ARGUMENTS
BALDWIN'S BURDEN
Less and less today are the lives of
individuals
developed and
explored by novelists. Many writers might be called "literary" social
scientists, spending their major energies on descriptions of social strug–
gle, cultural change, or clinical psychopathology. Their novels reflect
this kind of categorical thinking as much as their essays. Characters are
not explored with a compassionate eye for how extraordinarily complex–
marvelously so, terrifyingly so-human beings are. Characters tend to be
merely illustrative of the emerging Jewish middle class in America, of
the Negro struggle for survival, of the problem of identity in college stu–
dents, the nature of the unconscious in children or adults. Character
portrayal by way of
appreciating
the particular has given way to the
meticulous study and representation of various groups and "problems."
Ironically (should I say unselfishly?) even the individual author's
private life, let alone his characters', submits to this new and impera–
tive fashion. James Baldwin, for instance, isn't satisfied with a letter
from a region in his mind. He can't be satisfied simply with relating
a critical time in his early manhood to the tragedies of our country. He
is impelled to expand his feelings, make them into the feelings of all
Negroes, make his struggle theirs, his conclusions their demands, his
frustrations their accusation, his anger their treat. He is determined to
offer a general truth out of the sphere of his own life, and has a
grandiose remedy for our social ills. For Baldwin-a sharp critic of
America's vulgar piety-it is love, love, love.
Baldwin translates his own adolescent agony into the hate in all
Negroes for whites and then predicts the white man's inevitable doom
unless he learns a radically new way of getting along with the Negro.
In this painful, alternately hopeless and hopeful trek, with its mingled
overtones of augury and fierce accusation, we pass through one man's
encounter with a fearful and senselessly oppressive world to his final
