(Dis)entrenched Narratives in Baldwin

Another Country encapsulates Franz Fanon’s insistence on the concepts of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness,’ as set forth in Black Skin,White Masks; however, while at least Fanon states that he searches for a solution (although I did not see it in the portion we read, other than his comment that the world needs to be entirely restructured—difficult, at best, to fathom, much less to implement, as I said last week), Baldwin leaves his characters and his readers wandering in a morass of chaos—and an inescapable dichotomy. Ida Scott, perhaps the most negative character ever to grace (yes, read sarcasm) the pages of American literature, seems to me to be the epitome of the inability to transcend or understand or practice tolerance, and if we must start somewhere, those seem to be practical, obvious choices.

Ida’s actions and attitudes entrench the concepts of whiteness, blackness, maleness, femaleness, and class. She refuses to allow any other character to venture outside the identity she has created for him or her. To Vivaldo she continually speaks of the ‘dues’ one must pay, and, too, she derides him for his whiteness. When he attempts to defend himself by saying “it’s not my fault I’m white. It’s not my fault you’re black” (656), her response is that “Nobody’s willing to pay their dues” (657). In that exchange, Ida has reduced humans to commodities—things for which there must be some type of exchange or payment exacted as part of existence. And it is true that she holds each of the characters in the novel to some type of payment: Cass’ payment is silence; Vivaldo’s payment is pain and humiliation (for Ida admits that he takes whatever she dishes out, which seems, even according to her, to be quite a bit); and Ellis’ payment is Ida’s success. In exacting payment from Ellis, however, Ida finds herself outwitted by a mind more narcissictic than her own—and her own unwillingness to pay dues is illuminated. Ida has thought that her affair with Ellis would bring success, but she seems to have neglected to count the cost to herself, and in her payment of dues she finds herself suddenly outside her own blackness, and thus outside the system by which she views the world and operates. For it is not fear of Vivaldo’s pain and humiliation that causes Ida to admit her affair with Ellis; rather, it is Ida’s realization that her blackness has been compromised, demonstrated to her by the musicians’ utter disrespect and rejection of her. Unfortunately for Ida, she focuses on the acts to which Ellis has ‘subjected’ her instead of her rejection by the musicians, thereby denying herself any true identity.

Interestingly, Ida is a reincarnation of her brother, Rufus, in many ways. Both of them hold others to absolutely impossibly levels of expectation in terms of identity, confining all characters to superficial categories. And, both of them destroy or at least try to destroy those with whom they come in contact because of their own inability to form identity beyond narcissism. Rufus seems to come to an awareness of this, which causes his suicide; as for Ida, the future is unknown. At the end of the novel, she is Vivaldo’s comforter, which suggests that she is not yet sufficiently finished with him to allow him to be free of her; however, the inscription at the end of the novel, “Istanbul, 1961, suggests that he has been able to remove himself physically to write his novel about Brooklyn. Notably, Eric, Vivaldo, and Leona, the characters most affected by Rufus and Ida, must all leave the geographical space inhabited by Rufus and Ida in order to escape them.

I’m fully aware that we are not supposed to be looking for solutions, but if we’re not, what is the point of the discussion? If all we do is wander around talking about issues of ‘ness’, then we become no more than Baldwin’s characters Ida and Rufus, both of whom expect blackness, whiteness, and all other ‘nesses’ to be completely separate, confined and total. And I suspect that Baldwin was a smart enough writer to be cognizant of that, lamenting and decrying it through his text.