The Queering of Fate: How James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room Reveals the Impossible Idea of an Isolated Archive
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 I was on a path. No, I thought I was on a path. I knew exactly what kind of African-American literature I wanted to study, teach, and continue to fall passionately in love with. Everything changed when I was introduced to James Baldwin. Although criticized for his lack of attention to race in many of his novels, he is a prolific writer of African-American and Queer literature. Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room, changed the way I read literature, and continues to shape my thoughts and feelings surrounding not only Queer literature, but African-American literature as well. Through his use of confinement regarding homosexuality in Giovanni’s Room, the room serves as a homosexual archive, one that can only be altered or interrupted by the intrusion of the heteronormative society.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 3 There are dozens of interpretations of the word archive, most often referred to as place to store materials that are considered valuable but not necessarily useful at the moment. We create public, private, and personal archives that are reflective of our history, society, and personal interests. My personal archive is composed of things I have accomplished, failed, and what I wish to learn. For example, the Romanian language is close to my heart because it is the language that my friends that live in Moldova fluently speak. I do not have an extensive knowledge base about this language, but it is in the archive as a wish to learn. The point is that other people are able to change or alter archives. As much as we want to believe our personal archives are ours, it is almost impossible not to recognize that those items within the archive are sometimes influenced by something or someone else. In regards to this idea that others are influential to our own archive, I argue that these interruptions can illustrate the idea of haunting. The people, ideas, and material that we suppress in our archive can be positioned as ghosts. These archival ghosts reveal themselves in many forms, but it indicates that the items in the archive are never truly objects from the past. By the interruption of the ghosts, we are aware of the present and the action that we must take in order to fulfill these “ghostly matters.” As Avery F. Gordon discusses in her text, Ghostly Matters¸ we cannot ignore the ghost, but we must act instead. We are constantly triggering ghosts in our archive, sometimes by our own digging, or interruptions from the world around us.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 The intrusion of others in the development of the archive is something that we cannot always control. After all, it is an intrusion that is influenced by particular agendas. An agenda does not have to be a negative feature, but we must be aware that we are influenced by societal factors that shape the way we live and archive. I agree with Derrida when he says, “I shall choose it from up close to archive desire from up close to an impossible archaeology of this nostalgia, of this painful desire for a return to the authentic and singular origin, and for a return concerned to account for the desire to return: for itself” (85). Derrida was concerned with the idea that we have an intense desire to trace the archive to the original source. As scholars we are guilty of doing so, yet I argue that this is never possible due to the idea that many items in our archive are unable to be fleshed out by locating their origin. This builds off of the idea that because of the intrusion of others, we are not alone in constructing our archives, whether they are public or personal. Although we can locate the source of their origin, we truly have no grounds to accurately consume the material that we find. Instead of attempting to digest the information in our archives as pieces, maybe a better solution is to think of it as a piece of a puzzle that must be integrated with others in order to gain a sense of collectiveness.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 1 Building an archive is something that we have been engaging in, whether it is consciously or unconsciously. Before I began to actively think about archives, I knew that there was some sort of collectiveness regarding my academic career and personal life, but I was having problems connecting the two. This is until I discovered that an archive does not need to be broken into categories. I have a collective archive of who I am in the various roles that I play, while intertwining the scholar that I hope to become. The items that I have archived are layered with more information that continuously builds into a larger sense of who I am in the process of becoming. Giovanni’s Room has impacted that archive by aiding in the understanding of how influential society can be, and how we can be neglectful of this idea of intrusion into lives. Giovanni and David built an archive in the room that they made love, but the heteronormative world’s intrusion broke the archive by conditioning David to question his love for another man. In the larger archive of Giovanni’s Room as a text, it can be positioned with the history of Queer theory, gay rights, African-American literature, masculinity, and other texts such as Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. The main point I am trying to make is that no archive can entirely isolated. This means that we cannot label an archive and its composition by one idea or theme. It is part of a collective that reaches out to many disciplines. So when we speak about the lesbian or feminist archive, we are not only looking at these particular identities, but also what has influenced this archive as a whole.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 Archives are continually shifting. We like to think of them as something that is concrete and in the past, but it is impossible to do so. Walter Benjamin is really interested in the idea that the archive is never truly in the past, but an extension of the present moment. Benjamin makes the claim that we can never truly know the items in the archive because we are aware of what happened afterwards. Therefore, the material in the archive has directly influenced the present, which means it is not in the past until it completely forgotten. With the emergence of sub-fields in various disciplines, the archives continue to shift based on who is constructing the archive. It is important to remember that each archive has an author and their particular interest helps to shape what is included. Because of this idea, many authors attempt to exclude material by force. As stated before, this is an impossible endeavor because no archive can be entirely isolated.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 1 My personal archive will continue to shift in the future as all archives will, and the shift should be welcomed as a new way of approaching the material that interests us. Although change can be frightening, it can be an indication of growth, which is something I think we all aspire to. I look forward to recognizing new ways that literature and culture continue queering my fate, that impossible idea that we are the only authors that have a hand in composing our archives.
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room; a Novel. New York: Dial, 1956. Print.
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 Benjamin, Walter, Hannah Arendt, and Harry Zohn. Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. Print.
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Derrida, Jacques, and Eric Prenowitz. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996. Print.
¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota, 2008. Print.
¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 Puig, Manuel. Kiss of the Spider Woman and Two Other Plays. New York: W.W. Norton, 1994. Print.
See, now you got me all frustrated. Mentioning this category-defying book and being all mysterious about what it’s about. Either that or I’m getting all kinds of confused, which often happens with me…