Nadine Gordimer seems to have reconciled the conflicting demands of ethics and aesthetics „in an age when any transcendental basis for ethics (as for aesthetics) is being denied in the name of politics", as John Coetzee has stated. Is an ethics possible without such a transcendental basis in view of deconstruction's premise that the text produces its own meanings in an endless play of the signifier?   The moral agency of the author is elided in the act of writing, so that the text reveals contradictions and silences that the author is not aware of. Whereas the author's conscious statements may be assigned to a rational subject, his/her silences form part of the collective unconscious of a class. This renders the idea of the moral responsibility of the author meaningless. The writer constructs „reality" from the vantage point of the subject which has been constituted by social texts. It is the critic's role to tease out these contradictions and silences.   Writing cannot be seen as a „natural" act, free from all social and political constraints. It is bound up with the social matrix of the writer as subject. His/her attempt to free the text from these constraints expresses a desire to change the social and political conditions underlying it. The author could be seen as an intersection of contradictory texts (an intertext) which s/he does not fully control, yet for which s/he has to accept responsibility.   One could distinguish an aesthetic freedom that affirms the dominant value system from one that questions it. The writer's choice between these options is both moral and political in nature. If the writer does not conform to the „truth" as defined by the norms of the ruling class, his/her construction of the „truth" will nevertheless bear the distortions of society, as Gordimer points out in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech: „(T)his aesthetic venture of ours becomes subversive when the shameful secrets of our times are explored deeply, with the artist's rebellious integrity to the state of being manifest in life around her or him, then the writer's themes and characters inevitably are formed by the pressures and distortions of that society."   If ethics involves a choice between two mutually exclusive options, then aesthetics suspends the law of necessity. It establishes the rules of its own game that allow the artist to say things which can neither be expressed in everyday speech nor in scientific discourse. Art extends and shifts the boundaries of language. This flux is triggered by the unconscious which manifests itself in metaphors, symbols, sounds, rhythm, the combination of opposites, contradictions, and the incommensurate. Although she checks the playful aspect of language by a sense of moral responsibility, Gordimer recognises the effect of the unconscious on her language. In her novels she often lets a protagonist re-examine his/her most deeply held beliefs through a confrontation with the repressed.   The major social and political pressure on the writer in South Africa over the past forty years was apartheid. Gordimer wonders whether she would have become a writer at all, if she had been born „black", as she acquired her real education through reading. This presupposes access to a library, but even then she would only have had a choice between English literature and translations of European writers which would have confined her imagination to late 19th and early 20th century Europe and America. In The Lying Days, Helen Shaw reflects: „I had never read a book in which I myself was recognizable; in which there was a 'girl' like Anna who did the housework and the cooking and called the mother and father Missus and Baas; in which the children ate and lived closely with their parents and played in the lounge and went to the bioscope."   Gordimer is referring to the reality as experienced by a „white" South African girl in a small mining-town. Her position within the relations of class, race and gender imposes restrictions on Helen, which she becomes aware of in the course of the novel. In order to break out of these constraints she has to come to terms with the world of the „black" people in her town and, in a wider sense, South Africa. This confrontation forces her to make a moral decision. Helen becomes involved in the liberal politics of the forties and early fifties, but she has to admit its ineffectiveness in the light of the rise to power of Afrikaner nationalism in 1948. The system of apartheid imposes limits on Gordimer's imagination which are manifested in the split between her „actual" and „virtual" audience. Although her novels are implicitly addressed to a „black" revolutionary class, it is predominantly an overseas and local „white" élite that reads them. Her own social position excludes her from „the repressed black world that her writing cannot really be part of and from which [...] it cannot directly speak." Thus a „whole domain of South African life belongs to the 'unconscious' of her fiction" .Despite her efforts to cross the boundary between „blacks" and „whites", the „black" becomes the Other in Gordimer's writing, for whom she must speak.   The responsibility of articulating the historic demands of the „black" majority, who have been denied access to the means of cultural representation, became a moral injunction for „white" writers in the apartheid era. Instead of delivering moral sermons, Gordimer poses the major social and political questions of her time in such a way that demand an ethical response from her readers. She appeals to the author's and the reader's honesty: „My novels are anti-apartheid, not because of my personal abhorrence of apartheid, but because the society that is the very stuff of my work reveals itself … if you write honestly about life in South Africa, apartheid damns itself."   Helen Shaw's journey of self-realization begins when she disobeys her parents' injunction orders not to go to the mining town alone. By defying their authority she overcomes the fear that inscribes their rules onto her body. The transgression of the familiar opens the possibility of self-knowledge. The recurrent image of the mirror reinforces this. It invokes the split between illusion and reality. The unfamiliar forces the subject to reassess its perception of reality. The mark of „reality" is its ugliness, that which lies beneath the thin veneer of „civilization" or which has been discarded by it. Dust and dirt are associated with the bodily functions, which in the absence of public toilets are performed on the street: „Even though it was winter there were flies here … , and above the gusts of strong sweet putrescence enveloping suddenly from the eating house, the smoke of burned mealies and the rotten sweetness of discarded oranges squashed everywhere underfoot, there was the high, strong, nostril-burning smell of stale urine." This triggers a feeling of nausea and disgust in Helen: „I felt suddenly that I wanted to bat at my clothes and brush myself down and feel over my hair in case something had settled on me - some horrible dirt, something alive, perhaps." The obsession with smells and contagious diseases has strong racial overtones: „I looked at these dark brown faces - [...] ; wondering, receptive, unthinking, taking in with their eyes as earth takes water; close-eyed, sullen with the defensive sullenness of the defenceless; noisy and merry with the glee of the innocent." The „black" workers threaten the order of the „white" middle class. The stench and noise of the town is contrasted with the tennis party at home. Helen escapes the confines of her family only to reinforce her bonds with the „white" high society of Atherton.   The theme of putrefaction recurs in The Conservationist: The corpse of an anonymous „black" man on Mehring's farm is denied his proper burial rights by the „white" policemen . The body haunts both Mehring and the farm-labourers until it is returned to the land, closing the disruption of the continuity between the ancestors and the living. The main narrative, which changes between Mehring's and Jacobus' perspectives, is interspersed with fragments of Zulu mythology. Mehring's acquires the farm as a retreat from the business world of the city, although he wants a measure of profit from it. This stands in marked contrast to the relationship of his Afrikaans neighbours to their land. They are fiercely possessive of „their land" as it is their only means of survival, though in both cases the „black" labourers cultivate the land. Their knowledge of the land is belittled: They are „lazy" and lack the know-how of the „white" commercial farmer, but they are held responsible when anything goes wrong.   Dispossessed of their land and the products of their labour, they have to produce a profit for their „white" employers. Despite its centrality to the novel, the question of land-ownership is never foregrounded. It remains a silence both in the narratives of Mehring and Jacobus, the „black" foreman. It is displaced by the question whether land-ownership should be hereditary or based on profit. Underlying this is the assumption that the land can be exploited infinitely. Mehring's utilitarian ideology is paralleled by his relationship to „blacks" and women: They can be bought and disposed of just like a piece of land. In their association with chaos and nature they pose a threat to the order of the intellect.   Mehring's view of the land and the elements as a threat carries political overtones, „as if the invader [i.e. the fire] were reconnoitring a place to cross - which eventually it did by leaping from reeds to reeds and burning down towards the hidden islands." Inorganic nature seems to possess an unfathomable force which encompasses both destruction and regeneration. After the fire everything seems dead except the „glancing river": „The river is extraordinarily strong, slithering and shining, already it seems to be making the new paths possible for it through the weakened foothold of destroyed reeds." The descriptions of nature have a distinctive sensual, even erotic quality.   In Burger's Daughter, Gordimer tests the collective values of a leading communist's family in the liberation movement against the virtues of individualism through the characters of Rosa Burger and Conrad. He sets in motion her self-questioning and it is to him that her memoirs in prison are addressed, although he might already be dead. She comments: „One is never talking to oneself, always one is addressed to someone. Suddenly, without knowing the reason, at different stages in one's life, one is addressing this person or that all the time, even dreams are performed before an audience." Through her exploration of her own desires which leads her to France and England, she redefines her role in the struggle for a society free of exploitation. When she is imprisoned on her return to South Africa, this is as a result of her own choice and not of a restriction imposed by her family. Her process of self-realization - including her moments of ecstasy and despair - is contained in this complex decision. July's People anticipates the rupture of „white" society in what JanMohamed terms the „hypothetical, but really inevitable black rebellion which seems to have turned into a race war" .Gordimer explores the effects of the civil war on an ordinary „white" family who seek refuge from it with the family of their „black" servant in one of the „homelands" .In a reversal of the master-servant relationship, the „white" family has to unlearn its privileges and learn what it means to be dependant on a „benefactor" .The novel does not reflect on the industrial workers who are potentially more revolutionary than the servant class, because of their ability to organize in the work-place. This is borne out by the powerful trade-union movement which emerged in the seventies.   In her latest novel My Son's Story, Nadine Gordimer adopts the persona of the son of a „black" activist, who is writing his first autobiographical novel. The protagonist, Will (named after William Shakespeare), records the story of his father's involvement in the struggle of the eighties, and how he is personally disillusioned when he finds out about his father's affair with a „white" woman. He becomes his father's reluctant confidante when he accidentally meets him at the cinema while he himself is playing truant. This discovery of his father's sexual infidelity, which suggests to him that his involvement in the liberation struggle is not merely altruistic, gives Will a sense of power. In retrospect he says: „What he did - my father - made me a writer." He sees his contribution to the politics of his country as that of a writer, distinct from his father's contribution as an activist. He explains this as follows: „I'm going to be the one to record, someday, what he and my mother/Aila and Baby and the others did, what it really was like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free, as desert dwellers' days are determined by the struggle against thirst and those of dwellers amid snow and ice by the struggle against the numbing of cold. That's what the struggle really is, not a platform slogan repeated like a TV jingle." Gordimer thus asserts the key role of literature in the reconstruction of society in the post-apartheid era. It intervenes at precisely that point where the slogan ends by exploring the relationship between individuals and society in depth and developing a new value system in that process.   Nadine Gordimer received various international awards, culminating in the Nobel Prize in 1991. International acclaim brought her recognition in South Africa. This indicates a colonial relationship between South African literature and publishers in London and New York: Once a writer from the Third World has made it in the metropolis, s/he is re-exported into the Third World and celebrated as a „great" writer. A reviewer who does not wish to reinforce this form of colonialism needs to re-appropriate Gordimer's work within the South African context, from which it has been expropriated by the metropolis. This, I believe, can only be done by re-thinking the relationship of a writer to his/her community and its ethics.