"Just Enough for the City": Limitations of Space in Baldwin's Another Country

Abstract

James Baldwin's novel Another Country begins with suicide of Rufus Scott, a young black jazz musician who spends last month of his life alone and homeless, fried with anguish, and roaming Manhattan's streets. Although Rufus dies within novel's first hundred pages, he is Another Country's most important character, structuring narrative through a series of relationships and memories each evoked by his death. Even before Rufus's ultimate month of wandering, he is dispossessed of a permanent home. Having years before left his parents' in Harlem, Rufus finds himself--and eventually, his white Southern girlfriend, Leona--living in a series of increasingly shabby East Village and Lower East Side apartments. Racism, poverty, and violence all thwart Rufus's attempts to claim a permanent home, and condemn him to a life of temporary habitation until last nights of his life, when he sleeps in movie theaters and finds warmth in all-night diners. While Rufus's experience of domestic impermanence is most protracted, all of characters of Another Country find themselves, at some point in novel, moving from one to another, attempting to create life. To say that Rufus Scott is absent protagonist of Another Country is not a unique claim; that his life and death shape everything that occurs afterwards is a point agreed upon by many. My reading argues that Rufus, as absent protagonist, is equally central to framing of novel's spatial logic. His dispossession and eventual homelessness disrupt and interrogate symbolic and material value of home and call into question limitations imposed by available postwar discourses of home and family. This reading of various domestic and public spaces within Another Country relies on distinction between and made by Michel de Certeau's claim that space is a practiced place (117). Certeau allows us to understand that exists on a map or as a proper noun, but is created through lived experience, and while is knowable and mappable in specific geo-political terms, is layered with both visible and veiled histories, signs, symbols, and experiences. (1) Using this language, and building on important literary work that has arisen in last fifteen years in area of cultural geography, this reading of Another Country argues for an understanding of material world occupied by Baldwin's characters as informed by and informing the socio (2) spatial dialectic. This approach to reading Another Country not only allows for a reading of space as a system of meanings--to see ... as text--but also reminds us of important work of literary interventions and multiple possibilities for (re)imagining national, urban, and domestic spaces (Jarvis 4). Another Country was published in 1962, at a time when Baldwin was deeply engaged with larger conversation and debate between black nationalism and civil fights movement. (3) In November 1962 New Yorker article Letter from a Region in My Mind, Baldwin reflects on a dinner he shared with Elijah Muhammad at Nation of Islam headquarters in Chicago. (4) Baldwin highlights Muhammad's discussion of land and nation as a moment of particular agreement and enlightened understanding: And I looked again at young faces around table, and looked back at Elijah, who was saying that no people in history had ever been respected who had not owned their land. And table said, Yes, that's right. I could not deny truth of this statement. For everyone else has, is , a nation, with a specific location and a flag--even, these days, Jew. It is only the so-called American Negro who remains trapped, disinherited, and despised, in a nation that has kept him in bondage for nearly four hundred years and is still unable to recognize him as a human being. (Region 115-16; original emphasis) Baldwin's prose lends a precision and clarity to ideological, symbolic, and material interrelatedness of land ownership, national belonging, and claims to full citizenship in African American context. …