A review of Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin speaking about the dualities of guilt.
‘This new book will ruin your career. Burn it.’
This was the generous advice given to James Baldwin by the Knopf Doubleday Group – his American publishers – upon submission of his sophomore novel Giovanni’s Room. In their minds, to print it would have meant to ‘alienate’ his newborn, black audience. However, there was an absurd irony in this warning, since the principal objective of Baldwin’s novel was to expose the consumptive damage of alienation, guilt, and suppression.
Giovanni’s Room follows David as he spends a few passionate months in Paris, while his fiancée, Hella, arranges their wedding. David lives in the romantic limbo of adolescence, surviving off money from acquaintances and spending his days at Guillaume's gay bar. David meets the Italian bartender Giovanni and the reality of his sexuality begins to dawn him. David awakens to his bisexuality, yet chastises himself for it. Baldwin addresses the destructive nature of confounding gender norms with sexuality through David’s own insecure sense of masculinity after acting on his bisexuality. A large part of the novel’s relevance is the unsparing, confessional honesty of its narrator. David is flawed and prejudiced, fearful and ashamed, jealous and insecure. However, he also eventually recognises the corrosive nature of his self-inflicted guilt. Baldwin urges the same realisation in his audience.
On another level, David represents the meeting of nations. Just as David tries to mediate his sexual identity, he is torn between America and Europe. As an American, Baldwin destroys the outsider’s ideal of Europe. Paris is the city of love, but only for those who are not afraid or ashamed of who they love. David loses his identity as he tries to hide his sexuality from his fiancée and father, who both chain him to the suppressive heteronormativity he is trying to leave behind. David’s struggle of being ‘alienated by the culture that produced him’ continues to be a contemporary issue. Though strides in understanding the intersectionality of gender and sexual politics have been made, Baldwin recognises that any changes made are but an extension of the same culture that suppresses us. Society is prone to slip into harmful dualities and alienation, so constant awareness — both in Baldwin’s readership and society — is vital.
We must recognise and fight societal alienation even while we ourselves are isolated. In being separated from society, we feel what marginalised groups have felt for centuries. Overall, Giovanni’s Room depicts the claustrophobic spaces constructed by society which we must enlarge and purge of dualities of guilt. For, even from our own little rooms, we hold the power of acceptance and society is nothing without us.
Review written by Ian Kirkland
(He/Him)
Works Cited
The Guardian. (2020). James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room: An Antidote To Shame. [online] Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/19/james-baldwin-giovannis-room-garth-greenwell-60th-anniversary-gay-novel> [Accessed 27 May 2020].
TóibÃn, C. (2020). The Unsparing Confessions Of ‘‘Giovanni’s Room’’. The New Yorker. [online] Available at:<https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-unsparing-confessions-of-giovannis-room> [Accessed 27 May 2020].