Looking Together: Desiring Relations in James Baldwin

Abstract:This essay argues that Baldwin’s Another Country evinces his search for a connective principle (of the self to self and others) beyond what the representatives of Western tradition, from the Oracle of Delphos to twentieth-century theorists of ideology, have called “knowledge” (gnosis). Baldwin’s novel seemingly promotes the redemptive role of knowledge in inter- and intrapersonal relations, both by having such privileged characters as Ida Scott announce its importance as an ethical principle and by structuring the narrative so that it concludes in a moment where the barriers to the novel’s heterosexual, interracial couple are swept aside in an epiphanic moment of mutual “understanding.” To highlight the problems with knowledge, the essay turns to passages in Proust, Conrad, and Wright that are echoing in Another Country; and points to a moment in the novel and in one of Baldwin’s interviews where an alternative connective principle—one of “looking together”—is elaborated.