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Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin
by , 11-01-2010 at 04:03 PM (8142 Views)
Along with Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar, Baldwin's Giovanni's Room is one of the most widely read of gay literature, probably the most widely read by heterosexuals. However, it has long been a problematic text for gay readers, particularly gay African American readers.
Baldwin was actively involved with the civil rights movement, but shied away from the gay rights movement. He proudly fought along the lines of African American identity politics, was involved in forming a positive image of African Americans, but his one gay novel does little to affirm homosexuality. To put it succinctly, Baldwin has often been accused of being a self-deprecating homosexual, and guilty of perpetuating negative stereotypes. Nonetheless, he was still one of few major American authors to tackle the issue.
For those unfamiliar with the novel. It is about the affair of a white American, David, with a young Italian man, Giovanni, while living in Paris. David has money issues, and ends up living in Giovanni's room, though of course the room itself is a symbolic representation of the containment of David's homosexual desire. The typical psychoanalytical interpretation involved in the liminal spaces and liminal character that David is. He's never grounded, he's in transition, and the homosexual is a liminal person. I don't like to spoil endings, but things don't turn out so well for David, and especially bad for Giovanni.
Personally, I'm not one to trash Baldwin's effort in this novel. He tries to put forward an argument against the repression of homosexuals, he tries to show suffering as a result of the lack of acceptance. Nonetheless, I have to admit that Baldwin is hardly the most enlightened of gay writers, he displays a lot of resentment and negativity towards homosexuality. In large part I'm willing to forgive this because it is a first person narrative in David's voice, and he is the epitome of the self-loathing homosexual. The troubling implication is that this is the book that is the most widely read by heterosexuals and is often encountered early on by homosexuals looking through gay literature, it's probably not the best novel if we're concerned with the social implications. It's another one of those gay novels that perpetuated the image of the permanently unhappy gay man, there really rarely is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in gay lit.
The most striking criticism I've come across has come from African American gays. Many of whom resent Baldwin's unwillingness to directly tackle the issue of black gays. An issue largely erased historically, unmentioned and impossible to admit to a public discourse at the time so heavily concerned with establishing the legitimacy of African Americans. Instead, Baldwin chose to write his novel about white people, in fact he establishes the whiteness of his narrator from the very first page. Some, have argued rather convincingly that the characters are subtly codified as black anyway, and argue that the novel really does say something very controversial by rendering the issues of race and sexuality ambiguous. Though, it doesn't help to ablate the subtle resentment of what is perceived as a lack of courage by Baldwin to tackle the issue of the duel hardships, of racism and homophobia, that black gays faced in the 60s.
Ultimately, if we remove the novel from its social and political implications, we're left with a rather convincing narrative of an individual in conflict with social expectation and his desire to fulfill them, and in many ways it's a rather conventional tragedy as it is his desire to remain socially acceptable that is his undoing. The novel is tightly structured, and Baldwin shows his usual love of symbolism. It's a good novel, even if I sometimes worry over the impression it might give to young gay readers. Moreover, just because of how widely read it is, it's nearly impossible to ignore for anyone interested in LGBT literature.
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