For our Marginalia web feature, we ask writers to introduce us to their favorite works of literature by way of a short piece of prose. This week, Urvi Kumbhat—whose story “Girls I've Known” appears in our Summer 2024 issue—dissects a passage from Another Country by James Baldwin.
2024 marks one hundred years since the birth of James Baldwin. Another Country—a city novel in which love and contempt compound helplessly, in which young artists suffer from precarity, soar briefly, or submit to the uneasy compromises the world demands of them—took Baldwin over ten years to finish. The book is as much about the cruel romance of New York City as it is about the thick web of want and resentment between its characters.
Rufus Scott—a Black jazz drummer from Harlem—is dead by the end of the opening section, and the book unfolds around the pit of his absence. This passage occurs shortly before his suicide, and after a turbulent affair with Leona, a white woman from the South. After Rufus has drifted through the streets, whittled nearly to nothing, he waits for the subway:
But suppose something, somewhere, failed, and the yellow lights went out and no one could see, any longer, the platform’s edge? Suppose these beams fell down? He saw the train in the tunnel, rushing under water, the motor-man gone mad, gone blind, unable to decipher the lights, and the tracks gleaming and snarling senselessly upward forever, the train never stopping and the people screaming at windows and doors and turning on each other with all the accumulated fury of their blasphemed lives, everything gone out of them but murder, breaking limb from limb and splashing in blood, with joy—for the first time, joy, joy, after such a long sentence in chains, leaping out to astound the world, to astound the world again. Or, the train in the tunnel, the water outside, the power failing, the walls coming in, and the water not rising like a flood but breaking like a wave over the heads of these people, filling their crying mouths, filling their eyes, their hair, tearing away their clothes and discovering the secrecy which only the water, by now, could use. It could happen. It could happen; and he would have loved to see it happen, even if he perished, too. The train came in, filling the great scar of the tracks.
Another Country might be slotted into the category of social realism, but here, a rupture of genre occurs. When Rufus imagines an apocalyptic scene in the subway platform on Eighth Street, its violent exuberance escapes the boundaries of his interiority: The train malfunctions, the platform fills with water, the people go mad with joy. The people emerge furiously from their “long sentence in chains” as Baldwin’s winding sentence moves with a maniacal breath. What transforms this violence into a liberating joy? Utopia and dystopia collapse strangely into each other through a collective madness in the city’s tunnels, one that would remake the world in the image of the water. The water is no longer a utilitarian substance, then—this liquid current is more evidence of realism’s collapse, of a mysterious animation in the substance itself.
A revolution also requires the collapse of realism. The promise of New York City can’t hold for Rufus, beleaguered by history and desire, and so the city itself must be broken. Within the urban infrastructure that both isolates and connects people—and stridently racializes them—Rufus is denied the city’s freeing anonymity, the city’s luck of encounter. Fitting, then, for Rufus to imagine himself as the spectator in this drama of “accumulated fury,” to see an apocalyptic futurity that is also the failure of power and history. Through the force of Baldwin’s frenzied clauses, the surprise of his syntax, and the subway’s animism, the city gasps and totters. In a way, Rufus does “see it happen” before his too-early death, and the reader can’t help but see with him.