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I first read James Baldwin’s classic second novel, from 1956, when I was 14 or 15 and pulled it from a shelf of “gay and lesbian literature” without knowing anything about it. I’ve often said that I feel like it saved my life—that it radically reoriented my relationship to dignity. The novel has a similar effect on generations of queer people, and it’s impossible to imagine queer literature without it. And yet it’s very hard to square the book’s depiction of queer life with the tenets of our current-day sense of “positive representation.” How is it possible that a book in which everyone ends up dead or devastated—in which it is impossible to imagine enduring love between gay men—has been so powerfully affirming for so many generations of queer people? How can Giovanni’s Room complicate and enrich our ideas about how art helps us to live?
We’ll consider these questions as we pay attention to the novel’s very brilliant formal qualities, including its Jamesian approach to psychology; its remarkably expressive style; its inhabitation of place and approach to the classic genre of the American abroad; its writing of conflicted and ambivalent desire; its brilliant manipulation of time; its morally complex, tragically flawed, limited narrator.
I first read James Baldwin’s classic second novel, from 1956, when I was 14 or 15 and pulled it from a shelf of “gay and lesbian literature” without knowing anything about it. I’ve often said that I feel like it saved my life—that it radically reoriented my relationship to dignity. The novel has a similar effect on generations of queer people, and it’s impossible to imagine queer literature without it. And yet it’s very hard to square the book’s depiction of queer life with the tenets of our current-day sense of “positive representation.” How is it possible that a book in which everyone ends up dead or devastated—in which it is impossible to imagine enduring love between gay men—has been so powerfully affirming for so many generations of queer people? How can Giovanni’s Room complicate and enrich our ideas about how art helps us to live?
We’ll consider these questions as we pay attention to the novel’s very brilliant formal qualities, including its Jamesian approach to psychology; its remarkably expressive style; its inhabitation of place and approach to the classic genre of the American abroad; its writing of conflicted and ambivalent desire; its brilliant manipulation of time; its morally complex, tragically flawed, limited narrator.