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chapter 2 The Centrality of Religious Faith Communal Acceptance, Textual Ambiguity, and Paradox GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN (1953) and A Visitation of Spirits (1989) reveal the centrality of the Bible and the related African American religious tradition and at the same time significantly oppose them. The tradition of faithful vision based on the Bible is important to black people and an important influence on these narratives, no matter how critical they may be on different narrative levels. Go Tell It on the Mountain politically opposes the biblically derived practices and beliefs that privilege the patriarchy. In terms of what is written, the Bible is rigidly doctrinaire in its portrayal of patriarchal privilege, which limits the appropriation and use of its creative and cosmic vision, particularly for a writer like Baldwin with such a thorough political consciousness. However, his novel places the power and reality of African American faithful vision based on the Bible in the foreground of its own vision of “truth” as much as it critiques and rejects it. Although homosexual proscription is not as often dealt with as patriarchal privilege, the Bible seems equally rigid in its treatment of homosexuality. A Visitation of Spirits implies great ambivalence about the biblical beliefs that condemn Horace to suicide because he so deeply internalizes African American religious tradition. (Go Tell on the Mountain, of course, reveals the suppression of John’s sexual attraction to males because beliefs based on the Bible influence him.) Kenan’s novel has a more postmodern focus on its own textuality and on writing generally, and therefore it emphasizes the potential power of the Bible as writing, the ultimate limitations of narratives to convey a substantive or truthful story notwithstanding. However, the novel does not re43 strict the Bible’s importance to its power as an iconic text that creates unquestioned traditional beliefs that are negative and dangerous. The Bible and the black religious tradition also are potentially positive and saving, just as they are in Go Tell It on the Mountain. James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain is unique in its portrayal of black religious belief, but unlike Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), its main difference from most of the novels that I analyze is the depth of its focus on religion and not an underlying general theme that totally undercuts the importance of the African American religious tradition. To a greater extent than any other novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain foregrounds the Bible as an intertext, and Christian faith and practice as the main features in the lives and cultural tradition of its characters.1 There are always multiple perspectives in the novel. There is a general fascination with the potential of the Word of God to evoke the mystery of the underlying design of human existence and interaction , while the Word is also the potential solace against the mystery. There is also a paradoxical perspective that sees the saving power of the Word of God in the character’s lives, and at the same time criticizes the characters’ use of the Word because it limits their self-perceptions and self-critique in relationships with others. From the paradoxical perspective, the novel implies that the Bible is full of the law and moral prescription that prevents the characters ’ exploration of humanity through relationships, which is the essence of living for Baldwin, and also so full of that very mystery of human existence, interaction, and motivation that Baldwin believed relationships always reveal .2 It is more than just the paradoxical complexity of the Bible as a text, however, that accounts for the power of the Word of God in Go Tell It on the Mountain. The novel’s own visual perspective shows this power as it affects the lives of people. The novel never negates its multiple, conflicted perspectives , but it does not deny the reality of the power of the Word that it sees.3 Go Tell It on the Mountain moves inevitably toward the anguished mystery of existence, particularly of African American life, and the implication that God must be that mystery; the mystery of God is the saving Word that one can know only by faithfully giving up the self to the spiritual experience of the power and benevolence of God. Thus, the mysterious Word of God is the only sure thing that can bring light to a fearful, fathomless darkness. The text shows John’s deliverance from the darkness through...

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