Beneath the Black aesthetic: James Baldwin's primer of Black American masculinity

African American Review, Summer, 1998 by Andrew Shin, Barbara Hudson

How interesting, then, that James Baldwin's voice has been both silenced and lost - silenced by the sexual politics of an emergent black left, lost because critics like Irving Howe decried Baldwin's putative aestheticism in favor of Richard Wright's militancy. But from our perspective, Baldwin's is a voice ahead of its time, one that explicitly addresses the implication of race and gender and, even more, attempts to articulate a gay ethic well before "gay" entered common parlance and certainly before the work of writers and scholars like Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Michael Lynch, Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick, and Lee Edelman legitimated "queer theory" as a critical discourse. Baldwin's position is especially interesting because he synthesizes race and gay consciousness during some of the most politically volatile decades of the twentieth century. Moreover, Baldwin's career strongly suggests the influence of feminism on his gay aesthetic, the insights of which he subsequently recontextualized in the struggle for black liberation.

African American literature from approximately 1940 to the mid-1970s was primarily a masculinist enterprise dominated by Richard Wright's protest novel and Ralph Ellison's literary pluralism. Along with Alice Walker's re-discovery of Zora Neale Hurston and the pastoral tradition, the last two decades have witnessed an explosion of writing by black women and the recuperation of a black female literary history that dramatizes a specifically urban sensibility suggested by the novels of, among others, Nella Larsen, Ann Petry, and, of course, Toni Morrison. In the process, Baldwin's novels have been relegated to the archives of the unread, cast aside in favor of the lapidary, famously polemical essays. The novels, however, despite their poor critical reception, are interesting because they rarely capitulate to the urge for a simplified rhetoric that characterizes the essays of the early 1970s, persistently retaining the unresolved tension and complexity of a writer - a gay black writer no less - divided between his role as a popular spokesman for the race and his role as an artist whose imaginative life encompasses aesthetic standards that may alienate a popular audience. The novel form partially liberated Baldwin from the pressures that he felt as an essayist answerable to frequently hostile audiences, both black and white. Baldwin's work, moreover, suggests a cultural space where the trend in black literary history to polarize itself along gender lines might be reversed.(3) Ours, then, is an especially compelling moment in both literary and social history to reassess Baldwin's importance in matters of black liberation.

Baldwin's famous rejoinder to Norman Mailer's manifesto of hipster culture, "The White Negro," specifically addresses the sexual mythology that obtains to black men living in America: "I think that I know something about the American masculinity which most men of my generation do not know because they have not been menaced by it in the way that I have been" (Price 290). Here, Baldwin suggests the straitjacket of black virility that he struggled to liberate himself from throughout his career. A legacy of the antebellum South, celebrated by 1920s primitivism and consumer culture, this cultural mythology was perpetuated in the 1960s by the radical black left and white liberals like Mailer and Norman Podhoretz. Baldwin, who challenged this orthodoxy, became the whipping boy of a cultural establishment that understood the black man as, in Baldwin's words, "a kind of walking phallic symbol" (Price 290). Thus the question "What does it mean to be a man in America?" became Baldwin's donnee, inflecting virtually all of his literary production.(4)

Baldwin resisted an uncritical embrace of black nationalism, developing instead a vision of the homosexual as the chief instrument of cultural renovation. Indeed, bodily pleasure between men functions as a paradigm for the body politic - two men lying together spoon-fashion becomes an image of the just society. The black man as fetishized phallus gives way to an image of wholeness, of reintegrated bodies and of community. David Leeming, Baldwin's friend and recent biographer, suggests that much of Baldwin's early work can be characterized in terms of a family romance, as elaborating a search for an absent, idealized father (Leeming 3), as though the restored authority and centrality of the father could redress the history of slavery, an institution enabled by the codification of illegitimacy, defining black children as bastards. Indeed, for Baldwin, personal and familial redemption is political; but the rhetoric of family and the inherited view of a body politic organized around paternal privilege and masculine autonomy give way to the more egalitarian ideal of brotherhood - of a society founded upon the love between men. Baldwin thus redefines the discourse of family grounded in biology and posits alternative social structures in its place.(5)

Throughout Baldwin's oeuvre, the ideal of brotherhood displaces the idea of redemption through the restored centrality of the father: Horizontal equity supplants verticality. Brotherhood in this instance, however, is not exclusive but all-encompassing, suggesting egalitarian relations between men and women as well. Cora Kaplan, for one, distinguishes Baldwin's fictional treatment of sexuality, the family, and women as much more sympathetic to women than Wright's or Ellison's, but still qualifies her judgment: "Although Baldwin is one of the first and major analysts of the intimate relationship between dominant notions of masculinity and oppression within the Black family, his view of women as somehow inevitably confined to heterosexual relations is one of the historical limitations of his writing" (185). But Kaplan here raises issues that Baldwin tacitly engages, to the degree that he emphasizes the historical limitations of heterosexual relationships for women. Additionally, it should go without saying that homosexual relationships, whether gay or lesbian, are vulnerable to hierarchy.(6)