Giovanni’s Room Presentation

Bio: Born in Harlem in 1924. After leaving his biological father, his mother

married a Baptist preacher, David Baldwin, with whom she had eight children.

During his teenage years, Baldwin followed his stepfather's shadow into the religious

life. However, he became dissatisfied with ministry, considering it hypocritical and

racist, and ultimately left the church because his father's expectation was that he be a

preacher. The difficulties of his life, including his stepfather's abuse, led Baldwin to

seek solace in religion. At the age of 14 he attended meetings of the Pentecostal

Church and, during a euphoric prayer meeting, he converted and became a junior

minister [hence all the biblical references and language in the novel, including the

names of the protagonists: David and Giovanni (Jonathan), from “I am distressed for

thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was

wonderful, passing the love of women” (2 Sam. 1.26)]. Before long, at the Fireside

Pentecostal Assembly, he was drawing larger crowds than his stepfather had done in

his day. At 17, however, Baldwin came to view Christianity as based on false

premises and later regarded his time in the pulpit as a way of overcoming his personal

crises.

November 1948 moves to Paris. “I left America because I doubted my ability to

survive the fury of the color problem here. (Sometimes I still do.) I wanted to prevent

myself from becoming merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer.” (Essays,

137). Meets Swiss Lucien Happersberger and falls in love (novel is dedicated to him).

Died in 1987 in France from stomach cancer.

The novel

Baldwin had trouble publishing it (Knopf refused, saying it was for his own good, so

as not to “alienate” his audience): accused of shying away from race (all characters

are white) and being too lewd. His explanation: ‘‘I certainly could not possibly have

—not at that point in my life—handled the other great weight, the ‘Negro problem.’

The sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal with. I could not handle both

propositions in the same book. There was no room for it,’’

But race is still there: 1st page reference to colonialism: “My blonde hair gleams.

My face is like a face you have seen many times. My ancestors conquered a continent,

pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from

Europe into a darker past.” (GR 3) Furthermore, “Joey, the childhood friend with

whom David spent one passionate night, is described repeatedly as “brown” and

“dark”. Giovanni himself is “dark and leonine”; more pointedly, he’s imagined in this

first scene as standing “on an auction block” [p.28]. Race is an imaginary category,

under constant negotiation; it’s worth remembering that in America, not long

before Giovanni’s Room, Italians and other southern Europeans were viewed as non-

white.” (Garth Greenwell)

General outline: love triangle David (American) with Hella (American) and

Giovanni (Italian). Let’s start with Americanness.

“America’s history, her aspirations, her peculiar triumphs, her even more peculiar

defeats, and her position in the world . . . are all so profoundly and stubbornly unique

that the very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and

extremely controversial proper noun. No one in the world seems to know exactly what

it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans” (‘The

Discovery of What It Means To Be an American’, p 137)

 Context: 1950’s France, post-WWII reconstruction, Marshall Plan and US

supremacy and start of the end of their isolationism. E.g. the 6,000 francs he owes and

is kicked out of his hotel for in p.22 is 3,000 pesos now. The 10,000-franc note he

pays Giovanni with is a vestige of the inflation. Note France is 2 nd largest benefactor

of Marshall Plan.

“For Paris is, according to its legend, the city where everyone loses his head, and his

morals, lives through at least one histoire d’amour, ceases, quite, to arrive anywhere

on time, and thumbs down his nose at the Puritans---the city, in brief, where all

become drunken on the fine old air of freedom.” (from ‘A Question of Identity’, p.

93). (Note that gay sex is not a crime in France, as opposed to the US).

In America, David confronted with identification with his father: “What passed

between us as masculine candor exhausted and appalled me. Fathers ought to avoid

nakedness before their sons. I did not want to know […] that his flesh was as

unregenerate as my own. […] He thought we were alike. I did not want to think so.

[…] He wanted no distance between us; he wanted me to look on him as a man like

myself. But I wanted the merciful distance of father and son, which would have

permitted me to love him.” (17) But: “The American in Europe is everywhere

confronted with the question of his identity” (Essays 98). Irony: “the American

wishes to be liked as a person, an implied distinction which makes perfect sense to

him, and none whatever to the European. What the American means is that he does

not want to be confused with the Marshall Plan, Hollywood, the Yankee dollar,

television, or Senator McCarthy. What the European, in a thoroughly exasperating

innocence, assumes is that the American cannot, of course, be divorced from the so

diverse phenomena which make up his country […] At this point […] the legend of

Paris has done its deadly work, which is, perhaps, so to stun the traveler with freedom
that he begins to long for the prison of home---home then becoming the place where

questions are not asked.” (Essays 95) See, e.g., David’s defensiveness about his

Americanness with his 1st encounter with Giovanni (33 onwards): David says

Americans are a different, newer people:

“Ah! If it had only made you a different people!” he laughed. “But it seems to have turned

you into another species. You are not, are you, on another planet? For I suppose that would

explain everything.”

“I admit,” I said with some heat---for I do not like to be laughed at---”that we may

sometimes give the impression that we think we are. But we are not on another planet, no.

And neither, my friend, are you.” (34)

The Americans in the American Express office “didn’t all look alike to me. I was

aware of that they all had in common something that made them Americans, but I

could never put my finger on what it was. [I] resented being called an American (and

resented resenting it) because it seemed to make me nothing more than that, whatever

that was; and I resented being called not an American because it seemed to make me

nothing.” (89)

As much as David tries to run away, “Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be

born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him---he may be forced to---

but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him

everywhere.” (Essays 141). Thus, David exhibits what Baldwin sees as one of the

most distinctively American traits: the “nearly unconscious assumption that it is

possible to consider the person apart from all the forces which have produced him”.

“Yet, walking into the American Express Office one harshly bright, midsummer

afternoon, I was forced to admit that this active, so disquietingly cheerful horde struck

the eye, at once, as a unit. At home, I could have distinguished patterns, habits,

accents of speech---with no effort whatever: now everybody sounded, unless I

listened hard, as though they had just arrived from Nebraska.” (89). In his un-

heideggerian assumption he ignores the power of tradition: “one of the most

American of attributes, the inability to believe that time is real. It is this inability

which makes them so romantic about the nature of society, and it is this inability

which has led them into a total confusion about the nature of experience. Society, it

would seem, is a flimsy structure, beneath contempt, designed by and for all the other

people, and experience is nothing more than sensation---so many sensations, added up

like arithmetic, give one the rich, full life. They thus lose what it was they so bravely

set out to find, their own personalities” (‘A Q. of Id.’ 99). Compare with this

exchange between Giovanni (1st) and David:

“I don’t believe in this nonesense about time. Time is just common, it’s like water for a fish.

Everybody’s in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that

happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little

fish. That’s all. […]

“Oh, please,” I said. “I don’t believe that. Time’s hot water and we’re not fish and you can

choose to be eaten and also not to eat---not to eat,” I added quickly, […] “the little fish, of course.”

“To choose!” cried Giovanni […] “To choose! […] Ah, you are really an American.” (34-5)

Baldwin states that “Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken

but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception. It is up

to the American writer to find out what these laws and assumptions are.” (Essays

142). I thus contend that Baldwin does just this through the medium of one of the

most personal, intimate themes possible: that of love. See interview:

Giovanni’s Room is not really about homosexuality. It’s the vehicle through which the

book moves. [GR is] about what happens to you if you’re afraid to love anybody.

Which is more interesting than the question of homosexuality.

But you didn’t mask the sexuality.

No.

And that decision alone must have been enormously risky.

Yeah. The alternative was worse.

What would that have been?

If I hadn’t written that book I would probably have had to stop writing altogether.

It was that serious.

It is that serious. The question of human affection, of integrity, in my case, the

question of trying to become a writer, are all linked with the question of sexuality.

Sexuality is only a part of it. I don’t know even if it’s the most important part. But it’s

indispensable.

[...] It’s very frightening. But the so-called straight person is no safer than I am really.

Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous

responsibility. Loving of children, raising of children. The terrors homosexuals go

through in this society would not be so great if the society itself did not go through so

many terrors which it doesn’t want to admit. The discovery of one’s sexual preference

doesn’t have to be a trauma. It’s a trauma because it’s such a traumatized society.

Contrast with Jacques’ advice in p.57:

“ “Love him,” said Jacques, with vehemence, “love him and let him love you. Do you

think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it

last? since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I

assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, hélas! In the dark. And if you think of

them as dirty, then they will be dirty---they will be dirty because you will be giving

nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his.” ” Initially, David is too attached to

his culture and ignores good advice (from Jacques and the mummy, eg) because it

comes from marginalized members of society, but he learns in the end: “People who

believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue

to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.” (20)

David runs away from his feelings towards men (“The beast which Giovanni had

awakened in me would never go to sleep again” (84)), and hides in comfort of a

heterosexual relationship with Hella: after sleeping with Sue he says, “I wanted

children. I wanted to be inside again, with the light and safety, with my manhood

unquestioned, watching my woman put my children to bed. […] I wanted a woman to

be for me a steady ground, like the earth itself, where I could always be renewed.”

(104). This attitude is reinforced by everyone around David, like his father or even the

landlady in the south of France: “You must go and find yourself another woman, a

good woman, and get married, and have babies.” (68) [Note she is miserable with her

life and finds little comfort in the rare visit of her only remaining child].

He thus tries to maintain his “purity” as a man by being with Hella (after everyone

has seen his flirtation with Giovanni, “Then I wanted to get out of this bar, out into

the air, perhaps to find Hella, my suddenly so sorely menaced girl.” (40-1)), unable to

fully love her (or anyone else, for that matter): “You never have loved anyone. I am
sure you never will! You love your purity, you love your mirror […] You want to be

clean.” (141)

Parallel with Gide’s wife, Madeleine: “she was not so much a victim of Gide’s

sexual nature […] as she was a victim of his overwhelming guilt” (contrasted with “I

looked to Hella for help. I tried to bury each night, in her, all my guilt and terror”

(152)).

In this sense, “the whole novel is a kind of anatomy of shame, of its roots and the

myths that perpetuate it, of the damage it can do. And also of its arbitrariness, since as

rebuttal to any claim that shame might be some natural accoutrement of queerness –

the belief that lies at the heart of David’s malaise – the novel offers the fact of

Giovanni, who seems immune to shame, or at least to the shame that plagues David.

And it is this freedom that makes him available to the joy and love David finally

believes men can’t share with one another” (Greenwell). E.g. one of the most

gruesome images is when David describes les folles (“las locas”), in particular the

transvestite: “People said that he was very nice, but I confess that his utter

grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys

eating their own excrement turns some people’s stomachs. They might not mind so

much if monkeys did not---so grotesquely---resemble human beings.” (27)

Thus, David finds himself in a prison of masculinity and heteronormativity: when

imagining his life with Giovanni he says “You want to go out and be the big laborer

and bring home the money, and you want me to stay here and wash the dishes and

cook the food and clean this miserable closet of a room and kiss you when you come

in through that door and lie with you at night and be your little girl.” (142) That

narrow and rigid thinking prohibits David from meaningfully connecting with anyone,

man or woman, and sets him in a path similar to Jacques’. See Baldwin’s comments
on Gide: “Gide’s dilemma, his wrestling, his peculiar, notable and extremely valuable

failure testify […] to a powerful masculinity and also to the fact that he found no way

to escape the prison of that masculinity. [...] It is important to remember that the

prison in which Gide struggled is not really so unique as it would certainly comfort us

to believe, is not so different from the prison inhabited by, say, the heroes of Mickey

Spillane. Neither can they get through to women, which is the only reason their

muscles, their fists and their tommy guns have acquired such fantastic importance. It

is worth observing, too, that when men can no longer love women they also cease to

love or respect or trust each other, which makes their isolation complete. Nothing is

more dangerous than this isolation, for men will commit any crimes whatever rather

than endure it.” (‘The Male Prison’ 235). See David’s dad’s angry proclamation: “all I

want for David is that he grow up to be a man” (15) or the sailor that “wore his

masculinity as unequivocally as he wore his skin” (92). Even David’s boyhood

memories are marred by it: re Joey, “the idea that such a person could have been my

best friend was proof of some horrifying taint in me.” (6) His sex life becomes

shamefully emasculating: after sleeping with Joey, “The power and the promise and

the mystery of that body made me suddenly afraid. That body suddenly seemed the

black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I

would lose my manhood.” (9)

This is why so many mirror images: 3rd sentence in book starts “I watch my

reflection in the darkening gleam of the window pane”. Also (64, 166, 167, 168, 169).

Some have suggested Lacan’s theory of the mirror phase (recognising and

differentiating oneself from the reflection --> schizophrenia-ish; see monkey quote

above), but I’d like to suggest something closer to Sartre’s idea of reflected
consciousness: “Hell is other people”; I.e. other people as mirror, which is what David

most fears, in particular as an American.

Just as David depends on Hella, Giovanni takes David as his saviour (“I have only

just found out that I want to live”, says Giovanni right after meeting David (49) or “I

understood why Giovanni had wanted me and had brought me to his last retreat. I was

to destroy his room and give Giovanni a new and better life.” (88)): “Because of

David, Giovanni experiences an awakening from the somnambulistic state to which

his grief and apostasy had reduced him. Unfortunately, David does not understand

until later the significance of Giovanni’s investing in him the possibility of escaping

from the accursed life symbolized by Giovanni’s prisonlike room.” (Raymond-Jean

Frontain in ‘James Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room" and the Biblical Myth of David’).

I.e. we have the symbolic representation of societal expectations as physical,

architectural confines (add to its physical nearness to the zoo). Relate to Hella’s own

imprisonment: she tries to go off to Spain to be independent but feels “aimless---like a

tennis ball, bouncing, bouncing”, like she “missed the boat” (122). She longs for some

mooring post, for a deep, loving connection and so initially sees family as the only

option (note the cliché-ness of “missing the boat”). But then: “I began to realize it in

Spain---that I wasn’t free, that I couldn’t be free until I was attached---no,

committed---to someone” (126). She correctly points out the ills of femininity and

opts for comfort rather than struggle, seeing it as futile: “From now on, I can have a

wonderful time complaining about being a woman. But I won’t be terrified that I’m

not one” (126). She initially tries to challenge the social mores yet comes to terms

with going with its flow, “taking to it like ducks to water” (127). Note that in the end

this approach fails: in the end both “walked a lot, in silence [and we] drank too much,

especially me. Hella, who had been so brown and confident and glowing on her return
from Spain, began to lose all this; she began to be pale and watchful and uncertain.”

(159). Hella cries and begs: “David, please let me be a woman. I don’t care what you

do to me. I don’t care what it costs.” (161) She runs back to the US to save her

womanhood. Her plan of being guided by the social conventions backfires: “if women

are supposed to be led by men and there aren’t any men to lead them, what happens

then?” (163) --> gender expectations spare no one.

The power of structural problems such as national and gender identity explains the

time flow of the novel: knowing the ending, and the cocksure future assertions (e.g. 1 st

page “I may be drunk by morning but that will not do any good. I shall take the train

to Paris anyway. The train will be the same, the people, struggling for comfort and,

even, dignity on the straight-backed, wooden, third-class seats will be the same, and I

will be the same […] It will all be the same, only I will be stiller.” --> David’s

epiphany about the inexorability of life: “people can’t, unhappily, invent their

mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their

parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say

Yes to life.” (5)). Also the oracle figure in p.39-40 (the mummy) who tells David:

“You will be very unhappy. Remember that I told you so.” (40), as well as Jacques’

warning that he should love Giovanni, lest he end up like him (56-7). So that David,

in his search for freedom from his identity, is like the American student who wishes to

become fully French: “he encounters here is that which he came so blindly seeking:

the terms on which he is related to his country, and to the world.” (AQoI 100). “You

don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go

back.” (116) Structure of Greek tragedy in a way (eg also the parallel between

Giovanni meeting Guillame at the cinema and pleasing Guillame when he was

making a scene because he was “very well dressed, of course, and I was not” (60),
meeting Guillame only because he “was very hungry” (61) [Giovanni even predicts

Guillame will fire him in that page] and the end, Guillame strangled by his scarf-like

sash after once again holding Giovanni hostage with his money). The confidence of

the American is reduced to ambiguity: “I told her that I had loved her once and I made

myself believe it. But I wonder if I had.” (5) And multiple contradictory adjectives in

descriptions: “His touch could never fail to make me feel desire; yet his hot, sweet

breath also made me want to vomit” (105) or “I do not know what I felt for Giovanni.

I felt nothing for Giovanni. I felt terror and pity and a rising lust” (138). In the end

David understands that, as much as he’d like to rip up the past like any blue envelope,

“the wind blows some of them back to [him]”.