James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain and the Psychoanalytic Poetics: Affirming the Subjectivity of the African American

Abstract

Although James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain has attracted some critical analysis, most critics seem to see the novel either as Baldwin’s creative confrontation with American racism or as an imaginative exploration of the role of the church or the Christian religion in the lives of African Americans. But how the psychoanalytic poetics features in the novel and the reason for its employment appears to be largely ignored. In this essay, I utilize some psychoanalytic concepts in the reading of the novel, and argue that Baldwin’s characters’ internal (psychological) and external (sociological) conflicts are inseparable since their external problems serve as catalysts for their internal ones and vice-versa. Robert Tomlinson has noted that “when analyzing his (Baldwin’s) artistic development, critics tend to polarize the private and the public” (135). But as it is already evident, in this paper, I demonstrate that such dichotomy or polarization does not figure in Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain. I then conclude the essay by contending that Baldwin’s appropriation of the psychoanalytic poetics is not just for the fun of it, but to affirm the subjectivity of the African American. In this way, he humanizes the African American who has been dehumanized by white American epistemological thought.