1. Introduction
James Baldwin arrived in Paris on the 11 November 1948 with just forty dollars in his pocket. Having grown up in Harlem, the postwar deprivation of the city was probably less of a shock for him than it was for many other American expatriates. In every other respect, however, he was in a very different world. Paradoxically, in this alien country he was able to affirm his identity as an American citizen. This article will discuss the essays in which Baldwin begins to explore the complexity of his national and racial inheritance. Collectively these essays are referred to as the “Paris essays.” They include the following: “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown” (1950), “Stranger in the Village” (1953), “A Question of Identity” (1954), “Equal in Paris” (1955), “Princes and Powers” (1956), “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American” (1959) and “The New Lost Generation” (1961).Footnote 1
Previous scholarship on this stage of Baldwin's career has tended to focus on his difficult relationship with Richard Wright.Footnote 2 Critical biographies by David Leeming and James Campbell acknowledge the importance of these essays, but they give little close attention to the texts themselves.Footnote 3 Recent anthologies, such as James Baldwin Now (1999) and Re-Viewing James Baldwin (2000), have given these essays comparatively scant attention and tend to focus on the ways in which his work intersects with post-structuralist notions of identity and sexuality.Footnote 4 This article will build on Lawrie Balfour's emphasis on the importance of recognition in his discussion of Baldwin's essay “Many Thousands Gone,” as well as on Ross Posnock's argument that Baldwin plays out a dialectics of stranger and citizen in these texts.Footnote 5 In the “Paris essays” Baldwin begins to develop some of the key ideas behind his work. He endeavours to resolve the contradiction between his sense of himself as an individual and the determinations of an alienated and alienating racial identity by affirming his American citizenship. This affirmation leads him to radically revise the concept of citizenship and makes his racial identity a source of cultural strength and critical authority. As we shall see, Baldwin conceives of race in dialectical terms, with the African American as the dynamic agent in a process envisaged as leading to an overcoming of both whiteness and blackness in favour of a reformulated American nationalism. He suggests that by recognizing and including that which had been excluded – the black American – the identity of the white American will be transformed in turn.Footnote 6
Writing about his experiences in Paris enabled Baldwin to shed what he felt to be his oppressive and imposed “Negro” identity and embrace a much more emancipated and individuated sense of himself as an American. Intrinsic to this new sense of himself was his realization that he shared an experience of alienation common to all Americans. The crucial factor would be to recognize and affirm this cultural and historical alienation. He suggests that the historical, cultural and political situation of the African American, if understood correctly, represents a moral and cultural challenge to America, Africa and Europe. As a counterpoint to the critical truth of the African American, Baldwin also begins to articulate what he calls the “innocence” of white Americans, a quality he feels derives from a disregard for the identity of others (specifically the African American) and from contempt for history in general.Footnote 7 Coupled with this idea is Baldwin's view that the ignorance, fear and desire with which the white American regards the black reveals the white American's own self-hatred and denial and lack of self-knowledge.Footnote 8 White Americans, he writes, “are caught in a kind of vacuum between their past and their present – the romanticized, that is, the maligned past, and the denied and dishonoured present” (PT 386). In the African American, the white American at once recognizes and denies a part of reality that unsettles his understanding of himself and his nation as democratic, progressive and, most of all, white. As Baldwin writes with a typically suggestive and ambiguous use of the pronoun, “In our image of the Negro breathes the past we deny” (PT 68). He argues that the collective refusal of white American society to recognize the African American forms a structure of suppression and denial that manifests itself politically, in terms of institutional racism and segregation, and psychologically, in terms of a distorted and destructive national self-image (PT 66).
2. Baldwin's Flight to Paris: The Autobiographical Context
Baldwin described the circumstances and reasons for his flight to Paris on a number of occasions. In the essay “No Name in the Street” (1972) he blamed a kind of “madness”: “If I had not gone mad, I could not have left” (PT 460). In “Every Good-bye Ain't Gone” (1977) he wrote that he fled America to try and discover what he calls the “demarcation line” between the things that “had happened to me because I was black” and the “things that had happened to me because I was me” (PT 642–43). In these retrospective essays Baldwin presents himself as trying to discover the extent to which his individuality could be separated from his racial identity. In contrast, his earlier essays place greater emphasis on the urgency of his escape. “Notes of a Native Son” (1955) evokes the psychological torment of being treated as nothing but a “Negro.” He describes the sensation as a form of contagion, a “dread, chronic disease,” a “blind fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowels” and a “rage in the blood” (PT 133). He presents himself as caught between the outward oppression of his racist environment and the inward “hatred I carried in my own heart” (PT 135). In his biography, James Campbell quotes from a letter Baldwin sent shortly after settling in the Left Bank which refers to a “violent, anarchic-hostility-breeding pattern” in himself “that seems invested with the power to kill.”Footnote 9 Paris offered a way out from this intolerable situation, providing a space where he had the opportunity to find a creative outlet for such tensions.
“The New Lost Generation” (1961) cites the suicide of his close friend, Eugene Worth, as another reason: “I was absolutely certain, from the moment I learned of his death, that I, too, if I stayed here, would come to a similar end” (PT 307). Baldwin was convinced that Eugene “would not have died in such a way and certainly not so soon, if he had not been black” (PT 307). These sentiments would resurface in his fiction with characters such as Richard in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1954) and Rufus in Another Country (1963), whose fatal leap reworks Eugene's tragic end.Footnote 10 Going to Paris was a chance to escape from what he called “the ‘nigger’ who surrounds him and the ‘nigger’ in himself,” to seek release in an intensity of writing that would eventually lead Baldwin to demand recognition from the nation he had fled from (PT 74).
What remains unusual and distinct about his contribution to the literature of American expatriate experience is the extent to which his experience enabled him to affirm – in a way impossible back home – his identity as an American.
3. The Expatriate Context
Donald Pizer's study of American expatriates between the wars, American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment (1996), outlines the orthodox expatriate experience. Pizer describes the expatriate “state of mind” as “composed out of the interrelated conditions of the rejection of a homeland and the desire for and acceptance of an alternative place.”Footnote 11 The world “one has been bred in is perceived to suffer from intolerable limitations; another world seems to be free of these failings and to offer a more fruitful way of life.”Footnote 12 This precept was as true for Baldwin as it was for his precursors, but then his “rejection” of America was much less of a choice. Unlike the authors in Pizer's study – Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller and John Dos Passos – Baldwin's relationship with his “homeland” was much more ambivalent. As far as he was concerned, America had rejected him. Getting out was a matter of survival.
Taking his metaphor from Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1935), Pizer refers to Paris as an “obstetrical instrument” to describe how the city helped to give birth to particular formulations of transatlantic Modernism.Footnote 13 However, Miller's expatriate declaration of independence, “I'm not an American anymore … even less a European … I'm neither for nor against. I'm neutral,” draws upon assumptions Baldwin was unable to hold.Footnote 14 Miller's affirmative (and, despite himself, very American) neutrality and self-invention was spoken from a position that was denied to Baldwin by the colour of his skin. To decry his independence from sociohistorical forces was not a realistic option. His expatriate precursors, confident of their national and cultural capital, had the privilege of being able to choose which aspects of American society they wished to reject, as well as which parts of European culture they wanted to embrace. In contrast, for Baldwin to assert he was an American was an act of liberation and defiance equivalent to Miller's self-proclaimed neutrality. The estrangement produced by living in a foreign land merely highlighted the contradiction inherent in his national identity as black American.
In “A Question of Identity” Baldwin articulates a cogent critique of what he considers to be the experience of the white American expatriate.Footnote 15 The essay is unusual among the “Paris essays” in that it makes no reference whatsoever to the black expatriate, or to issues of being a “Negro.” Instead, Baldwin concerns himself with undermining – through a series of sly reversals – the reasons the white American expatriate has for being in Paris. He starts by dismissing the notion that the expatriate has any real love of French tradition, language or culture and claims that even the most earnest can only bring “the hurried bewilderment of the tourist” (PT 93). The expatriate, he contends, has come to a city “which exists only in his mind” and prefers to “cling” to this “image” rather than face the “shock of reality” (PT 93). Instead of acting as an “obstetrical instrument,” Baldwin suggests that for white Americans Paris actually functions as a buffer to keep them “protected against reality, or experience, or change” (PT 97).
The American expatriate, being divorced from Parisian society (and ignored by the Parisian), lives “in a kind of social limbo” (PT 94). Although it may seem wonderful, Baldwin argues the “irresponsibility” afforded by this position reveals a paradox underlying white American identity. The expatriate American, he claims, does not want to be considered an American. He merely wants to be “liked as a person, an implied distinction which makes perfect sense to him, and none whatever to the European” (PT 94). He argues the European observer cannot so easily “divorce” the American “from the so diverse phenomena which make up his country” (PT 95). The European treats the American – white and black – as an American, whether the American likes it or not. When perceived by the other, the American realizes that his being in France merely confirms his American identity. Far from being liberated by his situation, Baldwin suggests the white American is forced to confront the fact of his national and historical difference. Indeed, this European habit of identifying the white American as a white American and not as some self-created individual or fellow European in disguise is analogous to the inability of the white American to recognize the black American as anything other than a stereotyped “Negro.” In Sartrean terms, this is the moment when the white American recognizes “that I am as the Other sees me.”Footnote 16 At this point, Baldwin writes, “many a student packs his bags for home” (PT 95). Unsettled by this dissonance between their self-perception and the way others see them, white Americans return to the United States where no such contradiction between public and private spheres will disturb them.
In a 1961 interview Baldwin clarified this insight. He said,
When I was living in Europe, it occurred to me that what Americans in Europe did not know about Europeans is precisely what they did not know about me; and what Americans today don't know about the rest of the world, like Cuba or Africa, is what they don't know about me. The incoherent, totally incoherent foreign policy of this country is a reflection of the incoherence of private lives here.Footnote 17
Baldwin connects the private and personal problems of the white American with wider political problems, suggesting a direct relationship between, on the one hand, social and emotional dishonesty and ignorance at home and, on the other, a treacherous foreign policy abroad. He suggests that every white American, through their refusal to affirm the common national heritage they share with the African American, perpetuates a structure of repression and denial.
In this sense, the Paris experience of the white expatriate acts as a metaphor for the wider issue of the refusal of white Americans to achieve what Baldwin calls “individual maturity” (PT 96). He argues,
This little band of bohemians … grimly single-minded as any evangelical sect, illustrate, by the very ferocity with which they disavow American attitudes, 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. (PT 98)
Baldwin suggests the American exists in a perpetual haze of misrecognition and misunderstanding. By highlighting their “inability” to believe in the reality of time, he critiques the ideology of American exceptionalism. He suggests that being in the ancient cities of Europe does not make the white American question the fallacy of such views: they remain unable to believe “that time is real.” Despite sharing a similar skin colour, white Americans' persistent indifference to history underscores their alienation from, and their inability to comprehend, the significance Europe has for the United States.
Baldwin writes that American expatriates dismiss society as nothing but a “flimsy structure, beneath contempt, designed by and for all the other people” (PT 98). Doing so, they reduce the transformative power of experience to “nothing more than sensation,” and, as a result, “their own personalities … soon cease, in effect, to exist” and they arrive at a “dangerous disrespect for the personalities of others” (PT 98). This “shapelessness” is mistaken for “freedom” and, in a deft reversal of the expatriate motive, he claims the American colony transforms Saint Germain des Prés “into a replica, very nearly, of Times Square” (PT 99). The American remakes everything in his own image.
Baldwin does not, however, end the process there. Having suggested that white Americans' expatriate thirst for experience leads them to ignore or misunderstand the historical and social differences between the Continent and the United States, he concludes by affirming the possibility that an individual can recover a more authentic sense of self from the “confusion” of the American in Europe (PT 99). He stresses that the American's difficult relationship with the question of history is germane to his wider concept of identity as a whole. “The American confusion” is based
on the very nearly unconscious assumption that it is possible to consider the person apart from all the forces which have produced him. This assumption, however, is itself based on nothing less than our history, which is the history of the total, and willing, alienation of entire peoples from their forebears. What is overwhelmingly clear, it seems, to everyone but ourselves is that this history has created an entirely unprecedented people, with a unique and individual past. (PT 99)
Severance from the sort of ancestry and historical memory enjoyed by the European or the African makes the identity of the American so special. Historical alienation should form a common, national bond between white and black America, a fact that is “overwhelmingly clear … to everyone but ourselves.” But whereas the social fabric of the United States daily confirms the black American's alienation, the white American must travel to Europe before the experience of misrecognition makes him realize the extent of his difference from the rest of the white world and the unsuitability of colour alone as a means of self-definition.
The estrangement and alienation of expatriation has the potential to force white Americans to confront the strategies of denial which have shaped their national self-image and so achieve a greater understanding of themselves in personal and historical terms. Such introspection promises to “end the alienation of the American from himself” and make clear to him “the extent of his involvement in the life of Europe” (PT 99). Authentic self-awareness leads to the understanding of Europe the white American has always sought, but it is a mature understanding, informed by an awareness of history: “From the vantage point of Europe he discovers his own country” (PT 99). Baldwin concludes by asserting that black and white Americans need to recognize their common heritage if they wish to overcome the alienation that defines the American scene. To achieve this, Baldwin suggests that the future of America will depend on its ability to understand how it is involved with Europe, what it has taken from Europe and, crucially, how it can avoid repeating the horrors of European history. The fatal error is for white Americans to assume, on the basis of a common skin colour, that they have more in common with Europeans than with their fellow black Americans.
We will now look more closely at the essays in which Baldwin articulates his realization that he had more in common with white Americans than they had with white Europeans, and consider the wider implications of this insight in terms of his understanding of American identity.Footnote 18
4. What It Means to Be an American
In the essays “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown” (1950), “Stranger in the Village” (1953) and “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American” (1959), Baldwin develops his idea that the American experience of alienation from European and African culture and history is expressive of American selfhood as a whole: “this depthless alienation from oneself and one's people is, in sum, the American experience” (PT 39). Understanding the “meaning” of this alienation becomes Baldwin's central task as an American writer.
While anxious to present this condition as a national, rather than an essentially racial, trait, Baldwin argues that the African American is more sceptical, ironic and self-aware than the white American. Foregrounding what he calls “the specialness of my experience,” he starts to look for the “terms on which my experience could be related to that of others” (PT 171–72). In “Encounter on the Seine” Baldwin signals his rejection of Afro-centrism or négritude as a meaningful concept for the African American. The essay emphasizes his view that the “gulf of three hundred years” between “the Negro and the African” has made the African American a very different type – he uses the word “hybrid” – from his African ancestors (PT 39). These encounters help Baldwin to realize how his “special experience” sets him apart from the African and French Caribbean emigrants encountered in Paris. These meetings lead him to conclude that race is secondary to the experience of social alienation and severance from a continuous historical–cultural memory. Neither skin colour nor the common experience of racial oppression is enough to bridge this gulf.
However, the encounter between the African and the African American is merely a foil for his main theme: the encounter between the white and the black American. Baldwin suggests that in Paris white and black Americans exist in a curious void, absent as they are from the segregated mentality of the United States. As a result both compatriots avoid mentioning anything that might bring about an embarrassing remembrance of how different things are back home: “The American Negro and white do not, therefore, discuss the past, except in considerately guarded snatches. Both are quite willing, and indeed quite wise, to remark instead the considerably overrated impressiveness of the Eiffel Tower” (PT 37). It is a risky endeavour to trouble the unacknowledged but all-pervasive social and racial codes of the United States. Nonetheless, being in Europe highlights the artificiality of these divisions and, according to Baldwin, provokes a sense of contradiction in the American citizen. Realizing the staged nature of their social roles back home throws both white and black Americans into a quandary, forcing them to reassess their identity in terms of a common cultural heritage:
In white Americans he finds reflected – repeated, as it were, in a higher key – his tensions, his terrors, his tenderness. Dimly and for the first time, there begins to fall into perspective the nature of the roles they have played in the lives and the history of each other. Now he is bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh; they have loved and hated and obsessed and feared each other and his blood is in their soil. Therefore he cannot deny them, nor can they ever be divorced. (PT 39)
Baldwin bypasses the surface of the skin to bury deep within the American self: white and black “reflect” and “repeat” each other, two words that suggest the impossibility of separating the one from the other. Their mutual subjectivity is defined in terms of “tensions,” “terrors” and “tenderness,” an interiorized commonality of emotion. The “higher key” of the white American suggests a difference merely in tone, not kind. Plunging into the body allows Baldwin to reiterate their physical, emotional and sexual mutuality: they are part of the same family.
Baldwin's ambiguous use of the personal pronoun in the quoted paragraph also reflects this complex interdependence. The “he” of the African American merges with the white “their” to produce the plural “they” with which the last two lines conclude. The essay is deliberately ambiguous about the author's skin colour, frustrating any assumptions the reader might have. On occasion the pronouns of the third and first person plural refer now to whites, now to blacks, and even to both at the same time.Footnote 19 Miscegenating his pronoun in such fashion allows Baldwin to demonstrate at a grammatical level what he considers the true, interdependent, multi-racial fabric of American society.
Despite this unequivocal assertion of a common American heritage, Baldwin withdraws a little in his conclusion, acknowledging that although the segregated reality of the States seems absurd from the point of view of Europe, he cannot always be in Europe. Affirming himself as an American does not mean that he wishes to “forfeit his birthright as a black man,” rather “it is precisely this birthright which he is struggling to recognize and make articulate” (PT 39). Within his attempt to privilege national over racial identity is an acknowledgement of the need to embrace and affirm the fact of his blackness. During the same period, Frantz Fanon also wrote about the need to overcome his sense of being black as a “lack” or “crushing objecthood.”Footnote 20 Fanon sought to make himself visible in order to affirm his legitimacy as both human being and French citizen. Baldwin demands a similar recognition.
Before integration must come recognition. Without the affirmation of racial difference, the African American would have to become the same as the white American. Such a move is unacceptable for Baldwin, as it would entail a fall from critical self-consciousness to conformity and denial. Recognition, therefore, is in turn inseparable from articulation: to be recognized, the black American must have a voice in the new republic. He seeks to resolve an apparent contradiction between racial essence and individual subjectivity by replacing a negating either/or binary with a both/and dialectic: he wants to be recognized both as black American citizen and as individual American artist. The emphasis falls on being an “American.” Affirmation of national identity makes such a duality possible, preserving the importance of his particular racial heritage without allowing it to eclipse his sense of himself as an individual.
Much of the problem, as Baldwin understood it, concerns the order of this recognition. “Stranger in the Village” complicates his original nationalistic affirmation by foregrounding the fact of his blackness. The essay contrasts the effect of his being in a remote Swiss village where nobody had ever seen a black person before with the disquiet his presence causes among white Americans. He considers the extent to which racial difference frustrates recognition of a common national heritage. Blackness threatens America's misguided sense of itself – as a national type – as white.Footnote 21 Baldwin chastises the white American for being in thrall to a European ideology of white supremacy in which “the white men are the creators of civilisation,” and for clinging to the notion that they can return to a time before their sense of themselves was disturbed by racial difference: “the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist” (PT 88, 89). He argues white America holds to an invented image of Europe devoid of complexity and conflict.Footnote 22 Sustaining this idea of themselves as transplanted Europeans has made it “impossible for Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardise their status as white men” (PT 88). As a result, the “strain” of denying what Baldwin calls the “overwhelmingly undeniable” has the detrimental consequence of forcing “Americans into rationalisations so fantastic that they approach the pathological” (PT 88). Unlike Europe, where encounters with the racial “other” occurred far away and in a very different context, Baldwin argues that the experience of the interracial encounter in an alien land forms the key narrative of American history. As a result, “Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be,” just as the African American is “unique among the black men of the world” (PT 89, 86). For as long as the white American's sense of identity is dependent upon such strategies of denial and evasion, Baldwin suggests that America, as a nation, will merely repeat and re-create the same repressive forces that their ancestors originally sought to escape from by crossing the Atlantic.
Baldwin adapts a nineteenth-century argument concerning American nativism, to imply that the white American has failed to appreciate the importance of the break with Europe (and Africa) in establishing this new identity. The institutionalization of racism in the United States suggests white America has failed to heed Emerson's famous assertion: “These are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”Footnote 23 Baldwin argues that as a result of their misunderstood sense of identity white Americans are unduly swayed by European ideas: “The ideas on which American beliefs are based are not, though Americans often seem to think so, ideas which originated in America. They came out of Europe” (PT 87). Baldwin's argument was not entirely new. In 1916 Randolph Bourne noted, “The early colonists did not come to adopt the culture of the American Indian … They invented no new social framework. Rather they brought over bodily the old ways to which they had been accustomed … they were, like every colonial people, slavishly imitative of the mother-country.”Footnote 24 Baldwin shares Bourne's transnational emphasis, albeit one articulated from the point of view of the minority. For Baldwin, racism and segregation represent an American corruption of sins perpetuated during the European conquest of the world.
Baldwin argues that as long as the white American refuses to recognize that he is irrevocably divorced from his origins, America will remain a poor relation to Europe. The onus is placed on the white American: he must abandon his racially overdetermined self-image as a transplanted European and embrace a much more complex and inclusive national identity. In as much as his emphasis on the unrealized novelty of the American scene can be conceived as a solution, Baldwin suggests that recognition of a common national and cultural bond between the white American and his black compatriots would allow the development of the “new laws” and “new thoughts” heralded by Emerson.
“Stranger in the Village” concludes with another assertion of national identity:
[The African American] is not a visitor to the West, but a citizen there, an American; as American as the Americans who despise him, the Americans who fear him, the Americans who love him – the Americans who became less than themselves, or rose to be greater than themselves by virtue of the fact that the challenge he represented was inescapable. He is perhaps the only black man in the world whose relationship to white men is more terrible, more subtle, and more meaningful than the relationship of bitter possessed to uncertain possessor. His survival depended, and his development depends, on his ability to turn his particular status in the Western world to his own advantage and, it may be, to the very great advantage of that world. It remains for him to fashion out of his experience that which will give him sustenance, and a voice. (PT 88)
This passage exemplifies the slant of the “Paris essays” as a whole, showing how he works through estrangement to a confident sense of legitimacy grounded in black citizenship.Footnote 25 By emphasizing the need to explore the “terrible” and “subtle” relationship between white and black Americans, and to make the African American “voice” be heard “in the Western world,” Baldwin outlines his prospect as a writer. His self-emancipatory mission remains tied to American notions of self-reliance, articulating his belief that what is to the “advantage” of the individual is also “to the very great advantage of that world.” Concluding with a triumphant warning to his compatriots, “the world is white no longer, and it will never be white again,” “Stranger in the Village” ends with the suggestion that including the African-American within the democratic mandate of the United States will have consequences for the entire world (PT 90).
“The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American” builds on these ideas as Baldwin attempts to show how his literary prospect accords with his emphasis on recognizing the historical and cultural importance of the African American experience in the new world. Ensconced in Europe, Baldwin made his famous claim: “I proved, to my astonishment, to be as American as any Texas G.I.” because “they were no more at home in Europe than I was” (PT 172). Although Europe “had formed us both, was part of our identity and part of our inheritance,” the “fact” is “we were both searching for our separate identities” (PT 172). His use of the word “separate” is important: it conveys his belief that the identity which he and the “Texas G.I.” search for is different, but that such difference can be preserved within a common nationality. Self-discovery promises to overcome the determinations of racial essence. Baldwin anticipates that when “we had found these [identities] … we would no longer need to cling to the shame and bitterness which had divided us so long” (PT 172). Recovery of individual identity becomes the antidote for psychic and social alienation, allowing for a move from division and guilt to brotherly love and national unity.
However, he resists treating identity merely as an object to be reclaimed. Instead, he emphasizes identity as a project, a task (political, social, psychic and sexual) with which one must engage. The essay refers to the wider sociopolitical context in order to show how the facts of American (and French) racism disturb the expatriate bubble and precipitate what he calls “this crucial day” in which he is compelled as both writer and black American to take action (PT 174). His idealistic affirmations of citizenship begin to seem rather precarious when set against the racial conflicts taking place across the world. Back home, the civil-rights movement was a fight for the pluralistic, civic definition of American identity Baldwin supported. It was increasingly impossible for him to ignore this wider situation:
This crucial day may be the day on which an Algerian taxi driver tells him how it feels to be an Algerian in Paris. It may be the day on which he passes a café terrace and catches a glimpse of the tense, intelligent and troubled face of Albert Camus. Or it may be the day on which someone asks him to explain Little Rock and he begins to feel that it would be simpler – and, corny as the words may sound, more honorable – to go to Little Rock than sit in Europe, on an American passport, trying to explain it.
This is a personal day, a terrible day, the day to which his entire sojourn has been tending. It is the day he realises that there are no untroubled countries in this fearfully troubled world; that if he has been preparing himself for anything in Europe, he has been preparing himself – for America. In short, the freedom that the American writer finds in Europe brings him, full circle, back to himself, with the responsibility for his development where it always was: in his own hands. (PT 174–75)
It is no use merely proclaiming his American citizenship from the refuge of France. Instead, his European “sojourn” is cast as a preparatory stage. The “freedom” that the “American writer finds in Europe” returns the writer – if he wishes to end, rather than prolong his alienation – back to “himself,” back, therefore, to America. Understanding that “there are no untroubled countries” closes the distance he sought to preserve between the United States and the Continent. By referring to Camus and the Algerian struggle in the same passage as he mentions Little Rock, Baldwin acknowledges that divisions between national and ethnic identity are also a problem for Europe. The essay dramatizes his turn towards a much more overt engagement with political problems, even while he continues to envisage solutions in personal and subjective terms.
Freedom from segregation and social racism may have allowed Baldwin to perceive himself differently, but his sense of himself as an equal American citizen was far from guaranteed. As a result, he stresses his sense of American society as something fluid and dynamic. Baldwin makes this struggle for identity the matter for his writing:
American writers do not have a fixed society to describe. The only society they know is one in which nothing is fixed and in which the individual must fight for his identity. This is a rich confusion, indeed, and it creates for the American writer unprecedented opportunities. (PT 175)
His essay distances itself from the social-protest fiction of his immediate forebears, dismissing the notion that American society is susceptible to such representations. These works are rejected as a “symptom of our tension” rather than an “examination” (PT 175). Retaining the medical metaphor, he conveys a sense of the American writer as both surgeon and psychoanalyst, peeling open the social and emotional surface of American society, breaking down the “assumptions” of its people to “find out” what they really mean. The essay concludes with an assertion of the importance of the “interior life,” stating, “the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world” (PT 176). The dream of liberty connects with the struggle in the schools of Little Rock: Baldwin weds his sense of the importance of the private life of the individual to the need for freedom in the public sphere. America's struggle to fulfil its democratic mandate must therefore engage the individual at the political as well as the personal level. Only by recognizing and affirming the centrality of African American experience to the narrative of American history as a whole can such divisions be overcome through the achievement of a mature identity – an identity figured in both individual and collective cultural–historical terms. Baldwin's dialectics of self-discovery, initiated by his personal experience of individual liberation in Paris, have led him to the realization that his ability to affirm his national identity remains a fiction for as long as he remains abroad. To translate ideal into actuality, he must align his individual struggle as an artist with the social struggle of a people; he must return to the United States to fight for his civil rights.
5. Conclusion
If one considers the entirety of Baldwin's oeuvre, one can only conclude he is a deeply pessimistic writer.Footnote 26 Increasingly his essays – especially those written after the civil-rights era – would edge towards a messianic view of history, with an apparent yearning for divine vengeance or apocalyptic renewal. However, the “Paris essays” present Baldwin at his most optimistic. He envisages an America transformed by the recognition and inclusion of the African American citizen within the body politic. He suggests this movement would finally legitimate the American state, allowing for a break with European history and all its ills. By asserting that all Americans share an experience of cultural–historical severance from the rest of the world, Baldwin imagines a potential resolution of the social and political divisions of 1950s America. He casts the African American as the dynamic agent in a dialectical process in which inclusion and recognition would in turn transform white Americans, banishing their distorted eurocentric self-image in favour of a reformulated multi-ethnic nationalism.
However, these essays are not the whole story. During his first sojourn in Paris Baldwin also wrote his second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956). This tragedy of sexual desire and emotional passivity troubles the idea that the self can be so easily separated from its social determinants. The normalizing, coercive power of family and nation prevents David from acting on the self-knowledge produced by his affair with Giovanni. He refuses to acknowledge the disturbing self-revelations and material contradictions uncovered by his homosexual experiences. The depth of David's denial testifies to Baldwin's concerns about the ability of white Americans to be transformed by their relationships with their darker compatriots. As he was to discover when he returned to the States to involve himself in civil rights, the intransigent white majority was not about to acknowledge his multi-racial vision for a truly new American national identity.
