Hi everyone. Hope you're enjoying Giovanni's Room as much as I am. I finished it, but I will try to limit my comments to the first half:
The protagonist David is quite often confronted with versions of his own queerness that he despises and he writes about the queer scene in Paris with a less than favorable tone. Some objects of his scorn include Guillaume and Jacques' and their 'fairy' mannerisms, the rent boys such as the skinny Yves (who is mentioned twice in the novel), and the 'mummy' transsexual at Guillaume's bar, which I will discuss further on. It is not merely the expository or self-reflective scenes that exhibit this quality; the scenes written in dialogue intensely focus on the most despicable or pretentious conversations from the queer scene, David and Giovanni included. One such weightless exchange occurs between Giovanni and Madame Clothilde at her restaurant:
"This is Monsieur Guillaume," [Giovanni] tells her, and with the most subtle flattening of his voice, "my patron. He can tell you if I am serious."
"Ah," she dares to say, "but I cannot tell if he is," and covers this daring with a laugh. (52)*
There is evidence that lines like these could either be examples of David's self-hating gay identity, or simply the fanciful (yet meaningless) musings of youth abroad (the conversations regarding differences between Americans and French later on in the novel speak more to this observation). And let us not forget, Giovanni and David are in the same boat, so to speak, as neither is a native Frenchman, though Giovanni seems to play the part a little more admirably. Still, is it a parody of queerness that is on display or a critique of youthful folly?
The most striking example of the horror David feels comes in his description of the 'mummy' or 'zombie' that approaches him at Guillaume's bar. "the thin, black hair was violent with oil [...] the eyelids gleamed with mascara, the mouth raged with lipstick. The face was white and thoroughly bloodless with some kind of foundation cream [...] The shirt, open coquettishly to the navel, revealed a hairless chest and a silver crucifix [...] He wore buckles on his shoes." The 'mummy' asks David if he is interested in the barman, to which David recoils into his realm of privacy, of guarding secrets: "I don't see how that concerns you" (40). The deathly queen is like an apparition, taunting David with a reading of fate and then disappearing from the novel like a ghost: "You will be very unhappy. Remember that I told you so" (41).
#1) Given the above context, discuss the dialectic that occurs between embracing queerness and shunning it throughout the novel. Consider this problem: did queerness exist as a relevant form of social identification at this time or is it being invented along with the literature itself? How is David's embittered struggle for selfhood and acceptance exemplary of the invisible queer's greater struggle for social acceptance (or, if you want to put the analysis in the African-American box, how could this struggle speak to all who are marginalized and problematize the privileging of social movements?)
Since the environmental norm of this novel is in the queer quarter of Paris and not on the streets of straight-laced New York, David's character and his discomfort with his queerness causes him to be alienated with his novel. However, since he can also not conform to heteronormativity (and ultimately loses Hella late in the book), his alienation spirals into self-loathing. David's experience tells him that he has a choice of social conformity and that the choice is to be Jacques or Guillaume (despicable old queers) or his father. Though this novel was published prior to the 60s counterculture, it temporally explodes with New Left and poststructural leanings because it refuses to seat David or resolve his social schizophrenia. Even the marginal characters are described in such variance and depth (yet ambiguity) that they can not be resolved as types. Read, for instance, how he describes the counter and cashier ladies of Paris:
"They are neither ill- nor good-natured, though they have their days and styles, and they know, in the way, apparently, that other people know when they have to go to the bathroom, everything about everyone who enters their domain. Though some are white-haired and some not, some fat, some thin, some grandmothers and some but lately virgins, they all have exactly the same, shrewd, vacant, all-registering eye; it is difficult to believe that they ever cried for milk or looked at the sun; it seems they must have come into the world hungry for banknotes, and squinting helplessly, unable to focus their eyes until they came to rest on a cash register" (50-51).
Within this passage, the author reaches for a type that itself is unattainable. The counter ladies of Paris are themselves inimitable as types, but cannot be described to their essence, since "some [are] grandmothers and some but lately virgins." In another passage, David describes the pluralistic nature of "hate" and "love" emotions as he considers how Giovanni's love is changing him for the worse. He writes, "there opened in me a hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots" (84).
#2) Given how the author destabilizes the characterization of types in the novel (save for perhaps the gay queens), is the novel adopting a poststructural or chaotic attitude toward social phenomena? How do you reconcile this evidence of early postmodernity with the author's optimism and altruism/absolutism in other passages (see "men can never be housewives" on page 88 or the privileging of privacy throughout)?
Finally, let's discuss form and style. The "chronotope" (to use a really pretentious Bakhtin term) of this novel resides within a formal device, one that shifts back and forth from the present, where David resides and writes (with self reflection), to the distant past of David's childhood and first sexual experience, to the not-so-distant past of his tragic Parisian love affair with Giovanni. This device resembles the staging or blocking of scenes and uses the lens of revision and self-reflection -- hindsight, if you will. The latter temporal place makes up the bulk of the novel and, thus, can be regarded as the seminal event or primary "scene." As we shall see, "scene" becomes a very important word to this novel.
The "scene-ing" of this novel and the handling of the exposition relates strongly to the novel's overt references to theatricality. Consider the 'mummy' queen from earlier, who is heavily made up, dressed as something she is not; the author clothes and costumes her in a manner very reminiscent of Genet's costuming in Our Lady of the Flowers. Further, the narrative itself can be read as a stock gesture -- if you wanted to read it as a genre, it is that of the "star-crossed lovers" variety intermingled with the (sexual) bildungsroman. It plays out with the air of romance and theatricality and the dialogue is prevalent, carrying the bulk of scene description (particularly upon the first meeting of Giovanni and David).
But the writing goes further than these two structural strategies to the point where the characters themselves cannot help referencing the theatricality of it all. Constantly, David refers to the queer quarter as a "scene" or Paris itself as a "scene." David discusses the possibility of Hella finding out about his queer relationship as he and Giovanni lie in bed together. Giovanni refers to David's sensibilities, his dramatizing of events as "English murder mysteries [...] as though we were accomplices in a crime"** (81). One senses that in Giovanni's eyes, David is complicating his own life by refusing to acknowledge an intangible desire, but apparently nothing has changed in the present iteration of David and he ends his tale as an unreconciled and alienated character.
#3) How does the careful and meticulous nature of scene-blocking in this novel relate to the theatrical characters and "scenes" within the novel? What might the author be saying about theatricality, role-playing, rooms, scenes, home, and identity? How does the temporal fluctuation in the novel work to its benefit or success as a narrative?
Wow. WAY TOO MUCH WRITING. Well, I hope you enjoyed my ridiculous rant. There's so much more I want to say about "home" and "rooms," but it's all second half stuff and I have to save it for the people next week... to quote Charlie Brown, "WAAUUUGHHH!" Also, these questions are (for the most part) really dense multi-part ones so I decided to only do three. I hope that's acceptable.
*I feel like there are better examples of this, but I'm struggling to find them right now.
** He also refers to David's behavior as being an "English melodrama" (82).
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