As I explored in my first blog post, Giovanni’s Room examines themes of denial of sexuality and intimacy, and distancing oneself from any love for or closeness to another person. Specifically, the Controlling Idea I came up with was: Closing oneself off from intimacy and closeness leads to anguish in solitude. Its counter-idea is this: Allowing oneself to be seen and accepted by others (and oneself) will lead to fulfillment and love. In the novel, we can see David struggle to become intimate with anyone, which culminates in a final act of rejection of others and himself, when he tears up Jacques’s letter and scatters the pieces into the wind (Baldwin 169).
So to set the stage for noticing surprising details within the text, we must first establish the genre or genres of the text so we have something to contrast these details with. The reality is, at least for me, the genre of Giovanni’s Room is difficult to pin down. If you look the novel up on Google, most sources I can find list it as belonging to the genre “Gay literature.” My issue is that I’m not quite sure what that means. If it means that there are gay or LGBT characters prominent in the story, then I agree that it conforms to this genre. If it means something more, then I’m not sure exactly what the conventions are. For a modern audience, “Gay literature” might have an idea different from Giovanni’s Room. If I had just looked this book up on Goodreads, I might think that David would come to accept his sexuality, and the story might end on a positive note that promotes acceptance of others. Upon reading the novel, it does not seem to conform to this idea (which might, in itself, be a projection of what a “Gay novel” is). David can be cruel, bitter, deceptive, cold, everything the modern progressive cultural code tells us LGBT characters are not. In retrospect, this is kind of shocking. Why would the author, James Baldwin, a gay man himself, write the main character in this way? Perhaps he wanted to defy a stereotype of what a gay man is and can be, and show that they can struggle with accepting themselves as others struggle to accept them.
All this speculation might just be stalling, because, as for genre, I’m not quite sure where to stick Giovanni’s Room. Romance doesn’t feel quite right; this doesn’t seem to mirror any other Romance books I’ve heard of. The only thing that felt truly descriptive of the story was something Billy suggested, which was simply Tragedy. Giovanni is executed, Hella leaves, David is left alone. As Destiny and Angelina pointed out to me, the novel almost gives itself a prologue, telling the reader that the story will end in tragedy, even in the first sentence: “I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life” (Baldwin 3).
So, let’s finally get into Jane Gallop’s method of close reading, as she describes in her article “The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters.” She demonstrates the value of noting surprising details that seem to subvert the genre of a given text:
When the reader concentrates on the familiar, she is reassured that what she already knows is sufficient in relation to this new book. Focusing on the surprising, on the other hand, would mean giving up the comfort of the familiar, of the already-known for the sake of learning, of encountering something new, something she didn’t already know.
(Gallop 11)
So, in an effort to encounter something new, something I found surprising and out of place, and to learn from it, let’s examine this passage regarding the Garden of Eden:
Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare. (Baldwin 25)
For large parts of the text, David describes the world through the lens of his emotions, so this passage, to me, sticks out. It is strangely philosophical compared to most of the novel, and has this really striking sentence structure that jumps off of the page. “Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both.” This bringing together of opposites puzzles me. How can someone both forget and remember something? Can one remember, but choose to let go? Is that what makes a hero? If it is, then it seems David fails to become one, stuck in the significance of what happened with Joey, trying to convince himself he can forget, but ever failing, damned to be one of “the madmen who remember.” This quote is really interesting in that it comes from extended pondering that David has done in the wake of Giovanni being sentenced to die, yet, at this point in the narrative, we lack the context to understand the quote. It is as if this exists for the reader who is also reflecting on the narrative, looking back with the knowledge that David has, mulling over the branching paths that led them to this moment, staring out the window of a house that isn’t theirs. Are you one of many, a madman? Or rare, a hero?
Read the Room 