Oana COGEANU Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi JAMES BALDWIN’S STRANGER IN THE VILLAGE: AN ESSAY IN BLACK AND WHITE Abstract: Rereading James Baldwin’s famous essay “Stranger in the Village”, this paper highlights for the first time Baldwin’s dialectic representation of black-white relations as initiated in Europe and perfected in America. Starting from the observation that Baldwin comes to understand during his Swiss sojourn that the roots of his identity are to be found not in Africa, but in Europe, the paper offers a textual and cultural close reading of a text in which past confronts present and Africa confronts Europe in an American individual experience of cosmic dimension. Key words: James Baldwin, Stranger in the Village, African-American, black, white, dialectic James Baldwin seminal essay “Stranger in the Village” is one of the earliest and most discussed pieces that the African-American author wrote in and of Europe. The text was first published in Baldwin’s debut volume Notes of a Native Son (1955) and makes up, together with three other essays, Part III thereof. Just like critics assent to James Baldwin’s high stature as an essayist, so they agree on the centrality of this particular essay within his entire work. The collective appraisal has its downside, resulting in a general neglect of the other essays of comparable substantial and formal achievement in Part III, namely “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown”, “A Question of Identity”, and “Equal in Paris”, but it remains justified for at least two reasons. Firstly, in negotiating identity between personal experience and impersonal truth, “Stranger in the Village” strikes the balanced blend of excess and restraint that produces, as Harold Bloom observed, the rhetorical power of Baldwin’s writing.1 As we shall see, restraint is judiciously assigned in Baldwin to the report of personal experience, while excess is allotted to the production of impersonal truth. Secondly, “Stranger in the Village” contains in nuce the formal and substantial variations of the ten texts in Baldwin’s first volume. That is because the essay deals with a travel experience that not only initiated the writing career of James Baldwin, who finished his first novel, significantly entitled Go Tell it On the Mountain, in the Swiss Alps, but also acquired a revelatory dimension in the writer’s attempt to claim his place in the West.2 As one scholar believes, Baldwin’s physical journey provides the precondition for an ultimate liberation, for penetrating the colorline on a metaphysical level.3 Nevertheless, as we shall see below, in “Stranger in the Village” the color line is never penetrated; it is resignified as a color bond. For a travel essay, “Stranger in the Village” contains little geographical progress; it abounds, however, in mental journeying. Save for the introductory part, few details in the text remind of the conventions of travel and travel writing. The writer does not even dramatize the motives and context of his Swiss journey; nevertheless, the curious reader could look into Baldwin’s biography for the missing facts. In the summer of 1951, Baldwin almost suffered a breakdown and his partner, Lucien Happersberger, took him to Leukerbad, an established Swiss health-resort in the Valais Alps. Significantly, the name of the place does not appear in the essay, nor does the person who took Baldwin there; the protagonist, who is dwelling at “a friend’s” house and walks the town’s streets alone, only 1 Harold Bloom, «Introduction», in Harold Bloom (ed.), James Baldwin, Chelsea House Publishers, New York, 1986, p. 4. 2 Isabel Urban, «James Baldwin in Switzerland: “Stranger in the Village”», in Waldemar Zacharasiewcz (ed.), Images of Central Europe in Travelogues and Fiction by North American Writers, Stauffenburg Verlag, Tübingen, 1995, p. 245. 3 Ibidem declares himself struck by the remoteness of the mountain village. The text assigns the relatively scarce description of the setting to the introduction only and devotes its body to an essayistic scrutiny of coordinates of being other than place. That is because, in spite of its narrative framework, “Stranger in the Village” remains an essay and hence belongs to the mode of argumentation. Even so, the travelogic introduction does provide a sense of spatial causality: thoughts and revelations are triggered by the author’s precise location. Indeed, the features of the Swiss village as described by Baldwin seem to support such a displacement by projecting an atemporal, aspatial site whose only marked feature is its referential whiteness. If one considers the language Baldwin uses to describe the Central European mountain setting and the effect of his stay there, one realizes that the Switzerland represented by Baldwin is not the usual Switzerland of the tourist; while Baldwin cannot be ignorant of Leukerbad’s renown as a tourist resort, the essay focuses on the remoteness and primitiveness of the environment. The writer does not derive his inspiration from the scenic appeal of the Swiss Alps, but seems to regard them as some kind of social and even geographical void, which eventually enables him to finally look at those aspects of his experience of which he is trying to evade through his flight to Europe. The village provides the necessary remoteness to establish distance and, therefore, room for gaze. It becomes clear at this point, as I. Urban highlights4, that the protagonist does not perceive the Swiss experience within a touristic framework of a recreational stay in an alpine village, but construes his ascension of a metaphorical mountain in Central Europe as a journey back in time and history. Baldwin himself comments elsewhere upon the significance of his Swiss displacement: “There, in that absolutely alabaster landscape, armed with two Bessie Smith records and a typewriter, I began to try to recreate the life that I had first known as a child and from which I had spent so many years in flight.”5 It is only from a distance that the writer can come nearer to himself. Thus, it seems that the deletion into whiteness of the familiar features of the environment provides a remoteness that permits access to two projections of the self: the child and its correlative innocence – and the innocence of childhood is a favourite locus of Baldwin’s writing –, and the devil and its correlative sinfulness. The two projections reflect a two-stepped anamnesis of the self, by means of an emergence into personal – historical and collective – mythical beginnings. Whereas the other essays in Part III of Notes of a Native Son are written from the objectivizing perspective of a deus otiosus, a sociologist and moralist looking at racial and national categories and interactions, there is something more troublesome and alluring in James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” and that is probably the auctorial presence. The implicit author of “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown” or “A Question of Identity” was undramatized, impersonal, colorless, and this apparent self-effacement is part of an auctorial strategy of passing personal opinion as universal truth. However, following the brief experience of narrative embodiment in “Equal in Paris”, “Stranger in the Village” reaches a balance between argumentation and the epic, which is also a balance in re-presenting the persona who is the source of logos. Blackness is here claimed back – and it is, indeed, remarkable how many times in the text the signifier “black” is not only invoked but also assumed in the essay, from the first until the last line. Phrasing the argument in his own name, Baldwin provides indeed in “Stranger in the Village”, as one scholar remarked, one of the most intense and meaningful representations of the white-black dilemma in American literature.6 The meaningfulness of this representation, one should add, is not necessarily related to its truth value, but to its sheer expressive power. Baldwin only needs the first person singular to substantiate himself in the essay, but that is a scarce pronoun in the rest of his argumentative Notes. However, in his employment of the first person, Baldwin manages to make a controversy of his 4 Ibidem James Baldwin, «The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American», in James Baldwin, Collected Essays, Literary Classics of the United States, New York, 1998, p. 155. 6 Nick Aaron Ford, «The Evolution of James Baldwin as an Essayist», in Therman B. O’Daniel (ed.), James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation, Howard University Press, Washington, DC, 1977, p. 86. 5 allegiances, suggesting a modal and psychological schizoidism: when the first person singular is used, usually in the narrative parts of the essay, it refers to the black, individual Baldwin; when the first person plural is invoked, mostly in the argumentative sections, it refers to the white American society. Color is thus indirectly made an issue of the split mind and style, being offered as the signifying difference between ‘I’ and ‘we’. In this unlikely, Swiss context Baldwin places the discussion of African-American historical identity; it seems that the “Native Son” has chosen paradoxical surroundings in order to discuss a paradoxical situation. “From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came”7, begins the travel essay. To the post-colonial mind, this sentence cannot fail to evoke, in reverse, the image of the first white man to set foot in Africa. Warned of his novelty to the village people, Baldwin’s persona takes it to mean plainly that “people of my complexion” were rarely seen in Switzerland and that city dwellers are a rare sight outside the city. He further admits: “It did not occur to me – possibly because I am an American – that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a Negro.”8 Thus, in the incipit Baldwin inscribes himself as a Negro, an American, and the unseenbefore object of the Swiss’ gaze. The explanation in the last sentence suggests that the presence of the Negro in the life of the American is so prevalent that it stops being noticed as such; this makes it impossible for the narrating persona (who is both an American and a Negro) to imagine a world virgin of blackness. To him, the idea of the absence of the black man cannot even be supported by the inaccessibility of the village: “The village is very high, but it is only four hours from Milan and three hours from Lausanne”, although “It is true that it is virtually unknown. Few people making plans for a holiday would elect to come here.”9 The potential mobility of the Central European villagers is contradicted by the description of the village as a place unacquainted not only with the black, but also with the products of civilization, orderly enlisted: “In the village there is no movie house, no bank, no library, no theatre; very few radios, one jeep, one station wagon; and at the moment, one typewriter, mine, an invention which the woman next door to me here had never seen.”10 The leitmotific equipment of the travel-writer elicits as much surprise in the contemporary Swiss village as it might have produced, in white hands, during the very first racial encounter. “There are about six hundred people living here, all Catholic”, the text continues11 – the observation is of consequence, though not immediately. Since Baldwin visits the place in winter, the four or five hotels are closed, and only two of the bistros do some, limited, business. With a tourist’s gaze, Baldwin inspects and enumerates the minimal stores, notes in dissatisfaction an exchange office that cannot change his travelers’ checks, is surprised at the sight of a Ballet Haus “closed in the winter and used for God knows what, certainly not ballet, during the summer”12, and registers the existence of only one schoolhouse in the village. The tourist’s gaze only subsequently moves to the landscape, which is “absolutely forbidding, mountains towering on all four sides, ice and snow as far as the eye can reach.”13 The sight of the Swiss Alps fills the protagonist not so much with the tourist’s awe but with a chill. “In this white wilderness, men and women and children move all day”14 carrying out various household activities. Baldwin defines the sight as an alliterative “white wilderness” and the definition, although supported by the seasonal remoteness of the village, reveals itself as highly subjective: the wilderness is a place lacking geographical coordinates and population, which is not the case here, and whiteness signifies much more than its metonymic winter. “The village’s only real attraction, which explains the tourist season, is the hot 7 James Baldwin, «Stranger in the Village», in Notes of a Native Son, The Dial Press, New York, 1963, p. 143. Ibidem 9 Ibidem 10 Ibidem 11 Ibidem 12 Ibidem, p. 144. 13 Ibidem 14 Ibidem 8 spring water”15, Baldwin notes, yet finds no tourist satisfaction in it, because “a disquietingly high proportion of these tourists are cripples”16, which lends the village, together with its primeval appearance and overt Catholicism, “a rather terrifying air of sanctity, as though it were a lesser Lourdes.”17 In this place of wishful miracles people remain people, as Baldwin accounts synthetically: “wherever I passed, the first summer I was here, among the native villagers or among the lame, a wind passed with me – of astonishment, curiosity, amusement and outrage.”18 There follows a brief explanation which is useful for narratological purposes: Baldwin had visited the place in summer, returned in winter to write there because of the lack of distractions, and the time of narration finds him there a year later, in winter again. Over the recurrent visits, the villagers have grown accustomed to the sight: they know his name, his American origin, and his lodging friend. Nevertheless, “I remain as much a stranger today as I was the first day I arrived, and the children shout Neger! Neger! as I walk along the streets.”19 In spite of the layered duration of the events, the notational narrative reports them in a conflated timeline: in the beginning “I was far too shocked to have any real reaction”20 is the shock of the American Negro at the shock of his on-lookers, which renders him increasingly self-aware; the second reaction is to resort to the familiar strategy of being pleasant, “it being a great part of the American Negro’s education (long before he goes to school) that he must make people like him”21; as this smile-and-the world-smiles-with-you strategy proves as dysfunctional as in the situations for which it was initially designed, it leaves room for a realization: “All of the physical characteristics of the Negro which had caused me, in America, a very different and almost forgotten pain were nothing less than miraculous – or infernal – in the eyes of the village people.”22 The same blackness that made Baldwin in America the object of a discriminating social discourse makes him now the object of the different, but equally powerful, discriminating religious discourse: the American difference between human and subhuman is here recast in the difference between human and non-human, be it miraculous or infernal. None of the two inscriptions is more satisfying for the selfassertive subjectivity, and Baldwin, whose hair and skin are being touched in wonder of their strange materiality, only concedes to the villagers’ lack of harmful intent: “In all of this, in which it must be conceded there was the charm of genuine wonder and in which there were certainly no element of intentional unkindness, there was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder.”23 The living wonder needs to periodically reinforce this concession to himself, since being perceived as non-human, albeit in good humor, bears no essential difference from being considered subhuman. While the protagonist realizes that the children in the streets calling him Nigger “are brimming with good humor and the more daring swell with pride when I stop to speak with them”24, the name echoes directly the offensive practices he experienced as a child back home. In fact, what the protagonist experiences in the white wilderness is racism in its original, crudest form25, racism as an essentially human strategy of hierarchical identification. The attitude of the villagers towards “der Neger” lacks the sociological ramifications manifest in the United States, where the relationship attained a considerable social complexity because of the reality of cohabitation. The tragic irony of the situation elicits for the protagonist a polemical intertextual consideration on history: “Joyce is right about history being a 15 Ibidem Ibidem 17 Ibidem 18 Ibidem, p. 145. 19 Ibidem 20 Ibidem 21 Ibidem 22 Ibidem 23 Ibidem, p. 146. 24 Ibidem 25 Isabel Urban, op. cit., p. 245. 16 nightmare – but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”26 The text returns quickly from the bird’s-eye view commentary to the description of a custom in the village that shall prove significant to the evolution of the essayistic argument. It is worth noting at this point that in “Stranger in the Village” the argument is constructed neither linearly nor concentrically, but through a careful presentation of apparently disparate sights and ideas that will be heaped together at the right time. “There is a custom in the village – I am told it is repeated in many villages – of buying African natives for the purpose of converting them to Christianity,”27 the text continues. The custom, which not only renders the setting archaic, but also reveals the source of the villagers’ racialist attitude, is described in a mixture of Christian and pagan details, combining the donations box in the church with children wearing carnival masks: “During the carnival which precedes Lent, two village children have their faces blackened – out of which bloodless darkness their blue eyes shine like ice – and fantastic horsehair wigs are placed on their blond heads; thus disguised, they solicit among the villagers for money for the missionaries in Africa.”28 One need not be a historian of religions to realize the contradictory overlap between, on the one hand, the pagan ritual of the carnival, which permits a temporally confined disregard of the categories of order to serve as society’s way to let off its most repressed fears and desires, and, on the other hand, the implicitly suppressive Christian mission of conversion; this overlap is made possible by a white re-presentation of the black as a sign (a mask) of unruly forces. The blackened white children thus signify the double mental process through which the black is equated with the expression of the subconscious, which is to be salvaged and converted to the light. To Baldwin, this custom may seem ludicrously or picturesquely primitive, depending on his moralizing or ethnographic disposition, and the protagonist fakes an expression of “astonishment and pleasure”29 at hearing of it. But beyond arousing the tourist’s polite condescension, the custom serves to place into abyss the mercantile ironies of economic acquisition and religious conversion, so familiar to African-American history – which the protagonist contemplates both in general: “I tried not to think of these so lately baptized kinsmen, of the price paid for them, or the peculiar price they themselves would pay”30 and in his own particular history: “and said nothing about my father, who having taken his own conversion too literally never, at bottom, forgave the white world (which he described as heathen) for having saddled him with a Christ in whom, to judge at least from their treatment of him, they themselves no longer believed.”31 This practice is directly reminiscent of the time when African natives were bought for the purpose of slavery, hence the author contemplates, in a short-circuiting of historical time, the apprehension of the first white-black encounter in Africa compared to that in the Swiss village: the perfectly wrought parallelism, suggested from the essay’s incipit, makes evident to Baldwin the “great difference” between being the first white man to be seen by Africans and being the first black man to be seen by whites. The personal note of his anthropological insight makes it the more remarkable: “The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be questioned”, Baldwin bitterly observes, “whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence.”32 The initial reaction of astonishment at the sight of difference is the same, yet it is contextualized differently: the white man takes astonishment as tribute, irrespective of the possible denotations of his whiteness to the perceiving eye, for he never considers himself as the potential object of the African discourse of whiteness and unquestionably imposes his own narrative of superiority; thus 26 James Baldwin, «Stranger in the Village», p. 146. Ibidem 28 Ibidem, pp. 146-7. 29 Ibidem, p. 147. 30 Ibidem 31 Ibidem 32 Ibidem 27 the perception of whiteness in Africa does not belong to the African but is the self-perception of the conquering European, and the confidence of that imposition becomes contagious to the African. In the converse case, Baldwin commits a similar act of imposing on the perceiving eye a selfreading, and since he himself is situated within the Westcentric discourse, the self-reading is that of deprecatory blackness consequent to the initial, African encounter. In other words, he sees himself looked upon in present Switzerland as he was looked upon in past Africa. Consequently, it seems that in a racial encounter, when one looks in the eyes of the other, what one sees is only one’s own image; the other functions not as a depth of meaning, but as a reflecting surface. To the white, the gaze of the African reflected his own narrative of superiority inscribed by means of conquest and conversion. To the black, the gaze of the Swiss villager reflects his own individual indignation of having a white narrative inscribed upon a black self. The aggrieved memory of his historical self causes Baldwin’s inability to take the villagers’ astonishment as a gesture of innocence; it can only “poison” his heart despite an insistent enumeration of civil relations with his hosts. His answer can only be mediated by a racialized history. It is, in the end, an answer back over time and space to the colonialist arrogance. Baldwin’s primitive and secluded village becomes the site where, time and space suspended, past confronts present and Africa confronts Europe in an individual experience of cosmic dimension. The realisation of being culturally determined and controlled is further refined by the awareness that the six hundred hardly educated villagers cannot be held responsible for the presumptions of white culture: “America comes out of Europe, but these people have never seen America, nor have most of them seen more of Europe than the hamlet at the foot of their mountain.”33 Yet they are in possession of it by means of a subconscious inheritance that permits them to “move with an authority which I shall never have.”34 This is the same self-assigned, unjustified authority that the first white man imposed on the black man and which, Baldwin feels, is now being imposed on him: “they regard me, quite rightly, not only as a stranger in the village but as a suspect latecomer, bearing no credentials, to everything they have-however unconsciously-inherited.”35 This reading of the stranger’s perception by the villagers may seem exaggeratedly acute, yet it is, eventually, a subjective self-perception projected to historical consequence. And Baldwin reinforces that presumptuous authority by confirming his position as an outsider, a stranger, and a latecomer; as questionable as it may seem, this surrender into white discourse is one of the arguments to be harvested later on. It seems that James Baldwin’s spatial journey, initiated by a tentative rejection of an enslaving birthright, has come full circle and turns out to be, as scholars have suggested, a journey back in time36; or better said, a journey beyond time. Instead of evading the color line through a transatlantic expatriation, Baldwin comes to understand that the roots of his identity as an American Negro are to be found in Europe, not in Africa. They are grounded in the white icy West, the place where the image of the black man as devil was mythically forged. Throughout the essay, the village is not provided with its/a name, thus gaining symbolic significance; in being depicted as a Central European mountain setting, where no black man was ever encountered except in the purgatory practices of the carnival, the village becomes a sign for the Western mind, as Baldwin himself declares: “for this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted.”37 After providing the evident key to his allegory, Baldwin persists in establishing, in a Hegelian logic of history, the ideological centrality of whiteness as the source of modern culture and civilization: “These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it.”38 33 Ibidem, p. 148. Ibidem 35 Ibidem 36 Isabel Urban, op. cit., p. 245. 37 James Baldwin, «Stranger in the Village», p. 148. 38 Ibidem 34 Interestingly, it is the artistic canon that testifies to that centrality: “The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine”, “out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach.”39 The cathedral at Chartres, an image that will reoccur in the essay, “says something to them which it cannot say to me.”40; what it communicates, like all the other artistic masterpieces of Europe, is indefinite but of the same discourse of power refused to the outsider. Within the perspective of history, should one go back a few centuries “they are in their full glory – but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.”41 Baldwin has often been accused of black hatred and self-hatred and these are only some of his words used as evidence. An inferiority complex seems evident here, but it is not assigned to objective causes; Baldwin’s historical self identifies with the African setting and the rage subdued under the surface of the words has less to do with this identification, in spite of the transpiring regret of not being on the side of glory, and more to do with the fact that the self is forced into the passive position of watching the conqueror’s arrival, of becoming the object of conquest. As much as one would object, this is a fact of history acutely perceived by the present-day subject. This subject acknowledges his rage as the fruitless, yet inevitable reaction of the disesteemed, of those bought, converted, conquered, and promotes it into “one of the things that makes history”42, in an apology of rage of Biblical tone and phrasing. This internal warfare is presented as the core of black collective identity, as it separates blacks from the “Herrenvolk” and unites them beyond the individual ways of coping with the tension of objectification. Whereas for the white, the black is one object of his discourse of authority, for the black “white men have a reality which is far from being reciprocal”43, resulting in a subversive attitude designed “either to rob the white man of the jewel of his naiveté, or else to make it cost him dear.”44 Thus “the black man insists, by whatever means he finds at his disposal, that the white man cease to regard him as an exotic rarity and recognize him as a human being.”45 This plight for the recognition of his subjectivity constitutes an attack at the very heart of white power ideology and at the programmatic naiveté of its carriers. The resulting reaction in the white man, who “does not wish to be hated, neither does he wish to change places”46 is to resort to the subconscious stock of representations, the effect of which is that “the white man finds himself enmeshed, so to speak, in his own language which describes hell, as well as the attributes which lead one to hell, as being as black as night.”47 Language here is the vehicle of culture, and the perversity of this ultimate justification of white authority stems from the fallacy of semiotic motivation: it posits the direct connection between sign and referent, between word and reality. To maintain authority over one’s world (and those of others), one must persist in this ideologized naiveté. Thus the set of representations constituting one’s culture is taken as a datum of reality and not as one self-supporting signification system; this system, which happens to be one based on dual hierarchical difference, imposed in language and through language, projects a semiotic sphere of repression where black, night, hell and sexuality are mutually signifying. Every legend, says Baldwin, “contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.”48 Indeed, the word contains reality: it shapes and limits it, and the writer is keenly aware of the semiotic and ideological function of language as the means of taking possession over the universe. One can assume that this awareness leads directly to Baldwin’s attempt to literarily take charge of language and make it the instrument for taking possession of, ultimately, himself. 39 Ibidem Ibidem 41 Ibidem 42 Ibidem, p. 149. 43 Ibidem , p. 149. 44 Ibidem 45 Ibidem 46 Ibidem, p. 150. 47 Ibidem 48 Ibidem 40 Yet, the argument evolves, one can find unspeakable liberty in using the inscription to one’s own purpose: “when, beneath the black mask, a human being begins to make himself felt one cannot escape a certain awful wonder as to what kind of human being it is”49; the irony of prescriptive semiosis is that, once one realizes its arbitrariness, one can emerge from behind the mask and employ it as an interpretative and manipulative tool: hence “by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is.”50 In seeing himself as the white sees him, that is, in seeing what the white sees, the black man gains a direct view into the white man’s mind. In reflecting the gaze, the black takes possession of the possessor. The other as pushed into the distance through the linguistic and cultural sphere of repression is itself the most hidden content of the self. The individual and cultural consequence of this psychoanalytical realization accounts for the further development of the essay: since the other is the most intimate part of the self, it results that the black is a core part of white experience and society. Having been confronted with the source of the inflicting myth of blackness, Baldwin assumes his role in the good-evil dialectic as the interloper, the stranger in the village; nevertheless, the position of the interloper does not imply inferiority, but a vantage point. Oftentimes Baldwin’s passages on European civilization have been read as a manifestation of black-hatred and self-hatred; but when one looks at the depiction of the Central European mountain village and its inhabitants, they seem designed to the very opposite aim. Baldwin presents a group of undistinguishable people, immobilized within their anti-idyllic environment. Their innate superiority is unawares, their innocence is acultural, and their claim on the achievements of Western civilization is unconscious. The power automatically inherited by the Herrenvolk and their representations of the outer world are not their own; they are caught in an archaic worldview, manifest in their living conditions and in their religious practices. In a way, the villagers are confined into their own petrified world, and the image of the village tends to suggest that white centrality and supremacy is an anachronistic concept. The black tourist, conversely, while the result of a history of dehumanization, testifies to the intellectual potential and mobility of the interloper. Having fully developed the thesis of the black as a stranger to white civilization on European grounds, Baldwin turns his gaze to the American continent and makes the next step in his argument by reverting to his mise-en-abysmal personal experience. The writer modifies his initial assessment “that I am as much a stranger in this village today as I was the first summer I arrived” by noting that “the villagers wonder less about the texture of my hair than they did then, and wonder rather more about me.”51 The distance between self and other as expressed in initial wonder materializes in tentative social interaction, in which, however, the protagonist continues to perceive an echo of the American “paranoiac malevolence” at the remotest possibility of proximity. Nevertheless, the protagonist is aware of the “dreadful abyss” between his perception on the streets of this village and on the streets of his birth city; his strangeness to the villagers is rooted in the latter’s lack of experience and derives from a subconscious whitecentric heritage passed down by Europe to the American continent. However, “I am not a stranger in America and the same syllable riding on the American air expresses the war my presence has occasioned in the American soul.”52 While the Swiss villager can persist in the naiveté of his white wilderness and relegate his other to a mythical realm of carnivalesque representation and soul acquisitions, the American is forced to confront it. In this confrontation he automatically inscribes the Negro, for mutually supporting psychological and economic reasons, as part of his repressed, subhuman otherness, thus expressing, “with a truly American bluntness, the attitude which to varying extents all masters have had toward all slaves.”53 Baldwin thus reaches a point of abstraction where black-white relations in America are seen at a Hegelian scale of history as the master-slave dialectic. But the author immediately refines the scheme by positing that the 49 Ibidem Ibidem 51 Ibidem 52 Ibidem, p. 151. 53 Ibidem 50 uniqueness of the American slave’s position lies in the difficulty of conceiving the possibility, which is inherent in the dynamism of the Hegelian dialectic, of taking over the power from the master’s hands; that is because, through his severing from the past, the American Negro is divested from any knowledge of development and is enslaved in ahistorical stasis: “He is unique among the black men of the world in that his past was taken from him, almost literally, at one blow.”54 Because of this severance of identity, “one wonders what on earth the first slave found to say to the first dark child he bore.”55 (This is a troubling expression of an idea dear to Baldwin, which he reiterates in practically all the essays in Notes of a Native Son: the identity of the American Negro comes out of an extreme situation of rupture from his own historical self. Whereas Europe could afford to keep the black, that is, the other, at a distance, and thus “the black man, as a man, did not exist for Europe”56, America’s confrontation of and reliance on the black presence not only “caused the question of the black’s humanity, and of his rights therefore as a human being, to become a burning social issue for several American generations of Americans”57, but also, the argument goes, had tremendous effects on the American character. Then, Baldwin makes the bold move of explicitly writing the American Negro into the fabric of American identity formation as an active, essential participant. Stating in all clarity that the ideas on which American beliefs are based did not originate in America, but in the same Europe epitomized by the Swiss village, Baldwin furthers the daring idea that “the establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.”58 This is presented as a hard necessity since, on the one hand, it was impossible for Americans to abandon their beliefs because they afforded an instrument of ordering both the moral chaos and the physical chaos of the new continent, and, on the other hand, because the presence and necessity of the Negro threatened “an idea which, whether or not one likes to think so, is the very warp and woof of the heritage of the West, the idea of white supremacy.”59 Baldwin has reached the climax of his argumentation and will not refrain. The idea of white supremacy as reasserted in the inscription of the black into otherness and his resulting social oppression is not invented, but brutally perfected on American grounds, the essayist claims, while making evident its arbitrariness: “The idea of white supremacy rests simply on the fact that white men are the creators of civilization (the present civilization, which is the only one that matters; all previous civilizations are simply ‘contributions’ to our own) and are therefore civilization's guardians and defenders.”60 There is in this sentence, beyond its immediate content, a troubling first person plural possessive that suggests either that the implicit author identifies with the white civilization, which is incoherent with the rest of the essay, or that he borrows the voice of the white man, which is rhetorically unfortunate, or, finally, that he has somehow taken possession of that civilization; in any case, the appearance of a first person plural signifies the interrelation between the black individual and the American community. Thus, the American is placed in the dilemma of either accepting the humanity of the black man, which would jeopardize the authority of whiteness, or to deny that humanity, in a collective, pathological attempt of denying the overwhelmingly undeniable. Consequently, the Negro problem actually proves to be the American problem: “At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.”61 And the history of this problem, Baldwin synthesizes, oscillates between the impossible choice between 54 Ibidem, p. 152. Ibidem 56 Ibidem, p. 153. 57 Ibidem 58 Ibidem, p. 154. 59 Ibidem, p. 155. 60 Ibidem 61 Ibidem 55 acceptance and denial, in a futile attempt to escape the choice altogether. The resulting spectacle, “at once foolish and dreadful” from the vantage point of its emancipated object, leads Baldwin to agree, intertextually, that “the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men.”62 The history of America hence emerges as the site of an on-going battle at all levels of human existence in which “the white man's motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity.”63 Despite the permanence of that ontic conflict, Baldwin surprisingly announces that “the battle for his identity has long ago been won.”64 The Negro won by his very presence in the American life: “He is not a visitor to the West, but a citizen there, an American; as American as the Americans who despise him, the Americans who fear him, the Americans who love him.”65 The black is not a stranger in America as he is in the Swiss village and his identity is affirmed in the conflicting, love-and-hate relation witho the American home. He is perhaps, Baldwin speculates, “the only black man in the world whose relationship to white men is more terrible, more subtle, and more meaningful than the relationship of bitter possessed to uncertain possessors.”66 If the first element that distinguished the Negro from the universal master-slave dialectic was the disadvantage of a definitive severance from the past, the second, correlated element, is his unbreakable connection to the American present, which opens up a potential future of advantage. For he is the necessary opposite that completes the other half of the message: “The cathedral at Chartres, I have said, says something to the people of this village which it cannot say to me; but it is important to understand that, this cathedral says something to me which it cannot say to them”67, amends Baldwin. While, he speculates, the villagers of the West may be struck by the heavenly image of power and glory, representing the divine power in their own shape and image, it takes the stranger to be terrified by the infernal image of punishment and death, “seeming to say that God and the devil can never be divorced.”68 The cathedral at Chartre signifies both. Delving into the heart of the Western myth of double, hierarchical opposition, Baldwin brings to light its relational essence. God and the devil cannot be separated because they define each other. Yet in the acceptance of the white-black dialectic subversion appears: “I must accept the status which myth, if nothing else, gives me in the West before I can hope to change the myth”69; the change begins by capitalizing on the relational identity provided by the very myth. The end of the essay provides the suggestion of another of Baldwin’s core ideas, that of the American’s own severance from the past. The American illusion of recovering the European innocence of identity based on unquestioned white authority is derided because, Baldwin maintains, “the identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be.”70 The violent white-black dialectic which became the hard fact of American mental and social life has redefined both sides, and, Baldwin suggests, the American vision of the world is based on “the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged.”71 This black-and-white American vision, of which Baldwin inscribes himself as a possessor in the first person plural, is not only morally inadequate, but “dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless”72 because it hinders the grasp of reality. 62 Ibidem, pp. 155-6. Ibidem, p. 156. 64 Ibidem 65 Ibidem 66 Ibidem 67 Ibidem 68 Ibidem, p. 157. 69 Ibidem 70 Ibidem 71 Ibidem 72 Ibidem 63 In light of these considerations, the last paragraph of the essay acquires a vast prophetic tone. It calls clearly to the realization that “the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too.”73 The white wilderness of the Swiss village is no longer accessible to Americans; the black – and Baldwin assertively uses the first person singular here – is no longer a stranger; white and black have been shown to be deeply complementary to each other, having forged, in their battle, a new, American identity. This is how the violence of history can achieve positive significance: “the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met.”74 The final sentence of “Stranger in the Village” is not a Black nationalist cry, but the registration of the final breach produced in the discourse of white supremacy, providing a space for the assertion of a dialectic, black-and-white identity: “This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”75 BIBLIOGRAFIE BALDWIN, James, «Stranger in the Village», in Notes of a Native Son, The Dial Press, New York, 1963 BALDWIN, James, «The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American», in James Baldwin, Collected Essays, Literary Classics of the United States, New York, 1998 BLOOM, Harold, «Introduction», in Harold Bloom (ed.), James Baldwin, Chelsea House Publishers, New York, 1986 FORD, Nick Aaron, «The Evolution of James Baldwin as an Essayist», in Therman B. O’Daniel (ed.), James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation, Howard University Press, Washington, DC, 1977 URBAN, Isabel, «James Baldwin in Switzerland: “Stranger in the Village”», in Waldemar Zacharasiewcz (ed.), Images of Central Europe in Travelogues and Fiction by North American Writers, Stauffenburg Verlag, Tübingen, 1995 73 Ibidem, p. 158. Ibidem 75 Ibidem 74