Gender Roomours II

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. Giovanni's Room. New York: Random House Inc., 2000.

Bhabba, Homi K. "The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonization." Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Hall, Donald E.. Queer Theories. New York: Palgrave, 2003.

Mengay, Donald H. "The Failed Copy: Giovanni's Room and the (Re)Contextualization of Difference." Genders. No 17, Fall 1993.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky.Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1990.

_____. "Axiomatic." Queer Cultures. Ed. Deborah Carlin, Jennifer DiGrazia. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2004.

Todorov, Tzvetan. Theories of the Symbol, trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1982.

Notes

• 1) Baldwin's discreet dedication on the publisher's page, "FOR LUCIEN I am the man who suffered, I suffered, I was there. -Whitman," suggests a certain identification of the author with his character or at least with his characters' turmoil. This et in Arcadia ego, opens the possibility for Giovanni's Room to be an account of a rather meta-fictional than fictional nature.
• 2) The two texts on which Sedgwick focuses are Herman Melville's Billy Bud and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. The similarity to which I refer consists of stories essentially revolving around the themes of homoerotic desire, formation of sexual identity, etc.
• 3) I refer here to Butler's definition of performativity as "the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names" (2) in Bodies that Matter. Appropriately, David performs the role that reiterates a certain model ("norm," paradoxically) he saw (and detested) in Guillaume and Jacques, "citing" their behavior, thus reproducing, difference considered, the archetype of the male pimp/male prostitute.Thus, David reproduces a mannerism that he has earlier observed in others.
• 4) Guilt is indeed a recurrent theme in the narrative, although at times David emphasizes his immunity to it; "It would help if I were able to feel guilty. But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt," he claims (112). David, I argue, uses the self-creating subjectivity of the Nietzschean disclaimer: "thus I willed" in his "eternal recurrence" of Giovanni's room.
• 5) Mengay supports his claim evoking David's characterization of Giovanni as "insolent and dark and leonine," by which "he links him metonymically with all three cultural spheres," in other words, proud, black and of African origin (60). The critic further demonstrates this analogy when he cites instances in the novel sending back to slave auctions, such as David linking the atmosphere in Guillaume's bar with a slave market, when remarking that Giovanni could win any "bidder," should he keep his posture of "arrogance on the auction block," etc. (Mengay 61).
• 6) James Baldwin spent almost ten years in Europe, especially France, between1948-1957 before he returned to New York and got involved in the Civil Rights Movement. The writer chose to spend most of the remainder of his life, after 1968, in France. In 1986, the French government made him a commander of the Legion of Honor, France's highest civilian award. He died at his home, at St. Paul de Vence, in France, on November 30, 1987, at the age of 63.
• 7) In fact, Giovanni himself equates David with the likes of Jacques and Guillaume when he sardonically recalls his stillborn son: "It was a little boy, it would have been a wonderful, strong man, perhaps even the kind of man you and Jacques and Guillaume and all your disgusting band of fairies spend all your years and nights looking for, and dreaming of…" (140).
• 8) Butler, citing Slavoj Žižek, elucidates that "the 'subject' is produced in language by the act of foreclosure (Verwerfung). What is refused or repudiated in the formation of the subject continues to determine that subject" (190).
• 9) Todorov, in Theories of the Symbol, theorizes that the canonical story has five elements: a state of equilibrium, one of disruption of that equilibrium, a state of recognition, another which constitutes the action to restore and, finally, the new state of equilibrium, the disrupted or altered equilibrium.