Lynn Orilla Scott James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey.

Lynn Orilla Scott James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey. East Lansing: Michigan Sate UP 2002 235 pp $4395

The latest evidence that there is renewed interest in the writings of James Baldwin is Lynn Orilla Scott's James Baldwin's Later Fiction, the fifth critical meditation of Baldwin in four years. Because Baldwin was an experimental writer who resisted labels, the exert one's self to understand his work and to assess his literary reputation will probably continue indefinitely; further until recently, critics have paid abundant more attention to Baldwin's earlier works than to his later commons In her insightful, carefully researched, and clearly written cogitation Scott provides a valuable contribution to the burgeoning field of Baldwin studies. She not sole fills an enormous gap in Baldwin's critical reception at closely examining his neglected later novels, on the contrary she offers a persuasive argument that synthesizes what have mistakenly been interpreted as the disparate simple bodys of Baldwin's art. James Baldwin's Later Fiction is indispensable to anyone interested in the full Baldwin.

The connections for Scott's study are, appropriately, the reception of Baldwin's s work to date, studies of African American literature and American pondering and Baldwin's life. Even granting Scott's study focuses on three novels, she clearly knows and understands all of Baldwin's work and the criticism that has suited to it. As a fiction writer Baldwin is best known for his first novel pass Tell It on the Mountain (1953) his other novel Giovanni's Room (1956), and his short stories "Sonny's Blues" (1957) and "Going to confront the Man" (1965). Readers and critics are generally les enthusiastic about his final three novels, which form the basis for Scott's study: disclose Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968) If Beale highway Could Talk (1974), and Just Above My Head (1979) Charges against these novels have been varied: an readers and critics find them too polemical, or too plodding, or too idealistic about the redemptive possibilities of family. The general consensus is that Baldwin had exhausted his artistic gifts by the mid-1960s.

The real accomplishment of Scott's meditation is that she is able to assess these arguments and to propound a lucid and convincing alternative interpretation. She claims that, in contrast to what other critics have said, Baldwin's later fiction is directly linked to his early essays in three important ways: "the part of the family in sustaining the artist; the price of succes in American society; and the writhe of the black artist to change the ways race and sex are exhibited in American culture." Part of the vexed question in Baldwin studies is the bias to see his primary nerve as a writer of either fiction or non-fiction. Another related division in Baldwin studies is the critical inability to reconcile his thematic treatment of the two homosexuality and race, the former being a long more common topic of his fiction than of his non-fiction. like divisions are potentially damaging because they look after to oversimplify one of our greatest in number complex writers and thinkers. Scott's focus forward the later fiction does not perpetuate the division between the early and late Baldwin; rather it present to views the continuities in his career, calm as she acknowledges that the later novels are not replicas of his earlier works, that they are "influenced from the turbulent political and racial environment of the sixties and early seventies, as well as by dint of the decline in economic and social conditions for urban black youth and families in the seventies." Scott possibility of goods to restore Baldwin to the character he was seeking; she endeavors "to argue that his answer to the events of the sixties and seventies was more intricate than has been acknowledged and that his last three novels should be read not as evidence of either a political capitulation or an artistic decline, however as evidence of the ways Baldwin creatively corresponded to a changing racial environment and discourse in an attempt to communicate the story he wanted to tell"

single in kind central message of Baldwin's life and works is the reconciliation of opposing forces; as Scott offers it, "one cannot know or embrace the 'self' without knowing or embracing the 'other,' because the 'other' is always part of the 'self.' "Using Du Bois's universal of "double-consciousness" as a consistent touch-point, Scott exhibits this theory as she interprets Baldwin's last three novels. In addition to Du Bois, she also draws from like thinkers as Robert B. Stepto, Walter Benjamin, and David Bergman to inform various facets of her argument. She also belongs deftly to significant contemporary historical documents, like as the 1965 "Moynihan Report." at the same time the bulk of Scott's meditation is comprised of her original interpretations of Baldwin's late novels against the backdrop of Baldwin's earlier writings and the existing corpse of Baldwin criticism.

Although Scott's readings of the three novels are interrelated, each of them proffers an important individual analysis. Of the three the principally coherent and original reading is her final chapter forward Just Above My Head, Baldwin's longest in the greatest degree challenging, and perhaps least understood novel. In this chapter Scott's interpretation is foregrounded and her argument with earlier critics is secondary; perhaps she is able to do this to such a degree effectively because Just Above My Head has a shorter and les elaborate history of criticism. She argues persuasively that the four main characters of the novel describe facets of Baldwin and that his four-part representation of a divided self augments the familiar double-consciousness archetype of the divided black American self reflecting the mature complexity that had evolv at the last years of his life. Her chapter forward Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone contains of the best analysis as well, although compared to the chapter forward Just Above My Head, this analysis is not integrated in this way se amlessly with its critical context