Confronting the “Foreigner from Within”: (Sexual) Exile and “Indomitable Force” in the Fiction of James Baldwin and Colm Tóibín

Abstract

In his 1996 novel The Story of the Night, Irish writer Colm Tóibín addressed the issue of homosexuality for the first time in his fiction. The novel weaves a manifold
tale of nationality, identity and sexuality – and displaces that tale, as Tóibín himself acknowledged, onto “another country”,
avoiding the “personal or polemical” in favour of the displaced and figuratively exiled (C. Tóibín 1996: 2). In so doing,
Tóibín was following a model provided by one of his great literary idols, the African American novelist, essayist, playwright
and poet, James Baldwin. Baldwin's own first direct treatment of homosexuality in fiction, Giovanni's Room (1956), was similarly set outside of the borders of his home nation and exceeded the confines of political or racial identity
building.

Full text

Confronting the “Foreigner from Within”: (Sexual) Exile
and “Indomitable Force” in the Fiction of James Baldwin
and Colm Tóibín
Gerald David Naughton
In his 1996 novel The Story of the Night, Irish writer Colm Tóibín addressed the
issue of homosexuality for the first time in his fiction. The novel weaves a
manifold tale of nationality, identity and sexuality – and displaces that tale, as
Tóibín himself acknowledged, onto “another country”, avoiding the “personal or
polemical” in favour of the displaced and figuratively exiled (C. Tóibín 1996: 2).
In so doing, Tóibín was following a model provided by one of his great literary
idols, the African American novelist, essayist, playwright and poet, James
Baldwin. Baldwin’s own first direct treatment of homosexuality in fiction,
Giovanni’s Room (1956), was similarly set outside of the borders of his home
nation and exceeded the confines of political or racial identity building. The
similarities between the two novels go far beyond superficial confluence. Both
texts narrate tales of repression and desire, presenting a queer aesthetic of the
concealment and revelation of homosexual pleasure. The “room” of Baldwin’s
title – a chaotic and disordered space of the marginalized, though potentially
transformative, homoerotic – finds a resonant echo in the run-down Buenos
Aires apartment that forms one of the most telling spaces of Tóibín’s text. As a
contemporary Irish writer engages with an iconic twentieth-century African
American antecedent, a complex political dialectic is created between issues of
Irish and (African) American exile. Both narratives present their tales of
homosexual identity through exiled subjectivities, but in engaging with and, to
an extent, writing through, Giovanni’s Room, Tóibín adds a further level of exile
to his text: a challenging and potentially problematic dialogue across “Black”
and “Green” Atlantics.
Oscar Wilde once suggested that exile in America had had a transformative
effect on Irish identity. In Wilde’s words, America provided the “Celtic intellect”
with an “education” that would have seemed impossible before the great
nineteenth-century diasporas. What is learned, according to Wilde’s model, is the
terrible paradox of nationality: its “pathetic weakness” and its “indomitable
force” (O. Wilde 1998: 136) – two themes that are played out in the works of the

132 Gerald David Naughton
writers discussed in this chapter. The Story of the Night, like Giovanni’s Room,
plays on this paradox by writing a potentially debilitating awareness of the past
into its aesthetic of individual choice. Both texts reveal a similarly complex
relationship between language and temporality – one that displaces and redraws
nationality and sexuality.
There is, of course, an essential and unavoidable distinction between
“Black” and “Green” Atlantics. If Wilde had imagined the Celtic intellect, when
removed to the United States, “matur(ing) its powers (.…) concentrat(ing) its
action, (and) learn(ing) the secret of its own strength” (O. Wilde 1998: 287), it is
a vision of exile validating nationality that had historically been withheld from
black America. In a 1967 essay, Baldwin questions “whether Americans already
have an identity or are still sufficiently flexible to achieve one” (J. Baldwin
1985: 432). The Irish in America, he suggests, “cling (….) to those credentials
forged in the Old World, credentials which cannot be duplicated here, credentials
which the American Negro does not have” (J. Baldwin 1985: 432). Those
“credentials” involve history as the collective memory of a mythical past.
Nationality, according to Homi K. Bhabha’s Nation and Narration, requires a
“genealogy of origin” that is necessarily fictional (H. Bhabha 1990: 307), and
Baldwin’s model presumes the same. Ernest Renan rhetorically asks “(w)hat is a
Nation” and returns the paradoxical solution that “(t)hose who wish to make up a
nation must possess much in common and also be willing to forget many
things”1. Within Baldwin’s framework, what Irish Americans “possess in
common” are “Old World credentials” that are at bottom pure fiction; what they
wilfully and intransigently forget is their complicated and involved history in the
United States. For these reasons, America itself remains a provisional country in
Baldwin’s imagination. As will be discussed, however, though unclaimed and
unacknowledged, that troublesome past returns to interrupt and disrupt the
narrative of exile-as-liberation towards which Baldwin’s second novel,
Giovanni’s Room, tentatively moves, rendering the displacement of nationality
an eternally incomplete act. It is a framing of national identity that is, I would
argue, notably absent in Colm Tóibín’s versioning of James Baldwin.
Tóibín engages with Baldwin as a singular entity and never maps his
appropriations of Baldwin – or his similar engagement with Henry James – onto
some overarching image of America. Indeed, he seems inherently suspicious of
American influence on Ireland. A century after Wilde had seen the “Celtic
intellect” discovering its strength in the United States, he worries that Irish
identity has become obscured by American globalization. He wonders about a
country in which the literature that most speaks to aspiring writers is the modern
1 Quoted in C. Hitchens 2000: 97.

Sexual Exile in the Fiction of James Baldwin and Colm Tóibín 133
American novel and even laments the fact that “Irish people adore American
country music”. Ireland, he has claimed, has become “in certain ways (….) an
aspect of America and (the Irish people) are happy for that to continue” (C.
Tóibín and C. Abani 2006). If America is presented here as contaminant, rather
than inspiration, what can be made of Tóibín’s direct engagement with an
African American from an entirely different, even alien, context?
The comparison between these two writers is suggested, in the first place,
by Tóibín’s repeated and multilateral engagement with the figure of Baldwin as
antecedent. Tóibín has been interviewed several times on Baldwin; he has also
written several essays on him, one review for the London Review of Books and
an introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of one of Baldwin’s best-known
novels Another Country. At every stage of his engagement with Baldwin, Tóibín
presents him as a figure of the transnational – a transcultural personality par
excellence. Though his introduction to Another Country acknowledges that
Baldwin was “an American before he was anything else” (C. Tóibín 2001: x),
when it comes to the pertinent issue of influence, America disappears. Indeed,
Tóibín makes only one effort to situate the writer in anything like a national
canon when he notes that in writing of the black experience, Baldwin had
“looked to Henry James rather than Richard Wright” (C. Tóibín 2001: vii) – a
statement that serves only to emphasize Baldwin’s internationalism and freedom
from anything other than aesthetic concerns. Instead, Tóibín presents Baldwin as
a writer conditioned primarily by “things which had nothing to do with his
background or his own experiences”: “the sort of darkness and sense of gloom
you get in French fiction and philosophy of the period” and “the pessimism and
claustrophobia of Ingmar Bergman’s films”, for example (C. Tóibín 2001: viii-
ix).
Tóibín places the accent on Baldwin’s transculturalism – deliberately
ignoring outmoded national, racial or sexual identity discourses. As such,
Tóibín’s introduction is a representative example of current readings of Baldwin.
However, such readings have not always been well received. In a recent
roundtable discussion, simply entitled “A James Baldwin Tribute”, novelist,
activist, professor of African American Studies and former friend of Baldwin,
Michael Thelwell, cited an “attempt to diminish” his “extraordinary
contributions” and “to completely misunderstand (Baldwin’s) provenance, and
the sources which influenced him – giving them an Anglo-European context,
which is totally false” (W. Muyumba 2008). Thelwell refers here specifically to
the academic response to Baldwin’s work, in which there is now a far smaller
focus on racial politics than at any previous stage of criticism. The present

134 Gerald David Naughton
reception of the writer emphasizes his transcendence of identity politics2. Over
twenty years after his death, Baldwin’s relevance is increasingly felt as an
international and transnational event.
9.1 (De)Categorizing James Baldwin
In all of his readings of James Baldwin, Colm Tóibín has been particularly
suspicious of the ways in which the older writer had been appropriated and
misappropriated by other readers. As he put it:
(James Baldwin) has such a complex legacy. All sorts of people want to claim him as
theirs; some want the black element, some want the fiction, some want the essays,
others want only the gay side of him. That makes him difficult to assimilate in total. It’s
much easier to understand, say, someone like Saul Bellow than James Baldwin (Tóibín
and Abani 2006).
The idea of “assimilating” any writer “in total” may provide a faulty predicate
for Tóibín’s analysis here. We probably should not assume that an author as rich
as Bellow could be “understood” on the level that he suggests. However, unlike
Baldwin, Bellow was never subject to the reductive efforts of “all sorts of
people” to “claim him as theirs”. In many ways, Baldwin’s literary elusiveness
only manifests itself in the failures of the efforts that Tóibín describes. To give
one example, in a major editorial, published the year after Baldwin’s death, The
New York Times tried to hail the term “African American” as a testament to “the
nation’s success”:
Blacks may now feel comfortable enough in their standing as citizens to adopt the
family surname: American. And their first name, African, conveys a pride in cultural
heritage that all Americans cherish. The late James Baldwin once lamented, “nobody
knows my name.” Now everybody does3.
The editorial sounded a triumphal, even false, note – one that “the late James
Baldwin” himself had already guarded against. In 1972, he had defined the term
“Afro-American” as nothing “but a wedding (….) of two confusions, an arbitrary
linking of two undefined and currently undefineable proper nouns” (J. Baldwin
1972: 193). In fact, that term was but one of the labels from which Baldwin had
2 Two critical texts – the Dwight A. McBride edited James Baldwin Now (1999) and D. Quentin
Miller’s volume Re-Viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen (2000) – should probably be
considered the most indicative of current reception. Both texts reject the privileging of race or
sexuality over other forms of difference in Baldwin's work.
3 Editorial. The New York Times (22 December, 1998).

Sexual Exile in the Fiction of James Baldwin and Colm Tóibín 135
tried to flee during his lifetime. This rejection is characteristic of a writer who,
though black and bisexual, refused to be categorized as a “gay writer” or even as
a “black writer”, stating that: “I was not born to be defined by someone else, but
by myself, and myself alone”4.
Tóibín categorizes Baldwin as, paradoxically, a figure that refuses
categorization – a figure that cannot be claimed through any reading. His most
revealing statement on what he sees as the true value of Baldwin’s legacy comes
in a 2006 conversation with Nigerian writer Chris Abani:
(James Baldwin) remains a haunting figure simply because of the way he tried to solve
a number of very difficult problems, and he’s one of the people that I most admire of the
century (….) (Giovanni’s Room contained) only white characters and mostly gay
characters. His agent told him to burn the book, his publishers wouldn’t publish it — it
was first published in Britain — and you know, suddenly deciding to support William
Styron when he wrote Nat Turner. And insisting, in the essays, in the polemics, and in
Another Country, on actually holding the fort for Art. That “we’re artists, and we will
write our essays and polemics as we please, but the novels are sacred space, which will
not be invaded by anything other than stylistic concerns and the deep-seated private
concerns of the author” (Tóibín and Abani 2006).
Is Tóibín here guilty of the crime with which he himself had charged other
readers of Baldwin: of the desire “to claim him” as his? Baldwin becomes in this
passage a useable and tractable influence for Tóibín, who has repeatedly declared
his lack of interest in nationality and sexual identity as reductive categories: “I
don’t really know what a ‘gay’ novel is,” he recently stated, “just as I couldn’t
really tell you what an ‘Irish’ novel is”. He has also claimed, interestingly, that
“the ‘gay’ novel is a sort of American phenomenon” (Tóibín and Abani 2006,
emphasis mine). There seems an unavoidable linkage between Tóibín’s stated
ignorance of what constitutes the gay novel or the Irish novel and several similar
statements made by James Baldwin.
To give just one example, in one of his final essays, “Freaks and the
American Ideal of Manhood”, Baldwin writes:
(A)ll of the American categories of male and female, straight or not, black or white,
were shattered, thank heaven, very early on in my life. Not without anguish certainly,
but once you have discerned the meaning of a label, it may seem to define you for
others, but it does not have the power to define you to yourself (J. Baldwin 1985: 817).
There is a crucial difference here, however. Through his refutation of generic
“American” binaries, Baldwin ironically positions himself within a well-worn
national type. His insistence on being defined “not by someone else, but by
4 Quoted in S. Troupe 1989: 193.

136 Gerald David Naughton
(him)self, and (him)self alone”5 marks him as an inheritor of Emersonian
individualism. “A country”, he once proclaimed, “is only as strong as the people
who make it up and the country turns into what the people want it to become”6.
In this final description of America as a nation of absolute possibility, we get an
impression of the crucial point of divergence between my two protagonists.
Baldwin’s yet-to-be-created “nation of individuals” calls to mind Declan
Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland, which envisions a nation that will “emerge (as) a
self-creating Ireland produced by nothing but its own desire” – a country in
which “everything (….) might yet be remade” (D. Kiberd 1996: 579).
It is notable, therefore, that Kiberd’s thesis is brutally refuted in Tóibín’s
review of Inventing Ireland, which presents the book as wallowing in “some
very old-fashioned views on Irish nationalism and Irish history”, even claiming
that Kiberd is guilty of “adher(ing) to the story we all read in the schoolbooks
which he is the last to believe” (C. Tóibín 2000: 1137-9). Though one may take
issue with his critique of Kiberd, the reasons for these criticisms reveal a great
deal about Tóibín’s relationship to the idea of Ireland – and also about his
admiration for Baldwin. What he imagines is, as he puts it himself, a
hypothetical “book called ‘Not Inventing Ireland’ (….) in which writers ignored
the idea of Ireland” (C. Tóibín 2000: 1139). The review indicates an emotional
attitude towards Irish nationalism that may even exceed Baldwin’s more fervent
denunciations of narrowly defined identity politics. What I mean to suggest,
then, is that Tóibín’s deep-seated antipathy towards Irish nationalism is
transferred onto what he perceives as Baldwin’s deep-seated antipathy towards
American or African American nationalism. Could it be that, as he reads James
Baldwin, he finds the author of “Not Inventing (Black/Queer) America”? If so,
does he not produce a reading that may prove to be just as difficult to support as
any other appropriation of Baldwin? Moreover, in writing so consistently and
energetically of the “uncontained” Baldwin, Tóibín is involved in what, to an
older generation, looks like an ungendering, unsexing and unracing of one of the
twentieth century’s most important black or gay writers. His versioning of
Baldwin’s fiction as “sacred territory”, uncontaminated by racial or sexual
politics, sits rather uneasily with the high polemics exercized by the African
American – especially in the most critically neglected period of Baldwin’s
writing (c1964-1978).
Ironically, for a writer who tried to evade epithets throughout his career,
Baldwin seems to have been posthumously captured as a writer of the “post-
5 Ibid.
6 Quoted in D. A. Miller 1988: 3.

Sexual Exile in the Fiction of James Baldwin and Colm Tóibín 137
national”, “post-gendered” or (most forcefully) of the “post-racial”. Peter Kerry
Powers has recently attempted to explain the new consensus:
Baldwin’s finely tuned individualism, his refusal of racial and sexual identities, his
world travels, his intellectual homelessness, all these position Baldwin as a fellow
traveller with contemporary thinkers such as Anthony Appiah or Paul Gilroy as
prophets of post-racial consciousness and of a resurgent internationalist
cosmopolitanism 7.
Powers notably emphasizes mobility, cosmopolitanism and exile as indices
of post-racial prophecy. Interestingly, he figures Baldwin’s exilic travels as both
geographical and intellectual. Like Powers, Colm Tóibín tends to present
Baldwin as a “natural exile” – a phrase which he actually coins to define another
contemporary Irish writer, Dermot Hogan (C. Tóibín 1993: 13). The concept
suggests that exile is an aesthetic disposition, rather than a biographical fact.
9.2 Voluntary Exile: Tóibín’s The Story of the Night
Of course, as Edward Said reminds us, exile can be both “actual” and
“metaphoric,” “voluntary” or “involuntary” (E. Said 2000: 172-5). According to
Said: “(t)o see a poet in exile — as opposed to reading the poetry of exile — is to
see exile’s antinomies embodied and endured” (E. Said 2000: 174). It is a crucial
distinction, and one that guards against what he terms the singular danger of
“making a fetish of exile”, a practice that distances (the exile) from all
connections and commitments. “To live as if everything around you were
temporary and perhaps trivial”, Said continues, “is to fall prey to petulant
cynicism as well as to querulous lovelessness” (E. Said 2000: 182). This shallow
and ahistorical state becomes, at the extreme end of Said’s model, the sine qua
non of voluntary exile.
If the fetishization of exile is a danger, it is one with which Richard Garay,
the central character of Tóibín’s The Story of the Night, continually flirts. Garay
is not a figure of exile, but rather a figure of displaced alienation. The blond-
haired homosexual son of a British émigré family in Buenos Aires, he constantly
feels his apartness from the rigid strategies of identity building in Argentina. For
a long part of the novel, Garay is a consummate player of the game of
masculinity. He is initially rejected, for example, by the object of his affection,
Pablo, for being “good at playing the straightest boy in the class” (C. Tóibín
1996: 188). Garay does, however, learn to truthfully express his sexual identity –
7 Quoted in C. Hardy 2007.

138 Gerald David Naughton
and it is telling that this expression can happen only in the isolation of Garay’s
apartment life with Pablo. Outside of that private space, he continues to
sublimate his personal identity to a larger nationalistic power game. The spatial
solution that he finds to his sexual dilemma is foreshadowed in his childhood
attitude towards nationality:
My mother had come to Argentina with her father in the early 1920s just after her own
mother had died. When I was a small boy I always wanted her to tell me the story of the
voyage one more time. Days and days at sea, without a single sight of land, the sea flat
and monotonous, going on for ever. The story of a man who died and whose body was
thrown overboard (….) And then the port of Buenos Aires, and the long wait to
disembark, and this new language, how they did not understand a single word anybody
said. I knew this story as though its details were more real and absolute than anything
that happened in our apartment, or in school, or in our lives during all those years of
childhood (C. Tóibín 1996: 13-4).
As a young man, then, Garay situates himself within a moment of exile that is
not absolutely his own – within the provisional transnational chronotope that
transcends logos (“they did not understand a single word anybody said”) and
temporality (“the sea flat and monotonous, going on for ever”).
In The Master, his 2004 novelization of the life of Henry James, Tóibín
highlights a similar moment of liminal spatial and national transcendence. The
novel places Tóibín’s James in a dark street outside the home of Paul
Joukowsky, contemplating the final fulfilment of a long repressed desire.
Ultimately, James knows that he “(cannot) move, either to return to his own
quarters or – he held his breath even at the thought – to gain access to Paul’s
rooms” (C. Tóibín 2005: 10). His characteristic inaction lasts for several hours.
Later he contemplates that long moment of hesitation:
He wondered now if these few hours were not the truest he had ever lived. The most
accurate comparison he could find was with a smooth hopeful, hushed sea journey, an
interlude suspended between two countries, standing there as though floating, knowing
that one step would be a step into the impossible unknown (C. Tóibín 2004: 10).
Like Richard Garay, James connects sexual and geographical exile. Both
position their sexuality in the “interlude suspended between two countries”. Both
long for a borderless condition, a transcendence of categorization. In Julia
Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves, we are reminded that the exile longs not for
home, but for “that country that does not exist but that he bears in his dreams,
and that must indeed be called a beyond” (J. Kristeva 1991: 5). Like Henry
James pondering a step into an “imponderable unknown”, Richard Garay
hesitates to take a step towards any definitive sexual identity. For both, exile
becomes as much an act of evasion as a key to self-expression.

Sexual Exile in the Fiction of James Baldwin and Colm Tóibín 139
Later in his narrative, Garay admits that “one side of (him), the English side
maybe, was a way of hiding from the other side, which was Argentinean, so that
(he) never had to be a single fully formed person” (C. Tóibín 1996: 182). He
finally escapes from what Said describes as the danger of the “querulous
lovelessness” of voluntary exile, by finding genuine, transcendent love in his
relationship with Pablo (E. Said 2000: 182). However, in a novel that maps
Garay’s contested sexual identity onto the political vacuum of post-Falklands
War Argentina, that relationship can only exist in private spaces that are
dislocated and divorced from national politics. Like his childhood efforts to solve
the dilemma of uncertain nationality through self-willed exile, Garay’s very real
love for Pablo can only thematically fit as an act of escape, a way of avoiding the
question of his identity.
9.3 “Deliberate Untimeliness”: Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
Giovanni’s Room sees Baldwin deliberately exiling himself from the home
ground of “race literature” (as has been mentioned, the text does not include a
single African American character). However, the novel ends in the tragedy of
failed exile. In rejecting a potentially redemptive homosexual relationship with
the eponymous Giovanni, the white protagonist, David, confines himself to the
limits of American heteronormativity. Though exiled from America, David
allows his sexual identity to be eclipsed by his nationality – a danger to which
Baldwin the artist was all too alive. Baldwin cited James Joyce’s directives for
artistic freedom, “silence, exile and cunning”, as the necessary “system” that he
used to sustain his own life (F. Standley and L. Pratt 1989: 106). In 1948, he left
America for Paris – a move that made possible the bold statement of delivering
Giovanni’s Room into a marketplace that demanded from him another novel of
race. He later remembered his time in Paris as the period in which he learned
“about (his) own country, (his) own past, and about (his) own language” (F.
Standley and L. Pratt 1989: 106).
This discussion of exile as something that teaches him about “his own
language” is crucial. The twentieth-century writer, according to a famous
observation by George Steiner, is a “poet unhoused and (a) wanderer across
language. Eccentric, aloof, nostalgic, deliberately untimely”8. Baldwin had first
revealed his own feeling of “unhousedness”, “eccentricity” and “untimeliness” in
an early essay in which he defined himself as a “bastard of the West,” an
8 Quoted in E. Said 2000: 174.

140 Gerald David Naughton
“interloper,” a “suspect latecomer” (J. Baldwin 1985: 83). As has often been
noted, Baldwin’s writing is polyglossic – “wandering across” languages, idioms
and linguistic codes. It is infused not only with Black English, but also with the
cadences of the Old Testament and with the labyrinthine eloquence of Henry
James’s later fiction. James, a writer of “amphibious elegance,” “an artist
obsessed by dualities, paradox”, is, according to Charles Newman, Baldwin’s
most obvious stylistic antecedent: “The Atlantic Ocean separated James’s mind
into opposing hemispheres, and the gulf of colour so cleaves Baldwin” (C.
Newman 1966: 44). Though he initially likened Henry James’s idiom to a
“foreign language” (W. Weatherby 1989: 96), Baldwin eventually credited the
master with the completion in exile of his first novel Go Tell It On the Mountain
(J. Elgraby 1984: 54). That reading James should be such a critical catalyst for
the necessarily exilic process of learning “about (his) own country, (his) own
past, and about (his) own language” is important (F. Standley and L. Pratt 1989:
106). Baldwin discovers in Henry James – as Tóibín later discovers in both
Henry James and James Baldwin – a transcultural and transnational touchstone:
an American antecedent who can teach the lessons of exile.
David, the American protagonist of Giovanni’s Room, comes to Paris
needing to learn similar lessons, but is hampered by his failure to honestly
address his cultural past. The novel is framed by the familiar classical plot of the
attempt to escape from fate. David’s exile stems primarily from his first
homosexual encounter as a teenager with a boy named Joey, whom he quickly
rejects — and his life in Paris, which results from that rejection, is therefore
doomed to failure. In the scene where David meets Giovanni, the Italian mocks
his simplicity. David believes that “(you) feel in Paris all the life gone by”,
whereas in America “you feel (….) all the life to come”. Giovanni retorts:
The Americans are funny. You have a funny sense of time – or perhaps you have no
sense of time at all, I can’t tell. Time always sounds like a parade chez vous – a
triumphant parade, like armies with banners entering a town. As though with enough
time (….) everything will be settled, solved, put in its place (J. Baldwin 2001: 37).
While for the Americans everything can be “settled, solved” in this world,
Giovanni longs to “escape (….) this dirty world, this dirty body,” and tells David
that he “never wish(es) to make love again with anything more than the body” (J.
Baldwin 2001: 28) – a statement that indicates not contempt for the flesh, but
rather contempt for the fictions that the flesh represents. He longs to express a
physical love that will elude the projections that are placed onto the body.
Giovanni’s relationship with David – like his cramped, disordered and never-
quite-finished room – indicates a desire to create an alternative reality beyond
categorisation.

Sexual Exile in the Fiction of James Baldwin and Colm Tóibín 141
9.4 Unhomely Spaces
In Giovanni’s Room, David disdains the gay circle in Paris for being “of le
milieu”:
While this milieu was certainly anxious enough to claim me, I was intent on proving, to
them and to myself, that I was not of their company. I did this by being in their
company a great deal and manifesting toward all of them a tolerance which placed me, I
believed, above suspicion (J. Baldwin 2001: 32-33).
This is a strange process of denial and projection, couched in benignity that
Baldwin frequently identified with American Liberalism. It is also highly
suggestive of the games that Tóibín’s Richard Garay plays in simultaneously
hiding and revealing his homosexual identity. It is notable that Garay begins his
narrative in the squalid apartment left to him by his mother: a setting evocative
of the unfinished room of Giovanni – an “overcrowded”, “overfurnished”
version of home that is characteristically provisional and eternally incomplete.
Here again, Tóibín is playing with the theme of symbolic exile. We first
encounter Garay’s apartment as the site of his English mother’s descent into
jingoistic hysteria and, finally, quiet death. She has cluttered the home with
foreign ill-fitting furniture, and even “plastered the apartment with tourist posters
of Buckingham Palace and the changing of the guard and magazine photographs
of the royal family” and other “emblems of empire” (C. Tóibín 1996: 3) that
comfort her, but alienate her son. “The exile”, according to Julia Kristeva, “is a
stranger to his mother” (J. Kristeva 1991: 5). Garay has lost his mother, and, like
Camus’ “Stranger”, typically “reveals himself at the time of his mother’s death”
(J. Kristeva 1991: 5). It is only on leaving his mother’s room that Garay can
process the significance of her death: “As soon as I opened the door and went
into the hall,” he recalls, “I began to cry (….) I was alone now (….) I had lost
whatever anchor I had in the world: nothing I did mattered to anyone” (C. Tóibín
1996: 61). For the rest of the novel, Garay does not seek to restore this “anchor”,
but rather transfers identity into an “imponderable unknown” (C. Tóibín 2005:
10). Wilfully turning away from the great dilemmas of his identity, he does not,
like Giovanni, attempt to make disordered space into truthful self-representation,
but simply moves to a larger building, with less furniture, further from the centre
of the city.
Giovanni’s room is similarly cramped, dishevelled, and claustrophobic. It
marks his doomed effort to construct a space that somehow articulates his
identity – doomed because that identity remains eternally unspeakable. The
room, which is “always in process” and “never quite finished” (R. Reid-Pharr
1997: 372), is a manifestation of the life that Giovanni and David attempt to

142 Gerald David Naughton
build there: its amorphousness reflects their life together, which holds, in the
early stages, “a joy and amazement which (is) newborn every day” (J. Baldwin
2001: 69). It is also a space that terrifies David as much as the unkempt decaying
apartment in Buenos Aires panics Richard Garay. David concludes that:
it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one
began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in
any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or
temperament; it was a matter of punishment or grief (J. Baldwin 2001: 84).
Giovanni is condemned for his failure to be, in William Faulkner’s phrase,
“articulated in this world” (W. Faulkner 1995: 171): that is to say, for being a
character incapable of playing a game of categorization that would “place him
above suspicion” (J. Baldwin 2001: 33). His ultimate punishment is the
execution that follows from his manipulation, abuse and misidentification at the
hands of his brutal employer Guillaume. However, it is more essentially the
result of his desertion by David, who – still playing at being a heterosexual
American – returns to a self-denying engagement to a white American woman,
Hella. His return to Hella, a sort of surrogate for a homeland that has already
rejected him, is an act of wilful amnesia. David is clearly motivated by a desire
to refute and escape the past:
Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering (….) or forgetting (….)
Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it
takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of
the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind
of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the
world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget.
Heroes are rare (J. Baldwin 2001: 36).
David clearly sees himself as a “madman who forgets”. The French setting of
Giovanni’s Room thus becomes a metaphor for the distance that he, an expatriate
American, has attempted to put between himself and his past. His is an act of
voluntary exile that wishes to elude his private history.
Remembering Giovanni’s longing to “escape (….) this dirty world, this
dirty body,” we begin to see where this act of elusion leads. In Giovanni’s
formation, “world (….) body” are similarly corrupted and polluted by mutual
dependency. His solution is to take “world” from “body”: to “never (….) make
love with anything more than the body” (J. Baldwin 2001: 28). Giovanni’s final
tragedy is that he cannot take the “dirty world” away from his relationship with
David. Indeed, David makes the point clear when he imagines the door that will
lead to the place of Giovanni’s execution as the “gateway he (Giovanni) has

Sexual Exile in the Fiction of James Baldwin and Colm Tóibín 143
sought so long out of this dirty world, this dirty body” (J. Baldwin 2001: 158).
Of course, Giovanni had longed for love, not death; he had imagined the single-
room home that the two lovers had shared as the “gateway” of which David now
speaks. Moreover, it is David who lets the “dirty world” into that home. He
leaves Giovanni’s room to drift towards the simulacrum of heteronormative
marriage. What Baldwin is writing here is what Homi K. Bhabha has described
as an “unhomely” text. This is, to quote Bhabha, a narrative in which the world
impacts on the home to reveal a “double-edge, which (….) represents (….) a
difference ‘within’” (H. Bhabha 1992: 148). In such texts, according to Bhabha:
home does not remain the domain of domestic life, nor does the world simply become
its social or historical counterpart. The unhomely is the shock of the recognition of the
world-in-the-home, the home-in-the world (H. Bhabha 1992: 141).
As David tries to locate the “key to (….) disorder” in Giovanni’s room, he
imagines “mortal and unavoidable danger” and feels a vague “malevolence”,
which he connects to the room’s yellow light, hanging “like a diseased and
undefinable sex”. David cannot tolerate undefinability and he instantly decides,
as he sardonically puts it, to “play the housewife” in an attempt to apply
definition (J. Baldwin 2001: 84). Unhomeliness, as Bhabha points out, is
typically associated with the world of political reality invading the home and
disrupting domestic order. In Giovanni’s Room, however, homeliness is located
not in any established domestic order but in the effort to render the home
“newborn every day” (J. Baldwin 2001: 69). David’s need to push his
relationship with Giovanni into definable domestic gender roles is his great
failing – and it is crucially an American failing. Elsewhere he admits that he
“resented being called not an American because it seemed to make (him)
nothing” (J. Baldwin 2001: 86), and his need to fit the home of Giovanni into
what Baldwin describes as “the American categories of male and female, straight
or not, black or white” (J. Baldwin 1985: 817) follows the same logic. David is
thus revealed as what Julia Kristeva calls the “foreigner (….) from within” (J.
Kristeva 1991: 14). He creates “the shock of the recognition of the world-in-the-
home” (H. Bhabha 1992: 141), not by disrupting domestic order, but by
imposing it.
It is an imposition for which Giovanni will ultimately pay with his life – and
in this “punishment” (J. Baldwin 2001: 84) it may be tempting to see a further
parallel between Baldwin’s and Tóibín’s texts. Writing about Tóibín’s The Story
of the Night, Robert L. Caserio has noted that the “protagonist’s homosexuality
help(s) him to grow beyond his conservative Anglo-Argentine origins” (R.
Caserio 2006: 218). As Caserio states, in Argentina in the 1980s: “(n)ationalism,
global internationalism, and intensifying privatization paradoxically go

144 Gerald David Naughton
together”, and in Tóibín’s novel “(b)odily life repeats the paradox” (R. Caserio
2006: 218). The novel’s two lovers contract AIDS – a disease that will “torture
and punish” them (C. Tóibín 1996: 251), in a way that Caserio presents as a
reflection of the brutal political regime that forms the backdrop to their tale.
Though Garay does his best to ignore the political persecution going on around
him, according to this reading, he is metaphorically “punished”, as is his country,
for complicity in that persecution. However, an assessment of a superficially
similar “punishment” at the end of Giovanni’s Room calls into question
Caserio’s reading. Unlike Giovanni’s Room, Tóibín’s text ultimately rejects as
false the confluence of national and personal stories. Reading Tóibín’s The Story
of the Night as a reworking of Baldwin’s novel (Richard Garay’s Apartment?),
the difference between the two writers becomes apparent. In The Story of the
Night, Richard and Pablo’s journey ends in the quiet tragedy of their mutual and
terminal illness, but this is not tragedy in the Aristotelian sense. Richard is able
to return to his cluttered unwieldy apartment at the end of his journey and is able
to reform its rooms with his lover’s help. The two can thus create a separate
space that ultimately places their story outside of the corrupt polity of an
unreformed Argentina. Death here is not vengeful punishment, but private escape
– an escape that simply does not follow the contours of James Baldwin’s
thought. Though Baldwin’s narrator may view execution as Giovanni’s only
“gateway” out of the “dirty world”, this view has been significantly obscured by
his acceptance of American categorization. Thus, in what is ostensibly Baldwin’s
least “polemical” novel – which Tóibín suggests may be his most “sacred”, most
“private” novel (C. Tóibín and C. Abani 2006) – we find a deep critique of what
Baldwin perceives to be America’s greatest failing.
Both Giovanni’s Room and The Story of the Night narrate stories of
political, linguistic, social and temporal exile. However, in the novelists’
respective negotiations of sexual exile, we find two significantly different
transcultural personalities. Richard Garay is simply a “voluntary exile”;
Baldwin’s figuring of David, however, reveals the “indomitable force” of
American identitarianism.
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