Month: April 2021

James Baldwin, in his essay “The Male Prison” makes a point about where homosexuality fits in to the natural world. He writes, “to ask whether homosexuality is natural is really like asking whether or not it was natural for Socrates to swallow hemlock….whether or not it was natural for the Germans to send upwards of six million people to an extremely twentieth century death. It does not see me that nature helps us very much when we need illumination in human affairs” (232). Baldwin pushes back against the vision of an ideal natural world by positing that one could call the suicide of Socrates or the genocide of millions of Jews natural as well. To Baldwin, what human beings intuitively want, or do, does not always link up to being moral. Baldwin is actually summarizing one of the informal logical fallacies called the Naturalistic Fallacy in Philosophy. The fallacy goes something like this: 

1. Doing X is natural. 
2. Therefore, you ought to do X. 

This is a fallacy because what is natural is not always ethical. Getting vaccinated, for example, is not classified as natural because vaccines “trick” your body into creating antibodies without actually exposing someone to a disease. But many would agree that getting vaccinated is ethical because it protects individuals and the larger community. Baldwin employs this fallacy to argue that the question about whether or not homosexuality is natural is not the question at stake. 

I would argue, though, that the argument against the Naturalistic Fallacy undergirds “Giovanni’s Room” too. Giovanni describes his life in Italy before he knew he was homosexual, “I thought I was like other men…I wanted to stay forever in our village and work in the vineyards…” (334). At first, this beautiful, natural landscape seems like a dream or a fairytale. Giovanni is happy. But the space does not remain this way: his wife births a stillborn and Giovanni leaves the village, cursing God. What at first seemed like a natural paradise became a place where Giovanni could not create life, where his love could not produce more love. What is natural is not always what is good. But Baldwin does not try to suggest that the city is any better just because it is not natural. There is more freedom for homosexuals to thrive and crossdressing and other modes of being are much more widely accepted. But Giovanni and David are still holed up in a small room. Even here, their love cannot flourish. 

I think Baldwin is showing us all of these spaces where homosexual love cannot grow not to say that homosexual love is impossible, but to critique what the world is at this point in time. In other words, he does not fall for the Naturalistic Fallacy that what is is what ought to be. The novel is so tragic because it has a larger political aim: to show that the conditions of the world did not allow for love to flourish, especially homosexual love, and to suggest that it needs to change.

Giovanni’s Room broke my heart. Like, seriously, I did not expect it to be quite so distressing a read, and part of me isn’t even sure what’s sadder: David’s doomed relationships or the fact that he’s the one that dooms them. David himself says it best during his discussion of his father: “I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me” (232). And indeed, this much is evident in almost all of David’s relationships: from his father, whose attempts at bonding David constantly rejects; to Hella, the fiancee to whom David is unfaithful and dishonest; to even Joey, the first love to whom David is terrified of “[losing his] manhood” (226) and who David then bullies until he moves away, David seems hellbent on alienating himself from any person that might care for him.

Giovanni, of course, is only the latest victim of this cycle of self-destructive isolation. David’s fondness for the Italian bartender is so overshadowed by his own internalized homophobia that, despite the all happiness that he experiences while with Giovanni, David helplessly “[resists] him with all [his] strength” (287). David is unable to accept the greater implications a relationship with Giovanni has on his own sexuality and perceptions of masculinity and is therefore equally unable to accept Giovanni himself: David chooses a loveless marriage to a woman over a heartfelt affair with a man, toppling the first in a string of dominoes which ultimately results in Giovanni’s execution. I guess it all goes to show that whether we examine his familial, platonic, or romantic relationships, David’s self-hatred burns so intensely that it immolates his ability to connect to the people around him; he so despises himself that he loses the ability to love at all.

It’s funny, because at one point David eavesdrops on a woman’s conversation about her lover and rather snidely remarks that “One had the impression that, though she certainly did not wish to be a fool, she had lost one definition of the word and might never be able to find another” (293). I recently watched Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom on Netflix and they just happened to suggest such an alternate definition, though one which I believe David would benefit to learn more than the woman: A fool is responsible for what happened to him. A fool cause it to happen. David causes his own pain, his own suffering, and his own loneliness; he chooses (and keeps choosing) to be alone.

Baldwin published Giovanni’s Roomin 1956. However, the society that I grew up in seems to have barely progressed since then. A lot of what Baldwin mentions in Giovanni’s Room, I feel, is still valid for the Indian society today. I will not really touch upon American society in this blog post, since I feel that I have a very narrow and surface level view of it which stems from merely watching or reading the news or living in the “Notre Dame bubble.” The men in Guillaume’s Bar are not very fond of David. Baldwin writes that the men at the bar “could not, somehow, speak to us as they spoke to one another, and they resented the strain we imposed on them of speaking in any other way. And it made them furious that the dead center of their lives was, in this instance, none of their business.” (Baldwin 119) Sadly, this reminds me of the country I grew up in, and the people I grew up around. A famous comedian once described India as the country of the white people of the brown people. In South-East Asia, India is touted to be the most developed and progressive country in general. It was among the first to decriminalize gay couples and people of the same gender having sex (yes, there was an old law against it which the British had created.) However, the country I grew up in now seems very homophobic to me. Just like the people at the bar in Giovanni’s Room, my teachers shamed a boy in my class. They told him that he was “too effeminate” and my family members made sure to pass a demeaning comment towards anyone on the TV that remotely fit the gay stereotype. The attitude of the people at the Bar in Baldwin’s novel highlights how the Indian society is still stuck where Paris was in 1956. People are still uncomfortable around same sex couples and make the couples feel like they are different in a negative way as they do not conform. Same sex couples in India, are sadly made to feel like they are separate and the “other” part of society which must not be spoken about positively. This makes Giovanni’s Room still relevant towards the Indian society. However, the question is when will such a novel become irrelevant to current times?

Throughout the novel, I have been interested in the presence of women, or lack thereof. In “The Male Prison,” Baldwin discusses Gide’s use of a woman named Madeleine and her relationship with a homosexual man. In some ways, from Baldwin’s writing on Gide’s work, I see a similarity to David and Hella’s relationship in the novel. Baldwin writes, “Madeleine kept open for him a kind of door of hope, of possibility, the possibility of entering into communion with another sex. This door, which is the door to life and air and freedom from the tyranny of one’s own personality, must be kept open…” (Baldwin 235). He then goes on to say that those who feel that their door is going to close, or already has, need these relationships. 

This reflects the beginning of part two in Giovanni’s Room, when David is preparing for the return of Hella, and how his talk with Giovanni about it, made him question his life. Giovanni tries to understand David’s relationship with Hella and I think David is trying to understand it, as well. In some ways, David is afraid of the life he may live, or how different his world would be if he cut ties with Hella, and actually lived the life he wants to. Hella is holding his door open to an easier life; she is his tie to what he believes to be masculinity, and the normal life as the man that his Father wants him to be. We then see David go through the tyranny of his own personality and life in Chapter Two of Part Two, he says “I was in a terrible confusion. Sometimes I thought, but this is your life. Stop fighting it. Stop fighting,” (Baldwin 162, E-Book). This is where I find confusion with Baldwin’s two writings. I think we can see that David having a relationship with Hella would make his life easier, but it is not the life that he wants to or needs to live. I think Baldwin is saying that, yes, women and men may need each other to live, in the way that it would give them freedom to an easier life. However, the societal pressures often lead them to lives of misery, so in that sense, there is no freedom?

In our discussion with Professor Garibaldi, I was especially struck by the reinterpretation of Renaissance art, which we discussed in relation to the Lil Nas X video. In my PLS seminar, we are covering the Renaissance period through history, theology, and literature. Sometimes, those texts can feel so dead to me, especially in light of the fruitful conversations I am able to have about race and gender in my English classes. However, the “Montero” music video perfectly shows the way a canon can be passed down and reimagined to make space for the traditionally marginalized voice or artist. Interestingly, I am also struck by the ways this reinterpretation transcends the boundaries of time and brings a piece of art from centuries ago into the modern consciousness so dramatically. Last week, I wrote on the sort of queer temporality that Baldwin sketches out. I’m curious whether Baldwin’s subversive mixing of the sacred and the profane in his reinterpretation of biblical myths could relate to the question of temporality. To me, it seems that, for the characters, homosexuality allows an escape from the oppressive constraints of time. For Baldwin, though, the work of reinterpreting provides a further escape from the bounds of time. Ultimately, this transcendence more effectively allows for a resistance to the domination of a heteronormative world.

Lots of folks have discussed the Eden image is a great place to look on the question of biblical reinterpretation in this text. The idea that “nobody stays in the garden of Eden” precedes the claim that “everybody has a garden” (239). This parallels with David’s American proposition that we are not fish in the common, plain water of time waiting to be eaten, but rather “you can choose to be eaten and also not to eat” (248). In both the conception of Eden and the discussion of time, there is a distinction made between an oppressive, inevitable constraint and a moment of blissful, individualized freedom. This ultimately points back to the struggle of homosexuality in a hetero-world. In this way, Baldwin is also able, like Lil Nas X, to use biblical language to create an understanding of one dimension his intersectional exclusion.

As Theresa brought up in her blog post from last week, Baldwin talks about Giovanni and David’s relationship being “dirty” vs. “clean” when Jacques initially encourages David to love Giovanni authentically. In reading Part 2 of this novel, I found that the words dirty and clean are used with regard to David, Giovanni, and their relationships fairly frequently. After Giovanni is fired, he tells David that “They are just dirty, all of them, low and cheap and dirty… All except you” (305). In this same scene, he says that he did not want to be Guillaume’s lover because he “really did not want to be dirty with him” (307). Here, it seems as though he shares Jacques’s opinion in that he associates being dirty as being untrue to oneself. Giovanni knows that he does not want to sleep with Guillaume because he does not want to sell himself out like that, and he believes that what he has with David is sacred and should be protected. At this point in time, I think he is still under the impression that David and he could love each other and be happy together for the rest of their lives, which explains why he does not see David as one of the “low and cheap and dirty” people he despises. Once he realizes that David is going to leave him, however, Giovanni criticizes him by saying, “You want to be clean. You think you came here covered with soap and you think you will go out covered with soap – and you do not want to stink, not even for five minutes, in the meantime… You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love” (336). This flips the dichotomy that had been established between clean and dirty earlier in this story. Previously, if David had wanted to be clean, all he would have had to do was love Giovanni genuinely; now, Giovanni seems to be saying that David cannot be clean unless he denies their relationship because their love “stinks.” I don’t know if this is just him projecting what he thinks David believes about their love or if he has become cynical about love altogether, but either way, seeing how erratic, desperate, and anguished Giovanni has become is absolutely heartbreaking. Lastly, when David is imagining Giovanni’s execution, he narrates, “That door is the gateway he has sought so long out of this dirty world, this dirty body” (359). Again, David seems to associate their love with being “dirty” and as having been the cause of Giovanni’s downfall. However, it could also be read as David recognizing that the “dirty world” has made it so that they could never love each other genuinely, and this is the true reason for their despair: the dirty world that they live in cannot let them be authentic to themselves or to each other, regardless of the love they share.

Our discussion on whether the more masculine David constructed by Michaelangelo was an accurate representation of his progression into young adulthood, or imposed to be consistent with gender norms, led me to want to explore further the effects of other impositions of sexuality and gender norms surrounding the novel. Korey Garibaldi’s lecture featured pictures of a younger, more androgynous presenting David created by Donatello and an older, more masculine-presenting David constructed by Michelangelo. This transition between how David is represented is consistent with the historical context of the time. Because societies began embracing the female, male gender binary and other heteronormative standards, it would be easy to see how this transition exemplifies fitting into these norms and bounds. It is plausible that this artistic transition led Baldwin to name his main character in Giovanni’s Room “David” in protest to the shift to conform to gender norms and imposed masculine standards.

As the presentation was focused on exploring the historical context behind Giovanni’s Room, it also illuminated various other examples of people from writers, to monarchs, to actors who struggled to conform to heteronormativity and other imposed societal standards on sexuality and gender. While Giovanni’s Room encompasses many elements of Baldwin’s own life and is arguably semi-autobiographical, it features two white main characters. David is a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant man, and Giovanni is an Italian, Catholic man. It is plausible that Baldwin chose to create characters with those identities to represent his history with love in a way that did not directly implicate him. While Italians were discriminated against similarly to Black people, they were white and could be in a book about queerness, whereas Baldwin himself could not. Because prejudice against Black people was so prevalent, it is probable that Baldwin acknowledged Giovanni’s Room would not have been well-received because of the double-bind of racism and homophobia. Though Baldwin is a critique of these imposed sexuality norms, it is possible that his intersectional identity as a Black, queer man contributed to his decision to center the novel on two white main characters. His experiences may have led to his conformity to this racial norm.

Because both Go Tell it On the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room explore the common human struggle of fitting into societal norms and ensuring one’s identity is consistent with these norms, it is evident that Baldwin intended for his writing to serve as a subtle backlash to these norms. The references to historical art and cultural references explored by Garibaldi displayed a long history of those from writers, to monarchs, to actors and more struggling to conform to heteronormativity and other imposed societal standards on sexuality and gender. Baldwin clearly disagreed with these norms and focused his career on creating work that subtly critiques these norms while promoting a message of love and acceptance. Lil Nas X’s MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name) Video is a blatant protest to imposed societal norms on sexuality and is a clear evolution of the work Baldwin was doing to show us how to protest.