The American Dream (To Continue Dreaming…)

For this post, I decided to pay closest attention to the essays in this collection that I had not already encountered and studied. Despite my focus on these particular pieces, I still found that there is an escapable notion present in nearly all of Baldwin's work, a notion that runs beneath—and, therefore, acts as a necessary and supportive platform—much if not all of his beliefs, arguments, and reasoning. This is the notion that America is founded on a series of delusions, of refusals to acknowledge reality and the issues that have and continue to plague Americans. 

From this notion follows another, one that likewise runs its supportive beams beneath Baldwin's prose: in order to understand who we are, why we are, and what is to be done about the state of our people and our country, we must accept the past. Of course, this acceptance of the past requires an acknowledgment of the present—of reality. And, Baldwin argues, the acknowledgement of reality has and continues to be the action that America least desires to take—the action that America spends much of its strength avoiding. 

So continues that vicious cycle I discussed in my previous post on Mandelstam…

In "Question of Identity," Baldwin's investigation of "the American in Europe" leads us back to that aforementioned notion; in Europe, the American (often young, often a student), first longs for an escape—for the illusion of Paris. But what the American eventually, though unwillingly, must face is what he has been running from: himself, and his uncertain identity as it relates to his country's identity. In Europe, the American has no choice but to realize his past—and to later accept it—but he is forcefully thrust into this realization and, often times, thrusts himself right back to America where he can continue chasing his relentless dream of ignoring reality.

A most articulate passage (though, aren't they all so articulate?) from this essay: "Hidden, however, in the heart of the confusion he encounters here is that which he came so blindly seeking: the terms on which he is related to his country, and to the world…the American confusion seeming to be based on the very nearly unconscious assumption that it is possible to consider the person apart from all the forces which have produced him. This assumption, however, is itself based on nothing less than our history, which is the history of the total, and willing, alienation of entire people from their forebears" (136). 

No wonder America is abundant with people searching to uncover their pasts, to uncover their personal and familial histories. Despite this abundance, though, there are many who haven't even the thought in their mind to acknowledge that this urge—this need to find an identity, to claim one's roots—might exist. This is a startling fact.

This notion of the American as a continually and innately alienated being is discussed in Baldwin's "Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown." He writes, "Perhaps it now occurs to him that in this need to establish himself in relation to his past he is most American, that this depthless alienation from oneself and one's people is, in some, the American experience" (123). 

Also in this essay is the idea that when physically distanced from America, an American—whether he be a white student, black student, or, perhaps, a "Negro"—cannot escape confrontation with the way he perceives, the way he is perceived (in America and in Europe), and how those perceptions delude or illuminate the reality of his identity. "Dimly and for the first time," Baldwin writes, "there begins to fall into perspective the nature of the roles they have played in the lives and history of each other" (123). 

In "The Harlem Ghetto," Baldwin reveals the premise that the Negro and the Jew are united by suffering but that, despite this commonality, their assumptions and prejudices—which have, ironically and frustratingly, been perpetuated by the very force that caused their initial suffering—against one another stop them from becoming allies. This is an agonizing reality. The American white Gentile seemingly wins again, "two legends serving him at once: he has divided these minorities and he rules" (69). 

All of Baldwin's essays in Notes of a Native Son continually arrive at powerful conclusions and point to that notion I mentioned at the beginning of this post—that America is founded on a series of delusions, that to acknowledge reality one must accept the past. To that notion I'll add what I believe is likewise pervasive in Baldwin's work, an urgent call to action: "…the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly" (6). 

There is nothing to do but to cease dreaming, to wake from the deluded, unreal reality we have convinced ourselves is true reality, to inflict upon ourselves the wounds from which our necessary scars will appear—scars that will refuse us the ability to ignore the past and, therefore, force us to open our eyes.