Heteronormativity, Negative Space, and the Color of Selfhood in Giovanni’s Room

What is particularly instructive about James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room is what is left out: Baldwin is a queer black American adopting (persuasively) the voice and stance of David, a white, queer, self-hating ex-pat suffering—and making others suffer—under the conflicting pressures to live an authentic life and to hide under the mask of his privileged position within white American masculinity. The effect of the novel is therefore essentially metatextual, signifying what a black man notices about white behavior and motives, and therefore expressing what a white subject has difficulty seeing in himself and his lived experience. In this way, the novel might actually be about a black queer experience through its use of negative space: The specter of black identity haunts its pages like a film negative, springing up in David at his most vulnerable, at times a sort of shadow-self. Baldwin’s novel thereby renders, with excruciating intimacy, a reversal of the white gaze. For he has a perceptional superpower: He is a black subject who, unlike white subjects, has access to both the rhetoric of white, postwar, heterosexual normativity—since the culture is saturated with it—and black double-consciousness, inflected by the coequal marginality of mid-century queer identity.

In Baldwin’s novel, blackness is conflated with queerness, and through it we are invited into the crisis of American postwar anxiety, where the borders of race and other signifiers of alterity—poverty, foreignness, gender, etc.—are vigilantly policed. This novel is evidence for the imbrication of blackness and queerness, as Baldwin states plainly in “Go the Way Your Heart Beats”: “The sexual question and the racial question,” he avers, “have always been entwined” (178). In my argument I will amend Loredana Bercuci’s contentions that by leveraging the “troubled psyche” of a white character to call out “the post-war consensus on ideals of white masculinity,” Baldwin is actually expressing a black experience (191). He accomplishes this through metaphors: By peopling the text with shadows that “darken” the metanarrative David depends on for his identity, we see how reified blackness and whiteness operate and are dependent on one another. As such, the text is involved in “undoing whiteness,” an argument proposed by Aliyyah Abur-Rahman in “Simply a Menaced Boy.” Moreover, the text literalizes Edward Said’s theory that the West’s black and brown “Others” are really shadow-selves of its own desires and terrors. When David endeavors to project his fears and desires “outside” so he, a white man, can occupy the rarified status of “inside,” it costs him his happiness—and, in many ways, his soul. Blackness is expressed in shadows that frighten David, but the blackness, by the end, gestures the way to his liberation as well, as Emilio Amedeo suggested in Queer Tidalectics: He argues that the text’s shadows become paired with water imagery, emblematic of movement and authentic self-expression, antidotes to joyless and brittle American manhood. This metaphorical qualities of blackness—shadows and tides—corroborate Josep M. Armengol’s contention that the novel “smuggles” blackness into places we “least expect them” (674). It foregrounds white characters, but the text wears, in Mae Henderson words, a kind of “racial drag”—a costume assumed deliberately to launch a critique of the machinations of power in postwar America (298). Indeed, I argue that far from making the text a “white life” novel, this racial drag is central to the text’s project of dismantling whiteness, a sine qua non that draws an outline of black queerness in crisper lines than it can draw white heteronormativity, the boundaries of which the novel blurs beyond recognition.

Racial Drag: Contamination Fears, Cramped Spaces, and Surrogate Selves

The beginning of the novel is its end, after the lines have already been blurred. Giovanni’s Room opens on David, standing before a window inside a house as the day dies. We watch him watching himself. His white reflection is framed in increasing blackness as the sun slowly sets on the eve of a terrible day of reckoning for the actions that are about to be chronicled in flashback. Thus a metaphor of darkness and lightness—specifically the way the category “white” requires “black” to reify it in the same way light requires dark for its definition—sets the stage for the novel’s complication of racial and sexual identity. Baldwin embeds the metaphor in a moment of narcissistic contemplation. There is no ambiguity as to David’s race: The author foregrounds both the visuals that mark him as white and the complicated history of white colonialism that whiteness is dependent on for its signification:

I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as the night falls… I watch my reflection in the darkening gleam of the windowpane. My reflection is tall, perhaps rather like an arrow, my blond hair gleams. My face is a face you have seen many times. My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past (Baldwin 3).

Thus we understand, however obliquely, that the story will be concerned with race and its relationship to circumscribed boundaries. Indeed, the novel goes on to explore the boundaries between many things: the genders, youth and age, heterosexual and homosexual, American and European, and predator and prey. These boundaries are being constantly, anxiously, drawn and redrawn, even as they are transgressed. The narrator seeks constantly to reassert them, but his own desires—his very personhood—keeps asserting itself, causing boundaries to bleed into one another. David sees himself everywhere, in everything. The “darkening gleam” is distinct from the gleam of his blond hair—but the same word describes both in successive sentences, conceptually linking the two. He is “darkening” metaphorically. He says he is “rather like an arrow” (as in “straight as an arrow,” perhaps) because the qualifier “rather” suggests that he isn’t. His face is a face “you have seen many times”—the historical White Man, not an individual with what Eve Sedgwick, in Epistemology of the Closet, calls a “nonce taxonomy” (23), a set of one with a uniqueness all his own. The blackness of his “darker past” dogs him so that he can’t see his reflection without the intrusion of its ghostly remains. It is difficult to read this passage and assume that the book is merely a “white life” novel: The ghosts of blackness curtail the white character’s movements, relationships, and selfhood from the book’s first image; they paralyze him and turn love and pleasure into ashes in his mouth. David is, in many ways, a slave to blackness, reliant on blackness to prop him up, give his life meaning, shape his identity. David asserts his dominance over the queer characters around him, the novel’s proxies for black characters. Without queerness/blackness as a point of contrast with his own normativity—once he can’t separate himself from the rest of le Milieu—he is left starting into the face of his own inner darkness. Such a confrontation with inner darkness, Baldwin suggests, is a component of growing up, of maturity—a way out of American innocence.

In Bercuci’s “James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as a Transgressive White-Life Novel,” we get the definition of a genre that has fallen out of favor: White-life novels “refer to works written by African-American writers which primarily center upon white characters,” a genre later denounced for “pandering to a white readership” (192). She notes, however, that “While most white-life novels slid into oblivion… this is not true in the case of Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room” (193). We do not need to delve deep to discover why: The novel tells a white story, but it reveals more about the operations of reified “whiteness” on whites and non-whites alike than it panders to it. It exposes the corrosive power of that meaningless dividing line, shored up by fantasy and prior conquest and literary and cultural dominance. Whiteness comes at a price that is far too high for David, and by extension for all of the white Western world. It is not just the soul of the antihero at the gallows, it is his sense of joy and meaning and love, not to mention the life of his non-white Other who literally pays, in the text, for David’s sins.

 Black and queer: These describe the author, but the author’s creation, David, uses these categories to set himself against his “Others.” In Orientalism, Edward Said frames how, where there exists an asymmetry of power, the powerful group shapes and manipulates a definition of an “Other” against which to define itself. He traces how European colonial powers created a stereotyped “Other” deliberately “as a sort of surrogate and even underground self,” depending for its strategy on the “flexible positional superiority” of the colonizer but embedding its fears and desires and fetishes into the flesh and soul of the Other (7). He notes how “The nexus of knowledge and power” (a tool of white supremacy) creates sciences that establish white and black in diametric opposition to one another (Said 27). Baldwin does this with metaphor. Bercuci calls the novel’s play of light and dark a “narrative chiaroscuro effect, wherein light is associated with the status quo and darkness with marginality and otherness, but also liberation” (198). The light/dark dichotomy establishes a hierarchy of power that is conveniently visual, but we watch these binaries leach the humanity from both sides. Liberation exists only in the spaces where they bleed together. As Sedgwick notes, “A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of categorization have been painstakingly inscribed in current critical and political thought: Gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation are pretty much the available distinctions” (22). These categories are too cramped for comfort, and as tools they are ill-equipped for successful navigation of a complex world. While whiteness affords David a kind of shelter-in-the-open, allowing him to sneer at his fellow man from the vantage of privilege, his soul is cramped within its confines; queerness/darkness free his soul, but the sanctuary they offer is the cramped shelter of the closet. As soon as David is tempted with liberation, he grows uncomfortable in its cramped space—literalized here in the dark, dirty room in which he lives with Giovanni—and retreats back to the safety of normativity. But the power to trade these spaces for one another (a power that David has but Baldwin, being black, does not) comes at a terrible price. This is certainly the case for David in the story, but it is also the case in Baldwin’s America, and the price of normativity is what Baldwin endeavors to explicate. The novel explores the violence done to self and Others in the performance of white heteronormativity, written at a point in U.S. history where the template for the American man was at a crisis point.

The Bible, the Post-War Identity Crisis, and the Threat of Alterity

In midcentury America, Otherness of all stripes was condemned, and the fear of reprisal caused many white people to scuttle to the refuge of white heteronormativity, because alterity became associated, in the McCarthy era, with communism. The white, Christian, American family, whose structure and behavior was defined and reinforced as communism’s opposite by political rhetoric, media, and the education system, not only bought white Americans a good amount of belonging and safety—if they could but conform—but was also considered an unshirkable patriotic duty. Bercuci notes that by the midcentury, “Homosexuality became entwined with the threat of communist infiltration during the Cold War” (197), and Mae G. Henderson discusses the oppressive normativity of the Cold War era in “James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room: Expatriation, ‘Racial Drag,’ and Homosexual Panic”—how tinged it was with paranoia. She notes how difference was seen as infiltration, creeping in to contaminate American purity and innocence. Any flirtation with difference increased Americans’ collective vulnerability to the Red Menace:

sexual deviance or “perversion” was linked to “subversion,” and the job of the government was, in the words of the Reverend Billy Graham, to expose “the pinks, the lavenders, and the reds who have sought refuge beneath the wings of the American eagle.” In other words, to be a “good American” meant to be “a real man”… Baldwin’s literary performance of racial passing provides for the author a position that allowed him both to explore his own sexual variance or “difference” and to critique the dominant national construction of masculinity (299-300).

And according to Stephan Whitfield’s The Culture of the Cold War, the era “prescribed that men were men and women were housewives” and “the overriding fear of the American parent… was that a son would become a ‘sissy’” (qtd. in Henderson 299). In Bercuci’s words, it was a time when “sociological theories were being developed that attempted to uphold the heteronormative ideal of the white American family” (195). We feel David grappling with the monolith of American normativity throughout the novel. I seek to extend Henderson’s claim that this novel is an act of “racial passing.” Indeed, I argue that Baldwin embeds American blackness within his white character—blackness in general as both a sort of creeping menace and promise of salvation, and American queer blackness as the outer edges of alterity and the moment of ultimate freedom and selfhood—against which David’s white body can only hold out for so long—though he does not reach it within the pages of the book, there is an implication that Giovanni’s death might have caused enough internal change for him to eventually get to a space where he can give up black/white and live in full color.

The frame story is concerned with reflection. At the opening and closing of the novel, David sees himself reflected in windows and mirrors, and he reflections metaphorically as well. His reflection complicates the lie of his whiteness again and again. Before finally going to bed at the narrative’s close, he stands “watching, in the windowpane, my reflection, which steadily becomes more faint. I seem to be fading away before my eyes” (Baldwin 166). Whiteness has become ghostly, a lie, increasingly replaced by a more bespoke palimpsest of selves. His final reflections (physical and mental) are linked to increased maturity. He flees the window to sleep but the bedroom mirror once again accosts him, where his disembodied whiteness rears again, this time shot through with something else:

The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation (Baldwin 168).

Giovanni has hitherto been a proxy for the text’s black body, sacrificed to white American masculinity, but we see in this passage that it is David, as well as Giovanni, who is “under sentence of death.” He now perceives the conflict between “white” and another thing that “moves” through him, as water moves. He has been resisting “revelation” but here we see it will haunt his life until he is ready to accept it. The word is no accident, revelation: David looks to a surprising source to make sense of his human complexity (the thing that “moves” in the body despite his desire to keep it “lean, hard, and cold”). The Bible, the text Americans like Billy Graham hide behind when they define normativity, becomes for David a lens through which to see his potential maturity and liberation. He quotes Corinthians 1 to himself, and the Biblical allusion becomes a subtle dig at the lie of American innocence: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: But when I became a man, I put away childish things” (KJB 1Cor. 13:11). In this, he frames a desire to grow up—to leave American “innocence” behind. “I long to make this prophecy come true,” David opines. “I long to crack that mirror and be free. I look at my sex, my troubling sex, and wonder how it can be redeemed… the key to my salvation… is hidden in my flesh” (David 168). Revelation, salvation—Biblical concepts made crucial here as a way out of the trap of American manhood.

The Bible is likewise invoked in the names of the two protagonists, David and Giovanni (King David adored his friend Jonathan, the Italian form of which is “Giovanni”). In Samuel 1, “Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul… Then said Jonathan unto David, Whatsoever thy soul desireth, I will even do it for thee” (18:3, 20:4) and in Samuel 2, after Jonathan’s death, King David laments, “very pleasant hast thou been unto me: Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women” (1:26). Thus Baldwin weaponizes the Bible, the text that is most often deployed to bludgeon those who threaten, by their very existence, American normativity. Similarly, he weaponizes David’s whiteness to show not only the damage its reification does on the non-normative characters in the book, but on white men themselves. Baldwin showcases what Bercuci refers to as

the notion of American manhood in the 1950s and its damaging role when it comes to me achieving full humanity as it places [white men] in an impossible relation both to women and to other men… American culture clung to a notion of innocence, which would recognize the complexity of human beings—a complexity which would include homosexuality” (196).

So in this respect, Henderson is correct in her assertion that the author’s project “necessitates a male protagonist… defined in terms of racialized whiteness” (298). But the necessity of a white protagonist does not, as Henderson argues, mean the text is “passing.” I argue that Baldwin embeds blackness everywhere as David’s shadow—as the alterity in queer desire, as literal darkness and dirt—that both generates the whiteness that is his birthright and also contaminates it and renders it unsafe.

Seeing Double: Blackness as the Long Shadow of American Identity

The shadow hounds David with threats of contamination and peril as powerfully as it lures him with the freshness of selfhood and joy. We see the first indication of this threat early in the novel, when he watches the sleeping body of the “quick and dark” Joey—Giovanni’s antecedent—after their sexual encounter (Baldwin 6). He wakes and looks at his new lover: “I awoke while Joey was still sleeping, curled like a baby on his side, toward me… Joey’s body was brown, was sweaty, the most beautiful creation I had ever seen till then” (Baldwin 8). But the intrusion of white masculine performativity sours the joy: “my own body suddenly seemed gross and crushing,” David says, “and the desire which was rising in me seemed monstrous” (Baldwin 9). It is whiteness that is monstrous here. Joey’s brown body is still beautiful. But that changes when Joey’s body

suddenly seemed the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I would lose my manhood… A cavern opened in my mind, black, full of rumor, suggestion, of half-heard, half-forgotten, half-understood stories, full of dirty words. I thought I saw my future in the cavern. I was afraid (9).

A cavern is a black opening, the inverted shadow-self in which he had just experienced “great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst” and from which “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” (Baldwin 8). The depth of his passion is not allowed by his American alter ego, which endeavors to keep him cold, rational, unemotional. The white alter ego prompts men to adhere to the duty of wife and procreation, but not to seek, even there, the “thirsty heat” which, for the narrator, is the purview of queer love. The settings for queer love link, in Henderson’s words, “homosexuality with the alien, exotic, or outlandish,” but these spaces are also the spaces of greatest happiness and authenticity (299). After David abandons the heat he shares with Giovanni, leaving his Italian lover to the guillotine, he describes himself thus: “my body is dull and white and dry” (168). How anathema to the authentic passions that moved through him like water, animating him and pointing the way to his salvation.

David resists Giovanni at first. We are unsurprised: He has spoken with sneering heteronormativity about the queer Parisians with whom he spends his time: He remarks that the denizens of le Milieu, the gay bar in which Giovanni works, “looked like a peacock garden and sounded like a barnyard… a man who wanted a woman would certainly have rather had a real one and a man who wanted a man would certainly not want one of them” (Baldwin 27). He is a mouthpiece for normativity here. He compares marginalized people to beasts the way American racism deploys animal imagery to describe black people. He depicts a transgender blond in the bar (using the male pronoun and the masculine form of one of the only adjectives in English that declines by gender, “blond/blonde”): “his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people’s stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did not—so grotesquely—resemble human beings” (Baldwin 27). Such judgments make him feel superior, but we understand he is merely externalizing his own self-disgust. He is among them, after all. His dehumanizing metaphors are expressions of the same monstrousness he felt with Joey, not accurate portrayals of the vulnerable inhabitants of the bar. Later, David describes Guillaume and Jacques in terms that evoke both blackness and contamination, as “dirty old men” whose “filthy” thoughts “bubbled upward out of them like fountain of black water”—though his assessment might, in this case, be apt (Baldwin 45). And while walking along the quay, David describes the mist as “clinging like a curse to the men who slept beneath the bridges—one of whom flashed by beneath us, very black and lone” (Baldwin 45). The curse is within: He is “very black and lone.” In “In the Dark Room: Homosexuality and/as Blackness in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room,” Josep M. Armengol  notes that “David tried to affirm his heterosexuality by projecting his own repressed homosexuality onto the homosexual demimonde of Paris, which he sees as dirty and dark” (682). The novel dramatizes how the performance of whiteness sterilizes heat and passion, winnowing David down into something “dull and white and dry.” Blackness defines him, haunts him, and tempts him..

In “‘Simply a Menaced Boy’: Analogizing Color, Undoing Dominance in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room,” Aliyyah I. Abur-Rahman decries that the “label ‘homosexual novel’ and the critical obsession with the novel’s white characters have obscured many of the novel’s underlying critiques of the machinations of power” (Abur-Rahman 478), noting that in the novel’s “superficially all-white context,” Baldwin embeds the same racial signifiers that can be found elsewhere in his writing:

It was Baldwin who gave African Americans the word “unlivable” and “unspeakable” and “unanswerable” as the terms that most approximate … the experience of being a black person in the U.S. at any point in history… [because] the African American, the woman, and the (so called) sexual deviant are doomed symbols of the U. S. cultural imagination, where the fears, fetishes, and fantasies of the straight, white bourgeois mainstream are deposited (477).

She goes on to remark that Giovanni, until the end, is a stand-in black character: “In the text, Giovanni, David’s darker, poorer, abused, and finally executed Italian lover, undergoes the classic experiences of the degraded figure of both the African American and the homosexual” (Abur-Rahman 482). The door to Giovanni’s execution, after all, is described as “the gateway he has sought so long out of this dirty world, this dirty body” (Baldwin 168). The revelation David seeks never quite comes, but at the novel’s close, we see he is getting closer to it. In describing the older man, Jacques, he remarks in passing, “I understand now that the contempt I felt for him involved my self-contempt,” a moment of rare self-awareness (Baldwin 23); and another time he notes that everyone “goes down the same dark road—and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright” (25). Blackness haunts David in the story—as shadows, impulses, tricks of light, and in the novel’s tragic denouement. By the end Giovanni is a kind of Christ figure here, dying so that David can understand his nonce taxonomy. In this final Biblical allusion, David has to potential to be a sort of Longinus, implicated in Giovanni’s death—but, if strong enough, able to learn from it.

Conclusion: Crushing Whiteness, Fluid Blackness, Full Color Life

Though there are no black characters, Giovanni’s Room is not a “white-life” novel. Instead, it shines an unflatteringly harsh light on the dominant—though ultimately suicidal—project that is midcentury white American whiteness. Normativity functions as a kind of straitjacket that keeps David suspended, unable to mature. The few character strokes he is allowed (“manly,” “Teutonic,” “cold”) must be meticulously performed and maintained with a singular vigilance that is close to self-harm. Baldwin demonstrates how the project of whiteness is a parasite that kills its host as well as its “Others.” The narrative shows him beating back each dark, errant desire that rises in him in an exhausting game of whack-a-mole, until not one but three lives lie in tatters. His love can’t survive the parasite of white masculinity. In seeking the safety of normativity, David spreads the parasite to everyone he touches. The narrator’s disavowal of alterity costs him his happiness, humanity, and lover and, by the end of the story, has paid few perceivable dividends. Blackness is smuggled into the text in the form of darkness and filth, but all along there are other metaphors for alterity, in water and cleanses and flows, signifying the potential for metamorphosis, adaptation, mature love, and liberation. David’s humanity and capacity to love are here part of the project of blackness.

Whiteness and all it represents (intensified by a Cold War “Us/Them” mentality) is the novel’s villain. The specter of blackness that haunts the book’s pages signifies, in its blank outlines, the way white Americans create and maintain the binary of white/black, throwing all kinds of other alterity on top of blackness (including queerness), such that the room for individual personhood shrinks and finally disappears. Paris is neither represented as the utopia for black and gay Americans that many of Baldwin’s contemporaries regarded it to be, nor is expatriation sufficient to cure him of the disease of normativity reinforced by family and country. His character is weak and cruel, but Baldwin evinces empathy for him, drawing a parallel between a white man’s experience of being queer and a black man’s experience of being American. The white man must occupy an impossible space—rational, asexual, strong, masculine, superior—and he needs blackness as a point of contrast; but at the same time he must continuously annihilate the blackness within as a dangerous contaminant. We get the sense, reading Giovanni’s Room, that black men like Baldwin, who have no possibility of achieving American normativity due to a physically obvious marker of alterity, are both free of the crushing pressure to conform and also menaced by that same conformity, as impoverished, foreign-born Giovanni is. Giovanni’s Room is a black book. A book without black characters can still instruct white readers about the experiences of their Others: David, in brief, “dark” moments, learns what blackness feels like—and what it could feel like—if he (if we) could only mature into it.

Works Cited

Abur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. “‘Simply a Menaced Boy’: Analogizing Color, Undoing Dominance in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.” African American Review, Vol. 41, No. 3, Fall 2007, pp. 477-86.

Amideo, Emilio. “The Sub(merged) Text in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.” Queer Tidalectics, Northwestern U. P. 2021.

Armengal, Josep M. “In the Dark Room: Homosexuality and/as Blackness in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.” Signs, Vol. 37, No. 3 Spring 2012, pp. 671-93.

Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. First Vintage International, 2013.

——————. Giovanni’s Room. First Vintage International, 2013.

——————. “Go the Way Your Heart Beats.” Interview by Richard Goldstein, in James Baldwin: The Legacy, Simon & Schuster, 1989, pp. 173-85.

Bercuci, Loredana. “James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as a Transgressive White-Life Novel.” Philologia, Vol. 66, No. 1, 2021, pp. 191-204.

Henderson, Mae G. “James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room: Expatriation, ‘Racial Drag,’ and Homosexual Panic.” Black Queer Studies, Duke U.P., 2005, pp. 298-322.

Hughes, Langston. “Theme for English B.” Poetry Foundation, Accessed May 14 2022, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47880/theme-for-english-b.

King James Bible. “1 Samuel.” University of Michigan Online, Accessed 16 May 2022.

——————. “1 Corinthians.” University of Michigan Online, Accessed 16 May 2022.

Said, Edward. “Introduction.” Orientalism, Pantheon, 1978, pp. 1-28.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press, 2008.