Falling in "Another Country"

Abstract

In his novel, Another Country, James Baldwin abruptly breaks his reader’s expectations when his protagonist, Rufus Scott, commits suicide by jumping from the George Washington Bridge only eighty pages into the novel. This paper seeks to understand Rufus’s jump by analyzing him through the broader context of loneliness and its relation to physics. Drawing on Baldwin’s essays, as well as Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, and affect theorists like Sienne Ngai and Eugenie Brinkema, this paper examines loneliness as an explicitly fundamental concept for Baldwin, and the ways in which affect correlates to physics to determine character actions before they happen. Starting with a close reading of Rufus’s jump, I look at how Rufus’s loneliness is affectively constructed before moving to Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace to look at other instances of metaphysical gravity, and then look to Baldwin’s invocation of physical touch, in particular, the embrace, as the only remedy for loneliness.