David is Dead: Thoughts on Giovanni’s Room
““You play it safe long enough,” he said, in
different tone, ‘and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever…” ”
I’m wrecked. I’ve been picking myself up in pieces since reading this book, and I’m still not all together yet. It’s such a somber feeling to be immersed in a story and have it transcend the pages. I feel Giovanni, even now. I fear David, and I am forever grateful that I will never be him—that I decided when I was 17 that I would never be him.
This James Baldwin masterpiece is not a story about being closeted, or uncertain in love, or afraid of self. It is a story about how deeply fear and shame can be seated and how they drive people. Giovanni’s Room is not a love story. It’s a story about what the negation and subsequent absence of love may do to a person over time. The terror embedded in human affection, in loving. The binds of freedom and its forbidden sweet fruits. This story touches on numerous themes throughout including grappling with queer identity and desire, navigating societal perceptions and internalized shame, and self protection.
This book, to me, is an exercise in genuine love versus admiration or infatuation. David, an American immigrant living in Paris, represents those who are fearful, but yearn without action. They repress and resent that yearning for what it may eventually symbolize within them, how it may manifest into vulnerabilities they can no longer control. This, above all else, is what they refuse to give up. David is as selfish as they come, and his refusal to share himself sincerely with anyone juxtaposes Giovanni’s disposition in the most painful way. To know someone has and will never truly love you–that’s what kills a person.
Giovanni, an Italian immigrant bartender, represents those who lose themselves in the reckless abandon, who love for the sake of loving. Giovanni loves without expecting anything in return; he recognizes his own capacity to love as an infinite source and only hopes to enjoy reciprocity. His blind optimism and deference to feeling leave him wide open to the emotional assaults David inflicted on him. Some may say he was a willing participant in his own demise.
The song and dance these two engaged in both captured me and broke my heart. Baldwin tells us in the beginning how the story ends. I spent the entire time wondering how it would manifest, and I’m still sensitive about it! This essay is a short exploration of the characters and how their positions inform their relationship and its end.
David
David is dead. Giovanni was executed, but it is David who is, and always has been, dead. He is a ghost among men, a shell of a person from the moment we met him to the time his story ends.
David is a victim and a punisher. He’s needlessly cruel to himself and others, and it’s not entirely his fault. Self-hatred is a wicked thing that eats away at you and everyone around you. He devoured Giovanni and scattered his bones where he lay. Writhing with self-abjection, his disease gnawed at them both until they were nothing.
David killed Giovanni because he represented what he so deeply wanted to embody: freedom and sincerity. Giovanni’s authenticity, his ugly, his stink, and radical self-acceptance are what make him beautiful. It’s what makes him so striking as a character, so charming to David. A person like that can be intoxicating, and David, for all his echoing empty caverns, never stood a chance. Beyond empty, David was a void. He sucked the life out of Giovanni, and Giovanni let him.
David reeks of American individualism. What’s best for David, what makes David feel safe. His class and passing status become weaponized in this story, leaving Giovanni vulnerable to his whims. His coping mechanisms were vicious and Giovanni suffered it in every way. To be loved is to be seen, and the unreciprocal nature of their entanglement was the dagger to his heart.
Giovanni
Though Giovanni is an obvious foil to David, I find him to be a very compelling love interest and catalyst for self-discovery. The most striking thing about Giovanni is his ordinariness. He is a working-class, immigrant bartender living in a small room in Paris. He clings to David because he is highly coveted, but otherwise lonely. He is not a hero or a star. He is not rich. He is simply a man who knows himself and lives that truth authentically, given the constraints of the time period and location.
We must remember that we encounter Giovanni through David’s eyes, already a murky lens. His jealousy and repressed contempt for him bleeds through his descriptions and his unease in their intimate living. So, Giovanni, in all his glory, is just a man. He is not remarkable–but he is to David, because he exists in such stark contrast.
To David, he navigates his world as though he is larger than life, undaunted and flamboyant. He is not circumspect or sniveling around, waiting for his life to begin. He watches Giovanni with admiration and intrigue because he reconciles his humanity so effortlessly. Giovanni is extraordinary because of his fluid self-acceptance and open-mindedness. It is a poignant, simultaneous feeling that David reveres and detests. It reveals itself in flashes throughout the narrative until it can no longer be contained.
David’s unreliable narration–playing coy when he’s overwhelmed with desire, deriding attempts in love, clinging to heteronormativity, mistreating those he claims to love–makes it very difficult to accurately characterize or understand Giovanni. David is terrified of that type of vulnerability. That degree of surrender. It’s the single thing he simultaneously desires and reviles most.
Thus, by the end of the story, David kills Giovanni by denying him. Of course, losing a lover (when still in love) is sad, but the lingering emotional pain is worse. The way it changes you is worse. Persistent and stifling despair is much, much worse. That may be the saddest part of the book. Giovanni opened himself and allowed David to feast until he rotted from the inside out.
Apart from being so painstakingly well-written and entrancing, Baldwin captures the ephemerality of lovers and their whims. For example, the following passage indicates so much about understanding and exposing human nature, it almost makes you weep:
“You do not,’ cried Giovanni, sitting up, ‘love anyone! You never have loved anyone, I am sure you never will! You love your purity, you love your mirror—you are just like a little virgin, you walk around with your hands in front of you as though you had some precious metal, gold, silver, rubies, maybe diamonds down there between your legs! You will never give it to anybody, you will never let anybody touch it—man or woman. You want to be clean. You think you came here covered with soap and you think you will go out covered with soap—and you do not want to stink, not even for five minutes, in the meantime.’ He grasped me by the collar, wrestling and caressing at once, fluid and iron at once: saliva spraying from his lips and his eyes full of tears, but with the bones of his face showing and the muscles leaping in his arms and neck. ‘You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. And you—you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, look what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what you should do to love?”
Thus, Giovanni’s execution was much less about the physical form but his emotional destruction at David’s hands.
Why I’m Wrecked
I think this book affected me so deeply because I rarely see people love as fiercely as Giovanni does. Loving someone boldly takes courage that many people cower away from. It was empowering to experience a character like Giovanni, to see myself in print so clearly. I have been with people who treat their love as a reward for good behavior or a series of satisfactions; I have never been with a Giovanni, only Davids. I’ve encountered way too many people who are afraid to feel, so they feel nothing. People so terrified of their own shadows that they vow never to find themselves in the dark.
Baldwin has so many compelling excerpts on love that brilliantly encapsulate what it means to yearn.
“Love him,’ said Jacques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last, since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, helas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty— they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty, you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.’ He paused, watching me, and then looked down to his cognac. ‘You play it safe long enough,’ he said, in a different tone, ‘and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.”
My thoughts on this book aren’t just in praise of Baldwin, it’s about how he provokes my thinking. I can compare these two characters until I tire, but what it really illuminates to me is the sheer luck I have found in being openly lesbian. I struggled against my sexuality for three years before I accepted myself and compelled others to accept me too. I have been living out and proud as a lesbian since my senior year of high school, and I am immensely fortunate to have developed self-love, self-respect, and a deeply firm sense of my self-worth. David’s character echoes my past and what I knew I could not sustain; his self-loathing and vehement rejection of what he fears within himself has contorted his figure into an unrecognizable husk of a man. Giovanni, try as he might, could not love him through that. David’s demons are embedded within him that he can no longer separate who he is from his despair.
To reiterate my aforementioned point, this is not a story about queerness: it is an allegory for shame and self-denial. Yes, David is queer and he hates this about himself, but it’s about the self-hate and its derivative consequences more than it is about his sexuality. The problem is the crippling fear he exudes in his negligence to discover and honor himself. In the age of pop-psych and armies of wannabe therapists and psycho-analysts on social media, I’m sure there is fault to be found within both parties. Likely, Giovanni would be demonized for having weak boundaries and letting David treat him that way, for not defending himself or respecting himself once he realized who David really was. Whatever. His sincerity and openness make him such a compelling character, as much as David’s refusal to do so.
David is a cautionary tale of what it means to neglect and deprive yourself of your truth. Giovanni’s Room is a glimpse into the alternatives. The way he continues to forge paths of destruction, causing irreparable damage to those he claims to love, is a direct result of his extensive denials of self. His false commitments to Giovanni, Hella, and even Jacques correlate to his disjointed relationship with himself; everyone else is a casualty to his self-inflicitng hellfire.
How much empathy should we have for David, for the man who refuses to confront himself? How much havoc should he be allowed to wreak on others who dare get close to him? At what point should David be responsible for himself? Giovanni’s critiques were scathing because they were honest, and no one had ever been bold enough to tell him so. How many of us lack that kind of accountability? How many of us never find it?
Truthfully, I have a lot of compassion for David. I have experienced self-hate, and I am very glad I decided it was a taste I could not bear. I purged it from myself for years, and I’m still not clean, but at least I’ve taken the steps. David is terrified of those steps because it means confronting the worst parts of himself, not his sexuality, but every action he has taken to spite it.
Giovanni’s Room is such a rich site of metaphoric exploration because it is there David simultaneously felt the most unrecognizable and the most authentic. He could only ever be himself in private, to some degree, because he could never escape the torturous caverns of the mind no matter where he went. Becoming a prisoner of the mind makes the body a passenger. He chained himself to hate, such a heavy burden, and continues to pull everyone around him beneath the waves. He hates Giovanni because he won’t do the same. In the end, they both died.
In direct correlation to his story, I have had so much joy in my life because I remain authentic at all times. I don’t cower in anyone’s shadows. I have liberated myself from shame and I exalt in living and loving like Giovanni, to all its joys and detriments. I am happy here. I wonder and hope that one day, David might eventually be able to be happy too.
