Summary
In this chapter, Baldwin discusses two novels, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Richard Wright’s Native Son, in order to develop his ideas about protest novels. He argues that protest novels oversimplify the complexity of human beings for the sake of putting forward a message.
Baldwin is against what he calls “moralism” in fiction. Protest novels are guilty of using a “medieval morality” that clearly separates good characters and bad ones, right and wrong, black and white. The goal of this morality is to make people feel shame. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, makes its point far too obvious. The story, Baldwin asserts, “achieves a bright, almost lurid significance, like the light from a fire which consumes a witch.” This metaphor shows that, while the book might be against racism, it causes a kind of violence.
Another problem with protest novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin is that they are overly sentimental. There is so much over-exaggerated emotion in the novel that it reveals an “inability to feel.” Sentimentality is actually an escape from emotion for Baldwin: “The wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart.” Similarly, in trying to give a complete picture of society, these novels end up incomplete. They reproduce the same violence that exists in the world without any significant insight into the causes and effects of this violence. It stays on the surface, letting readers think they have understood an issue which makes them complacent and prevents further investigation.
These weaknesses in Uncle Tom’s Cabin are partially understandable, Baldwin says. Stowe was a writer of pamphlets rather than a novelist. She wrote the novel to make one simple point: slavery is wrong. Yet a novel ought to be more than that, Baldwin argues. Good intentions are not enough to redeem bad writing. While literature should reveal the complexity of human beings, Stowe relies on stock characters who are only there to prove a certain point. Characters like field hands and servants are there only to be lovable and charming. In the novel, there are three black characters, but two of them are described as acting like white people and the reader only knows they are black because Stowe tells us so. Then there is Uncle Tom himself, a “jet-black, wooly-haired illiterate” who is more of a saint than a fully-fleshed out character. He has no humanity or sexuality; he is simplified into an argument.
In reducing characters to parts of the argument, Uncle Tom’s Cabin commits violence against them. Again he describes these kinds of books as a witch-burning or a lynch mob. The use of violence to get rid of evil ends up replicating the same violence these books condemn. The desire to rid the world of evil without attempting to understand it comes from a place of panic. Even though it might be good-intentioned, it makes us superficial.
Baldwin then discusses Wright's novel Native Son, with its protagonist Bigger Thomas. Bigger grew up in a slum in Chicago and uses violence, murder, and rape as a way to reclaim agency in a world that does not value him. However, Baldwin argues that using violence as a way for this character to “redeem his manhood” just reproduces the racist stereotype that black people are violent. Baldwin writes: “ Bigger's tragedy is not that he is cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that admits the possibility of his being sub-human.” Bigger’s story replicates the idea that the only relationship between black and white people is one of conflict, hate, and distrust. Baldwin asserts that what we really need from literature is reminders of our true, complex humanity.
Analysis
“Everybody’s Protest Novel” centers on the relationship between politics and literature, asking if such a thing as “political literature” is possible and what its effects are. In short, Baldwin argues that there is a difference between a pamphlet and a novel. One might write a novel to make a political point. However, good intentions are not enough to make this kind of novel real literature. What this requires is a deep digging into humanity in all its complexity.
The problem with the protest novels Baldwin discusses is that they deny this complexity. They oversimplify issues and deny choice to their characters. This problem with protest novels overlaps with a larger problem in modern society, which according to Baldwin is always trying to simply human beings, make them into cogs in the machine. In the same way, protest novels deny human beings their complexity and try to make people into mechanisms that fulfill a function.
As a writer, Baldwin sees humanity instead as a “web of ambiguity, paradox.” People contradict themselves and are often mysterious, unaware even themselves of what they want and who they are. This complexity is what the novelist must show. One can be committed to a good cause, but a novelist must not let the cause get in the way of revealing humans in all their confusing realness. The world’s problems are complex and cannot be solved but cutting them down into bite-sized pieces. To treat the world and its people in this way might be comforting, but it cannot be real literature. Baldwin writes that “'The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is categorization alone which is real.” Humans cannot be defined based on any simple categories. Literature should resist categorization through “devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment.”
