Historically, blog four has not been my strong suit. I have struggled with fully grasping its ideas, blurring the lines between the authorial and the narrative audiences, unable to distinguish the full relationship between narrator and addressee, between the author and the reader. But the wheel of progress cannot help but turn! I’m a reading group leader now, so surely that means I know what I’m doing. Without 100% mastery, surely I wouldn’t be in this position, right? Not so much, but that’s okay. Despite my previous difficulty, I am ready to return to the rhetoric of narrative with fresh eyes.
The first question I must ask myself, if I am to resemble James Seitz’s “capable reader,” is: Who is David attempting to address through his narration? It isn’t an easy question. The instinctual answer might be himself, he is reliving the events of the narrative through a self address, to diagnose what went wrong, as a self-prescribed punishment, or some other purpose. While it could be that David isn’t addressing a flesh-and-blood person in the room with him, I think that it is a bit unfun to say that David is simply addressing himself. Unfun in the sense that I think there is likely a more interesting, more explorable answer. It has been suggested by some of my fellow reading group leaders, as well as students currently in the class, that David’s narration is an attempt at a confession, a pouring out of all of his sins, in order to free his conscience from its guilty shackles. Early in the book, David says:
I repent now–for all the good it does–one particular lie among the many lies I’ve told, told, lived and believed.
Baldwin 6
Here, we see David reckon with his misdeeds, the knowledge that he has been living a lie. He knows he has done something wrong, and he believes this is worthy of repentance. This is a far cry from the David I have been painting in these last three blog posts. I have demonstrated David to be an unsympathetic character, uncaring of the destruction he leaves in his wake, unwilling to change his ways, even for his own good. But maybe this is a simplistic view of the narrative. Maybe this is only the outer shell of a multi-layered organism.
On my first read-through of Giovanni’s Room, I could not help but play (that is to say, I was only capable of playing) the role of the narrative audience. The narrative audience, as defined by Peter Rabinowitz in his article “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences,” is the role we play when we enter the text as if it were real, as if it were happening right in front of us. The narrator is directing their narration at a specific sort of person, and a member of the narrative audience, for all intents and purposes, is willing to play ball. Through David’s narration, we, the narrative audience, come to understand the full extent of his character, in a way that no one else ever has, and we are forced to judge him. He narrates in such a way that makes us believe him “secretive and cruel,” as he says in his own words. David wants us to feel this way, to condemn him as he condemns himself. But for what purpose? Beyond confession, why would David want us to see his errors as they are? Maybe this is not a simple confession, but a plea for help. Maybe David is reaching out to us, the audience of his address, people who can feel love and intimacy, for help.
This brings us to the authorial audience. Peter Rabinowitz defines the authorial audience as “the author’s hypothetical audience,” or the audience that would understand the text completely, even more so than the author (Rabinowitz 126). By distinguishing the narrative audience for Giovanni’s Room, we have entered, or at least dipped a toe into, the authorial audience. We have glimpsed the second cube. From this spot, maybe we can see both views at the same time, both believing the narrative is true and knowing it is a construction of the author’s mind. From this perspective, we might question why Baldwin, a black man, would write David as a white man. As we have discussed, the time the novel was written in would be very resistant to this text in the first place. The 1950s were not kind to people who weren’t white and straight. If Baldwin had made David both gay and black, the culture at large would have rejected the text completely. In a way, by creating David in this way, Baldwin is commenting on the society in which he lives. He is telling the authorial audience something, that the society he lives in is broken, and that you (yes, you), the reader, are broken too for your inherent resistance to accept David if he was black. There is just as much, if not even more, hidden in what is not written in the text as what is written.
Read the Room 