Binding the Self: Baldwin, Freud, and the Narrative of Subjectivity

Protest novels translate the complexities of human life into the easily digested banalities of simplistic, sentimental narratives. This is James Baldwin's well-known argument in "Everybody's Protest Novel." Baldwin writes that, while seemingly addressing the issues, protest novels do not allow for a consideration of the "web of ambiguity [and] paradox" of human life. Rather, they carry a false redemptive value for American culture: having these novels in circulation is enough to placate its troubled conscience. Baldwin quotes the exemplary American liberal, who professes, "As long as such books are being published . . . everything will be all right." ¹

While addressing a host of different issues and audiences, Leo Bersani comes close to repeating Baldwin's scornful observations in his more recent discussion of art and sublimation. In The Culture of Redemption Bersani directs his polemic against the concept of art as a corrective to cultural and historical failures--that is, against the conviction that "art redeems the catastrophe of history." In this view, Bersani suggests, art acts as a refuge, an escape, from the visceral reality of, and responsibility to, experience: "Claims for the high morality of art may conceal a deep horror of life. And yet nothing perhaps is more frivolous than that horror, since it carries within it the conviction that, because of the achievements of culture, the disasters of history somehow do not matter." ² Similarly, for Baldwin, protest novels contain a dangerous promise of redemption from the particularly American disasters of slavery and the almost indelibly structural racism in American society.

One may be wary of equating protest novels with art, a conflation at which Baldwin would certainly cringe. Yet in reading Baldwin's suggestions alongside Bersani's psychoanalytically informed work, we can ask what kind of cultural work such narratives as protest novels perform. In the present context, it is crucial to note that, implicitly or explicitly, both Baldwin and Bersani link the question of redemptive narratives (or art) to questions of sexuality. Correspondingly, I argue here that in his 1962 novel Another Country Baldwin describes sexuality and subjectivity in terms quite similar to the ones he ascribes to the protest novel in his 1949 essay. ³ Culturally legitimated forms of subjectivity (characterized most prominently by traditional aspects of heterosexual masculinity) are represented in Another Country as fictional narratives that share the redemptive function of protest novels; that is, having been released into cultural circulation, they simplify complex issues by condensing them into neatly aligned stories. I suggest that in Another Country the productive interimplication between narrative and sexuality (or, in a more comprehensive sense, subjectivity) is figured in extremely literal terms. For the fictional characters, the ability to produce literary narratives guarantees the establishment of the normative sexual narrative; conversely, a sexuality that has not reached its heterosexual, genital goal makes the production of other, textual narratives impossible. Yet the narratives thus established are shallow and simplistic--protest novels of a sort.

The critics' condemnation of Baldwin's fictional texts as "unfinished" or "erratic" bespeaks an anxiety concerning the threat posed by perversions to the integrity of the narrative. The critics' reading of the mutually (re)productive relationship between sexuality and narrative thus repeats what the text itself illustrates; in a sense, critical reaction to Baldwin's fictional texts can be seen as an example of what Shoshana Felman terms the "reading-effect." ⁴ To understand the dynamic of narrative and sexuality in Baldwin's texts and in their reception, we might turn to psychoanalysis, where narratives enable representations of sexuality and subjectivity. Apart from Bersani, my understanding of Freud's sexual narratives draws on the observations of Peter Brooks, Judith Roof, Paul Morrison, and Teresa de Lauretis. In his influential Reading for the Plot Brooks speaks of "narrative desire" as the striving toward closure, from the viewpoint of which the preceding plot resolves into well-structured meaning...