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."

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.

Next read: Notes of a Native Son by Baldwin

The next read that I'll try to blog is Notes of a Native Son, a collection of essays by James Baldwin. I read it a while ago but didn't take notes, and note-taking greatly enhances recollection. So this time I'll blog about it.

Fanon chapters 4 and 5

 Fanon was a psychiatrist so his book is basically a psychoanalysis of people living under racism and colonialism. Much of it focuses on critiques of literary characters as illustrative examples. To examine it in-depth is to dissect a style of literary criticism that I've occasionally encountered and never really gotten comfortable dissecting. Also, to analyze it would be to take the ideas and accounts at something other than face value. In the year 2021 I see nothing good that can come from sitting in judgment of this book, and honestly I don't have any issues with it to the extent that I understand it.

So I'll just share one observation: In chapter 4 the part I liked best was where he said that learning more African history was essential to get over some of the neurosis and inferiority complex associated with his situation. To learn that African societies had rivaled any other societies in sophistication prior to colonialism did a lot to alleviate his problems. It made him see himself through some framework other than that of a black man in a white man's world. I suspect this will lead to the individualistic analysis apparently promised in the intro.

Black Skin, White Masks, Chapters 2 and 3

 These chapters mostly talk about interracial romantic relationships from the perspective of a black person, how status and skin color interact, etc. I think if I tried to summarize that fraught topic I'd just get myself in trouble. Also, a lot of chapter 3 is an analysis of some characters from a literary work who help illustrate his points.

I'll just note that Fanton gets to a very important issue on pages 50-51 when discussing a black character who had spent so much time in mainland France that he was, in many ways, a thoroughly French person. A white character encourages the black character to accept that fact and stop agonizing over being different from white people. That is a laudable sentiment as far as it goes, but the white character further implies that the black character is not "really" black. One needn't see color as everything to see that comment as troubling, because it implies a binary choice. Either the black character is "really" white or "really" black, rather than being a person with many experiences and relationships and affiliations.

I think this is building towards the individualist take promised in the intro.

Black Skin, White Masks, Chapter 1

 I don't have a lot of time to summarize Chapter 1, so I'll just note a few things.

First, Fanon spends a lot of time discussing how the use of a creole speech marks the black people of the Caribbean as distinct from the Frenchmen of mainland France, and is a cause of much anxiety. Caribbean people who have lived in France make a point of distancing themselves from their roots by speaking "proper" French, and have much anxiety over this. Much of this discussion reminds me of things linguist John McWhorter has said, about how we have to get past the idea that dialects, creoles, etc. are "wrong." They are perfectly fine systems of language with rich vocabularies and internally consistent rules of grammar and usage. It is fine and proper for children to learn and use "standard" dialects for the purpose of interacting outside their community, something that people in many societies throughout the world and throughout history have done and still do as a matter of course. But the purpose of learning a "standard" language should be to communicate easily with more people, not to distance oneself from a shameful identity.

Second, Fanon notes that plenty of people in French colonies can understand standard French just fine and it is demeaning to act like they can't. Just as they suffer humiliation from having their dialect degraded, they likewise suffer humiliation from well-meaning (and not-so-well-meaning) people who talk down to them. This he rightly calls out as racism.

On to chapter 2.

Black Skin, White Masks: Intro

 I read the intro. I don't have a lot of time, but I do want to summarize it. Basically, he argues that it is unhealthy to be a person defined by a race, either via pride or shame regarding that race, and it is similarly unhealthy to be a person seeking to masquerade culturally as another race. It is healthy to be simply a person who eschews racial identification.

So he says that black men and white men are unhealthy, but men are fine. Since this was a book written in French in the 1950's, there may be nuances missing in the translation, things that don't carry over well to how we speak about race in 2021. And the gendered language is even more complicated, given the differences between the 1950's and 2020's, and also the differences between French and English. Take it for what it's worth.

Do not take him as someone deliberately obtuse about race and color. He makes it clear that the book will discuss how living as a subject of colonialism screws people up. He sees racism as real and a problem, and will address it unapologetically.

Let's see how the book unfolds.