Hey Guys, pretty late with these. Got stuck in the Atlanta airport for a long time.
1. Jonathon (maybe that's how you spell your name?) mentioned last class that he looked at David's whiteness as allowing him to be a sort of "everyman". Does thinking about passages like "My face is like a face you have seen many times. My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe toward a darker past. " (3) or "He (Giovanni) said they all looked alike...At home I could have distinguished patterns, habits, accents of speech - with no effort whatever: now everybody sounded, unless I listened hard, as though they had just arrived from Nebraska." (89) as well as the continual descriptions of white people's complexions (Giovanni's in particular, Joey's also on p.6) as "dark" make David's whiteness something beyond a universal and into an aspect of Baldwin's portraiture? What about all the other mentions of "dark" (above, for example) in the book? It recurs frequently, often to signify the frightening, the unknown: caverns, hallways down which one might follow armies of boys. Do American (or international) race relations have anything to do with this book? Would I ask that question if Baldwin weren't an African American writer? Could this change our reading of statements like "...for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom." (p.5)
2. How does the narrative treat homosexuality? What kinds of examples (beyond, but including David and Giovanni) of homosexual love and sex are we given? Are homo and hetero relationships portrayed differently? What about Hella discussing her idea that a woman must have a man (p.126) compared to the later scene in which David accuses Giovanni of trying to make a "girl" out of him (p.142)? Is the narrator simply David or is there, as I think Tim was getting at last class, another disclosing consciousness at work here?
3. What is happening with time? In particular, what's happening with perpetuity in the scene of the hetero couple skipping through the roses on Giovanni's wall (see p. 86, 118, 140)? The frequent tense shifts? The structured availability of knowledge (we know Giovanni will die from the outset, we don't know his child died until the end nor do we know why he will be put to death). What about the strikingly (to an American) anachronistic method of Giovanni's execution? Guillotine? Really?
Q: How does the narrative treat homosexuality?
ReplyDeleteA: The narrative of the novel treats homosexuality quite critically. One of the few instances when the relationship between Giovanni and David is actually treated with care, it is when they are contrasted against the gay men of the French underworld. This is probably due to the fact that what Giovanni and David share was not born strictly out of sexual gratification. The older frequenters of Guillaume’s bar, however, give precisely the impression that they are there to pray upon men. We are, after all, made very aware of the selling of the boys that goes on in an around the bar. Additionally, once cannot help but notice that homosexuality in the novel is often described in terms of entrapment or imprisonment, As if it is an affliction to escape or seek salvation from. At least, if nothing else, this is certainly the perspective from which David sees it. As our narrator, that perspective then seeps into the very meaning of the novel, making it necessary to make and effort to differentiate between the two authoritative voices of the work, Baldwin and David.