Sonny's Blues, James Baldwin - Thorell Tsomondo (essay date 1995)
Thorell Tsomondo (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: "No Other Tale to Tell: 'Sonny's Blues' and Waiting for the Rain," in Critique, Vol. XXXVI, No. 3, Spring, 1995, pp. 195-209.
[In the following essay, Tsomondo compares Baldwin's and Charles Mungoshi's view of history as evinced in "Sonny's Blues " and Waiting for the Rain.]
In Tropics of Discourse Haydn White, identifies a marked hostility to historical consciousness in twentieth-century literature. The modern writer, he observes, "uses the historian to represent the extreme example of repressed sensibility in the novel and theatre." White cites Gide, Ibsen, Malraux, Camus, Huxley, and Sartre among others. He traces the hostility to history back to Nietzsche, who maintained that history cheats man by leading him to believe that whatever is worth doing has been done, thus robbing him of "that impulse to heroic exertion" that humanizes, if only temporarily, his absurd world. Man's...
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