Ah, cyberspace! In the spirit of my past attempt to use the strange and oftimes "less rigorous" space of the internet as a way to work through a paper idea (see my livejournal posts on the cyberqueer -- http://www.livejournal.com/users/writerpunk/13220.html -- I will use this forum similarly. I am working on a short essay for my first grad seminar at the University of Washington called "Sexuality and National Belonging." I have decided (albeit foolishly since my professor cum graduate director is writing on the very same subject) to work on James Baldwin's novel /Another Country/ and to employ a smattering of theory from Elspeth Probyn and Ahmed & Stacey and Michael Warner to the novel's skins, touches, and relationships. What follows will be a mishmash of ideas and ramblings, but I hope to get a paper out of it. Enjoy.
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A reading of Baldwin's Another Country must be complex and complicated. Much of the body of Baldwin scholarship, particularly on his third novel, has attempted to read and parse the conflicts, disruptions, ambiguities, reflections, and differences in the text, particularly in terms of sex, race, gender, sexuality, class, national belonging, love, and violence. Much of the work on Another Country strive for "deep" readings and analyses and theorize the novel as a means to understand and articulate (or a failure to do so) social, political, and psychological categories. Other work, more recently, see these "deep" readings as counter to Baldwin's insistence on complicating and exploding categories and struggle rather to critique Another Country in terms of intersections, interweavings, interpolations of categories, histories, and contexts. For example, William Cohen's analysis focuses on the novel's "unfolding series of crises" that stages "conflicts among characters in terms of structural and power relations, principally along axes of gender, race, and sexuality" (1); more importantly, he says, "Another Country not only maps its characters against these social indices but, more remarkably, also explores the ways in which vectors of power relations themselves interact--crosscutting, supporting, contradiction, and displacing one another" (1). It is this idea of intersection and complication that needs to be further teased, further fleshed, and further embraced. It is this twisting and fraying, this pressing and pulling that Roderick Ferguson recognizes in Baldwin's work borrowing Zygmunt Bauman's notion of the "parvenu"--the understanding that meaning, categories, and "identity is always in flux, and that naming is a contradictory process emerging out of the interaction between the definitions that are imposed upon us and the identities that we make" (258).
In a move away from "deep" readings of Baldwin, which oftentimes are undercut by their desire to stabilise categories, to focus identities, to resolve contradictions even as they critique them, an alternative approach to Another Country embraces the fluxes and flotsam and frustrations of the text and engages the "surfaces," the sketches the novel creates and presents; it is a move to a methodology that Elspeth Probyn deploys to explore identities, relations, desires, and belongings saying, "[T]he attraction to the surface moves us away from 'depth accounts of social life, where more fundamental levels of social reality...are called upon to explain less fundamental ones'" (quoting Chris Philo, 34). A Probynian critique of Baldwin, then, recognizes, "[T]he surface is not another metaphor nor yet another fad within intellectual circles: it is a profound reordering of how we conceive of the social" (34). Probyn declares, "I am arguing against marking identities within a hierarchical mode" (34). In other words, a "surface" reading of Another Country offers an opportunity to step away from more negative critiques of Baldwin and to imagine, to render the play of identities, alliances, and antagonisms as overlapping slippages, temporary inhabitations, and criss-crossed chains of desires.
Probyn is a fitting lens because she recognizies the potential and critical richness of the everyday, the quotidian, the banal. She explains her life experiences are entrances into "[h]ow individuals make sense of their lives" and "how desires to become are played out in everyday circumstances" (5). Her project is about attending to the commonplace, the exploration of the surfaces of the world around her, and about attending to the value of rendering the banal remarkable. In a sense, Baldwin's novel is very much about the banal; its setting is recognizable, its plot plottable, and its characters go about daily life walking, talking, hungering, working, having sex, playing, doing dishes, drinking, dying. In another sense, the novel itself as a physical object is banal--its size and shape, its black and blue paperback cover, its pages yellowing, used, its Times Roman typeface, anonymous comments in the margins. Yet the text is remarkable in the very way its surface, ink on paper, interpolates experiences, evokes emotions, and creates meanings. The story is remarkable because its everydayness is figured and reconfigured in the juxtaposition of very different surfaces, very different bodies, very different lives. A surface read provides a way to interact and intercept specificities such race, sexuality, gender, class, or country without fixing and falling into hard-walled categories. Probyn agrees, "[T]he surface is not to be posed as ineluctable but rather a way of configuring lines of force that compose the social, lines of force that are by their very nature deeply material and historical" (12). In this way, reading Another Country or a photo montage or a cityscape can attend to differences and disparities, to "enumerate singularities in such a way that they may overpower any generalization, any simple adding up to a general statement of identity" (21); it is about a critique, in the words of Homi Bhabha, "that 'adds' without 'adding up'" (as qtd. in Probyn 21).
A surface reading of Another Country offers an opportunity for play, for temporary fixing rather than affixing, for conversational and coalitional analyses. A surface reading, as Probyn argues, is not a "shallow" one. Rather it is this playfulness, this attention to a constellation of specificities that do not reduce Baldwin's novel to a text just about race relations in the US or pre-Stonewall sexual and gender identity politics or heteronormative black nationalism or writing and writer as social critique. A surface reading acknowledges but does not fixate on negative critique, on the potential racism, heterosexism, or homophobia of the text, on trauma, repression, or vicitimization of its characters, or on Baldwin's failure to imagine same-sex female relations or a black, gay, partnered, living protagonist. Baldwin certainly could imagine and articulate these lacks, absences, and problems. Surface reading is not about seeing endpoints but rather pivots, intersections, and simultaneities. What is at stake here is the rendering of what is imagined in relation to what might be imagined, a positive service to self, author, and text. What is important here is how these surfaces, these webs of thought, heart and matter join, reflect, refract, and distract understandings of identities, belongings, and desires.
Probyn articulates, "Surface belongings and desiring identities refuse to stand still...they compel connections, producing themselves as other...[their] sheer perplexity and yearning bypasses the meanness of individualized identities...they rub up against each other" (35). One way to materialize surfaces in Another Country is through looking at, tracing along skins and touches in the text. The skin, in its taken-for-grantedness and its all-too-scopic significance, embodies Probyn's theories of surfaces; the skin of the page and the skin of Baldwin's characters, the touch of the paper and the touch between characters become the rub in the generation of relationships, subjectivities, belongings, and longings.
In Baldwin, the importance of the skin cannot be reduced to just a signifier of race or gender even sexuality or nationality. The skin and by extension the touch become vehicles for complexity and intersectionality in identities. The skins and touches of Another Country evoke the work of Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey's edited collection Thinking Through the Skin that calls for "a skin-tight politics, a politics that takes at its orientation not the body as such, but the fleshy interface between bodies and worlds. 'Thinking through the skin' is a thinking that reflects not on the body as the lost object of thought, but on inter-embodiement, on the mode of being-with and being-for, where one touches and is touched by others" (1). In other words, theories of the skin, like theories of the surface, look for connections across textures and topographies of being, for transformations and transportations among temporary sites of identity, and for a means to see desire, as Probyn argues, "not as an individual possession but rather as a relational force among individuals" (25). Ahmed and Stacey ask how skin can become meaningful and how the largest bodily organ, which is always apparent for scrutiny, can be read, mapped, and marked. Theories of skin strive to take all skin in its many manifestations--whole, scarred, baby soft, wrinkled, pierced, tattooed, sewn, dark, light--and discover how skin is "lived, read, written, narrated, seen, touched, managed, worked, cut, remembered, produced, and known" (2), how it is made intelligible or mystified, and how it is politicized, commodified, and desired.
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