more like a “junk yard” than a place where humans lived (147-48).

But although the living conditions might not have changed much, the views and outlook of blacks have definitely registered a sea change since 1948 and Gordimer captures it very vividly. When Rosa pays a visit to Fats Mxange’s (Marisa Kgosana’s cousin) place she witnesses a heated argument between Duma Dhladhla, a young black South African and Fats, a middle aged man supposedly belonging to an older generation, for he worked with ANC Youth League alongside Lembede. Fats is a boxing promoter and is satisfied if a black boxer gets to play with whites or against whites. However, Duma disagrees with this stance tagging it as shortsightedness for even if there is no racism in sports “the black will still be black” in the rest of the areas and the country. Whatever the black man does“…he’ll still get black jobs, black education, black houses” (151). He, in an accusing tone for blacks like Fats, says “These people will always let themselves be used by the whites. They are our biggest problem; we have to re-educate” (152). A tone of anger against whites is registered here which can be ascribed to the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa discussed earlier. Old beliefs and new consciousness are in conflict with each other. At the same time there is a rejection of class analysis of South Africa offered by Orde Greer, a white communist. Duma dismisses them saying: “This and this should happen and can’t happen because of that and that. These theories don’t fit us. We are not interested. You’ve been talking this shit before I was born…” (161).

The young man seems to challenge the multi-racial ideology of the older generation very much like Baasie who talks about the exclusion of whites in the struggle for freedom. In his opinion all whites collaborate together in the exploitation of blacks and “…That is why we don’t work with whites…We must liberate ourselves as blacks, what has white got to do with that?”(157-58). In an angry tone that marked the black consciousness he declares: “Whites, whatever you are, it doesn’t matter. It’s no difference. You can tell them-Afrikaners, liberals, Communists. We don’t accept anything from anyone. We take…We take for ourselves…” (155).

The novel challenges the whole idea of the political and historical commitment. Gordimer explores this theme through Rosa, a figure in an ideological landscape, simply assumed to reflect her father’s views, like a “…hand- held mirror directed towards another mirror;…” which is all “concocted” in Rosa’s opinion (8). The internal reality is unknown. This disjunction between internal and external realities creating a tension between external image and the internal voice is rendered formally in the alternation of the first and third person narrative. The name Rosa Burger itself has double meaning as Conrad (her hippie lover) suggests that she is named after Rosa Luxemburg (a Polish Marxist revolutionary), fact which she thinks might be true but then her name also contained “…the claim of MARIE BURGER and her descendents to that order of life, secure in the sanctions of family, church, law-and all these contained in the ultimate sanction of colour, that was maintained without question on the domain, dorp and farm,…Peace. Land. Bread. They had these for themselves” (69). She is caught in the dilemma of choosing between the two.

The major part of the novel consists of Rosa’s revolt against her father’s legacy thrust upon her. After her father’s death she cannot help but question what she regards as oversimplification of Communist Party ideology. Above all she rejects her father because she thinks her father denied her a private existence, and her own individual self in favor of the political needs. She says “…My studies, my work, my love affairs must fit in with the twice monthly visits to the prison…” (59). Even the feeling of love remains suppressed in her for it is “used” to fulfill the political demands when she acts as fiancée to a prisoner in order to ease political motives (61). Rosa is not scandalized by this performance; as she says, “We didn’t despise prostitutes in that house-our house-we saw them as victims of necessity while certain social orders lasted” (65). Ironically, she had the true feeling of love for Noel de Witt which she never revealed and her parents “didn’t choose to see” (62). It also indicates the fact that in South African situation sentiments and emotions are inadmissible luxury. Finally she becomes “…sick of this job.…sick of the maimed, the endangered, the fugitive, the stoic; sick of courts, sick of prisons, sick of institutions scrubbed bare for the regulation endurance of dread and pain”( 65-66).

Her resentment against her father and all that he made her do coupled with a desire to find herself takes her away to Conrad and his cottage. Her relationship with the egocentric Conrad affords her the view of the self-centered way of living in this world. For him sex and death are the only reality. He reminisces that she didn’t cry when her father was sentenced to life imprisonment and calls it “…conditioning, brain-washing: more like a trained seal…” (48). He makes her realize that at an age when she knows about the massacres, detentions and trials is the age when one knows only about love (Oedipal in his case) or the feeling to kill someone just because it is “small and weak”. He tells her that she never has had a chance to live her life on her own terms and that she has“…grown up entirely through other people. What they told you was appropriate to feel and do. How did you begin to know yourself? You go through the motions…what’s expected of you” (41-42). Thus a ‘natural’ individual response is repressed in her, for the ‘natural’ at Burger’s household is Marx and Lenin. Rosa at this stage examines the sentence: “Now you are free” (35,58) which can best elaborated in the words of Dominic Head: “The phrase has metaphysical connotation, being addressed to someone deceased, but it also condenses a crucial debate about the idea of ‘freedom’, either as a political or a personal concept”(114). In her effort to what she calls ‘defect’ from her father in order to know herself and seek a life for herself she goes to Europe in part two of the novel to Katya, Lionel Burger’s first wife who herself once had been involved in Communist Party but leaves it and Lionel because she knows that “… ‘there’s is a whole world outside’ what he lived for” (BD 272).

Besides the above mentioned factor there are two more incidents observed in the novel which force Rosa to question the very ideology her father espoused. The first incident occurs in a park where she finds a tramp dying suddenly without making any noise in everybody’s presence. She comes face to face with an unceremonious death. The death brings existential questions to the fore. For every death (brother, mother and father) that occurs before, she is given a reason but this death is enveloped in mystery she is unable to fathom. The fact that death is inevitable creates disillusionment and forces her to think:

The revolution we lived for in that house would change the lives of the blacks who left there hovels and compounds at four in the morning to swing picks,…building shopping malls and office towers in which whites…moved in an ‘environment’ without dust or sweat. It would change the days of the labourers who slept off their exhaustion on the grass like dead men, while the man died….Black children- it was promised- would not have to live off the leavings we threw into the bin….All that might change. But the change from life to death- what had all the certainties I had from my father to do with that?...Nothing that had served to make us sure of what we were doing and why had anything to do with what was happening one lunchtime while I was in the square. I was left with that. It had been left out. Justice, equality, the brotherhood of man, human dignity- but it will still be there, I looked away everywhere from the bench and saw it still, when –at last- I had seen it once (76).

The above quoted paragraph reveals on one hand the condition of blacks and on the other and more importantly Rosa’a disillusionment with the ideology of her father and whatever he dies for. She discovers that it is inadequate to cope with the complexities of existence and the complexities of South African existence.

In search for the personal reason for political cause Rosa becomes witness to a second incident which is equally responsible for rejection of South African life and politics. While coming back to Johannesburg from a black township she comes across a black man relentlessly whipping his donkey drawing a cart while a woman and a child bundled at the back look on in terror. The whole spectacle seems to Rosa a combination of agony, pain, cruelty and despair. The scene brings to her mind some other images as that of the “…infliction of pain broken away from the will that creates it; broken loose, a force existing of itself, ravishment without the ravisher, torture without the torturer, rampage, pure cruelty gone beyond control of the humans who have spent thousands of years devising it…”(211). Rosa knows that social and political conditions in South Africa have combined to produce such a spectacle but what she is witnessing appears to be an existential essence or as she puts it, the “sum of suffering” (212). She associates it with all the suffering she has seen so far:

…the camps, concentration, labour, resettlement, the Siberias of snow or sun, the lives of Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki, Kathrada, Kgosana, gull picked on the island, Lionel propped wasting to his skull between two warders, the deaths by questioning, bodies fallen from height of John Vorster Square, deaths by dehydration, babies degutted by the enteritis in ‘places’ of banishment, the lights beating all night on the faces of those in cells….(211)

Rosa cannot exercise her will against the act of cruelty. It seems to her that if she intervenes she would seem to be exploiting her position as a white but then she knows that the drunk, brutal man has been reduced to such a condition by whites like her. If she helps prevent the beating of donkey, she would appear to be yet another white caring more for an animal than a human. Although this may not be true yet she finds herself helpless to do anything and comes to a conclusion that she doesn’t “know how to live in Lionel’s country” (213).This scene acts as the final trigger to send her on her way to Europe. If compared to Helen’s departure from South Africa, this scene is equivalent to the riot scene in The Lying Days in which she witnesses the shooting of a black man from inside the car in an utter state of helplessness.

In France, Rosa enters a different world. Walking into the room readied for her in the home of her father’s first wife Colette Swan (Katya), she encounters herself as a different woman. Katya has prepared a room “…for someone imagined. A girl, a creature whose sense of existence would be in her nose buried in flowers, peach juice running down her chin, face tended at mirrors, mind dreamily diverted, body seeking pleasure…”(235). With Katya and her set of friends Rosa is able to explore a personal pleasurable life with no necessity of political commitment. Place, person, and preoccupation stand in antithesis to the serious Rosa Burger first seen, caught in the central struggle of her own place and time. The style in the second part changes to a kind of aesthetic symbols like the mirror and the imagined creature. The basic pattern of part two consists of Rosa’s withdrawal from and subsequent rediscovery of political commitment. Although in Nice Rosa seems to enjoy her private existence yet it becomes clear from a close reading of the section that she never really ‘defects’ from her father. There are instances when she deliberately avoids discussion of politics in order to gain the knowledge of “how to defect from him” (272). When Michel Pistacchi, a Frenchman, tries to get Rosa’s comment on the subject of French revolution, denouncing communism, Rosa instead is more interested in visiting the “small farmhouse-cum villa” which he has inherited (261). A brief romantic description of the farmhouse follows and Rosa gives approval to such inheritance. But in another scene Rosa turns an abstract political discussion to the question of how political organization and repressive laws affects individual lives (304). It is evident that in the back of her mind Rosa feels the presence of her father as well as South African reality.

However, Lorraine Liscio argues that Rosa’s association with Colette and her pleasure seeking lifestyle is important in the sense that Colette helps Rosa to discover her sensuality and emotion. In Liscio’s opinion, it is an important aspect of life, without which one remains unsatisfied. She further says (illustrating the point which, she points out, is fundamental to feminists like Cixous and Irigaray) that Colette’s nurturing is important because “pleasure in the self” creates the ability to move freely towards “a real other” rather than from a motive of self need (257).

Rosa’s progress to autonomy involves coming to terms with the mythical masks men have fastened over the female face. Her affair with Bernard Chabalier reveals to her the negative side of living purely for love and emotions. Life with Bernard will uproot her from her historical destiny and trap her in an unreal place out of time. She realizes that “There’s nothing more private and personal than the life of a mistress…Bernard Chabalier’s mistress isn’t Lionel Burger’s daughter; she’s certainly not accountable to the Future, she can go off and do good works in Cameroun or contemplate the unicorn in the tapestry forest…” (Gordimer, BD 312). It will relegate her to a world of fantasy symbolized by the Bonnard painting and the unicorn tapestry. She comes to know that despite all the love she has for him, it will only lead her to one- sided domestic situation with the already married Bernard. In this context the Bonnard painting which Chabalier so admires, acquires significance. It emblematizes the art unblemished by time or history. He comments, “…there was the growth of fascism, two wars-the Occupation-And for Bonnard it’s as if nothing’s happened….” He further states that woman in the painting “…hasn’t any existence any more than the leaves have, outside this lovely forest where they are. No past, no future…” (295). The immediate comment from Bernard can also be interpreted as a typical male attitude towards woman who see her only as an object meant for giving eternal pleasure just like the painting, and that would Rosa will become in case she chooses to be his mistress. She rejects this mundane life for a better purpose.

The tapestry series entitled “la dame a la licorne” that Bernard wants to show Rosa embodies in itself a symbolic interpretation that parallels Rosa’s life. In the discussion of the significance of the six tapestries, Judie Newman argues that Gordimer has adopted the more contemporary interpretation of renunciation rather than celebration of the pleasures of life. She used the tapestries to summarize Rosa’s ultimate rejection of a pleasure-filled private life with Chabalier (81-83).The tapestries use the medieval fantasy landscape of islands, mirrors, flowers with a tame lion, a lovely land and a unicorn. In the first tapestry Gordimer describes a lady holding a mirror in which the reflection of unicorn is seen and the rest are termed as mere depictions of the other four senses of hearing, smell, taste and touch. The sixth tapestry however is most difficult to interpret with the “…Lady before a sumptuous pavilion or tent, amusing herself with a box of jewels…” (BD 353). The unicorn is:

…holding aside with a hoof one of the flaps of the tent….A legend is woven in gold round the canopy of the tent, A mon seul desir ….

Such harmony and sensual peace in the age of the thumbscrew and dungeon that there it comes with its ivory spiral horn

there she sits gazing…

Sits gazing, this creature that has never been. (353)

Newman has explained that the lady is not receiving the necklace but replacing it in the box. ‘A mon seul desir’ (by my own free will) is indicative of lady’s free will not to submit to the desires (here offered to Rosa by Chabalier) and exercise power of control over senses. The replacement of necklace can be interpreted as renouncement of the passions that may interfere with the ability to act morally. The tapestries thus indicates that Rosa knowingly chooses to abandon the sensual pleasures of life with Bernard, as she does not correspond to the mythical image he seems to have in his mind of her: “Rosa Burger may become, like the lady, a gazer into a hand-held mirror which reflects back to her only an unreal and mythical creature, a woman who has only existed in the projections of others. In returning to South Africa, however, Rosa chooses not to be such an image, an object to be displayed and desired, a figure in an erotic or political iconography” (Newman 83 ).

There are other reasons which force Rosa to re-evaluate her action and her desire for private existence. When she meets an old woman in her dressing gown with no sense of day and night, she seems to prefigure Katya in her impending old age.“…She was like anyone else,” Rosa thinks, “a hamster turning her female treadmill…” (BD 343). Rosa becomes aware of old age and loneliness, death and decay which undoubtedly results in suffering. It dawns on her that even a life lived purely on personal terms cannot avoid suffering. All this results in her determination to return to South Africa and accept the suffering of struggle rather than await the suffering of the old age. Ultimately, the personal turns the political and this indeed is unavoidable in South Africa. Rosa returns to South Africa and joins Baragwanath Hospital because now she knows that “No one can defect” (343). The fact is clear: Rosa does not re-engage herself with the political struggle following her father’s terms; for her the fact of suffering is paramount as she herself puts it: “I don’t know the ideology: It’s about suffering” (343).

Suffering is omnipresent, Rosa realizes, and the task at hand is to alleviate as much pain as possible. She knows “it ends in suffering,” for the struggle against suffering brings suffering (344). Gordimer too has explicated on this issue. She points out: when Rosa sees the old woman in the street, “it really hits Rosa that you get old, lonely, dotty. That you suffer. That Katya, running from suffering, has simply postponed what is coming.” Rather than wait, Rosa returns to pit herself against the “kind of suffering that you can fight and that human beings have been fighting generation after generation for thousands of years.” Rosa knows well what this commitment will cost her; Gordimer imagines her choosing “to become embattled with suffering” (Bazin and Seymour 174). Rosa’s “sense of sorority” becomes clear twice. First when she imagines herself lining up with the other women at the clinic, old, waiting for pap smears and breast exams, and second when she actually finds herself with Ivy Terblanche and Marisa Kgosana in the prison. Rosa refuses to follow the ‘imagined’ her and takes up the gauntlet against her own people. Rosa’s eventual return and stepping into the shoes of her father is marked by two senses: “first in terms of renewed political commitment, and second in the tending of black bodies” (Newman 84), indicated in the text when Rosa says: “Like anyone else, I do what I can. I am teaching them to walk again…They put one foot before the other” (BD 344). These lines are also indicative of Rosa’s commitment which is based on black ‘brotherhood’ more than anything else.

Abdul R. JanMohamed has pointed out that Rosa’a decision to come back to South Africa is incumbent upon her telephonic confrontation with Baasie (118). But it is not the only reason. She eventually takes up the social engagement she had tried to avoid. This course of the narrative gives Burger’s Daughter a dialectical form. So at first, there is Rosa together with her revolutionary inheritance, in the second she renounces this inheritance for a more personally fulfilling life and in the third she finally reunites with that inheritance, at the same time discovering her personal identity in becoming socially and politically committed.

In order to facilitate the progression of internal and external conflict of Rosa, Gordimer has employed the technique of first person and third person narrative which represents different voices. It is very similar to the narrative technique of The Conservationist where the external is juxtaposed with the internal monologue of Mehring. The first person passages alternate with the third person passages throughout the text. In the first person narrative Rosa addresses Conrad in part one, Katya in part two and Lionel Burger in part three as Rosa herself admits that “One is never talking to oneself, always one is addressed to someone” (BD 11). Any discussion of formal aspect of the novel must include the exploration of various narrative voices in the text as indicated by different critics. Critic Robert Green describes the novel as ‘multivocal’ and identifies five narrative voices: Rosa’s, three third person narrators (one “sympathetic”, one “hostile”, and another “neutral” towards Rosa), and the voice of Soweto students whose pamphlet is reprinted in section three (qtd. in Clingman, “Subject” 73). Clingman concurs with Green, but wonders if he “has possibly underestimated the number of narrative voices involved” (73).

Like Clingman and Green, Louise Yelin also believes that “there are several third person narrators.” She underscores the important dialogic function of the varied and various voices in the text. Echoing the novel’s epigraph (“I am the place in which something has occurred”), she argues that “the third-person narration is the site of contending narratives, a place in which something-a contention of narratives-occurs”. She notes: “This narration and these contending narratives are also placed in dialogue with the narrative of Rosa herself.” She also makes an observation that the third person narration represents the social world in totality which stands against the personal first person narrative. Rosa thus “embraces narrative complexity and indeterminacy” and “eschews… versions of authority in first person narration, in particular the idea that the narrating self can ever know the self-as-narrated or that the relationship between the self-as-narrated and the narrating self is one of continuity” (208-09). The reading of the novel clears that Rosa’s identity emerges in the dialogue between the self-as-seen and the self seeing.

Gordimer’s close examination of the contemporary events as well as the combination of historical and political texts into the narrative of the novel is termed as “textual collage” by Stephen Clingman which truly reflects the radical consciousness of the time (“Subject” 70). It can be regarded as another formal aspect of the novel employed by Gordimer for a definite purpose. He points out that Gordimer has included quotations from various sources, the pamphlet issued by SSRC being the most conspicuous one. It appeared on the streets of Soweto during the uprising. Gordimer admits that the pamphlet “in the book [is] with all the misspellings and grammatical mistakes…everything exactly as it was” (Bazin and Seymour 142). Elsewhere Duma Dhladla’s comment that black liberation cannot be separated from black consciousness because “…we cannot be conscious of ourselves and at the same time remain slaves” is a quote from Steve Biko who in turn has quoted Hegel (BD 163). Lionel Burger’s speech during his trial reflects Bram Fischer when he says “…what we as Communists black and white working in harmony with others who do not share our political philosophy have set our sights on is the national liberation of the African people, and thus the abolishment of discrimination and extension of political rights to all peoples of this country…That alone has been our aim…beyond…there are matters the future will settle” (20-21).

The major written source for Burger’s Daughter, as indicated by Clingman, is an essay written by Joe Slovo, a white communist leader and one of the founder member of Umkhonto we Sizwe (the military wing of ANC) titled “South Africa-no middle ground”. It was first published in 1976 and Slovo by virtue of being a long standing member of SACP talked about the strategies needed in the revolutionary struggle in South Africa. He has been quoted by Rosa quite often. When she says that “…it’s just as impossible to conceive of workers’ power in South Africa separated from national liberation, as it is to conceive of national liberation separated from the destruction of capitalism…”(BD 163). Here Rosa is talking of “sixth underground conference of the SACP in 1962 at which Party ideology was finally evolved” in the form of above stated premise which comes “verbatim from Slovo” (Clingman, “Subject” 70). These quotations are used without signifying the sources and are embedded in the narrative of the text. Using the quotations in their original form confer on their sources the respect they deserve. Moreover, it also helped in propagating the opinions and views, otherwise banned in South Africa at that time. It was partly due to this that Burger’s Daughter was banned as soon as it was published. In committee’s own words “the authoress uses Rosa’s story as a pad from which to launch a blistering and full scale attack on the Republic of South Africa” (qtd. in Clingman, “Subject” 72).

Burger’s Daughter is an attempt to examine the terms on which whites can participate in the struggle for freedom against black oppression in South Africa, when it has been so much called into question. As a writer, Gordimer herself was perplexed at that time by the growing Black consciousness which seeped in the world of art as well. The white writers were relegated to the periphery for they were no longer able to identify themselves with the black experience. She remarks: “the white artist belongs to the white culture…and is now itself rejected by black culture” (Essential Gesture 135). The reason for this rejection is the new found consciousness amongst blacks in all spheres similar to the experience of Rosa Burger in the text. She has inherited her father’s legacy but not his time. She has been relegated to the margin by the blacks. As Conor Cruise O’Brien points out in his essay “Waiting for Revolution” that Rosa Burger “may enjoy a feeling of solidarity with blacks in prison, but outside she will be excluded from all their councils” (52).

But as Nadine Gordimer recommends that in order to reconnect with the realities of “his place and time” an artist should find it by “rethinking his own attitudes and conceptions” and thereby becoming committed to the “commonly-understood, commonly-created cultural entities corresponding to a common reality-an indigenous culture”(Essential Gesture 139). Thus in shaping the character of Rosa, Gordimer has portrayed terms of new found commitment distanced from an inherited legacy which in turn makes Burger’s Daughter a testimony to the above statement by Gordimer and makes this text a truly radical attempt which assures Gordimer’s continuity as a true South African writer.