Is adoration a blasphemy or the key to life, to life eternal, our weight in the balance of the grace of God?
—James Baldwin, Just above My HeadOn the cusp of becoming conscious of their mutual attraction, Cathy Whitaker and Raymond Deagan, the main characters in Todd Haynes's film Far from Heaven (2002), run into each other at an opening for a local art exhibition. The two—she a white housewife and he her Black gardener, a widower, and a single father, living in the New England of the late 1950s—have cordial relations that are intensifying into desire as she struggles to understand the emotional unavailability of her husband, a closeted homosexual. As the famed Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, might have done, the art exhibit boasts the work of a rather stunning array of modern masters. Amid the riches of abstraction, Cathy and Raymond find themselves contemplating Joan Miró's The Nightingale's Song at Midnight and the Morning Rain (1940) (fig. 1). Mispronouncing the painter's name and admitting to ignorance about the field, Cathy observes: “I don't know why but I just adore it. The feeling it gives. I know that sounds terribly vague” (Far [2003] 45). Raymond responds:
No, it actually confirms something I've always wondered about modern art, abstract art.
CATHY: What's that?
RAYMOND: That perhaps it's just picking up where religious art left off. You know. Trying to somehow show us divinity, put it up there on the wall. The modern artist just pares it down to the most basic elements of shape and color. But when you look at that Miró, you feel it just the same.
CATHY: Why, that's lovely, Raymond. (45–46)
Raymond's observation alludes to a familiar reading of art in the secular age: in our disenchanted world, the aesthetic has become the refuge of the sacred. According to one critic, the early Jena Romantics located in aesthetics “a grammar for transcendence in an age of immanence” (Hampton 218); or, as others have noted, in Romanticism one witnesses “the becoming-religion of art” (Barnard and Lester xvi). More relevant to Raymond's point, such arguments are equally customary in declarations by twentieth-century abstract artists and the scholars who have explored their work, identifying there what an influential critic calls “the abstract sublime” (Rosenblum). According to others, twentieth-century abstraction negotiated the ravages of industrial modernity and modern warfare by “manifest[ing] . . . the spiritual laws of the universe” and attempting “to break through the visible to the eternal” (Levine 22; Fingesten 3–4). The artists themselves produced such manifestos as Wassily Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910); they routinely asserted, as Robert Motherwell did, “make no mistake, abstract art is a form of mysticism” (86); they might claim, like Mark Rothko, “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them” (qtd. in Rodman 93–94).
Fig. 1. Far from Heaven, directed by Todd Haynes (2002).
Cathy Whitaker momentarily extricates herself from the world of small-town America by contemplating, in a posture of adoration, a glimmer of “divinity” in the aesthetic arrangement on the Miró canvas. She discerns there what James Baldwin, too, seeks in abstract aesthetics: “otherwise possibilities” (as Ashon T. Crawley calls them [Blackpentecostal Breath 2]) beyond the strictures of modernity. In what follows, I outline the ways in which this history—that of the migration of the sacred into the aesthetic—is evident in Baldwin's work. To explore what I call his “onto-ethics/aesthetics,” I turn to two scenes from his fiction, both of which take place in museums. In the first, from Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), the reader witnesses a Black character's reaction to an African relic as he visits the Museum of Natural History in New York City. The ancient artifact teases the diasporic subject with secret knowledge that, as the reader is invited to surmise, might render his suffering meaningful. In the subsequent novel Another Country (1962), the relics of diasporic modernity have been replaced by an artwork whose description and location at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), again in New York, suggests that readers are looking at an abstract expressionist painting. In the two scenes, Baldwin—a contemporary to the American artists who, influenced by the likes of Kandinsky and Miró, became collectively known as the New York School—engages in onto-ethical speculations, an onto-ethics that is always also an onto-aesthetics. For him, the aesthetic offers a dynamic in which modern life finds itself rearranged.Footnote 1
To make this argument, my analysis pivots on keywords, most notably adoration, the Stimmung in which the Miró envelops Cathy. I detour through the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, who devotes a series of essays to the concept in his project of “deconstructing Christianity.” For Nancy, “adoration,” characteristic of the “going-beyond-itself” of Christianity (Dis-enclosure 141), is a mood in which an “elsewhere” opens “in the midst of the world” (Adoration 6–9, ch. 2), an elsewhere that, like the “otherwise possibility” Crawley posits in Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, is strictly immanent to the here and now. Baldwin, too, identifies in adoration an opening to an “outside” that is in this world, an opening that is always an aestheticizing moment. For very good textual reasons, Another Country has often been read as a critique of white liberalism's refusal to “know” the other and, concomitantly, as a plea for a reinvigorated epistemic ethics.Footnote 2 But Ida Scott's final request for Vivaldo Moore—that he forgo “understanding” (Baldwin, Another Country 752)—coupled with the earlier museum scene implies that the quest for epistemological access should be replaced with, or at the very least modulated through, a different relational approach. To negotiate “the peculiar difficulty of gaining self-knowledge in oppressive social contexts” (Martínez 783), Baldwin turns to aesthetics. In this, he anticipates Michel Foucault's later work, his efforts to displace the hegemony of knowledge, tied since the confessional culture of early Christianity to the subject's sexual interiority, by cultivating “an aesthetics of existence” (Foucault, History 2: 253). Baldwin supplements such analyses by attending to the grounding role that Blackness, in abjection, occupies at the episteme's limits. He begins theorizing what I call “diasporic modernity” in the essay “Everybody's Protest Novel” (1949) and in his debut novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, for example in the character of the protagonist's biological father, who seeks his dignity by challenging whiteness to a game of epistemological one-upmanship. In this game, Richard loses his life. Another mode of Black being, one beyond the dead end of epistemic contestation, is needed.
Hence, adoration: an orientation that unfolds as an aesthetic becoming rather than as an epistemological venture. The circulation of the theological term in the museum scenes indicates that when Baldwin speaks of aesthetics, he is speaking of the sacred. If the sacred has withdrawn into art, the aesthetic is imbued with a potential that many at least since Friedrich Schiller and Max Weber have considered depleted in the “disenchanted” modern world. Yet Baldwin's project, like Nancy's and Crawley's, is to think about the sacred, in its liminal existence in modernity, in immanent terms. Such immanence coincides with, or enables, the thought of singularity, of what I propose be called, in a gesture of paleonymy—“the maintenance of an old name in order to launch a new concept” (Derrida 71)—“the individual.” The word “individual,” Amiri Baraka observes, “is perhaps James Baldwin's favorite” (116). It is in moments of aesthetic production that this individual emerges: in Another Country, a scene in which two friends look at an abstract expressionist painting at MoMA, and another scene, depicting Ida Scott's debut nightclub performance.
In Go Tell It on the Mountain, readers witness the costs exacted by diasporic modernity in Richard, who fathers the novel's protagonist, John Grimes, but kills himself before the child's birth. He is never given a last name, and readers meet him only in the flashback sequence “Elizabeth's Prayer,” written in the voice of John's mother. In these passages, Richard is presented as one of modernity's precarious creatures. His “nervousness” (158) and “high strung” character (152) evoke the pathology of what was often, in the nineteenth century, called “neurasthenia”: the psychosomatically symptomized disorder whose causes were linked to the subject's failed adaptation to the existential dilemmas exacerbated by industrial modernity. The oddness in the description issues from the presumed contrast, in Theodor W. Adorno's words, between “the over-stimulated Western nerves” and “the vitality of blacks” (46). If Adorno assumes a Black immunity to such ailments, then Baldwin insists with his diagnosis, as Toni Morrison does, on the modernity of Black diasporic experience, imbued as it is with “[c]ertain kinds of madness,” typical of “the truly modern person” (qtd. in Gilroy 178).Footnote 3
Richard's bewilderment becomes particularly pronounced in the scene where Elizabeth recalls their visits to museums in New York City:
And when he took her to the Museum of Natural History, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they were almost certain to be the only black people, and he guided her through the halls, which never ceased in her imagination to be as cold as tombstones, it was then she saw another life in him. It never ceased to frighten her, this passion he brought to something she could not understand.
For she never grasped—not at any rate with her mind—what, with such incandescence, he tried to tell her on these Saturday afternoons. She could not find, between herself and the African statuette, or totem pole, on which he gazed with melancholy wonder, any point of contact. She was only glad that she did not look that way. She preferred to look, in the other museum, at the paintings; but still she did not understand anything he said about them. She did not know why he so adored things that were so long dead; what sustenance they gave him, what secrets he hoped to wrest from them. But she understood, at least, that they did give him a kind of bitter nourishment, and that the secrets they held for him were a matter of his life and death. (Baldwin, Go 160)
The scene seems to prefigure what will become one of Baldwin's repeated axioms, “know whence you came” (“Price” 841). Yet Richard's paralytic posture and his quest for—another important keyword—“bitter” sustenance in the object of his fascination complicate the imperative. In Eric L. Santner's terms, the African statuette is a “stranded object,” one of the uncannily resonant fragments that inhabit, and solicit our puzzled attention in, the modern world. Santner's examples come from post-1945 Germany, a nation whose “inability to mourn” (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich)—to come to terms with modernity's horrors as they culminated in the Nazi atrocities—infested the national landscape with ruins that compelled the fascinated attention of the melancholic's gaze. Invoking Walter Benjamin, Santner suggests that such ruins comprise “auratic objects” (99) carrying traces of the experience that, as Benjamin claims, has “atrophied” or “withered” (verkümmert) in modern life (“Work” 254; “On Some Motifs” 316). As one such object, the African relic indicates a cleaving: it suggests a connection at the very moment it irrevocably breaks off all communication. Paralyzed in front of it, Richard embodies a fascination that prevents him from fleeing an imminent mortal danger.
Richard expires in his frenzied efforts to parry modernity's anti-Black discourses. As he tells Elizabeth, from early on he had submitted to a discipline with which he hopes to rescue his Black self from the degradation it has been associated with:
I just decided one day that I was going to get to know everything them white bastards knew, and I was going to get to know it better than them, so could no white son-of-a-bitch nowhere never talk me down, and never make me feel like I was dirt, when I could read him the alphabet, back, front, and sideways. Shit—he weren't going to beat my ass, then . . . . That's how I got to know so much.(Baldwin, Go 161)
Attempting to redeem himself from the “dirt” attached to Blackness, Richard resembles Elizabeth's future husband, Gabriel Grimes, whose life's work is to purify himself and his people from the filth that is inscribed in his family name. The modern world has created what he, in his first sermon, calls a “bastard people” (132): Blackness as a lineage of immorality and sin. He seeks to wash out the taint of illegitimacy by founding “a royal line” (104), a new heritage that would begin with his firstborn son, whom he names “Royal.” His new world will precipitate a reversal of destinies: in a long-awaited peripeteia, whiteness will suffer damnation while the diasporic faithful will be delivered to righteousness. Yet, as his tortured existence indicates, Gabriel toils under an irresolvable aporia. Having accepted the world's racialized dualities, he unwittingly seeks the mortification of his Black self. Because all flesh is Black flesh in diasporic modernity, he cannot achieve redemption without self-destruction, a paradox whose torments he visits upon his wife and children.
Notwithstanding the differences between the two men, the error Richard commits is analogous. He has made a fatal miscalculation in accepting modernity's designs of purity and filth. Instead of seeking a transvaluation of values, he has set his mind to demonstrate that he is not made of the grime that the world deems the result of his enfleshment. To beat the white world in its own game, he becomes an autodidact, seeking to “know everything.” His determination recalls the reaction of W. E. B. Du Bois's narrator in “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” to his first boyhood brush with racism. As an incident makes him realize that “a vast veil” separates him from the world in which he has assumed membership, the indignant young man, holding the world “in common contempt,” is determined to prove his worth with his academic and physical prowess, to “beat my mates at examination time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads” (10). Yet the narrator immediately continues, “Alas, with years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine,” and then offers the reader the famous account of double consciousness.
This is Baldwin's point, too. Beginning with “Everybody's Protest Novel,” Baldwin never tires of telling readers that all endeavors to “protest” injury in the oppressor's language merely obligate one to the system of one's dehumanization. In Go Tell It on the Mountain, Richard and Gabriel—to quote the early essay—“battle for [their] humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed [them] at [their] birth” (18). Richard, burning bright, is devoured by the whiteness he despises: what the museum scene calls his “incandescence,” a term derived from the Latin candēscĕre, “to become white” (“Incandesce”), suggests an inadvertent internalization of, in the form of resistance to, modernity's anti-Blackness. His program of epistemological uplift will end in his suicide.
Like the “pensive, brooding” Bigger Thomas, “tantalized by a riddle whose answer seemed always just on the verge of escaping him” (Wright, Native Son 17), Richard is stymied in front of the African relic, unable to access its “secrets.” Responding to his inquisitive gaze with a stony silence, it solicits in him an attachment to an irrecuperable, unmournable absence: a “melancholy wonder.” In this, Richard resembles such self-punishing diasporic creatures as Elihue Micah Whitcomb, “suffering from and enjoying an invincible melancholy” (Morrison 170). Like Gabriel Grimes, Elihue Whitcomb, whom Pecola Breedlove begs for a pair of the bluest eyes, develops a “hatred of, and fascination with, any hint of disorder or decay” (169). A West Indian immigrant turned preacher and miracle worker, he labors to dissociate his being from the filth that the previous generations of “a family proud of its academic accomplishments and its mixed blood” have taught him is the lot of Blackness (169). As his “fascination” with the “disorder” and “decay” nevertheless suggests, he is paralyzed in front of an internalized, malevolent other as it opens it jaws to devour him. In different ways, Richard and Elihue are in the grip of a melancholia that issues from the black bile (melaina chole) that consumes them much as it does Gertrude Stein's Melanctha (see English 99–100).
As the narrator of Morrison's first novel puts it, the riddle that plagues Elihue is, “where was the life to counter the encroaching nonlife?” (170). Elihue's question burns in and paralyzes Richard: Elizabeth witnesses his effort to plug into this vitality—“another life” (Baldwin, Go 160)—through his connection with the African relic. In Benjamin's terms, Richard, Bigger, and Elihue belong to the ranks of modernity's brooders, enraptured by the world's stranded objects, which seem to ostentatiously withhold the key to their selves.
The melancholic paralysis is produced by the ancient artifact as it at once solicits Richard's attention and turns away from him. In Michael Fried's terms, the object that calls out to the spectator only to reject the contact with a stony silence is both “absorbed” and “absorbing.” Fried argues that in the mid–eighteenth century there emerged “a paradoxical relationship between painting and beholder”: the painting was to present an “absorbed” tableau that refused to acknowledge the spectator; yet by thus “neutralizing or negating the beholder's presence,” the tableau guaranteed that the beholder was “stopped and held” in its thrall (Absorption 108). In this model, “a painting had to call to someone, bring him to a halt in front of itself, and hold him there as if spellbound and unable to move” (92). Synthesizing Fried's work on eighteenth-century art with Peter Brooks's analysis of nineteenth-century melodrama, Joan Copjec suggests that absorbed art's enthrallment is characteristic of what Brooks calls the “post-sacred era,” the world that emerges at the turn of the century and whose “resacralization,” according to him, becomes the task of melodrama (Brooks 15, 16). As Copjec writes, “the development of techniques of absorption coincided with our entry into the postsacred world and the beginning of realism. This moment has sometimes been described as that of the disenchantment of the world” (113–14).Footnote 4
While it is an exemplar neither of the paintings Fried analyzes nor of the modern art that concerns Raymond Deagan, the statuette that enthralls Richard offers a trace of the sacred in the “postsacred” world. It has been cut off from its “enchanted” context and transported to the deathly cold halls of the modern museum, where it beckons to Richard and Elizabeth—the only Black visitors—with the “fascination” that Rudolf Otto attaches to manifestations of “the holy.” This awe-inspiring mystery—mysterium tremendum et fascinans—evinces what Fred Moten, discussing Fried, calls the “double bind of subjection” (236): Richard discerns in the artifact an antidote to encroaching nonlife, yet it only exacerbates the work of diasporic modernity's corrosive toxins. Later in the narrative, the museum, “cold as tombstones,” will be replaced with another “tomb”: the downtown jail “the Tombs,” from which Richard is released to commit suicide at home. In this, he, as a subject of “fascination,” is “absorbed” by the enthralling object, devoured and assimilated like the bird captured by the serpent's hypnotic gaze.
Diasporic modernity's stranded objects promise to redeem Richard from his loneliness by reconnecting him to an “Origin” (Fanon 104). What Frantz Fanon identifies in the ideals of négritude Richard finds, or so it seems,Footnote 5 in the African statuette. To put it differently, as the narrator does, he “adores” the dead thing. The Latin adōrātiō indicates an “act of worship or prayer,” “veneration of the host or a sacred object” (“Adoration,” etymology, def. 1a). Immanuel Kant speaks of the mute astonishment when the mind contemplates the created world: the vision “transport[s] the mind into that sinking mood [vernichtende Stimmung], called adoration, in which the human being is as it were nothing in his own eyes” (Religion 212).Footnote 6 As John Milton writes, human beings adore that which created them. “[H]ow may I / adore thee, Author of this universe,” asks Adam in Paradise Lost (8.359–60). Once created, man is
In René Descartes's Meditations, the thinking thing, recognizing the indisputability of God's existence, sinks into the contemplative moods that arrest Cathy and Raymond before the Miró and takes a break from the adventure of cogitating “to gaze with wonder and adoration on the beauty of this immense light” (36). This is the same “adoration” that in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness Kurtz reportedly elicits in the African natives when he enters the scene as a demiurge. His Russian associate recalls the colonialist's godlike apparition for the Africans: “he came to them with thunder and lightning, you know—and they had never seen anything like it,” the man says; “They adore him” (56). To his “adorers,” Kurtz is an “idol” (63, 58; see also 72n). Marlow thus suggests that in him the natives find an opportunity for self-creation. It is such self-creation that Richard appears to seek in his worshipful contemplation of the African statuette: he adores that which he takes to be a link to the constitutive, lost origin.
In his worship, Richard hopes that the sacred relic will whisper to him the truth of his diasporic being, provide an answer to the “teasing questions” that, as Richard Wright notes, plague the displaced moderns (Introduction xxii) and that he illustrates in the “brooding” Bigger Thomas, faced with the “riddle” he cannot solve. As the death of Baldwin's Richard suggests, in disenchanted modernity the adoration of fascinating objects can be fatal. Like Kant, one can speak of the subject's “annihilation” (Vernichtung) by this Stimmung.
Yet Baldwin also presents a different model of adoration in the debut novel. “The sacred” in its relation to Blackness and diasporicity is briefly reconsidered in another moment amid the flashback sequences that make up the novel's second part. One of the sections recounts the desperate efforts of Florence, Gabriel's sister, to “uplift” her husband, Frank, from his commonness and bodiliness—that is, his Blackness—to the ranks of bourgeois respectability (Baldwin, Go 77). The intensity with which she hates the “common niggers” he introduces as his friends and the “vulgar” hats he buys her as gifts (82, 79) is coupled with her disappointment in the failure of her skin whitening creams to rescue her—like Pecola—from “the pit of her blackness” (Morrison 174). Yet, as she recognizes after their separation and his death in Europe, he had “adored” her (Baldwin, Go 171). She observes this to her new friend, Elizabeth, who had used the same word in the passage describing Richard's mesmerization by the lifeless museum pieces. While Richard had practiced his worship in tomblike exhibition halls, Frank's work of adoration takes place in the bedroom. He calls Florence away from the mirror in front of which she exercises her own rituals of supplication, the nightly routine of applying whitening creams to her face. “You just kindly turn off that light,” he says, “and I'll make you to know that black's a mighty pretty color” (85). His is a lusty and, for Florence, infuriating presentness: his embrace of his Blackness and his sexuality seems to coincide with the failure of foresight that is a familiar trope in representations of primitiveness. In complex ways, Baldwin affirms Frank's “adoration” of his wife's sexy Blackness as a counterpoint to Richard's doomed efforts to sacralize his diasporic being in the halls of whiteness.
The difference between Richard and Frank suggests a need to reinvent diasporic sacrality, to come up with modes of adoration that differ from Richard's fascination with dead things. If Frank's desire constitutes one such mode, the question of the sacred gets another reading in Another Country. As in Go Tell It on the Mountain, the work of worship is evoked in a museum scene, this time between Eric Jones and Cass Silenski as they meet at MoMA to discuss the fact that Cass's husband—yet another Richard—has found out about their affair.
Early on in the scene, the reader again encounters some of what I propose are Baldwin's keywords:
[Cass and Eric] reached the first of a labyrinthine series of rooms, shifting and crackling with groups of people, with bright paintings above and around them, and stretching into the far distance, like tombstones with unreadable inscriptions. The people moved in waves, like tourists in a foreign graveyard. Occasionally, a single mourner, dreaming of some vanished relationship, stood alone in adoration or revery before some massive memorial—but they mainly evinced, moving restlessly here and there, the democratic gaiety. (726)
The characters are again amid “tombstones,” a description that recalls the freezing halls of the Museum of Natural History, where Richard is paralyzed by the sight of diasporic relics, and then “the Tombs,” where this paralysis finally depletes him of life. Indeed, at this moment the narratives of the two novels intersect, for the solitary “mourner” whom Cass and Eric pass cannot but be Richard, “dreaming of [his] vanished relationship” with an unnamable origin, absorbed—again—“in adoration” of an artwork that evokes the broken link. Readers have moved from the Museum of Natural History to the Museum of Modern Art, yet Richard mournfully gazes at stranded objects.
The keyword repeats as Cass and Eric, having left the lone worshiper behind, proceed “through fields of French impressionists and cubists and cacophonous modern masters” and enter another hall in the museum (726). Here they encounter a painting that, given its description and its location at MoMA, can be taken as a representative of abstract expressionism:
They passed not far from a weary guard, who looked blinded and dazzled, as though he had never been able to escape the light. Before them was a large and violent canvas in greens and reds and blacks, in blocks and circles, in daggerlike exclamations; it took a flying leap, as it were, from the wall, poised for the spectator's eyeballs; and at the same time it seemed to stretch endlessly and adoringly in on itself, reaching back into an unspeakable chaos. It was aggressively and superbly uncharming and unreadable, and might have been painted by a lonely and bloodthirsty tyrant, who had been cheated of his victims. “How horrible,” Cass murmured, but she did not move; for they had this corner, except for the guard, to themselves. (728–29)
If the sacred relic arrests Richard's gaze, a different sacrality is exemplified in this painting. In its self-adoration, it is as “absorbed” as the eighteenth-century paintings Fried analyzes, yet this self-relation is not a lure for the viewer. Instead of fixing the spectator, the painting repels the gaze. It is “uncharming,” without the “charisma” that solicits a viewer's fascination.Footnote 7 Viewers must turn away from it if they are to keep on looking, if they are not to be blinded by its cruel splendor. The poor guard who, even with averted eyes, has had to spend time in the presence of this painting “looked blinded and dazzled,” worn out by a luminosity that should perhaps remind one of the light that John Grimes faces in his conversion experience in “The Threshing-Floor,” the final part of Go Tell It on the Mountain: “a light he could not bear” (197).
Because of this, one cannot sustain a relationship of “melancholy wonder” with the painting. It refuses to be “adored” in the mournful supplication and epistemological hunger that mark Richard's posture. It is not an “auratic” object that enthralls its viewer by promising to reward him with knowledge about his self, what he might have been before his scattering into dispossession. It does not studiously ignore the viewer in order to arrest him all the more efficiently. Rather, its light, while catching the spectator's eye, refuses further contact. The artwork constitutes a sacrality that drives the adorer out of its presence.
The would-be supplicants of the abstract expressionist painting are Cass and Eric. Unlike Richard, they are, of course, not immediately recognizable as diasporic subjects. Yet one of Baldwin's recurrent arguments concerns the diasporic nature of all modern life in the West. Baldwin is among the numerous artists (and in their wake, scholars) who have delineated the implications of what for them is the coincidence of the African diaspora with Western modernity's emergence. If, as Morrison puts it, “modern life begins with slavery” (qtd. in Gilroy 178), all modernity is diasporic modernity; all subjects are, in crucially different ways, diasporically modern subjects. Simply put, Baldwin suggests that while Black diasporic subjects in the United States are tortured by efforts to render themselves recognizable in a language that has condemned their enfleshed being, white Americans are consumed by an exhausting determination not to observe the past, not to look at its ruins, for fear that such acknowledgment will indenture them to an interminable ethical labor. The refusal of such labor is paid for not only in the poorly understood unease or derangement symptomized by David in Giovanni's Room, Vivaldo in Another Country, and Jesse in “Going to Meet the Man,” but also, as Morrison suggests, in some of twentieth century's most devastating catastrophes. She describes the presumed beneficiaries of this history: “Slavery . . . made them crazy. You can't do that for hundreds of years and it not take a toll. They had to dehumanize, not just the slaves but themselves. They had to reconstruct everything in order to make that system appear true. It made everything in World War II possible. It made World War I necessary” (qtd. in Gilroy 178). Frederick Douglass speaks of the “pestiferous breath” of the peculiar institution (427): no one escapes the plague.
In Another Country, the subject of “adoration” is the painting itself. Instead of attracting the spectators by studiously ignoring them, it “stretch[es] endlessly and adoringly in on itself.” The artwork does not offer itself as an object of worship; rather, it spirals around itself in self-adoration, jealously refusing any intrusion into its narcissistic, speculative self-reflexivity. It goes for the eyeballs of anyone unwise enough to linger over its splendor. Yet its violence is not the kind of revengefulness exemplified by Gabriel Grimes's messianic visions or Bigger Thomas's fantasies of bombing the city that keeps him earthbound. It seems to the narrator that the painting might have been produced “by a lonely and bloodthirsty tyrant, who had been cheated of his victims.” But because, in its objectlessness, the solitary tyrant's rage does not reach out to the world, the violent “adoration” is “a sentiment without ressentiment” (Nancy, “On Dis-enclosure” 312). In the pan-African shades of greens and reds and blacks, the painting protests nothing. It repels any relation to the viewer but does so indifferently. Its éclat is in its nature; it is like the illumination that pierces the Ramsays’ house in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse: a “light bent to its own image in adoration on the bedroom wall” (130).
In this sense, adoration proper is always self-adoration. For Nancy, “adoration” constitutes Christianity's radical potential of “opening” (or, as he puts it, echoing Martin Heidegger, “dis-enclosing”) the world. “Adoration,” Nancy writes, “is addressed to what exceeds address. Or rather: it is addressed without seeking to reach, without any intention at all” (Adoration 20). The adoration exemplified in the MoMA painting is this address without an addressee beyond its own pan-African figuration. This adoration, as Nancy writes, “opens the world” by referring not to a transcendence but to an immanent outside:
Adoration signals a relationship to a presence that it would be out of the question to bring “here,” that must be known and affirmed as essentially “elsewhere,” with the effect of opening the “here.” It is therefore not a presence in the accepted sense of the word. It is not the presence of anything in particular, but that of the opening, the dehiscence, the breach, or the breaking out of the “here” itself. (9)
Adoration is an orientation toward, or an enabling of, an immanent sacrality in which the world accesses, once again, a stymied potential.
In this way, the painting, with its pan-African colors, figures an entity whose viability Baldwin has been testing from his earliest work onward: the self-determining Black subject, unbeholden to and unconcerned with the white gaze, moving toward its actualization heedless of the world's chronic anti-Blackness. The light that Cass and Eric cannot bear is that of a self-adoring—which is to say, self-generating—Black diasporic being, one that does not solicit the world's attention either for approval or in protest. In Go Tell It on the Mountain, Florence's husband, Frank, is an earlier exemplar of this mode: “adoring” Blackness, he remains indifferent to the call that he ascend above what the world, speaking through the young Florence, deems his enfleshed commonness and vulgarity. His mode of self-making has nothing to do with what the European observers in Heart of Darkness imagine is the Africans’ subjectivation through their “adoration” of imperial masters.
Such adoration is exemplified in what Crawley calls the “circum-sacred possibility” in Black cultural performance (“Susceptibility” 12). According to him, Black performance “is never about the one but about the plural, never about the individual but about the social from which the individual emerges”; it denotes “a presence that is about marking relation, existence, or being with, a presence that is about sociality as the ground of irreducibly plural existence” (23, 13). Crawley's emphasis coincides with that of Nancy, for whom to imagine self-deconstructed Christianity's immanent God is “to affirm [God in his absence] ‘among us.’ That is to say, he is ‘himself’ the among: he is the with or the between of us” (“In the Midst” 9). For both Crawley and Nancy, the thought of “relation” or the “among” or the “with” necessitates moving beyond the concept of “the individual” as it has been identified as perhaps the fundamental category of Western modernity: the “possessive” or “abstract” or “monadic” being, full of the self-assured pride of its cogito. Crawley quotes Fumi Okiji's study of Adorno and jazz to define what he means by “the individual.” “The individual,” according to Okiji, “holds a problematic but central position in jazz narratives” insofar as the concept “in its most common usage leads us to the image of the defunct bourgeois subject of earlier and less malignant permutations of capitalism” (Okiji 7; see Crawley, “Susceptibility” 27). In this view, the promise of individuality in jazz is but a ruse of atomized bourgeois culture.
In Baldwin, the figure of the self-generating Black subject nevertheless points to this apparently familiar concept. Here and elsewhere, he insists on the value of reassessing this overused and seemingly exhausted notion. Among his contemporaries, he would not have been alone. What according to commentators was the effort, in abstract expressionism, to experiment with “the obliteration of the ego and its release into a cosmic experience” (Levine 24) coincided with an assertion of singularity that approximated such familiarly American values as “individualism.” As a contemporary critic put it, “The meaning of modern art is, that the artist of today is engaged in a tremendous individualistic struggle—a struggle to discover and to assert and to express himself” (“Life” 78–79; see Leja 3); “the individual personality,” another writes, constituted “a fundamental subject of modern art” (Seitz 92). Because of its practitioners’ (or at least their advocates’) efforts to reinvent (which may have been but an effort to reassert) “the individual,” abstract expressionism was readily weaponized in Cold War politics: the artform's “resolute individualism” was vaunted as a solvent of the presumed conformity demanded by other Cold War regimes (Leja 31).Footnote 8
In complicated ways, Baldwin both agreed with and challenged the ethos of the “highly individualistic age” that determined the “highly individualistic point of view” of modern art (“Life” 70). Like his contemporaries, he often bemoaned the presumed generic facelessness of Cold War culture. He was never far from joining Norman Mailer, Philip Wylie, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and others in their lamentations over the “crisis of masculinity” of postwar United States. Like Ralph Ellison in his satirical portrait of the Brotherhood, Baldwin would have similarly rejected the classical Marxist argument for the dialectical evacuation of “the individual” in favor of “the masses,” the movement in which, “politically, individuals were without meaning” (Ellison, Invisible Man 447). Yet he also recognized the ways in which various programs to address such perceived problems plugged into the mythologies—for example, that of “rugged individualism”—that sustained diasporic modernity's disavowals. More than most cultural commentators, he remained cognizant of the masculinist ethos that informed the efforts to resuscitate the individualism threatened by modern life's bureaucratized conformism. He similarly discerned in the “highly individualistic age” of postwar America a repetition of mechanisms by which the nation had avoided becoming responsible for “the price of the ticket.”
In a 1970 interview, Baldwin drew attention to the paradox encountered by anyone who seeks to actualize what the habitually evoked concept promises: “Well, if one is trying to become an individual in that most individual of countries, America, one's really up against something” (Conversations 106). Yet this is precisely his project: beginning with his earliest texts, he seeks what remains of singularity beyond the American mythos of individualism, whose purpose—articulated, say, in the discourses of the frontier, of self-help, and of pragmatism—has been to disenable any consideration of intractable structures inherited from history. In his 1949 essay on protest novels, he points to an ethics that entails one's unbinding from the exigent definitions that have individuated the subject. If “we find ourselves bound, first without, then within” by the world's categories, he imagines a process of unraveling in which our constitutive binds are loosened and then reorganized, where, in other words, the bondage to which we have necessarily acquiesced may yet be mitigated (“Everybody's Protest Novel” 16). Whereas projects that solicit the recognition of one's dignity in the eyes of a contemptuous and pitying world merely confirm such bondage, we must court the mortal danger of plunging into what Baldwin calls the “void” (16) of “our unknown selves” (16–17), a void that “demand[s], forever, a new act of creation” (17). He suggests that it is by approaching and escaping from the void “[w]ith the same motion, at the same time” that we can pry looser the stranglehold of subjectivation: in this rhythm of simultaneity, “we can find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves” (17, 13). Already in this essay, he is speculating about what he, in Another Country's museum scene, will indicate is the generative potential of (self-)adoration. If this “mood” invites, as Kant suggests, the self's Vernichtung, this annihilation, Baldwin continues, “will free us from ourselves” so that “we can find . . . ourselves.”
Baldwin recurrently alludes to the creative force residing in the nonbeing of “the void” or (as he terms it in Another Country) “unspeakable chaos.” “[T]his chaos,” he writes in 1959, “contains life—and a great transforming energy” (“Mass Culture” 6); it is, as he continues in 1964, “the chaos out of which and only out of which we can create ourselves into human beings” (“Uses” 64). The painting in Another Country exemplifies the ways in which in abstract expressionist art “the individual loses himself either to color or [to] movement” (Levine 25). Such “losing”—which is also a loosening—enables a rebinding. That the colors in which such unraveling is endured are those of the pan-African flag suggests that the MoMA abstraction figures the aesthetic creation that Baldwin begins to think about—and never ceases returning to—in the 1949 essay: the Black diasporic subject's unbinding into self-determination. The painting assumes a movement of incomparability where what becomes would somehow remain indifferent to the world's solicitations, its efforts to bondage the individual to the schemas of anti-Blackness that Frank B. Wilderson III and Jared Sexton have recently deemed inextricable from Western modernity. Yet Baldwin is no Afropessimist, at least not yet: for him other solicitations—self-solicitations—are available, such as the painting's, in whose presence Eric and Cass must avert their eyes.
In its diasporic sacrality, the MoMA painting offers a moment of nonrelational self-adoration, something that according to Sidney Bechet eludes white critics in jazz music. In his autobiography Treat It Gentle (1960), Bechet writes that in jazz one can hear “a lost thing finding itself”; white commentators are unable to hear such moments because “they don't have the memory” (qtd. in Edwards 11). How much should be made of the fact that the moment is one of “finding,” rather than “refinding,” that which has been lost? The self-recognition in memory—a jazz anamnesis—is a creation. While Bechet's scenario inverts the psychoanalytic subject's realization that the “finding” of the libidinal object is in fact “a refinding of it” (Freud 145), the two scenes are identical in their reversal. In their divergent ways, Bechet and Freud revise Plato's account of the subject's anamnestic return to pre-embodiment forms by suggesting that, organized according to the time of “afterwardsness”—as Jean Laplanche translates Freud's Nachträglichkeit—such a return is in fact a moment of immanent creation.
For Ellison, too, “music gives resonance to memory” (“Golden Age” 314). He argues that after an “apprenticeship” in “the fundamentals of his instrument and the traditional techniques of jazz” (322–23), the musician “must then ‘find himself,’ must be reborn, must find, as it were, his soul” (323). This finding demands a dislocation: as much as “the void” enables us to “find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves” (Baldwin, “Everybody's Protest Novel” 13), “the jazzman must lose his identity even as he finds it” (Ellison, “Charlie Christian Story” 356). In this loss, he “achieve[s], in short, his self-determined identity” (“Golden Age” 323). It is indeed in music and not, as is the case in the two museum scenes I have explored, in the visual arts that most commentators, including Baldwin, have observed such creative self-enfoldings in Black culture. As it turns out, in Another Country the pan-African painting's aesthetic potential is prefigured in the scene of Ida Scott's first performance as a singer. In an unpublished outline of the novel, Baldwin describes her as “twenty-six, frivolous, and bitter, intent, without knowing it, on revenge. Revenge, that is, against the entire white world, all white men and all white women, for the humiliations which she, as a woman, and a Negro[,] has endured” (Outline). With her “bitterness” and unacknowledged thoughts of “revenge,” she appears as an extension of the many characters in Baldwin's texts who focus their energies on making sure the white world gets its long-awaited comeuppance. Among such characters are Gabriel Grimes, with what Baldwin, in a draft of the debut novel, calls his “awful bitterness” (Draft 12); Richard in his quest for “bitter nourishment” in New York museums (Go 160); the autobiographical narrator's father in “Notes of a Native Son” (1955), “the most bitter man I have ever met” (64); and the Barbadian father in Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), “dreaming bitterly” of the homeland, its vanished relationship (17).
Baldwin's early outline implies that a crucial component of Ida's trouble is her lack of self-knowledge: Ida is caught in the impasse of bitterness because she is bent on revenge “without knowing it.” The suggestion ventriloquizes an ego-psychological will to knowledge. Having become the hegemonic mode of conceptualizing psychological conflicts in the 1950s (Hale, ch. 16), ego psychology instructed Americans that to eliminate suffering one must become conscious of and then “work through” the tension between one's desires and the demands of the environment; the ego reins in the petulant id, a reality check that would facilitate an equilibrium between the subject and the world. Without fail, Baldwin dismisses such an assimilationist ethos,Footnote 9 and for many Another Country reads as an effort to establish an ethics of knowing according to a more complicated calculus. Ida figures centrally in such analyses because of her repeatedly articulated demand that her family's white friends acknowledge the role their willed ignorance played in her brother's suicide. Readers are invited to think that all of them—Vivaldo, Cass, Eric, Richard—belong to the ranks of the “ignorant armies” of the novel's working title.Footnote 10
Yet, as if exhausted by her efforts to convince white liberals to unlearn their privilege of unknowing, Ida, in her final lines, tells her lover, “Vivaldo, . . . just one thing. I don't want you to be understanding” (Baldwin, Another Country 752). Instead of merely rebuffing liberalism's cloying attentiveness, the refusal of “understanding” complicates her presumed role in the novel's epistemic ethics. If the description in the unpublished outline suggests that her task will be to know herself (and, concomitantly, to force others to actualize their Delphic destinies), her request to Vivaldo indicates the need for another way of countering what Morrison calls the nonlife inherent in diasporic modernity's arrangements.
The scene where Ida takes to the stage in a nightclub suggests what might exist beyond the vehicle of “understanding” that has promised Vivaldo access to “the desired and unknown Ida” (479). Readers witness her performance from Vivaldo's perspective:
What she lacked in vocal power and, at the moment, in skill, she compensated for by a quality so mysteriously and implacably egocentric that no one has ever been able to name it. This quality involves a sense of the self so profound and so powerful that it does not so much leap barriers as reduce them to atoms—while still leaving them standing, mightily, where they were; and this awful sense is private, unknowable, not to be articulated, having, literally, to do with something else; it transforms and lays waste and gives life, and kills. (592)
What the scene identifies as the “awful sense” in her voice—“private, unknowable, not to be articulated,” a “something else”—is the force that Baldwin has been interested in evoking throughout his career of writing and thinking. In its egoic singularity, her voice carries a “quality” that “no one has ever been able to name”; it is, as Baldwin puts it in the 1949 essay, “something resolutely indefinable, unpredictable” (“Everybody's Protest Novel” 13). Jazz scholars might see a familiar legerdemain in the description of Ida's singular voice. For Okiji, the prioritization of “the individual” in jazz critique led to “the fetishization of the solo as the essence of jazz work” (7). Consequently, jazz, much like abstract expressionism, became eminently useful for Cold War propaganda: with its emphasis on “improvisation” and “spontaneity,” particularly embodied in the soloist, jazz was deemed “reflective of American liberal democracy” (16).Footnote 11 Yet if Baldwin sees in abstract art a force of singularity different from what Cold War apparatchiks ascribed to it, he similarly suggests that an identical force subsists in Black music. Speaking of Ida's “egocentricity,” he implies that we don't yet quite know what “the individual,” organized around the center of her “ego,” is. The “ego” here names an incomparability: in its centeredness, Ida's voice, like the MoMA painting, does not seek the audience's recognition; its refusal demolishes the epistemological project that comes with the price of one's bondage to hostile categories. Instead, the voice solicits “awe”—a Stimmung of sublimity and potential annihilation (“awful, in the Biblical sense” [Baldwin, If Beale Street 415]). It thus constitutes an adoration, a “speech that somehow responds only to itself: to its opening, to the possibility of going to the limit of significations and as far as silence—and even further than silence, as far as song, as music” (Nancy, Adoration 64). It actualizes a force like that of the singular incandescence—the self-adoring sacred—that shines in MoMA's halls or, in To the Lighthouse, on the Ramsays’ bedroom. Here is a life to counter diasporic modernity's encroaching nonlife.
In contrast to the “incandescent” Richard's efforts to actualize a different world by challenging the extant one to an epistemic battle, Ida's singing exemplifies “the anepistemology of black sacred sound” (Crawley, “Susceptibility” 17). Like the MoMA painting, her awe-inspiring performance sacralizes the world, but sacralizes it immanently. Like the “unspeakable chaos” around which the painting gravitates, this sacred is the void that unbinds the subject but by such unbinding allows “the self”—a being without mirrors—to issue as an incomparable voice, that lost thing that is now re-located for the first time. It is the aesthetic, rather than the epistemological, that enables a release from the contract that has stipulated what remains of one's survival in, and through, modern bondage.
Baldwin's project thus anticipates Foucault's effort to scramble the coordinates set at “the Cartesian moment” (Foucault, Hermeneutics 14–19)—coordinates that stipulate that the subject's relations are “defined entirely in terms of knowledge” (“Ethics” 294)—by turning to “aesthetics” as an access route to the outside of the Cartesian episteme. Both urge us to “create ourselves as a work of art” (“On the Genealogy” 262). If for Foucault our volonté de savoir is provoked by sexual secrets, Baldwin supplements the argument by proposing that the other's enigma, tantalizing the subject with the promise of self-knowledge, is forged in racial histories. Ida's plea that Vivaldo forgo “understanding” is an invitation for him to cease the work of his self-definition by trying to “penetrate” and “decipher” what for him appears as the Black woman's mystery (Baldwin, Another Country 646).
In her encounter with Raymond Deagan, Cathy Whitaker both illustrates the epistemophilial approach to otherness and suggests an alternative relational mode. First, having expressed surprise at finding him among the visitors, she tries to offset the patronizing impression by flaunting her liberal credentials: she bears no prejudice, she informs Raymond; she and her husband “support the NAACP.” “I just wanted you to know,” she says as they stand facing each other, in front of an abstract painting of two figures that seem to mirror the couple (Far [2003] 44; see fig. 2). The cringy scene is followed by the exchange regarding The Nightingale's Song at Midnight and the Morning Rain. Here Cathy confesses to a failed epistemic familiarity: “I don't know why but I just adore it,” she concedes; Raymond responds by theorizing modern art's efforts at sacralization (45). For diasporic modernity's non-Black subjects, her stilled contemplation of the Miró suggests a relation to otherness different both from her awkward attempt at allyship and from Vivaldo's self-redemptive efforts to solve Ida's riddle. Cathy and Raymond come together in an “understanding,” one might say, but this synchrony differs from what Ida designates by the term. Instead of gazing deeply into his being, Cathy stands with Raymond in front of the Miró; looking together at the painting, they share an “adoration” of and “wonder” at that which repels signification (fig. 3; see also fig. 1).
Fig. 2. Far from Heaven, directed by Todd Haynes (2002).
Fig. 3. Far from Heaven, directed by Todd Haynes (2002).
For the Black diasporic subject, self-creation cannot be the kind of epistemological venture exemplified in Richard's and the young Du Bois's projects of beating the white world in its game of knowledge. Yet Baldwin, as I noted, repeats the call for the Black subject to “know whence you came” (“Price” 841; Fire 293); white Americans, he adds, have remained “incoherent” in their failure to do so (“How” 763). To still speak of “self-knowledge,” the term, like “the individual,” needs to be reconfigured paleonymically. This is Foucault's strategy, too. While, experimenting with ways of being beyond the Cartesian frame, Foucault continues to evoke the role of “knowledge” in antiquity's epimeleia heautou (“care of the self”), such “knowing” for him entails an artfulness: “It was a question of making one's life into an object for a sort of knowledge, for a tekhnē—for an art” (“On the Genealogy” 271). The “sort of knowledge” Foucault has in mind differs from the mode that became hegemonic in the wake of Descartes's thought, where it nevertheless may reside as a potentiality.
“Know whence you came”: rather than engaging this world's ossified objects, Baldwin points us toward the site of nonbeing he calls “the void” or “unspeakable chaos,” unspeakable because it refuses capture by “the disastrously explicit medium of language” (Baldwin, “Autobiographical Notes” 8). He speculatively identifies a mode of “knowing” in the unnamable “quality” of the jazz singer's voice. Ida is an artist and, as an artist, “a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. [Her] role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are” (Baldwin, qtd. in Howard 89). The awe-inspiring voice renders her one of Baldwin's “witnesses,” whose art can precipitate the world's opening amid the perpetually encroaching nonlife.
