The “Adolescent American” Abroad: Assessing Expatriation and Tragedy in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
Cody Reid-Dodick
A Master’s Thesis submitted to the English Department of the University of Amsterdam
Table of Contents
Introduction... 3
Chapter 1: Contextualizing the Pervasiveness of Race-Based Giovanni’s Room Criticism... 13
Chapter 2: “American Adolescence” and David’s Expatriation... 30
Chapter 3: The Tragedy of American Self-Deception... 42
Conclusion... 55
Introduction
More than thirty years after his death, James Baldwin, the prolific American intellectual, is back in vogue. As his native country experiences a tangle of grave identity crises – political, social, economic, racial – Baldwin’s cutting, prescient takes on American history and society have gained a renewed relevance. Baldwin spent much of his life relentlessly examining how identities develop and interact within America’s cultural imagination. Read today, his fiction and non-fiction re-contextualize the country’s complex reckoning with its own troubled history, its sense of national self, and its elusive myths of equality and unity. To study Baldwin now is not to unearth a historical thinker and tenuously re-appropriate him to fit the current cultural playing field. Instead, it is to access an enduring, almost timeless, body of work that, through Baldwin’s unique combination of acute perception and raw personal struggle, exposes the fundamental illusions of American identity.
In 1948, Baldwin moved to Paris. Never again would he reside in the United States with any real permanence, so his exhaustive prodding of what exactly it meant to be an American took place mostly from afar. Baldwin dissected his country while in exile from it, in flight from the very ills he spent decades so forcefully indicting. Here, perhaps, lies the central irony of his career: his most discerning writing on the question of America came from a continent away. This was not an entirely unusual orientation – there is a long history of expatriate artists whose escape from the clutches of American culture allowed them to more shrewdly critique it. Henry James and Ernest Hemingway are chief examples, as are John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, and Richard Wright. However, it was the unique nature of Baldwin’s expatriation itself that makes the life he lived abroad, and the work he produced there, so ripe for examination.
This thesis project is guided by the same broad questions which so deeply concerned Baldwin during his career: how does one’s expatriation problematize, sharpen, and ultimately define how they view America? How and why does the complicated American condition become more starkly realized from afar? And, most importantly, what does it mean to be an American abroad? In both his fictional work and his personal essays, Baldwin chipped away at these questions with bold eloquence. His process was less one of distanced observation and analysis, and rather one of raw self-examination. As he wrote in the introduction to his 1961 collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, the social forces that menaced him at home had “become interior” and journeyed with him across the Atlantic. “The question of who I was had at last become a personal question,” he wrote, “and the answer was to be found in me” (xii). It is this tortured process of self-exploration – borne out in Baldwin’s fiction and essays, as well as in letters and interviews – that forms the foundation of this thesis project.
Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room, provides an especially applicable source text to focus some of the wide-ranging notions of expatriation, American mythology, and identity mentioned above. The novel is set mainly in Paris, where David, an American running from his drab life in the States, meets Giovanni, an Italian bartender. The two begin a passionate affair over the course of several months before David’s fiancée, Hella, returns from a stint traveling in Spain. David’s brutal struggle with his sexuality and sense of shame about his deepening love for Giovanni occupies much of the novel. After Hella’s return, David abandons Giovanni, which indirectly leads to the latter’s spiral out of control and the murder of his boss. The opening and closing scenes of the novel take place on the eve of Giovanni’s scheduled execution. Baldwin wrote almost all of Giovanni’s Room while in Europe, and, like most of his fictional work, both superficial and deeper thematic elements can be closely traced to his own life (Leeming 127).
While the novel is Baldwin’s only fictional work that features no black characters, it is not, as Baldwin’s biographer David Leeming wrote, “a bastard among the literary offspring of James Baldwin; it is one of the more impassioned expressions of the story he told all his life” (123).
As a novel about the tragedy of an American’s expatriation to Europe, written by an American expatriate while abroad in Europe, Giovanni’s Room figures as an essential text in the broader survey of Baldwin’s expatriation and his tireless exploration of American history, identity, and imagination. However, since its release in 1956, the novel has been relatively under-considered by critics, especially compared to its predecessor, Go Tell it on the Mountain, and many of Baldwin’s later essays. For the most part, the related critical discussions revolve around Baldwin’s omission of black characters, and the various implications of such a choice. Less has been written exclusively considering the novel’s tragic view of expatriation, and the ways in which Baldwin exposes the fatal flaws of being an American abroad. The aim of this thesis project is first to trace and critique the existing scholarship around race and Giovanni’s Room, and then to extend the critical conversation to more closely consider how the novel operates as a distinct fictional manifestation of Baldwin’s personal notions of expatriation and American identity. While my arguments will be supported consistently by close textual analysis of Giovanni’s Room, I will also lean heavily on Baldwin’s non-fictional writing to more firmly situate the novel within the key thematic arc of Baldwin’s intellectual career: the discovery of what it means to be an American.
Before I can argue for the relevance of Baldwin’s own expatriation in critiquing Giovanni’s Room, I must first dedicate a portion of my introduction to closely tracing the contours of Baldwin’s time abroad. While biographical details of Baldwin’s life are widely available, Leeming’s official biography provides the most thorough and nuanced account of his
experiences in Europe. Much of the following summary is drawn from Leeming’s work, and consolidated to provide an outline of Baldwin’s expatriation that is most relevant to this thesis project.
In some respects, Baldwin’s first act of expatriation came when he moved from his family home in Harlem to Greenwich Village in 1943. This was both a highly practical and highly symbolic move. Realistically, he needed to escape his home to avoid becoming deeply resentful of his family. Remaining in Harlem meant settling into a life of “no prospects,” the visceral consequences of which he’d just witnessed in his stepfather’s own decline (Leeming 43). More symbolically, the move into the Village “scene” – notoriously liberal, bohemian, artistic, racially and politically progressive – signified an embrace of independence that was deeply emboldening for a young intellectual. He began holding court at his favorite MacDougal Street restaurant, the Calypso, where he sharpened his wit and honed his cutting voice. The Village was also an intense and interesting place to begin more fully discovering his sexual identity. Where Harlem necessitated secrecy, the Village encouraged exploration. But it also introduced Baldwin to the complicated tangle of sensuality, emotional insecurity, self-doubt, and racialized sexuality that would define much of his sexual and romantic life. It was his move from Harlem to the Village that inaugurated his lifelong struggle with freedom and love, a struggle that lurks behind the fiction of Giovanni’s Room.
In 1948, after five years in the Village and with only forty dollars in his pocket, Baldwin left for Paris. It is important to situate this move within the extensive lineage of American artists who moved across the Atlantic to distance themselves from the “provinciality” of American life and embrace the cultural density of the old continent. As critic Robert Tomlinson notes, “since colonial times, the Grand Tour of Europe, and more particularly visits to Paris and Rome, had
signified for the sensitive American artist a return to the locus of Western civilization” (135). And for African American artists in the twentieth century, cultural reasons for expatriation were compounded by social ones. Several jazz musicians and writers followed the steady stream of black GIs who’d relocated to Paris after World War II, hoping to escape the racial persecution and artistic marginalization they experienced at home. Baldwin was very much a part of this march of optimism – he arrived in Paris hoping for the artistic liberation that could come when unharnessed from the racial realities of his American life (Tomlinson 136).
Baldwin’s original expatriation to Paris can also be characterized as a “flight,” an escape from the foreboding reality of self-destruction coming his way in New York. In an essay titled “The New Lost Generation”, he writes of the suicide of his friend – induced by the excruciating state of being black in America – as the catalyst for his move from New York: “I was absolutely certain that I, too, if I stayed here, would come to a similar end” (661). Even if it didn’t result in his physical death, he knew that remaining in New York would allow his own hatred and desire for revenge to fester until he became unrecognizable. He would later render a tragic portrait of “what could have been” in the self-loathing character of Rufus in Another Country, who jumps off the George Washington Bridge under the pressure of his deep-seated conceit for the white world smothering him. According to Leeming, Baldwin needed a new context in which to confront “his own inner world,” (56) something Baldwin affirmed in his own self-reflection. “What Europe still gives an American -- or gave us -- is the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself,” he wrote in 1961 (“The New Lost Generation” 668).
Baldwin’s flight inaugurated a “head-on confrontation” with his own identity that took place amidst the chaos of expatriate Parisian life into which he dove (Leeming 57). Baldwin quickly settled into an existence in Paris that seemed a mix of myth and reality – a life that was,
at once, transient, decadent, free-flowing, and bohemian. The atmosphere of relatively open sexual exploration he first encountered in the Village transferred across the Atlantic, as did the nagging sexual ambivalence that Baldwin had begun developing. Although certainly aware of the Hemingway-esque mystique that surrounded him and his cohorts, Baldwin’s early
expatriation was far from an unencumbered fantasy (Leeming 59). While it sharpened his sense of what it meant to be an American, he was still, just like at home, searching for a more coherent understanding of his own identity. The end of his first year in France was capped by a half-hearted suicide attempt brought on by a deepening sense of loneliness and lack of purpose (Leeming 72). Beneath the grandeur of the “New Lost Generation” he found himself in, was a base disillusionment with the hollowness of fleeting connection and drunken bohemian wandering.
In early 1950, Baldwin met Lucien Happersberger, a Swiss “streetboy” living in Paris who would become the love of his life. Although they were lovers for only a small portion of their nearly forty-year companionship (Lucien would go on to marry three times and have two children), Baldwin found in Lucien the sort of deep-rooted connection and hopeful sense of domesticity he had so yearned for. The passionate, complicated start to the relationship formed much of the conceptual framework for Giovanni’s Room (Leeming 74-76). Paris, in all its temptation and natural romance, formed the tableau for this intense tangle – two expatriates liberated by each other’s love, but weighed down by deeper uncertainties, inadequacies, and a foreboding sense of impermanence. Noting the non-fictional roots of Giovanni’s Room, Leeming writes that “subliminally, he was creating the novel that several years later would allow him to confront so many of the personal problems that had plagued him before Lucien came into his life” (74). But before that, Baldwin had to experience his first profound fictional breakthrough.
In one of their better stretches, the two spent the winter of 1951-52 in a tiny Swiss mountain village of Loche. There, experiencing the acute alienation of being both black and American in a setting completely devoid of either identity, Baldwin found the conditions that allowed him to finally finish the manuscript he’d left America to write (Leeming 78). It would become his debut novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain. As his first stint in Paris ended in 1952, it became clear that this initial “confrontation” of expatriation had profoundly altered his life. Out of it came his lifelong relationship with Lucien – replete with all the complications of loving a non-American whilst abroad – as well as the context to write the novel that would catapult him into the
international literary spotlight.
Baldwin returned to Paris for much of 1953, energized by his newfound prominence, but dogged by requests for a sequel to Go Tell it on the Mountain. He took a working vacation to the South of France, where, again, a change of scenery provided him the space to reflect and begin formulating an understanding of his constantly writhing internal state. Here, the roots of Giovanni’s Room that had been planted during his early Paris days became more robust. He “brooded” for days about his “his own emotional needs, his own failure to achieve a viable domestic situation, his sexual ambivalence, and the apparent failure of the one great love affair of his life” (Leeming 95). But instead of falling into another characteristic malaise, he channeled this period of brooding into the beginning of a new novel that would eventually become
Giovanni’s Room, a work built on his “autobiographical meditation on love and the payment incurred for the denial of love” (Leeming 96). The importance of Baldwin’s own experience of expatriation in the formulation of Giovanni’s Room’s key thematic arc cannot be understated: this is a novel borne out of the expatriate experience. As Leeming states unequivocally, “Giovanni is a direct product of the ten years following his leaving home,” (127) and Baldwin
himself affirmed that the novel emerged from his expatriate experiences in Greenwich Village and Paris. In short, the fictional focus of this thesis project is the product of the deeply complex web of experiences and emotional anguish that Baldwin’s own expatriation wrought.
Slowed by trips back to America and the reticence of many publishers to accept a second novel with no black characters, it took until 1956 for Giovanni’s Room to finally be published. By this time, Baldwin had been living in France for most of the previous eight years, and while the country had inspired the creativity that would jumpstart his career, he was beginning to feel disillusioned by the persistent lack of personal fulfillment which had defined his youth. He felt an urge to return to a variety of artistic projects in New York City and a growing sense of
conflict and guilt over his role in the burgeoning American Civil Rights struggle (Leeming 116). This deeply-rooted ambivalence would come to define his experience as an expatriate for much of the rest of his life. After spending an extended period in Istanbul, he decided, once and for all, that this burning, dichotomous choice between America and abroad was a false one. In a 1961 letter to his agent Robert P. Mills, Baldwin wrote that he’d henceforth resign himself to
becoming a “trans-Atlantic commuter” and, more dramatically, a “stranger everywhere” (Field 115). This orientation fit Baldwin, as the tug-of-war between full expatriation and permanent American residence was bound to be a lifelong battle with no victor. As Leeming writes, he “was doomed to juggle his prophetic mission as an American with his deeply complex and confused state as James Baldwin the individual” (197). In 1970, after a frenzied few years of shuttling between France, Turkey, New York, and California, he bought an old Provençal farmhouse in St. Paul-de-Vence, near Nice, where he would spend much of the rest of his life. While his feverish traveling and writing continued basically until his death in 1987, it was in the South of France where Baldwin developed his most enduring, entrenched sense of home.
As this summary establishes, the complex condition of expatriation was fundamental to Baldwin’s life and work. It is abundantly clear that Giovanni’s Room sprung from the
complicated search for identity and love that undergirded Baldwin’s early experiences in Greenwich Village and Paris, making expatriation an especially relevant theme to assess.
This thesis project will be organized into three chapters. In Chapter 1, I will outline the critical conversation surrounding Giovanni’s Room, with particular attention paid to the overwhelming scholarly focus on race, and then assess that criticism in the broader context of African American literary history. Drawing on Baldwin’s own writings on protest literature and authorial freedom, I will argue that the novel’s scholarship remains too narrowly focused and must be widened to include more robust examination of other themes, namely expatriation. Given the pervasiveness of race-based Giovanni’s Room analysis and the related historical implications of such a firmly-established pattern of critique, a thorough examination is essential for framing my later analysis as disruptive within the existing field. In Chapter 2, I will introduce the concept of “American adolescence” using a range of Baldwin’s non-fictional writings, and ground this concept in the novel through an in-depth character analysis of David. And in Chapter 3, paying close attention to David and Hella’s embrace of domesticity and the American home, I will assess how David’s persistent self-deception defines, and dooms, his expatriate experience.
My analysis will ultimately confirm that Giovanni’s Room exposes America’s most deeply-rooted flaws through its rendering of the clash between American and European spirits. But despite its tragic nature, the novel should not be considered a broad condemnation of
expatriation itself. Instead, Giovanni’s Room is a piercing fictional examination of the fraudulent core of American identity, and reveals the disastrous fruit that engrained self-deception can bear. As my conclusion will lay out, the novel frames expatriation as an opportunity for
self-examination that Americans so desperately require if they are to more fully embrace the complexity of the human condition.
Chapter 1: Contextualizing the Pervasiveness of Race-Based Giovanni’s Room Criticism The acclaimed release of Go Tell it on the Mountain in 1953 brought a deeply ambivalent fame to Baldwin’s Parisian life. Before his thirtieth birthday, Baldwin was suddenly a celebrated writer – sought after and much talked about, excitedly surveying the array of potential projects now open to him. But his distaste for responsible budgeting left him financially insecure, and, after spending ten excruciating years on his debut novel, the project’s completion left a gaping hole in his life. Despite Go Tell it on the Mountain’s rousing success, Baldwin found himself in Paris unfulfilled, depressed, and broke. Naturally, his editors at Knopf began pestering the young literary star for a follow-up, preferably another “Harlem novel” like the one that had captured the ever-elusive mix of both critical and commercial attention. There was immense pressure on Baldwin to re-employ the “Mountain formula” of raw, auto-biographical fiction, but he was profoundly weary of building a one-dimensional reputation as a “Harlem writer,” or “protest writer,” or even just a “black writer” (Leeming 90). As a result, Baldwin’s next major fictional project, Giovanni’s Room, was a dramatic divergence from the formulaic expectations imposed on him – a short novel about desire and the messiness of love, set in Paris with no black
characters. Unsurprisingly, he struggled mightily to get it published. Baldwin’s editors did not just consider the novel’s content ill-advised, but warned that releasing it could ruin his career. Its explicit descriptions of homosexuality would have sparked controversy if penned by an
established white writer, never mind the rebuke it would certainly trigger coming from a young, black upstart (Abdur-Rahman 478). Discouraged further by the high-anxiety, Cold War culture of the 1950s, Knopf blankly refused to even consider the novel for printing.
After much difficulty, a small publishing house, Dial Press, finally accepted the
into a second printing in six weeks (Leeming 133). From the earliest review of Giovanni’s Room through contemporary critical analyses, there has been a persistent focus on how race does – or does not – operate beneath the surface of the novel’s distinctively white veneer. In this chapter, I will trace the full arc of the novel’s race-based criticism and situate it within the broader context of African American literary studies. Ultimately, my evaluation will prove the pervasiveness of race-focused analysis in the critical conversation surrounding Giovanni’s Room. Relying heavily on Baldwin’s own espousal of literary universalism, I will conclude by asserting that such a pattern of critique has been counterproductive to a full examination of this thesis project’s key thematic concerns: expatriation and American identity.
I. Tracing the critical preoccupation with race
While receiving some acclaim, initial reviews upon the novel’s release were preoccupied with the near total omission of race from Giovanni’s Room. Many critics saw this narrative decision – and thus the novel as a whole – as a sort of “youthful literary misstep,” a slip outside the lines that Baldwin had had such success drawing between in his debut effort (Stuart 53). Fixated on this glaring absence of blackness, critics broadly overlooked the major thematic elements of the work, opting instead for laments about what Baldwin “could” or “should” have accomplished in his highly-anticipated second novel. Soon after its release, Leslie Fiedler wrote “in exasperation” at the novel’s total avoidance of the “Negro Problem” (Tomlinson 139). This was echoed by Nathan A. Scott Jr., who characterized it as a “deflection, as a kind of detour” (Armengol 671). Others were more outwardly dismissive, categorizing Baldwin’s effort as some sort of “misguided bid for artistic legitimacy,” (Stuart 53) as if the avoidance of race amounted to a hollow act of artistic chest-puffing. Taken together, these early negative reviews frame
Baldwin’s second novel as a sort of transgression, a deviation from the racial bounds prescribed to him. In Go Tell it on the Mountain, Baldwin was operating within his native literary
environment – prodding storylines, settings, and characters that aligned with his lived experience as a black man from Harlem. He had the authority to write authentically about these topics, and his art was thus sanctioned by mainstream publishers, critics, and readers. The same broadly-held critical attitudes that made Go Tell it on the Mountain “acceptable” for Baldwin to write, are precisely what deemed Giovanni’s Room somehow “unacceptable.” His depiction of white characters in traditionally white settings, the logic followed, rang hollow because Baldwin was bereft of real, lived insight into the internal lives of white people (Stuart 54). The pervasiveness of this line of criticism in mid-century American literary analysis significantly shaped the early reception of Giovanni’s Room.
While the tenor of critical conversations in African American literary studies has evolved to become drastically more open and nuanced, recent critical analyses of Giovanni’s Room remain fixated on race (Stuart 53). However, over time an inversion of sorts has occurred in the scholarship around the novel. As Christopher Stuart puts it, recent critics “have sought to turn these (race-based) interpretations inside out by arguing that the novel does in fact dramatize the black experience within Anglo-European culture, so long as one knows how to decode it and thus strip the ‘whiteface’ from the novel’s ‘truly’ black characters” (54). In some ways, this critical turn has helped revive Giovanni’s Room and recast it as a legitimate, complex work that is essential to the Baldwin canon. The move past the superficiality of early critiques has allowed many critics to assess the novel’s far more nuanced themes. But it has also morphed into a wide-ranging critical resistance against the ostensible whiteness of the novel’s characters, based on the insistence that non-black Baldwin characters can only hold real value when their cloaked
blackness is unearthed by way of clever critical excavation. Where early reviews were obsessed with the absence of race in Giovanni’s Room, contemporary criticism has become preoccupied with the hidden existence of race lurking beneath the novel’s surface. While these interpretations are technically opposed, they are both overtly preoccupied with the thematics of race and
blackness.
In what has become a particularly prominent pattern in recent criticism, several scholars have explored how Baldwin’s exploration of sexuality in Giovanni’s Room can also be read as a cloaked examination of race. These arguments are based on a fundamental parallel between the ways that homosexuality and blackness function in an American cultural context. The connection between blackness and homosexuality makes sense: both are marginalized identities defined, according to dominant American culture, by their deviation from a certain idealized norm, namely white heterosexuality. It is this cutting sense of deviance and abnormality that consumes David for much of the novel – he cannot cope with an innate part of his identity and obsesses over the ways in which his sexuality would define him if he were to succumb to it. David’s self-denial reflects the deep-seated cultural marginalization of non-normative identities that he has internalized whilst growing up in America. This self-destructive quality has close resonance with common narratives of black self-hatred and alienation – forming a key link between blackness and homosexuality. To borrow a phrase from critic Robert Tomlinson, there is a deeply
significant “kinship of Black and homosexual” in American culture, one that several critics have identified and expanded upon in the context of Giovanni’s Room. As Tomlinson puts it, “color and homosexuality assume a common rhetorical function, evoking the dark side of human nature.” He argues that blacks and homosexuals exist in a state of “racial and sexual exile,” and share the common experience of being “repressed by the national consciousness” of America
(139). Aliyyah I. Abur-Rahman draws a similar connection in her analysis of color and
dominance in Giovanni’s Room, pointing out the shared sense of “social alienation and psychic fragmentation” that inherently link racial and sexual outsiders (478).
In their examination of how homosexuality operates as a surrogate for race in Giovanni’s Room, many critics lean on the ways in which whiteness is constructed, and then dissected, by Baldwin throughout the novel. European critic Josep M. Armengol provides a particularly salient example of this pattern of analysis. In his article, “In the Dark Room: Homosexuality and/as Blackness in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room”, Armengol aligns himself closely with the new wave of Giovanni’s Room scholarship that challenges the initial view of the novel as “raceless.” He argues that, “race and sexuality in Baldwin are not simply interrelated but virtually
interchangeable so that homosexuality becomes, literally and metaphorically, associated with blackness at the same time that heterosexuality… is indissolubly linked to whiteness” (674). Armengol is getting at the very essence of marginalized blackness: it is constructed in relation to a normative whiteness. He goes on to stress the ways blackness and whiteness and
homosexuality and heterosexuality operate within closed systems, dependent upon one another, stating that “blackness is inextricably bound to whiteness, and homosexuality to heterosexuality” (689).
In their discussion of whiteness, Armengol and others also surface one of the novel’s key subthemes: the encroachment of homosexuality on a deeply-held normative identity. Baldwin explores this notion of invasion most obviously through David’s character, who is positioned as the prototypical white, heterosexual, American male, but who spends the entire novel fighting a battle against the homosexuality that seeks to consume his normativity. Many critics have pointed to this deconstruction of normative whiteness as the key narrative arc for David’s
character. As Abur-Rahman, and others such as Michel Fabre and Robert Reid-Pharr, point out, David is initially presented as a “prototype” of whiteness (Abur-Rahman 480). His “typicality” is stressed in the first chapter’s opening paragraph – one of the most critically-assessed passages in the entire novel – as David gazes at his reflection in a mirror and declares: “My face is like a face you have seen many times” (3). As the common critical analysis goes, this initial image of
whiteness is then muddied, or corrupted, throughout the rest of the novel as David succumbs to his desires and acts on his homosexuality in the face of self-denial. Maintaining the link between homosexuality and blackness that I have described in the preceding paragraphs, critics have labeled this transformation as a sort of “descent” into blackness. Abdur-Rahman identifies this process as proof of the “racializing effects of queerness” (480), thus further demonstrating how blackness and homosexuality function in parallel ways. Noting that sexual deviance is figured as the “property” of the “socially ousted black (or dark) figure,” she writes that David’s repeated violation of heteronormative codes amounts to a “progressive racialization” that “throws his avowed whiteness into question” (481). Armengol echoes this, arguing that David’s
heterosexuality becomes increasingly “contaminated” by the blackness of homosexual desire (686). Again, in these critical interpretations, homosexuality and blackness assume a “common rhetorical function” (Tomlinson 139), combining to shadow and “racialize” David’s character as he succumbs to his desire for Giovanni.
Fundamental to this particularly prevalent critical interpretation of David’s
“de-constructed” whiteness is the argument that Giovanni is racially coded as black throughout the novel. As Jessica Kent points out, Baldwin’s introduction of Giovanni stresses his complexion and compares him to an African predator: “[the new barman] stood insolent, and dark, and leonine” (Giovanni 28). This description stands “in notable opposition” to the introduction of
David’s whiteness, and immediately casts him as “racially other” (Kent 80). Armengol,
Tomlinson, Reid-Pharr, and Marlon B. Ross all echo this line of argument, which orients David and Giovanni as coded racial opposites. Beyond descriptions of his physicality, and the
alignment of his homosexuality with blackness, Giovanni is a figure of deep social, economic, and sexual degradation, which has led critics like Abdur-Rahman to further argue that he is a representative black character obscured by “white-face.” She writes, “Giovanni's dislocation in Paris, his failure to belong, and the extreme poverty he faces emblematize the alienation that African Americans experience wherever they are on the globe, including in the country of their births and citizenship” (481). These interpretations persistently cast Giovanni as a highly symbolic character, especially in relation to David’s deeply-engrained American identity. Giovanni’s blackness is disguised but significant; he is, as a racial and sexual other, a personification of the desire and deviance at the root of David’s self-hatred.
As evidenced by the scholarship presented above, a large swath of contemporary critics remains primarily concerned with reading and decoding the racial elements of Baldwin’s second novel. To borrow a phrase from Abdur-Rahmin, a full survey of recent Giovanni’s Room
criticism reveals a broad critical preoccupation with “recovering the underlying racial antagonisms of the putatively white characters” (478). For the majority of critics that I
researched, the process of “recovering” or “unearthing” the racial thematics beneath the novel’s surface tends to be oriented around a set of common correlations. Put simply, these are:
Homosexuality ≈ Blackness Heterosexuality ≈ Whiteness Giovanni ≈ Blackness ≈ Homosexuality
The clash that defines the novel is the “racial antagonism” that arises from David’s acquiescence to his desire for Giovanni, and the resulting descent into the blackness of his homosexuality. This results in a thorough deconstruction of the hetero-normative ideal of whiteness, which, as the critical conversation tends to settle on, is Baldwin’s “true” aim in Giovanni’s Room.
II. The “Protest Literature” Debate: Contextualizing race-based Giovanni’s Room criticism To more thoroughly assess the fixation on race that has characterized much of the recent criticism of Giovanni’s Room, this criticism must be placed in a broader African American literary context. The following section will briefly outline the contours of the deeply complex debate around black protest literature, and then examine Baldwin’s own significant contributions to that debate at one of its most contentious points.
The importance – and, some may argue, centrality – of political protest to black literature can be traced back to the earliest stages of the African American literary tradition. As with most strains of American literature, it is virtually impossible to decouple the artistic endeavors of black writers from the concurrent political and social contexts in which they lived and worked. As they contributed to the broader fight to achieve unqualified citizenship, early black novelists produced explicitly political work and began ingraining a sense of racial responsibility in the literary arts (Abdur-Rahmin 478). As black artists, there existed a vague, but significant, obligation to recast blackness as normative in an effort to enter the American cultural
mainstream. Given the unyielding pressures of systemic American racism, this deeply-rooted commitment to black cultural advancement persisted in African American literary tradition, as did the expectation that black literature have “manifestly political” aims (Abdur-Rahmin
478-479). Consequently, texts that did not overtly concern themselves with the political were viewed suspiciously by black critics and readers as somehow lacking authenticity.
In her discussion of black literary canon formation, Claudia Tate writes that works which focused too much on the “inner worlds of black characters” without adequately meditating on, or militating against, the consequences of a racist society, were cast aside as “not black enough” (4). It is important to note that Tate is describing a mechanism of literary control that originated from both black and nonblack scholars and readers. Certainly, much of the white audience representing “mainstream” literary culture consistently levied the same criticism at black authors who did not concern themselves intensely enough with the narrowly prescribed “black
experience” (Stuart 54). This entrenched, problematic notion of black artistic authenticity had two related consequences over the last century. The first was the tacit “disciplining” of themes of desire and over-aestheticized prose in black literature, on the basis that such writing lacked seriousness and political utility (Abdur-Rahmin 478). And the second was the rise of so-called “protest literature,” which prioritized both themes of political struggle and simply-rendered, highly-allegorical characterization. Put simply, to write protest literature was to place deliberate social critique over stylistic flourish (Leeming 64-65).
Far before his reputation as a black novelist and intellectual was solidified, Baldwin weighed in dramatically on the predominance of “protest literature” in midcentury fiction. Just months after arriving in Paris, Baldwin wrote a piece for Zero Magazine entitled “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” The essay is a scathing excoriation of the “genre” of protest literature. Baldwin describes it as archaic and “medieval” in its aims and insists that most protest novels are basically un-literary, lacking the style and fluency he believes makes good literature. They are “forgiven” for “whatever violence they do to language” based on the vague reverence for their
“good intentions,” he writes, calling them “both badly written and wildly improbable” (15). As the essay builds, Baldwin’s critique cuts far deeper. He asserts that the protest novel, in its detachment from reality, serves to further entrench systems of oppression. These works, he argues, reek of colonialism – they flatten “inferior” races into mere societal categories devoid of humanity, thus re-asserting their inferiority. “The aim of the protest novel,” Baldwin writes, “becomes something very closely resembling the zeal of those alabaster missionaries to Africa to cover the nakedness of the natives, to hurry them into the pallid arms of Jesus and thence into slavery” (16).
The first part of “Everybody’s Protest Novel” is a close literary analysis of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. To Baldwin, the text stands as a sort-of canonical protest novel – widely celebrated by the masses, but anchored by the classical elements of protest literature that he holds in such contempt. In it, black characters are either misrepresented to the point of being “as white as (Stowe) can make them,” or robbed of their internality and made into mere symbols (13). Stowe, of course, is white, but Baldwin believes her flattened representations of blackness and evasion of human complexity are echoed by those “multitudinous, hard-boiled descendants” of hers churning out the protest fiction of the time, be them black, Jewish, female (12). And, he ends his essay by tracing an illustrative line from Stowe to a renowned contemporary text quickly solidifying itself in the American canon:
Richard Wright’s Native Son. In a betrayal of the black literary giant who just months before had helped him settle in Paris, Baldwin points directly at Native Son as an example of a protest novel that only perpetuates the evil it was written to destroy. If Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the grandfather of protest literature, he argues, Native Son was its direct descendent (17). As Baldwin sees it, the novel’s main character, Bigger Thomas, is a sad portrait of acceptance – he accepts the
sub-humanity imposed upon him, accepts his unquenchable hatred, accepts his inferiority in a system that robs him of his personhood. But what he doesn’t accept, or perhaps what Wright doesn’t allow his character to accept, is the complicated “burden” of humanity. By creating a character like Bigger – one “who admits the possibility of being subhuman” – Wright is only fortifying a cage of “lust and fury” that locks black and white in an unending battle of “thrust and counter-thrust” (18). Baldwin merges Stowe with Wright in order to drive home an illustrative point: these texts, which supposedly reflect an admirable political fortitude, only further deny the freedom of blacks to transcend their peculiar, painful position in American society.
The release of “Everybody’s Protest Novel” caused a stir not only because of Baldwin’s bold critique of someone who many perceived as his natural literary forefather, but also because it came at a particularly important inflection point in African American literary history (Brown 7). Wright’s Native Son was, in some ways, derivative of the long-held protest tradition
described above, but he re-fashioned the protest novel in a particularly prescient way for mid-century, post-Great Migration America. As Stephanie Brown writes, Wright’s work inaugurated a new subgenre of politically-potent black literature: “the gritty, urban social realist novel.” According to the critical narrative of the time (one that many would argue still persists today), Wright became the “progenitor” of this new type of “black protest literature,” which “redefined African American literature and provided a template for ‘authentic’ work by black writers for the next twenty years” (8). It is precisely this figuration of authenticity that Baldwin militates so vehemently against in “Everybody’s Protest Novel” – one that constrains the black artist and limits the power of black art to represent the complex tangle of life. As he concludes, “the failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread,
power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended” (18).
With the benefit of hindsight, it becomes clear that Baldwin’s release of “Everybody’s Protest Novel” so soon after his arrival in Paris achieved two significant aims. The first was a rejection of Richard Wright as his presumptive literary forefather. To note, this presumption was based on far more than just their shared experience as black men. Years earlier, in New York, Wright had counseled a young Baldwin on the early stages of a manuscript, and helped him secure a fellowship that provided the struggling writer with his first taste of financial
independence (Leeming 45). It was the path forged by black artists like Wright that Baldwin followed when he expatriated to Paris, and, while they were never particularly close, Wright did help Baldwin settle into Parisian life when he first arrived. But Baldwin, having already noticed their ideological and stylistic divergence, was wary of being too easily painted as Wright’s obedient “descendant.” In an interview with David C. Estes later in his life, Baldwin called “Everybody’s Protest Novel” his “declaration of independence” (Pratt 276) – an act of self-determination that freed him from a lineage of black protest writing. To follow directly in Wright’s path would have been to “get trapped in a particular form” and succumb to neat artistic categorization (Pratt 277). While some accused him of youthful naiveté, Baldwin yearned to be rid of the shackles of artistic expectation, and understood the gravity of self-liberation early in his career.
The second aim was Baldwin’s alignment with a loose school of “literary universalists” that sprouted in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Put rhetorically, in rejecting Wright, Baldwin was embracing his longtime literary hero, Henry James, from whose fiction he derived his steadfast insistence on an “authorial prerogative that transcended racial boundaries” (Stuart
55-56). Although James predated the most contentious periods of debate around protest
literature, his views on authorial privilege are highly applicable in this context. In his 1884 essay, “The Art of Fiction”, James staunchly defends the artistic freedom afforded to novelists, arguing that those gifted with the power of imaginative narration need not be constrained by the
“accident” of their race, or gender, or upbringing. “If we pretend to respect the artist at all,” he writes, “we must allow him his freedom of choice” (397). He argues that literary criticism must focus on the author’s execution of their chosen subject, not on the worthiness of the subject itself, or whether the author has any business exploring it. Beyond James’ straightforward argument for granting authorial freedom is his belief that those artists who counter expectations actually produce more fruitful art. “Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions,” he claims, “and some of the most interesting experiments of which it is capable are hidden in the bosom of common things” (397). Thus, James does not just believe in protecting authorial freedom, but actively encourages it: to write about what you may not be expected to “know,” is to create something more interesting, animating, and intriguing.
Baldwin considered James a forefather of modern American fiction, and there is little doubt that his philosophy deeply influenced Baldwin’s own notions of authorial freedom and racial transcendence (Leeming 66). In his examination of their unique philosophical connection, Christopher Stuart stresses James’ formative effect on Baldwin’s early intellectual development. At a pivotal moment in Baldwin’s young life, “James had confirmed him in his nascent
conviction that the novelist’s authority to imagine the lives of others, no matter how different, is underwritten by the sensitivity of the artist’s consciousness and by our common human nature” (56). Even at an early stage in his intellectual development, Baldwin was establishing what would be a guiding thematic concern for the rest of his career: the complex nature of a common
human struggle. Implicit in this rather James-ian focus is the assumption that there exists a complicated web of human suffering that is shared by all, regardless of group identity. “At least to this extent,” notes Stuart, “Baldwin was, like James, a universalist, always reminding us of the leveling effect of the common corporeal stench that only love can transform” (68). To Baldwin, the artist’s job was to prod at the deeply complex human condition and fictionally recreate both the “deeds of humanity” and the motivation for those deeds (Leeming 65). As he wrote in “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” “only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves” (13).
III. Widening the Critical Conversation
When assessed within the broader context of African American literary history, the pervasive critical focus on sub-textual racial elements in Giovanni’s Room takes on a more reductive, and even vaguely oppressive, tone. As the second section of this chapter lays bare, a critical analysis of the novel would be ill-informed without acknowledging the complexities of the protest literature debate and Baldwin’s outspoken role in it. While recent Giovanni’s Room scholarship is far more sensitive to the nuances of race and literary history than initial reactions to the novel were, I argue that reductive attitudes towards black authorial freedom remain present in much of the contemporary criticism summarized above.
As is clear from the first section of this chapter, there exists a distinct and pervasive pattern in the scholarship around Giovanni’s Room that elevates race as the novel’s principal subject of analysis. Assessed together, most critical analyses of the novel are concerned with overlapping arguments around the common function of homosexuality and blackness, the deconstruction of normative whiteness, and/or the “racial antagonism” at play between David
and Giovanni. Of course, Giovanni’s Room is, on the surface, devoid of overt racial politics and lacks non-white characters. Thus, race-based criticism is inherently focused on excavating racial elements of the text that function sub-textually or abstractly. The majority of critics are
motivated by a drive to uncover the racial subtext that Baldwin has deftly obscured, to interpret subtle hints that signal at a grand racial commentary hidden behind the novel’s whitewashed façade. This, of course, has one abiding implication: Giovanni’s Room simply must be about race, no matter how concealed such thematics may at first seem. It takes little imagination to assert that the critical insistence described above is based on a plain biographical fact: Baldwin is black. Had Giovanni’s Room been penned by a white author, it is nearly impossible to imagine a comparable critical fixation on race. Instead, the author’s omission of black characters or
avoidance of racial politics would likely have been taken at face value, if not ignored completely. It certainly would not have been deemed a smokescreen used to subtly cloak racial critique, as most contemporary critics suggest of Baldwin’s narrative choice.
Many will argue that critical interpretations of Giovanni’s Room do not exist in a vacuum – that they are informed by Baldwin’s larger body of work, much of which is explicitly
concerned with race. This defense has validity. I am not asserting that attention to the novel’s conspicuous lack of race is, in itself, a reductive line of critique. Situating Giovanni’s Room within a broader Baldwin-ian context, one must naturally consider how the novel does, or does not, handle themes of blackness, whiteness, or racial antagonism. It is also important to
distinguish between those scholars who overtly argue that the novel is about race and those that understand race as just a part of the novel’s thematic patchwork. The critics in the former camp (Abdur-Rahman, Armengol, for example) run the risk of not just avoiding other major thematic elements of Baldwin’s fiction, but of actively obscuring them as misguided lines of critique that
naively fail to recognize race as the novel’s driving force. This can be significantly more
counterproductive to the overall critical engagement around the novel compared to those scholars that just happen to concentrate on race as a piece of a larger puzzle (Kent, Henderson,
Tomlinson). However, on the whole, the pervasiveness of such race-based analysis worrisomely narrows the critical conversation. The scholarship consistently prioritizes unearthing sub-textual racial themes over analyzing more explicit themes of expatriation, sexual anxiety, emotional dislocation, and so on. Such a ubiquitous critical fascination with race tends to neglect many other elements of Giovanni’s Room that are ripe for analysis. Wider critical examination of such elements would add important texture to the field of Baldwin-ian studies, but they have been repeatedly overlooked in favor of a feverish critical treasure hunt for the novel’s hidden racial philosophy. This, in turn, only constricts the critical focus around Baldwin’s work, and implies that a thorough analysis of Giovanni’s Room must contend with the author’s identity as a black man, regardless of (and, often, in ignorance of) the text’s other, more overt thematic concerns.
While contemporary critics do not “relegate” Giovanni’s Room to mere protest literature, they do tend to curtail the freedom of Baldwin to explore more universal themes by persistently re-focalizing their analysis around race. The culture of protest literature conferred inauthenticity on those black writers whose thematic concerns strayed too far from racial struggle. Moreover, white audiences (both critical and commercial) solidified this sentiment by consistently forcing black writers to “stay in their lane” and stick to representing their own lived experience. A similar tone can be detected in Giovanni’s Room scholarship. The bias towards race-based analysis tends to imply that Baldwin’s real value as a writer lies in what he knows – namely, the dynamics of race – and that the novel’s more universal themes are superfluous, undeserving of extensive critical assessment. The same mechanisms of control that policed non-protest writing
in midcentury African American fiction seem still to be operating, albeit more subtly, in this context.
In the following two chapters, I will break out of the existing critical paradigm and focus my analysis of Giovanni’s Room on themes non-specific to race. Key to this analysis will be an assumption of Baldwin’s total authorial freedom to fictionally represent universal human complexity. Thus, the novel’s whiteness will be maintained, and I will resist the critical trend to strip David and Giovanni of their “whiteface.” This disruption in the problematic pattern of criticism that I have detailed above will allow me to more judiciously examine aspects of the novel that have been relatively under-considered, namely expatriation, Baldwin’s notion of “American adolescence,” and national identity.
Chapter 2: “American adolescence” and David’s Expatriation I. An Introduction to “American adolescence”
Baldwin opens his 1959 essay, “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American,” with a short quote from Henry James: “It is a complex fate to be an American.” To Baldwin, upon leaving this “profoundly and stubbornly unique” country, “the principal discovery an American writer makes in Europe is just how complex this fate is” (Nobody Knows 3). In Baldwin’s case, his expatriation to Europe allowed him to view his native America with a far more penetrative eye. Much of his time abroad was dedicated to discerning his convoluted national identity, and much of the work he produced attempted to distill the tangle of American history into something consumable, penetrable. A full survey of these attempts far exceeds the scope of this thesis project. Understanding what it meant to be an American was, in the eyes of many Baldwin scholars, his life’s work.
In analyzing Giovanni’s Room as an essential fictional contribution to his longtime intellectual project, Baldwin’s notion of “American adolescence” provides a particularly useful figuration of American identity. Baldwin first introduced the concept in an essay for Zero Magazine that he wrote in 1949 just after leaving New York (Leeming 66). Titled “Preservation of Innocence,” the essay condemns the tendency of American writers to flatten the humanity of their subjects by depending too heavily on clichéd, prejudiced, and un-imaginative modes of representation. What results from this trend, according to Baldwin, is a “mindless and pallid” literary atmosphere filled by authors who “are wholly unable to recreate or interpret any of the reality or complexity of human experience” (600). Baldwin sees this as symptomatic of a broader American ignorance – “one of the major American ambitions” – especially when it comes to confronting questions of sexuality and masculinity. The reduction of human beings to mere
platitudes constitutes a “truly awesome attempt of the American to at once preserve his innocence and arrive at a man’s estate” (597). And, it is the nation’s “immature” refusal to recognize human complexity that severely stunts its growth.
Baldwin explored America’s fundamental immaturities throughout much of the rest of his career. To borrow a phrase from the title of his early essay, Baldwin consistently chronicled the inhibiting power of the nation’s obsession with “preserving its innocence,” and the ways this obsession left the nation more naïve, less thoughtful, and deeply ignorant. Proving its endurance as a concept, Baldwin returned to the notion of American adolescence nearly four decades later in a 1986 interview with his biographer David Leeming that appeared in the Henry James Review shortly before his death. Responding to Leeming’s inquiry about James’ influence on him, Baldwin launches into a brilliant diatribe about America’s rise to power and the peculiar nation that it became:
You know, it would really be quite an extraordinary spectacle, for one sitting on Mars perhaps, to realize that the most powerful nation on Earth—the viceroy of the Universe— is one of the most astounding examples of retarded adolescence in human history. It's not even a tragedy. It's far beyond that. It's a failure to see, a failure to live, a failure to be. (50)
The response is striking in both its scathing admonishment of American failure, and its
re-appropriation of a concept that Baldwin had conjured when he was a far younger, less developed intellectual mind. His conception of American adolescence deepened and became more nuanced over the years, but its core assertion – that America is fated by its stunted evolution – remained unchanged.
Fundamental to the nation’s protracted development, is the stubborn tendency of white America to project its guilt onto a maligned Other, thereby maintaining a false sense of
innocence. As Christopher Stuart writes, Baldwin deeply resonated with James’ ability to “dramatize the historical tendency of Americans to screen themselves from self-knowledge and their own human frailties by imagining an Other as the soul of corruption” (59). Corruption is the inevitable “price” one pays for living, Baldwin argues, but Americans have always found a “receptacle for their troubles, someone or something to pay their dues for them” (Henry James 50). These others include Native Americans, blacks, homosexuals – all of whom must absorb the nation’s guilt as white America passes them its “bill.” Instead of accepting their history and embracing the complexity of life, Americans instead construct for themselves a deeply troubling fallacy based in phony innocence and deep-seated ignorance. But, as Baldwin tells Leeming, the bill does eventually come due: “The price they pay for living is to pretend that I'm not here, and the price they pay for that is not being able to see the world in which they live” (50). It is this fundamental self-delusion, this “congenital American blindness” (Stuart 63), that keeps the nation trapped in its state of adolescence, unable to empathize with others or embrace the pain and corruption that comes with truly living.
II. David’s “American adolescence”
In Giovanni’s Room, David serves as the fictional personification of Baldwin’s notion of American adolescence. Throughout the novel, David clings desperately to his sense of innocence as it is gravely threatened by his suppressed homosexuality, his desire for Giovanni, and his deep uncertainty towards life in Europe. The result is, just like the condition of American adolescence, predictably tragic: the guilt that sprouts from David’s self-denial is both deeply internalized and
dangerously externalized, and he wallows helplessly between retreating into his innocence and embracing the “dirt” of life. He is a tragic rendering of what Baldwin suggests as distinctly American traits: neurotic whiteness and the denial of life.
David recollects his first homosexual experience with a childhood friend named Joey in the novel’s opening pages, and the guilt resulting from the encounter blankets the rest of the narrative like a storm cloud. The descriptive sensory language that Baldwin uses to describe the experience colors Joey and David’s fated coupling with a deep ambivalence – David feels a “tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst,” but from “this astounding, intolerable pain came joy,” even as the “bed, in its sweet disorder, testified to vileness” (8-9). It is this ambivalence, introduced in the very first chapter, that characterizes David’s tortured desire throughout the rest of the novel. Every moment of indulgence, every time he acquiesces to his craving, is tainted by the shame that emerges from this seminal encounter with Joey. While his shame acts as a tether anchoring David to his guilt, it also takes on a mutable, germinating character: “it remained, nevertheless, at the bottom of my mind, as still and as awful as a decomposing corpse. And it changed, it thickened, it soured the atmosphere of my mind” (16). The image of decay is especially piercing here. Baldwin depicts David’s shame as rotten, festering deep inside him as it slowly consumes its host. It is clear from the outset that David is infected by his internalized guilt – it putrefies within him as he works futilely to suppress it.
While this initial description of guilt focuses on its internality, David externalizes his shame in moments of troubling homophobia. Describing a boy who frequented Guillaume’s bar in drag, David confesses that “his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people’s stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did not – so grotesquely – resemble human beings” (27). Only the
boy’s outfit is described before this proclamation, implying that the source of his
“grotesqueness” in David’s eyes must be his outward display of homosexuality. The observation, despicable in its blatant homophobia, is also tinged with self-hatred. The effeminate drag queen is figured as a “monkey” eating its own excrement, but this image is somewhat reflective: David is both the disgusted observer, and the “monkey” on display. He sees himself in the image he so detests. Later in the same chapter, David again dehumanizes an outwardly homosexual character that approaches him. The man’s physicality is described in meticulous detail, but he is referred to repeatedly as “it,” casting him as an unfamiliar creature to be gawked at warily and documented carefully. “It looked like a mummy or a zombie,” narrates David, “it carried a glass, it walked on its toes, the flat hips moved with a dead, horrifying lasciviousness. It seemed to make no
sound…” (39). The complete omission of gender specific pronouns is disrupted abruptly in the paragraph’s final sentence – “He wore buckles on his shoes” – implying a mischievous self-awareness in David’s dehumanizing description of the man. Of course, this “creature” was a man all along, but David could not resist injecting disgust into his account of the man’s approach. These moments of homophobic narration are manifestations of David’s rotting self-hatred – his guilt bubbling to the surface and being projected onto those he feels an uncomfortable
association with. This, as Baldwin would argue, is a distinctly American reaction to one’s internal guilt: shame morphs into self-hatred, and then self-hatred is cast onto a non-normative “Other.”
Throughout Giovanni’s Room, David is confronted repeatedly with a choice between the safety of his illusory innocence and the freedom that comes with embracing the mess of life. In his Henry James Review interview, Baldwin stresses the mutual exclusivity of this choice: “freedom and innocence are antithetical,” he tells Leeming, “you can’t have both… the end of
innocence means you’ve finally entered the picture. And it means you’ll accept the consequences too” (54). This dichotomy defines David’s tortured state throughout the novel. Recalling nights in bed with Hella early in their relationship, David describes the “peculiar innocence and confidence” they engendered in him, attributing their delight to the simple fact that “it was not necessary for me to take any but the most mechanical responsibility for them” (5). But when David attempts to solidify this state of innocence, to fashion Hella into a “mooring post” by proposing to her, the illusion is exposed: “people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts… Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life” (5). While David recognizes this “great difficulty,” he spends the rest of the novel unable to offer that affirmation, instead cowering in the face of his desire. Later, while discussing the prospect of leaving Paris, Giovanni levies a particularly cutting critique at David: “You do, sometimes, remind me of the kind of man who is tempted to put himself in prison in order to avoid being hit by a car” (117). The image of prison is a particularly apt one in this context. In his desire for safety, David retreats behind the defenses that a cell provides, but this only serves to entrap him further, to cut him off from experience, to sever his freedom. According to Baldwin’s figuration of American adolescence, it is precisely this intellectual and emotional imprisonment that Americans inflict upon themselves in their search for safety and rejection of life.
Baldwin also presents the conflict between cleanliness and “dirt” as a parallel figuration of the dialectic of innocence and freedom presented above. To hold onto innocence is to remain “clean,” to shield oneself from the “dirt” that accompanies life’s inevitable corruption and the messiness of desire. Baldwin first significantly introduces this concept through Jacques – David and Giovanni’s older gay friend and a morally ambiguous character, to say the least – who senses David’s desire for Giovanni on their first evening out together despite David never having
admitted his homosexuality to any of his Parisian acquaintances. Jacques implores David to unshackle himself from his shame and embrace the adventure of Giovanni, employing the metaphor of dirt in his admonishment of David’s hesitation. Trying to cajole him, he insists on the rapidity of the affair, saying,
Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most that, hélas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty – they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty; you can give each other something which will make both of you better – forever – if you will not be ashamed if you will only not play it safe. (57) The use of the word “dirty” is notably nuanced here. Jacques is basically urging David to re-conceptualize his notion of dirtiness. If the “dirt” of an affair with Giovanni stems from his own self-hatred (“despising your flesh”), then David will again find himself suspended, yearning for innocence and ashamed of his desire. But if he is to embrace this dirt, then it will not feel dirty at all – instead it will embolden him, afford him a freedom he has shielded himself from all his adult life. Parsing this meaning of “dirt” is essential to understanding Baldwin’s underlying views of freedom and the magnitude of saying “yes” to life. David is not wrong in seeing his desires for Giovanni as complex, confusing, “dirty,” but it is exactly this tangled experience – this “dirt” – that one must accept if they wish to be free.
Baldwin renders Giovanni’s cramped room on the outskirts of Paris as a concentration of literal and metaphorical dirt. The room exists in a constant state of renovation. Unfinished, with open paint cans covering the floor, its wallpaper is streaked and peeling. After warning David that his room was “very dirty,” Giovanni jokes with him: “all of the garbage of this city? Where do they take it? I don’t know where they take it – but it might very well be my room” (86-87).
But David senses the symbolism of the mess during his very first visit. This was not the garbage of Paris, he notes, “this was Giovanni’s regurgitated life” (87). While he understands that within the clutter lies something more meaningful, David’s reaction is typically American: he strives to domesticate the room, to clean it, to impose a sense of order on the accumulated bottles and spilled wine. He even takes a “kind of pleasure in playing the housewife after Giovanni had gone to work” (88). But this is a futile attempt to erase the dirt of Giovanni’s life, and it belies the beauty that the room represents, which Baldwin describes in his interview with Leeming. “Giovanni's room, for example, is a room into which one must go to learn to touch, to learn to pay one's dues, to exchange innocence for freedom,” he says, underscoring the potential of Giovanni (and his room) for teaching David how to eschew safety and embrace life (55). Instead, in another example of his adolescent inability to accept the dirt of his desire, David warps the room into an emotional trap. It becomes somewhere to escape from, as Baldwin explains to Leeming: “Somehow it’s easier to run away than to be closed in with all the smells, the
emotions, the debris – with all the demands the room makes on one” (55). Instead of bending to these demands and settling, emotionally and physically, in Giovanni’s room, David turns his back and runs towards safety.
The novel’s climax is punctuated by Giovanni’s ferocious indictment of David’s aversion to the dirt of life, which he describes as a desire to be “clean.” David has just told Giovanni that he must leave his room for good, using the feeble excuse of Hella’s return to Paris which Giovanni immediately rejects. He launches into the following tirade, which constitutes the richest, most dramatic denunciation of American adolescence in the novel.
“You do not,” cried Giovanni, sitting up, “love anyone! You have never loved anyone, I am sure you never will! You love your purity, you love your mirror – you are just like a
little virgin, you walk around with your hands in front of you as though you had some precious metal, gold, silver, rubies, maybe diamonds down there between your legs! You will never give it to anybody, you will never let anybody touch it – man or woman. You want to be clean. You think you came here covered with soap and you think you will go out covered with soap – and you do not want to stink not even for five minutes, in the meantime … You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. And you – you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life…” (141)
Giovanni’s impassioned outburst amounts to an almost systematic dismantling of David’s patently American approach to love, lust, innocence, and freedom. All the markers of Baldwin’s conception of the stunted American psyche are on display here: the inability to accept desire, the obsession with the “cleanliness” of innocence, the avoidance of consequences, and the projection of one’s guilt, in this case directly onto the spurned Giovanni. But this pivotal diatribe also adds new texture to Baldwin’s theme. First, Giovanni directly confronts the centrality of sex to David’s tragic situation, eschewing vague euphemism to address the fundamental character flaw of his ex-lover: a deeply internalized homophobia that has morphed into self-hatred. This, in turn, has turned David’s perception of any sex – hetero- or homosexual – into transgression, a rotten act that can only serve to soil his innocence. And second, Giovanni asserts the immorality of American adolescence by testifying to its tragic consequences on others. To this point,
Baldwin had mostly framed David’s imprisonment in the illusion of innocence as a personal disorder (albeit, one endemic to his countrymen), one whose tragedy was mostly borne by David himself. But the other repercussion of David’s distinctly American avoidance of life is, of
