For most, tragedy means a life of pain and suffering. For Nietzsche, the paradox of life's tragedy means being pulled in two directions: a desire to surrender ourselves to our suffering and a reciprocal need to represent and express it. But for Baldwin, life can transcend beyond this tragic binary. Phillip E. Mitchell argues that it is authors like Baldwin that teach us about moments of astonishment, where we can move beyond both pain and language, beyond the impulse to destroy and distil. When we stop seeing art as an attempt to make our suffering beautiful, we are released from tragedy’s causal chain, and we can achieve freedom.
Jazz sings suffering. Born out 19th century blues, with its improvisations and wild rhythms, it expresses the alienation and despair of Black Americans in the aftermath of slavery, Jim Crow America, and the Civil Rights Movement.
Novelist and short story writer James Baldwin is attuned to jazz’s power to communicate those experiences. His 1957 story Sonny’s Blues, one of several of his stories that feature jazz musicians, explores the relationship between two brothers in Harlem in the ‘50s. The [nameless] narrator, who appears to have it together—he’s a family man and algebra teacher—must navigate how to (re)connect with his estranged brother, Sonny, a heroin addict and jazz pianist. The rhythms of Sonny’s life, both literally and figuratively, are out of step with his own.
Their reconciliation occurs while Sonny plays a jazz (or bebop depending on which academic article one reads: see Sherard in the bibliography) version of “Am I Blue?” shortly after he’s released from prison. While he plays, the narrator experiences a moment of rapture and, although reticent to applaud Sonny’s musical ambitions, does that very thing. He says Sonny teaches him how he, and the people around, “can be free” and can “cease lamenting” (140 ). During the number, the narrator also ruminates on his and his family’s losses (an uncle who was killed by drunk white men and the loss of his daughter Grace, for example). After the song, the narrator sends Sonny a milk and scotch, and they exchange nods. Somehow, the music is able to speak in a way that Sonny had not been able to before. And the music allows the narrator to understand what he’s saying.
SUGGESTED VIEWING
The Mystery of Music
With Jonathan Derbyshire, Eric Clarke, Lydia Goehr, Marc Robinson, Rhian Samuel
It’s one of the most important and popular stories of the twentieth century, so there’s no shortage of scholarship on it. I teach it every semester in American literature. The more I’ve read it over the past few years, the more I’ve been reminded of another important work about suffering, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. This connection isn’t new, either. Two other scholars have used The Birth of Tragedy to discuss the story (Golden and Reid).
___
That’s no surprise given that all of life must be understood as art, or an aesthetic experience, to Nietzsche
___
Nietzsche’s work attempts to chart the, well, the birth of tragedy as an art form in Ancient Greece. He does this juxtaposing the Olympic Gods with the more chaotic world that came before them. He believes that, because life offers only pain, the Greeks had to invent gods, and art, to make sense of the world. That’s no surprise given that all of life must be understood as art, or an aesthetic experience, to Nietzsche.
What I found in working through connections between Baldwin and Nietzsche, however, is that the story is an explicit dramatization of Nietzsche’s ideas—up to a point, anyway.
___
Music is the sound of this drunkenness. It’s the art form that arises from being in touch with primordial suffering
___
So what, exactly, does Nietzsche say in The Birth of Tragedy? It’s difficult to distill economically, but I’ll try; The Dionysian is the basis of reality for Nietzsche; it’s quite bleak. It’s suffering turtles all the way to the bottom. It’s violence, chaos, and destruction. Under the grip of this great force of suffering—Mr. Dionysus—one’s conscious mind (one’s whole self, really) is obliterated. This results in “drunkenness,” which is Nietzsche’s word [in translation] for being under Dionysus’s spell (498). Music is the sound of this drunkenness. It’s the art form that arises from being in touch with primordial suffering. So, it functions in two ways. It destroys the individual and then celebrates that destruction (strange, huh?). See the first line of this essay.
Sonny says that when he is “most out of the world,” he “didn’t really have to play [piano],” that “it just came out of [him], it was there” (Baldwin 134). Like the Dionysian figure, he’s drunk on his suffering. And he’s a good representative for it given he’s just been released from prison and has a long history of trying to break the smack habit. And he takes that suffering and lets it flow into his fingers where they dance on the piano. It’s all that keeps him going. At one point the narrator even says that Sonny is playing the piano “for his life” (125).
In the other corner, we have Apollo (not that Apollo, Rocky fanboy). Apollo was a cool and collected god, the god of dreams and representation. Nietzsche puts sculpture, visual art, and poetry under the eye of Apollo. The narrator is the Apollonian figure, reading into Sonny’s music the desire to form order out of the terror of existence. He says as much at the end when he thinks that “the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air” (137).
There are so many explicit references to suffering, the void, and lamentations that it’s hard not to see Nietzsche haunting the story.
Nietzsche believed that what made Greek Tragedy great was the reciprocal relationship between the Dionysian and Apollonian, the one impulse that tore things apart (found through the music of the chorus and the violence of the stories) and the distanced, calm impulse that used language to tell stories. One can apply these impulses to the narrator and Sonny. Timothy Golden believes, in fact, that their coming together at the end is represented in the cup of trembling (the glass of scotch, representing the drunkenness of the Dionysian, and milk, representing the Apollonian) (567).
What bothers me, however, is, according to this idea, one must also interpret the narrator’s experience of Sonny’s music as a kind of suffering, even if that suffering is assuaged by the Apollonian narrator. Or, perhaps more tragically, the narrator must endure again his own tragedies, and it is the experience of tragedy that allows him to connect to his brother. Pain mediates reconciliation.
But when reading the ending, something doesn’t sit right about this (As a musician and music lover myself, that kind of epiphany—an epiphany of united suffering—doesn’t strike the right chord, if you will).
I don’t think that’s what the narrator experiences, either, given that he associates his feelings with “freedom” (140). And, this is the crux: he says that the music he hears reminds him of “Something else” and then “[carries] him past it” (140). No image. No representation. Apollo doesn’t transform suffering into poetry. Whatever happens in these moments is beyond language’s capacity to represent it. But we also know that self has been restored or perhaps transformed rather than destroyed.
It is not, then, a celebration of suffering; it is a release from it.
Enter William Desmond: I met Desmond in a book in which we were both published several years ago. Desmond has a great [and difficult] book called Arts, Origins, and Otherness in which he explores, among other ideas, how we have largely abandoned attributing anything metaphysical—like God, or Goodness, or Beauty—to what happens during an intimate moment with a work of art. He also word- wrestles with Nietzsche (and often lets Tharathustra body slam him). Unlike Nietzsche (or Schopenhauer or even Buddha), though, he does not think that suffering is the basis of reality. He has important questions for Nietzsche—and his predecessor Schopenhauer. One question—and this is my version of it—is “what changes suffering into art?” Or, “why do we find the song of suffering beautiful?” He thinks that, rather than suffering making suffering beautiful, something (sSomeone?) pokes through, awakening wonder and reorienting us to the world—an epiphany that intercedes from elsewhere.
___
Rather, something takes hold of him and breaks through the suffering, transforming the music into a song of praise
___
And I think that’s exactly what happens to the narrator in the story. The narrator feels freedom in the air while he listens to Sonny, not freedom “from” something but just…freedom. Likewise, he is in the grip of something beyond his control. The music moves him from something terrible to something beautiful. If the music is a reflection of only suffering (or suffering itself), making it beautiful would be hard (impossible) to pull off. So, this moment of transport is not the result of the narrator’s thinking; it’s not Sonny’s playing, either. And it’s not the music itself. Something shines bright on Sonny’s song, and the light fills the narrator’s eyes.
Whether this swerve away from Nietzsche was intentional or not doesn’t really matter—at least to me. I read it as a revision of Nietzsche’s ideas and an evocation of forces beyond the Apollonian and Dionysian. What happens at the end is what Desmond would call astonishment: “Astonishment…captures the sense of being rocked back on one’s heels, as it were, by the otherness of being in its givenness…One does not take possession of, or grasp anything. One finds oneself illuminated by a sudden surge of light: something—exactly what is hard to fix—is being revealed. One does not take hold of an object, one is taken hold of by this surge of light, taken out of oneself. One is impelled to self-transcendence by an initially unchosen illumination that is not objectified” (BB 8).
___
And the narrator, at the end, understands that it is not just music that Sonny is after but the light from beyond that music mediates.
___
In what cannot be represented in the story, the narrator has pointed to this kind of experience. It is not that he grasps something definitively or even has a way to articulate what he feels. Rather, something takes hold of him and breaks through the suffering, transforming the music into a song of praise. It is a light that one cannot define, but it shines, nonetheless.
SUGGESTED VIEWING
Tyranny of the pen
With Joanna Kavenna, John Ralston Saul, Ruth Padel, Rana Mitter
The bond that the brothers form, then, is the result of experiencing this light from elsewhere. Sonny opens himself to it through music. And the narrator, at the end, understands that it is not just music that Sonny is after but the light from beyond that music mediates.
From where does this light come? Where is it going? How can we get some? I have a hunch, but I prefer to let others walk to the beat of their own drums and write to the sound of the inner-and-outer and who-knows-from-where-they-come voices that sing all around us.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” Going to Meet the Man: Stories. Vintage. NY 1995. Reprint. pp. 103-141.
Desmond, William. Being and the Between. Art, Origins, Otherness: Between Art and
Philosophy. SUNY Press, 2003.
--Being and the Between. SUNY PRESS, 1998.
Golden, Timothy Joseph. “Epistemic Addiction: Reading ‘Sonny’s Blues’ with Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 26.3, 2012, pp. 554-571.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Philosophies of Art and Beauty. Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, edited by Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns, Chicago UP, 1964, pp. 498-544.
Reid, Robert. “The Powers of Darkness in Sonny’s Blues.” CLA Journal, 43.4 (June 2000), pp. 443-53.
Tracey Sherard’s “Sonny’s Bebop: Baldwin’s Blues Text as Intracultural Critique,” African American Review, 32:4, 1998, pp. 691-705.
Join the conversation