Giovanni's room part 2

THURSDAY, APRIL 28, 2011

Giovanni's room part 2

Giovanni's Room part 2

"The beast which Giovanni had awakened in me would never go to sleep again; but one day I would not be  with Giovanni anymore. And would I then, like all the others, find myself turning  and following all kinds of boys down God knows what dark avenues, into what dark places?"(Baldwin,84).  Giovanni, Guillaume and Jacques have embraced their sexuality; yet, these figures are portrayed in the novel as either desperate, hideous, or isolated. Considering the state of these men in the novel is David's  fear of accepting his homosexuality justified?

Giovanni's room is not only a physical place in the novel but is also its title. What is the significance of the room is the novel? David says 'It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find  myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni's room"(Baldwin, 85). Is the room simply a memory or is there more to it? Why does David spend so much time describing specific details about the room?


"I resented  this: resented being called an American(and resented resenting it) because it seemed to make me nothing more than that, whatever that was; and I resented being called not an American  because it seemed to make me nothing."( Baldwin, 89) These lines reflect David's thoughts about Giovanni calling him an American. What is the significance of being an "American" in the novel? What weight does this title hold if any in David's life?  Is being an American in any way connected to David's ideas of man hood?

Hella is significant as David's fiance . However outside of  this position, what is her role in the novel? Is  her adventure in Spain, significant in anyway to our understanding of the novel?

Giovanni's Room pt. 2

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?

Giovanni's Room Part Deux

It seems that it is very much impossible for David to accept the strange package that love comes in. What, in David's mind, are the tragic outcomes of his love affair with Giovanni? How does the final conclusion of the novel negate or diminish David's original ideas of tragedy?

The author possesses a keen sense of lyricism in his writing. I find his writing a bit haunting. How do you feel about it? Do you believe it possess a haunting lyricism? Take a look at these passages:
1. "perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition" (pp.121)
2. "descending night...protected them against the darkness and the long moan of this long night...and wonder, like me, how they had fallen out of the web of safety. What a long way, I thought, I've come-to be destroyed." (pp. 137)
3."But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt." (pp.148)
4. "And at moments like this I felt that we were merely enduring and committing the longer and lesser and more perpetual murder." (pp.157)
5. "...watching, in the window pane, my reflection, which steadily becomes more faint. I seem to be fading away before my eyes-this fancy amuses me, and I laugh to myself."(pp.220)

There is a serious disparity in David’s story about what makes a home and what a home consists of? How is Giovanni’s room- the room Giovanni and David inhabit for a short time, exhibit a true home for David and/or Giovanni? Giovanni envisioned a safe nest for himself and his lover, while David saw something very different. In retrospect what is Giovanni’s room indicative of ?

NEMLA Panel Proposal

Hey all --

I've just submitted a panel proposal for the 2012 NEMLA Convention in Rochester, NY. The panel is entitled "Infighting and Rival Texts in 20th Century African-American Literature." It has not yet been approved and I won't know if it will be until later May. If one person would like to co-chair such a panel with me and help handle the glamorous responsibilities that accompany such a job (emailing respondents, reading abstracts, promoting the CfP, etc.), please get in touch with me early on so we can discuss that possibility. The panel description is below.

From early on in the Harlem Renaissance, many black writers knew for a fact that there was a New Negro, but most differed on the nuances when creating such a character from text. African-American Literature in the early 20th century was marked not only by the spirit of cooperation and the feeling of community, but also by infighting and fevered debate over what constituted a proper direction for the movement(s). This panel seeks to reignite discussion over the ideas and histories of these debates between black writers during the formative and fluid period of 1920-1960. Divisive texts will be highlighted and discussed. By evaluating not only the texts, but also the historical reception of the opposing ideas, we may track how the representations of competing ideologies have been altered or filtered over the ensuing years. Papers should not merely chose sides or say who was ultimately correct or incorrect in such debates, but should allow for some measured or reasonable analysis of the competing arguments through synchronic and/or diachronic lenses. Some topics, debates, and divisive texts include, but are not limited to:

W.E.B. DuBois and Claude McKay

W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey

James Baldwin and Richard Wright (‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’)

Carl Van Vechten’s *Nigger Heaven*

Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes

Claude McKay’s *Home to Harlem* or *Banjo*

Eldridge Cleaver and James Baldwin

Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston

The purpose of such a panel is to provoke a reappraisal of plurality during this period. Our interest is in exhibiting and discussing this widely varied canon prior to its representation as being homogenized in later eras. Further, we are seeking deeper understanding about the differences in opinion that have informed our broader opinions about African-American Literature in contemporary times.

The Queer Theatre: Questions on Giovanni's Room

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).

Discussion questions for Giovanni's Room

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?

James Baldwin's "Giovanni"

NOTE: These are my questions for the week of April 14th.

1. What are the implications of Baldwin writing from a white first person perspective during his time, and in context to the novel?

2. Baldwin writes, “Joey’s body was born, was sweaty, the most beautiful creation I had ever seen till then.” To the reader it can seem as white exoticism, but Baldwin continues to write, “I would have touched him… but something stopped me… perhaps it was because he looked so innocent lying there… he was so much smaller than me; my own body suddenly seemed gross and crushing and the desire which was rising in me seemed monstrous,” (9). What does this relation say about the Baldwin’s white/black dynamic historically, politically, and sexually.

3. On page 34 Giovanni says that American’s believe to much in the constraints of time, rather than the beauty of pain, death, and love (the essence of life). “Time is just common, it’s like water for a fish. Everybody’s in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. That’s all. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn’t care.” What does this symbolize for Giovanni, between the differences of the East and the West?

4. On pg 55 Guillaume tells David that he is lucky he is going through “this” young and not when he is older. What does this signify? Is this instance saying homosexuality’s an experimental phase?