Family and social solidarity in Nadine Gordimer's My son’s story

Francesco Gissi

                       
In this paper I try to show the interrelation in My son’s story between social solidarity in the development of the family and political struggle and self, in an uncertain identity.

I begin presenting the distinction of social solidarity as defined by Durkheim in The Division of Labour in Society (1893): Solidarity is social cohesion based upon the dependence individuals have on each other. Mechanical solidarity comes from the homogeneity of work and purpose between individuals, most commonly in preindustrial societies and in the novel, common to the race movement. Durkheim’s work points out correctly that those societies tend to be ruled with repressive sanctions, and there’s prevalence of penal law. This is why it has been a question of sociology how and why this type of authority works in nominally modern societies like South Africa in apartheid. Organic solidarity, on the other hand, comes from interdependence of highly specialized work in industrial societies. In colonial structures hegemony of one group breaks or devalues solidarity bonds between oppressed individuals by ideological assertions of superiority of race, unequal distribution of self-esteem, wealth and power.

There came a point, not possible to determine exactly when, at which equality became a cry that couldn’t be made out, had been misheard of misinterpreted, turned out to be something else-finer. Freedom. That was it. Equality was not freedom; it had been only the mistaken yearning to become like the people of the town. And who wanted to become like the very ones feared and hated? Envy was not freedom. (24)

Sonny has already constructed a family, yet he falls so in love that he starts needing Hannah. Being in the same movement, their dependency and exalted love in the struggle are almost one and the same. Disruption of social norms and family becomes less important when a common purpose and common transgression are in order. This corresponds with mechanical solidarity in the movement, where individuals matter less. Sonny’s identity, as a teacher, was always aligned with knowledge. One could also point out the kind of knowledge of ‘in-betweenness’ that coloured identity means for Sonny (Sakamoto, 6). Now this knowledge is being used for action and his self-esteem in a position of power grows, he has respect, he’s in love with a blond woman; a mark of possessing the location or symbol of sex, wealth and power. He therefore feels he has escaped solitude. Evidently, as he had a family and cared for his students, this escape is from a social solitude, the solitude of marginality.

 Joy. That was what went with it. The light of joy that illuminates long talk of ideas, not the 60-watt bulbs that shine on family matters. (65) Sonny: “You’re the only friend I’ve ever had” (67) There grew in him a defiant desire to be seen to belong together (72)

They are both working for freedom. Work, that’s supposed to be normal and unheroic, is for them exceptional.

 The nature of work she did develops high emotions. It arises from crises. It deals only with disruption, disjunction-circumstances in people’s lives that cannot be met with the responses that serve for continuity (89)

With this exceptionality comes a recasting of morality: “All I have had was the courage to be a victim” (129) “Better to be vile than esteemed, when not to be receives reproach of being.” However, Sonny says: “There’s no freedom in working for freedom” (96). One can understand this better if we use Isaiah Berlin’s concept of negative and positive freedom. In his activities, Sonny fights for both positive freedom, of education, of being enabled to pursue certain goals, and negative freedom, that is, freedom from constrains. He lacks negative freedom to pursue romantic love. Meanwhile Will and Baby have too much negative freedom, as their father leaves home and pays little attention to care. Will is put in a position of equality after he is in the know. When Baby cuts her wrists, she had showed the symptoms of adolescent solitude (sexual promiscuity, drugs, self-denigration, self-harm) and therefore doesn’t know what to do. In this position one should provide care and authority, where as they “discussed what she wanted to do” (78). This lack of authority is to be expected from the situation because a) The movement is working to defy authority and in these cases all authority is under suspicion and b) Sonny has lost the moral legitimacy to take the role of father. Also, Aila is put in a position where her role as a women and wife is challenged because his husband has stopped working as such. She cuts her hair and joins the revolution, breaking the closest circle. However, their children make her still a mother and a woman. By the point a husband for Baby has been found, Will’s role has also changed. The contradiction is thus twofold, on the one hand Sonny says:

Marriage, these days. In their circumstanses, the instabiliy, exile, no home-what for? Marriage implies certain social structures, and we’re busy breaking up the existing ones (175)

And on the opposite side we have Will, who studies economics, a grounded, useful study, for their home. Economics, we know, comes from the greek oikos-nomos (the law of the house). It is, as well, the exaltation of organic solidarity in society. Economics then celebrates the order of interdependence. Will then has the role of grounded, non-revolutionary man. He has no charismatic authority. He has pragmatic knowledge needed in societies that seek stability.

My mother would like to see me-at least one of her children-’settled’ with a conventional domestic life, nearby. And hang liberation, eh. (…) She, too, has a role for me: tame Will keeps the home fires burning while noble Sonny and Baby defend the freedom of the people. I said to her when I brought the results of my first-year studies-distinctions all the way-What am I doing this for? Who’s going to employ a business school graduate in a revolution? (…) -We’re going to need qualified people. Bush fighters won’t win the economic war.- (…) You’re valuable Will.” (186-187)

At the same time Sonny loses ground in the movement and with it comes a loss of authority. As his new self was based in such a role, his radical descent inside the movement brings about a questioning of self:

Self, self; since when was he obsessed with self (191) With Hannah there was the sensuality of commitment; for commitment implies danger (…) In this freak displacement, the biological drive of his life, which belonged to his wife and the children he’d begotten, was diverted to his lover. He and Hannah begot no child; the revolutionary movement was to be their survivor. The excitement of their mating was for that. But Aila was the revolutionary, now. (241-42)

As it is said, “Something bigger than self saves self” (243). The problem then is how and why save self, for it would not do to save it for selfish reasons. Both romantic love and education, unless used like he had done and is now unable to, are primarily individual more than social. Now that he’s come back from homo faber to homo sapiens, he has the problem of reflection to deal with.

A prisoner of conscience, you sit in detention, on trial, convicted for the liberty of all your people. That conscience takes precedence over any conscience about a wife and family left to shift for themselves, and over any woman you have need of. (157)

Then the result of the movement, of action, becomes crucial. Near the end of the novel Sonny had been to Lusaka to visit his grandson, Will takes him back to their home, that has been burned by revolutionary  whites. They enter Will’s room:

Your room, he said, making a claim for me, my life, against destruction, making sure I wouldn’t forget. But there were no categories of ownership of even usage left. What had been the kitchen, the sitting-room, the places for sleeping were all turned out, flung together in one final raid, of fire and water, the last of the invasions in which our lives in that house were dragged and thrown about by hostile hands. (273) He (Sonny) went poking at rubble with his foot and dirtying his fingers tugging away wet remains as if there were bodies to be found and rescued. He was breathing fast and loud in anger or close to tears; or both. Sick, sick, they’re sick he kept hammering at me. (273-274) We emerged and our people who had dared to come out were still there, staring. Their eyes fixed him. Their fear held them. I saw what it was-they expected him to have brought something out of what was destroyed. Something for them. He grinned and his whole face drew together an agonized grimace of pain and reassurance, threat and resistance drawn in every fold of skin, every line of feature that the human face could be capable of conveying only under some unimaginable inner demand. (274)

Sonny has tried to find meaning in the past and the past is not dust. His face becomes the face of colonial trauma, the “unimaginable inner demand” to overcome the past and make a future. At the same time there’s resistance. There’s freedom lost and gained. In gaining the freedom they sought, Sonny has lost the home he made in the movement, and the place of family, their old home -“This is my father’s house” (272) says Will- has been destroyed in the process.

The novel ends with a poem where a bird “Dashes in swift through the bars, breaks its neck/Against stone walls.” Such ending can only point out to failure. However, Will also says: “What he did- my father-made me a writer. Do I have to thank him for that? Why couldn’t I have been something else?” it is his father’s authority and passion for Shakespeare that informs Will’s eventual authorship (Jacobs, 39). In this way, the political circumstances that first elevated Sonny and then questioned him at the end created a space for Will. But he laments “why couldn’t I have been something else?” because like any writer, he is in the paradox of writing alone and from his interior self, but doing it so others can read him and maybe understand him. Where’s the solidarity of the writer? As to the conclusion, one can and should celebrate the victory of anti-apartheid, while at the same time saying ‘we are not there yet’. This ‘not yet’ is identity being created. The truth of the novel, like Sonny, lies likely in an uncomfortable in-between, where acting for and relying on others saves one self. Perhaps, then, Sonny’s mistake was not acting for and relying on the closest circle, that is stronger, and when broken, leaves one in the unknown, with only ashes to dig.    

 

Works cited

Gordimer, Nadine. My son’s story.

Sakamoto, Toshiko. ‘Coloured’ identity and cultural transformation in Nadine Gordimer’s My son’s Story. Web, 17^th November, 2013. http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/acd/re/k-rsc/lcs/kiyou/14-1/RitsIILCS_14.1pp.313-330SAKAMOTO.pdf

Jacobs, J.U. Nadine Gordimer’s intertextuality: Authority and authorship in My son’s Story. Web, 17^th November, 2013. http://www.jstor.org