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

Baldwin's critique of this literary foremother becomes a compromise formation; the length of his analysis pays homage to her status within American literary history at the same time that his reservations about her artistic choices cut her down to size. Baldwin's considerations of Stowe's book, I am suggesting, exemplify the challenges of what might have felt like illicit, unpalatable affiliations, especially ones that crossed the lines of racial difference. The section on Stowe, like his referencing of James or Franklin, represents the subject and object of the identificatory process as a mutual transformation. Baldwin begins with an active, creative desire to belong, and concludes with an understanding that American ideals and traditions are permeable and malleable. Someone or something gets altered in the identificatory experience of assimilation, but the change does not diminish Baldwin or devalue his writing.

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom draws upon Freud's oedipal theories to argue that a writer's attitude toward his literary precursors is reminiscent of the father-son relationship. (2) However, as Byron Washington points out, "Bloomian theories of influence, for example, because they ignore race and class, are unhelpful" to considerations of "the enormous weight white experience and white texts bring to bear on black experience and black texts" (22, 8). But while scholars are right to question the universality of Bloom's model, Washington's critique is not borne out by Baldwin's own descriptions of the weightiness of his influences. Consider the burden of Richard Wright, whose 1940 novel Native Son leaves its trace in the title of Notes of a Native Son, and whose prominence as an American writer activated father-son rivalries in many of his disciples. Wright's novel was "the most powerful and celebrated statement we yet had of what it means to be a Negro in America" (Notes 30). Though Baldwin does not have to cross barriers of race or gender in order to identify with Wright, the two writers' very similarities seem to interfere with Baldwin's attempt to embrace this literary father. Baldwin is ambivalent about "Wright's intention to create in Bigger a social symbol, revelatory of social disease and prophetic of disaster." This intention, as Baldwin sees it, gives the novel its "significance," but also becomes its weakness. Wright, like Stowe, is guilty of a lack of psychological realism, which leaves white readers with no reason to question their projections, legends, and myths about black men. Thus, for Baldwin the "overwhelming limitation" of Native Son is its inability to depict neither Bigger's "relationship to himself, to his own life, to his own people, nor to any other people" (Notes 33-34).

Baldwin's biographer lists Wright as one of "three literary father-figures, two black, one white," whom Baldwin had "knocked ... off their pedestals" (Weatherby 142). On the day that the essay about Wright appeared in the Partisan Review, Baldwin met Wright at a restaurant, and during their conversation Wright accused Baldwin of betraying him. (3) A witness to a subsequent argument between Wright and Baldwin recalls Baldwin concluding that" 'the sons must slay their fathers'" (Weatherby 117). Baldwin's language describing their relationship suggests that he believed there was not, in the field of American letters, room for both Wright and Baldwin himself. According to Weatherby, Baldwin complained that Wright had written his story and hadn't left other American black writers anything to write about. Such accounts imply a rather rigid model of innovation or originality, with little room for influence, indebtedness, or heterogeneity. Whereas Baldwin found James or Forster merely hard to swallow, Wright's art seems to have threatened to annihilate Baldwin's, who must either destroy or be destroyed by Wright.