"I'm not the boy you want": sexuality, "race," and thwarted revolution in Baldwin's 'Another Country.'.

Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories. (Virginia Woolf 39)

Critics of Another Country have been eager to see in the novel the promise of a transparent sexual utopia grounded in a healing unveiling of a serenely accepted identity. Whether in terms homophobic or racist, or anti-homophobic or anti-racist (rarely, though more often with the former than with the latter, do the poles of either of these oppositions come together), critics have dwelt on a transcendence defined as a coming to terms with one's identity. This transcendence relies on the transparency of revelation in the text and the assertion of this transparency's liberatory potential, regardless of whether or not such liberation is a term of approbation. Such a reading allows "race" and sexuality to disappear from critical view; more precisely, it allows critics to cast them as mere obstructions littering the path of a surpassing transcendence, usually cast in terms of art. Thus, to some critics, Baldwin (or, alternatively, his characters) comes to terms with his identity, and this self-acceptance and self-knowledge lead him (or his characters) to a fuller and more mature development as an artist; the achieved transcendence and clarity then shed the obstructing specificities of sexuality and "race" in the blinding splendor of a universalized artistic insight. To others, Baldwin does not achieve such clarification because he is waylaid by the obstructions: His racial or sexual obsessions or politicized dogmatism smothers his true artistic self. Even those arguments explicitly focused on questions of "race" or sexuality - or on their relation - often do not escape the structuring pull of a privileged transcendence that casts either one, the other, or both as unfortunate obstructions that might, with majestic artistic clarification, be surpassed. Thus, for many concerned with "race," Baldwin's focus on sexuality obfuscates (or, alternatively, movingly metaphorizes) questions of "race."(1) Sexuality, like "race" in certain accounts, appears as an obstruction to be overcome, a blockage in the path to artistic transcendence, even if this transcendence includes a fuller understanding of "race" and racial identity.

In Emmanuel Nelson's reading of Baldwin, sexuality is, in several contradictory ways, an obstruction to be overcome. His essay "The Novels of James Baldwin: Struggles of Self-Acceptance" divides Baldwin's corpus into three stages. These stages show the author's "confrontation with and acceptance of his sexuality" and his struggle "toward a healing and liberating sense of self-acceptance" that manifests a "growing maturity of vision" (11). The relation of this self-acceptance to the closet, however, is a paradoxical one; the sign of both sexual self-acceptance and artistic maturity is a resolute silence about sexuality that can be distinguished from the closet's silence only by a tendentiously psychologized later absence of anxiety. In and out of the closet, one is silent about one's sexuality - in the first instance because one is afraid to speak one's desire, in the second because one has transcended this fear. While I would argue that, aesthetically speaking, the torturous middle ground of frantic and ecstatic self-betrayal is by far the more interesting, Nelson's account ties artistic accomplishment to a conflict-free authorial self-acceptance, and this achievement is tied to an ability to overcome the specificities of gayness, even as his account implicitly ties this overcoming of queerness to the closet.(2)

Michael F. Lynch argues for the redemptive place of suffering in Another Country, for a sacrifice that enables the artistic transcendence of both "race" and sexuality. To Lynch, suffering forces the characters to examine themselves more critically, to accept responsibility for their actions, and, through the perils of self-disclosure and self-scrutiny, to achieve a healing reconciliation with themselves. A healing, Christ-like suffering serves to contain "race" and sexuality as categories to be transcended - or, rather, as vehicles to transcendence. Racism and homophobia appear only obliquely as causes of the suffering that allows them to be overcome in a character's reconciliation with himself, and "race" and sexuality are resolved into more "universal" problems. Sexuality becomes universal love, and the experience of "race" allows African Americans access to a "moral superiority" purchased through their "privileged" experience of suffering. Criticism focused on "race," Lynch argues, "ignores Baldwin's more universal message that one needs to recognize one's faults but also to overcome guilt through forgiving oneself and others" (17), and homosexuality evaporates in the transformation of African American suffering into what Stanley Mecebuh calls "an instrument of moral regeneration in America" (qtd. in Lynch 17).

To Terry Rowden, Baldwin's transcendent vision of sexuality obfuscates questions of "race"; in Another Country, Baldwin's homosexual "utopianism" is secured through scapegoating the black man. "Most works of fiction," Rowden writes,

rely on some implied notion of community in order to maintain their narrative and normative coherence. They achieve this coherence by the explicit scapegoating of some person (or persons) who, by extension, become representative of something whose eradication would bring about the kind of communal situation that I am calling "utopian." The scapegoated character exists as the point in relation to which an anti-utopian or dystopian alternative can be glimpsed and textually activated, thereby making possible the normative coding of the various characters and their actions. It is as reactive movement away from this implicitly dystopian alternative that the narrative is constructed. (41)

This model might more persuasively be said to structure eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novels whose formalism might arguably (although would not necessarily) be in a less ambiguous relation to "dominant culture"; nevertheless, in addition to underlining the potential political effects of the gravitational pull of traditions of narrative coherence, Rowden's model also stresses the importance of examining the conditions of discursive possibility that structure the often antagonistic terms in which different minority discourses can be articulated in relation to one another. One potential danger of such an argument, however, is that it tends to invest one of these discourses with a phantasmatic dominance - here, the discourse of gay male identity - that threatens to reproduce New Right strategies (for example, the chimeras of "political correctness" or "reverse racism") which invest minority discourse with a phantasmatic and oppressive power that is but the New Right's misrecognition of its own oppressive power effects. To be fair, Rowden's argument is more complex: It argues that Another Country denies the sexuality of the (in this article, always heterosexual) black man, positing black male sexuality as the dystopian world that has to be abjected to achieve the homosexual utopia that is for "whites only." The novel, which posits Eric as the sexual savior, gateway to a gay paradise whose transcendence is denied only to Rufus, fails to give a "realistic," socially and politically aware portrayal of the African American condition.

Rowden's argument assumes that Baldwin is here interested in presenting an artistic "transcendence" of sexual problems (where transcendence seems to prevent a real confrontation with a political consciousness of the more pressing problems of "race"), and, concomitantly, it relies on a notion of politics that is directly related to representation. Social critique, however, need not be based on "realistic" representation; more importantly, this model of novelistic representation can lead to a misrecognition of the relation between homophobia and racism. Rowden is quite right to point to the importance of Rufus's ostensible disappearance from the novel. That he dies, however, does not necessarily mean that he has been "scapegoated" in any simple sense, and I would argue for Rufus's centrality in the novel's interrogation of the complex intertwining of homophobia and racism.

For the moment, I would note that the novel's politics need not be read solely in terms of its plot and that a homology between what it "depicts" and a concept of political intervention modeled on representational politics need not structure a critical response to this text. Such assumptions similarly underlie William Cohen's reading of the novel: Another Country and its political world cannot imagine the inclusion of women, lesbians, and (homosexual or heterosexual) intraracial black relationships because they are not represented as successful (or represented at all). Cohen argues that social relations of gender, "race," and sexuality determine the personal interactions of the characters, but that Baldwin retains his faith in the "liberal-humanist" individual and his power of liberation: If the novel stages a breakdown of a universal liberal subject, this subject is reconstituted as the saving gay white man (Eric), the only figure allowed access to redemption. This universalized gay white savior, Cohen argues, is a translation of Baldwin's real concerns; sexuality replaces "race" as the ground of liberal-humanist redemption, because it is safer. Eric has to become the "spokesman for all alterity" (15) because the argument Baldwin wanted to make for the healing power of love was only possible if it were "transferred" from "race" to sexuality. Baldwin turns to the gay man because, before Stonewall, homosexuality was seen as an intensely private matter; the limitation of Baldwin's political project lies in his re-investment of the healing powers of the bourgeois liberal-humanist subject in the privatized field of exclusively white male-male sexual relations.

Finally, Lyall Powers's study of Baldwin's relation to Henry James condenses many of the critical strands I have noted. It argues that Another Country presents an artist's journey toward authenticity and self-acceptance. To Powers, the central conflict in James is that between perceptive artists and their conventional surroundings, and the artists' goal is to remain true to themselves, to admit honestly their faults and limitations, and to come to a compromise with their surroundings without giving up their "essential" selves. The result is a redemptive vision of utopian social transformation through artistic self-acceptance. "Race" and sexuality again become obstacles to be transcended on the path to artistic wholeness in a reading that smoothes over the textual complexities of both James and Baldwin. The reading ignores, among other things, the fraught movements of Jamesian syntax, which make it difficult to read his fiction as simply or easily a path anywhere, much less to artistic transcendence: His legendarily difficult sentences enact the extreme epistemological pressure he puts on notions of artistic completion or revelation, and Powers's reading takes the always vexed and undermined positions of James's characters as epistemologically secure groundings for a cut-and-dry project of readerly decoding.

These accounts, variously relying on transcendence and a certain transparency of reading, all trace a teleology of a self's revelation of itself to itself as the movement of the novel. The difficulty, perhaps, is neither that revelation is absent from the text, nor that Baldwin avoids questions of self-awareness - Another Country continually raises issues of self-scrutiny and self-knowledge - but that the movement from revelation to artistic transcendence and self-aware wholeness is challenged by the opacity the text introduces into moments of revelation. Critics fail to note that self-revelation almost always appears in the novel as a poignantly yearned-for impossibility. Revelation appears only in the guise of its failure. Here, perhaps, is Baldwin's proximity to James: Jamesian syntax is enacted textually in Another Country through references to constitutive secrets that refuse to reveal themselves, secrets that maintain the characters' and the novel's consistency not through self-revelation but through their exorbitant, recalcitrant, and inscrutable weight. That the characters taken to be revealing themselves to themselves and to others can in fact reveal only the fact of having an incommunicable secret attests to a traumatic opacity, as incommensurable as it is inconsolable and as incomprehensible as it is essential, at the center of their experience, a trauma enacted in Another Country through the figure of Rufus and what I will call his scandalous place in the narration of the novel.

Another Country speaks repeatedly of "revelation" and of the revelation of secrets, but the content of the secrets revealed is nowhere specified; the secret seems to occupy a purely structural place in the novel, one which gives the characters, like the novel itself, their coherence, and marks their unutterable sadness. Thus, readings privileging a revelation that opens up a self-accepting sexual utopia finally achieved when Yves disembarks in New York are vexed - for example, by the sense of buried trauma that haunts Baldwin's description of the city as Eric arrives there:

New York seemed very strange indeed. It might, almost, for the strange barbarity of manner and custom, for the sense of danger and horror barely sleeping beneath the rough, gregarious surface, have been some impenetrably exotic city of the East. So superbly was it present that it seemed to have nothing to do with the passage of time: time might have dismissed it as thoroughly as it had dismissed Carthage and Pompeii. It seemed to have no sense whatever of the exigencies of human life; it was so familiar and so public that it became, at last, the most despairingly private of cities. One was continually being jostled, yet longed, at the same time, for the sense of others, for a human touch; and if one was never - it was the general complaint - left alone in New York, one had, still, to fight very hard in order not to perish of loneliness. . . .

This note of despair, of buried despair, was insistently, constantly struck. . . . [Eric] could not escape the feeling that a kind of plague was raging, though it was officially and publicly and privately denied. (230-31)

This is perhaps one of the queerest moments in Another Country, not because all queers are sad, but because of the contradictory play of signification that the passage creates around New York City. The passage is built around a series of collapsing oppositions: "Familiar" and "public," New York becomes "the most despairingly private of cities," and, never "left alone," one feels a torturous sense of "loneliness." This collapse of oppositions paradoxically represents the "impenetrable," and New York becomes an "objective correlative" for both Eric and the other characters in the novel, represented here as the fissure between the promise of the city's open surface and that promise's betrayal. This fissure marks a discord in representation, a gap between "inner" and "outer" that paradoxically represents the character's "inner" being (in an objective correlative) by failing properly to represent.

More than the revelation of loneliness, the description's poignancy derives from a promised revelation (figured by New York's outer sociability) and the revelation's failure (figured by the gap between the "inner" loneliness and its "outer" manifestation). The contradiction, in other words, between the seeming gregariousness of the city and its inner loneliness forms and conditions the "buried despair" that appears in the form of this contradiction. Just as the very "presentness" of the city leaves it as outside of time as any city that has been reduced to ash, whether by Scipio's soldiers or by an erupting Vesuvius, the city's promise that it is "there," open and public, as the epitome of social interaction and contact, creates its own contradiction, which expresses and creates the buried despair it simultaneously hides and reveals. This despair, moreover, is not given a positive content: The passage moves toward a plague that is "officially and publicly and privately denied," suggesting that the denial of despair is crucially a part of the despair itself. The passage circulates around a sense of loss whose main "content" is its inability to speak its content, its inability to express what has been lost or even to speak itself as loss.

Contemplating a secret that Vivaldo does not express, Cass thinks:

Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world's experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed, the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness; and she saw, with a dreadful reluctance, why this effort was so rare. (112)

The passage suggests that, with courage, one can face and examine one's hidden secrets even if Cass herself, who goes on to think about Richard's novel, turns away from such a secret. A few pages later, however, linguistic resonances suggest that these secrets can remain impenetrable even to the person who houses them: "Something was going on in her mind, something she could not name or stop; but it was almost as though she were her mind's prisoner, as though the jaws of her mind had closed on her" (125). The figuration here disorients the earlier topography of the secret's "dungeon," and the imprisoning of a secret in the "dungeon" of the mind appears simultaneously as the blockage, and as the condition, of self-consciousness. As Cass becomes separated from, and imprisoned by, her own mind, in other words, it becomes difficult to locate the secret, her relation to it, and "where" it might be imprisoned. The secret thus traps her, defining and disorienting the distinction between her "inner" self and her "outer" surroundings.

Critics have read Cass's affair with Eric and its ending as her redemption through love (and her accepting of "responsibility" for her marriage through self-scrutiny); others read it as the sacrifice of Cass to an oppressive gender system. Redemption and sacrifice, however, are hard to sustain in the novel, and the figurative death underlying these readings is suspended in a larger resistance to meaning that is difficult to transpose into terms of sacrifice or redemption. When Cass meets Eric in the museum, for example, she seems to become the corpse she has always been, and the passage's stark terms resist redemptive recuperation. The paintings they view are troped as tombstones, and Eric

felt as far removed from Cass now, in her terrible hour, as he was physically removed from Yves. Space howled between them like a flood. And whereas, with every moment now, Yves was coming closer, defeating all that water, and, as he approached, becoming more unreal, Cass was being driven farther away, was already in the unconquerable distance where she would be wrapped about by reality, unalterable forever, as a corpse is wrapped in a shroud. (404-05)

In this rather paradoxical unveiling, Eric realizes that his desire for Cass is dead. The revelation, however, is vexed by the difficulty of aligning oppositions in the passage. On the one hand, Eric's "true" desire seems to be unveiled as his desire for Yves; on the other, the truth of desire is opposed to "reality." As Yves becomes spatially more proximate, he becomes "unreal," and Cass is shrouded in reality. Unveiling, then, appears in the passage as the death knell of desire, making the "content" of what is revealed interchangeable with, and causally linked to, the fact of the revelation itself. As Cass becomes "unalterable forever" and infinitely removed from Eric as she is "wrapped about by reality," moreover, the unveiling is unsettled not only by the recursive intertwining of revelation with what is revealed, but also by ambiguities created by the crossing of literal and figural registers in the passage. The metaphor of space - which indicates, for Eric, a growing emotional "distance" from Cass - is thus unsettled by the proximity of its literalization in the fast-approaching Yves, and the interplay of "figural" and "literal" language disorients the revelation, which is difficult to place in either register. The language of proximity and distance thus gives way to one of enshrouding and encrypting, which brings together infinite proximity and infinite distance at the juncture of the literal and the figural. For Cass, then, the only realization arrived at here is perhaps one of sorrow: "'I am beginning to think,' "she remarks, "'that growing just means learning more and more about anguish. That poison becomes your diet - you drink a little of it every day. Once you've seen it, you can't stop seeing it - that's the trouble. And it can, it can . . . drive you mad'" (405).

The poisonous diet of anguish Cass discovers might be one that, fatefully scripted into her name, she has been served all along; Cass is short not for Cassandra, the far-seeing prophet who always speaks a truth no one will believe, but for Clarissa, the violated and self-encrypting, melancholically self-silencing, self-starving heroine of Richardson s novel.(3) Throughout the text, Richard's failure as a writer is tied to his inability to perceive himself and his relation to Cass; this blindness paradoxically turns him into Richardson, the perhaps unwitting author of Clarissa's woe. The novel makes it hard to assert, however, that Eric "redeems" her by knowing her better, that he liberates her by revealing the clarity perhaps etymologically encrypted in her name. Even as the affair begins, the novel suggests that she is not so much redeemed as returned to what she always was:

Like children, with that very same joy and trembling, they undressed and uncovered and gazed on each other; and she felt herself carried back to an unremembered, unimaginable time and state when she had not been Cass, as she was now, but the plain, mild, arrogant, waiting Clarissa, when she had not been weary, when love was on the road but not yet at the gates. . . . She watched his naked body as he crossed the room to turn off the lamp, and thought of the bodies of her children, Paul and Michael. . . . They were oddly equal: perhaps each could teach the other, concerning love, what neither now knew. And they were equal in that both were afraid of what unanswerable and unimaginable riddles might be uncovered in so merciless a light. (291)

As often happens in Baldwin, the beginning of the paragraph promises revelation and liberation (here as a return to innocence), only to show this promise's betrayal by the paragraph's close, which suggests that what Eric and Cass might teach each other is the merciless existence of "unanswerable and unimaginable riddles," riddles that could not be answered even if they could be posed. From the perspective of the end of the paragraph, it becomes clear that its mercilessness was already there at the beginning. The "unimaginable riddles" thus inflect the "unremembered and unimaginable time and state" to which Cass is carried back, not only putting pressure on the know-ability of that "very same joy" - unveiling a familiar past that is, paradoxically, "unremembered" - but also retrospectively rewriting the innocence that Eric and Cass, "like children," unweary, experience as their affair begins.

The "very same" joy, moreover, carries Cass back to a textual past; Baldwin's italics suggest that Cass is remembering herself as a text, and Richardson's text in particular. Her name encrypts a textual past, that is, and a textual past that itself indicates an encrypted confinement. Cass's past and destiny are encoded and prescripted in her name, and the passage places her within Clarissa: The Clarissa for whom love is still "on the road but not yet at the gates" recalls a Clarissa Harlowe yet to be abducted and raped by Lovelace, yet to make her fatal rendezvous at the gates of her father's garden. Cass's reenactment of this moment before Clarissa's violation, however, inscribes her in the inexorable movement of Clarissa itself, and the prior "innocent" time is already inscribed in the terms of its violation. Freedom appears only in the retrospective light of its loss, just as Clarissa at the gates is "free" only in relation to her future abduction. The free Clarissa is already a prisoner in her father's house, and her abduction by Lovelace simultaneously constitutes her previous freedom and makes her previous imprisonment explicit. Similarly, just as Eric appears to liberate the young Clarissa in Cass, he also appears to her as her own children, the bonds that tie her inexorably to Richard's house.

Vivaldo's character is similarly constructed around a series of "unspeakable" secrets which are particularly important in the novel's depiction of his relation to Ida, his writer's block, and some "unspeakable" and unaccountable factor of his sexuality that molds his relation with Rufus. "He felt that if he were a real writer," we are told, "he would simply go home and work and throw everything else out of his mind, as Balzac had done and Proust and Joyce and James and Faulkner. But perhaps they had never held in their minds the nameless things he held in his" (300). Vivaldo's secret thus prevents an idealized relation of transparency to his writing, a nameless blockage that, interfering with his writing in some substantial way, is nonetheless never specified. "There was certainly something he did not want to think about," we are told a few pages later:

He did not want to think about where Ida was, or what she was doing now. Not now, later for you, baby. He did not want to go home and lie awake, waiting, or walk up and down, staring at his typewriter and staring at the walls. Later for all that, later. And beneath all this was the void where anguish lived and questions crouched, which referred only to Vivaldo and to no one else on earth. Down there, down there, lived the raw, unformed substance for the creation of Vivaldo, and only he, Vivaldo, alone, could master it. (305-06)

The "unformed substance" that Vivaldo has to face is simultaneously that which will enable him to write (his "creation") and to come to terms with himself (as a "creation," created by the void). Initially, we are given a positive content for what he wants to avoid thinking about - where Ida was and what she was doing - but, moving toward its repeated stutterings of Vivaldo's proper name, the passage gradually evacuates from the torturous secret all positive content and all reference to the outside world: The void whose contents remain unspecified "referred only to Vivaldo and to no one else on earth."

Early in the novel, Vivaldo stares at Rufus "and feels terrible things stir inside him" (69), tempting us to read Vivaldo's secret as gay desire. In this scene, Rufus tortures him with aligned specificities of their relation in an almost violent aggressivity of unveiling: He details sexual acts with women and the unspoken particularities of the relations of "race" circulating in his friendship with Vivaldo. The hatred, or "murder," that then appears in the scene testifies to a history of "race" as a block between them, to the competitiveness of their relations with women, and to their unspoken sexual attraction to each other. Although Vivaldo has sex with Eric and seems unable to separate it from his desire for Rufus, although he discusses his buried homoerotic desires (notably in the cab with Cass and on the roof with Harold), and although he confesses that panic about homosexual desire prevented him from holding Rufus when Rufus most needed it, the inner secret that makes Vivaldo look most like a gay character is not, finally, revealed as a gay secret.

Recalling the discussion on Rufus's bed about sex with women, Vivaldo later conceives of this secret as something beyond categories of "race" or gender (even as its framing suggests that it is constituted through these categories), a locus of seeing that cannot be seen, alien to him even as it forms his innermost being. While the framing of this scene (and its reference to the earlier discussion with Rufus) suggests that homosexual desire and racial difference are constitutive of Vivaldo's disorienting secret, neither "race" nor sexuality is revealed. Unveiled through desire is, rather, a sense of unspeakable, unlocatable trauma; looking at a woman in a bar, Vivaldo thinks of how Rufus would have desired her, feeling his own desire run cold and then oddly come flooding back:

Aha, he heard Rufus snicker, you don't be careful, motherfucker, you going to get a black hard on. He heard again the laughter which had followed him down the block. And something in him was breaking; he was, briefly and horribly, in a region where there were no definitions of any kind, neither of color, nor of male and female. There was only the leap and the rending and the terror and the surrender. And the terror: which all seemed to begin and end and begin again - forever - in a cavern behind the eye. And whatever stalked there saw, and spread the news of what it saw throughout the entire kingdom of whomever, though the eye itself might perish. What order could prevail against so grim a privacy? And yet, without order, of what value was the mystery? (301-02)

This "grim privacy" is forbidden even to the corporeality it occupies; an alien inhabitation of "oneself," it seems to evacuate the very self it continues to occupy even after that self has ceased to be sentient.

Bringing to mind Bataille's eyeball turning back into an evacuated skull before it is exorbited, this passage is more, I think, than a vision of androgyny and a world beyond racial definitions where a color-blind and androgynous "essential" self meets itself in its own process of perception. In this desire that crosses boundaries of gender and "race" even as it is constituted by them, merging Vivaldo's desire for the unnamed white woman with his desire for Rufus (as a desire for his desire), Baldwin imagines an eye of desire that keeps seeing without anyone to see or to do the seeing, without even the eyeball itself. The "cavern behind the eye" occupied by "whatever" or "whomever," locates a disorienting topography neither within nor without the consciousness (not) seeing. It delineates a central, alien, but constitutive void as the secret but unfathomable and traumatic locus of desire, sight, and subjectivity, and it connects this void to the paradoxical interaction of categories of "race" and gender. The paradoxical choreography of a gaze that sees without anyone to do the seeing or anyone to see is thus tied to a sight and a desire which generates and is generated by categories of "race" and gender even as the desire and perception take shape through the surpassing of these categories. Vivaldo's desire is shaped through reference to differences of "race" and gender; if this desire, however, leads him to something beyond them, it also shows that this "something" the self discovers through the veil of difference is the subject as the void, a sightless, seeing, exorbited eyeball that is completely alien to him and yet is him, a grim privacy he can neither escape nor penetrate. It is difficult to read the blockage of "race" and sexuality as an obstruction to this daunting realization; rather, the very contentlessness of the unveiling that constitutes Vivaldo forms the very "content" of the unveiling itself.

In Another Country, the experience of desire often opens up such a void. Vivaldo and Ida's relationship, for example, as Vivaldo discovers contemplating Ida's face after sex, is similarly constituted and haunted by a traumatic secret:

He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger. Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment. (171-72)

Outlining a thoroughly narcissistic theory of the epistemology of desire, this passage, coming at the beginning of Vivaldo's relationship with Ida, suggests that people become more mysterious when invested with desire, that desire creates such mystery by projecting onto another one's own opacity to oneself. It further suggests that there is more, when the novel asserts that "there was speedily accumulating, then, between Ida and Vivaldo, great areas of the unspoken, vast minefields which neither dared to cross. . . . Ida and Vivaldo buried their disputes in silence. It seemed better than finding themselves hoarse, embittered, gasping, and more than ever alone" (320), than the positive "content" of their secrets - Ida's affair with Ellis and Vivaldo's unresolved same-sex desire, for example - more even than the ineluctable facticity of the gulf of their racial difference. As Vivaldo's reading of Ida's face suggests, these barriers of difference are created through and "represent" each character's difference from him or herself, even as they simultaneously serve as the obfuscating and constitutive misrecognitions of such self-difference.

Vivaldo figures the block between them as a hidden sanctuary in Ida to which he is forbidden access, and the novel most often discusses Ida's "secret" through her singing. "What in the world did these songs mean to her?" he wonders on the roof with Harold:

For he knew that she often sang them in order to flaunt before him privacies which he could never hope to penetrate and to convey accusations which he could never hope to decipher, much less deny. And yet, if he could enter this secret place, he would, by that act, be released forever from the power of her accusations. His presence in this strangest and grimmest of sanctuaries would prove his right to be there; in the same way that the prince, having outwitted all the dangers and slaughtered the lion, is ushered into the presence of his bride, the princess. (313)

These "privacies" seem to be less "in" Ida than a necessary part of Vivaldo's desire; the privacies her singing flaunts and the accusations it conveys seem less an index of Ida's intentionality than of the importance of the inscrutability and impenetrability that spur and frustrate Vivaldo's perception. Ida's accusations simultaneously constitute (and manifest) Ida's distance from him and are not "in" her: Were he to "penetrate" into this "strangest and grimmest of sanctuaries," the accusations that have built its walls would dissolve. The passage is not so much a frustrated account of racial division and a utopian hope that it might be transcended as it is a demarcation of one way such blockage - emptied even of the positive content of "race" that might provide a concrete reason why a reassuring desire between equals fails to materialize - constitutes the desire it seems to obstruct.

The impossibility of entering Ida's sanctuary, as well as its role in motivating desire, is played out in the passage's turn toward fairy tale. The figures of the "prince" and the "princess" initially seem to level Vivaldo's conundrum to a culturally inherited cliche, and the passage figures, through its reference to Romance, Ida's accusations as the blockages, dangers, and tests of faithfulness used by the princess to create and inflame desire. A cultural story about desire that creates retrospectively the very desire it narrates, however, it should not be seen as entirely a defensive translation or a debasing of the "reality" of Vivaldo's love; the trope's retrospective determination of that which it tropes figures here the interrelation of racial difference and desire. The turn toward Romance is paradoxically not a turn away from the "real" problem of their racial difference; rather, as a story that precedes its protagonists, it metaphorizes this racial difference itself.

Vivaldo's lesson then is both a lesson in desire and a lesson "in" Ida's sanctum - his desiring relation to Ida's racial experience. The passage suggests that Vivaldo has to realize that Ida's accusations are as much his as hers, while simultaneously belonging to neither of them. Although he continually asserts that their love can escape its scripting by the culturally encoded fact of their racial difference, he must realize what his metaphor has already realized: This racial strife may be unavoidable, but, more importantly, like an inherited fairy tale, it also determines who they are and how they desire. Desire here is built around both a necessary myth that ties loving fulfillment and artistic integrity to clear perception of oneself and others and the necessity that such transcendent perception never be attained. The yearned for clarity of perception is thus built on a misrecognition, here, Vivaldo's, first, that he is not already "in" Ida's "sanctum," and, second, that there is a "sanctum" to be "in."

This sanctum grounds Ida's riveting power as a singer; as accounts celebrating self-knowledge in the text fail to note, however, the sanctum, tied to Ida's powerful sense of self, provides the riveting fuel for spectatorial desire only as long as its contents remain unspecified:

She was not a singer yet. And if she were to be judged solely on the basis of her voice, low, rough-textured, of no very great range, she never would be. Yet, she had something which made Eric look up and caused the room to fall silent; and Vivaldo stared at Ida as though he had never seen her before. What she lacked in vocal power and, at the moment, in skill, she compensated for by a quality so mysteriously and implacably egocentric that no one has ever been able to name it. This quality involves a sense of self so profound and so powerful that it does not so much leap barriers as reduce them to atoms - while still leaving them standing, mightily, where they were; and this awful sense is private, unknowable, not to be articulated, having, literally, to do with something else; it transforms and lays waste and gives life, and kills. (253-54)

The unnamable, contradictory power of an egocentrism that lays waste to barriers even as it leaves them intact, that kills and gives life, is "not to be articulated" and can only be defined as "having, literally, to do with something else." This "something else" gains its power from a paradoxical transparency; the riveting power of her performance comes from the transparent unveiling of her "self" in all its opacity. When Ida tries to unveil something in particular, to confront her audience with a knowable, namable, localizable grief, when she tries to name the power of her singing in her next song's dedication to Rufus, the power becomes obscene. By "obscene" here I mean - as its etymology would perhaps suggest - a riveting but scandalous exposure to view in the sense of the (always embarrassing) material presence of actors on a stage. Thus the obscenity grows in part out of a concretization, an attempt to locate a riveting power that was already built on exposure and spectacle. The exposure of her "private grief" in an elegy that is also an accusation becomes obscenity, leaving her audience cold and reluctant. If the "sense of self" so celebrated by critics of Another Country points almost invariably to a private or encrypted sorrow, part of its evocative power, misrecognized by critics as "artistic transcendence," grows out of its refusal to specify a scene or expression of localized grief.

A similar power, having to do with "something else," rivets viewers of Eric's filmic performance. The film holds an "undeniably necrophilic fascination" due to the death of its main star soon after it was made (328), and Eric's performance, by being nothing like Eric, shows Vivaldo more of Eric than Eric himself (330). The unveiling of mysterious, unseen parts of Eric's character - the revelation, that is, of their mystery - fascinates Vivaldo and fuels the desire for Eric that he will later realize. A similar desire seems to underlie critical accounts of Eric's presumed self-knowledge. Critics who read Eric as self-knowledgeable and self-aware, that is, seem to be in transference: Taking shape through the misrecognition of lack for plenitude in Eric, this disavowed critical desire is played out in the insistence that Eric "has" self-knowledge. The text's explicit treatment of Eric's relation to revelation and self-knowledge, however, does not bear out this critical fantasy.

For example, Eric's reminiscences as he prepares to leave France and Yves for New York City detail his realization of his gay desire. Critics celebrate Eric's retrospective awakening as a coming out marking a transparent journey to self-knowledge; however, from the outset, his revelation is phrased in terms of impenetrable secrecy:

And the thought of the gym, while the water fell down over him, he was alone with his body and the water, caused many painful and buried things to stir in him. Now that his flight was so rigorously approaching its end, a light appeared, a backward light, throwing his terrors into relief.

And what were these terrors? They were buried beneath the impossible language of the time, lived underground where nearly all of the time's true feeling spitefully and incessantly fermented. Precisely, therefore, to the extent that they were inexpressible, were these terrors mighty; precisely because they lived in the dark were their shapes obscene. And because the taste for obscenity is universal and the appetite for reality rare and hard to cultivate, he had nearly perished in the basement of his private life. Or, more precisely, his fantasies. (196-97)

The language initially suggests illumination, a passage out of the closet into the light of day, where, a new connoisseur of "reality," Eric would no longer be trapped and his desires no longer obscene. This light, however, is from the outset a "backward light," and the light of illumination takes shape only through a retrospective passage through a closeted time, a time of shame. This light is doubly "backward." As the passage suggests, Eric's desires are "obscene" - scandalously put too much in view - because they are kept in the dark; exposure and hidden shame thus retrospectively constitute each other. Moreover, the desire that would be liberated is itself formed through its own obscenity, through the paradoxical concatenation of mutually constitutive disguise and over-exposure; without this obscenity, without these desires already being both impossible to bring into view and already too much in view, there would be no such desire to liberate into the light of day.

The "impossible language of the time" is thus less an obstruction, one which prevents desire from being clearly or openly expressed, than the very condition of the desires and terrors it buries: The stress, then, is not only on a language made impossible but also on a language that is, in essence, impossible, that expresses through its very impossibility. This paradoxical movement is condensed in the repetition of the word precisely. The last sentence of the passage ("Or, more precisely, his fantasies") seems, on the one hand, a transparent definition of what exactly is seen as obscene: his fantasies (as opposed perhaps to his "deeds"). The word precisely, however, aligns this definitional moment with the cause of shame; precisely because they were inexpressible, precisely because they lived in the dark were Eric's fantasies shameful. The fantasies themselves, that is, take shape through a causal explanation of their shamefulness; it is their inexpressible nature, evoked only to express their inexpressibility, that, once more, blocks his access to and creates Eric's fantasies themselves. Only by being named as "shameful" do these fantasies, in retrospect, gain their coherence and their power to define the identity they unveil for Eric.

Eric's discoveries about gay desire's relation to revelation make it difficult to align revelation with a self-discovery and self-awareness that might be placed in the service of his empowerment; the two sides of his desire's obscenity are polarized to delimit his own epistemological disadvantage. Although the secret of his desire is "in" him, revelation is never on the side of one with secret desires. Rather, it is invested in others (whether phantasmatically or in "reality") who, through their presumed knowledge of him, make his desires all the more shameful, and the shame generated by this epistemological disadvantage creates his identity as an undefinable difference from others:

The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret from the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those people who see his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of him; . . . whatever the intent, the moment is awful and the accumulating revelation is an unspeakable anguish. . . . How could Eric have known that his fantasies, however unreadable they were for him, were inscribed in every one of his gestures, were betrayed in every inflection of his voice, and lived in his eyes with all the brilliance and beauty and terror of desire? . . . No doubt, at school, the boy with whom he was wrestling failed to feel the curious stabs of terror and pleasure that Eric felt, as they grappled with each other, as one boy pinned the other to the ground; and if Eric saw the girls at all, he saw mainly their clothes and their hair; they were not, for him, as were the boys, creatures in a hierarchy, to be adored or feared or despised. None of them looked on each other as he looked on all of them. His dreams were different: this was not known yet, but it was felt. He was menaced in a way that they were not, and it was perhaps this sense, and the instinct which compels people to move away from the doomed, which accounted for the invincible distance, increasing with the years, which stretched between himself and his contemporaries. (199-200)

I am less concerned with debating the "truth" of the passage's stereotyping of "gay development" (and I have not quoted the soon-to-be-repudiated pleasures of wearing his mother's clothes detailed here) than with what these moments of stereotypical gayness suggest about Eric's epistemological relation to others. For the moments that expose Eric's desire to wear his mother's clothes have little to do with the older Eric in the text; rather, they expose Eric as others would see him if they knew he were gay. The stereotyping is important, in other words, not because it establishes the truth of a gay ontogeny but because it establishes the locus through which Eric's desires are seen. This stereotyping puts pressure on the epistemological privilege of those presumed to know Eric's sexual difference. The secret that, transparently legible to others, remains mysteriously unreadable to Eric places him at an epistemological disadvantage that expresses less the "true" knowledge relations here than his own necessary projection, one that constitutes the very secrecy and unfathomable nature of his sexuality. No doubt Baldwin here evokes one of the most excruciating - if also pleasurable - predicaments of the closet, which dictates that every move one makes gives away, with embarrassing transparency, a knowledge that one does not "have" about oneself; it is the excruciation of serving, through one's own extravagant self-betrayal, as the prop that establishes others' secure self-knowledge and self-sufficiency.

That such a disadvantage is shown to be phantasmatic does not mean that it is not experienced as "real" and that it is not important in determining who one "is." The universalizing tone of the passage - "no doubt" none of the other boys felt the same pangs or gazed at either girls or boys the way he did, and certainly this difference in Eric's gaze and Eric's desire was perceptible to everyone - is evacuated of any perspective that could bring his particular difference into focus (when it is not that of a stereotyped gaze, equally hard to place, that does not see him except as it expects to see him) other than that of Eric seeing himself as he saw others see him. If this evacuation attests more to Eric's projection than to any knowledge that was actually there, this is not to say that Eric's difference or his sexual oppression was not really experienced as torturous by the boy who was "doomed" to become a gay man: A gay man is always menaced in a way that "they" are not. Rather, the phantasmatic presumption of his secret's transparency to everyone but himself, the phantasmatic assumption of his own constitutive epistemological disadvantage, is the very condition of the formation of his secret and self-betraying desires themselves. This play of perception and difference, of lack invested with knowledge, results in the "unspeakable anguish" of Eric's "invincible distance" from his "contemporaries," a seemingly ironic label for others that highlights his ineluctable removal, not only in terms of space, but in time as well. The experience of the closet conditions an experience of temporality that for Eric both makes his past and his past desires legible only in terms of a coming-out and makes it impossible to make sense of his past through such a narrative. More simply, gayness here appears as an interference in a narrative of gayness, an interference that may be subjectively experienced as a constitutive epistemological disadvantage.

The episode with LeRoy is often read as the moment when Eric "comes to terms" with his sexuality and accepts its "healing" revelation. The novel cannot, for all its seeming effort to do so, make racial difference simply another reason that their relation scandalized the world, cannot make the effect of "race" something simply added to their experience of same-sex desire. Transformative and, in many ways, constitutive of their relation, this difference thwarts the revelatory healing critics want to see. Leaving aside their racial difference, however, the scene with LeRoy does initially seem to posit a passage to self-knowledge and self-acceptance. It begins with an evocation of mysterious, inscrutable desires (in which LeRoy, because of his experience of "race," knows what Eric wants):

. . . there was something unspoken between them, something unspeakable, undone, and hideously desired. And yet, on that far-off, burning day, though this knowledge clamored in him and fell all around him, like the sun, and everything in him was aching and yearning for the act, he could not, to save his soul, have named it. It had yet to reach the threshold of his imagination; and it had no name, no name for him anyway, though for other people, so he had heard, it had dreadful names. It had only a shape, and the shape was LeRoy and LeRoy contained the mystery which had him by the throat. (203-04)

Beginning a passage to revelation here is already problematic, for it is unclear who or what is struggling to be named: Is it that Eric lacks a name for the act he desires (though others have names for it) or that this desired act has yet to name him as it has so dreadfully named others? Similarly, the ambiguous temporality of "undone" inflects that of "unspoken." Does undone mean 'yet to be done' or 'the reversal of something already done'? The ambiguity makes unspoken hesitate between the unveiling of a future - an act or desire as yet unspoken but soon to be spoken - and an action that takes place through speaking's negation.

The uncertainty of the passage's negated verbs and the directional uncertainty of its prepositions unsettles any subjective "revelation." If, that is, the text suggests that desires are "within" a person, demarcating his very being, and are thus the key to a subject's self-knowledge, it also suggests that these desires are radically exterior. It is no longer a question of "knowing" one's desires but of being known by them (in both senses of the phrase); the desires which know one and by which one is known precede and constitute the subject who would know his "inner being" by them. Having no name "for" him, the act "undone," "unspoken" names what will be named by unnaming it.

After LeRoy tells Eric what others have been saying about him ("He had not known what they were saying, or he had been unable to allow himself to know; but he knew now" [205]), they commit the act which has already been named and which has already named them. Here, I think, is where critics find a sense of healing revelation:

That day. That day. Had he known where that day would lead him would he have writhed as he did, in such an anguished joy, beneath the great weight of his first lover? But if he had known, or been capable of caring, . . . it could never have been his necessity to bring about such a day. He was frightened and in pain and the boy who held him so relentlessly was suddenly a stranger; and yet this stranger worked in Eric an eternal, a healing transformation. Many years were to pass before he could begin to accept what he, that day, in those arms, with the stream whispering in his ear, discovered: and yet that day was the beginning of his life as a man. What had always been hidden was to him, that day, revealed and it did not matter that, fifteen years later, he sat in an armchair, overlooking a foreign sea, still struggling to find the grace which would allow him to bear that revelation. For the meaning of revelation is that what is revealed is true, and must be borne.

But how to bear it? (206)

The passage is conditioned by a movement to knowledge: Had he known in advance, he never would have had the revelation. The reasoning is circular, and the point is perhaps banal: Eric needs to be ignorant before he can become knowledgeable, must be in the dark before he can have a revelation. In context, however, the logic is perhaps unsettling; if revelation comes about through a sexual act with a man Eric desires, the reasoning and wording here might suggest that Eric would not have had sex with a man if he had known he desired him. He must be ignorant of his desires before he can, colloquially speaking, "act on" them. More important, perhaps, is the tautology of the revelation that does come: What is revealed is that it is a revelation, and the only "meaning of revelation is that what is revealed is true, and must be borne." Moreover, the revelation that reveals itself as revealing itself seems to Eric, looking back, as the moment "when the blow had inexorably fallen and his shame and his battle and his exile had begun" (201). The circularity of the revelation (its self-reflexivity) constitutes its traumatic opacity; what is unbearable (though must be borne) is that this revelation constitutes an inscrutable trauma generated by its lurid and transparent, riveting and finally contentless promise of revelation itself. The pressure of this tautological revelation (which alienates him from the man he loves) is not the moment of his liberation but the beginning of his struggle to bear the revelation, the secret "unspeakable anguish" that no subsequent sexual encounter seems completely to heal.

This structure of revelation and buried trauma is played out not only in the novel's depiction of characters but at the level of its narration. Rufus's character is the switch point between these two levels. In relation to the other characters and in his structural place in the novel, Rufus figures or names the characters' and the novel's inexpressible sadness. For the characters, the "action" of the novel's plot could be read as the work of mourning after Rufus's death; each tries to come to terms with his death, looking for the secret locked in his heart and sealed away in death. As Cass remarks of his relation to his father, "What had Rufus been to him? - a troublesome son, a stranger while living and now a stranger forever in death. And now nothing else would ever be known. Whatever else had been, or might have been, locked in Rufus's heart or in the heart of his father, had gone into oblivion with Rufus. It would never be expressed now. It was over" (122).

Grief for Rufus allows Eric to localize his pain, even as this lurid concretization exorbitantly exceeds its localization. This pain, as Eric discovers when he visits Cass after returning to New York, can reappear at any time in a riveting image condensing Rufus's central place in Eric's psychic life, Eric's past love for him, and his death:

He felt a very dull, very distant pain. It all seemed very long ago, that gasping and trembling, freezing and burning time. The pain was distant now because it had scarcely been bearable then. It could not really be recollected because it had become a part of him. Yet, the power of this pain, though diminished, was not dead: Rufus' face again appeared before him, that dark face, with those dark eyes and curving, heavy lips. It was the face of Rufus when he had looked with love on Eric. Then, out of hiding, leapt his other faces, the crafty, cajoling face of desire, the remote face of desire achieved. Then, for a second, he saw Rufus' face as he stared on death, and saw his body hurtling downward through the air: into that water, the water which stretched before him now. The old pain receded into the home it had made in him. But . . . not for the first time: it would force an entry one day, and remain with him forever. Catch them. Don't let them blues in here. They shakes me in my bed, can't sit down in my chair. (237-38)

The image of Rufus's face - as he died and as Eric loved him - returns for Eric with a forceful immediacy. He "sees" Rufus's body hurtling toward the water, and the identity of their gazes (as Eric, too, looks at the river) makes Eric relive Rufus's death, an event he could neither have experienced nor witnessed. The intrusion of Bessie Smith's voice enacts - both subjectively for Eric and for the text as a commemorative interruption (here and elsewhere) - grief and the experience of Rufus's death: Rufus, we note, listens to her before he commits suicide. The passage stresses this impossible but constitutive reenactment, and it sets up Rufus's death - so central to Eric and the other characters that they continually relive it - as determining a disorienting "internal" alienation. The pain of Rufus's death - so much a part of Eric that it cannot fully be recollected - will return one day, like a haunting Bessie Smith song, "to remain with him forever"; returning, it will "force an entry," not from "without" but from "within" Eric.

The constitutive trauma of Rufus's death resurfaces, with recalcitrant insistence, throughout the text. Most notably, this melancholic resurgence marks those moments that critics most often read as liberatory: the consummation of love. Syntactically, nearly all sexual episodes in Another Country enact Rufus's suicide: The vocabulary of their eroticism is usually one of falling, drowning, or both. As Eric reflects on his experience with LeRoy, for example, this "falling" is already there - condensing, in retrospect, Eric's "revelation" of his sexuality and the anguish-laden experience of Rufus's death:

Nothing could have moved him out of LeRoy's arms, away from his smell, and the terrible, new touch of his body; and yet, in the same way that he knew that everything he had ever wanted or done was wrong, he knew that this was wrong, and he felt himself falling. Falling where? He clung to LeRoy, whose arms tightened around him. (205)

Similarly, Eric and Vivaldo's sexual encounter - often read as a moment of healing - reenacts Rufus's death. For Vivaldo, the sex scene begins with a dream that conflates his desire and Rufus's death: He dreams of Rufus propelling him to the top of the bridge and of Rufus falling, to be impaled on a fence, and then he dreams of making love to him. He awakens to find himself having sex with Eric in a scene that again reenacts Rufus's death:

It was strangely and insistently double-edged, it was like making love in the midst of mirrors, it was like death by drowning. But it was also like music, the highest, sweetest, loneliest reeds, and it was like the rain. . . . He felt that he had stepped off a precipice into an air which held him inexorably up, as the salt sea holds the swimmer: and seemed to see, vastly and horribly down, into the bottom of his heart, that heart which contained all the possibilities that he could name and yet others that he could not name. Their moment was coming to its end. He moaned and his thighs, like the thighs of a woman, loosened, he thrust upward as Eric thrust down. How strange, how strange! . . . But Rufus had certainly thrashed and throbbed, feeling himself mount higher, as Vivaldo thrashed and throbbed and mounted now. Rufus. Rufus. Had it been like this for him? And he wanted to ask Eric, What was it like for Rufus? What was it like for him? Then he felt himself falling, as though the weary sea had failed, had wrapped him about, and he were plunging down - plunging down as he desperately thrust and struggled upward. (385-86)

The passage gains its erotic power through its elegiac tone, and its consummation marks the moment when its sustained suspension gives way to the replaying of Rufus's death. Rufus's centrality is marked not only by the explicit references that place him as the object of both identification and desire, but also in the syntactical encrypting of "falling" and "death by drowning." Such encrypted choreographies seem to form almost the entirety of Baldwin's virtuosic sexual lexicon in the novel, and the italicized reiterations of his name act not only as markers of Vivaldo's elegiac memorialization but as markers of the text's own encrypting of Rufus. The same syntactical patterns memorializing Rufus's death can be found throughout the book, especially, but not exclusively, in the sex scenes.

The place of Rufus and his suicide in the psychology of the characters (and in the text itself) brings to mind Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's notion of the crypt, which builds upon their work on introjection and incorporation. Introjection, the psychic process that helps to overcome loss by putting it into language, allows the

progressive partial replacement of satisfactions of the mouth filled with the maternal object by satisfactions of the mouth devoid of the object but filled with words addressed to the subject. . . . Thus the original oral void will have found a remedy for all its wants through their conversion in linguistic intercourse with the speaking community. To introject a wish, a grief, or a situation is to dispose of it through language in a communion of empty mouths. ("Introjection-Incorporation" 5-6)

As a fantasy, incorporation "undoes" introjection by literalizing its metaphor. Denying loss, the ego maintains the loved object; refusing to "swallow" loss, it attempts literally to swallow the object, building an intrapsychic crypt, a "secret vault" to house it (5, 8). Because, moreover, the process of introjection is itself metaphorical, transferring the void experienced to its metaphorical representation in language, incorporation is a literalized and literalizing destruction of metaphor. The importance of incorporation fantasies, Abraham and Torok stress, is in their nullification of figurative language. This "active destruction of figuration" they call "antimetaphor," stressing that it does not merely literalize a figure but destroys its "figurativeness." Incorporation is radically anti-metaphorical: "It involves the destruction, in fantasy, of the very act that makes metaphor possible - the act of putting the original oral void into words, the act of introjection" (10). Such anti-metaphorical effects recede in Abraham and Torok's account, encrypting anti-metaphor at the heart of introjection and the metaphorical production of meaning. This account, moreover, highlights the constitutive place of mourning and the encrypted unmeaning void in the establishment of meaning.

This encrypted void appears in Another Country as a resistance to meaning that frustrates readings privileging transcendence and revelation. Meaning in the novel is more vexed than these accounts would suggest, and Rufus's place in the text points to one way to conceptualize its interrogations and frustrations of consolatory meaning. Rufus's place in the text and the way his traumatic presence unsettles a seamless reading of transcendence enacts the psychic and readerly relations Abraham and Torok chart in their theorizations of the "crypt": Rufus is incorporated into the text as the kind of crypt they explore in The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. As a model of reading, "cryptonymy" is less the "theory of readability" (Ii) Nicholas Rand outlines in his "translator's introduction" than Derrida's more paradoxical raveling and unraveling of the crypt's web of contradictions, its ceaseless deconstruction of the oppositions that form it. Topographically, the crypt is both internal to the self (a "system of introjections") and external to it.(4) A "nonplace," it houses a living dead.

The work of analysis does not amount to a decoding of hidden meaning because the crypt takes into account its own decipherment. The crypt is only strengthened by its breach (Derrida notes that it is "built" upon its "ruin"); the paradoxical "topography" of the crypt determines that "access" to the crypt's secret only makes the secret more inaccessible - the walls of the crypt in fact rely on this intrusion. Thus, when "cryptonymy" uncovers the "word-thing" that has been incorporated into the intra-psychic "crypt," it uncovers a word that is already a substitute, already part of the process of introjection. Derrida writes:

In order for the introjective metaphor to be taken literally, the limit prohibiting introjection has to be situated in the mouth - as the very paradigm of introjection. No longer able to articulate certain forbidden words, the mouth takes in - as a fantasy, that is - the unnamable thing. It is only from that point on that incorporation passes through a crypt of language (whence the "linguisticistic" effect), but this is only because the forbidden moment of the oral function had first been a "substitute" for or a "figure" of a wordless presence. If some sort of metaphorization had not preceded it (in the body), the process of demetaphorization (which is also a hypermetaphorization) could not have pretended to ingest the unnamable thing - another way of getting rid of it. (xxxviii)

The "wordless" presence for which the "magic word," the encrypted "word-Thing" stands in as a substitute is not an image that can be represented or perceived. If the trauma of the crypt is susceptible to the work of cryptonymy, it has already been displaced; there is no direct recovery of this "unnameable thing."

The crypt's paradoxes and contradictions simultaneously incite and frustrate a project of reading that would decipher them, that would bring them to rest in a stable meaning with the consoling power of a decent burial. As such, it adumbrates a readerly predicament whose manifold layers and webs of contradictions I would read as analogous, almost point for point, with the closet. To read the closet in terms of linguistic structures of the crypt is not, I think, to vaporize a gay "content" that would "come out." The closet, like the crypt - built upon its ruins, shored up by its breach - frustrates the definitive unveiling of its content because it includes, structurally, this recursive return, which allows us perhaps only to say to each content unveiled that this does not seem to be "it." The crypt thus allows one more compellingly to conceptualize the opacities and resistances of the closet as a structure whose significatory potentialities always to some degree escape any intentionality that would control them, even to the extent of knowing where to locate itself - inside or out - in relation to the closet's formidable but elusive architectural solidity. To experience the closet is to experience the terrors and erotics of such losses of volition or intentionality, particularly around signification; how often, for example, does one come out without intending it and fail to come out when one most desires it? Such accidental effects, moreover, are singularly resistant to verification.

The conundra around signification in the closet perhaps account for straight culture's barely disguisable and barely repressible glee at the spectacle of the closet, whether in its warnings to girlfriends about duplicitous bisexual boyfriends or in the always deniable metonyms with which it so archly surrounds popular culture figures of "ambiguous" sexuality. Whatever the risks of such allusions - the risk that a fascination and a paranoia (its own) will be exposed and that the deviance it would suppress will continue to flourish, even beyond the bounds it has set - they allow for the pacifying reassurance that such disruptive effects of signification are located in the hapless flounderings of closeted queers whose significations exceed them.

The opacities that Another Country introduces into a reading of its liberatory unveiling of transcendence thus mark within the text its ravishing evocation of loss and delimit its own epistemology of the closet. This is not to say that the text fails in a project of liberation but to point to some of the ways it ties a particular sexual predicament to its structures of reading (and unreadability), structures that are perhaps most apparent in the novel's mourning for Rufus. Thus the place of Rufus in Another Country is, I think, the place or, rather, the figure of the crypt. The text's syntactical reenactments of Rufus's death point to his central, traumatic place in the characters and the narrative itself. For the characters, Rufus seems melancholically undead; he returns over and over to haunt them, asserting his presence through the reenactments that commemorate him. The novel figures this trauma through the scandalous place of Rufus in its narration. On a microlevel, the text enacts this melancholy interruption through syntactical enactments such as the incorporation I discussed earlier of Bessie Smith's song, rupturing the texture of the novel in unmarked commemorations. On a macro-level, the text enacts dynamics of encrypting in its very structure. Killing the most important character in the first quarter of the text (and the character whom we have been led to believe will be the novel's protagonist), Baldwin seems to risk undermining the coherence of his whole novel. Rufus's death is all the more scandalous because, I believe, it cannot be recuperated as a "sacrifice"; his return from the dead (or his continually replayed process of dying) refuses to mean in this way. Rather, it registers continually as a traumatic rupture.

As my explorations of revelation might suggest, however, the place of Rufus is perhaps more complex: Rufus is never "unveiled" or "revealed" as the cause of trauma in Another Country. While the syntactical and psychological reenactments of his death are partly so resistant to containment in the text and take on the force of their unsignifiable rupture through their recalcitrant, unassimilable, dauntingly opaque materiality, these enactments also serve as figures. They figure, in other words, an unlocatable trauma that appears as Rufus, a trauma that, seen through the lens of incorporation, threatens the very possibility of both figuration and reading.

The frustration of a seamless reading of "meaning" is important, not only for the text's exploration of the closet, but for its implicit critique of the kinds of reading of the relations between sexuality and "race" with which I began. A more nuanced understanding of meaning, I would argue, would point to some of the ways a complicity between racism and homophobia has been misrecognized. Accounts privileging the liberatory potential of revelation in Another Country often tie a transparency of unveiled meaning to the liberatory unveiling of a self-knowing and coherent subject. The thwarting of such unveilings in the novel troubles this concept of liberation. The unveiling of a self in Baldwin usually reveals only its own process of unveiling, revealing not a positive "content" around which an identity might coalesce, but a traumatic kernel we might conceptualize as a "crypt."

In "The Part for the (W)hole," Lee Edelman argues that Baldwin deconstructs Du Bois's notion of "self-conscious manhood." Through a reading of the tropological relations underlying racist and homophobic ideologies, Edelman underlines their complicity when liberation is understood as access to such self-conscious manhood. African American men, for example, might conceive of their political disenfranchisement (under racial oppression) as a symbolic castration that denies them the rights and privileges of a manhood read as coterminous with subjectivity itself. The paradoxical relation between castration and homosexualization (in homophobic accounts) makes the tropological relations between racist ideology and an imagined homosexualization unstable; an abjected homosexuality refuses to remain a stable ground for racist metaphorics. The incoherence of this mobilization of homophobia, however, is often masked, even through the efforts of critics who would fight racial oppression. Racial oppression, Edelman notes, is often troped, even within explicitly anti-racist texts, as the experience of being sodomized; being sodomized figures "symbolic castration." Racism, then, is identified with an "active" homosexuality, and the complicity between racism and homophobia is thus obscured through reference to self-conscious manhood. As long as one misrecognizes racism as homosexuality (by identifying, for example, as some critiques do, racism with an abjected homosexuality, by casting racists as "repressed homosexuals"), the real location of rupture remains hidden. In other words, the structuring of both racial and sexual oppression points to a rupture within the cultural phantasm of "self-conscious" (white) male heterosexist subjectivity. This phantasm remains safe as long as racial and sexual minorities contest for the "manliness" each sees the other as having. Self-conscious, self-affirming (implicitly male) identity is thus not an index of liberatory potential.

To argue that liberation would take the form of an unveiling of oneself to oneself in the transparency of one's triumphant plenitude thus leaves the phantasmatic wholeness of the (white) male (heterosexual) subject unchallenged and threatens to shore up that very wholeness as the unquestioned ground of contestation. The perhaps inevitable fissures and incoherences within this construct can then conveniently be assigned to those "without," to racial minorities and gay people, left reassuringly to figure and embody a paradoxical lack. The lived experience, whether of "secret shame" or of more openly virulent oppression, of marginalized people, would then be the "objective correlative" of the disavowed kernel that structures the self-conscious manly subjectivity that excludes these marginalized people, figuring and comfortingly localizing, through their marginalization, this rupture itself.

Another Country, through Rufus, does not merely unveil the lack at the center of all subjectivity. Rather, by placing Rufus at the center of the text, as the Real or the crypt that structures and ruptures the text, Baldwin frustrates a project built upon an ease of decoding secrets in a literary text, and he frustrates a liberatory reading of self-knowledge achieved in a transparency of unveiling. This opacity of reading points to the implicitly masculinist ideology underlying the celebration of identificatory unveilings - whether in terms of "race" or sexuality - and it points to the complicity of racism and homophobia through the more nuanced protocols of reading it seems to demand.

It is in terms of the opacity Baldwin introduces into revelation that we might read the phrase another country, the novel's title. It is not the utopia to which we can escape to freedom; it is rather, perhaps, the sustaining illusion that such an impossible utopia might be possible. As a figure, it is perhaps the alterity that structures Baldwin's text itself, the crypt of Another Country. This alterity registers in Another Country as the novel's traumatic center in sadness. I would place the stress at the end of the novel not on the utopian vision of life in New York, "that city where the people from heaven had made their home" (436), but on Yves's thought as the plane lands: "It had not occurred to him, until this moment, that he could possibly have left behind him anything which he might, one day, long for and need, with all his heart" (435). Baldwin's text quite movingly makes trauma speak without losing this speech's traumatic exorbitance. By refusing the revelation of transcendence through self-consciousness, it figures and avoids complicity in the phantasm of coherent manliness that creates - but cannot contain - the trauma itself. It is to this place of mourning, the crypt within and without the text, and to the difficulties of meaning and reading it introduces, that I would look for this novel's startlingly prescient social critique.

Notes

1. Perhaps the most famous attack on Baldwin for his treatment of homosexuality is that of Eldridge Cleaver, who writes, "Homosexuality is a sickness, just as are baby-rape and wanting to become the head of General Motors" (110); Black homosexuals "are outraged and frustrated because in their sickness they are unable to have a baby by a white man . . . though they redouble their efforts and intake of the white man's sperm" (102). Cleaver goes on to criticize Baldwin's Rufus Scott for letting "a white bisexual homosexual fuck him in the ass" (107). In "Critical Deviance," Emmanuel Nelson gives an important call for further work, asserting that criticism of Baldwin has to take into account his "peculiar predicament" as an African American gay writer: "Without privileging his ethnicity over his sexuality . . . or his sexuality over his ethnicity . . . we have to explore the combined cultural, political, and artistic consequences of both" (91).

2. A similar frame structures Yasmin Y. DeGout's reading of Giovanni's Room. Dividing its portrayals of homosexuality into good ones (usually depicting positive, happy, and self-accepting gay men) and bad ones (usually relying on or betraying a phobic or pathologizing internalized homophobia), DeGout concludes that "perhaps Giovanni's Room is not, after all, about homosexuality." Instead, it is about the "larger" struggle to learn love, self-acceptance, and responsibility (434).

3. For a brilliant reading of starvation and imprisonment in Clarissa, see Ellmann. In this "epic of incarceration" (95), Ellmann writes, Clarissa's "body's protest wildly exceeds her speech, racked by meanings too ferocious to enunciate" (72); "unfeeding and unbreeding, Clarissa's body represents the hungry core of this fat book, the dearth that nourishes its strange fecundity" (73). Ellmann relates Clarissa's starvation not only to the textual production of the novel but also to her melancholic incorporation of her violation: "The more her body wastes away, the more her epistles proliferate, for after the rape, it takes her more than fifty letters to disenflesh herself sufficiently to die" (81-82). Cass's name probably also cites Clarissa Dalloway and her husband Richard in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (and, much more briefly, in The Voyage Out), though Woolf, too, probably cites Richardson with these names:

4. Derrida writes: "Caulked or padded along its inner partition, with cement or concrete on the other side, the cryptic safe protects from the outside the very secret of its clandestine inclusion or its internal exclusion. Is this strange place hermetically sealed? The fact that one must always answer yes and no to this question that I am deferring here will have already been apparent from the topographical structure of the crypt, on its highest level of generality: The crypt can constitute its secret only by means of its division, its fracture. 'I' can save an inner safe only by putting it inside 'myself,' beside(s) myself, outside" (xiv).

Works Cited

Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. "Introjection-Incorporation: Mourning or Melancholia." 1972. Psychoanalysis in France. Ed. Serge Lebovici and Daniel Windlocher. New York: International UP, 1980. 3-16.

-----. The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. 1976. Trans. Nicholas Rand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

Baldwin, James. Another Country. 1962. New York: Vintage, 1993.

Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. New York: Dell, 1968.

Cohen, William A. "Liberalism, Libido, Liberation: Baldwin's Another Country." Genders 12 (1991): 1-21.

DeGout, Yasmin Y. "Dividing the Mind: Contradictory Portraits of Homoerotic Love in Giovanni's Room." African American Review 26 (1992): 425-35.

Derrida, Jacques. "Fors." 1976. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Abraham and Torok, Wolf xi-xlviii.

Edelman, Lee. "The Part for the (W)hole: Baldwin, Homophobia, and the Fantasmatics of 'Race.'" Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 1994. 42-75.

Ellmann, Maud. The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, Imprisonment. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

Lynch, Michael F. "Beyond Guilt and Innocence: Redemptive Suffering and Love in Baldwin's Another Country." Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review 7.1-2 (1992): 1-18.

Nelson, Emmanuel. "Critical Deviance: Homophobia and the Reception of James Baldwin's Fiction." Journal of American Culture 14.3 (1991): 91-96.

-----. "The Novels of James Baldwin: Struggles of Self-Acceptance." Journal of American Culture 8.4 (1985): 11-16.

Powers, Lyall H. "Henry James and James Baldwin: The Complex Figure." Modern Fiction Studies 30 (1984): 651-67.

Rowden, Terry. "A Play of Abstractions: Race, Sexuality, and Community in James Baldwin's Another Country." Southern Review NS 29.1 (1993): 41-50.

Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. London: Harcourt, 1931.

Kevin Ohi is a graduate student in the Department of English at Cornell University. He is writing a dissertation on aestheticism and sexuality in late-nineteenth-century British prose fiction. Mr. Ohi offers his special thanks to Hortense Spillers and Ellis Hanson for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay.