Understanding James Baldwin

Marc Dudley

Description

An analysis of the ground-breaking author's vision and thematic concerns

The Harlem-born son of a storefront preacher, James Baldwin died almost thirty years ago, but his spirit lives on in the eloquent and still-relevant musings of his novels, short stories, essays, and poems. What concerned him most—as a black man, as a gay man, as an American—were notions of isolation and disconnection at both the individual and communal level and a conviction that only in the transformative power of love could humanity find any hope of healing its spiritual and social wounds.

In Understanding James Baldwin, Marc K. Dudley shows that a proper grasp of Baldwin's work begins with a grasp of the times in which he wrote. During a career spanning the civil rights movement and beyond, Baldwin stood at the heart of intellectual and political debate, writing about race, sexual identity, and gendered politics, while traveling the world to promote dialogue on those issues. In surveying the writer's life, Dudley traces the shift in Baldwin's aspirations from occupying the pulpit like his stepfather to becoming a writer amid the turmoil of sexual self-discovery and the harsh realities of American racism and homophobia. The book's analyses of key works in the Baldwin canon—among them, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, "Sonny's Blues," Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and The Devil Finds Work—demonstrate the consistency, contrary to some critics' claims, of Baldwin's vision and thematic concerns.

As police violence against people of color, a resurgence in white supremacist rhetoric, and pushback against LGBTQ rights fill today's headlines, James Baldwin's powerful and often-angry words find a new resonance. From early on, Baldwin decried the damning potential of alienation and the persistent bigotry that feeds it. Yet, even as it sometimes wavered, his hope for both the individual and the nation remained intact. In the present historical moment, James Baldwin matters more than ever.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• 20th Century
• Modern
• América
• Going to Meet the Man
• Randall Kenan
• William Bradford Huie
• Self-love
• Modern history
• Father Divine
• Supplication
• The Defiant Ones
• W. C. Handy
• Uncle Tom
• African American
• Inception
• La Chaîne (film)
• Herman Wouk
• American
• V.
• Père divin
• Paul Goodman
• William Styron
• Ralph Waite
• Eldridge Cleaver
• William Christopher Handy
• Black
• Chester Himes
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Adage
• William Faulkner

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 17 avril 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 9
• EAN13: 9781611179651
• Langue: English

Extrait

UNDERSTANDING
JAMES BALDWIN
UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
UNDERSTANDING
JAMES BALDWIN
Marc Dudley
2019 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-964-4 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-61117-965-1 (ebook)
Front cover photograph Ulf Anderson
http://ulfanderson.photoshelter.com
CONTENTS
Series Editor s Preface
Chapter 1
Understanding James Baldwin
Chapter 2
In the Beginning: Fictional Foundations in Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni s Room
Chapter 3
Another Chapter, Another Life, Another Country: Baldwin s Big Book of Ideas
Chapter 4
Eyes on the Prize: Baldwin, the Essay, and Civil Rights Discourse
Chapter 5
Telling a True Story, Differently: Baldwin s Short Fiction and Drama
Chapter 6
When the Sun Goes Down: Baldwin, the Later Years
Notes
Bibliography
Index
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931-2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.
As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers-explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives-and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.
In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
CHAPTER 1
Understanding James Baldwin
Columbus was discovered by what he found.
James Baldwin, Imagination
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
James Baldwin, The Precarious Vogue of Ingmar Bergman
At forty James Baldwin was already midway through a stellar career when he collaborated with a high school friend turned professional photographer, Richard Avedon, to create a kind of visual poetry he entitled Nothing Personal . The title would prove to be both overtly ironic and a harbinger of things to come. In crafting these essays with pictures, Baldwin was interested in pursuing one principal angle: the isolation of the human soul, or as biographer W. J. Weatherby suggested, alienation of people, what keeps them apart. 1 Several of Baldwin s early works had aptly dealt with this same theme, and Baldwin would wrestle with the complications of human relations his entire literary life. In doing so, he simply continued the ongoing conversation that so many writers before him had started. Not the least of these conversations were those begun by Charles Dickens a century before him: It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness . we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way-in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree comparison only. So begins Dickens s A Tale of Two Cities . As a child, James Baldwin loved Dickens; as an adult, Baldwin lived Dickens, championing his own brand of justice for a world he saw falling woefully short of its grand potential. 2 Even when he was not front and center as champion, James Baldwin was a witness.
While much has been made of his youthful adoration of Harriet Beecher Stowe s Uncle Tom s Cabin (his mother purportedly hid his well-worn copy from him to save his eyes) and his more cynical reading of it years later, comparatively little has been said about his attraction to Dickens. In his reflective years, Baldwin would become more fully appreciative of the imprint Dickens s writing would have on his own worldview. In fact, reflecting on his career s major influences at its midpoint in 1970, Baldwin succinctly conjured his holy trinity: Formative influences: my father, the Church, and Charles Dickens. 3 It only seems appropriate that this volume on James Baldwin should begin with allusions to Dickens. Few opening lines of any novel are more iconic than those opening Dickens s 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities . Moreover, few opening lines encapsulate so precisely the state of the world in both Dickens s day and, by extension, Baldwin s. Dickens transports his readers to eighteenth-century France and paints a world born of radical change. The year 1789 was a touchstone, marking the Bastille s storming and revolution in France. It also marked George Washington s election to the office of American president, legitimizing a new nation. The publication year of A Tale of Two Cities , 1859, was a year of sea change as Charles Darwin publicly posited his natural selection theories in Origin of the Species , and across the Atlantic, John Brown was hanged after a failed slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, marking the beginning of the end of the American union. In December of the very next year, South Carolina seceded from the union, and just months after that, Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter, sending America headlong into its own civil war. Dickens as nineteenth-century reporter and prophet could not be more prescient; his words reverberate a century later.
James Baldwin could have borrowed from Dickens in writing about the present world, too. The second decade of this young century has been both the best and the worst of times. The new millennium has witnessed the striking down of DOMA, the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (introduced to legally disallow same-sex unions), in 2015. Conversely, since then a flurry of legislative activity at the state level worked to curb civil liberties for those in the LGBTQ community. The summer of 2015 also saw the continuation of a long black song of bloodshed, of conflict between police and black America and renewed media conversation surrounding an age-old issue. Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland: all victims of racially charged police brutality. South Carolina state senator Clementa Pinckney was among nine shot dead by a self-professed executioner of racial law at Charleston s Emanuel AME Church that summer. In the span of months, race riots erupted in Ferguson, Missouri; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore Maryland. The following year Philando Castille in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana joined the victims list, and it only grows longer and the tragedy only deepens. Each of these incidents serves as a touchstone in the ongoing conversation about race in America. James Baldwin helped initiate that conversation over a half century ago. Although he died in 1987, Baldwin s continued relevance in the new millennium, decades after he last spoke to America, cannot be overstated. Baldwin s eloquent, sermonic, spiritual musings find a new resonance in today s sociopolitical culture.
In today s headlines one sees the very same issues that pressed hard on his mind all those years ago-years during which Rosa Parks engaged in quiet protest as she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama; Emmett Louis Till was brutally murdered in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman; Martin Luther King, Jr., marched on the Washington Mall for freedom; and gay demonstrators rioted in New York s Greenwich Village over discriminatory practices. Gay rights and issues of race, issues of the color line-what W. E. B. Du Bois insisted would be the dominant twentieth-century issue-are certainly still at the forefront of issues facing twenty-first-century America. The United States Supreme Court s recent rulings on the Defense of Marriage Act, the recent wave of state supreme court decisions allowing for the civil union of same-sex couples, an immediate conservative backlash, and the spate of violence directed at people of color by police (the tiny city of Ferguson, Missouri, was little known before 2014 s police shooting of a black teenager) all attest to the timelessness of Baldwin s prophetic words. Baldwin knew the truth in Du Bois s prophesy early on, knew it was and that it would be so unless America confronted the demons that haunt it. If you can describe it, whatever it is, Baldwin once suggested, describe it. You are not at the mercy of something you don t understand. If you can describ