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•Œunder a Foreign Sky:•Š Place and Displacement in James Baldwinâ•Žs Giovanniâ•Žs Room

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•Œunder a Foreign Sky:•Š Place and Displacement in James Baldwinâ•Žs Giovanniâ•Žs Room UCLA Paroles gelées Title “Under a Foreign Sky:” Place and Displacement in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7p92b81t Journal Paroles gelées, 26(1) ISSN 1094-7264 Author Hamilton, Njelle Publication Date 2010 DOI 10.5070/PG7261003195 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California “Under a Foreign Sky:” Place and Displacement in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room Njelle Hamilton Brandeis University And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no one to watch, no penalties attached.1 James Baldwin Giovanni’s Room Unlike the largely autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain, the novel which ushered James Baldwin into fame, in Giovanni’s Room, the I who introduces himself to the reader in the first paragraph immediately reveals his representativeness of white masculinity, with ancestors that “conquered a continent”(3). Con- sequently, critical readings of the novel have largely been focused on what is considered its displacement of blackness unto whiteness, and stage a sort of lynching party to—nevertheless convincingly— search out and expose to the critical gaze the “absent black man” in the text (Reid-Pharr; Holland). Others have completely ignored the novel as a blip on the screen of the obviously black writer’s career preoccupation with racial themes in the rest of his oeuvre. Andrew Shin and Barbara Judson go as far as to say that Baldwin “ventriloquizes his story through a white protagonist” (3). A few critics have attempted more compelling readings of the metonym of whiteness in Giovanni’s Room: Marlon B. Ross, for example, suggests that through David, Baldwin “posits the white man as a problem” (25), since “the fire next time cannot merely be a fire that sears the racial existence of Americans but also must be one that disrupts their sexual psychology” (19). Only a few recent readings (Tomlinson, Méral), beyond biographical surveys of expatriate writers, have considered expatriation and exile outside of Baldwin’s biography and essays, and particularly in Giovanni’s Room, or seri- ously attempted to locate exile as a key theme and strategy in his © 2010 by Njelle Hamilton. 27 Njelle Hamilton fiction. As Jean Méral has pointed out, Paris is “closely linked with the first fictional attempts to deal with the subject of homosexuality” (223), a list which includes Giovanni’s Room. There must, then, be something about the city which is ripe as a setting for exploration of homosexual themes. In an attempt to address this lacuna, and to unite Baldwin’s biographical and fictional interest in the productive functions of ex- patriation, this article examines the symbolic function of the places and displacements in Giovanni’s Room through the prism of the dé- calage afforded by Parisian exile. I argue that, through the depiction of the Parisian spaces—the city itself, the gay bars, and Giovanni’s room—and their contrast with American, homely spaces, Baldwin shows the function of exile and otherness in not only evading, but producing and reinforcing (sexual) identities. With the freedom af- forded “under a foreign sky” to ‘find oneself’—and the white Amer- ican’s self-discovery is precisely at the heart of Baldwin’s critique of the narrator—David explores, then excises and exorcises, his hid- den, “dirty,” “dark,” gay self in the figure of the guillotined Giovan- ni. As such, David reproduces heteronormativity through, literally, torturous means, highlighting the contortions required to maintain the heteronormative status quo, as well as white American identity. Parisian Fictions Americans have been enthralled with France and its capital ever since the first Americans went on the Grand Tour of Europe and reported back about the wonder of the City of Lights; from aventuri- ers, to America’s founding fathers such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson—whose dialectic relationship with the city and their nation resulted in the mutual influence of the French Revolu- tion and the American Declaration of Independence, both founded on similar principles of universal humanity and equality, and the fundamental right to freedom. Notions of Paris as a libertine city spread with the arrival of bohemian American writers and artists in self-imposed exile, singularly from the 1880s, but in groups and fad-like droves from the 1920s or the interwar period onwards, 28 “Under a Foreign Sky” where the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein—between whom the label the ‘Lost Generation’ was coined as the epitaph of the bohemians of the era and their lifestyle—played physical hosts, literary inspiration and Paris-myth-makers to those who would come later: Sylvia Plath, Sylvia Beach, Richard Wright, James Baldwin (Carpenter). Indeed, as Méral’s book-length study on Paris in American literature reveals, writings about Paris not only docu- mented the experiences of Americans living in the European city over the centuries, but also formed the perception of Paris as a space of freedom from the puritanical values and restrictive codes of be- havior that existed in American society, and one that, according to Robert Tomlinson, “signified for the sensitive American artist a re- turn to the locus of Western civilization” (135). While the quest for origins and an enthrallment with the Paris of lore might have motivated the white Americans clustered in the American colony of the Left Bank and cloistered in the garrets of the Latin Quarter (Carpenter), for Africans, Afro-Caribbeans and African-Americans in the narrow, hilly streets of Montmarte who arrived during and after the second World War, the City of Lights signified a space free from the racist and racialized constructions that dehumanized them in their ‘home’ countries (Edwards; Méral). What (theoretically) united the various groups is not only the “en- counters on the Seine” (Baldwin, Price), in the bars of Montpar- nasse or the halls of the Sorbonne, but the shared experience forged through exile of being alienated from home, “distanced physically and emotionally from America, yet not fully integrated into French society” (Tomlinson 137), a sensation that diasporic blacks already knew too well. Baldwin’s own French exile was likewise a flight from a space in which he felt alienated, perhaps doubly so, as a black man and a homosexual, although the catalyst he cites is a racial one. In addition to the shocking suicide of a close friend, Eugene, fictional- ized in the opening chapter of Baldwin’s third novel Another Coun- try, his self-imposed exile came “because [he] doubted [his] ability to survive the fury of the color problem [in the U.S.].... [He] wanted 29 Njelle Hamilton to prevent [him]self from becoming merely a Negro” (Price, 217). In the two decades he spent in France, with sojourns in other parts of Europe and Asia and brief stints in the U.S., Baldwin wrote and published most of his novels and essays, works which not only fixedly deal with profoundly American themes—“what it means to be American” in general, and a black homosexual American in par- ticular—but also which return almost obsessively to the expatria- tion experience, particularly for Americans in France. In his political and autobiographical essays, collected in The Price of the Ticket, Baldwin returns to his experience in France, a country he considers free from the constricting racial and sexual identity categories that plagued postwar America. In his essay “The Discovery of What it Means to Be American,” he contrasts the lived racial experience in the two places: I was born in New York, but have lived only in pockets of it. In Paris I lived in all parts of the city—on the Right Bank and on the Left, among the bourgeoisie and among les misérables, and knew all kinds of people, from the pimps and pros- titutes in Pigalle to Egyptian bankers in Neuilly. ... This perpetual dealing with people very different from myself caused a shattering in me of precon- ceptions I scarcely knew I held. (174) I want to equate this experience with the concept of dé- calage, which Brent Hayes Edwards theorizes in The Practice of Diaspora, his book-length exploration of the transnational con- nections that were enabled among Africans, Afro-Caribbeans and African-Americans in Paris in the interwar period. Décalage “can be translated as ‘gap,’ ‘discrepancy,’ ‘time-lag,’ or ‘interval’; it is also the term [for] ‘jet lag.’ In other words, a décalage is either a difference or gap in time ... or in space.” (13) Edwards further defines the term as “the kernel of... the received biases that refuse to pass over when one crosses the water… [It is] what resists or escapes translation” (15). The shattering of Baldwin’s preconcep- 30 “Under a Foreign Sky” tions—preconceptions, which reveal themselves through décalage, preconceptions which “resist… translation” across the Atlantic— would be an important step in his formation as a writer, and the con- ceptualization of France as a discursive ‘void’ which allowed him the positioning vis-à-vis the U.S. to “recuperat[e] his own intensely American past” (Tomlinson, 137). The irony, if not the uniqueness, of the experience of expatriation—of the displacements inherent in décalage—is summed up in Baldwin’s realization that “if [the ex- patriate] has been preparing himself for anything in Europe, he has been preparing for himself—for America. In short, the freedom that the American writer finds in Europe brings him, full circle, back to himself” (Price, 175). This revelation in Baldwin’s essays about the self-reflexive function of expatriation is also a recurring theme in Baldwin’s nov- els. In Another Country for instance, Baldwin not only creates in France a pastoral idyll for his (white) homosexual expatriate Ameri- can, Eric, and his young gay French lover, Yves, France also func- tions as a kind of rehabilitative center for Eric as well as for the reader: the French section is the novel’s formal center and a well- needed reprieve from the narrative shock of the suicide of Rufus, the narrator, in the very first chapter, and the ensuing struggle between Rufus’s best friend Vivaldo, and sister, Ida to have an emotionally honest interracial relationship in a racially toxic New York City.
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