Notes for a discussion of James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN: six questions/six responses

November 28, 2018

University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh

1.            What would be your comments to this Baldwin statement if it was directed to all Black males, "Our crowns have been bought and paid for....All we have to do is put them on our heads."  What impact would this message also have on how they view themselves?

My first response is to ask if the purchased crowns are made of thorns and barbed wire or of precious metals, and my second reaction is to ask what is the actual or symbolic meaning of wearing a crown.  Where is the fascination with an object associated with royalty/aristocracy coming from?  And was Baldwin sending forth an allusion to Christianity?

It is impossible to say how "all Black males" would receive the statement, and it simply will not do to speak in generalities that lack confirming data.  As an African American male, I am not the least interested in putting a crown on my head. I am an ordinary person who works for a living, who has no patience with delusions about ancestry. In my mind's eye I see the 1980s Budweiser series on the kings and queens of Africa.  I think that series, however well-intentioned it was, was at bottom an ambiguous bit of advertising to sell beer.

I am not sure this message has significant impact on how males view themselves, because males possess a full range of attitudes regarding how they undervalue, value, and overvalue themselves.  In terms of black speech, the words "king," "duke," "earl," "prince" and "count" do get associated with musicians and other artists.  Ultimately, Baldwin's statement refers to what black males and females have earned by dint of sustained struggles in political economy.  The question is so framed as to invite a mission impossible: asking all Black males in the United States what they think about crowns.  

2.            James Baldwin describes in Giovanni's Room a world that is difficult even for a white same-gender-loving male.  David, the main character reveals through his sexual relationships that his view on gender roles and sexuality is at the heart of his internal struggle with his identity and his inability to separate the two is what makes him destructive to himself and those who love him.  Baldwin appears to be ahead of his time in his understanding of gender and sexuality.  Share your thoughts on Baldwin's writing about masculinity and sexuality.  Do you think his perspectives influenced his future writings?

There is no reason to think "a white same-gender-loving male" would have an easier life journey, even in 2018, than a Chinese or Japanese or Hispanic same-gender-loving male.  I preface my comments by saying I have been reading Baldwin since 1959; my perspectives on his contributions to 2018 discourses on race, gender, and sexual identity are old-fashioned and outside the box of what may be trending in academic and non-academic sectors.  I speak from the standpoint of saying we should read Baldwin thoroughly, think critically about those work through the lens of our lived experiences, and only resort to the ever-growing criticism and commentary on his works as a second or third resort.  I set the terms of my engagement with Baldwin's writing on personal grounds, just as I do with the legacy of Richard Wright.

It is a given, for me,  that a writer's sequential perspectives influence what she or he writes in a future.

It is useful  to read two essays from Nobody Knows My Name ----"Notes for a Hypothetical Novel" and "The Male Prison."  Especially the essay on Andre Gide and the novel Madeleine, where Baldwin was proclaiming already in 1954 that if Gide wanted to talk about homosexuality, "he ought…to have sounded a little less disturbed."  It is pointless according to Baldwin to ask whether homosexuality is natural, because he could not see what difference the answer would make.  He was more concerned with "outwitting oblivion," and  "to ask whether or not homosexuality is natural is really like asking whether or not it was natural for Socrates to swallow hemlock…..for the Germans to send upwards of six million people to an extremely twentieth-century death" (Nobody 128).  I don't think Baldwin was, to use wording that is as tired as an overworked prostitute, was disturbed by homosexuality although the idea of homosexuality continues to disturb some of his Bible-haunted readers.  Baldwin disturbs us for our edification.

3.            James Baldwin stated, "It is quite impossible to write a worthwhile novel about a Jew or a Gentile or a Homosexual, for people refuse, unhappily, to function in so neat and one-dimensional a fashion."  Many of Baldwin's critics wished he had kept to just talking about race ---  specifically about African Americans ---  and kept other intersecting identities, except perhaps class ---invisible.  Is there still a trend in both literature and society to want to see African American characters and people as having only one identity ---their race?

I think Baldwin was suggesting that it is not possible to write a worthwhile novel  about a cartoon, a stereotype, or a prejudice which denies the existence of something on the contrary. The duration we call life is neither one- dimensional nor neat.  In "Words of a Native Son" (originally published in Playboy, December 1964), Baldwin was clear about the obligation of the writer as an artist. 

"Every artist is involved with one single effort, really, which is somehow to dig down to where reality is.  We live, especially in this age and in this country and at this time, in a civilization which supposes that reality is something you can touch, that reality is tangible. The aspirations of the American people, as far as one can read the current evidence, depend very heavily on this concrete, tangible, pragmatic point of view.  But every artist and, in fact, every person knows, deeper than conscious knowledge or speech can go, that beyond every reality there is another one which controls it.

…….

The things that people really do and really mean and really feel are almost impossible for them to describe, but these are the very things which are most important about them.  These things control them and that is where reality is.  What one tries to do in a novel is to show this reality."  (The Price of the Ticket, 396)

Yes. There does seem to be in the publishing industry some desire to see "African American character and people as having only one identity ---their race."  The desire is impotent.  It shall not have a blissful orgasm.

4.            How did Baldwin's work, particularly Another Country, look at the intersection of race and sexuality and open up new dimensions in his future work?  Are these dimensions  relevant today?

Yes, the intersections and dimensions have not ceased to be relevant in 2018.  They may be hyper-relevant.  In Another Country,  Baldwin was dealing with aspects of chaos, with actuality,   prior to its being reduced to reality.    I am not enough of a Baldwin scholar to say with  confidence that he was indebted to Christopher Marlowe, but I do note the wording "another country" has special meaning in The Jew of Malta when Barabas the Jew says "Fornication?  But that was in another country , and besides the wench is dead." (Act 4, sc. 1)  I like the ghost of accusation in that bit of dialogue as much as I like Baldwin's comment on what he intended in Another Country in his 1970 interview with John Hall [Transatlantic Review 37-38 (Autumn 1970-71): 5-14 ]. "A lot of people in that book had never appeared in fiction before.  People overlook this fact.  And there's an awful lot of my experience which has never been seen in the English language before.  Rufus, for example.  There are no antecedents for him.  He was in the novel because I didn't think anyone had ever watched the disintegration of a black boy from that particular point of view.  Rufus was partly responsible for his doom, and in presenting him as partly responsible, I was attempting to break out of the whole sentimental image of the afflicted nigger driven that way (to suicide) by white people" (Conversations with James Baldwin, 104). And in this interview Baldwin suggested to Hall that his future work would change and that all he could do was "to work, and see where [his] experiments lead [him]" (104).  Thus, such intersection of race and sexuality as we find in the novel is still relevant, because good writers are still obliged to examine the reality that stands behind the surface of reality.

5.            In a 1968 interview on race for Esquire magazine Baldwin stated, "The American White man does not really want to have an autonomous Negro male anywhere near him?"  Do you believe this message to still be the sentiment some 50 years later and if so why?  If not, why not?

The statement contains two abstractions (American White man and Negro male), a specification of proximity (to have…anywhere near him), and an utterly crucial modifier "autonomous"-----which by dictionary definition means "1. having self-government, 2. acting  independently or having the freedom to do so " (The Oxford Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus).  Between 1968, the year in which LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal published the anthology  Black Fire (a major document of autonomy), and 2018, the abstractions have become more diverse and nuanced; the notion of having another person near oneself has more fully exposed the benefits and dangers of intimacy;  the likelihood of being fully autonomous rather than interdependent has diminished. 

The statement needs temporal or historic interpretation. And it is  our need to consider that a white man may indeed want to have an autonomous black man near him if the two of them play on the same NFL team or if they are American soldiers in one combat zone or another.  We need also to note what Baldwin said about history and black people and white people in the essay "White Man's Guilt" (Ebony, August 1965).  In an invisible location, "in the most private chamber of his heart always, the white American remains proud of that history for which he does not wish to pay, and from which, materially, he has profited so much "(The Price of the Ticket 411).  He added that it is fatal for black people to buy into the view that they deserve what is horrible in their American history ; if they do so, they perish. "Moreover," Baldwin continued, "the history of white people has led them to a fearful baffling  place where they have begun to lose touch with reality ---to lose touch, that is, with themselves  ---  and where they are truly not happy for they know they are not truly safe" (412).  The rash of randomly motivated events in contemporary society  wherein white men (it is usually men) attempt to murder large numbers of white people is evidence of being "not truly safe."  Something quite inhumane and evil has been loosed in our nation since November  2016, and it tempts one to believe that the sentiment which existed among some Americans 50 years ago is still operative among some Americans in 2018. That belief emerges from excavation of the historical narratives of the present.

I have not had sufficient conversations with the abstraction American White man (a gendered abstraction to be sure) to determine that the sentiment is still the same as it was in 1968 or that in 1968 the sentiment was more than hyperbole.  I can do no more than speculate.

6.            The question of race is at the fore in one of the essays in Baldwin's book The Fire Next Time. The essay, "My Dungeon Shook ----Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation," implores his nephew and other young black men "to transcend already simmering anger and adopt a broader, perhaps even compassionate, perspective" as it pertains to race in America.  Do you think Baldwin took a defeatist approach to being Black in America?  If so why, if not, explain.

Baldwin seems to have embraced and adapted , in the context of what we call the humanities and humanism,  the Heisenberg  "Uncertainty (or Indeterminacy) Principle," the idea in quantum physics that quantum particles do not occupy a fixed, measurable position. [See Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (1962)]  The acknowledgement of limits is not in itself "defeatist," although from some extremely radical vantages it is said to be so, from vantages where the blues is a defeatist posture.

In the text of "My Dungeon Shook…, " I do not find the wording "to transcend already simmering anger and adopt a broader, perhaps even compassionate, perspective."  Use of the word "transcend" is a smokescreen that obscures what I think Baldwin was saying to his nephew in urging him not to "perish in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go behind the white man's definitions, by never being allowed to spell your proper name" (The Fire Next Time, 23).  Baldwin was urging his nephew to fight and not to fiddle (echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks' sonnet "First fight. Then Fiddle.")  This is much removed from being defeatist in America. Baldwin was not wasn't naïve in the way Ta-Nehisi Coates, unfortunately, seems a bit naïve in giving advice to his son in Between the World and Me (2015).