Keith Clark. Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson

African American Review, Summer-Fall, 2003 by D. Quentin Miller

Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002. 164 pp. $34.95.

The tension between the individual male artist and his community is a perplexing one that deserves close attention. In this study Keith Clark writes with admirable confidence and authority about this tension in fiction and drama by late twentieth-century African American authors. Ranging deftly among philosophy, cultural history, and literary history, Clark's first chapter is an impressive introduction to his study and a solid foundation for the rest of the book. With grace and clarity, Clark succeeds in his stated goal: "to extrapolate the intersection between subjectivity and masculinity, exploring how male writers have negotiated and critiqued constructions of gender in formulating and depicting black male literary subjects." The "matrix" of his study, as he describes it, is "linguistic self-definition ... the quest for subjectivity through voice." Clark locates Frederick Douglass's Narrative as the appropriate origin for this examination, and he uses Wright's Native Son and Ellison's Invisible Man as two more immediate launching points into his consideration of Baldwin, Gaines, and Wilson, who reimagine "the black male subject" and depart "from the constricting lexicon of protest." The three authors under consideration are connected to Douglass, Wright, and Ellison, yet distinct from them in important ways. As Clark writes, "The multilayered and multivoiced works of Baldwin, Gaines, and Wilson reflect a new wave of African-American writing, where characters and authors background racial oppression and move beyond protesting the sanctity and superiority of whites and whiteness." The author is optimistic about this new wave's capacity to transform "the damaged black male Other into the communal Brother."

The study overall is smart and convincing. Clark's method is not to scrutinize every work by Baldwin, Gaines, and Wilson; instead he extrapolates broadly from one or two representative works from each author and alludes to other works as necessary. Although this method allows Clark the flexibility to develop his thesis and to read outward from this literature into the culture that surrounds it, the reader is occasionally aware of works that are not part of the study and curious about how Clark would interpret them. In the chapter on August Wilson, Clark states from the beginning that he will discuss Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Seven Guitars in detail but will only allude to other plays. Perhaps this admission, coupled with Wilson's relatively coherent oeuvre, account for the fact that this chapter is the most thorough in the book. The chapter on Gaines really only focuses on one novel in detail A Lesson Before Dying. Again, through his summaries and obvious knowledge of many other works by Gaines, Clark manages to cover Gaines's career, yet it would have been interesting to see a slightly broader consideration of some of Gaines's other works in this context, even In My Father's House, a novel which is not alluded to here.

A more problematic omission is in the chapter on James Baldwin, though largely because it is difficult to draw definite general conclusions about an artist whose body of work is so varied and experimental. Clark examines two of Baldwin's fictions in detail, the 1957 story "Sonny's Blues" and the 1979 novel Just Above My Head. Although Clark's readings of the two texts are original contributions to Baldwin criticism, one wonders how the rest of Baldwin's work might look when viewed through this lens. It makes sense that Clark does not spend too much time on texts such as Giovanni's Room that do not address black manhood, the central topic of the study. But in one curt paragraph Clark dismisses If Beale Street Could Talk as "excessively flawed" and describes it as a book that "mawkishly extolled the virtues of heterosexual love and the black man's ability to endure virulent white racism." In so doing, he misses an opportunity to see the complex connections formed between the isolated artist Fonny and the black male community represented by his father and his father-in-law. A more egregious omission is Baldwin's neglected 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone. Clark explains that he pairs "Sonny's Blues" and Just Above My Head "because of their intertextuality; the short story and the novel address each other structurally and thematically." He concludes of the novel that "Hall's heteronormative text blots out Arthur's homosocial and homosexual text; as his name suggests, Hall leads us to Arthur's story but leaves the interiors of Arthur's sexual self largely unexamined." He later concludes of Baldwin's work as a whole: "While Baldwin could conceive of the viability and simultaneity of the homosocial and the homosexual in his own life, perhaps something in his fictive imagination prevented him from ascribing such complexity and roundedness to his representation of a black gay subject." An examination of Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone might lead the author to a different conclusion. Like the other two texts, Train is on one level a story of two brothers, but in this case they have a homosexual encounter that negates the distance between them in a way the brothers of the other two texts only bridge through music. The artist in this novel, Leo, narrates his own story, a fact that counters the "problematic" notion that Arthur Montana in Just Above My Head "is paradoxically a character from whom subjectivity--voice, community, and selfhood--is ultimately withheld." Train seems like a perfect text to examine closely in this context rather than to relegate to a couple of footnotes.