제임스 볼드윈의 『또 다른 나라』에 나타난 자기 재현과 초월적 사랑의 문학적 비전

James Baldwin's Declaration of Self and the Vision of American Race Relations in Another Country

James Baldwin's third novel, Another Country (1962), can be marked as a turning point in his literary career. In the novel Baldwin deals with the theme of black homosexuality for the first time, creating the character of Rufus Scott, a black gay man, whose kind never appeared in any of his previous works, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Giovanni's Room (1956). In this essay I use the term, "black homosexuality," in order to distinguish Baldwin's treatment of homosexuality in Another Country from that of Giovanni's Room, a novel that deals with the intraracial rather than the interracial love between the two white men, David, a young American in Paris, and his Italian lover named Giovanni. Baldwin once called Giovanni's Room his personal "declaration of independence," perhaps in the sense that he could reveal what he had not been able to do in his highly acclaimed first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, in which he traces his childhood, describing beautifully a variety of black lives in Harlem. As far as Baldwin's self-representation is concerned, however, Giovanni's Room may be only half a proper declaration of independence, for it does not represent another important part of his being, that is, his racial identity. This essay reads Another Country as Baldwin's true declaration of himself. In the novel Baldwin employs Rufus as a figure for his self-representation, or a vehicle through which he attempts to confront the reality of his own black homosexuality, freeing himself from the dilemma which he has faced as an individual artist seeking to be true to his materials and as a spokesman of black people. Though homosexual contents of Another Country and the novel's scandalous reception in America seriously damaged Baldwin's reputation as a writer representing twentieth-century African-American literature, along with Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, the novel "saved [his] life as a writer," and as Baldwin insisted in several interviews, it is the book he "had to write." Another important concern this essay has of Another Country is how Baldwin develops his philosophy of "love" into a vision of American race relations. Relationship is a recurring theme of Baldwin's fiction, but he did not apparently deal with the relationships between white and black people in the earlier novels; it is only in Another Country that Baldwin attempts at the theme, fictionalizing what he wrote in many of his non-fiction essays, including "The Male Prison" (1954), "Nobody Knows My Name" (1959), and "In Search of a Majority" (1960). Emphasizing the ending of Another Country, where Ida Scott (Rufus's sister) and Vivaldo (Rufus's white friend who felt guilty about his death) achieve a kind of coherence in their relationship all beyond the history of white guilt and black hatred, this essay demonstrates that the love Baldwin pursues in his novel is not exclusively homosexual; but it is a transcendent love that embraces all human beings beyond gender, race, class, and any other socially constructed categories.