family or the village community. She cannot fulfill a motherly role because her children adapt to village life without her assistance. And Bam ultimately becomes only the "blonde man" to her, as she becomes only "her" to him. Maureen and Bam become alienated from one another because they cannot identify with each other outside of their former domestic context, which defined them both.

Also, while Bam can perform small tasks like building a water tank and hunting with his shotgun, Maureen cannot work with the other women. She hopes to encourage a sense of feminine kinship between her and the village women, but July thwarts her attempts by disapproving of her actions. Yet even with July's approval, the women would not welcome Maureen. She believes she can transcend their racial differences, but the black women see her not as a fellow woman sharing in their endeavors but as an incompetent white woman who cannot perform even simple tasks. She becomes frozen in a now bankrupt role: July's white "mistress" to whom others cater.

Once again, a confrontation with July underscores Maureen's predicament, since he will not allow her to improve her status to him and, thus, the other villagers. She desires an effective means of communication with him, but such communication proves impossible because of the limits of his English. The English they spoke in Johannesburg was not a problem because "it was based on orders and responses, not the exchange of ideas and feelings."

In their former roles, Maureen did not need to communicate complex ideas to July and did not need to discuss her emotional situation or his own needs. Their language proved functional and kept them at a distance from one another. Now this language is both an impediment to understanding and a means for July to maintain his distance from Maureen. For instance, when July disapproves of her desire to work with the other women, Maureen asks if he is afraid she will tell Martha "something " Angered, July responds, "—What you can tell?— ... —That I'm work for you fifteen years. That you satisfy with me—." Once again, he asserts the mercantile nature of their relationship. She has no special knowledge of him that can prove valuable to her or dangerous to him. They were not friends and she did not know him In fact, her pretense of liberal tolerance and respect actually humiliated him.

Thus, in her attempts to overcome the constraints of her current existence, Maureen actually discovers the limits of her former existence and the arrogance of her comfortable sense of personal worth. Having believed herself a woman of humane values with a secure place in the world, she now recognizes that she depended on an accepted cultural dominance over others to define her social (and familial) roles. Now at the mercy of a new cultural context, she is subject to the perceptions and definitions of others.

Maureen's fragile self-perceptions and her hopes of establishing a fruitful relationship with July are dealt a crippling blow in her final argument with him When Barn's gun, their last possession, is stolen, Maureen tries to force July to retrieve it, desperately relying on him to salvage some sense of their former power. Instead, by declaring that she has become an unwanted burden to him and that he cannot help her, July makes Maureen feel "stampeded by a wild rush of need to destroy everything between them." She accuses him of stealing from her in Johannesburg, reasserting her property owner's right to indignation. He denies the accusation and, enraged, speaks to her in his own language. In this moment, Maureen understands him for the first time and realizes that she had perceived him as she wanted to perceive him, made him into her idea of him. He, however, never needed her approval but drew his sense of manhood from his family. Therefore, when the economic and social structures of white South Africa unravel, he retains crucial elements of his sense of self while hers disintegrates.

Because Maureen finally achieves an insight into July's character, the reader might think that this moment could lead to understanding between them and help forge a new, mutually beneficial relationship. Gordimer undermines such an optimistic reading, however, when Maureen confronts July with words that "sank into the broken clay walls like spilt blood." She tells him that he will profit from the losses of others, that he wants the possessions he never had before, regardless of then-human cost. These possessions will make him feel important until, like the bakkie, they become inoperative and useless. Then he, too, will experience the same deprivation as the Smales, since they all draw their worth from what they own.

In an action that reveals Maureen's final, desperate association of herself with material possession, "she lurched over and posed herself, a grotesque, against the vehicle's hood," aligning herself as a sexual accoutrement to economic status. Her attempt fails, though, because "the death's harpy image she made of herself meant nothing to him, who had never been to a motor show complete with provocative girls." July does not share the cultural references from which Maureen derives her gesture of self-humiliation. Thus, she can neither fulfill a sexual role in July's domain, nor can she impress upon him that he, too, has been corrupted by greed and a complacent sense of superiority. She is left with only her comprehension of her own entrapment and powerlessness.

This comprehension may explain Maureen's ambiguous flight from the village toward an unidentified helicopter at the novel's end. Gordimer provides no direct explanation of either Maureen's motivations or the consequences of her actions, but the images she employs imply both the helicopter's threat and Maureen's internal transformation. Maureen experiences the sound of the helicopter as a sexual invasion as "her body in its rib-cage is thudded with deafening vibration, invaded by a force pumping, jigging in its monstrous orgasm," and she sees the helicopter with "its landing gear like spread legs, battling the air with whirling scythes." These images imply rape and warfare, but Maureen does not react fearfully to the helicopter, as if she is either unmoved by or actually welcomes the danger the helicopter poses. It could hold "saviours," who would presumably harken a return of white control, or "murderers," either black or white, who come to punish.

In her flight to reach the helicopter, she runs past "the man's voice and the voices of children speaking in English" and enters the river "like some member of a baptismal sect to be born again." In the end, she runs for herself alone, like an animal "existing only for their lone survival, the enemy of all that would make claims of responsibility." The distanced description of the Smales family implies Maureen's disassociation from her husband and children, and the baptismal imagery clearly evokes the possibility of a new birth. But a birth into what? Maureen appears to slough off both her familial obligations and her current internal conflicts, but Gordimer leaves open the question of exactly what she desires to transform into. Left with no ideals with which to define herself, Maureen seems to run by instinct toward some sense of closure, escaping the conditions that have proven so destructive to her, even if this escape means her death.

As Maureen realizes, the violent overthrow of apartheid entails not only a political revolt but also "an explosion of roles." She can no longer be "Maureen Smales," the middle-class Johannesburg wife and mother, because the preconceptions upon which she grounded her sense of self-worth collapse with the radical shifts in her social position. And she cannot become one of "July's People" because both she and they cannot escape the cultural definitions and prejudices that prohibit real intimacy between them. Therefore, her firm, comfortable perceptions of herself give way to utter emptiness, a vacancy inside of her to match the vacant horizons of the bush country. And fleeing this emptiness seems to be her only recourse as she, like the South Africa that Gordimer portrays, runs from a sterile past to an indefinite, ominous future.

Source: Darren Felty, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1998.

It is hardly surprising that the ending of Na-dine Gordimer's July's People should have occasioned a fair amount of puzzlement. As Maureen Smales runs towards the helicopter, neither she nor the reader has any way of knowing 'whether it holds saviours or murderers; and—even if she were to have identified the markings—for whom.' And not knowing that, we are left uncertain what to make of the conclusion.

One impression readers may gain from the final pages of the novel is that they constitute what Russian Formalists called a 'zero ending', an ending in which the conclusion is left hanging in the air. Certainly, given Gordimer's guiding conception of the historical moment in which she was engaged in writing the novel, a zero ending would make sense. She chose as an epigraph for July's People a well-known formulation by Gramsci that was to become particularly significant for her: 'The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.' A notion of interregnum—a moment , between two states of affairs, in which outcomes are not only unclear but cannot yet come into being—is necessarily going to make closure problematic. Nevertheless, I hope to show that, however perplexing the ending of July's People may be, it is not simply left hanging.

What we might think of as the polarities in interpretative responses to the ending of the novel have been outlined by Stephen Clingman and Margaret Lenta. Clingman is so far the only critic to opt for what might be thought of as the positive interpretation:

at the end of the novel Maureen is running The circumstances in which this occurs are ambiguous, but their significance surely is not. An unmarked helicopter has flown over near July's village and is coming down to land. No one knows whether it is manned by freedom fighters or by the South African army. But Maureen knows she must run She is running from old structures and relationships, which have led her to this cul-de-sac, but she is also running towards her revolutionary destiny She does not know what that destiny may be, whether it will bring death or life. All she knows is that it is the only authentic future awaiting her.

The confidence of Clingman's second sentence ('their significance surely is not') is belied by what follows. At precisely the moment we are to be informed of the significance, we are told 'she is running ... towards her revolutionary destiny'. The phrase is rhetorically impressive, but it is more of an evasion than an explanation Linking it to a generalized notion of authenticity only further obscures whatever significance the ending might be thought to have. Clingman sets out to address the problem of the ending; he ends up writing his way out of the interpretative dilemma the ending creates.

Clingman's account of the novel nowhere suggests why Gordimer would want to provide Maureen with a positive ending. Everything the novel discloses about Maureen's life 'back there', before South Africa boiled over into full-scale civil war, renders her as the very type of the white suburban liberal. Clingman himself recounts Gordimer's public break with South African liberalism in 1974, some seven years before the publication of July's People. To suggest, in light of that break, that such a figure moves at the conclusion of the novel towards a positive resolution of her dilemma would' have to entail that Maureen has undergone some sort of conversion experience, a moment of Aristotelian anagnorisis or self-recognition. No such experience is rendered at the conclusion of the novel. Indeed, in linking her final action to her confrontation with My, Clingman has to supply Maureen with thoughts that are nowhere expressed: 'she realizes that this too [the reversal of roles whereby July is now dominant] is a circle she must break out of.'

Lenta takes issue with Clingman's account of the ending, discounting not only his positive interpretation but also the view, perhaps set out most clearly by Rowland Smith, that the ending is ambiguous and inconclusive. For Lenta,

The fact that the nationality and loyalties of the crew of the plane are unknown to [Maureen], and that there has been earlier reference to several opposing South African and foreign contenders for power suggests strongly to me that Gordimer intends us to reflect on the negative meaning of her act. she is leaving, not joining. Our verdict is to be passed on the education and social conditioning of a white woman of our own day.

At first glance Lenta's suggestion that the novel prompts a critique of the social conditioning of Maureen in particular and, by extension, liberal values in general is persuasive. Such a view would certainly seem more in accord with Gordimer's reassessment of South African liberalism than Clingman's view. Somewhat less certain is what connection that might have with the ending. The critique is woven into the entire fabric of the novel; it does not have to wait for the ending to be initiated. Moreover, a critique does not imply a comprehensively negative judgment. After all, the Smaleses are not the villains of the piece, and certainly in the context of South African politics and history, not villains in any more general way either. Gordimer's critique of South African liberalism does not include the facile premise that liberals are fully the partners of white racists. The Smaleses are, to be sure, limited, and those limitations are explored at length; nevertheless, the novel does not in any straightforward way condemn the Smaleses. What it does, and does unrelentingly, is expose the intractable contradictions inherent in the lives of such people. In this respect, the novel does not seek to incriminate the Smaleses, but to lay bare the conditions of their social existence.

Clingman and Lenta are unable to provide convincing grounds for their views of the ending. Clingman assures us that its significance is obvious, but cannot say with sufficient clarity just what it is. Lenta says that Maureen's running 'suggests strongly' to her that the ending is to be construed negatively, but it is not immediately clear why the uncertainly about the helicopter's occupants or the fact of contending military forces should suggest anything in particular. Then claims to the contrary, within the framework of interpretation they share, the conclusion to the novel is undecidable.

That framework centres the significance of the ending on the particular action of an individual character—Maureen's running The meaning of the ending, then, hinges on its significance within the fate of the individual. Given Gordimer's break with liberalism and commitment to an avowedly radical position, which must at the very least imply a shift from the privileging of the individual over the collectivity to a position directly contrary to that, it becomes open to question whether any interpretation which does not shift its gaze beyond Maureen can hope to account for the ending.

One feature of the ending, unremarked by either critic, may provide a clue to what Gordimer is about. The helicopter's approach is represented in a language of aggressive sexuality. We read of the village 'cringing beneath the hoverer'; Maureen is 'invaded by a force pumping, jigging in its monstrous orgasm'; the helicopter descends with 'its landing gear like spread legs', making a 'rutting racket'. The helicopter is the figure of a rapist; Maureen moves spontaneously towards it. That might appear to lend itself to a negative interpretation of the ending, but something quite different is in fact implied, or so I believe.

What I want to suggest about the ending will doubtless seem, at least initially, unlikely to the point of being bizarre. All I can ask is that readers bear with me for a moment. My suggestion is that behind the ending of July's People is another text —Yeats's 'Leda and the Swan'. Copyright statutes preclude quoting the poem in full, which is unfortunate since a direct comparison would make it easier to argue my case.

What initially prompted my impression that Gordimer is invoking Yeats's poem is a series of parallel expressions embedded in the sexually charged language. Some of the parallels are fairly strongly marked; others are subtle echoes. There are at least four of the more direct parallels: Gordimer has 'A racket of blows', Yeats opens the poem with 'A sudden blow'; Gordimer has the 'shuddering of air', Yeats 'A shudder in the loins'; Gordimer has 'terrifying thing', Yeats 'terrified vague fingers'. The most persuasive parallel is Gordimer's 'the beating wings of its noise' and Yeats's 'the great wings beating still'. Since helicopters do not have wings, it would appear that the reference is retained to preserve the connection between the two texts, and to reproduce the excited atmosphere of the moment.

If the more obvious echoes and parallels led me to wonder about the possible connection between the two works, other features reinforced the case. The ending of July's People has some curious stylistic features. There is, for instance, an unusual use of the passive: 'A high ringing is produced in her ears, her body ... is thudded with deafening vibration, invaded by a force'; and 'She is righted'. Related to this are such expressions as 'she must have screwed up her eyes: she could not have said what colour it was'. And finally, there is the shift in the final chapter to the present tense. Such stylistic devices may be seen as transformations of some of the linguistic forms and effects of 'Leda and the Swan', notably the mixing of present and past tenses, and the questions of the second quatrain and the conclusion of the poem.

What is involved in these stylistic devices is the relation established between Maureen and the helicopter on the one hand and Leda and Zeus in the form of a swan on the other. In both works, the violently possessed woman is overwhelmed by the violator. Not just physically—the very will to resist is obliterated. The stylistic features in both texts also operate to blur perspective so that descriptions made ostensibly in the voice of the speaker or narrator are given from the standpoint of, or filtered through the numbed, barely registering consciousness of, the woman. The 'racket of blows' is not just stated; it is experienced by Maureen: it 'comes down at her head', just as the 'sudden blow' and 'the great wings beating' are registered, if only dimly, by the consciousness of Leda. The passives in July's People reproduce stylistically the submission of Maureen to the 'force' of the helicopter, just as Leda is 'mastered by the brute blood of the air'.

It is never easy to demonstrate that one text functions as a source for another. The moment one attempts to set out the traces of the one work in the other, the relations between the two, for all that they seemed so obvious, suddenly seem quite tenuous. Nevertheless, I think a careful reading of the two works will persuade readers that 'Leda and the Swan' underlies Gordimer's conclusion. What is more, I think the relation between the two is crucial for our understanding of the ending of July's People.

The standard interpretation of Yeats's poem situates it within his reworking of Vicoman notions of historical cycles. Following her rape by Zeus, Leda gives birth to Helen of Troy, whose abduction by Paris gives rise to the Trojan War. The editors of The Norton Anthology of Poetry provide a gloss that sets out the conventional understanding of the poem: 'Yeats saw Leda as the recipient of an annunciation that would found Greek civilization, as the Annunciation to Mary would found Christianity' [Allison, et al, 1983.]

Such an 'annunciation' is what I believe is suggested in Maureen's final action. It is not a question of deciding whether she is running 'towards' or running 'away from'. In any event, there is no clear support in the text for either view. She is drawn to the helicopter, by a power she does not understand, does not even reflect on. On her way, she crosses the river, undergoing what is explicitly figured as a 'baptismal' experience—a ritual cleansing—in which she is 'born again', and passes over the 'landmark of the bank she has never crossed to before'.

The imminent convergence of Maureen and the helicopter, like the convergence of Leda and the god-swan, heralds a new civilization, a new epoch for South Africa that cannot, particularly from within a moment of interregnum, be described but can only be symbolically prefigured in a prophetic gesture of revolutionary optimism. If in the interregnum, as Gramsci puts it, 'the new cannot be born', the convergence, taking the metaphor a vital step further, is a moment of insemination, from which new possibilities will emerge. The significance of Gordimer's conclusion lies not, then, m the particular fate of Maureen: it does not really matter whether we see her opened up to negative judgment or going to seek her revolutionary destiny (though the latter, in its very vagueness, comes closer to capturing what is going on at the end of the novel). Maureen has been overtaken by something far larger than herself, than her self The ending is neither positive (in any narrow sense focused on the vicissitudes of Maureen) nor negative; it is not even undecidable or inconclusive. At this moment of closure, July's People moves from a mode of future projection concerned, as Clingman notes, with 'seeing the present through the eyes of the future' to a mode of revolutionary, Utopian vision—a future projection intimating a realm of possibilities beyond interregnum.

Source: Nicholas Visser, "Beyond the Interregnum. A Note of the Ending of July's People" in Rendering Things Visible. Essays on South African Literary Culture, edited by Martin Trump, Ohio University Press, 1990, pp 61-67.

July's People moves to a world of the future where the fears of the whites in all Gordimer's books have become reality—the revolution has occurred, the whites are dispossessed and have no means of escape from the riots and the burning of their cities. They have no place to go—except back
in time to the timelessness of the kraal, to the black primitive community of their servant July's village people. The novel's title reflects the two previously unconnected worlds which are brought together when July brings his city people, the white Smales family of Maureen and Bam and their three children, to his bush people, Martha his wife, his elderly mother and his extended family. Neither side is prepared for the other and both are dismayed by the reality that replaces their dream fantasies. Only the Smales children cross the cultural chasm, in a few weeks going back thousands of years in societal development. But since their hope lies in being absorbed by the black community, not in changing it, this hope does not alleviate the despair of the novel's epigraph: "The old is dying and the new cannot be born." ...

The true subject of the novel is not the nightmare of South Africa as representative of "injustice and retribution, of betrayal and dispossession," central though this concern is. [In "The Testing Out of Tomorrow," TLS, 1981.] Instead, I will argue, the nightmare the novel records with tender but unflinching honesty is that of Maureen Smales' discovery that she has no substance and no self. The novel dramatizes the horrifying thesis (concerning even those of us lucky enough not to know of South Africa except through novels such as Gordimer's) that without selfhood there can be no adaptation and no miracle of new birth from suffering.

The novel's form is dictated by this inner journey. In both the beginning and the ending of the novel Gordimer raises the subject of delirium. Initially, delirium serves as Maureen's metaphor for the three-day-and-night journey hidden in the back of the truck that delivered her from the city to the bush. The novel proceeds to reflect, as in delirium or dream, memories that are both sharp in detail and yet discontinuous in time and in consciousness. Combined with an elliptical style the narrative form creates problems for the reader. But late in the novel Maureen associates the insubstantiality of time with her own disintegration.

She was not in possession of any part of her life. One or another could only be turned up, by hazard The background had fallen away, since that first morning she had become conscious in the hut, she had regained no established point of a continuing present from which to recognize her own sequence.

In the novel's opening, awakening in the hut that is "the prototype from which all the others had come and to which all returned," in a space "confining in its immensity," Maureen faces a return in time and in space which has the archetypal possibility of birth or death, of womb or tomb. Her consciousness opens and closes the novel and at the end "she runs" towards the helicopter of unknown origin that has landed in the forest. On the surface it appears that the reader's apprehension of death and destruction has been averted, and that a miracle has taken place. But one of the indications that the ending is not hopeful is that the vitality of language that Gordimer uses as one symbol of new life struggling to be born is replaced by the sounds of the machine. The repeated refrain "lucky to be alive" becomes increasingly ironic and tragic as Maureen experiences the truth of her belated awareness that as "one ought to have known from the sufferings of saints ... miracles are horrors."

What is it that frustrates the miracles of rebirth? What is the nature of the self that the novel seeks and finds wanting? Maureen is not the only failure. Like her, July stripped of his persona is unable to discover substance, while her husband Bam rather surprisingly reveals a self that survives the loss of everything on which his "civilized" identity has been predicated The contrast with the two males illustrates Maureen's plight. Let us turn first to July.

Maureen feels she understands July and has always been able to communicate with him better than her husband has, acting often as a translator between the white master and the black servant. Even when July becomes the master, Maureen continues to confront him and draw responses from him in a way Bam cannot. Their understanding even when expressed as mutual hostility arises, Gordimer shows, from the way the black servant and the white mistress share a common entrapment in a system from which they have gained nothing but material security. Maureen's name on July's paycheques represents the abstraction of money that his village wife translates into the concrete of goods. But Maureen comes to realize that she herself means nothing to July in any real sense....

Because his self is a reflection of his worth in the eyes of his women, July's return to the village with his white people marks the crisis in his own self-regard Perhaps intuitively he clung to the Smales and offered them asylum because they provided him with a sense of selfhood, but when they appear in his world as his possessions his own people fail to respond to his master/servant role. Instead of gaining prestige through Ms possession of this family he arouses the hostility of the matriarchy and becomes a victim of its power....

July is further weakened by the loss of the young man, Daniel, before whom July could maintain his persona of power which the women had stripped from him. But Darnel steals the Smales's gun and returns to the city world of not and violence, which July's own kindness prevents him from entering. The novel's first words commenting on July's action, however, connect this attribute to conditioning rather than to positive substance or virtue. "July bent at the doorway and began that day for them as his kind has always done for their kind...."

Of the three central figures, July's dispossession is the greatest, as is his innocence His language lights against both grammatical structure and the absence of words in either English or his own dialect to describe his being and his situation as a victim of capitalism more than apartheid ...

It was their possessions and their investments that kept the Smales in South Africa too long and prevented their emigration to Canada. But the loss of the possessions "back there" in the city has, Gordimer suggests, freed Bam to be fatherly and he assumes the role previously appropriated by July with the Smales children. Though Bam plays his new role with distinction, Gordimer does not romanticize the relationship, or suggest that it is a substitute for self-identity. As he leaves his son Victor behind when he goes to shoot the pigs, Bam has "a foretaste of the cold resentment that he would feel towards his son, sometime when he was a man; a presentiment of the expulsion from paradise, not of childhood but of parenthood."

The theft of the gun is a devastating blow to Barn's power and pride both in societal and psychological terms, yet it is he who recovers himself the same night to feed the children while Maureen retreats to the hut, drinking the whole of the water bottle "like an alcoholic who hides away to indulge secret addiction." Barn's adaptation is a remarkable and hopeful indication of a species characteristic essential for survival but it is not as remarkable as his response to the loss of his wife. The relations between husband and wife, Gordimer suggests, are the ones in which the most profound and far-reaching effects for the self are to be found The sexual desire fostered and apparently dependent on the materialism of the "master bedroom" life disappears in the enforced intimacy of the squalid hut, brought to life once only by the aphrodisiac of the meal of meat Though Bam recognizes that Maureen' s gesture of baring her breasts before him "was not an intimacy but a castration of his sexuality and hers," he remains tender and protective towards her. It is Maureen's withdrawal from him that renders Bam silent, an impotence more serious than the loss of sexual desire.

The summons of the family to the chiefs village makes it clear how little connection remains between the couple. The title of the only book they bring to the bush, The Betrothed, becomes an ironically apt reminder that the union of Bam Smales and Maureen Hetherington was a product of a world that no longer has any reality. Maureen cannot comprehend the fiction because her own life has become fictive:

She was in another time, place and consciousness, it pressed in upon her and filled her as someone's breath fills a balloon’s shape She was already not what she was No fiction could compete with what she was finding she did not know, could not have imagined or discovered through imagination They had nothing

The ambiguous "they" refers as much to the Smales as to the villagers.

It is Bam, however, who relates the deprivation to the loss of communication with his wife As they prepare to face the village chief who Bam fears will expel them, he longs to share his concern with Maureen. But he recognizes that

he did not know to whom to speak these days, when he spoke to her Maureen His wife The daughter of the nice old fellow who had worked underground all his life The girl m leotards teaching modern dance to blacks at night school The consort clients meant when they said And we'd so much like you and your wife to come to dinner The woman to whom he was "my husband"

Her Not "Maureen " Not "his wife," The presence in the mud hut, mute with an activity of being, of sense of self he could not follow because here there were no familiar areas in which it could be visualized moving, no familiar entities that could be shaping it. With "her" there was no undersurface of recognition, only moments of finding each other out... He had no idea how she would deal with his certainty There was no precedent to go on, with her And he himself How to deal with it How to accept, explain—to anyone' after all these days when his purpose (his male dignity put to the test by "Maureen," "his wife," Victor, Gina, Royce, who were living on mealie-meal) had been how to get away—now it was how to stay.

Although Bam survives the loss of language that accompanies loss of identity, the novel offers no assurance of his rebirth, or of the reintegration of self and community that the researches of Carl Jung suggest is essential for true individuation [The Collected Works, 1970] Nevertheless Bam, alone of the three protagonists, remains in what Jung suggests is the feminine mode (necessary for both males and females) of relatedness, as well as the masculine one (equally necessary for both sexes) of action and thought. [The Collected Works, 1970] As the novel ends, Barn's identity is focused at the most primitive level—of connection to his offspring, an ironic reversal of the roles enacted in the middle class suburb "back there" by the mother/wife, but parallel to the way July's Martha retains identity despite both the absence of her husband and his theoretical dominance. In contrast, at the end of the novel, Maureen

runs trusting herself with all the suppressed trust of a lifetime, alert like a solitary animal at the season when animals neither seek a mate nor take care of young, existing only for their lone survival, the enemy of all that would make claims of responsibility.

The last words of the novel are those of the simple sentence, "She runs." But is the helicopter towards which she is running the symbol of the survival she seeks and an implied authorial validation of the state of individualism without responsibility, or conversely the final symbol of a delusion, a symbol of death rather than life? From the social/political aspect of the novel the latter seems more likely, since it is more probable that the helicopter is manned by black revolutionaries alerted to the existence of the white family by Daniel than that it represents an American deus ex machina. Even if it were the hoped for means of return to civilization, nothing in the novel suggests that Maureen is able to run to something new, a truly re-creative or restorative world that would replace the one in which all her life she has lived without acknowledging it as an exploiter of and parasite on the black. Though she may now be able to acknowledge the truth of the Life photograph of herself as a schoolgirl accompanied by her black friend Lydia who is bearing Maureen's case on her head, her sojourn in the bush has not shown her how to alter her condition. The "real fantasies of the bush" that she dreams of as she runs "delude more inventively than the romantic forests of Grimm and Disney," but what they invent are what she associates with the security of her lost part—"the smell of boiled potatoes ... promises a kitchen, a house," and "the patches where airy knob-thorn trees stand free of the undergrowth and the grass and orderly clumps of Barberton daisies and drifts of nemesia belong to the artful nature of a public park."

What Maureen runs to is a return to the illusion of identity created by a world of privilege and possession. What she runs from is her failure to find any creative source for re-birth. Interestingly Jung suggests that in the second stage of life it is the mother who represents the symbol of the "unconscious as the creative matrix of the future." Maureen is fleeing from motherhood, and her own mother is significant by her absence in her daughter's memories—displaced entirely by the father, the miner "Boss." But unlike her father, who went below ground and lost a finger in the danger of his work with black helpers, Maureen has lost touch with the reality of the lives of those she depends upon. She enters July's rooms in the Smales's suburban yard only to minister to him when he is ill, and in the bush instead of going to July's hut she demands that July come to her....

Maureen is forced to accept her failure in the area she had most prided herself on being superior, the area of communication based on sensation, feeling and intuition, traditionally associated with the feminine. Her access to the matriarchal realm where this often unspoken language is inextricably connected to a power of thought and action that dominates the male even while appearing subversive to him is blocked.

The only unqualified triumph of the novel belongs to the matriarchs, Martha and the mother. No matter who mans the helicopter, they will be freed of the unwanted white people, and they have sacrificed nothing of their own sense of self in the interval. Nevertheless, again (as with Barn's paternal role) Gordimer refuses to romanticize Martha and the mother, who represent the matriarchal way. It is the "old way" and for all its strength and dignity in its own time and place, there can be no turning back to it for someone who has known a different conception of human experience. Maureen can no more go back in time than can Martha go forward. As Martha tells July when he suggests that he will take her to the city with him, "Can you see me in their yard' How would I know my road, who would tell me where to go?"

But for Maureen, without access to the old way and without ability to create a new one the final image is that of "death's harpy ... a grotesque against the vehicle's hood." Maureen's is the greatest tragedy of the novel for she has the closest instinctual link to the two creative forces the novel posits for which language is the symbol—the Eros of feminine relatedness and the Logos of masculine thought and action. The androgynous balance the novel supports though the demonstration of its absence in time present cannot be taken as a symbol for solution on the social/political level, but perhaps in its realization by individuals of both races lies the only hope for the future, for South Africa as a nation, and for each of us as individuals.

Source: Nancy Bailey, "Living Without the Future: Nadine Gordimer's July's People" in World Literature Written in English,autumn, 1984, Vol. 24, No 2, pp. 215-224.