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

African American Review, Winter, 2004 by Elise Miller

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).

A refusal to be subject to another writer can be seen in Baldwin's discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe, which rejects the notion that it is Baldwin who gets lost, twisted, or deformed as he struggles to make his place in American letters. Stowe, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin Baldwin calls "the cornerstone of American social protest fiction," is the subject of "Everybody's Protest Novel," in which Baldwin rereads both Uncle Tom's Cabin and Native Son. He casts Stowe and Wright as mother and father of a dysfunctional family of literary predecessors. While Baldwin does seem disturbed or disrupted by his similarities to and differences from Stowe, in the end, his appraisal of her splits apart the literary foremother. Calling her not a true novelist but rather a "pamphleteer," Baldwin argues that Stowe wrote out of guilt, "a panic of being hurled into the flames, of being caught in traffic with the devil" (17). In her missionary zeal, he asserts, Stowe undercuts her effort "to bring greater freedom to the oppressed" by painting sentimentalized, unrealistic portraits of her black protagonists: "It is, indeed, considered the sign of a frivolity so intense as to approach decadence to suggest that these books are both badly written and wildly improbable. One is told to put first things first, the good of society coming before niceties of style or characterization" (Notes 18). Baldwin must establish himself in relation to both this major American author and her subject matter of blackness in America.