The "maw of western culture": James Baldwin and the anxieties of influence.

In No Name in the Street, his 1972 autobiography, James Baldwin reports a curious memory. A "young white man, beautiful, Jewish, American," Baldwin recalls, "ate his wife's afterbirth, frying it in a frying pan":

   He did this because--who knows--Wilhelm Reich, according to him,
   had ordered it.... By this effort, he made his wife and child a part
   of himself. The question which has remained in my mind, no doubt, is
   why so extreme an effort should have been needed to prove a fact
   which should have been so obvious and so joyous. By the time he told
   me, he had lost both the wife and the child, was virtually adopting
   another one, black this time ... and though he did not know it, was
   now helplessly and hopelessly in love with a small black boy, not
   more than ten. (52-53)

Baldwin seems to intend this story to illustrate America's "emotional poverty" and "terror of human life"; it also serves to introduce his interest in questions of sexual preference, sexual identity, and race (55). The young father wishes to ritualize his biological bond--with mother and son--by consuming parts of them both, but his desperate need to feel connected inspires a perversion of the boundaries of self and other, male and female, white and black. As Baldwin tells the story, the widower compounds his confusions by thinking he can replace his estranged family with a black boy, through a compensatory, incestuous attachment that transgresses racial and generational boundaries.

But the story also contains a lesson for writers, and Baldwin enlists Henry James to explain: "'Only connect,' Henry James has said. Perhaps only an American writer would have been driven to say it, his very existence being threatened by the failure, in most American lives, of the most elementary and crucial connections" (54). The social failures observed by James are grotesquely illustrated by Baldwin's account of the young man, but when it is read in the context of Baldwin's autobiographical explorations of race and writing, it also raises, I would argue, what Baldwin called the "question of assimilation." As a narrative of affiliation, incorporation, and adoption, the afterbirth story dramatizes the cultural, intellectual, and psychological experience of replacing "habits of feeling, thinking, and acting by another set of habits which belonged to strangers ..." (Nobody 16).

As a "bastard of the West," an "interloper," a "suspect latecomer, bearing no credentials," as he describes himself in Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin wrote with the acute consciousness of a stranger who struggles to adopt, or adapt to, parts of the culture that preceded him (6-7, 164). Feelings of envy, competition, and exclusion can be gleaned throughout his autobiographical writings; these literary allegiances and estrangements are expressions of an "elaborate, mediating process that relates self to other, subject to object, inside to outside" (Cheng 176). The figure of swallowing a new mother's afterbirth is one of many metaphors that Baldwin uses to explore his anxieties about assimilating, and assimilating into, American culture. References to eating, digestion, and expulsion--as well as images of sodomy and castration--exemplify the unconscious reverberations of Baldwin's conscious literary projects, reverberations characteristic of primary processes of symbiosis and annihilation. Taking something deep into the self to the point where it becomes a part of the self, as the young man did with his wife's afterbirth, can nourish and sustain, but it can also engender its psychic opposite, a fear, as Baldwin describes it, of "simply being swallowed up, of disappearing in the maw of Western culture ..." (Nobody 16). (1)

As an allegory about taking in--or on--the work of predecessors, the afterbirth story is framed by a number of references to James, a writer Baldwin once described as "my master" (Leeming, "Interview" 55). As Baldwin explains in No Name, his alienating experiences as an American writer living in exile in Europe were eased by reading James, "who had been there before me and had had the generosity to clue me in" about Parisians' indifference to Americans (40). Although Baldwin claimed he had trouble reading James as a boy, he told his biographer W. J. Weatherby that by the time he had moved to Paris, he "had become a Jamesian." After struggling with the completion of his own first novel, Baldwin explained, "'I needed a box to put thoughts in--a model'"; James's theories about the novel provided that box (96, 98). A friend of Baldwin's once observed the intensity of Baldwin's emulation of his predecessor, and commented that it "'was as if Henry James had inhabited his odd body'" (Weatherby 97).

A footnote to Baldwin's quotation of James's comment about connection, however, raises questions about who inhabited whom:

   I have made a mistake of attributing to
   Henry James something which was
   actually said by E.M. Forster, and I
   apologize for this lapse. James and
   Forster have always been entangled in
   my mind, because of my great respect
   for both of them, their influence on me,
   and the frequent similarity of their
   subject matter.... Both are speaking of
   a cultural collision, collisions which
   fatally indicate personal disasters. (54)

By mixing up James and Forster, Baldwin exposes his internal experience of claiming or relinquishing literary influences. The error is itself a "cultural collision" of James, Forster, and Baldwin, who, interestingly, leaves the error, and a defensive correction of it, in his text. The slippages of Baldwin's erratum exemplify how he sorts out his relationships to literary figures who often offer "no honorable access to them[selves]" (Name 47). In one sense, by confusing these two predecessors, Baldwin diminishes them in some way. If he is, however, holding himself above these two novelists, he undercuts this sense of superiority in his conclusion to the footnote: "Be it also remembered that America was a British colony, that I was born in the English language, have a British name, and speak as the descendent of the slave of a subject." Baldwin assigns himself a place in the canon of Western letters, but one produced by a "special brand of relations between human beings which had been imposed by colonialism" (Nobody 16). This experience of himself as having been colonized by James and Forster, in turn, calls to mind the historical fact of slavery. By interrupting his narrative with this odd homage to James and Forster, Baldwin conveys his subordination to them, and betrays an anxiety of influence that characterizes his place, as he both perceived and constructed it, in American literature and culture as well as in the Western traditions that shaped them. But as other examples from Baldwin's personal writings suggest, his concerns about being contingent or derivative give rise to a number of psychological and literary innovations.

The autobiographical Notes of a Native Son, which Baldwin compiled in 1955 from writings of the late 1940s and early 50s, makes it clear that James and Forster were not the only predecessors who became part of Baldwin and the body of his work. Baldwin was already a fairly established novelist by the time he was invited to publish Notes, and the chapters devoted to "charting the course of the writer's relationship to the literary" reinforce a lesson gleaned from the personal history he will detail in the title chapter about his stepfather: "We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins, which contain the key--could we but find it--to all that we later become" (Marcus 17, Notes 27). Notes is Baldwin's search for his origins, and throughout his literary analyses, Baldwin represents himself as both a writer and a reader considering his influences and debts, his inspirations and obstacles. One cannot write, Baldwin believes, without first reading, so the genesis of an author must include the story of his experiences as a reader. The second sentence of "Autobiographical Notes" announces, "I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read" (3). One meaning of this claim is that Baldwin's origins contained his destiny: he was born to become a writer. But the statement also suggests that, for Baldwin, reading and writing are simultaneous; neither is prior, neither privileged. Moreover, Baldwin's identity as a writer is not easily distinguished from what he has read, and this interchangeability further blurs any boundaries between what as a writer he produced and what produced him.

Many first-person narratives focus on the autobiographer's genesis as an author, and Notes typifies how "autobiographical, authorial and literary spaces exist in complex interdependence with each other" when the autobiographer identifies himself as an author whose life story will demonstrate the development of his artistic self (Marcus 17). The first half of Notes of a Native Son surveys Hollywood, the Harlem Renaissance, and the American social protest novel, and includes literary discussions of Dickens, Stowe, Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, and his notorious critique of Richard Wright. As he portrays himself in Notes, Baldwin is a "son" in many senses of the word, and he uses these autobiographical reflections to organize multiple identifications, emulations, and differentiations. Notes thus functions as cultural commentary and as a personal record of Baldwin's wish to create a place for himself in the literary traditions of America and Europe--as well as a place within himself to hold and organize authors and texts. The "occasion," to use Albert Stone's term, for Notes of a Native Son is an exploration of one author's cultural inclusions and alienations. By placing the writer's life in the context of "shared cultural experiences of the past," Baldwin's narrative "creates a model of literate culture" and explores his concerns about who is open to whom and how openness can fill or deplete the writer's self and his art (Stone 4-5).

Notes begins with an allusion to one of Baldwin's American literary predecessors whom he simultaneously honors and displaces. The passage is not an explicit discussion of Baldwin's reading, but rather, a residue of it, and it exemplifies how Baldwin acts upon the sources of his literary identity without completely destroying them: "The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again" (3). Baldwin's use of the term "fantasy" signals to readers that the autobiographical narrative is a space of play and imagination. And it is within this space that Baldwin lays claim to a foundational narrative of American literature-the beginning of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, wherein Franklin relishes the prospect of reliving his life:

   ... were it offer'd to my choice, I
   should have no objection to a
   Repetition of the same Life from its
   Beginning, only asking the Advantage
   Authors have in a second Edition to
   correct some of the Faults of the first so
   would I if I might, besides correcting
   the Faults, change some sinister
   Accidents and Events of it for others
   more favorable, but tho' this were
   deny'd, I should still accept the offer.
   However, since such a Repetition is
   not to be expected, the next Thing
   most like living one's Life over again,
   seems to be a Recollection of that Life;
   and to make that Recollection as
   durable as possible, the putting it
   down in writing. (43-44)

Unlike Baldwin, Franklin is writing at the end of a long and successful life, so he can assume the position of the father who can share an authoritative version of history that will benefit his son. Secure in his position as patriarch, Franklin can make room for his son eventually to follow him in some appropriate manner. Thus, by addressing his son, Franklin makes all future readers, including Baldwin, his descendants. Baldwin then responds to this fatherly and literary invitation by embedding Franklin in the beginning of Notes. Baldwin has inherited Franklin's autobiography by reading it, by mastering it, as have generations of Franklin's readers. Baldwin's reference to Franklin's testimony to what Sidonie Smith calls "the self-determining individuality of desire and destiny" comments on that testimony, for Baldwin's use of Franklin's text transforms The Autobiography to suit the purposes of Notes (Smith 9). And if the structure of The Autobiography depends on readers' engagement, so too does this passage from Notes, since Baldwin's invocation of Franklin elicits the participation of the reader, who then brings Franklin's very different story to the one about to be told by Baldwin, a story that will provide a marked contrast to Franklin's "entry into the domain of the subject of democratic liberalism" (Smith 9). The contrast--both unspoken and explicit--between Franklin's self-declared patriarchal narrative and the self-conscious representation of Baldwin's early life reminds us that Baldwin is an American author as well as a black author. The tacit reference to Franklin may also serve a private psychological purpose for Baldwin, since it provides the writer a way to distance himself from the apparent agonies of recalling his childhood. He can recast his own hideous past as a rewriting of a classic American autobiography, which in turn can be read as an ironic commentary on the differences between white and black life-stories. The prospect of reliving his earlier years is rendered tolerable by framing it as a conventional American success narrative. Baldwin's use of Franklin as literary father thus offers an opportunity for an even more satisfying oedipal struggle than he will have with his own father, as we learn in the chapter of Notes devoted to their relationship.

In reading Baldwin's re-making of Franklin this way, I diverge from recent books such as David Eng's Racial Castration and Anne Cheng's The Melancholy of Race, which explore the psychological price paid when Asian and/or African Americans seek to participate in a "ruling episteme that privileges that which they can never be" (Cheng 7). Cheng is interested in the kind of "structural identity formation" that must negotiate differences of race, ethnicity, and gender in order to accommodate the "disparity between Enlightenment ideals and social practices" (7, 13). The illusory nature of an identification with someone whom one can never possess or become necessitates, in Cheng's analysis, "a substitution that is also a gravestone" (178). Baldwin's efforts to negotiate the boundaries--between self and other, father and son, reader and writer--often cross lines of race and gender difference. But if he seems to worry that "assimilation is purchased only through elaborate self-denial," or that certain literary connections might damage as much as they sustain, he also seems committed to creating alternatives to the splitting of self or depleting of art observed by Cheng or Eng (Eng 22). Baldwin's efforts to negotiate the boundaries--between self and other, father and son, reader and writer--often cross lines of race and gender difference. But if he worries that "assimilation is purchased only through elaborate self-denial," or that certain literary connections might damage as much as they sustain, he also seems committed to creating alternatives to the splitting of self or depleting of art observed by Cheng or Eng (Eng 22).

A refusal to be subject to another writer can be seen in Baldwin's discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe, which rejects the notion that it is Baldwin who gets lost, twisted, or deformed as he struggles to make his place in American letters. Stowe, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin Baldwin calls "the cornerstone of American social protest fiction," is the subject of "Everybody's Protest Novel," in which Baldwin rereads both Uncle Tom's Cabin and Native Son. He casts Stowe and Wright as mother and father of a dysfunctional family of literary predecessors. While Baldwin does seem disturbed or disrupted by his similarities to and differences from Stowe, in the end, his appraisal of her splits apart the literary foremother. Calling her not a true novelist but rather a "pamphleteer," Baldwin argues that Stowe wrote out of guilt, "a panic of being hurled into the flames, of being caught in traffic with the devil" (17). In her missionary zeal, he asserts, Stowe undercuts her effort "to bring greater freedom to the oppressed" by painting sentimentalized, unrealistic portraits of her black protagonists: "It is, indeed, considered the sign of a frivolity so intense as to approach decadence to suggest that these books are both badly written and wildly improbable. One is told to put first things first, the good of society coming before niceties of style or characterization" (Notes 18). Baldwin must establish himself in relation to both this major American author and her subject matter of blackness in America.

But because he sees his own struggles in Stowe's artistic conflicts, Baldwin's critique of Uncle Tom's Cabin is partly defensive, but ultimately productive. Understanding Stowe and her novel becomes a way of understanding himself as a particular kind of writer. Throughout Notes, he emphasizes that "literature and sociology are not one and the same thing" (19). As he recounts his earliest writing experiences in "Autobiographical Notes," he acknowledges that every writer sees the world as "nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent," but the black writer is particularly vulnerable to the pressure to represent his race and its political agendas (4). Baldwin rejects Stowe because he believes that "social affairs are not generally speaking the writer's prime concern"; however, Baldwin does not want to abandon the black race that Stowe claimed to wish to save. Having defined social protest fiction as bad art, Baldwin can affirm Stowe's political sentiments, but then is left without a model for good literature. If he privileges literature, will he abandon black Americans, and thus, perhaps, fall prey to underplaying social and historical forces in favor of aesthetic and psychological ideals? Baldwin's identification with Stowe in essence splits her into a good mother and a bad one, as it were: the former a laudable abolitionist; the latter a writer ineffectual because she let politics contaminate her art.

Baldwin's critique of this literary foremother becomes a compromise formation; the length of his analysis pays homage to her status within American literary history at the same time that his reservations about her artistic choices cut her down to size. Baldwin's considerations of Stowe's book, I am suggesting, exemplify the challenges of what might have felt like illicit, unpalatable affiliations, especially ones that crossed the lines of racial difference. The section on Stowe, like his referencing of James or Franklin, represents the subject and object of the identificatory process as a mutual transformation. Baldwin begins with an active, creative desire to belong, and concludes with an understanding that American ideals and traditions are permeable and malleable. Someone or something gets altered in the identificatory experience of assimilation, but the change does not diminish Baldwin or devalue his writing.

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom draws upon Freud's oedipal theories to argue that a writer's attitude toward his literary precursors is reminiscent of the father-son relationship. (2) However, as Byron Washington points out, "Bloomian theories of influence, for example, because they ignore race and class, are unhelpful" to considerations of "the enormous weight white experience and white texts bring to bear on black experience and black texts" (22, 8). But while scholars are right to question the universality of Bloom's model, Washington's critique is not borne out by Baldwin's own descriptions of the weightiness of his influences. Consider the burden of Richard Wright, whose 1940 novel Native Son leaves its trace in the title of Notes of a Native Son, and whose prominence as an American writer activated father-son rivalries in many of his disciples. Wright's novel was "the most powerful and celebrated statement we yet had of what it means to be a Negro in America" (Notes 30). Though Baldwin does not have to cross barriers of race or gender in order to identify with Wright, the two writers' very similarities seem to interfere with Baldwin's attempt to embrace this literary father. Baldwin is ambivalent about "Wright's intention to create in Bigger a social symbol, revelatory of social disease and prophetic of disaster." This intention, as Baldwin sees it, gives the novel its "significance," but also becomes its weakness. Wright, like Stowe, is guilty of a lack of psychological realism, which leaves white readers with no reason to question their projections, legends, and myths about black men. Thus, for Baldwin the "overwhelming limitation" of Native Son is its inability to depict neither Bigger's "relationship to himself, to his own life, to his own people, nor to any other people" (Notes 33-34).

Baldwin's biographer lists Wright as one of "three literary father-figures, two black, one white," whom Baldwin had "knocked ... off their pedestals" (Weatherby 142). On the day that the essay about Wright appeared in the Partisan Review, Baldwin met Wright at a restaurant, and during their conversation Wright accused Baldwin of betraying him. (3) A witness to a subsequent argument between Wright and Baldwin recalls Baldwin concluding that" 'the sons must slay their fathers'" (Weatherby 117). Baldwin's language describing their relationship suggests that he believed there was not, in the field of American letters, room for both Wright and Baldwin himself. According to Weatherby, Baldwin complained that Wright had written his story and hadn't left other American black writers anything to write about. Such accounts imply a rather rigid model of innovation or originality, with little room for influence, indebtedness, or heterogeneity. Whereas Baldwin found James or Forster merely hard to swallow, Wright's art seems to have threatened to annihilate Baldwin's, who must either destroy or be destroyed by Wright.

Baldwin met Wright, "my ally and my witness, and alas! my father," when he was 20, which he remembers as "a carnivorous age" (Nobody 190-191). In "Alas, Poor Richard," a series of essays written after Wright was dead, Baldwin conveys his anxieties about writerly dependency and destructive envy when he admits that a "writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody" (182). (4) In his discussions of Wright, Baldwin ironically constructs him as a kind of mother who threatens either to starve or to force-feed him. And in one explicit passage in the essay series, Wright figures as both mythological female monster and rival father: "... I had used his work as a kind of springboard into my own. His work was a roadblock in my road, the sphinx, really, whose riddles I had to answer before I could become myself" (197). In this allusion to the Greek myth, Baldwin as Oedipus casts Wright as his foe, the impassive, withholding sphinx who must be penetrated and outwitted. But Baldwin's comment also contains a reference to Laius, the father whom Oedipus unknowingly murdered when, as Oedipus tells it, "the old man himself wanted to thrust me/out of the road by force" (Sophocles 46). By using Wright as a "springboard," an image which implies both deference and dismissiveness, Baldwin leaps past him into a space cleared by a psychological and literary murder. (5) Wright's power over Baldwin is thus measured by Baldwin's efforts to denigrate him: Wright "had never really been a human being for me, he had been an idol. And idols are created in order to be destroyed" (Nobody 197).

Baldwin's statement of the relationship between Wright and Stowe in "Many Thousands Gone," the chapter in Notes devoted to Wright, illustrates the idolater's conflict between envy and reverence, and hints at the preoedipal nature of Baldwin's anxieties: "The contemporary novelist and the dead New England woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle; the one uttering merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses" (22). Here, it is not father or son contending, but rather, mother and father--caught in a "web of lust and fury"--with the son witnessing their mutual "longing making the heavier that cloud which blinds and suffocates them both" (22). In this image, all distinctions collapse between Stowe and Wright, female and male, mother and father, white and black. Bloom asks, "[W]hat is the Primal Scene, for a poet as poet? It is his Poetic Father's coitus with the Muse" (37). And I would argue that Baldwin's dramatization is evidence of the unconscious dimensions of separation and individuation processes when race, Baldwin's imagery suggests, acts upon the infant's immature self via the psyches of its parents, and has its most formative and invasive influence. The two novelists might be thought of as giving birth to Baldwin, but in this blur, Baldwin imagines "knives and burning; the thrust, the counterthrust," of cutting and castration.

But who is castrating whom? In this imagined battle, it's difficult to determine who wields the knife--Stowe, Wright, or Baldwin. It isn't clear if Baldwin cuts himself loose from the father or if the father is preparing to unman the envious, resentful son. (6) If this scene can be read as a metaphor for the field of American letters, then Baldwin imagines it as a war for ascendancy, certainly not a place of equitable influence, deference, and imitation. This review of Wright and Stowe exemplifies how intellectual and psychological influences converge in Baldwin's autobiographical writings. "When the books are placed together," Baldwin experiences a kaleidoscope of reflections, idealizations, internalizations, and renunciations that form his efforts to identify and disidentify himself as an American author. Whether he is absorbed in these novels as he was in childhood, or re-reading them as an adult, whether he is projecting himself onto their protagonists, or seeing himself in their authors, Baldwin is fighting virtually to the death.

Psychoanalysis was, for Baldwin, just another way that America enslaves its oppressed, though he was not immune to the Freudianisms of American literary culture of the 1940s. (7) In "Many Thousands Gone," for example, Baldwin once again makes use of the Oedipus myth so key to Freud's formulation of psychoanalytic theory. After a discussion of "what it means to be a Negro" in America, Baldwin concludes: "It is a sentimental error, therefore, to believe that the past is dead; it means nothing to say that all is forgotten, that the Negro himself has forgotten it. It is not a question of memory. Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him" (Notes 29).

What, one might ask, does this ancient tale have to do with the predicament of African Americans in 20th-century America? More importantly, what place does this foundational text of Western culture have for someone who viewed psychoanalysis as a tool of racism? On one level, Baldwin uses the play to explain the "sentimental error" every American is tempted to make in order to fit in or belong--ahistoricality or the wish to revise or repress a past that contains evidence of shame, trauma, or signs of unacceptable differences. The allusion to Oedipus thus introduces a theme that preoccupies much of Notes of a Native Son--the black man's racial history is "indivisible from himself forever," whether he remembers, represses, disavows, or distorts it (29). Just as Oedipus's scarred ankles are evidence of his bondage, just as even his name (Oedipus literally means swollen foot) conveys a part of his history that he does not recall, so the black man's "shameful history was carried, quite literally, on his brow" (29). (8) Baldwin's reference to the "thongs" suggests that he was a careful reader of the text, and that he was not referring to the play merely via Freud's references to it. The strips of leather used to bind Oedipus's feet subvert Jocasta's wish to bury the past, for the thongs are "witnesses" to her infanticidal plans to abandon him on a mountain slope to die, the "tendons" of his feet "pierced and fettered" (Sophocles 55). Substitute Oedipus's "thongs" for the chains of slavery, as I read in Baldwin's revision, and Oedipus Rex becomes racialized, that is, re-read as a narrative relevant to the "American Negro" whose "past was taken from him, almost literally, at one blow," and whose history begins with "the signature on the bill of sale" (Notes 169). If Baldwin's readers can play with the meanings of Sophocles's tragedy, as I believe his brief allusion invites us to do, we might discover that Baldwin sees himself in the tragic hero, and that he reads into Oedipus's dilemmas a version of the autobiographer's betrayal of ancestry--a betrayal that is unavoidable even if unintended. Baldwin's invoking of Sophocles signals the unconscious dimensions of his reflections on familial and literary progenitors, allows him to introduce themes of murder, castration, adoption, and usurpation, and sets the stage for the study of his father that occupies the center of the autobiography.

Byron Washington's analysis of Baldwin's literary influences describes the author as a "claimant" of Western culture (22); but Baldwin, when considering his own historical narratives, laments, "Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt ... were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in vain for any reflection of myself" (6-7). And yet, his casual but acute references to the Oedipal drama and myth, which make it a "springboard" for an analysis of race, exemplify how Baldwin constructs, when he cannot easily find, reflections and relevancies. Baldwin assimilates the tragedy on two levels: he identifies with Oedipus's conflicts, and he integrates Sophocles's play into his own autobiography. The Greek text central to the culture of psychoanalysis--with its white, European, upper-middle-class roots--is subordinated to Baldwin's first-person narrative. Baldwin's allusion to Oedipus Rex thus not only invokes the conflicts of the play, it re-enacts them. His fleeting focus on the "thongs" implies that he has bypassed Freud to lay claim to Sophocles, who then becomes a commentator on race in America. Rather than pay homage to Freud or Sophocles, however, Baldwin joins their ranks. In the process of internalizing these predecessors, he begins as a reader but becomes a writer. If Baldwin needs to displace Freud or Sophocles in order to make room for his own voice, the means by which he supplants their narratives with his own suggests a feeling of entitlement not evident in his images of illegitimacy and exclusion. The very brevity of the reference, the fact that Baldwin feels no need to explain or elaborate upon the play, points to his assumption that he and his readers are part of an intellectual community of shared cultural and literary referents.

By invoking Sophocles, as he did Franklin and Stowe, Baldwin is engaged in a revisionary project that claims the right to such classic Western texts as Oedipus Rex. Re-reading these texts through the lens of race colonizes them. Instead of being alienated from or excluded by these writers, Baldwin is detached from them, a distance that allows him to draw upon his predecessors without submitting himself to them: they are his to use, to quote, to paraphrase, to twist or temper, to revise and refresh. In his analysis of the black American autobiography, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. uses images of insertion to trope how these authors write their selves "into existence among the authors and texts of the Western tradition" by "placing their individual and collective 'voices,' as it were, in the text of Western letters" (63). Gates's language suggests that black writers bring something to--or into--these traditions, which are then altered or widened to include new voices or perspectives. The result is not the transformation of someone like Baldwin, whose personal identity and artistic integrity survive the connections he inserts, but rather Baldwin's insistent revisions of narratives of American literature open and stretch those seminal texts.

Metaphors of insertion, however, as Eldridge Cleaver's famous critique of Baldwin reveals, retain oppositions between inside and outside and the privileges of inclusion and exclusion they imply, and in his 1968 autobiographical Soul on Ice, Cleaver indicts Baldwin's relationship to Western culture with homophobic images of penetration and openness. He laments the "systematic emasculation of Negro leadership" and the type of "intellectual sycophant" who "hates what he is and seeks to redefine himself in the image of his white idols" (87, 103). According to Cleaver, Baldwin's "ethnic self-hatred" and "racial death wish" makes him one of those "black intellectuals who have become their own opposites, taking on all of the behavior patterns of their enemy...." As Cleaver reads him, Baldwin "becomes a white man in a black body," a black man who has been both literally and literarily castrated by male white idols (101, 103). When whiteness is the object of all desires, Cleaver contends, then the black homosexual will covet all of Western culture, since a racial death wish defines one's sexual and literary tastes. Baldwin's "nose," Cleaver continues, "is forever pointed toward his adopted homeland Europe, his by intellectual osmosis, and in Africa's stead" (105). Any identifications with the writers Baldwin draws upon in Notes is, for Cleaver, a symptom of "self-effacing love for his oppressors," which takes the form of "bending over and touching their toes for the white man, [and] the fruit of their miscegenation is not the little half-white offspring of their dreams but an increase in the unwinding of their nerves--though they redouble their efforts and intake of the white man's sperm" (106, 102).

During his travels throughout the South (reconstructed in No Name in the Street), Baldwin meets "an elderly black man, standing in front of his barber shop" in a posture signifying the price one pays to assimilate. The old man, Baldwin observes, "had been bowing so long ... that his head would never be straight on his neck again" (65). But because Baldwin is able to distinguish social humiliation from literary sycophancy, he can claim that black men "have no reason to bow down before Shakespeare, or Descartes, or Westminster Abbey, or the cathedral at Chartres" (No Name 47). His perspective on the postures that the white world requires of black men is complicated by his memory of "being groped by one of the most powerful men in one of the states I visited.... With his wet eyes staring up at my face, and his wet hands groping for my cock, we were both, abruptly, in history's ass-pocket" (No Name 61). From this experience, Baldwin concludes, "one had to be friendly; but the price for this was your cock" (62). Thus, Baldwin demonstrates his writerly understanding of something Cleaver does not comprehend--that intercourse with others does not always signify castration by them. Social humiliation, in other words, is not synonymous with literary allegiance.

As evidence that the white man "castrated him in the center of his skull," Cleaver points to the essays Baldwin devotes to Wright in Nobody Knows My Name (103). Baldwin's criticisms of the older novelist are nothing more, Cleaver claims, than a projection of Baldwin's self-hatred. In one of the essays that Cleaver lambastes, Baldwin considers the "violence" of Wright's writings, and suggests that its "root is rage. It is the rage, almost literally the howl, of a man who is being castrated" (188). This reference to castration is one of several in Nobody, which Baldwin employs as a metaphor for being black, that is, unmanned, in America. In another allusion to Oedipus Rex, Baldwin states that the "past of a Negro is blood dripping down through leaves, gouged-out eyeballs, the sex torn from its socket and severed with a knife" (213). (9) And as his plane touches down in Georgia, his "mind was filled with the image of a black man.. hanging from a tree, while white men watched him and cut his sex from him with a knife. My father must have seen such sights ..." (100).

The phantasm of the castrated black man is the father's legacy to Baldwin, who transforms it into a metaphor about race and art. But in this succession of literary fathers and sons, who, readers might wonder, is castrating whom? That Cleaver might be doing to Baldwin what Baldwin theoretically did to Wright may seem obvious to anyone but Cleaver. After Wright's death, Baldwin says that "the debt I owe him now can never be discharged" (Nobody 190). Similarly, Cleaver says of Baldwin, "I, like the entire nation, owe a great debt to" him. Cleaver, who "lusted for anything that Baldwin had written," conveys his own anxieties about whose art engenders whose in turn when he fantasizes that he would like to "sit on a pillow beneath the womb of Baldwin's typewriter and catch each newborn page as it entered this world of ours" (97). But as midwife to Baldwin's art, Cleaver qualifies his predecessor's influence by complaining that "his work is the fruit of a tree with a poison root. Such succulent fruit, such a painful tree, what a malignant root!" (104). Cleaver's mixed metaphors suggest that he is struggling with the kind of difficulty of swallowing something unsavory but essential that Baldwin saw in the experience of the man who ate his wife's afterbirth when she bore his son. "After all," Cleaver reminds us, "it is the baby we want and not the blood of afterbirth" (98).

Notes

(1.) When Baldwin refers to "the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted," he offers another metaphor for his anxieties about inclusion and intrusion (Notes 164-65). Baldwin is the bud inserted into the larger tree, where he continues to grow as a part of the parent tree. He is living tissue transplanted from one body to another within which he might grow and heal, or be rejected as foreign matter. But is Baldwin the gardener or surgeon joining new growth to old, adding his new add tons to the great tree of western culture? Who, in other words, is the agent of the grafting?

(2.) The story of poetic influence, Bloom suggests, is a "battle between strong equals, father and son as mighty opposites, Laius and Oedipus at the cross-roads.... Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves. But nothing is got for nothing, and self-appropriation involves the immense anxieties of indebtedness, for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself?." (11, 57).

(3.) "'What do you mean protest!' Wright said. 'All literature is protest.' "When Baldwin replied that all protest wasn't literature, Wright retorted, "'Oh here you come again with all that art-for-arts-sake crap'" (Weatherby 85). Weatherby adds, "Some of Wright's admirers were so incensed that they suggested Baldwin must have a homosexual hang-up over Wright" (87). Indeed, many of Baldwin's struggles with male authors have been attributed to his attraction to them, a theory that puts the rival son back in his place by castrating him. According to most accounts, Baldwin was ambivalent about Wright, admiring, even idealizing him (particularly his resilience to Baldwin's attacks on him), dependent upon him for approval and for mentoring, while at the same time experiencing a genuine disdain for the older author.

(4.) In "A Study of Envy and Gratitude," Melanie Klein explains: "Greed is an impetuous and insatiable craving, exceeding what the subject needs, and what the object can and wishes to give. At the unconscious level, greed aims primarily at completely scooping out, sucking dry, and devouring the breast ..." (213).

(5.) See Dudley's discussion of the way these writers "seek to knock down pre-existing structures in order to clear space for themselves" (2).

(6.) See the first few pages of No Name in the Street for Baldwin's memories of familial fights involving himself, his mother, and his stepfather.

(7.) Mental illness, in turn, becomes a form of social rebellion, the cure for which is conformity: "Anyone who thought seriously that I had any desire to be 'adjusted' to this society had to be ill," he informed Weatherby (65).

(8.) Oedipus Rex opens with the city of Thebes "reeling like a wreck" with "blight," "pestilence," and "black death"; this "pollution" will be eliminated only when the murderer of King Laius is identified and exiled. Oedipus soon discovers the advantages and disadvantages of historical ignorance, since the criminal he seeks turns out to be himself. By the end of the play, which consists of a painstaking piecing together of lost fragments of Oedipus's past, he learns that he was left to die, rescued by a shepherd, and adopted by Polybus and Merope, only to leave these parents when he learns of the oracle. While fleeing Polybus and Merope and the oracle he believes will destroy them, Oedipus kills King Laius, marries the now widowed queen, and takes over the throne of Thebes.

(9.) Upon learning of Jocasta's death, Oedipus "tore the brooches ... and lifting them up high/dashed them on his eyeballs, shrieking out/such things as: they shall never see the crime/I have committed or had done to me!" (66).

Works Cited

Baker, Jr., Houston. "The Embattled Craftsmen: An Essay on James Baldwin." Standley, Fred. L. and Nancy V. Burt, eds. Critical Essays on James Baldwin. Boston: Hall, 1988. 62-77.

Baldwin, James. Nobody Knows My Name. 1961. New York: Vintage, 1993.

--. No Name in the Street. 1972. New York: Laurel, 1972.

--. Notes of a Native Son. 1955. Boston: Beacon, 1984.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. London: Oxford UP, 1973.

Cheng, Anne. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. London: Oxford UP, 2000.

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

Dudley, David L. My Father's Shadow: Intergenerational Conflict in African American Men's Autobiography. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991.

Eng, David. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.

Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography. 1973. New Haven: Yale UP, 1964.

Gates, Jr., Henry. "James Gronniosaw and the Trope of the Talking Back Book." Studies in Autobiography. Ed. James Olney. London: Oxford UP, 1988.

Klein, Melanie. "A Study of Envy and Gratitude." The Selected Melanie Klein. Ed. Juliet Mitchell. New York: Free P, 1986.

Leeming, David. Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Holt, 1994.

--. "An Interview with James Baldwin on Henry James." The Henry James Review 7.1 (Fall 1986): 47-56.

Marcus, Laura. "Theories of Autobiographies." The Uses of Autobiography. Ed. Julia Swindells. London: Taylor & Francis, 1995. 13-23.

Smith, Sidonie. Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women's Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.

Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. Trans. David Grene. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.

Stone, Albert. Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1982.

Washington, Byron. The Politics of Exile: Ideology in Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Baldwin. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1995.

Weatherby, W. J. James Baldwin: Artist on Fire. New York: Laurel, 1989.

Elise Miller, PhD, is working on a psychoanalytic study of American autobiography. She teaches at Saint Mary's College and in the American Cultures Program of the University of California-Berkeley.