figuring out where and what it means. It helps that I know that Baldwin was a preacher’s son, that his
most famous novel is called Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952), that the story already displays a strong
Cain-and-Abel element when the narrator initially denies his responsibility toward Sonny, so my scriptural
hunch was pretty strong. Happily, in the case of “Sonny’s Blues,” the story is so heavily anthologized that
it’s almost impossible not to find the answer—the phrase comes from Isaiah 51:17
[“Awake,awake,standup,OJerusalem,whichhastdrunkatthehandoftheLORDthecupofhisfury;thouhastdrun
kenthedregsofthecupoftrembling, and wrung them out.”]. The passage speaks of the cup of the Lord’s
fury, and the context has to do with sons who have lost their way, who are afflicted, who may yet
succumb to desolation and destruction. The ending of the story is therefore made even more provisional
and uncertain by the quote from Isaiah. Sonny may make it or he may not. He may relapse into addiction
and trouble with the law. Beyond that, though, there is the broader sense of the residents of Harlem,
where the story is set, and by extension of black America, as afflicted, as having drunk from that cup of
trembling. There is hope in Baldwin’s last paragraph, but it is hope tempered by knowledge of terrible
dangers.
Is my reading greatly enhanced by this knowledge? Perhaps not greatly. Something subtle happens
there, but no thunder and lightning. The meaning doesn’t move in the opposite direction or shift radically;
if it did, that would be self-defeating, since so many readers would not get the allusion. Ip. 56think it’s
more that the ending picks up a little greater weight from the association with Isaiah, a greater impact,
pathos even. Oh, I think, it isn’t just a twentieth-century problem, this business of brothers having trouble
with each other and of young men stumbling and falling; it’s been going on since forever. Most of the
great tribulations to which human beings are subject are detailed in Scripture. No jazz, no heroin, no
rehab centers, maybe, but trouble very much of the kind Sonny has: the troubled spirit that lies behind the
outward modern manifestations of heroin and prison. The weariness and resentment and guilt of the
brother, his sense of failure at having broken the promise to his dying mother to protect Sonny—the Bible
knows all about that, too.
This depth is what the biblical dimension adds to the story of Sonny and his brother. We no longer see
merely the sad and sordid modern story of a jazz musician and his algebra-teacher brother. Instead the
story resonates with the richness of distant antecedents, with the power of accumulated myth. The story
ceases to be locked in the middle of the twentieth century and becomes timeless and archetypal,
speaking of the tensions and difficulties that exist always and everywhere between brothers, with all their
caring and pain and guilt and pride and love. And that story never grows old.
8 – Hanseldee and Greteldum
p. 57BY NOWI’VE BEATEN YOU SEVERELYabout the head and shoulders with the notion that all
literature grows out of other literature. We’re dealing in this case, however, with a pretty loose category,
which could include novels, stories, plays, poems, songs, operas, films, television, commercials, and
possibly a variety of newer or not-yet-invented electronic media we haven’t even seen. So let’s try being
a writer for a moment. You want to borrow from some source to add a bit of flesh to the bare bones of
your story. Who ya gonna call?
Actually, Ghostbusters is not a bad answer. In the short run. Will people in a hundred years, though, be
conversant with film comedy of the 1980s? Maybe not. But they will get it right now. If you want topical
resonance, current film or telep. 58vision may work fine, although the frame of reference as well as the
staying power may be a little limited. But let’s think in terms of slightly more canonical sources. The
“literary canon,” by the way, is a master list of works that everyone pretends doesn’t exist (the list, not
the works) but that we all know matters in some important way. A great deal of argument goes into
what—and more important who—is in the canon, which is to say, whose work gets studied in college