James Baldwin: Influences, Writing Styles, and Cultural Issues - Essay Example

2 April James Baldwin: Influences, Writing Styles, and Cultural Issues “You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all,” writes James Baldwin (qtd. in Held). And this is what he precisely did; he lived according to what his blood beats. Though he once left his nation to find himself outside his cultural, gender, and racial struggles, his works exhibit that his native blood beats inside them. This paper explores the influences on James Baldwin as a poet and prose writer and discusses his writing theories, styles, and techniques. Baldwin’s socio-economic, gender, racial, and religious conditions shape a personal-universal writing style, which aims to write for people who establish and develop their identities, using their own frame of references. Cultural Issues and Influences Baldwin’s cultural issues intersect concerns for race, gender, and class, where Harlem is one of the strongest cultural influences on Baldwin. The poverty of his family and neighborhood and the religiosity of his stepfather affected his work aesthetics and style. Gerald Meyer believes that the key to understanding Baldwin’s politics is through analyzing his Harlem roots and culture. While some writers like Langston Hughes saw Harlem as a black Mecca, Baldwin lived in it and remembers it as a ghetto.” Baldwin’s “The Harlem Ghetto” dispels notions of aesthetic greatness that some writers attribute to it: …the buildings are old and in desperate need of repair, the streets are crowded and dirty; there are too many human beings per square mile… All of Harlem is a place pervaded by a sense of congestion, rather like the insistent, maddening, claustrophobic pounding in the skull that comes from trying to breathe in a very small room with all the windows shut.” (39 qtd. in Meyer 274). Living in the poor side of the social divide of Harlem allows Baldwin to de-romanticize his roots, as he writes from the politics of blackness, a person who is poor and black at the same time. As a result, Baldwin produces works that describe poverty and the challenges of overcoming it, wherein gender and racial issues altogether make the fight for one’s identity more difficult and complex. Furthermore, though coming from a low economic status with racial and gender concerns, Baldwin resists being a black fundamentalist or to conform to any label. Instead, he supports diverse views, a devotion which signifies his multiracial and multi-gender politics. He does not want to be seen as a Negro writer or as a gay writer per se (Field 7). In writing for all, nevertheless, critics charged him for having no unifying ideology. Francois Burgess disparages Baldwin’s works as being too broad: “Alone among Black contemporary writers, Baldwin could not or did not know how to find a central ideology that would give to his work coherence and unity” (Bobia 54 qtd. in Field 7). But this paper believes that Baldwin only writes from what he feels is personally right, which resonate with those who experience or witness the same struggles. Baldwin does not have to conform to the frameworks and labels of others to become the writer that he wants to be. Aside from Harlem, Paris shaped Baldwin’s writings through the theme of expatriation. Baldwin leaves America, not only because he is disillusioned with the persecution of his race and gender in the U.S., but more so because he wants to distance himself from these struggles, in order to find his identity, including his writing voice. Price describes Baldwin’s Parisian stopover as a “liberating experience,” that gives him “the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself” (313 qtd. in Tomlinson 136). Baldwin cannot be himself in a society that attacks him from different sides. The physical distance refreshes him, reminding him of his roles and functions as a writer and as an American. Robert Tomlinson argues that the theme of expatriation in Baldwin’s works reflects his feelings of exile: “…the voyage to a foreign land is an exile that restages the original historical and cultural alienation at ‘home’” (136). Tomlinson depicts Paris as a place where people pay their dues, as Baldwin has. The pain of alienation is present in Baldwin’s writings, where people feel exile in their own families, neighborhoods, and societies. Ironically, Baldwin turns “full circle” after physically isolating himself from American society (Tomlinson 136). After running away from what stopped him to become who he is, Baldwin finds himself back in the heart of his contentious American identity. Influences and Dialogues Baldwin’s influences come from diverse sources, including the people who criticized him, nurtured and trained him, and whom he criticized or idolized. Aimee Pozorski argues that one of the under-stated influences on Baldwin is T.S. Eliot, particularly when many scholars greatly devoted their works on studying Baldwin’s prose, not his poetry. She stresses that Baldwin is a poet too: “Baldwin was at least as interested in the aesthetics of the poetic line as he was in the politics of his time” (228). Pozorski shows that T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land,” has affected Baldwin’s untitled poem. The relationship can be found in diction, symbols and issues. Pozorski asserts: “Baldwin was invested, from the beginning, in the universal struggle—for a home, for identity, for intimacy, for culture, for peace” that Eliot nurtures in him as a poet and as a writer (232). Baldwin selects T. S. Eliot as a significant poetic influence, since Eliot is one of the first supporters of poetry of “impersonality” (Pozorski 232). Eliot argued in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (43 qtd. in Pozorski 233). Baldwin writes about escaping the self too, not just finding the self, where the self can be reunited with the plight of others. He distances himself from issues, so as to get a better perspective and to be more truthful of what he sees and the changes he wants to see next. Aside from T.S. Eliot, Eldridge Cleaver, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes influenced Baldwin’s writing too. Nathaniel Mills argues that Cleaver’s scathing criticism of Baldwin affected the latter’s prose. He notes how Cleaver perceives Baldwin’s works, as he: “sees Baldwin’s homosexuality as a perversely weak, racially inauthentic masculinity that is part and parcel of a fawning love of whites and white culture” (50-51). Cleaver charges Baldwin for being a white-lover due to his absence of “social reference,” where “[h]is characters all seem to be fucking and sucking in a vacuum” (132, 134-135 qtd. in Mills 51). Baldwin reacts with a more critical perspective of racial issues, although critics noted that his writing was uncertain in the call for black separation and hate for whites (Mills 51). Langston Hughes inspires Baldwin because of the former’s use of authentic black speech and black music; although Baldwin asserts that the former has not maximized his talents because of limitations in exploring other issues that Baldwin believes as more important (Mills 51). Baldwin once was under the tutelage of Richard Wright, whom he later criticized because of Wright’s characters in Native Son, who lack complexity and depth. These are only some of the influences on Baldwin’s thinking as a writer, where their writings and criticisms affected the former’s own prose and poetry. Writing Theories, Styles, and Technique Though Baldwin himself resisted being labeled as writer of any specific ideology or style, this paper argues that he writes in a personal way that is universal. Baldwin writes for a universal audience, which is why some critics maintain that he lacks consistency or a core. Instead, he writes from his core: “[All theories are suspect, one must find, therefore one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright” (9 qtd. in Field 7). This core resonates for every person, not just for black people or men. The writing theory of Baldwin is that he offers no theory, but asks people to write theories of their own. Furthermore, Baldwin uses ambiguity in characters and plot as a technique for exploring the many sides of one story. Norman stresses that in “Notes of a Native Son,” “Baldwin’s ‘ambivalent’ and ‘extraordinary’ use of figures of white women is not merely a chapter in Baldwin’s psychological development” (249). White women are critical to Baldwin’s urge of analyzing personal experience and identity so that American race relations can be transformed (Norman 249). The personal is the universal. Claudine Raynaud argues that Baldwin writes with reference to the personal, specifically the autobiographical. The “autobiographical core” allows Baldwin to be in his stories, and yet also outside it (Raynaud 47). He writes not for ideological reasons, but to know himself, however tormented that identity is. Brian Norman asserts that Baldwin’s pluralistic writing crosses gender empowerment lines. He believes that the white women in some of Baldwin’s works are not there for the purposes of criticizing white alone or using white women in place of black women: “White women are central to Baldwin’s call to examine personal experience and identity in order to change the reality of race in America” (248). Dramatizing the violence on white women demands people’s reflection of their own personal and social issues. Conclusion James Baldwin’s writing has roots that significantly hail from Harlem and Paris. These places influence how he sees the world and how he sees his place in it. Furthermore, his detractors and those whom he criticizes shape his writing abilities and plots. They may be lumped in the protest literature, but Baldwin wants to reach out across racial and gender line issues. His politics is the personal; his writing is the personal. Somehow, all that is within can be connected to universal anxieties and dreams. Baldwin’s works are about him and about others, where similar experiences and aspirations bind them. Works Cited Field, Douglas. “Introduction.” In D. Field (Ed.), A Historical Guide to James Baldwin. Oxford: Oxford U P, 2009. Print. Held, Marcy. “James Baldwin: The Writer and the Witness.” National Portrait Gallery, 19 Aug. 2011. Web. 29 Mar. 2013. Meyer, Gerald. “James Baldwin's Harlem: The Key to His Politics.” Socialism & Democracy 25.1 (Mar.2011): 273-281. Web. 29 Mar. 2013. Political Science Complete. Mills, Nathaniel. “Cleaver/Baldwin Revisited.” Studies in American Naturalism 7.1 (2012): 50-79. Web. 29 Apr. 2013. Academic Search Complete. Norman, Brian. “Crossing Identitarian Lines: Women's Liberation and James Baldwin's Early Essays.” Women's Studies 35.3 (Apr/May. 2006): 241-264. Web. 29 Mar. 2013. Academic Search Complete. Pozorski, Aimee. “The Influence of T. S. Eliot on James Baldwin's Poetry.” ANQ 24.4 (2011): 227-234. Web. 29 Apr. 2013. MasterFILE Premier. Raynaud, Claudine. “'Flesh And Blood': Autobiographical 'Material' Between Fiction and Non-Fiction.” New Formations 67 (2009): 46-56. Web. 29 Apr. 2013. Academic Search Complete. Tomlinson, Robert. “’Payin' One's Dues”: Expatriation as Personal Experience and Paradigm in the Works of James Baldwin.” African American Review 33.1 (1999): 135-148. Web. 29 Mar. 2013. JSTOR Arts & Sciences I. Read More