Author: James Baldwin
themes
- What happens to you when you can’t love anybody (James Baldwin on Giovanni’s Room)
- You’re dangerous
- No way of learning humility
- Suffering of other people
- How to use suffering to get from one place to another
- Suffering of other people
- More substance than meets the eye
- Freedom and will (^ca954e)
- Mooring posts ^ca954e
- Contrasting views of time ^0472b7
- Time is a parade for Americans
- Time is water, we are the fish
- Time as a vehicle of change
- Time as a vessel that carries us
- Movement of fate
- Water imagery
- Surrender, drifting with the current, giving up control
- Water imagery
- Desperation, emotional poverty, innocence, loss, disgust
- Chemistry, magnetism, time, water, succumbing to time’s will
- Escape from the body
- Shame and self-loathing
- Losing innocence as an inevitable pain of life
- Eden as Giovanni’s room
- Individualistic, isolated attitudes of Americans
- Measure
- Rationality triumphs over the raw human experience
- Love
- Loving freely, shame & repression, paternal advice, the magic of a fleeting moment, letting go at the precipice, mother motif
- Penetrates the soul
- Giving your all to the other, uninhibited
- Vulnerability
- Love is the desire for the power to make another happy
- Jumping into the deep end
- Lust is merely dipping into the surface
- Opening up and feeling each minute movement of the currents within another’s soul as if they were your own
- Being watched
- Voyeuristic desire to live out a fantasy romance
motifs
- Decomposition
- Instability
- Uncertainty
- Anxiety
- Stillness
- Stagnation, trepidation
- Motion
- Metamorphosis
- Home
- Mother
- Room
- Symbolism for a person’s soul
characters
- David
- Running from the past, denying self, only to find self rooted in the same place where he left it
- Constant motion in contrast with stillness
- Finally allows self to catch up
- Isolated experience of eros
- The desire for an anchor, refuge in another
- Foundation of David’s character: he does not want his father to know him
- Distance
- Never touching through the handkerchief
- Resentment toward change
- Knowing you’ve loved and will never love the same again
- Rejection of self
- Fragile masculinity
- Uniting contradictions: “I smiled and really felt at that moment that Judas and the Savior had met in me” (111)
- Betrayal
- Really good at reading others behind their walls, yet does not show much himself
- Trapped by own nature
- Running from love
- Claustrophobia within the body
- Jacques
- Acceptance
- Retrospective advice to younger self
- A desire to remedy the past
- bitterness, reflection of the other → fear and regret
- David & Giovanni’s relationship
- Push and pull, a persona created to penetrate defenses meets someone who cannot be approached
- Pain of being unable to love back entirely, of not loving freely
- Wanting stability in an inherently unstable relationship
- David eventually refers to the room as “ours”
- Falls apart slowly but steadily. David is too scared to face himself, and Giovanni is too afraid to lose David
- Fear breaking love apart, eating it from the inside out
- Sue
- Contrasting with Giovanni’s flood of emotion
- Emptiness of hookup culture to fill a void, an unattainable desire ^bc97fb
- Wishing for wishes to be fulfilled through the flesh
- Using her to confirm that he can still love a woman
- Can he still be convincing?
- Will he ever be the same?
- Hella
- Loves David because she must love to survive
questions
- What does it mean to be a man? To be a woman? To be?
structure & style
- Frame narrative
- Shifts focus from events to process
- From what to how
- Makes you read slower
- From what to how
- Shifts focus from events to process
- Novel of confession
- The writing style weaves important events with introspection
- Variety of internal conditions
notes
- Media is full of paradigms of heterosexual romance
- Yet David has to make his own discovery
- Profound effect Giovanni has on him
- Not an imitation
- Love as an apocalypse
- Profound effect Giovanni has on him
- Yet David has to make his own discovery
- The chemistry between Giovanni and David is not willed at all
- Room as an extension of self
- Tumultuous inner currents
- Describing people by the objects in their proximity
- Reflection of mental state
highlights
And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no one to watch, no penalties attached — it was this last fact which was our undoing, for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom. – p. 5
But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life. – p. 5
Now, from this night, this coming morning, no matter how many beds I find myself in between now and my final bed, I shall never be able to have any more of those boyish, zestful affairs —which are, really, when one thinks of it, a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation. People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted. – p. 5
I feel in myself now a faint, a dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst. But out of this astounding intolerable pain came joy; we gave each other joy that night. It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love. – p. 8
Note: Remembering a love that will never again be
He wanted no distance between us; he wanted me to look on him as a man like myself. But I wanted the merciful distance of father and son, which would have permitted me to love him. – p. 17
Note: Inferno of the same vs. apocalypse of the Other 🔗 The Agony of Eros
For I am or I was — one of those people who pride themselves on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all — a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named — but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. – p. 20
🔖 “Measure!” cried Giovanni, “ah, these people and their measure! They measure the gram, the centimeter, these people, and they keep piling all the little scraps they save, one on top of the other, year in and year out, all in the stocking or under the bed and what do they get out of all this measure? A country which is falling to pieces, measure by measure, before their eyes. Measure. I do not like to offend your ears by saying all the things I am sure these people measure before they permit themselves any act whatever… . ” – p. 36
Note: Rationality triumphs over the raw human experience
“Tell me,” he said, “what is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. What are they waiting for?” “Well,” I said, feeling myself being led by Giovanni into deep and dangerous water, “I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel.” – p. 38
“I could say the same about yours,” said Jacques. “There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain. You ought to have some apprehension that the man you see before you was once even younger than you are now and arrived at his present wretchedness by imperceptible degrees.” – p. 55
“Why are they—shameful?” I asked him. “Because there is no affection in them, and no joy. It’s like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.” – p. 56
“Love him,” said Jacques, with vehemence, “love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last? since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, hélas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty—they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty; you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.” – p. 57
“Somebody,” said Jacques, “your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour—and in the oddest places!—for the lack of it.” – p. 58
“If dirty words frighten you,” said Giovanni, “I really do not know how you have managed to live so long. People are full of dirty words. The only time they do not use them, most people I mean, is when they are describing something dirty.” – p. 81
And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon. And, watching his face, I realized that it meant much to me that I could make his face so bright. I saw that I might be willing to give a great deal not to lose that power. And I felt myself flow toward him, as a river rushes when the ice breaks up. – p. 83
🔖 I was to destroy this room and give to Giovanni a new and better life. This life could only be my own, which, in order to transform Giovanni’s, must first become a part of Giovanni’s room. – p. 88
Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part; beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected. – p. 90
He made me think of home—perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. – p. 92
It was a gesture of great despair and I knew that she was giving herself, not to me, but to that lover who would never come. – p. 99
“If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.” – p. 137