by, Matt Berrian
Within most narratives based upon the nineteenth century novel structure, the “hero” or protagonist will almost certainly encounter a vision that embodies their most horrible nightmares. The sort of nightmarish specter that they encounter depends upon the generic conventions that the text is operating within — it may be a magical vision, it may be a ghost, it may be a hallucination, or it may be a very real thing that is constructed by the narrator to be monstrous. Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin, pits the protagonist, David, up against a host of his own personal nightmares — Jacques is the lonely queen with a perpetually stunted love life, Guillaume is the manipulator bred from neglect and degeneracy, and David’s father is the hollow shell of a man that David may become himself. But these dark projections pale in comparison to the almost-literal monster that David encounters the night he meets Giovanni.
Moments such as these are revealed through reading in the synthetic register, which is to read in a way that draws attention to the artificial dimension of a text. Metaphor, irony, anaphoric sentences, climax, and parenthesis are all examples of elements within a text that signal the deliberate construction carried out by the text’s author. Examining these elements are an integral part of Gallop’s “close reading” method — closely reading means to scrutinize “prominent” moments within the text that “call attention to themselves” (Gallop 8).
The encounter that David has with the monstrous-looking stranger is something that stands out within the flow of the narrative — a surprising detail that Gallop’s method implores us as readers to reflect on before we trudge through the rest of the book. From page 38, to halfway through page 39, David spends an overly-large paragraph’s worth of text to convey the horrific appearance of this stranger who approaches him. This stranger comes from “out of the shadows” looking like a “mummy or zombie”, and walking like “someone who might be sleepwalking” (Baldwin 38-39). The horror-tinged language does not stop here: the stranger’s hips move with “horrifying lasciviousness”, the face is “thoroughly bloodless with some kind of foundation cream”, and the stranger’s shirt “stormed in the light and made one feel the mummy might … disappear in flame” (39). Throughout the entire description, the stranger is also only referred to as an “it”. Until David can see that “He” is wearing buckles on “his” shoes (39).
There are so many layers to unpack within this encounter alone, and how it operates both within and without the surrounding narrative. But for now, I only want to call attention to David’s word-choice and how this helps to reveal the synthetic nature of the text. In tandem with Gallop’s close reading method, Kaja Silverman’s work on defining the operation of semic codes within a text can illuminate the significance of David’s language. The semic code “operates by grouping a number of signifiers around either a proper name” or a signifier which can temporarily function “as if it were a proper name” (Silverman 251). Here, David is thematizing this stranger as grotesque, vile, and threatening through the signifiers that he applies to the man. He compares the nameless stranger to monsters, both directly (“mummy”, “zombie”) or by using signifiers that connote monsters (“it”, a “bloodless” face, “out of the shadows”). The lengths to which David constructs this man as a monster can signal something to the reader — Baldwin is choosing David’s use of language in a way to deliberately characterize this (probably) ordinary man as an antithesis to David’s ideal image of himself.
Utilizing negatively-charged signifiers not only thematizes the stranger as a creature from a horror film, but it also creates a symbolic field that communicates what controlling values the narrative is dominated by. For everything that the stranger is, the text is implying that David is not. A man who wears make-up, with a feminine saunter, in flamboyant clothing, is constructed as monstrous because these behaviors betray the heteronormative definition of masculinity within the culture that David seeks acceptance into. For David, the stranger is a Frankenstein’s Creature of gender performance — the outward femininity is blended with traditionally masculine traits in a way that angers and frightens David, whose identity relies on the strict separation of male and female archetypes. He notes (with “an unbelieving shock”) that the stranger’s hands are “very large and strong”, signifying that, in an escalation of horror, it is impossible to view the stranger as wholly feminine or wholly masculine (39).
This stranger is set-up almost perfectly within the narrative to represent everything that David finds most horrible in the world that he lives in. For a work that operates within the confines of realistic fiction, this novel’s dalliance in horror imagery allows readers to clearly see Baldwin’s handiwork as an artist crafting a narrative. The signifiers used to thematize a feminine man as monstrous are beholden to a larger cultural code that Baldwin’s narrator is also beholden to. These signifiers being overtly negative contributes to a broader understanding of the cultural code as existing in opposition to the signifiers. A feminine man is a freak because of his non-binary gender performance, therefore non-binary gender performance is freakish. If non-binary gender performance is freakish, then binary-obeying gender performance is acceptable and good. As David is the vehicle through which these values are conveyed, it can be assumed that David is loyal to the cultural code which glorifies a strict male/female separation of gender performance. This is one of many ways in which Baldwin can communicate the values that operate within his text, without literally having his narrator speak the words: “Men should act like men. Women should act like women. I hate queer people!”
All You Read is Love 