The "maw of western culture": James Baldwin and the anxieties of influence

African American Review, Winter, 2004 by Elise Miller

The phantasm of the castrated black man is the father's legacy to Baldwin, who transforms it into a metaphor about race and art. But in this succession of literary fathers and sons, who, readers might wonder, is castrating whom? That Cleaver might be doing to Baldwin what Baldwin theoretically did to Wright may seem obvious to anyone but Cleaver. After Wright's death, Baldwin says that "the debt I owe him now can never be discharged" (Nobody 190). Similarly, Cleaver says of Baldwin, "I, like the entire nation, owe a great debt to" him. Cleaver, who "lusted for anything that Baldwin had written," conveys his own anxieties about whose art engenders whose in turn when he fantasizes that he would like to "sit on a pillow beneath the womb of Baldwin's typewriter and catch each newborn page as it entered this world of ours" (97). But as midwife to Baldwin's art, Cleaver qualifies his predecessor's influence by complaining that "his work is the fruit of a tree with a poison root. Such succulent fruit, such a painful tree, what a malignant root!" (104). Cleaver's mixed metaphors suggest that he is struggling with the kind of difficulty of swallowing something unsavory but essential that Baldwin saw in the experience of the man who ate his wife's afterbirth when she bore his son. "After all," Cleaver reminds us, "it is the baby we want and not the blood of afterbirth" (98).

Notes

(1.) When Baldwin refers to "the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted," he offers another metaphor for his anxieties about inclusion and intrusion (Notes 164-65). Baldwin is the bud inserted into the larger tree, where he continues to grow as a part of the parent tree. He is living tissue transplanted from one body to another within which he might grow and heal, or be rejected as foreign matter. But is Baldwin the gardener or surgeon joining new growth to old, adding his new add tons to the great tree of western culture? Who, in other words, is the agent of the grafting?

(2.) The story of poetic influence, Bloom suggests, is a "battle between strong equals, father and son as mighty opposites, Laius and Oedipus at the cross-roads.... Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves. But nothing is got for nothing, and self-appropriation involves the immense anxieties of indebtedness, for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself?." (11, 57).

(3.) "'What do you mean protest!' Wright said. 'All literature is protest.' "When Baldwin replied that all protest wasn't literature, Wright retorted, "'Oh here you come again with all that art-for-arts-sake crap'" (Weatherby 85). Weatherby adds, "Some of Wright's admirers were so incensed that they suggested Baldwin must have a homosexual hang-up over Wright" (87). Indeed, many of Baldwin's struggles with male authors have been attributed to his attraction to them, a theory that puts the rival son back in his place by castrating him. According to most accounts, Baldwin was ambivalent about Wright, admiring, even idealizing him (particularly his resilience to Baldwin's attacks on him), dependent upon him for approval and for mentoring, while at the same time experiencing a genuine disdain for the older author.