Baldwin, Autobiographical Notes and "Everybody's Protest Novel"

 The book starts with several pages of autobiographical notes. I'll just quote these great words from pages 8-9:

I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure, and I do not like people who are earnest about anything. I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright.

The first essay proper is "Everybody's Protest Novel", a critique of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Baldwin argues that it's a bad novel, being too sentimental. My recollection of it is that it was a very earnest novel, to use a term from a few pages earlier. Uncle Tom's meek obedience was offered not as some example to which Harriet Beecher Stowe thought that black people should aspire, but as an indictment of slave owners: Even the most servile of servants was abused when he did nothing that could ever plausibly anger his owners. If even this most meek and abased of servants could be mistreated then it was the ultimate indictment of slavery from a certain 19th century Christian perspective.

The problem with the novel, as Baldwin says here and others have said elsewhere, is that it's a pamphlet rather than a novel. It's a piece of moral instruction, which is good and necessary but not a work of art. Works of art can indeed be instructive, but the good ones are more than just that.

Here's something that would give a heart attack to today's critics of art and entertainment, who see everything through a lens of identity and marginalization:

...the avowed aim of the American protest novel is to bring greater freedom to the oppressed. They are forgiven, on the strength of these good intentions, whatever violence they do to language, whatever excessive demands they make of credibility. 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. Even if this were incontestable--for what exactly is the "good" of society?--it argues an insuperable confusion, since literature and sociology are not one and the same; it is impossible to discuss them as if they were.

I need to trot this essay out the next time somebody critiques a novel or movie or TV show or whatever primarily through a lens of representation.

Some thoughts on society vs the individual, and the paradox of attempts at social reform:

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed to us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed. Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden. From this void--ourselves--it is the function of society to protect us; but it is only this void, our unknown selves, demanding, forever, a new act of creation, which can save us--"from the evil that is in the world."

It must be remembered that the oppressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same society; they accept the same criteria, they share the same beliefs, they both alike depend on the same reality. Within this cage it is romantic, more, meaningless, to speak of a "new" society as the desire of the oppressed, for that shivering dependence on the props of reality which he shares with the Herrenvolk make a truly "new" society impossible to conceive. What is meant by a new society is one in which inequalities will disappear, in which vengeance will be exacted; either there will be no oppressed at all, or the oppressed and the oppressor will change places.

We see this in calls to "center" marginalized voices, invert hierarchies, and always believe certain claims. If we can't even things out exactly then we'll reverse things.

He goes on to say, though, that more than reversal the oppressed long for a status that reflects the pathologies of being oppressed, as Fanon discussed:

But, finally, as it seems to me, what the rejected desire is, is an elevation of status, acceptance within the present community. Thus, the African, exile, pagan, hurried off the auction block and into the fields, fell on his knees before that God in Whom he must now believe; who had made him, but not in His image. This tableau, this impossibility, is the heritage of the Negro in America: Wash me, cried the slave to his Maker, and I shall be whiter, whiter than snow! For black is the color of evil; only the robes of the saved are white.

I have no idea what to do about this, and I'm not sure that Baldwin did , at least not in his capacity as a wordsmith with a duty to be better than merely earnest.