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

African American Review, Winter, 2004 by Elise Miller

Byron Washington's analysis of Baldwin's literary influences describes the author as a "claimant" of Western culture (22); but Baldwin, when considering his own historical narratives, laments, "Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt ... were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in vain for any reflection of myself" (6-7). And yet, his casual but acute references to the Oedipal drama and myth, which make it a "springboard" for an analysis of race, exemplify how Baldwin constructs, when he cannot easily find, reflections and relevancies. Baldwin assimilates the tragedy on two levels: he identifies with Oedipus's conflicts, and he integrates Sophocles's play into his own autobiography. The Greek text central to the culture of psychoanalysis--with its white, European, upper-middle-class roots--is subordinated to Baldwin's first-person narrative. Baldwin's allusion to Oedipus Rex thus not only invokes the conflicts of the play, it re-enacts them. His fleeting focus on the "thongs" implies that he has bypassed Freud to lay claim to Sophocles, who then becomes a commentator on race in America. Rather than pay homage to Freud or Sophocles, however, Baldwin joins their ranks. In the process of internalizing these predecessors, he begins as a reader but becomes a writer. If Baldwin needs to displace Freud or Sophocles in order to make room for his own voice, the means by which he supplants their narratives with his own suggests a feeling of entitlement not evident in his images of illegitimacy and exclusion. The very brevity of the reference, the fact that Baldwin feels no need to explain or elaborate upon the play, points to his assumption that he and his readers are part of an intellectual community of shared cultural and literary referents.

By invoking Sophocles, as he did Franklin and Stowe, Baldwin is engaged in a revisionary project that claims the right to such classic Western texts as Oedipus Rex. Re-reading these texts through the lens of race colonizes them. Instead of being alienated from or excluded by these writers, Baldwin is detached from them, a distance that allows him to draw upon his predecessors without submitting himself to them: they are his to use, to quote, to paraphrase, to twist or temper, to revise and refresh. In his analysis of the black American autobiography, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. uses images of insertion to trope how these authors write their selves "into existence among the authors and texts of the Western tradition" by "placing their individual and collective 'voices,' as it were, in the text of Western letters" (63). Gates's language suggests that black writers bring something to--or into--these traditions, which are then altered or widened to include new voices or perspectives. The result is not the transformation of someone like Baldwin, whose personal identity and artistic integrity survive the connections he inserts, but rather Baldwin's insistent revisions of narratives of American literature open and stretch those seminal texts.