From:
intraphase@gmail.com
Published on May 2, 2021
James Baldwin and the Trouble with Protest Literature
written by Samuel Kronen
https://quillette.com/2021/05/02/james-baldwin-and-the-trouble-with-protest-literature/
“The hardest thing in the world to do,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in a 1934 article for Esquire, “is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn
and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out.” Of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, he quipped, “see how you will have to skip the big Political Thought passages, that he undoubtedly thought were the best things in the book when he wrote it,
because they are no longer either true or important, if they ever were more than topical, and see how true and lasting and important the people and the action are.” Hemingway was not discounting the political, merely clarifying its relationship to
literature. “Books should be about the people you know, that you love and hate, not about the people you study up about. If you write them truly they will have all the economic implications a book can hold.”
Be it a piece of fiction, criticism, or journalism, great literature has always contained a social and political dimension with moral ramifications for the society in which it was conceived and written. But its unique role is to explore a version of
reality that others may have overlooked—indeed, there may be nothing more subversive than honestly re-creating one’s own experience. However, when a writer or artist enlists in a specific socio-political cause—that is, how things ought to be,
rather than how they are—their work might succeed in persuading people but, ultimately, it fails to achieve transcendent resonance. This tension between moralism and humanism requires clarification at a time when private life has been swallowed up by
politics, and this is nowhere more apparent today than on the subject of race in America.
Few historic figures embodied that tension as vividly as James Baldwin. In 1948, as a 24-year-old aspiring writer brimming with urgency, Baldwin nearly got himself killed when he threw a coffee mug at a diner waitress in a spell of rage after she told
him “Negroes aren’t served here.” He then set off for Europe to escape the stifling atmosphere of segregated America, and to discover precisely where his racial identity ended and his individual identity as an artist began. He would later write in
his memoir, Nobody Knows My Name, that the journey gave him the moral and artistic freedom to “recreate the life that I had first known as a child and from which I had spent so many years in flight.” “I wanted to prevent myself from becoming merely
a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer. I wanted to find out in what way the specialness of my experience could be made to connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them.” Out of those reflections emerged his first two novels and the
timeless essay collection, Notes of a Native Son, inaugurating the unique and lucid voice for which he’d come to be known.
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The first article he published upon arriving in Paris was entitled “Everybody’s Protest Novel”—an essay that would establish Baldwin’s possibilities and foreshadow his limitations. It takes aim at the tendency to dramatize social issues through
literature in racial terms for political purposes. This, he argued, ultimately reinforces the very principles which activate the oppression such writing is meant to protest. It relies upon the same moral logic of blackness and whiteness, damnation and
salvation, good and evil, and cross-generational guilt and innocence from which the whole problem of race and racism came about in the American context. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which helped spark the civil war,
and the civil rights antecedent Native Son by Richard Wright, Baldwin’s former mentor and fellow expat in Paris, provide Baldwin with his argument’s points of departure.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Baldwin wrote, was activated by “a theological terror … and the spirit that breathes through this book, hot, self-righteous, fearful, is not different from that spirit of medieval times which sought to exorcise evil by burning
witches; and is not different from that terror which activates a lynch mob.” In order to fire the reader’s indignation, Stowe conceived Uncle Tom as a racial caricature of victimized innocence, “robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex.”
This revealed the goal of the protest novel to be “something very closely resembling the zeal of those alabaster missionaries to Africa to cover the nakedness of the natives.” The book’s brutal “catalog of violence” and “ostentatious parading
of excessive and spurious emotion” worked to conceal the only question that actually matters—“what it was, after all, that moved [Stowe’s] people to such deeds.” The book is now more famous for the stereotype it ushered in than the war it began.
The commitment to a social cause characteristic of protest fiction contradicts the “devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment; freedom which cannot be legislated; fulfillment which cannot be charted.” By evading the hidden complexity
of other people, we evade our own underlying complexity, and it is “only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness” that we can “find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves.” And it is this
power of revelation that is the business of the novelist, the artist, the seer, the writer, “this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over all other claims.” Conversely, Stowe was “an impassioned pamphleteer” who set out
to do nothing more than prove that slavery “was, in fact, perfectly horrible.” However badly written or wildly improbable such books are and “whatever violence they do to language” and “excessive demands they make of credibility,” they are
forgiven in view of their good intentions. In short, “literature and sociology are not one in the same.”
Above all, protest literature doesn’t challenge any of the prevailing cultural forces in society and instead lends them vindication, which is why ostensibly subversive and revolutionary books have become “an accepted and comforting aspect of the
American scene.” Keeping the subject matter “safely ensconced in the social arena” makes introspection unnecessary. The questions we are asked to consider have nothing to do with us—have, in fact, “nothing to do with anyone, so that finally we
receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at all.”
It wasn’t until the very end of his essay that Baldwin briefly turned his attention to Native Son. Wright’s novel tells the story of a young black man in Chicago named Bigger Thomas who smothers a white girl, sort of by accident. But it subsequently
emerges that the murder is also a reaction to the mounting psychological and social pressures imposed on him by his race. The depths to which he descends are meant to illustrate, in graphic and horrifying detail, the human toll of societal racism, the
scope of white culpability, and the attendant need for social intervention. Wright, a former Marxist, was a social determinist who believed that political and economic structures had the power to dictate the quality of human life. As he wrote in the
essay “How Bigger Was Born,” he sought to paint a portrait of black life “so hard and deep that [the reader] would have to face it without the consolation of tears.”
To Baldwin, however, Wright had created a character who portrayed none of the subtleties, complexities, or ambiguities of black American life, culture, or even of Wright himself. Bigger was conceived as a feral racial stereotype to make a point about
oppression. “Bigger’s tragedy,” Baldwin wrote, is not that he is poor or black, but that “he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his
humanity.” But, in actuality, “our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult—that is, accept it.” This quality of acceptance is the seed of change.
Moreover, Baldwin saw Native Son as “a continuation, a complement to that legend” of blacks “it was written to destroy,” and Bigger Thomas as “Uncle Tom’s descendent, flesh of his flesh, so opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed
together, it seems that the contemporary negro author and the dead New England woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle.” To accept the premise that we can overcome the effects of racism merely by injecting a different moral meaning into
race, whether to symbolize the inherent virtues of the oppressed or to justify their self-destructive impulses, “black and white can only thrust and counterthrust, long for each other’s slow and exquisite death.” In the final and most memorable
line of the essay, he writes: “The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and cannot be transcended.”
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Baldwin and Wright were both living in Paris when the essay was first published in 1949. Their relationship was complicated from its inception. As a 20-year-old upstart in Harlem, a former boy preacher fighting to achieve his identity—gay, broke,
despairing—Baldwin sought out Wright “because he was the greatest black writer in the world for me.” In his books—particularly Wright’s memoir, Black Boy—Baldwin “found expressed, for the first time in my life, the sorrow, the rage, and the
murderous bitterness which was eating up my life,” and described the undertone of Wright’s work as “almost literally the howl of a man who is being castrated.” When he finally met Wright in his Brooklyn apartment to solicit advice for a potential
novel, Baldwin, drinking on an empty stomach, “was so afraid of falling off my chair and so anxious for him to be interested in me, that I told him far more about the novel than I, in fact, knew about it, madly improvising, one jump ahead of the
bourbon, on all the themes that cluttered up my mind. I am sure that Richard realized this, for he seemed to be amused by me. But I think that he liked me. I know that I liked him, then, and later, and all the time. But I also know that, later on, he did
not believe this.”
After their first meeting, Wright helped Baldwin earn a major writing fellowship for a novel, though the project would ultimately fall through. “The saddest thing about our relationship,” Baldwin wrote in the essay “Alas, Poor Richard” after
Wright’s death in 1960, “is that my only means of discharging my debt to Richard was to become a writer; and this effort revealed … the deep and irreconcilable differences between our points of view.”
The morning the magazine was published, Baldwin encountered Wright in a cafe. Wright accused Baldwin of betrayal, not just of Wright but of all black Americans for attacking the idea of protest per se. “It simply had not occurred to me that the essay
could be interpreted that way. I was still at that stage when I imagined that whatever was clear to me only had to be pointed out to become immediately clear to everyone.” But he realized, too, “that Richard was right to be hurt, I was wrong to have
hurt him. He saw clearly enough, way more clearly than I dared allow myself to see, what I had done: I had used his work as a kind of springboard into my own.” Wright was never a human equal in Baldwin’s impressionable eyes, but a “spiritual father,
” an idol, and “idols are created in order to be destroyed.”
Two years after “Everybody’s Protest Novel” was published, Baldwin wrote a follow-up essay entitled “Many Thousands Gone,” which expanded upon his critique of Native Son. Like the previous piece, it would be included in Notes of a Native Son in
1955. It begins with the question of American identity and racial history. We don’t know who we are as a nation, Baldwin argues, because we are trapped in a history we don’t understand. As a consequence, our attempts to escape it—either by
downplaying the effects of that history or, conversely, establishing our own innocence by adopting a particular social stance towards blacks—ultimately keeps it alive out of a tacit feeling of guilt and “an unrealized need to suffer absolution.” It
was from this historical paradox that Native Son emerged: In the effort to show the effects of racism on a person, Wright effectively vindicated the image of blacks used to justify racial segregation. He also failed to capture their continuing and
complex group reality that made survival under centuries of oppression possible—“that depth of involvement and unspoken recognition of shared experience which creates a way of life” for which there has “yet arrived no sensibility sufficiently
profound and tough to make this tradition articulate.”
The relationship between white and black Americans, he went on, is “literally and morally, a blood relationship,” and it is from this hidden connection that a truer national identity could be forged. If Wright were to have penetrated this inward
contention of love and hatred, blackness and whiteness, self and other, the thrust and the counterthrust, Baldwin argued, the book would have been more honest, tragic, and effective. But this was impossible given the prepackaged limitations of protest
writing because “the reality of a man as a social being is not his only reality and that artist is strangled who is forced to deal with human beings solely in social terms … The unlucky shepherd soon finds that, so far from being able to feed the
hungry sheep, he has lost his wherewithal for his own nourishment: having not been allowed … to recreate his own experience.” This last point, for Baldwin, would prove to be prophetic.
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