4 - The Critical Reception of “Sonny's Blues”

Summary

THE CHAPTERS IN PART 1 have considered the critical reception of James Baldwin's entire body of work. In truth, though, taking a broad view of Baldwin's critical reception allows us to consider only a handful of the full-length works he published. As I will discuss in chapter 5, scholars have established a hierarchy of Baldwin's works and, consequently, our understanding of Baldwin as a writer rests on the merits of a few essays and a couple of novels. If we step outside of this “canon” we find another work, Baldwin's 1957 short story “Sonny's Blues,” receiving considerable attention. Yet that particular conversation proves to be an anomaly in Baldwin scholarship.

I've separated the criticism on “Sonny's Blues” from the criticism on Baldwin's other work because, in large part, the critical life of “Sonny's Blues” is separate from the critical life of Baldwin's other work. By far Baldwin's most anthologized work, “Sonny's Blues” is a well-crafted, highly readable, and accessible story. And because it lacks the possibly polemical and alienating quality of the essays or other short stories like “Going to Meet the Man,” it is a natural fit for introductory college literature courses. In addition to being included in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature and Call and Response: A Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition, it is also included in, among other anthologies, Fiction 100 and The Short Story and Its Writer, two popular and widely used fiction anthologies, and in Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, as an illustration of point of view. When the story is included as simply one story among ninety-nine other stories, anthology editors tend to focus on the universal themes and appeals of “Sonny's Blues.” In the autobiographical note on Baldwin in Fiction 100, the editor cites a “recent critic” who states that the “final and most persuasive assumption found in Baldwin's art is that all mankind is united by virtue of their humanity” (1457). Consequently many readers’ first (and often only) exposure to Baldwin is “Sonny's Blues.” And just as the story is often experienced as separate from Baldwin's other work, the critical reception of the story is separate as well.