Book Review: James Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain - Page 4

Along the way of telling the stories of the Grimes family, the novel works magic on so many levels. Baldwin is one of the most successful disciples of Henry James, because he knew the master's power lied in his exquisite imagery and ability to find and illuminate subtle truths in his examination of the human soul. And you can see that in beautiful scenic montages that show the joy, pain, exaltation and horror of being in the spirit, the anguish one has to have to want to go through such a state, the stream of conscious power of a sermon, the horrific, all too real and all too damaging father/son dynamic between Gabriel, Roy and John, the tragic ethos of Elizabeth's first love with Richard, his subsequent frame-up by the police and suicide and the wounded yet beautiful daughter/son dynamic that Elizabeth has with John. Here Baldwin takes subtle shared experiences of African American life and makes them beautifully human and undeniably powerful. Another way Mountain was revolutionary was in the way it almost singlehandedly transform the American language. Toni Morrison said it best in her eulogy of him:

You made American English honest - genuinely international. You exposed its secrets and reshaped it until it was truly modern dialogue, representative, humane. You stripped it of ease and false comfort and fake innocence and evasion and hypocrisy. And in place of deviousness was clarity. In place of soft plump lies was a lean, targeted power. In place of intellectual disingenuousness and what you called 'exasperating egocentricity,' you gave us undecorated truth. You replaced lumbering platitudes with an upright elegance. You went into that forbidden territory and decolonized it, 'robbed it of the jewel of its naivete,' and un-gated it for black people so that in your wake we could enter it, occupy it, restructure it in order to accommodate our complicated passion - not our vanities but our intricate, difficult, demanding beauty, our tragic, insistent knowledge, our lived reality, our sleek classical imagination - all the while refusing 'to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize [us].' In your hands language was handsome again. In your hands we saw how it was meant to be: neither bloodless nor bloody, and yet alive.

Reading Mountain again I am struck on how, for all Morrison's influences, she and Baldwin are parallel bookends to each other; each showing the best that postmodernist black fiction has offered in the past 50 years. Like Baldwin did in Mountain, Morrison's best work highlights the universal in the African American experience by focusing on the personal and interior of black life. Mountain's greatest triumph is exactly that, as John Grimes and his struggles don't belong only to the scope of African American history, but also of the narrator of In Search Of Lost Time's finite descriptions of his life and world, Stephen Dedalus, the hero of James Joyce's Portrait of The Artist as A Young Man, struggling to search for self and make sense of his life, and in the end Joseph, hero of the Old Testament, desperately trying to come to terms with the nightmare of his family.

Article Author: Robert Lashley

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