James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” – suggested topics
for a 1000 word essay, and a brief note on Thomas Hardy.
The first three paragraphs describe the small Swiss village
in which Baldwin spent two winters. It is an isolated village far from the
distractions Baldwin is trying to avoid. The isolated people of the village
had, when he first visited it, never seen a black man. They knew about black
people as being from Africa. Therefore, when the children of the village first
saw him, they pointed fingers and yelled, “Neger! Neger!” The idyllic isolation
is thus contrasted with a xenophobic prejudice.
Paragraph four investigates why his non-reaction to the
name-calling, his pleasant nature or what he calls his
“smile-and-the-world-smiles-with-you routine” did not work to alleviate stress,
despite the fact that “there was certainly no element of intentional
unkindness.” The villagers questioned what sort of human he was. For instance,
it was difficult for them to believe he was American, since black people came
from Africa.
Paragraph five begins the investigation of Baldwin’s innate
rage at the situation. He knows there is no unpleasantness meant by the
villagers. He is pleasant to them. But there actions are an inevitability of
history. “Joyce is right about history being a nightmare—but it may be a
nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history
and history is trapped in them.” This is now presented as a first step toward
the idea of inherent racial rage.
Paragraph six presents a further example of the villagers’
unknowing belittlement of others based on race.
This was the idea of the largely Catholic villagers trying out a system
(imposed upon them from the church) of “buying’ African natives for the purpose
of converting them to Christianity.” This includes a Lenten festival in which
two children in blackface perform the roles of Africans. Baldwin reports on the
solicitude of acquiring six to seven natives per year, something the villagers
express with a sense of pride. Again, though, Baldwin has to suppress an
immediate inner discomfort.
Paragraph six compares the conversion to Christianity of the
Africans to Baldwin’s father’s conversion to Christianity. Here the sense of
inherent rage comes out. Baldwin’s father did convert, and did so with
fervency. But he could never get over an anger at those who converted him while
all the while they treated blacks in such an un-Christian like manner. Starting with those who went to Africa to
gather potential slaves for commerce, the Caucasian world had behaved in a most
sinful manner. Yet all the while, as a historical group, the whites professed a
Christian superiority, one tat had persisted throughout the history of blacks
in America.
Paragraphs seven and eight further describe the
inevitability of the social milieu of whites as they move in a world in which
they are inheritors of the grand traditions of the Western world while the
black man is firstly seen as the African watching his conquerors roll into
their world. Par 8 begins, “The
rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also absolutely inevitable.”
The essay goes on for 10 paragraphs at least to investigate
the American race problem as a continued examination of how Western culture
could have done to black humans what it did when capturing Africans and bringing
them to America. The whole of the race problem even to the present day is
described by Baldwin as “the necessity of the American white man to find a way
of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself” (par. 14).
Par 16 is a description of the black man at the Cathedral of
Chartres. His view of the cathedral is different than the traditional Western
view. Caucasians wonder at the beauty of the cathedral, its aspiring towers and
its glorified windows. But the view of
the disenfranchised is defined by their notice of the bottomless well depicted
for the outsiders, the heretics being hurled to death and the gargoyles jutting
out of the stone “to say that God and the devil can never be divorced.” The
Christian myth gives the disenfranchised the status of the punished.
*******
What does Baldwin have to do with Thomas Hardy? When asked,
literature scholars would say that Hardy most influenced D.H. Lawrence, Marcel
Proust, John Fowles, and Theodore Dreiser (see the chapter headings of Casagrande,
Peter J. Hardy’s Influence on the Modern Novel, Barnes & Noble
Books, 1987). I have worked, in my blogs, to establish A.S. Byatt amongst the
major children of Hardy also.
I have also worked to establish the reading of literature as
a sense of immediacy. So in taking a short memoir of Baldwin and dissecting it
into small fragments without necessarily pointing to a narrative between those
fragments, I establish a type of literary reading.
Eustacia Vye, in The Return of the Native, has an ironic tug
between her connection to the natural world of the moors and the elegant
lifestyle to which she aspires. Perhaps this tug of irony is what motivates
Baldwin also. Only whereas with Eustacia, the irony comes with desire, with
Baldwin it comes with rage. Both are elements of class difference, both are
elements of identity with which the characters are born. Baldwin quotes James Joyce as noting that all history is a nightmare. All these authors, taken in the world of theie circumstance with each idea they present, display immediate and
tragic ironies, the nightmares of the individual caught in the nightmares of history..
