“They had taught him what it meant to be a man”

In “Going to Meet the Man” and Giovanni’s Room, the father figures of the main characters undertake the responsibility of showing their sons what it means to be a man. In “Going to Meet the Man,” the narrator recounts the way Jesse remembers his father and his father’s friends, saying, “They were his models…and they had taught him what it meant to be a man” (939). Jesse’s memory of a lynching in his childhood shows exactly how his father taught him his understanding of manhood. Rather than simply allowing Jesse to tag along to the murder, Jesse’s father ensures that the murder becomes formative for his young son’s conception of manhood, hoisting Jesse up on his shoulders to witness the murder and repeating that Jesse was “never gonna forget this picnic” (949). In Jesse’s father’s mind, manhood was intimately related to white supremacy and power.

Similarly, in Giovanni’s Room, David’s father attempts to impose his conception of manhood on his son. In the heat of a drunken argument with his sister, David’s father says, “All I want for David is that he grow up to be a man. And when I say a man, Ellen, I don’t mean a Sunday school teacher” (231). Through this line, David’s father seems to imply that a man is not a beacon of purity; prior to this conversation, David’s father was “interfering” with a woman, one of his nightly activities. Ellen responds, saying, “A man is not the same thing as a bull.” In other words, his depiction of man is lacks humanity and love.

Strikingly, these two descriptions of manhood precede opposite reactions by the main characters. As the murder ends in “Going to Meet the Man,” Jesse describes loving his father more than ever (949). However, after David hears Ellen and his father’s conversation, he recounts despising his father and hating Ellen (231). Yet, despite these polar opposite reactions, each of the principal characters adopts their father’s understanding of manhood, showing that the father’s example either influences this opinion of manhood or serves as an example their sons are fated to repeat. Jesse associates manhood with power—just as his father has sex with his mother only on the eve of this expression of white power, Jesse cannot achieve an erection and fulfill his manly duty of making love to his wife unless he too thinks about power and domination over others. 

More surprisingly, David also adopts the mistaken depiction of manhood presented his father. Unwilling to fully love Giovanni, David has loveless intercourse that he does not allow to mean anything. Though not to the same extent as his father, David is a bull in the sense that his affairs are loveless and meaningless. Just as David’s father runs around with women without looking for commitment, David is unwilling to commit to a relationship filled with real love. In each of these texts, the father figures show their son’s that manhood does not entail love—the Sunday school teacher, in David’s father opinion, shows too much love and not enough manhood and the white supremacist can only love in a limited way. Though each of the characters responds differently to this message, David and Jesse ultimately repeat the loveless lives of their fathers, reinforcing the ineptitude of a live without love.

Love and Hate

ThroughoutGoing to Meet the Man, there is a certain contrast between love and hate. I found it interesting that Baldwin chooses to tell this tale of horrifying hatred during the act of lovemaking was performed. Jessie is unable to get an erection, which is when he recounts an incidence of extreme hatred towards a black man. This gruesome tale of a black man getting mutated and lynched by the white public is told without paying much attention to what action the man did to deserve this inhumane treatment. Baldwin writes that Jessie “beg[ins] to feel a joy he had never felt before. He watche[s] the hanging, gleaming body, the most beautiful and terrible object he had ever seen till then.” (Baldwin 335) The joy is contrasted with the hatred which has caused the “hanging” body. This contrast allows the reader to really feel disgusted at the white man who is turned on by this hate. It makes the story more impactful for me because Jessie does not find anything wrong with the joy he is receiving after seeing such heinous treatment. It makes me despise this white man, who represents the general white male population at that time. Baldwin also contrasts love and hate when he points out that “at that moment Jesse loved his father more than he had ever loved him.” (Baldwin 336) Jessie’s love for his father stems from his father introducing him to the hatred which he carries with him in his adulthood. 

            In his adulthood, when Jessie cannot get an erection, he finally gets one by recounting the story of a black man getting lynched. Jessie “[thinks] of the morning and grab[s] her, laughing and crying, crying and laughing, and he whisper[s], as he stroke[s] her, as he [takes] her, [and says] “Come on, sugar, I’m going to do you like a nigger, just like a nigger, come on, sugar, and love me just like you’d love a nigger.” (Baldwin 338) He is turned on by hate and then makes love to his wife. Yet, he only thinks about a white mob lynching a black man. Not only is the act of lovemaking made possible because of hate towards the black population, but even during the act of lovemaking Jessie does not think about his wife, and thinks about the lynching. He is literally in love with hate. 

            The contrast between love and hate makes the readers despise Jessie as it reveals his personality which involves only unreasonable hatred to his core, even while lovemaking.   

Race and Sexuality as Social Constructions

Reading ahead in the syllabus, I was interested to see that Going to Meet the Man was included in our unit on James Baldwin’s queerness. Of course, this attuned my reading to queer motifs in the short story. Going to Meet the Man is undoubtedly a story about systemic white supremacy, anti-Black police brutality, and a horrific lynching. The white family literally enjoys a picnic at the lynching, reminding the reader that Baldwin is speaking, first and foremost, about race. But there are also important passages relating to sexuality. For example, the short story opens with Jesse’s inability to achieve an erection with his wife. Although “[e]xcitement filled him like a toothache…it refused to enter his flesh.” It is only at the end, when Jesse thinks about the brutalized Black male body that he is able to achieve an erection: “He thought of the boy in the cell; he thought of the man in the fire; he thought of the knife and grabbed himself and stroked himself and a terrible sound…came out of him.” It is notable, then, that Baldwin depicts Jesse as both sexually perverse and horrifically racist. 

I don’t think that Baldwin is claiming that Jesse is “gay.” As a queer man himself, it is hard to believe he would write a story in which part of Jesse’s perversion is his homosexuality. Still, I am reminded of how the United States itself constructed sexuality along similar lines as it constructed race, an idea which I first learned about after reading Siobhan B. Somerville’s Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. In the monograph, Somerville argues that “it was not merely a historical coincidence that the classification of bodies as either “homosexual” or “heterosexual” emerged at the same time that the United States was aggressively constructing and policing the boundary between “black” and “white” bodies” (3). 

An example that Somerville offers is the year 1892 –– the year that Plessy v. Ferguson was decided by an all white, all male Supreme Court. This case was the most dramatic pronouncement of how American culture was fundamentally racialized along Black/white lines, according to Somerville. That same year, another court case entered the national limelight: the case of Alice Mitchell, who murdered her female lover because she believed there was no reason for the two to live if they could not get married. This case, widely sensationalized by national American media sources, hardened the distinction between homosexuality/heterosexuality, resulting in the widespread criminalization of sexual “inverts” (queer people). 

I bring up this reading because Going to Meet the Man attunes the reader to topics of both race and sexuality as they are constructed in America. Baldwin centers white sexualization of the Black body, such as when Jesse sees the Black man’s “privates…huge, huge, much bigger than his father’s, flaccid, hairless, the largest thing he had ever seen till then, and the blackest.” It is notable that Baldwin is voicing these fetishizing thoughts, with an attention to skin tone, through a white narrator. Hence, in Going to Meet the Man, Baldwin intertwines the themes of race and sexuality, especially as the two are constructed by anti-Black hegemonies. 

The Naturalistic Fallacy

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.

On Fools

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.

Societal Isolation

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?

A Foucaultian Idea of Power

When Korey Garibaldi guest lectured our class, he asked us: Who holds the power, David or Giovanni? Some people responded that David is less powerful because he is so controlled by his own shame, fear, and second guessing of himself and his actions. Giovanni was perceived as powerful to an extent because he feels that he has nothing to hide about himself. He is not ashamed of his queerness, and he does not feel that he is doing anything unnatural or wrong. David’s identity grants him immense power–he is a white, American man. America is the richest nation in the world. David has money, and he also has a partner, Hella, who has money; wealth obviously grants him considerable power. 

There seemed to be no direct answer as to who holds the power in their relationship. Rather, the power dynamics between them are nuanced. This idea reminded me of Foucault’s conception of power in The History of Sexuality, VI. He believes that society typically envisions power solely in a monarchical fashion–what he termed the “juridico-discursive” representation of power (Foucault, 82). He describes one of the main features of this power as “the insistence of the rule”–the manner in which power is conceived as unilateral; certain laws are given by the authority and received by the subject (Foucault, 83). This idea of power creates a binary between those who possess it and those who are subject to it. 

Foucault believes that understanding power in this way leads to misunderstanding the manner in which sex and sexuality function in our society. Foucault redefines the concept of power as diffused, operating through “unspoken strategies” and having no certain direction (Foucault, 95). It is exercised from “innumerable points,” meaning that there is no singular authority possessing it (Foucault, 94). It is multidirectional, with power originating from below as well as from above, operating vertically and horizontally. It is inextricably linked to “economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations,” and relationships of the like (Foucault, 94). These “power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective,” meaning that while some individuals are responsible for carrying out certain acts of power, there are forces of power that exist beyond any individual act, always controlling people but without a precise locus of control (Foucault, 94). Foucault reenvisions power as something enacted by the individual that may conventionally seem powerless as well as something imposed upon them.

With Foucault’s idea of power in mind, I believe it is possible for both David and Giovanni to hold power in their relationship. The power between them need not be dichotomous. There are certain aspects of their character, race, ethnicity, nationality, and economic status that grant each of them power in very specific ways. There are also factors beyond either of their control that have power over them–like society’s heteronormativity. I feel as though considering Foucault and his ideas of sex and sexuality may bring to light aspects of identity that are at play in the novel that on the surface seem neglected in failing to thoroughly address race and intersectionality.

Revolving Doors

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?

Reinterpreting the Myth

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.

Dirty vs. Clean

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.