James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues and the Art of Expression

In James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues,” artistic expression creates a new language for the artist and his community in which to express the truth. The titular character is a jazz musician and heroin addict whose thirst to express the truth that lurks inside him is a powerful and even self-destructive urge. Yet this form of self-destruction is sacrificial, for it allows the narrator, who is Sonny’s brother, to witness the truth that exists all around him, not only through Sonny’s music but in life itself.

“Sonny’s Blues” is less about Sonny as it is about the entire Black community. Told from the narrator who struggles to understand his brother, Sonny’s addiction is treated neither as a tragedy nor as a triumph, but a means to an end. Through drugs and music, Sonny is capable of delving deep into his soul to discover a new form of personal and spiritual interpretation. Like many jazz musicians on which Sonny is based, Sonny’s desire to “[g]et[ting] it out-that storm inside,” to play it even when he “realizes nobody’s listening” (Martin 507) is so overwhelming that he can barely control it. He struggles to find the perfect musical language in which to express this “storm inside.” Music becomes a substitute language of interpersonal expression for a people stripped of their own langauge. Through much of the twentieth century, African Americans have used the linguistic codes of music as a means to express themselves and to form a communcation with others that is appropriate to their experiences and values. Jazz, along with the blues and later rhythm and blues and hip hop, has become the appropriate vehicle in which black people have been able to interpret those spiritual truths that an alien language thrust upon them has not enabled them to achieve. Sonny’s determination to find that right language through music leads him to self-destruction, yet this desire to find the right language and Sonny’s willingness to destroy himself in order to do that, forms the crux of his sacrifice to his community.

Sonny’s brother comes to this realization when he sees Sonny perform at a local club. His realization of the necessity of music, its role in the black community, leads him to the ultimate conclusion of his brother’s sacrifice:

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But 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. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours”(Italic emphasis mine) (509).

The terrific notion of a language with “no words” and its triumphalism is at the heart of the evocations Baldwin addresses in “Sonny’s Blues.” The discovery of this new language, this new form of communication, means that prior structures of language must be abandoned in order for this new language to have meaning. When the narrator hears the music Sonny and his bandmates create, he abandons his old ways of thinking and joins in this triumph. He hears what Sonny hears: its evocations in expressing the struggles, fears, joys, and triumphs of a people, spoken in a language that is as truthfully appropriate for expressing these ideas. Again, Baldwin’s thematic use of language is given even broader depth when earlier in the story, the narrator states that when he tries to convince Sonny to give up heroin, he uses language that only express “empty words and lies” (507). The language the narrator uses is incapable of bridging the divide between himself and his brother, creating the kind of connective tissue between them that only Sonny’s music can. It is foreign and incapable of expressing truthfully to his experience as a black man. It is a language that is thrust upon him and makes for an ill fit, alienating him from his brother and his community.

Sonny’s music rescues the narrator and brings him back within the fold of that community. When he watches his brother perform on the piano, he notices how “Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others” (511). Sonny regains himself by losing himself in the expression of this music, creating a wholeness that encompasses the greater community in which he belongs. His triumph in finding this new language is universally shared and acknowledged.

Reference:

• Martin, Wendy. The Art of the Short Story. Houghton Mifflin: Boston. 2006.