Salvific Manhood: James Baldwin's Novelization of Male Intimacy by Ernest L. Gibson Iii

Author:Ernest L. Gibson Iii
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004040 Literary Criticism / American / African American, American, Social Science, African American, Literary Criticism, Men's Studies, SOC018000 Social Science / Men's Studies
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2019-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

Although claiming little textual space, this incident and its memory are very critical to understanding Rufus’s feeling of absurdity. Perhaps, and this is a priori, this event marks Rufus’s first serious encounter with the racism of 1950s America. Even if he had experienced the burden of race within New York, surely the cultural geography of the South enlightened him to the serious racial divide still present in the land of his birth. The white officer signifies the onslaught of a world bent on rejecting Rufus’s Black manhood. By coupling Rufus’s tears and blood with the quiet longing for vengeance, Baldwin displays the impact of this racial encounter on Rufus. Being kicked in the mouth, as the text suggests, splinters off into various meanings. Rufus literally is the victim of physical racial violence, his Black body the site of tangible torture. Additionally, the boot to mouth represents how Black men were refused, denied, and stripped of voice. The officer’s vanishing and his metaphoric escape into the “forever beyond” symbolizes the inability to locate or directly identify the source of anti-Black racism and violence. Racial absurdity, in its abstractions, positions racist subjects as the mediums of a more powerful and dangerous ideology at play or work. Rufus is unable to enact revenge on the white officer because his agency is a perpetually shifting fiction, an ideology of violence with multiple sites and hosts. Although named as white and male, the officer emerges as, in antithesis to the saxophonist, a metonym for a more general community. As such, Rufus’s experience racializes the absurd, and the “life” from which he divorces can no longer simply be viewed as some abstract world in which anyone might share his experience. Additionally, because of the double function of white male subjectivity in this moment, his crisis becomes inextricably fraternal and existential—a symbolic space-in-between men where the painful divorce man suffers from his life is brought about by an oppressive subjectivity. Inevitably, this encounter echoes the idea of how “at any streetcorner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face”; the face of Rufus just happened to Black.18

If Rufus’s recollection of the violent South remains tethered to his first encounter with Leona, then, undeniably, their relationship becomes the unfortunate site for his wrestling with racial absurdity. As a white, blonde, older woman from the South, she carries with her the multiple layered racial scripts of her past and past localities. Baldwin carefully scripts the intercoursing of Rufus’s Black male body with her gendered white Southernness by having them meet the night that he performs his last jazz gig. Immediately following his performance, they accompany each other to a party, further punctuating the occasion. While drinking on the balcony and after dismissing their worries about the other partygoers, they submit to the magnetism pulling their bodies together. And though spontaneous sexual acts are often a staple of the midcentury American bohemian narrative, something in their exchange proves disturbing. To be clear, Baldwin’s description of the sexual scene emphasizes both the vulnerability and the violence of Rufus’s touch.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.