Oedipus Complex in the South: Castration Anxiety and Lynching Ritual in James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man”

CLA JOURNAL 319 Oedipus Complex in the South: Castration Anxiety and Lynching Ritual in James Baldwin’s“Going to Meet the Man”1 Kwangsoon Kim James Baldwin’s short story “Going to Meet the Man” opens up to contemporary readers the history of racial violence against black people in America through the eyes of a 42-year-old white sheriff named Jesse and his traumatic childhood memory of witnessing the lynching of a black man. Just as young Jesse was tightly gripped by his father, forcing him to witness the lynching spectacle, so Baldwin’s graphic description of the lynching scene grips readers, forcing them to witness the history of racial violence without flinching. However, in reopening the lynching story, Baldwin does not endow the defenseless black man (victimized at the lynching post by a mob of white people) with a narrative voice. Instead, the narrative voice in the short story is given solely to Jesse. Thus, readers hear the story of the kind of lynching case that was prevalent in the South from the perspective of a southern white man with a psychosexual dysfunction that is obviously related to his childhood trauma from the lynching spectacle. Why does Baldwin, an African-American writer during the Black Power movement period, give the narrative voice to a white victimizer instead of the black man on the lynching post? This essay posits that Baldwin’s story does not aim to recover the muted and silenced black voices and insert them back into the official history of the United States; rather, it aims to examine how racism can cause damage to whites as much as blacks from a psychoanalytic perspective. Baldwin’s story is a psychoanalytic investigation of a southern white man’s psychosexual problem that stems from his witnessing of a castration at the lynching spectacle. As Beazley Kanost notes, “Going to Meet the Man” was published “at a historical moment when Freudian ideas and Fanon’s expansion of them were current” in the United States (155).Frantz Fanon,a Martinique-born Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, investigates the colonized psyche of black people in the French Antilles through the prism of Freudian psychoanalysis, claiming that “Freud and Adler and even the cosmic Jung did not think of the Negro in all their investigations” (151). There is no historical record indicating that Baldwin read Fanon’s book, published thirteen years before “Going to Meet the Man.” However, considering that “Fanon’s work was an inspiration to the Black Power movement in the United States during the 1  This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2015S1A5A8012501). 320 CLA JOURNAL Kwangsoon Kim 1960s” (Leitch 1577), we can speculate that Fanon’s psychoanalytic investigation of racial relations may have inspired Baldwin to examine the racial tension of the American South through the psychoanalytic lens in his story. In locating Jesse’s psychosexual problem within the historical context of lynching rituals in the South, Baldwin clearly intends to demonstrate how Southern racism harmed white people as well as black people. In fact, critics have noted that Jesse’s psychosexual dysfunction relates to Southern racism. Louis H. Pratt argues that Jesse’s inadequacy in consummating the sex act “symbolizes his inability to look at himself and recognize the ugly, unspeakable crimes which he has perpetrated in the name of white supremacy” (49). Tiffany Gilbert comments, “Jesse’s sexual impotence is merely symptomatic of a gradual erosion of white culture’s racial superiority and social dominance” (251). Viewing Jesse as a victim of Southern racism, Griffith states that Jesse,“himself a casualty of myth”and“selfcentered in Southern racist history, lies psychically and sexually wounded in his bed, languishing in the anguish of his devitalized present condition” (513). These critics correctly find the metaphoric relation between Jesse’s psychosexual problem and Southern racism,but they do not go further to explain how the lynching rituals disrupt the psychosexual development of young whites. Instead, these critics have conveniently read Jesse’s sexual impotence as a metaphoric device that represents the abnormality of white racism. In closely reading Jesse’s memory as it slowly unfolds in his...