Another novel I picked up during my extended stay in Ravenna was James Baldwin’s queer tragedy Giovanni’s Room (1956). Narrated in the early hours of the morning by the half-drunk David, Giovanni’s Room recounts the romantic entanglement between David, a frictionless American, and Giovanni, an earthy Italian barman he meets in Paris. At the time of their introduction, David has already proposed to Hella, another American who is seemingly drifting across the old world, her life a series of spectacles without consequences. Despite this set-up, Giovanni’s Room is not exactly a love triangle. Not only is Hella absent in body – she has left for Spain to consider David’s proposal – but she is emotionally distant too: her attachment to David appears to be one of mutual convenience. In contrast to the tender affection he displays towards Giovanni, David characterizes his relationship with Hella as being somewhat frivolous and lacking depth: ‘she would be fun to have fun with’. David doubts that the romance meant anything more to Hella; however, he does concede that perhaps she ‘began to wonder […] if a lifetime of drinking and watching men was exactly what she wanted’. One of the novel’s themes is precisely this transformation of an ‘affair’, which had previously belonged to a sequences of casual ‘affairs’, into an ‘irrevocable’ event which fundamentally alters the way one experiences themselves and their relations with the world.
Giovanni’s Room is a novel of doubling that works through and others the binary oppositions that structure social relations and domesticate privates lives. Given its sensitive but unsparing portrait of male sexual encounters in a post-war Parisian society which tolerates homosexuality, the novel most clearly queers desire. Sexuality breaks free from a repressive heteronormativity; however, the novel also questions the possibilities, practices, and behaviours which form in these conditions where love between men cannot be socially recognized. This consideration of how unconscious desires are channeled and socialized in turn queries the gendered relations and roles assigned to men and women. Whilst David himself professes to be fully ignorant of the constraints imposed on women, Hella advances a feminist position that there is something inherently ‘humiliating’ for women in their being defined by and dependent on marriage. At the level of the world-system, there is a sharp contrast between the ascendant empire of the United States, inflected by a buoyant confidence and hope, and the waning imperial pride of Europe, marked by melancholia and decline. This inter-imperial rivalry gets worked out in terms of class relations, with the American characters seemingly acting as consumers, unconcerned about the need to work and able to draw on endless reserves of dollars; whilst the Europeans are proletarianized, either in the grotesque figure of bar owner Guillaume, who comes from a diluted aristocratic bloodline, or Giovanni himself, who is ‘poor […] and there really isn’t much that he can do. And for what he can do, there’s terrific competition’ – (the situation of the precarious worker).
At the level of style, Giovanni’s Room is populated by folds and crevices, but also by recurring images of oceans, windows, and mirrors. These gleaming surfaces both transport bodies and psyches across time as well as space, but they are also sites and objects of reflection. They are surfaces that simultaneously promise transparency but in their splitting of the self, introduce a degree of opacity, a knot which conceals as much as it reveals.
Such a logic of double encoding can be detected in the very structure of the novel, which organizes its commentary around a frame tale. That is to say, the present of the narrative now encloses and demarcates the past incidents that are being narrated. Giovanni’s Room opens with a striking image that captures this dialectic between memories and their re-living: ‘I stand at the window of this great house in the South of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life […] I watch my reflection in the darkening gleam of the window pane’. Here, the window frames the landscape outside and arranges the domestic space within the house; however, it additionally draws attention to the presence of the viewer, whose self cannot be erased from the scene. David’s appearance within the window, a trace which distorts the division between exterior and interior, becomes itself a metaphor for the frame tale as a formal device, suggesting that there is no unmediated access to the past without a connection to the present. Histories, personal or social, are always produced through narrative reconstructions, acts of remembrance which contextualize the past but also betray the marks of their creators – who, in the case of Giovanni’s Room are ‘too various to be trusted’.
Hence the novel closes with the disappearance of David’s reflection in the incipient dawn light, which signals the termination of this particular seance with the past: ‘I pour myself a very little drink, watching, in the window pane, my reflection, which steadily becomes more faint. I seem to be fading away before my eyes – this fancy amuses me, and I laugh to myself’. As with a ghost story, David’s tale disperses with daylight, even if this new day comes freighted with a death sentence. If there is a sense that David’s narration is an exorcism of the past, which attempts to enact a severance, it is also clear that his subjectivity has been transformed in the process. Even when the past is torn up and destroyed it has a habit of blowing back into our paths and lives.
Thomas Travers 