Giovanni's Room and the Question of Identity

I have been intending to read some James Baldwin, but picked up "Giovanni's Room" only recently. I suppose what particularly fascinates me about Baldwin is the fact that he emigrated to France but continued to write about United States. There was undeniable love for his homeland (and I don't think he tried to hide it), but the love is only able to live outside of the soil of this land.

(Side note: I recently read some fluffy article on the implied differences among words of similar meaning: White people who move to another country are called expatriates, but nonwhites are immigrants or, worse, migrants. They forgot the term reserved for intellectuals: the exiled. But then what exactly are the differences?)

Back to Baldwin.

A debatable element in Giovanni's Room is that the narrator, "I" (David), is a white American man in Paris, not black like the author. Sure, white men have written mountains of books in the voice of nonwhite men and all colors of women, but a black author writing in the voice of a white man makes everyone uncomfortable.

Actually a lot of the character traits in David are counterfactual to Baldwin's own. For example, David has no mother but a doting and possibly alcoholic father who loves him. Baldwin himself had a stepfather who abused him in childhood.

On some level I have felt a kinship to Baldwin before I read anything he wrote. Besides the realization distance is necessary to allow for love and understanding to survive, I also sensed his ambivalence about identity: American or European, hetero- or homosexual, black or white, here or there. Or both and all of them. The ambivalence can be tormenting, but it can also be delicious. More important, it carries a promise of freedom, which is far more urgent and necessary to those who have less of it.

When one has one or more identities that are not dominant in his milieu, be it black, gay, foreign, poor, or any kind of outsideness, he gets to taste a multitude of feelings, because one does not lose the yearning for a sense of belonging and insideness. But standing a little away, sometimes, also allows for a better and more realistic view of things, a bigger picture. Why? Because we do also identify with the dominant and the powerful. Who hasn't read "Pride and Prejudice" and identify with Mr. Darcy or his "lucky" wife? Who hasn't gone on the adventures of the Fellowship of the Ring? Who hasn't slayed dragons and flown X-wing fighters and blown up Death Stars? (Yes, girls too!) So that part is universal. And everything outside of the dominant identity, we can acquire through experience or empathy.

Giovanni's Room is, in some way, about of self-loathing. Making David white focuses our attention on the hatred brought by one's desires. It's also a story about running away, away from home so that one can be at home with oneself.

King Lear Again

Of all the Shakespeare plays I am fond of --- Henry IV Part 1, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, Much Ado, Richard III --- King Lear was the first and is still the closest to my heart. I had never seriously watched any Shakespeare plays until I happened upon a PBS broadcast of NT's production of King Lear starring Ian Holm. Before this I had seen Branagh's movie version of Hamlet, but that hardly endeared me to the Bard. (Even today I remain puzzled and indifferent to this most famous and celebrated of plays.) This Lear, however, decimated me.

This is a strange family. There is no mother. The father acts like a child. The daughters, even the bad ones, behave more like adults. And yet there is so much truth in these bizarre relationships, truth that we do not talk about in polite society, especially the society in which I grew up, where children are expected to worship and obey their parents, until the parents become senile and childish (and sometimes mad).  

The shattering truths in King Lear lie not only in family dynamics though. Watching a recent version starring Anthony Hopkins, I cannot help but be reminded of the state we're in now, everything that is happening, watching people squirming to escape the confrontation: the true nature of the relationships between men and women in this world. 

We have had thousands upon thousands of stories about the power struggles between fathers and sons, and the necessity of patricide to "make a man." Rivers are choked with the corpses of King Laius and Darth Vader. But fathers and daughters, that is a territory rarely encroached. While Cinderella's evil sisters remain a staple of female characters, where else have we seen the likes of Regan and Goneril? Not until we got Cersei Lannister. She is far from the most evil character in ASOIAF, but she has more haters than Ramsay Bolton or Tywin Lannister (in fact both have plenty of fans). Evil with ambition earns some grudging respect for the Duke of Gloucester and even heroism for Macbeth, but Regan and Goneril got their father's vicious curses on their bodies and their wombs. 

Coincidentally, I heard on the radio a piece of news about a recent study that found women prisoners are twice or thrice more likely to be punished, and punished more harshly, for the same infractions than male prisoners. This is consistent with previous studies indicating that female lawyers get disciplined far more harshly than male lawyers for the same unethical behaviors. Even in abstract psychological experiments, people tend to hand down more severe punishment to women than to men for the same bad deeds. Women are held to much higher moral standards than men are, and that's not a uniquely American or Protestant phenomenon. 

The conflict between men and women is pervasive, unconscious, and intractable, and perhaps impossible to resolve, ever. At the heart of it might be the unbearable (at least for men and probably for many women) fact that we are the same. Women are no better or worse than men, including, but not limited to, the same thirst for power and the same need to vanquish their parents in their rite of passage.

(This is perhaps one of the many ways gender conflict echoes racial conflict: What is intolerable is not the difference, but rather the recognition of similarity and commonality and, subsequently, our shared humanity. That's just going too far!)