Notes of James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man (1/4)

James Baldwin was one of the first writers to put in question the common feature of so-called protest novels written by earlier novelists. His awareness of issue toward racial discrimination is explained in the last lines of his essay, Everybody’s Protest Novel, which first appeared in print on 1949:

The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it has categorization alone which is real and which cannot be translated. (19)

Judging from above, the crucial problem of racism in the United States is not the situation of the white having predominance over the black, but the disposition that their race aside individualities are buried in oblivion. Baldwin required reconsidering even the novelists who were thought to have been “conscientious,” such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Richard Write, for they share a kindred premise in their writing; good blacks and bad whites. He insisted that their narrative is simply an inverted image of the binary opposition between the races, revealing the limited imagination of the authors; even strengthening the stereotype produced by the white.

Paradoxically, dealing with racial discriminations may collude with racism itself. This theory became a milestone in the tradition of protest novels, at the same time putting Baldwin, as one of such novelist, into a dilemma. The purpose of the following notes are to examine Going to Meet the Man, a representative novel by the same author, written 16 years after the essay, and to discuss how it is organized as an “everybody’s protest novel.”

Notes of James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man (2/4)

James Baldwin: Early Novels and Stories (Library of America) James Baldwin Toni Morrison

Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, the Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, the Devil Finds Work, Other Essays (Library of America) James Baldwin Toni Morrison