It is bound up with the social matrix of the writer as subject. 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 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. The major social and political pressure on the writer in South Africa over the past forty years was apartheid. 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. 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.