Baldwin's /Another Country/: Queering the Surface (a work in progress), Part III

Continued from: http://queerviewmirror.blogspot.com/2005/12/baldwins-another-country-queering_07.html...

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Another Country is all about skins and full of touches from the very first page, from a destitute and half-asleep Rufus in a movie theatre feeling "caterpillar fingers between his thighs" (3) to the idyllic, tremulous moment when Yves touches Eric "lightly on the elbo, as a very young child might do" (185); from Eric's musing on ostensibly closeted men and their need for somewhere to love "them enough to caress them...in the light, with joy" (212) to the description of New York City with its "rough, gregarious surface" where the multitudes were "continually being jostled, yet longed, at the same time, for the sense of others, for a human touch" (230); from Vivaldo memories of a boy and "wanting to touch the boy, to make the boy laugh, to slap him across his behind" (315) to the very end of the novel, to Yves's arrival in America and the endorsement of his body, his love for Eric, his place for "his passport was eventually stamped and handed back to him" (435), a final touch between nation and subject.

Perhaps the queerest of touches (and the one most focused on) is between Vivaldo and Eric. The consummation of their lust, their love, and most importantly their desire functions as central axis in the novel; it materializes and navigates the terrain of physical, erotic, and identificatory possibilities for the characters as well as the readers and opens a space, a fold where desire can complicate and radicalize social categories. On the surface, the sex, the confessions, the touches between Vivaldo and Eric promise some sort of human and humane truth, liberation, and revelation. The three-page long paragraph sex scene told from Vivaldo's point of view is a many-stroked mix of internal and external confusion, connection, contradictions, and realizations: "This was in honor of Vivaldo, of Vivaldo's body and Vivaldo's need, and Vivaldo trembled as he had never trembled before. And this caress was not entirely pleasant. Vivaldo felt terribly ill at ease, not knowing what was expected of him, or what he could expect from Eric. He pulled Eric up and kissed him on the mouth, kneading Eric's buttocks and stroking his sex. How strange it felt, this violent muscle, stretching and throbbing, so like his own, but belonging to another!" (384). It is a moment of interface, of intersection, of "fluidity between bodies" that does not "take the boundary line of skin for granted" (Ahmed and Stacey 11).

Vivaldo is confronted not only by himself, his skin, his sex but the self, skin, and sex of Eric, of Ida, of Rufus, and of other partners, past and imagined, real and yet to come. As Cohen carefully explains, "Baldwin envisions this sexual climax as a coming-into-consciousness for Vivaldo" (10). Cohen continues, "This consciousness entails a crossing of more than the hetero/homo line, for in having sex with Eric, Vivaldo collapses a whole series of identifications...This sexual connection generates an orgasmic concatenation of identities, whereby Vivaldo conceives of himself as simultaneously gay and straight, male and female, white and black" (11). It is through sex, which for Baldwin is the fullest expression of desire, through erotic touch that Vivaldo finally understands his intercorporeality, his interconnectedness to the world around him; he has learned to "enter himself" (319), to realize the impossibility of giving up his skin, his color, and to finally understand what it might be like to live in another skin, another color--in Baldwin's sense, another country.

Cohen says, "[T]aking 'love' as the revolutionary act, this disordering sexual experience enables Vivaldo provisionally to escape limiting categories...Sex with another man does not function to categorize Vivaldo as 'gay' because such a sexual taxonomy, for Baldwin, is always limiting. Instead, as 'a great revelation,' this sexual act raises his consciousness in an ostensibly universal and 'human' way, emancipating him from the constraints of social classifications" (12). However, rather than read Vivaldo as shuttling between points of binaries or edges of categories, a less reductive reading imagines Vivaldo and the other characters of the novel traversing a web, a landscape, a skinscape of unfolding possibilities. Desire becomes the revolutionary act. Queer sex becomes the revolutionary act. Queer touch becomes the revolutionary act.

But Baldwin's desiring vision is not without risk, without warning. To be unable to recognize one's skin, to be unable to touch another, to be unable to queer sex, love, desire is to disavow interconnection, intercorporeality, and to disrupt the circuits of humanity. Another Country reveals the risk of turning away from desire, from touch through the down and out figure of Rufus. At the start of the novel, Rufus is all too aware of his embodiment, of his skin, of his disconnection from the world around him. He has turned inward, he has removed himself from the chain of desire, and he has been reduced to corporeal meanness, which manifests in both psychic and physical violence to himself and others. Rufus only knows pain:

Yet he was aware, perhaps for the first time in his life, that nothing would stop it, nothing: this was himself. Rufus was aware of every inch of Rufus. He was flesh: flesh, bone, muscle, fluid, orifices, hair, and skin. His body was controlled by laws he did not understand. Nor did he understand what force within his body had driven him into such a desolate place (54).

For Rufus, the city has become a prison, his body a cell, and his skin a boundary. Whatever "laws" or "force" pummeled and pressed him into such a state, Rufus has lost the ability to render complexity in himself and in his relationships; he has settled and sedimented into hard, edged, impenetrable categories, be it "black," "poor," "rapist," or "abject." When desperate with hunger, both for physical nourishment and emotional sustenance, and confronted by a would-be, white, same-sex john, Rufus retreats further into solitary saying, "I'm not the boy you want, mister...I don't have a thing to give you. I don't have nothing to give nobody" (44). Even though the moment prompts his memory to think of Eric, whom he did have something to give in the past, Rufus can only move away, hide in silence, and refuse any chance for exchange, warmth, rejuvenation. In fact, shortly before he commits suicide, Rufus recognizes the possibility for change, for return: "The most impenetrable of mysteries moved in this darkness for less than a second, hinting of reconciliation" (54). It would take less than a second to reach out, to be reached, to touch, to be touched.

Unfortunately, Rufus cannot make the leap of faith, the leap of desire in order to return to the circuit, to reconnect. It is this very reconciliation that Vivaldo realizes too late that might have rescued Rufus. In his very moving confession to Eric, Vivaldo recounts his last moments with Rufus:

I loved Rufus. I loved him, I didn't want him to die. But when he was dead, I thought about it, thought about it -- isn't it funny? I didn't know I'd thought about it as much as I have -- and I wondered, I guess I still wonder, what would have happened if I'd taken him into my arms, if I'd held him, if I hadn't been -- afraid. I was afraid that he wouldn't understand that it was -- only love. Only love. But, oh, Lord, when he died, I thought that maybe I could have saved him if I'd just reached out that quarter of an inch between us on that bed, and held him (342-343).

Touch is reconciliation. Touch is the key to reciprocity, to interface. Rufus's inability to touch or be touched, Vivaldo's confession, and his eventual consummation with Eric all point up the lesson in Another Country not of liberal, mythical, mystifying love but of open, tactile, transforming, transgressive desire. Touch and desire, skin and surface, bodies and identities can only be negotiated through contact, exploration, and reconstitution. In other words, as Probyn reminds us that we must "constantly place ourselves within relations of proximity of different forms of belonging. And at the edge of ourselves we mutate; we become other" (34).

The figure of Rufus is the fly in the ointment for many Baldwin scholars. The angst and decline and disturbing suicide of the novel's queer, black male character has been read as Baldwin's failure to fully embrace a disidentificatory project, a failure to imagine a fulfilled, individuated queer, black, male protagonist. Instead, the transgressive power and potential of the novel is displaced (some would argue misplaced) on a more palatable, bourgeois, white character, Eric. For Cohen, "Baldwin's fantasy of racial mixing and equality...was everywhere deflected onto sexual dynamics. To explore racial conflict as sexual was to bring it to the most private, individual terms Baldwin could imagine; it was to fantasize a relation between people nowhere impeded by an imbalance of power or inequality" (17). Critics of Baldwin recognize the limits placed on the narrative and the subject matter of Another Country by the social, cultural, and historical imperatives and ideologies of the time -- post-War anxiety, shifting gender roles, increased industrialization and capitalization, desegregation and civil rights, and black nationalism -- but offer little forgiveness for the killing off of Rufus. Cohen continues, "[T]he impossibility of representing a person simultaneously gay and black signals the crises of this structure: To be both, like Baldwin himself, was to find oneself impelled contradictorily by both individual volition and social forces. That Another Country cannot sustain a gay black subject...bespeaks the liability of remaining within a liberal humanist ideology" (17).

However, there is a more positive, more forgiving reading of the figure of Rufus. Rather than see lack or absence or failure in Baldwin's imagination, we can read the circumstances and collapse and denial of Rufus as a commentary on the sexual, social, and erotic economy of the novel and the world at large. And though Rufus dies early on in the novel, his skin, his sex, his ghost remains, lingers, touches everything and everyone. He and others participate in what Cohen describes as the "metonymic nature of desire in this text, which flows by transpositions and displacements through one character into another" (13). This metonymic chain of desire, from Rufus to Leona to Vivaldo to Ida to Cass to Richard to Eric to Yves, is webby and recursive allowing each of the characters to complicate and contrain one another in terms of their identities, sexualities, and embodiements. Though Rufus is not given the opportunity to play out in this exchange, as James Dievler says, "[H]is presence remains through the novel, reminding and offering hints to the other characters about the cost of socially constructed identity categories" (170).

---------------------------------------------------------------------

It is through these unsettled interpolations that Vivaldo matures, gains wisdom, and finally learns to love himself and love others. More importantly


Though Vivaldo muses on what it must be like for those who must be "condemned to women" or those "condemned to men" (585), it can be argued that the passage argues for a broader stroke and that Baldwin argues people must come to some terms of multiplicity, of those "condemned to another" or "others."