Baldwin: "Many Thousands Gone"

"Many Thousands Gone" is about Richard Wright's novel Native Son. Baldwin sees it as a protest novel, which it certainly is, and he hates protest novels. He might indict it for other sins, but I'm pretty sure he just hates protest novels. I'm OK with art having a message as long as the message doesn't get in the way of the art, but everyone will have a different threshold for whether the art has gotten in the way. Baldwin's threshold is pretty sensitive, as is his right. (And given the modern moralizing emphasis on messages when critiquing art, I sympathize with his threshold.)

He also indicts Native Son for having a main character who is largely blank, devoid of much of his own development, and serving largely as a metaphorical or allegorical figure on a journey that will illustrate a critique. That's a stylistic choice which Baldwin hates but I'm more forgiving of. Or, at least, I think I am--I last read Native Son in 1994. Maybe I wouldn't like it if I re-read it. But Baldwin undermines his own indictment by conceding that the main character, Bigger Thomas, represents a primal anger that many black people feel on some level, even if they don't manifest it outwardly. There are traces of Fanon's claim that being black in a white-dominated society produces some deep emotional challenges. Whether it's as common of a feeling as he claims (who'd know without a survey?) the very fact that he sees it as a common theme suggests that there's something to explore, and so I see the artistic justification.

But let's go beyond Baldwin's critique of the novel to some of the wider social commentary in this essay.

Page 26: 

[The black man in America] is a social and not a personal or a human problem; to think of him is to think of statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence; it is to be confronted with an endless cataloguing of losses, gains, skirmishes; it is to feel virtuous, outraged, helpless, as though his confining status among us were somehow analogous to disease--cancer, perhaps, or tuberculosis--which must be checked, even though it cannot be cured. In this arena the black man acquires quite another aspect from that which he has in life. We do not know what to do with him in life; if he breaks our sociological and sentimental image of him we are panic-stricken and we feel ourselves betrayed.

First, I like how Baldwin steps back and dares to speak as a generic, detached American observer, pan-racial rather than as one of the black men under that microscope. He doesn't allow himself to be a victim, a pathology, or a Noble Activist. He's just a pan-American observer. It's an admirable conceit. He won't allow white people the sole right to speak as the detached observer on behalf of American Social Analysis.

Second, in American education today, 66 years after the publication of this book, we still cannot bring ourselves to look at black people as simply complicated individuals. The success or failure of a black student is something that requires celebration as social progress or hand-wringing as social failure. John Q. Blackman can't just get a good grade in math and a bad grade in history because he likes math and found his history class boring and hated the early-morning time slot. No, John Q. Blackman succeeded in STEM because we're working so hard on the STEM Pipeline, and he did badly in history because that teacher doesn't know how to Connect With The Black Experience. John Q. Blackman never just gets to be himself, a point that Fanon made.

And it is Bigger Thomas's detachment from any sort of individual personality or cultural richness that bothers Baldwin. Bigger is this alienated observer. Even when real people are alienated, they're more than just alienation. That's Baldwin's critique. I think there's room for effective use of one-dimensional characters, and we'll have to agree to disagree on whether this use was effective, and agree to disagree on whether detaching Bigger from any rich self and experience was making the point or ruining it, but that certainly is the point.

On pages 31-32, Baldwin discusses the discourse around Native Son:

The feeling which prevailed at the time of its publication was that such a novel, bitter, uncompromising, shocking, gave proof, by its very existence, of what strides might be taken in a free democracy; and its indisputable success, proof that Americans were now able to look full in the face without flinching the dreadful facts. Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection, and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle. Such a book, we felt with pride, could never have been written before--which was true. Nor could it be written today. It bears already the aspect of a landmark; for Bigger and his brothers have undergone yet another metamorphosis; they have been accepted in baseball leagues and by colleges hitherto exclusive; and they have made a most favorable appearance on the national screen.

It sounds like 2020 and everyone patting themselves on the back for enjoying a good scolding by Ibram Kendi. All of this has happened before and will happen again.

The last sentence is complicated: The events that he describes, the steps of inclusion and acceptance, were real. They were tangible. They mattered. They didn't fix everything but they fixed something, they improved actual lives. I think Baldwin's point is that whether those steps are big or small, however real they are, the euphoria would make it harder for a dour protest novel to be accepted at that moment. Mood is cyclical, and after each time of shame there is progress that's a mix of mere symbol, useful symbol, and tangible improvement, and in that new mood the novel that started it could not be written at that time.

Later in the essay Baldwin notes that the greatest forgiveness of Bigger's crimes came from white liberal characters in the book, not black characters. I think this undermines Baldwin's contention that the book is "just" a protest novel. It strikes me as deeply insightful. Bigger might be, as Baldwin says on page 35, "an incarnation of a myth" but the reality in the people around Bigger is also part of the novel. Maybe it's about them?

On page 38, Baldwin says that the anger in Bigger is a specter in American life, hovering in the hearts of black and white people alike. There's an element of that anger in every black person who has felt injustice and every white person who has felt the associated guilt, but it is just a part of black life, not the whole portion. On page 43 he writes:

If, as I believe, no American Negro exists who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in the skull, then what most significantly fails to be illuminated here is the paradoxical adjustment which is perpetually made, the Negro being compelled to accept the fact that this dark and dangerous and unloved stranger is part of himself forever. Only this recognition sets him in any wise free and it is this, this necessary ability to contain and even, in the most honorable sense of the word, to exploit the [Bigger Thomas] which lends to Negro life its high element of the ironic and which causes the most well-meaning of their American critics to make such exhilarating errors when attempting to understand them. To present Bigger as a warning is simply to reinforce the American guilt and fear concerning him, it is most forcefully to limit him to that previously mentioned social arena in which he has no human validity, it is simply to condemn him to death.

Indeed, on page 40 Baldwin says that black life is so much more than that, and hence he dislikes building a novel around this mythological character.

In other words, he thinks the novel simplifies too much, but isn't all fiction a useful elaboration on a simplified portion of human existence?

Anyway, I will stop here. I tried to read the next essay, concerning a remake of the opera Carmen with black characters, but I couldn't get into it. Let's try the next essay after that, "The Harlem Ghetto."