Photo by Madison Loughlin

Many identities are necessarily crafted with distinguishable traits that make them attractively secure, and David of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room is solidly entrenched in this notion. Throughout the course of David’s tumultuous time in Paris, it is this very concreteness in identity that makes him struggle so. Despite attempting to embrace the tenets of his American identity, David’s thoughts and actions ultimately drive away this false and entrapping conception, resulting in a much truer, if not lonelier, understanding of happiness.

Although it is maintained by multiple characters in Giovanni’s Room that happiness is inherent to American identity, David recognizes that this happiness is of a superficial nature and ignores the somewhat grim and cynical patterns of real life. When David enters the Parisian American Express Office, for example, he is immediately struck with the greenish joviality that separates this group, saying, “I only saw bags, cameras, belts, and hats, all clearly from the same department store” (89). Their identities and similarities are blatantly obvious, from the way they dress to the way they speak, even in their relationships to one another, which blend disturbingly, such as when David notes, “his wife might have been his mother” (90). It is obvious that David identifies very little with this group despite appearing very much to belong; in circles far removed from the American Express Office, he is known as “the American” and “the football player,” and yet his scrutiny of these people, and the detached tone this sets, points to his dissociation. This tone is fitting, then, for the melancholy twist in David’s observations, seen when he says, “beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected” (90). Here David rejects the chattering and superficial face these Americans present. It is not happiness, so false and forced, that unites them, but an underlying sorrow, and David seems to identify with this part of them more than any other. His descriptions soften after this, and a note of sympathy is even detectable when he talks of this moment and of the people in line in front of him. In a place that so avidly and forcefully denies the slow and sad pace of the world, David seems not to belong. These Americans are in denial, and despite his acute observations, David is in denial too: who he is, why he is where he is and what he’s doing all remain stubbornly and willfully obscure. The image of David and many mirrored selves standing in line in front of him in the American Express Office may be too close for comfort, further suggested by his eternal reluctance to return to this office to obtain money, which he is in constant need of. In a place so similar to the American home David so badly wanted to escape, the marked differences and uncomfortable similarities between himself and his compatriots expose a truth that David may not want to acknowledge.

Although David clearly understands the superficiality that defines American happiness, he nevertheless attempts to mimic this mindset in order to pursue it, making him more unhappy and isolated. A prominent example of this is in David’s interactions with Sue, an American also living in Paris. Despite feeling close to nothing for a woman he does not even find attractive, from the moment he meets Sue David attempts to woo her. Sue, even in name, is an embodiment of the unconsciously unhappy quintessential American, with “curly blonde hair” (96) and is a wearer of “tight blue jeans” (96), from a wealthy Philadelphia family. Her initial bubbliness and American-ness are all things that appeal to David, who was, in origin, merely searching for someone with whom he could have sex. In an attempt to seek out that all-American happiness in spirit (and girl), David flirts with Sue and eventually sleeps with her. But even in their initial interactions, it is once again clear that Sue herself, who fights so hard to appear cheerful and nonchalant, is also not happy. When Sue says to David that she’s made “‘all the discoveries that I can stand’” (97), her sadness is palpable, and David’s continuous references to her eyes, which do not match her lighthearted behavior, illustrates how aware he is of this sadness. Neither of the two seem to really believe that the nature of their encounter will be the fun romp they would like it to be, and yet both continue to treat it as such, even as David feels “a dreadful holding back” (98). David’s increasing isolation in chasing an American concept of happiness is also evident once he begins to have sex with Sue, for example when he says, “somewhere, at the very bottom of myself, I realized that I was doing something awful to her and it became a matter of my honor not to let this face become too obvious” (100). Far from being happy or distracted, David instead dolorously endures this process which he so desperately sought out and even says, “then it was ending and I hated her and I hated me” (100). The falsity of his experience does not validate or reinvigorate his stolid, American appearance; instead, it is unsettlingly unpleasant, a reminder that David is different from who he should be. Although from an American perspective David’s experience might have been classified as exciting or pleasurable, David cannot bring himself to gloss over the bitter details which make his experience unbearable. Sue herself even fights to appear happy after David’s humiliating rejection, and she wears a smile “pained and vindictive and humiliated, but she expertly smeared across this grimace a bright, girlish gaiety” (102). David’s self-loathing in this moment is undeniably tied to Sue’s forceful presentation of happiness, and so it is made sadly apparent to him the flaws in the American mindset he so desperately pursued.

This search inevitably reveals the danger present in the labels and notions that encompassed David’s definition of happiness and exposes the much freer blank space between them. Although most of Giovanni’s Room focuses on David’s inner thoughts and experiences, the tail end of the novel begins to spin out of David’s carefully narrated control as his search for definition and identity begins to impact others. After Hella’s arrival in Paris, David understands that while he may have wavered between two versions of himself, one American and classic and the other twisty and treasured as Paris itself, the choice of who he is will be made for him by Hella’s return. As David says, “I felt a certain relief. It seemed that the necessity for decision had been taken from my hands” (94). Here, David no longer has to actively seek out American happiness in any form, as it is coming especially for him. Hella is David’s American validation, his proof that his happiness is unique to his nationality and his nationality is exclusive in defining him. This, however comfortable, also has a profound and damaging effect upon others: Sue, Giovanni, Hella, and even David himself. By choosing American happiness over the dramatic and winding life he led with Giovanni, one where happiness was less evident in every interaction, David irreparably damages Giovanni, who “was waiting, I think, for me to cross that space and take him in my arms again-- waiting, as one waits at a deathbed for the miracle one dare not disbelieve, which will not happen” (144). Giovanni’s sickly dependence upon David reveals a man that he dare not align with himself, as it would forever destroy his chance at American happiness (however unlikely) and define him as one of the drunk, gay boys of Paris. Claustrophobic of the heavy neediness in his and Giovanni’s relationship, David moves in the opposite direction to the independent (and female) Hella, whom he also succeeds in injuring by hiding behind her reassuring Americanness. During their final fight, with David’s sexuality exposed, Hella asks, “‘what’s the good of an American who isn’t happy? Happiness was all we had’” (165), and that final sham of an image seems to dissolve in her tears. If this all-American happiness is some sort of last, remaining mainstay against the onslaught of the world, is it happiness at all? Rather, it seems closer to the dreary denial and delusion that David noticed so early on in that American Express Office. David’s ensuing isolation in that house in the south of France after Hella’s departure reveals his folly, and only when faced with true isolation can he begin to see who he truly is. Well and truly alone, David heads off into the symbolically dawning day, saying, “the morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope” (169). His destination is unsure, his company nonexistent, and he has lost the people that mean the most to him, but David has never been so baldly honest with himself, nor less subject to the delusions that led him to his wild sufferings. Hope, an idea usually characterized as light, is here instead a “dreadful weight,” illustrating David’s more nuanced understanding of happiness: it is not simple and all-encompassing, dripping from an identity of straightness, or gayness, or Americanness. As David sets out, rather, he is free to discover what part of an individual happiness may actually be derived from.

David’s long journey from young struggling man to older struggling man reveals, in tellingly cyclical fashion, why David has ended up where he started. His desperation to be seen as a strong American male and feel the resulting happiness of this leads him to embrace the tenets of an ideology that even he himself sees as faulty, and only the resulting isolation he experiences can reveal to him that happiness does not have one obviously discernable source. The only identity that can coexist with happiness, Baldwin seems to be saying, is a person’s own.