Download Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964) by James Baldwin

Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964)
by
James Baldwin
I of I
Realism, Naturalism, Socialism
“Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1943)
In 1949 the young New York essayist James Baldwin, a protégé of Wright,
published Everybody’s Protest Novel, a criticism of protest fiction from
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Native Son. Baldwin’s charge
that the protest novel was prone to overlook the complexities of human
beings.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous
sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. ... But this, let us say,
was beyond Mrs. Stowe’s powers; she was not so much a novelist as an
impassioned pamphleteer[….] Our passion for categorization, life neatly
fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; a
confusion, a breakdown of meaning."
• Baldwin’s fiction increasing turns toward the absorption of avant-garde
(often French) genres of narrative and poetry. His theater is not exempt
from this tendency.
Brecht and Epic Theater
From his late twenties Brecht remained a life-long committed Marxist who, in developing the
combined theory and practice of his ‘’epic theatre’', to explore the theatre as a forum for political
ideas. and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism.
Brechtian theatre articulated popular themes and forms with avant-garde formal experimentation to
create a modernist realism that stood in sharp contrast both to its Psychological and socialist varieties
]
Epic theatre incorporates a mode of acting that utilizes what he calls gestus. The epic form describes
both a type of written drama and a methodological approach to the production of plays: "Its qualities
of clear description and reporting and its use of choruses and projections as a means of commentary
earned it the name 'epic'." The audience should always be aware that it is watching a play: "It is
most important that one of the main features of the ordinary theatre should be excluded from [epic
theatre]: the engendering of illusion, producing the key (and perhaps paradoxically named effect of
alientation).
In epic theatre requires actors to play characters believably without convincing either the audience or
themselves that they have "become" the characters. Actors frequently address the audience directly
out of character ("breaking the fourth wall") and play multiple roles. Brecht thought it was important
that the choices the characters made were explicit, and tried to develop a style of acting wherein it
was evident that the characters were choosing one action over another. For example, a character could
say, "I could have stayed at home, but instead I went to the shops."
Staging Nationalism and Integration in Epic
Theatre
Talking Points
1) The use of Brecht’s epic mode to call attention to call
attention to the construction and dimensions of
segregation and a de facto Black Nationalist community.
2) The Use of the Skeleton Courtroom: Putting NonViolent protest, segregation, and the race problem on
trial in the absence of American justice.
3) The Church as a symbol of the black collective and
the importance of its split staging vis-à-vis the issues of
non-violent protest and militant Black nationalism.
4) Staging Plessy vs. Ferguson- Visually representing the
absurdity of “separate but equal”
5) Using the technique of alienation to stage
And, in so doing represent, this aspect of
The black experience: that one must “play black”
6) Using the Alienation of Epic Theater to Stage Black
Nationalism: Forcing the
Audience to contemplate its role at a distance
&) The implications of linking racial terrorism to a
Self consciously-constructed show.
The Play’s Political Problematic
Violence, Non-Violence, Justice
Talking Points
1) Lorenzo as
Militant Black
Nationalist
2) Non-Violent
Protest and the
Possibility of
Justice
3) Violent Protest
and the
Impossibility of
Survival
4) Segregation and
Nationalism
Staging the Protest of Staging
Traumatic Testimony:
Medgar Evers and Emitt Till
The accident, that is, as it emerges in Freud and is passed on through other
trauma narratives, does not simply represent the violence of the collision but
also conveys the impact of its very incomprehensibility. What returns to
haunt the victim, these stories tell us, is […] the reality of the way that its
violence has not yet been fully known.
The story of the accident thus refers us, indirectly, to the unexpected
reality—the locus of referentiality—of the traumatic story. (Caruth, Cathy.
Unclaimed Experience: Explorations in Trauma and Memory )
As a relation to events, [traumatic] testimony seems to be comprised of bits
and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that
have not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be
constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in
excess of our frame of reference. What the testimony does not offer,
however, is a completed statement, a totalizable account of those events. In
the testimony, language is in process and trial, it does not possess itself as a
conclusion, as the consternation of a verdict or the self-transparency of
knowledge. Testimony is, in other words, a discursive practice, as opposed
to a pure theory. To testify— to vow to tell to promise and produce one’s
own speech as material evidence for truth— is to accomplish a speech act,
rather than to simply formulate a statement. As a performative speech act,
testimony in effect addresses what in history is action that exceeds any
substantialized significance, and what in happening is action that dynamically
explodes any conceptual reifications and any constative delimitations.
(Felman, Shoshana. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis, and History)
What is ghastly and almost hopeless about our racial
situation is that the crimes we have committed are so
great and unspeakable that acceptance of this
knowledge would lead literally to madness. The human
being, the, in order to protect himself; closes his eyes,
compulsively, repeats his crimes, and enters a spiritual
darkness no one can describe. (James Baldwin)
May 28, 1963
The assassination of
Medgar Evers (two
white juries deadlock
and do
not convict
De la Beckwith)
The murder of Emitt Till
(1958), (results in two
acquittals
Traumatic Testimony
Epic Theatre, Black Aesthetics, and the Truth of the
Incomprehensible
Talking Points
1) Traumatic Memory: The
Mechanics of Repetitive
Atrocity
2) Religious Testimony
3) Trauma and Testimony:
4) The Call and Response of
the Black Church
Aesthetic
5) Epic Theatre and
Cognitive Frames
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
Novelist, Essayist, Playwright, Civil Rights Activist
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Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953
Notes of a Native Son, 1955
Giovanni's Room, 1956
Nobody Knows My Name, 1961
Another Country, 1962
The Fire Next Time, 1963
Blues for Mister Charlie (play)
Nothing Personal (with Richard Avedon), 1964
Going to Meet the Man, 1965
The Amen Corner (play), 1968
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, 1968
A Rap on Race (with Margaret Mead), 1971
No Name in the Street, 1972
A Dialogue (with poet Nikki Giovanni), 1973
If Beale Street Could Talk, 1974
The Devil Finds Work, 1976
Just Above My Head, 1979
The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 1985
An Absurd Impulse
“Kazan asked me at the end of 1958 if I would be
interested in working in the Theatre. It was a
generous offer, but I did not react with great
enthusiasm because I did not them, and don’t do
now, have much respect for what goes on in American
Theatre. I am not convinced that it is a Theatre; it
seems to me a series, merely, of commercial
speculations, stale repetitious and timed. I certainly
didn’t see much future for me, and was profoundly
unwilling to risk my morale and talent—my life in
endeavors which could only increase a level of
frustration dangerously high.” (James Baldwin)
Baldwin hints, here, as to the other
Philosophical and Theatrical movements informing his
play: existentialism and absurdism. He, in essence,
insinuates that he will write an absurdist play about
the absurdity of race in America.
Existentialism and the Notion of the Absurd: The Absurdity
of Non-Violent and Violent Protest
The play then, for me, takes place in Plaguetown U.S. A, now,
the plague is race, the plague is our concept of Christianity;
and the raging plague has the power to destroy every human
relationship. (James Baldwin)
Kierkegaard
The absurd encounter can also arouse a "leap of faith", a term
derived from one of Kierkegaard's early pseudonyms,
Johannes de Silentio (although the term was not used by
Kierkegaard himself[ where one believes that there is more
than the rational life (aesthetic or ethical). To take a "leap of
faith", one must act with the "virtue of the absurd" (as
Johannes de Silentio put it), where a suspension of the ethical
may need to exist. This faith has no expectations, but is a
flexible power initiated by a recognition of the absurd.
However, Camus states that because the leap of faith escapes
rationality and defers to abstraction over personal
experience, the leap of faith is not absurd. Camus considers
the leap of faith as "philosophical suicide", rejecting both this
and physical suicide
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What is the Absurd? It is, as may quite easily be seen, that I, a
rational being, must act in a case where my reason, my
powers of reflection, tell me: you can just as well do the one
thing as the other, that is to say where my reason and
reflection say: you cannot act and yet here is where I have to
act... The Absurd, or to act by virtue of the absurd, is to act
upon faith ... I must act, but reflection has closed the road so I
take one of the possibilities and say: This is what I do, I cannot
do otherwise because I am brought to a standstill by my
powers of reflection
•
– Kierkegaard, Søren, Journals, 1849
Camus
Although the notion of the 'absurd' is pervasive in all of the literature of Albert Camus,
The Myth of Sisyphus is his most extensive work on the subject. In it, Camus
considers absurdity as a confrontation, an opposition, a conflict or a "divorce"
between two ideals. Specifically, he defines the human condition as absurd, as
the confrontation between man's desire for significance, meaning and clarity on
the one hand – and the silent, cold universe on the other. He continues that
there are specific human experiences evoking notions of absurdity. Such a
realization or encounter with the absurd leaves the individual with a choice:
suicide is a leap of faith or recognition. He concludes that recognition is the only
defensible option.
For Camus, suicide is a "confession" that life is not worth living; it is a choice implicitly
declaring that life is "too much". Suicide offers the most basic "way out" of
absurdity: the immediate termination of the self and its place in the universe.
Lastly, a person can choose to embrace his or her own absurd condition. According to
Camus, one's freedom – and the opportunity to give life meaning – lies in the
recognition of absurdity. If the absurd experience is truly the realization that
the universe is fundamentally devoid of absolutes, then we as individuals are
truly free. "To live without appeal",[] as he puts it, is a philosophical move to
define absolutes and universals subjectively, rather than objectively. The
freedom of humans is thus established in a human's natural ability and
opportunity to create his own meaning and purpose; to decide (or think) for
him- or herself. The individual becomes the most precious unit of existence, as
he or she represents a set of unique ideals which can be characterized as an
entire universe in its own right. In acknowledging the absurdity of seeking any
inherent meaning, but continuing this search regardless, one can be happy,
gradually developing his or her own meaning from the search alone.
Camus states in The Myth of Sisyphus: "Thus I draw from the absurd three
consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere
activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to
death, and I refuse suicide.”
Existentialism as Heroic Crisis of Faith:
The Inadequacy and Inescapability of Racial Paradigms
Talking Points
1) B.C.- Moving Forward in
the absence of meaning
as embracing Existential
heroism
2) The harmful effects of
pacifism on racial uplift
and identity
3) The race problem in light
of the human race
problem as posited by the
Existentialists
4) Meridians “B.C.” as a
rejection of foundational
ideologies
5) The incompatibility of
ideology and the
complexity of lived
experience
Existentialism, Absurdism, and Theater of the Absurd
Absurdism is a philosophy stating that the efforts of humanity to find inherent meaning in the universe ultimately fail (and hence are absurd), because no such meaning
exists, at least in relation to the individual. "The Absurd," therefore, is commonly used in philosophical discourse to refer to the clash between the human search for meaning
and the human inability to find any. In this context absurd does not mean "logically impossible," but rather "humanly impossible]
In absurdist philosophy, the Absurd arises out of the fundamental disharmony between the individual's search for meaning and the apparent meaninglessness of the
universe. As beings looking for meaning in a meaningless world, humans have three ways of resolving the dilemma. Kierkegaard and Camus describe the solutions in their
works: Suicide(or, "escaping existence"): a solution in which a person simply ends one's own life. Both Kierkegaard and Camus dismiss the viability of this option. Religious
belief in a transcendental realm or being: a solution in which one believes in the existence of a reality that is beyond the Absurd, and, as such, has meaning. Kierkegaard
stated that a belief in anything beyond the Absurd requires a non-rational but perhaps necessary religious acceptance in such an intangible and empirically unprovable thing
(now commonly referred to as a leap of “faith” However, Camus regarded this solution as "philosophical suicide".
Acceptance of the Absurd: a solution in which one accepts and even embraces the Absurd and continues to live in spite of it. Camus endorsed this solution, while Kierkegaard
regarded this solution as "demoniac madness": "He rages most of all at the thought that eternity might get it into its head to take his misery from him!"[
The Theatre of the Absurd is commonly associated with Existentialism, and Existentialism was an influential philosophy in Paris during the rise of the Theatre of the Absurd;
however, to call it Existentialist theatre is problematic for many reasons. It gained this association partly because it was named (by Esslin) after the concept of "absurdism"
advocated by Albert Camus, a philosopher commonly called Existentialist though he frequently resisted that label.
In a 1966 interview, Claude Bonnefoy, comparing the Absurdists to Sartre and Camus, said to Ionesco, "It seems to me that Beckett, Adamov and yourself started out less
from philosophical reflections or a return to classical sources, than from first-hand experience and a desire to find a new theatrical expression that would enable you to
render this experience in all its acuteness and also its immediacy. If Sartre and Camus thought out these themes, you expressed them in a far more vital contemporary
fashion". Ionesco replied, "I have the feeling that these writers -- who are serious and important -- were talking about absurdity and death, but that they never really lived
these themes, that they did not feel them within themselves in an almost irrational, visceral way, that all this was not deeply inscribed in their language. With them it was still
rhetoric, eloquence. With Adamov and Beckett it really is a very naked reality that is conveyed through the apparent dislocation of language".
In comparison to Sartre's concepts of the function of literature, Samuel Beckett’s primary focus was on the failure of man to overcome "absurdity.“ Beckett's work focuses
"on poverty, failure, exile and loss — as he put it, on man as a 'non-knower' and as a 'non-can-er'
The Everyday Madness of The Failure to Overcome the Absurd and the “Race
Problem” in America: Racism as a Manifestation of a Universal Human
Condition
Talking Points
1) Meridian’s crisis as
exemplary of man’s
“failure to overcome
the absurd.”
2) Aligning the race
problem with a
universal crises of
meaning
3) Meridian’s madness
and the humanly
impossible: the search
for justice and the
search for meaning.
4) Non-Violence and
Existential Acceptance
Justice and Existentialist Rebellion:
The Hope for New Creation in a Hopeless Cause
One of Camus' primary arguments in The Rebel concerns the motivation for rebellion and
revolution. While the two acts - which can be interpreted from Camus' writing as states of
being - are radically different in most respects, they both stem from a basic human
rejection of normative justice. If human beings become disenchanted with contemporary
applications of justice, Camus suggests that they rebel. This rebellion, then, is the product
of a basic contradiction between the human mind's unceasing quest for clarification and
the apparently meaningless nature of the world. Described by Camus as "absurd", this
latter perception must be examined with what Camus terms "lucidity." Camus concludes
that the absurd sensibility contradicts itself because when it claims to believe in nothing, it
believes in its own protest and the value of the protester's life. Therefore, this sensibility is
logically a "point of departure" that irresistibly "exceeds itself." In the inborn impulse to
rebel, on the other hand, we can deduce values that enable us to determine that murder
and oppression are illegitimate and conclude with "hope for a new creation.”
-----When Wikipedia Works!:
The Rebel (French title: L'Homme révolté) is a 1951 book-length essay by Albert Camus, which treats both the metaphysical and the historical development of rebellion and revolution in societies, especially
Western Europe. Camus relates writers and artists as diverse as Epicurus and Lucretius, the Marquis de Sade, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and André Breton in
an integrated, historical portrait of man in revolt. Examining both rebellion and revolt, which may be seen as the same phenomenon in personal and social frames, Camus examines several 'countercultural'
figures and movements from the history of western thought and art, noting the importance of each in the overall development of revolutionary thought and philosophy.
Differing Ideologies and Overlapping Strivings
Bringing Things to a Cyclical Close
Talking Points
1) The Bible and Bullet
and The Ballot or the
Bullet (Malcolm X and
Black Power).
2) Existentialist
Acceptance as the Race
Problem
3) The Compatibility of
Incompatible
Ideologies and Racial
Uplift
4) Nihilism