Month: April 2021

In Giovanni’s Room, there is a constant tug-of-war between David’s desire for Giovanni and David’s desire to “be inside again, with the light and safety, with my manhood unquestioned” (Baldwin 305). This “insider status,” which Giovanni’s calls “la vie pratique” (287), is tied up with something that queer theoriests call “the reproductive imperative,” or society’s implicit mandate that individuals enter into a heterosexual marriage and have children. It is children that are the core of David’s tension, a motif which embodies Lee Edelman’s concept of “reproductive futurism.” All of this to say: Giovanni’s Room anticipated important conversations about how queer people fit into a society that holds children to be “the telos of the social order” (Edelman, No Future 11).

First, an explanation of some terms: reproductive futurism describes society’s obsession with procreation, resulting in political orders that hold the Child (or rather, the image of the Child) to be all-important, a moral trump card over everything else. This is why queer people are deemed “unnatural” and are villainized by society: because we (often) do not procreate, we represent “the side of those not ‘fighting for the children’” (No Future 3). Of course, I can talk about this for ages, and Edelman’s theories, deemed the “antisocial thesis” by some, are not universally accepted; still, the point remains that this tension between the queer person and procreation is a critical component of Giovanni’s Room. 

We see a tension between queer men and reproductive futures in multiple chapters. For example, Giovani notes that Guillaume, another gay man, “is a member of one of the best and oldest families in France. But maybe, then, he remembers that his name is going to die with him” (Baldwin 306). Implicit in this passage is the fact that Guillame, due to his sexuality, will never reproduce. He represents the end of his bloodline, a travesty in a society that values children over all-else. David himself sees women only for their value as bearers of children, precisely because he recognizes that society demands that he reproduce. He says things like “I wanted a woman to be for me a steady ground, like the earth itself, where I could always be renewed” (305). This ‘renewal’ is undoubtedly procreation itself, and the woman is nothing more than a field to be plowed. It makes sense, then, that when Hella says “I want to start having babies,” David replies “I’ve always wanted that” (321). It is notable that Giovanni himself respects women “for their inside life,” a phrase which refers both to women as having different emotional lives and as having the ability to bear children (285). In short, Baldwin’s astute eye to society and the queer experience enabled him to anticipate conversations that are ongoing today, about how queer people fit into a global hegemony that not only demands heterosexual, biological reproduction, but literally murders those who do not comply with the reproductive imperative.

“You live in the dark, boy, I cannot pretend,” sings Lil Nas X in “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” a song about a same-sex relationship with someone who has not come out publicly. The content of the song and its accompanying music video center around the rejection of feeling shame about one’s identity, a theme that features prominently in Giovanni’s Room. David struggles with his attraction to men, his love for Giovanni, and the realization that he has to return to his fiancée soon. To escape these feelings and possibly to prove that he is attracted to women, he sleeps with a woman named Sue. As he has sex with her, he goes through the motions and refers to it as a “performance” (302). She asks to see him again afterwards, but he shrugs her off and “could scarcely bear to watch the struggle occurring in her face, it made [him] so ashamed” (303). In this scene, David, unlike Lil Nas X, can and does pretend to be someone he’s not, an experience that leaves him feeling unfulfilled and ashamed. 

When Lil Nas X sings, “Call me by your name,” he is encouraging his lover to feel comfortable around him in his identity, something that Giovanni wants from David as well. In class, Lan Ahn brought up the fact that every person in the music video, from Satan to the serpent, was portrayed by Lil Nas X. She asked if we think that has any connection to the theme of identity. I think it absolutely does. The “Other(ed) Americans in Paris” article describes the tension between the true self and the historically-determined self present in Baldwin’s work. In “Montero,” Lil Nas X is taking the version of himself society has createdーthe sinner who is going to Hellーand uses it to show them who is really is: a black queer artist who is not ashamed of who he is. David, in his relationships with Hella, Sue, and even his father, is attempting to be who society wants him to be: a straight, white, engaged man. His love for Giovanni interferes with that performance by revealing his true identity. 

I was really struck by the motif of the ocean in Giovanni’s Room. Some version of the sea or the ocean or water is often used to describe David’s relationship to America and David’s relationship to Giovanni. I couldn’t help but track this repetition, considering how pervasive the way in which Baldwin uses it is. 

David’s internalized homophobia makes him believe his sexuality is his original sin. It seems as if David, in escaping across the sea to another land, is escaping a proposed cleansing of his homosexuality. He is jumping from one land to the next, crossing the sea to get there. The water that separates the two countries is cleansing and baptismal. Geographically, David’s sexuality differs. In America, David’s home is his ideal of heterosexuality and conventionality. In France, where David (and James) flees, is where David can practice homosexuality. Despite avoiding the water, David can’t forget his home and the shame that discolors his self-concept. Home is not specific enough for David, it is relational to the sea: “across the ocean” (271). The ocean transcends the different sexualities, he wades deeper into the water as he experiments more with Giovanni. It is an alternate baptism; instead of washing away the original sin, he is submerged in it. In this way, Baldwin is subverting our Christianized ideal of baptism. David is “being led by Giovanni into deep and dangerous water” (250); his life with Giovanni occurs “beneath the sea” (281); life “occurs underwater,” David undergoes a “sea-change” (289); Giovanni drags David with him to “the bottom of the sea” (314). Baldwin exploits the qualities of water: its cleansing ability and its potential for depth and danger. The “dirt” of his sin is not washed away, despite Giovanni’s assurance that the “dirty water” the older gay men swim in will be easily washed away by him and David (256). He is being baptized by Giovanni, but the act is incomplete. He is submerged in the water, yet does not come up for air. This motif comes to exclusively symbolize suicide. David says, “I thought of the people before me who looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it” (304). All those who committed suicide by drowning exist in the between, an incomplete act of baptism, in which they are submerged in sin (as David acutely feels). Yet this is a shame that is not shared by the others. Specifically, Jacques encourages David not to get trapped within this perception of his dirty body because he will end up despising every inch of his flesh (267). 

David soon develops a fear of water, because it is a reminder of his incomplete and subverted baptism. After sleeping with another woman in order to distract himself from the pull of Giovanni, David “hear[s] the water running” and becomes afraid to “go out into that night which had seemed to be calling [him] only a few moments before” (303). Giovanni tries to complicate David’s notion of water when he describes women as “like water…tempting…treacherous…bottomless…shallow…dirty” (285), yet it is Giovanni who represents all of these things for David. He is the possibility of simultaneous fulfillment and paralyzing shame, freedom and imprisonment, salvation and damnation. 

David has a strained relationship with his dad, although his dad does not seem to know this. They are as close as acquaintances, and although David wishes for a deeper tie, he continues to hide himself from his father. After a car accident, David and his father share a tender moment, but David notes that it is fleeting and shallow: “For I understood, at the bottom of my heart, that we had never talked, that now we never would” (235). David puts significant weight into the activity of talking. He cannot “talk” to his father because he cannot communicate his true feelings, thoughts and desires to him. This is why, I will argue, Giovanni and Jacques step in as father figures. 

The joy of reading sections of the text with Giovanni and David is the dialogue. They are intellectual equals—they spar and joke and question each other. Giovanni is able to push David to question his mindset. During a rather philosophical conversation about time, David tries to suggest that people need time to make good decisions: “‘I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel'” (250). This sentiment, of course, mirrors David’s own choices thus far in his life. He has waited to learn to accept himself or be truthful of his identity. Giovanni responds in a way that prods this exact fear: “‘And when you have waited—has it made you sure?’ For this I could simply summon no answer” (250). David reaches a point with Giovanni where he feels stumped and finally begins to wonder if he might be wrong (at least his silence implies this). Because David defined a strong relationship between father and son as one where they can actually talk, I think that Giovanni fills in as a father in this moment. Their conversations digs deep immediately and pushes the other to see a new worldview. This is the intimacy David craved from his father and even acts as a sort of tough love. 

On the line of tough love, I want to briefly mention Jacques, who I think exemplifies this even more. Jacques is an advice giver. He takes David under his wing and, at least in some moments, tries to guide him along a better path than his own. He understands David’s shame and asks him to shed it for the sake of love: “‘Love him,’ said Jacques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?'” (267). Jacques, too, is taking on a role that David’s own father never did. For one, he knows that David is homosexual, but he also actively guides David towards a better life. He does so often by bluntly pointing out David’s shame, but also suggests a new path going forward. This protective attitude and tough love resembles that of a father figure. 

Finally, David explicitly connects the caretaker to his mother, who passed when he was young. The caretaker is an older Italian woman who checks up on David and attends to his needs in a way that a mother would, or at least a very friendly neighbor. Before she leaves, David thinks to himself,  “I feel that I want to be forgiven, I want her to forgive me. But I do not know how to state my crime. My crime, in some odd way, is in being a man and she knows all about this already. It is terrible how naked she makes me feel, like a half grown boy, naked before his mother” (278). It seems that part of the reason David cannot forgive himself for his homosexuality is because he needs his mother, or a mother figure, to do so for him. He wants desperately to be forgiven, to no longer feel like a little boy, naked and scared and guilty. 

The inclusion of these pseudo-parental figures illuminates something larger about David. He lacks these strong relationships with his own parents, and this contributes to the shame and fear he has surrounding his sexuality. In many ways he resembles a child in the text, lashing out easily at those who make him scared and hiding everything he feels ashamed about. This childlike attitude might illuminate his character traits and actions more going forward and stunt his ability to fully accept himself.