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The "maw of western culture": James Baldwin and the anxieties of influence
African American Review, Winter, 2004 by Elise Miller
Unlike Baldwin, Franklin is writing at the end of a long and successful life, so he can assume the position of the father who can share an authoritative version of history that will benefit his son. Secure in his position as patriarch, Franklin can make room for his son eventually to follow him in some appropriate manner. Thus, by addressing his son, Franklin makes all future readers, including Baldwin, his descendants. Baldwin then responds to this fatherly and literary invitation by embedding Franklin in the beginning of Notes. Baldwin has inherited Franklin's autobiography by reading it, by mastering it, as have generations of Franklin's readers. Baldwin's reference to Franklin's testimony to what Sidonie Smith calls "the self-determining individuality of desire and destiny" comments on that testimony, for Baldwin's use of Franklin's text transforms The Autobiography to suit the purposes of Notes (Smith 9). And if the structure of The Autobiography depends on readers' engagement, so too does this passage from Notes, since Baldwin's invocation of Franklin elicits the participation of the reader, who then brings Franklin's very different story to the one about to be told by Baldwin, a story that will provide a marked contrast to Franklin's "entry into the domain of the subject of democratic liberalism" (Smith 9). The contrast--both unspoken and explicit--between Franklin's self-declared patriarchal narrative and the self-conscious representation of Baldwin's early life reminds us that Baldwin is an American author as well as a black author. The tacit reference to Franklin may also serve a private psychological purpose for Baldwin, since it provides the writer a way to distance himself from the apparent agonies of recalling his childhood. He can recast his own hideous past as a rewriting of a classic American autobiography, which in turn can be read as an ironic commentary on the differences between white and black life-stories. The prospect of reliving his earlier years is rendered tolerable by framing it as a conventional American success narrative. Baldwin's use of Franklin as literary father thus offers an opportunity for an even more satisfying oedipal struggle than he will have with his own father, as we learn in the chapter of Notes devoted to their relationship.
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In reading Baldwin's re-making of Franklin this way, I diverge from recent books such as David Eng's Racial Castration and Anne Cheng's The Melancholy of Race, which explore the psychological price paid when Asian and/or African Americans seek to participate in a "ruling episteme that privileges that which they can never be" (Cheng 7). Cheng is interested in the kind of "structural identity formation" that must negotiate differences of race, ethnicity, and gender in order to accommodate the "disparity between Enlightenment ideals and social practices" (7, 13). The illusory nature of an identification with someone whom one can never possess or become necessitates, in Cheng's analysis, "a substitution that is also a gravestone" (178). Baldwin's efforts to negotiate the boundaries--between self and other, father and son, reader and writer--often cross lines of race and gender difference. But if he seems to worry that "assimilation is purchased only through elaborate self-denial," or that certain literary connections might damage as much as they sustain, he also seems committed to creating alternatives to the splitting of self or depleting of art observed by Cheng or Eng (Eng 22). Baldwin's efforts to negotiate the boundaries--between self and other, father and son, reader and writer--often cross lines of race and gender difference. But if he worries that "assimilation is purchased only through elaborate self-denial," or that certain literary connections might damage as much as they sustain, he also seems committed to creating alternatives to the splitting of self or depleting of art observed by Cheng or Eng (Eng 22).
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