Commentaire du texte "Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin" (1955)

Résumé du document

Il s'agit d'un commentaire du texte "Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin" (1955) en 3 pages et rédigé en anglais.

Extraits

[...] The people of Harlem are all brought together, including types of people who usually do not get along at all, because of the "directionless, hopeless bitterness, as well as that panic which can scarcely be suppressed when one knows that a human being one loves is beyond one's reach, and in danger". That economy of affects culminates at the funeral. That is when Baldwin identifies the affect at the heart of the economy: pain, which can be summed up by the adage, "hurt people hurt people". But the realization operates an almost alchemical transformation: pain is not an economy but a cosmology. Indeed: "when one slapped one's child in anger the recoil in the heart reverberated through heaven and became part of the pain of the universe". [...]

[...] It consists in provoking emotions in the reader through personal stories that take on a universal value, rather than in considering ideas abstractedly. But of course, that notion of universalism is to be problematized: Thoreau and Emerson, as white men, have access to that dimension; but how can a black man, marginalized and silenced, dehumanized, can see in his struggle the struggle of mankind? That is precisely what Baldwin attempts to do in this autobiographical essay: to reclaim the universalism of his experience. [...]

[...] That is how Baldwin reconciles with the transcendental, and thus, with the universal. The final example of this cosmology is the redemption narrative that the priest invents wholesale for Baldwin's father, completely unsupported by facts; it is also the "invention" around a real incident, that posits that a black man was shot in the back by a policeman, while defending a black woman. As Baldwin puts it: "they preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly". [...]

[...] In childhood, his conception of the world was Biblical. That is because his father was extremely pious, of course, but it says something deeper about Baldwin's transition to adulthood, which coincided with his moving from an all-black community to New Jersey, where white and black people live together - or rather, segregated. That is when Baldwin is actually confronted with the racism his father never ceased to talk about, which is to say, that is when he discovers it. And so, the naiveté that allowed him to see his world in Biblical terms - which, in the West, means universal terms - is ended. [...]

[...] When he is confronted with the reality of segregation in New Jersey, he compares the "rage" he feels to a disease that "can wreck more important things than race relations". It is this rage that motivates the incident where he throws a mug of water at the face of a waitress who does not serve black people. If the incident escalates to that point, it is because of an affective exchange: "she [said it . ] with a note of apology in her voice, and fear. This made me colder and more murderous than ever". [...]