In any discussion of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) it is important to note that the writer grew up in an era before South African racial politics had hardened into their present intransigence. As J. F. Cronin has written:

Paton was born in 1903. He was, thus, already in his mid-forties when the Nationalist Party under Malan ousted Smuts in the General Election of 1948 to establish the first Afrikaner government of South Africa and inaugurated the present régime. It helps towards an understanding of his career to know that he grew up at a time when South Africa's racial issues were not yet as violent and clear-cut as they are today. True, it has often been pointed out that much racially oppressive legislation had found its way onto the statute book in South Africa even before Afrikaner Nationalism came to power, and it may be true that Smuts' United Party was essentially as illiberal in this respect as Verwoerd's National Party came to be, but it was only from 1948 on that apartheid began to be applied at all points as a deliberate governmental policy. Paton was by then already in middle life. Growing up as he did in an earlier South Africa than that which saw the youth of Dan Jacobson or Nadine Gordimer, he would be less likely than they to see the country's problems as susceptible only of extreme solutions.¹

The important point is that Paton wrote his first and most famous novel at a time when liberalism still seemed to provide an answer to South Africa's problems. In a sense, it represents the culmination of the heyday of white liberal optimism and confidence during the two or three decades preceding the novel's publication, and it is deeply informed by the thinking of South African liberal intellectuals like Hoernlé, Rheinalt-Jones and J. H. Hofmeyer:

This “Story of Comfort in Desolation” was written when the English United Party was still in power in 1948; and it presents a picture of optimism, together with an assumed confidence in the European's ability to lead and guide Africans to a better condition. Today it is regarded by many who would have praised it then as an old-fashioned paternalist book, which portrays Africans in a sentimental and unrealistic light; and it is probable that Mr. Paton himself, who has since become much more deeply involved in politics (in common with other liberal writers) would agree. Soon after Cry was written the Afrikaner Nationalist Party came into power, and liberals have been forced into a more militant and committed position.²

This was written in 1957 by an anonymous reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement. Yet even when the novel was written, roughly ten years earlier, the liberal vision which finds frequent didactic expression in it was inadequate. The very problems which Cry, the Beloved Country first formulates and then endeavours to solve do not admit of a solution in the terms which liberal ideology provides.

If Paton's intentions in Cry, the Beloved Country are carefully examined, it will emerge that his primary concern in this novel is to expose a certain state of affairs in South Africa; namely, the social consequences of the destruction of the tribal system by the whites and the general disintegration, both moral and otherwise, which characterizes South African society as a whole. Through the personal sagas of the Reverend Stephen Kumalo, James Jarvis, and their respective sons, he wishes to reveal some of the tragic consequences of this social disintegration and, at the same time, to provide an example of moral and spiritual growth through suffering—a Christian message of comfort and hope despite the prevailing desolation—and to make an appeal to the liberal consciences of his readers.

In order to achieve these purposes, Paton makes use of the literary mode of tragedy. But this is not only because the novel abounds in those fateful contradictions which make tragedy the most appropriate mode for it. As J. M. Coetzee has said:

A favoured mode among White South African writers has been tragedy (though Afrikaans writers have given much time to a mythographic revision of history). Tragedy is typically the tragedy of inter-racial love: a White man and a Black woman, or vice versa, fall foul of the laws against miscegenation, or simply of White prejudice, and are destroyed or driven into exile. The overt content of the fable here is that love conquers evil through tragic suffering when such suffering is borne witness to in art; its covert content is the apolitical doctrine that defeat can turn itself, by the twist of tragedy, into victory. The tragic hero is a scapegoat who takes our punishment. By his suffering we undergo a ritual of expiation, and as we watch in sympathy our emotions are purged, as Aristotle noted, through the operations of pity and terror.

Tragedy affords a solution, both artistic and otherwise, to that which in reality has not been solved at all. Coetzee goes on to say:

Religious tragedy reconciles us to the inscrutable dispensation by giving a meaning to suffering and defeat … The predominant example of religious tragedy in South Africa is Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country. A young African comes to the city, falls among bad companions, and in a moment of confusion kills a White. He is hanged. The fathers of the dead men console and learn to respect each other. The hero who bears the blows of fate is here doubled in the persons of the two fathers; we share their suffering as they share each other's suffering, in pity and terror. The gods are secularized as the pitiless justice of the law. Nevertheless, Paton's fable bears the invariant content of religious tragedy: that the dispensation under which man suffers is unshakeable, but that our pity for the hero-victim and our terror at his fate can be purged by the ritual of re-enactment.³

It is not, however, only because of its apolitical nature that tragedy becomes a mode which results in mystification rather than revelation. In the final essay of Language And Silence, George Steiner, discussing whether revolutionary art will succeed in producing ‘high’ revolutionary tragedy, remarks:

no less than a tragedy with God, with a compensating mechanism of final justice and retribution, a tragedy without God, a tragedy of pure immanence, is a self-contradiction. Genuine tragedy is inseparable from the mystery of injustice, from the conviction that man is a precarious guest in a world where forces of unreason have dark governance. Lacking this belief, a drama of conflict will hardly be distinguishable from serious comedy, with its pattern of intrigue and mundane resolution (the equations of tragedy cannot be solved, there are in them too many unknowns).⁴

Sophoclean tragedy, for instance, draws much of its mystery and strength, its power to evoke feelings of pity and terror, from its characteristic emphasis on the gap between human and divine judgements. Sophocles writes throughout in the conviction that the laws of the gods are not the same as the laws of men, and what may seem right enough to men may be utterly wrong for the gods. His tragic world is one in which men, acting according to their human nature, are countered and corrected, for evil or for good, by powers outside themselves, and although they may try to work against these, in the end they are at their mercy. The ways of the gods remain a secret and it is not for men to criticize them or even to hope to understand them. What is required is a mood of unquestioning awe and respect. The discrepancy between a divine order and the order of the world is what creates genuine tragedy.

Now it would seem that Paton, in order to make a powerful emotional appeal to the consciences and liberal sentiments of his readers, is concerned to make the causes for the tragic unfolding of events which his novel records ultimately inexplicable, the function of some Fate or divinity whose ways cannot be fathomed by man. For only through this strategy will injustice become mysterious and produce that sense of ultimate mystery which is one of the defining features of tragedy. Consequently, he is continually harping on mystery and the mysteriousness of human existence. The novel abounds in expressions of this sort:

Who indeed knows the secret of the earthly pilgrimage? Who indeed knows why there can be comfort in a world of desolation?⁵

His son had gone astray in the great city, where so many had gone astray before him, and where many others would go astray after him, until there was found some great secret that as yet no man had discovered.

(p. 78)

I believe, he said, but I have learned that is a secret. Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are secret.

(p. 193)

Why was it given to one man to have his pain transmuted into gladness? Why was it given to one man to have such an awareness of God? … But his mind would contain it no longer. It was not for man's knowing. He put it from his mind, for it was a secret.

(p. 234)

And just as many aspects of human existence are surrounded by a nimbus of mystery, so the law is deified, is put into a position where it cannot be questioned; it is treated as a divine institution which requires unquestioning awe and respect as an utterly objective arbiter over the subjective follies and anarchies of men:

You may not smoke in this Court, you may not whisper or speak or laugh. You must dress decently, and if you are a man, you may not wear your hat unless such is your religion. This is in honour of the Judge and in honour of the King whose officer he is; and in honour of the Law behind the Judge, and in honour of the People behind the Law. When the Judge enters you will stand, and you will not sit till he is seated. When the Judge leaves you will stand, and you will not move till he has left you. This is in honour of the Judge, and of the things behind the Judge.⁶

(p. 136)

Yet in attempting to re-create the mystery of injustice and Fate which has such potent emotional effects, Paton stumbles into the contradiction which Steiner has pointed out. For the series of misfortunes which his novel relates are definitely not the result of the obscure workings of gods (or of God) whose ways and whims cannot be discovered by man. Like the law which has been formulated as an expression and defence of the interests of white South Africa alone, and which therefore has no credibility whatsoever as an impersonal god, these misfortunes are quite explicable in terms of the man-made reality and historical conditions of South Africa in the first half of this century. Cry, the Beloved Country is thus a tragedy of “pure immanence” on top of which a mystifying Christian concern with suffering and joy has been imposed. In short, it is not genuine tragedy at all.

Part of Paton's technique of mystification is to portray a succession of unfortunate events and then to dwell on the deep, passive grief which these cause in various persons. Thus, in the section which dramatizes a housing shortage in the townships outside Johannesburg and which refers to the death of a black woman's child and to her subsequent grief, we find generalizations of the following sort: “Such is the lot of women, to carry, to bear, to watch, and to lose” (p. 54). Thus we repeatedly find Stephen Kumalo with his “tragic eyes” and “his face in the mould of its suffering” (p. 105). The description of the misfortune is invariably converted into a drawn out characterization of the almost insuperable sorrow and mourning which it arouses. And although Paton could be said to follow this strategy in order to convey the very real helplessness and justifiable bewilderment of the simple-hearted, largely uneducated black in the face of a cruel and alien white world whose domination is ubiquitous and so unfathomable that, like a Kafkaesque one, it takes on all the mysteriousness and arbitrariness of an unknown god, the function of his emphasis on blind, grief-stricken reactions is both to obscure the real reasons (and hence possible solutions) for the tragic incidents and to elicit from the reader a purely emotional identification with the suffering hero so that, again, the real reasons for a predicament are smothered under the flow of sympathy which the reader feels. Brecht's “estrangement” effects, whereby the emotional responses of his dramatic characters are deliberately muted in order that the audience might better perceive that a particular bereavement has specific societal causes and thus can be prevented through specifically social solutions (which perception might make possible a rejection of the fatalities and eternal recurrences of tragedy), might have had a salutary effect on Cry, the Beloved Country. For the emotionalism of the novel time and again results in mystification.

There is another type of mystification at work in this novel, one which has equally serious consequences. As a rule, a novel opens by depicting a problematic situation which the rest of the text then seeks to solve. Another way of putting this would be to say that the text (whether it be novel, poem, or drama) is internally dissonant. In the words of Terry Eagleton, it is “never at one with itself, for if it were it would have absolutely nothing to say. It is, rather, a process of becoming at one with itself—an attempt to overcome the problem of itself.”⁷ In its simplest, most conventional expression, this dissonance usually takes the form of a conflict between the dreams and idealism of an individual, and a society whose materialism and determinism prevent the fulfilment of individual ideals. The internal dissonance of the text is produced by a conflict between material-historical conditions and the various forms of necessity which these impose, and an ideology which enshrines values opposed to those determined by these conditions.

Cry, the Beloved Country provides a particularly clear example of this process which is characteristic of almost all literature. The problem that it initially poses and presents is that of the detribalization of blacks by whites and the lawlessness and moral corruption which this enforced social disintegration has caused. The novel describes quite accurately and also explains a certain historical phenomenon which is now a commonplace in the analysis which one finds in South African criminology textbooks.⁸ Msimangu formulates the central problem of the novel as follows:

The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended again. The white man has broken the tribe. And it is my belief—and again I ask your pardon—that it cannot be mended again. But the house that is broken, and the man that falls apart when the house is broken, these are the tragic things. That is why children break the law, and old white people are robbed and beaten.

(p. 25)

And this is set out more formally in the papers of the murdered Arthur Jarvis:

The old tribal system was, for all its violence and savagery, for all its superstition and witchcraft, a moral system. Our natives today produce criminals and prostitutes and drunkards, not because it is their nature to do so, but because their simple system of order and tradition and convention has been destroyed. It was destroyed by the impact of our own civilization. Our civilization has therefore an inescapable duty to set up another system of order and tradition and convention.

(p. 127)

It is this social disintegration which constitutes the central problem to which the novel addresses itself.

At the same time, however, a certain ideology, which is an amalgam of liberalism and Christianity, is brought to bear upon this problem. And it is through this that the internal dissonance of the novel becomes most apparent; it is through this, too, that the major mystification of Cry, the Beloved Country is perpetrated. Through the mouthpieces of Stephen Kumalo and Msimangu, Paton attempts to solve what is clearly and statedly a material, sociological problem by means of metaphysics; against the multiple problems caused by detribalization and urbanization he advances the solution of love. Thus Msimangu maintains that “there is only one thing that has power completely, and that is love. Because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power” (p. 37). Of course this is useless; the problem has not been caused by a lack of love in South Africa, and therefore to prescribe an antidote of love for it is simply naïve and beside the point.⁹ The actual problem and Paton's solution for it are two completely separate, independent spheres which have no real practical relation to each other. And since there is no possibility of the one really acting upon the other, since crime cannot be solved through love, and also because Paton can see no other solution (his ideology prevents this), throughout Cry, the Beloved Country there is a steady displacement of or shift away from the major problem of the book, the sociological one, and an increasing focus on a single consequence of it: the personal sufferings of Stephen Kumalo and, to a lesser extent, James Jarvis. The focus steadily shifts away from the question of what has caused a certain state of affairs and what is to be done about it, and increasingly revolves around the efforts of single individuals to survive and to transcend personal suffering. And since the problem cannot be solved by the Christian love of Msimangu or Kumalo, nor by the liberal change of heart which James Jarvis undergoes and which expresses itself through a paternalistic handout to a “boy's club” and his financial assistance in the restoration of the valley, it is simply subsumed under the religious trials of Kumalo and the symphonic finale to the novel.

When there is an irreconcilable clash between certain historical conditions and an ideology, the invariable result is tragedy. But the mode of tragedy itself is often also a means of transcending this clash. Just as Jarvis and Kumalo are finally united by a mutual sympathy caused by their common loss of a son and, in a microcosmic, symbolic way effect a reconciliation between black and white races in South Africa, tragedy finally collapses the poles of the conflict and finds a solution in the restoration of an ultimate order and meaning which serves to create a calmness of mind. The social failure which is signified by the murder of Arthur Jarvis and the execution of Absalom Kumalo is transformed, by the twist of tragedy, into the moral victory of James Jarvis and the religious exultation of Stephen Kumalo who is restored to an intimation of ultimate order and meaning through his final sense of the nearness of God. Even so, the evidence that this is not a genuine restoration (as in Sophoclean tragedy, for instance) but only an instance of two men who have each, as it were, made a separate peace, is to be found in the fact that Paton quite literally cannot finish his novel. Although, in the final scene, the sun rises in the east and Stephen Kumalo rises in thanksgiving from his mountain vigil, the essential question remains unanswered—the “mystery” of freedom and injustice remains to be solved: “But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret” (p. 236).

Nevertheless, something of a practical answer to this question is at least suggested in an ideological conflict which the novel promises to elaborate, but which is also collapsed and then abandoned. This conflict is the one feature of Cry, the Beloved Country that promises to redeem the novel from its persistent naïveté of tone and its extraordinary lack of political vision. However, that the novel is not redeemed by a development of this conflict is itself a reflection of Paton's commitment to an ideology which cannot allow for certain forms of conflict and which simply cannot countenance them if its credibility is to survive.

As has already been suggested, Paton's ideology is an amalgam of Christianity and liberalism. In a fundamental respect these two ideologies are by no means incompatible. As Leo Marquard has written, “liberals believe in the integrity and worth of every single individual. Religious people would express this by saying that every individual is a child of God; and liberals who are not religious may derive their belief from humanism. But whatever its origin, the belief is fundamental to liberalism and from it flow many of the demands of liberals, such as the rights of the individual and the equality of all in the eyes of the law.”¹⁰ In their common concern for and emphasis upon the worth of each and every human individual, liberalism and Christianity go hand in hand. Now a belief in the primacy of the individual is at the very base of liberal ideology; and with this belief it is inevitable that those virtues which will enhance the life of the individual will be emphasized and valued above all others, that there will be a heavy stress on private virtues such as inner strength and integrity, and that there will be a marked suspicion of any political ideas and programmes which make demands of absolute commitment upon men and women since these are perceived to be threatening to the essential autonomy of the individual.

Paton's deep-seated belief in this fundamental liberal tenet is the obvious reason why he would seem to refuse to explore the political implications of the clash of ideologies found in the altercations between John and Stephen Kumalo—a clash which promises much, but is never developed. Perhaps Ezekiel Mphahlele is getting close to this when he expresses the following dissatisfaction: “The priest's brother, John Kumalo, pretends to a roundness and one is tantalized into hoping that the interplay of opposite personalities such as his and the priest's is going to grow into something memorable. John Kumalo is a political speech-maker; he always seems to be addressing a crowd even when he speaks to one person; he does not like Christian convention; he is sensible of the insecurity around him. He will do anything to avoid more pain than is already being inflicted upon him and his people.”¹¹ Yet Mphahlele never fully articulates this failure. In a very real sense these two characters embody the distinction that Arthur Koestler draws in his essay “The Yogi and the Commissar”. Stephen is an advocate of “Change from Within”, of spiritual purification, and is in favour of passivity, submission, meekness and guidance; John is a proponent of “Change from Without” and of the activism, domination and calculation which this programme for social change demands. John Kumalo believes “that what God has not done for South Africa, man must do” (p. 25). Stephen's faith is “that power corrupts, that a man who fights for justice must himself be cleansed and purified, that love is greater than force” (p. 182).

Now it is all too clear that throughout Cry, the Beloved Country Paton is preaching for a revolution of hearts (“Change from Within”) rather than for a revolution in social and economic structure (“Change from Without”). Because of his liberal Christian vision and the limits it automatically imposes on the nature and range of political beliefs and practices available to him, he never really questions the power of humility, respect for persons, compassion and the quest for personal salvation to achieve a significant restructuring of society. He himself does not seem to realize (though John Kumalo makes this clear) that although Christianity might offer profound spiritual strength to people at bay (the novel itself is a good illustration of just this), it also imparts a political weakness which dictates, however necessarily and realistically, an acceptance of the hegemony of the oppressor.¹² Nor does Paton ever really question the applicability of the Sermon on the Mount to a political programme. For though it may be possible to establish just relations between individuals purely by moral and rational suasion and accommodation, in inter-group relations this is practically an impossibility. The relations between groups are always predominantly political rather than ethical; they are determined by the proportion of power each group possesses as much as by any rational and moral appraisal of the comparative needs and claims of each group. Paton, with an ideology which commits him to the individual rather than to the group, does not understand this.

Nevertheless, scattered through the novel are a number of passages which either implicitly or explicitly call into question his ultimate faith in a change of heart (an increase in love and the rooting out of fear and hatred) to cure various ills. These passages are usually given to John Kumalo. For example, the following words come from him during a public speech:

“Is it wrong to ask more money?” John Kumalo asks. “We get little enough. It is only our share that we ask, enough to keep our wives and our families from starvation. For we do not get enough. … We know that we do not get enough,” Kumalo says. “We ask only for those things that labouring men fight for in every country in the world, the right to sell our labour for what it is worth. … They say that higher wages will cause the mines to close down. Then what is it worth, this mining industry? And why should it be kept alive, if it is only our poverty that keeps it alive? They say it makes the country rich, but what do we see of these riches? Is it we that must be kept poor so that others may stay rich? … All we ask is justice, says Kumalo. … We are asking only for more money from the richest industry in the world. This industry is powerless without our labour. Let us cease to work and this industry will die. And I say, it is better to cease to work than to work for such wages.”

(pp. 258-59)

In so far as Cry, the Beloved Country records an antagonism between a basically materialist view of South Africa's conflicts (which is reflected in John Kumalo's attitudes and ideas) and an idealist attempt to solve them (reflected in the ideas of Stephen and Msimangu), it can be regarded as a rudimentary novel of ideas. But Paton never develops this antagonism to the point where it would become truly meaningful. Indeed, he cannot; his ideology prevents him from doing so. Through his liberalism and Christianity which demand that people be judged as ends in themselves and not as means, and according to their moral worth and integrity rather than their practical usefulness, he can conveniently dispose of this antagonism. Thus John Kumalo's moral corruption is emphasized to the extent that his actual political worth, the substantial accuracy of his many brief analyses, are ultimately ignored and glossed over: “—Perhaps we should thank God he is corrupt, said Msimangu solemnly. For if he were not corrupt, he could plunge this country into bloodshed. He is corrupted by his possessions, and he fears their loss, and the loss of the power he already has” (p. 161). In short, because John Kumalo is not a good man, his politics are not good. Yet, ironically, he is the one person in the novel who displays something of a real political understanding.

The immediate result of this ideological clash being dissolved and disposed of through moral condemnation is that the final political vision which emerges from Cry, the Beloved Country is naïve in the extreme. As Ezekiel Mphahlele has written: “Because the message keeps imposing itself on us in Cry, the Beloved Country, we cannot but feel how thickly laid on the writer's liberalism is: let the boys be kept busy by means of club activities and they will be less inclined to delinquency; work for a change of heart in the white ruling class (Jarvis's final philanthropic gesture and his son's practical interest in club activities together with his plea to South Africa indicate this).”¹³ These practical “solutions” scarcely solve or even begin to suggest a way of solving the problematic historical situation with which the novel deals.

A still further result of this failure to develop the implications of this clash of ideologies is an artistic failure; the novel becomes badly weighted, lop-sided; it becomes a tear-jerker—which is only another way of saying that it is lacking in reality. Its sentimentality is, of course, in accord with one of its express intentions; significantly, Cry, the Beloved Country is subtitled “A Story of Comfort in Desolation”. Like a good liberal and Christian, Paton is always concerned to console, to lessen any potential conflict, and to appeal to the moral consciences and emotions of his readers. Depictions of pain are always the best means for this latter purpose since they provoke pity and sentimentality. And his liberal desire to reduce conflict perhaps explains his almost obsessive presentations of the good white man, of characters like the advocate who takes on Absalom Kumalo's case pro deo, Father Vincent, and those helping blacks at a school for the blind: “It was white men who did this work of mercy, and some of them spoke English and some spoke Afrikaans. Yes, those who spoke English and those who spoke Afrikaans came together to open the eyes of black men that were blind” (p. 80). Furthermore, he uses this figure of the good white—the liberal hero (Arthur Jarvis), who is destroyed by the harsh South African reality—as a representative figure who atones through his death for the collective guilt of the whites. For the purposes of conciliation he also uses the figure of the good black man, the “Uncle Tom” character, who will allay the suspicions and the hostility of whites towards blacks. But the paternalism implicit (and often quite explicit) in his treatment of blacks and all the emotional effects aroused by his attempted reconciliations do not have the final effect of providing comfort in desolation; they merely serve as an incomplete disguise for the limitations in the ideology which informs the novel. In the final analysis, Cry, the Beloved Country does not so much display the iniquities of various aspects of South African life; rather, it reveals the poverty of Paton's ideology.

Given this poverty and also the fact that it has only grown more evident in the more than three decades that have passed between the publication of Cry, the Beloved Country and Paton's latest novel, Ah, but your land is beautiful (1981), it might have been expected that the latter work, particularly as it is centred around the Liberal Party in South Africa in the fifties, would have shown a greater awareness both of the contradictions within liberalism itself and also in the ways in which it was articulated at that time. And at first sight, this expectation does not seem to have been disappointed. Ah, but your land is beautiful, composed as it is of a number of cameos and representative South African voices clearly meant to convey the patterns of conflict in the country during the years 1952-1958, is noticeably more aware of the various alternatives to the liberal programme for social reform than Cry, the Beloved Country. Its various liberal protagonists also display an acute awareness of many of the contradictions that are part of their position. For instance, at a Liberal Party celebration one of the whites observes:

Because of my past I am very conscious that the [Liberal] party is not yet aware of its tour de force nature. The question as to why Drummond's diningroom is as big as many a black house has never been raised, nor the question as to why ninety-five per cent of the cars at the conference belonged to white members. The party has committed itself to the fight against all unjust laws, to the elimination of discrimination, and to the destruction of the colour bar … but there is so far no discussion as to why there are all these laws, nor any discussion as to their economic causes. I have long since ceased to believe that the causes of all social ills are economic, but so far the party seems almost unaware that many of the causes are economic.¹⁴

Nevertheless, perceptions of this sort are few and far between, and, as with the materialist-idealist clash represented by Msimangu and John Kumalo, they are never developed to the point where they might become truly significant. Although the sources of opposition to liberalism are fully defined in the course of the novel, there is never any attempt to expand upon or reply to the challenge being made to the liberalism of Paton's central characters and to his own liberal vision which dominates the book.

Many of the thematic concerns of Cry, the Beloved Country appear once again in his latest novel. There is the same concern with the destructive effects of racial fears, the same belief in the transforming power of personal encounters and the same image of South Africa as a land at once paradisial and purgatorial. Once again, just as in his first novel, there is an episode in Ah, but your land is beautiful which testifies to Paton's continuing faith in a personal act of devotion or humility to bring about that change of heart and atonement between races which he so much desires. In this case, a white judge washes and kisses the feet of a black servant at a church service. The episode is then blown up to the point where it might be said to be a symbol of a potential reconciliation between races in South Africa. At the same time, however, Paton also includes the following attack on the incident in the form of an article from New Guard:

The white bourgeoisie is getting itself all worked up because a white judge has kissed the feet of a black woman in a church in Bochabela. Half the bourgeoisie is disgusted, and the other half thinks that a bit of kissing wipes out the scandals of the pass laws and the rape of the blackspots and perhaps indeed lengthens the life of white supremacy.

New Guard does not indulge in attacks on the so-called independent judiciary, but will certainly not encourage white people to entertain the delusion that what happened in Bochabela is a solution to something, or that it is an indication of the way ‘things are moving’. The episode is totally meaningless and irrelevant, and it shows once more how unrelated to our realities are the bourgeois values of good-will and sporadic benevolence in our South African situation.

The aspirations of the people of South Africa were given unforgettable expression in the clauses of the Freedom Charter. They concerned themselves with government, land, rights, wealth, industry, education, freedom of movement. They made no mention of the washing or kissing of people's feet. The Congress of the People would have exploded into incredulous laughter had any one proposed the inclusion of such fatuities.

(p. 248)

Now it is extremely difficult to tell whether Paton has included this polemic because he considers it to be an incriminating example of left-wing cant, a serious rejoinder to the episode which he has developed with such emotional fervour, or a statement which prefigures the less tolerant climate of the sixties. But whatever his own attitude—and from the weighting that he gives to the Bochabela incident alone, it would seem to be the first of these—this attack on the liberal position, like all the others in the novel, is never answered. The debate, rudimentary as it might be, is left suspended as Paton switches his focus from one episode to another, from one fragment in his mosaic to the next. Finally, all such ideological conflicts are dissolved as the lights go out, the “Golden Age” of the Dr Hendrik (alias Verwoerd) era begins, and liberal ambitions, like others more radical, enter the political Dark Ages of the South African sixties. Once again the debate, like the novel itself, is left hanging.

More importantly, this also means that Paton is dismissing a conflict which may be more genuinely tragic than any number of those pathetic incidents for which apartheid policies are responsible. Isaiah Berlin, probably the most renowned liberal theorist of this century, has written time and again on that particular form of tragedy which results from the clash of ideologies, both practically and theoretically incompatible, and unreconcilable since there is, in his opinion, no sole, true universal ideal in terms of which all the warring ideas can be seen as forming a unity. “If, as I believe,” he writes, “the ends of man are many and not all of them in principle compatible with each other, the possibility of conflict—and of tragedy—can never be wholly eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition.”¹⁵ But the dilemmas which attend this “pluralism”—from choices at best agonizing to tragedy itself—are never fully articulated. Ironically enough, a recognition of them may well have provided Paton, as it does Berlin, with the basis for a defence of liberalism, a defence far stronger than the self-serving arguments which the novel puts forward.¹⁶

There are other features of this novel which severely weaken it. More than thirty years after Cry, the Beloved Country, Paton's characteristic simplicity of tone and language reads as intolerably faux-naïf; his “Biblical” style and its pieties (particularly evident whenever he touches on law and order, and family life) are simply not equipped to deal with the complex conflicts of the fifties, scarred as they were by serious ideological and political battles. Clearly one cannot develop much in the way of an historical debate if one is bound to the language of the Sunday school. Nor is his mixture of fiction and historical fact a success: whilst the fictional portions of the book seem to trivialize the historical, the historical merely serves to empty out the imaginative substance of the fictional—with the result that the novel fails both as fiction and as social document. But quite as crippling as these limitations is the fact the Ah, but your land is beautiful, a novel which deals with the fifties and a period which saw the founding of the Liberal Party and the consolidation of the policy of apartheid, is controlled and dominated by the ideology of a man who is himself very much the product of the liberalism of that selfsame era. As such, Cry, the Beloved Country and Ah, but your land is beautiful are not significantly different from each other; the inadequacies of the former are simply repeated in the latter.

Notes

1. J. F. Cronin, “Writer Versus Situation: Three South African Novelists”, Studies (Dublin), 56 (1967), pp. 74-75.

2. “South African Conflicts”, Times Literary Supplement, 16 August 1957, p. xxxvi.

3. J. M. Coetzee, “Man's Fate In the Novels of Alex La Guma”, Studies In Black Literature, 5, 1 (Spring 1974), 17.

4. George Steiner, Language And Silence (London: Faber, 1967), pp. 423-24.

5. Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 56. All subsequent references are to this edition.

6. It would seem that Paton never fails to fall into contradiction when it comes to a discussion of the Law and of jurisprudence in general. On the one hand, the whole force of Cry, the Beloved Country is to prove that there is a species of social determinism at work in South Africa; the breaking of the tribal system by the whites has led to a good deal of criminal activity on the part of dispossessed blacks. The one is responsible for the other. On the other hand, Paton continues to attribute free-wil to his characters and in terms of this they are then totally responsible for their transgressions and particular crimes. Thus, the jurisprudence which is contained in the Court scene in the novel (see p. 171) is completely confused and false. At this point one could easily imagine Cry, the Beloved Country turning into a polemic on unjust justice in South Africa. But, in accordance with his desire to create tragedy, Paton has to attempt to legitimize the law. That he fails to do so is quite clear in this section of the novel.

7. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso, 1978), p. 89.

8. See, for example, G. M. Retief, “Social Disorganization, Crime and The Urban Bantu People of South Africa”, Crime and Punishment in South Africa, eds. J. Midgley, J. H. Steyn, R. Graser (Johannesburg: McGraw-Hill, 1975), pp. 47-55. Paton himself has also written articles on the reasons for crime in South Africa. See, for example, “Who is Really to Blame for the Crime Wave in South Africa”, The Forum, VIII, No. 37 (December, 1945), 7-8. He is being quite accurate when he says in his “Author's Note” to Cry, the Beloved Country that the book “considered as a social record … is the plain and simple truth.”

9. Paton creates exactly the same form of mystification in his later novel, Too Late the Phalarope (1953). Apart from the fact that it also uses a spurious form of tragedy (the Immorality Act is no substitute for the gods), Paton also sees the problem here as being a tyranny of fear and a lack of love. He does not seem to realize that the rigid Afrikaner Calvinist mentality that he portrays in this novel (and which is exemplified by Pieter Van Vlaanderen's father), its lack of warmth and spontaneity, its many obsessional traits (such as love of Discipline and order, which manifests itself in strict parents and, particularly, in authoritarian fathers) operates as a defence mechanism among the ruling whites, especially the Afrikaners, against a basic national anxiety, arising from a basic national insecurity. In other words, the Calvinist gives evidence of an obsessional and authoritarian national character in an attempt to compensate for an abnormally high level of anxiety originating in a deep sense of national insecurity. His rigid nature, therefore, is due as much to his political position in South Africa as to any supposedly inherent traits. But in Too Late the Phalarope Paton, through the mouth-piece of Tante Sophie, suggests that the tragedy might have been avoided if sufficient love had been forthcoming. This might, of course, have been true. But in so far as this novel is a study of Afrikaner Calvinism in general, it is to be doubted whether the love, the true love as opposed to the twisted, which he advocates is any solution at all. Once again Paton is attempting to solve what is at root a political problem through personal love.

10. Len Marquard, Liberalism in South Africa (Johannesburg: Institute of Race Relations, 1965), p. 8.

11. Ezekiel Mphahlele, The African Image (London: Faber, 1962), p. 132.

12. Nietzche's polemic against Christianity: “The Christian faith, from the beginning, is sacrifice: the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit; it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation. This cruel religion of painful subjection softened the slaves by drawing the hatred from their souls, and without hatred there could be no revolt.” Beyond Good and Evil (London: Foulis, 1909), p. 67.

13. Mphahlele, p. 133.

14. Alan Paton, Ah, but your land is beautiful (Cape Town: David Philip, 1981), p. 159.

15. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), p. 169.

16. For an example of this, see Robert Mansfield's discussion with Luthuli, pp. 123-5.