The Moral Territories of James Baldwin’s ANOTHER COUNTRY
Another Country (1962) is James Baldwin’s third novel (and fifth published book). Many of its topics — race, racism, sexual fluidity — fit perfectly in today’s social and political discourse. And not just in terms of the choice of topics, but in Baldwin’s particular approach to them: a fully open reckoning with subjects that dominate the emotional lives of an entire society yet often stymy direct discussion. They’re so freighted. So bound up with our moral identities.
Baldwin’s signature frankness is on display from start to finish in this novel, but his characterization of the people who populate his book is crafted to suggest the opposite. Evasion. Enclosure. The ideas the characters grapple with tend to outsize them, turning them inward and fencing them in. They struggle to reach beyond the borders that define the specific social and emotional challenge each is drawn to represent.
Artistic ambition is a key motif in Another Country. It functions as a metaphor for the ill-fated emotional ambition that is embodied by the novel’s several main characters. They dream of achieving a full expression of themselves through art, yet they are bruised as they press against the confines of their distinct limitations.
They are artists, but they are not great artists.
In one way or another, each of the central characters is engaged in an artistic project that he or she cannot live up to — at least not within the frame of the narrative.
Ida wants to sing. She is the sister of jazz drummer Rufus who succumbs to despair early in the novel — a despair that is loosely linked to the fact of his race in midcentury America (he is Black) but also linked to a profound ambiguity regarding his place in the world (which is not entirely linked to race).
Ida’s singing talent is “in development” as she takes the first steps into a musical career. She doesn’t improve as a singer over the course of the novel, but the special something that draws people to her remains intact, an undying strength that often leads her to lash out, spark confrontations, and generally militate against intimacy, friendship and any concern for others.
This quality is at once the source of her allure and the mechanism of her moral failure. It controls her and shapes quite a bit of her bitter dialogue, which is anchored to thoughts on the impossibility of mutual understanding across the racial divide of the era.
Her authenticity is thus tied to a social politics that forms her character as well as the context for that character. She is a servant to an idea that she did not create and that she cannot overcome. This fact works in the novel to provide a figurative depiction of the experience of Blackness.
However, it’s Ida’s limitations that form the essence of her sensibility and these limitations connect her to the novel’s other central character, Vivaldo.
Vivaldo is a young White man with an ambition to be a writer. He fears that he cannot surmount the challenge of successfully finishing his book. He exists also in a state of attachment to people around him who he cannot fully love or find sympathy for. Though he suggests that he loves Ida and has an abiding affection for Eric, Vivaldo is starkly defined — within the many sections of the novel that convey his emotional life — as a man cut off from others.
He turns a blind eye to Ida’s affair with a music executive and suppresses self-knowledge as well. He clings to Ida as if she is an idea he needs to think through for his book — one that appears to him partially formed and that stubbornly refuses to reveal itself completely. Unable to bring the idea fully to light, Vivaldo instead dwells in the uncomfortable awareness that he is being kept in the dark, victim of a secret that he unfortunately covets.
Alongside this conscious “unknowing,” he also denies his homoerotic attraction to Eric. And he rejects a longtime friend when that friendship becomes emotionally inconvenient. He does this twice.
Ida is right about the impossibility of mutual understanding. In the character of Vivaldo, Baldwin gives us a figurative representation of a specific sort of White ignorance — well-meaning, full-hearted, but ultimately incapable of entering into the inner life of another. Vivaldo’s failure to complete his novel becomes a metaphor for this inability, this notable limitation of moral imagination.
Ida and Vivaldo can both be said to be defined by the line that divides them, defined by their limitations, which are deeply and permanently socially ingrained.
At a point late in the novel, Ida tells Vivaldo, “You people think you’re free. That means you think you’ve got something other people want — or need. […] And you do, in a way. But it isn’t what you think it is. And you’re going to find out, too, just as soon as some of those other people start getting what you’ve got now.” She is referencing Vivaldo’s painful situation, being in love with someone who he cannot understand or truly sympathize with. “I feel sorry for them,” she says,” I feel sorry for you. I even feel kind of sorry for myself.”
They will suffer the pain of division, remaining always in opposition to one another, defining one another through difference. That suffering might become a transformative knowledge, but these characters — as we meet them on the page — are not yet transformed.
In a novel that is explicit in its discussions of sex, sexuality, race and racism, these characters end up being ironic (or at least seeming ironic). They can only express the novel’s most hopeful themes in the negative. They are closed off. They are inversions of the ideals that Baldwin manages to articulate in Another Country, though he seems to be almost unconvinced of them himself.
These ideals: To be capable of first recognizing one’s own truth. Then finding the strength to act on that truth and be open about it.
Without exception, the steps that Baldwin’s characters take which would lead toward self-actualization or act as a bridge across a social divide are steps accompanied by betrayal and destruction.
In order for Vivaldo to accept his own feelings, he has to cheat on Ida. In order for Ida to maintain her inner flame, she has to cheat on Vivaldo. In order for the two of them to be together, they have to admit that a racial reckoning is necessary — but only somewhere down the line — and for the time being they will have to love each other while hurting each other. And that is how it is going to be.
Another Country’s secondary characters experience the same arc, taking steps toward an honest assessment of themselves by compromising the most important relationship in their lives. They invoke a certain dreadful risk, opening an abyss beneath their own feet, experiencing the great jeopardy that Baldwin attaches to any confrontation with the truth:
Now that his flight was so rigorously approaching its end, a light appeared, a backward light, throwing his terrors into relief.
And what were these terrors? They were buried beneath the impossible language of the time, lived underground where nearly all of the time’s true feeling spitefully and incessantly fermented. Precisely, therefore, to the extent that they were inexpressible, were these terrors mighty; precisely because they lived in the dark were their shapes obscene.
While Baldwin’s characters find value in this process, reaching a kind of assurance of authenticity, they also expose a fault-line of personal flaws — a selfishness that unites each character in the novel and which contains the novel’s most bitter and baffling theme.
Maybe this is a book of bifurcated expression. One man’s inner life, with all its conflicts, rendered in a set of figures where each character takes on a specific social and emotional challenge that was true for the writer’s own life. But there is no integration in the end. Each challenge exists separately. Each emotional conflict has its own social configuration, its own space within the text, its own territory.
It’s not a novel that occupies a single proverbial country or that even points the way to one. Instead, Another Country leaves us with a suggestion that each division of self has to stand on its own, each a unique psychological puzzle, a problem to be reconciled only by means of its own separate peace.
In their moral identities, each character suffers in their own country. And while the achievement of honesty might do the work of garnering some authenticity within that territory, the framework of each moral identity is too large, too socially ingrained to be overcome.
