Another Country
Immensely complex because of its size and scope, Another Country is James Baldwin's most ambitious novel. This novel of ideas covers myriad issues and themes, all related to the transcending power of love. Through interlocking events and episodes, Another Country critiques a “moral” and “democratic” America that fosters prejudice based on race, class, and sexuality. The author began writing it in the mid-1950s, completing it in Istanbul; Dial Press published the novel in 1962, and it became a best-seller.
Baldwin creates characters of various racial, sexual, and social backgrounds to illustrate how personal, cultural, and national identities intersect. We first encounter Rufus Scott, a black jazz musician and one of the novel's many artists. He mentally and physically abuses his lover Leona, a white Southerner who goes insane. Psychically and physically debilitated by a virulent self-hatred, Rufus portends America's fate if it continues to prevent people from connecting irrespective of differences. Baldwin uses Rufus's suicide as an ironic narrative device, for he permeates the novel and illuminates the characters’ wrenching attempts to come together. The phrase Rufus hears in a wailing saxophone, “Do you love me,” reverberates throughout the text.
The rest of the book concerns Ida, Rufus's sister and an aspiring singer; Vivaldo, Ida's lover, Rufus's best friend, and an aspiring novelist; Eric, a white actor from the South and Rufus's erstwhile lover who has fled to France; Yves, Eric's current lover; and Cass Silenski and her novelist husband Richard, both Vivaldo's friends. Purposely resisting a discernible plot, Baldwin's postmodernist text traverses spatial, temporal, and personal boundaries: the transatlantic setting includes Greenwich Village, Harlem, Alabama, and France; time vacillates between past and present; and characters who would be labeled straight or gay, black or white, male or female, rich or poor all commingle, albeit painfully. Redemption occurs only when one exorcises his or her demons, often rooted in the aforementioned oppositions. Baldwin's characters must divest themselves of “safe” distinctions—for instance, Vivaldo must atone for failing Rufus through a sexual union with Eric, the novel's unifying figure. Especially cogent is how Baldwin resists facile categories of “good” and “bad” characters: blacks and whites can alternatively be victims and victimizers. Apropos of his religious background, Baldwin posits that only through pain, suffering, and acceptance can one enter another country—a metaphoric utopia that eliminates artificial, socially constructed distinctions. The novel ends with Ida-Vivaldo and Eric-Yves tentatively reconciling.
Another Country remains both manifesto and cultural history, a document of the turbulent 1960s. The novel created controversy both critically and popularly: Robert Bone called it “a failure on the grand scale,” while citizens complained to J. Edgar Hoover about its “pornographic” content, which resulted in an FBI inquiry. But other critics such as Langston Hughes recognized the novel's “power,” the basis of which Baldwin himself elucidates:“… Another Country was harder and more challenging than anything I’d ever attempted, and I didn’t cheat in it” (Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, eds., Conversations with James Baldwin, 1989). Indeed, Baldwin's multicultural epic disrupts and challenges American racial and sexual discourse. As its continuing popularity attests, Another Country assiduously explores the conundrum of the self and its potential for love.
Bibliography
- Robert A. Bone, The Negro Novel in America, 1965.
- Louis H. Pratt, James Baldwin, 1978
Keith Clark
