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sereneHere's an essay I wrote about James Baldwin and the concept that rather than being an unalloyed good, innocence is a way to further evil in the world:
Something Left to Lose: The High Cost of Losing Innocence
Many of James Baldwin's most central characters—Rufus, David, Vivaldo—share a certain innocence that, at first blush, seems to make them less likely to be perceived as villainous. The characters are, as are many people in the world, bewildered that their good intentions go unrecognized or unrewarded. They do not know what or whom they want. They do not know why people react badly to them, and since it is obviously not their fault, they absolve themselves and go on hurting people, including themselves. Because innocence is perceived as a good, it is allowed to go unquestioned; as a consequence, remaining innocent allows people to ignore their own bad deeds. Baldwin presents a powerful message with the help of these characters' stories. This message is one that turns the whole idea of unassailable innocence on its head. In Baldwin's universe, innocence is the enemy, because it tends to foster willful ignorance and the denial of the hard truths that need to be faced if people are to open themselves up to love—romantic love or the love of humanity sharing a dangerous planet. In Baldwin's lexicon, innocence is not pure, or a goodness. Innocence is an evil that keeps people from taking the time and effort to face their own wrong actions, and it makes them willfully blind to their own cruelty and monstrous natures. Baldwin and his characters show that ignoring the bad parts of oneself can turn one into a monster. His stories, perhaps especially Another Country, underscore the necessity of coming clean, of taking off the blinders—to social injustice, racism, heterosexism, etc. Shedding this innocence is costly, as Baldwin acknowledges repeatedly, but it is necessary if one is to keep from being cut off from love.
Baldwin's fiction does not utilize the old trope in which innocent characters are of no harm to anyone, with the possible exceptions of accidental harm to themselves, or comic or tragic relief. Instead, his innocent characters' lack of self-knowledge "becomes an inability to love" (Dievler 175), and their willful ignorance of self and of love turns them into agents of destruction. Ross states this clearly, when discussing Giovanni's Room: "People like David, who shut their eyes to the reality of their desire, simply invite their own destruction.... By insisting on remaining in a state of innocence, which is really an illusion, he turns himself into the monster he hopes to escape" (33).
Taking the blinders off is preferred, but it is not without consequence, and Baldwin knows this. The thing that precipitates (no pun intended) Rufus's jump from the bridge is this painful awareness of reality. He suddenly sees things as they are. He knows "the pain [will] never stop" (Baldwin 87). He is probably not wrong—alive, he would never be likely to overcome the reality of the hateful racism around him—but even if he is wrong, even if he would some day have become happy and free, it would have cost him a price he became unwilling to pay. Baldwin may want us all to shed our innocence, but he also understands that doing so is costly. "Baldwin's challenge for us to face history and to be willing to examine honestly the ways in which it lives in each one of us can indeed be a painful and terrifying project." (Aanerud 64). Each of the innocents who takes off the blinders faces a steep price. Rufus even pays with his life.
Rufus's epiphany happened quickly, and while Rufus was in no emotional position to do anything constructive about it, so he escaped the pain in the only way he knew how. Vivaldo's awakening is more gradual. He grows toward an ability to look at truth, if not head-on, then at least with a sidelong glance, from time to time. Again, this is not without cost:
"Even though he knew that [Ida] was using him against himself, hope rose up hard in him, his throat became tight with pain, he willed away all his doubts. Perhaps she loved him, perhaps she did... and he thought, very unwillingly, that perhaps he did not love her. Perhaps it was only because she was not white that he dared to bring her the offering of himself. Perhaps he had felt, somewhere, at the very bottom of himself, that she would not dare despise him." (Baldwin 296)
Vivaldo feels the pain of insecurity and the knowledge that some of his motives and actions have been impure and harmful. This eventually leads him to a decision point, at the end of the novel, in which he has to decide whether to close himself off to reality or let it in and suffer the resulting pain and emotional work.
Cass, too, has moments of decision, where truth and its consequences battle it out. "She could keep silence and go into his arms, and the last few months would be wiped away—he would never know where she had been. The world would return to its former shape. Would it?" (Baldwin 372). She tells Richard the truth, and Baldwin doesn't create a sappy, soft result of this; Cass loses her relationship, her stability, and very nearly her life as a result of the revelation.
Unlike Cass, who faces Richard alone, and is cast off by him, Ida and Vivaldo face their truth in tandem, as a team of monster/innocents who reach out to each other in love to try to save first themselves and then each other. "Ida must necessarily shed the mask... and approach Vivaldo with complete honesty.... Ida's confession of her humiliation and submission to Steve Ellis marks the final unmasking of her manipulation of racial fantasy and Baldwin uses it as a vehicle of demonstrating her... ability to finally break free of the limits of her racialized/sexualized status" (Baham 19). This reality of experience finally breaks through to Vivaldo, who suddenly sees her in the light of her truth, rather than as a representation of the prostitutes he has conflated her with. Of course, the ideas of his that are the base of his representation of the prostitutes is itself a falsehood. This realization nauseates him, but the resulting "reconciliation and redemption" (Baham 20) that they find is as optimistic a picture of the result of unmasking as one may find in Another Country.
Even though facing oneself and shedding innocence is costly, it is necessary if one is to keep from being cut off from love. Too often in fiction, a truth revealed leads to an unrealistic clearing of the air, a result in which everyone is relieved, and no one pays the price for having to see herself head on. Fictional characters are often offered a choice between despair and hope, and generally, they choose hope, and things get better at the end of the story, or are hinted to be about to get better. There is at least one other option: acceptance and a continuation of facing the truth in love, which absolves no one of the consequences of looking at reality head-on. "Baldwin advances an alternative to despair: acceptance. Acceptance, for Baldwin, does not connote passivity or fatalism. Instead, Baldwin's notion of acceptance entails an active opposition to innocence, a confrontation with life's harshest truths" (Balfour 89). This is the opposite of despair, but it's also the opposite of hope. It doesn't assume things will get better; it merely opens one up to facing reality and to being able to connect in love with other people.
Love is at the heart of Baldwin's work, and while many of his losses of innocence happen to people who are about to break up or die, he also talks about this unmasking in the context of a loving, if dysfunctional, relationship. In the final scene between Vivaldo and Ida, Baldwin personifies that moment when the metaphorical blinders finally come off, and the innocence leaves. As Vivaldo and Ida embrace, "her long fingers stroked his back, and he began, slowly, with a horrible, strangling sound, to weep, for she was stroking his innocence out of him." HIs innocence has left him, probably for good, but that is not the end of the story. Next, Baldwin says, "By and by, [Vivaldo] was still.... The rain had ceased, in the black-blue sky a few stars were scattered, and the wind roughly jostled the clouds along" (Baldwin 431). Another Country doesn't end with rainbows and butterflies, but after the truth is faced, the sky begins to clear. It is dark and grand and full of stars. It is truth, unmasked. It is the end of innocence.
Works Cited
Aanerud, Rebecca. "Now More Than Ever: James Baldwin and the Critique of White Liberalism." James Baldwin Now. Ed. Dwight A. McBride. New York: New York UP, 1999. 56-74. Print.
Baham, Nicholas L. "Rough Sex and Racial Reconciliation: Toward a Kinky of Color Critique of James Baldwin's Another Country." Class handout.
Baldwin, James. Another Country. New York: Vintage, 1960. Print.
Balfour, Lawrie. "Finding the Words: Baldwin, Race Consciousness, and Democratic Theory. James Baldwin Now. Ed. Dwight A. McBride. New York: New York UP, 1999. 75-99. Print.
Dievler, James A. "Sexual Exiles: JamesBaldwin and Another Country. James Baldwin Now. Ed. Dwight A. McBride. New York: New York UP, 1999. 161-83. Print.
Ross, Marlon B. "White Fantasies of Desire: Baldwin and the Racial Identities of Sexuality." James Baldwin Now. Ed. Dwight A. McBride. New York: New York UP, 1999. 13-55. Print.
And here's the PDF of a photoessay I did for the same course, "James Baldwin in his own words."
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Date: 2013-06-10 12:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-10 03:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-10 06:24 am (UTC)The elevator-pitch premise is why I clicked/read, because I roughly agree with it... I'm interested to see that there is/was someone out there writing with the theme that it's cruel to the world and to one's self to make it a virtue to not face things as they are. :)