1. Why do you think James Baldwin chose to make his central character a white male, and furthermore to have that character narrate his novel?
2. Although sexual orientation and questions of normative pair bonding are central to Baldwin's text, race is essentially marginalized. How do you account for this?
3. How might David's own family structure be a reflection of the ideas expressed in your response to question 2?
4. How do you reconcile these choices with Langston Hughes' insistence that one must be a Negro writer first, for to do otherwise is to deny one's own true nature?
5. As she inspects the house he has been renting from her, the caretaker says to David:
We had three sons. Two of them were killed in the war. In the war too we lost all our money. It is sad, is it not, to have worked so hard all one's life in order to have a little peace in one's old age and then to have it all taken away? It almost killed my husband; he has never been the same since. [. . .] But our last son, he lives in the North; he came to see us two years ago, and he brought with him his little boy. [. . .] They stayed about ten days and we felt young again. (68-69)
Why do you suppose that Baldwin juxtaposes the caretakers' sons and money in this manner?
Jonathan --
ReplyDeleteRegarding questions 2 and 3, I've been thinking about the same issues this morning. And the truth is, I can't really find a satisfying explanation for David's family being written into this novel. In a way, I know I'm being disingenuous. But it seems as though David writes his father and his aunt and their fights into the novel because he's insisting on some root or family history that has fed his current attitudes or stigmas. The temptation is to unlock or unpack that section and find either a) the part of his family life that "made him gay" [I don't actually believe this] or b) the part of his family life that makes him afraid to embrace his queerness and informed his whole tortured, dramatic personae. I wouldn't harp on the former, except for the fact that David is motherless and if we want to get into Freudian theory... blah blah blah short circuit his Oedipal drives blah blah blah reroute his pleasure drives blah blah blah... as you might be able to tell, I'm not much for psychoanalytic theory.
Or maybe it's just written that way to make David seem that much more the homeless vagabond -- he hates Paris, he hates Spain, he hates home! He's got nowhere t'go! But David has a lot of white privilege and he gets by on borrowing money from businessmen and begging his Dad who (quite rightly) doesn't send the money... does anyone else get the sense that David is immature, not fully formed, rife with youthful naiveté? Is that the thread we're missing from the novel when we only talk about queer and black and international issues? I mean, when you put David's white privilege out on the table, his struggles really do seem, as Giovanni says, "melodramatic." (I hope no one gets the impression that I didn't LOVE this book - I always have)
ReplyDeletePerhaps Baldwin was intentionally revolutionary in choosing to make his central character a white male, so to make someone of the "privileged" race wallow in marginalization. Or perhaps Baldwin chose not to risk the scorn of the African American community-at-large if he were to expose this particular(gay)facet of black life.
ReplyDeleteIn response to question 3, I found it interesting how the distance David has with his father and mother at a younger age (and even when he leaves United States) is the mold of all his future relationships. For instance, the idea that his mother has died (what greater distance), or that his mother "watches" him through a picture sitting on the fireplace on the other side of the room is similar to his distance with Giovanni. Giovanni is going to die (I couldn't write this comment last week because I would have give away the ending), the idea that Giovanni is in a prison cell sounds reminiscent of the his trapped mother being captured in the picture frame. Similarly, both characters have a similar impact on David; both judge his way of being indirectly.
ReplyDeleteIn response to Question 5, I felt that Baldwin juxtaposes the caretakers' sons and money in this manner because for him it boils down to understanding what really truly matters in life. I am sure that the loss of her family’s live savings hurts immensely but at the same time losing two of her three sons is an unfathomable feeling unless you have lived through that. For the caretaker she looks at David as a son, she feels the need to give him motherly advice, that he should settle down and find a woman that he loves and have lots of babies, so for her personal and familial stability outweighs that of financial. As evident when she relates to David how young and rejuvenated she and her husband felt when their youngest son visited with their grandchild. So here I believe that Baldwin’s juxtapositions serves as a commentary on the elasticity of human existence with respect to financial loss, yes it’s a bad thing a devastating blow, but one that pales in comparison to actually losing a family member someone who you love, when they are gone its definite, and there is no elasticity of death.
ReplyDeleteMuch like the Baldwin's documentary that we have seen, The price of the ticket. Baldwin recognizes the human condition as opposed to the black/white/yellow/etc. condition. Instead of making David a black man, he makes him a white man. Some of the reasons can be that he wants David to appeal to a wider (white) audience, to make a white gay man's issues become more universal, not strictly limited to black men. I think that the universalism that making David a white man offered the novel is what made Baldwin choose David race to be white with the influence of his beliefs from his documentary.
ReplyDeletethanks for these questions, they are very interested and make me think about this topic! bigpaperwriter.com has an essay about James Baldwin and his Notes of a native son!
ReplyDelete