I want to be an honest man and a good writer." To fulfill that ambition he recognizes that "the artist . . . cannot allow any consideration to supercede his responsibility to reveal all that he can possibly discover concerning the mystery of the human being"; and for Baldwin this means that the role of the artist is to express the existential knowledge of experience: "The states of birth, suffering, love and death . . . extreme states—extreme, universal, and inescapable. . . . The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we fall prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge." An adequate perspective of man for our technological era is possible, in Baldwin's view, only when the artist analyzes man as not "merely a member of a society or group or a deplorable conundrum to be explained by Science . . . but something resolutely indefinable, unpredictable." Thus, in the effort to confront and reveal "the disquieting complexity of ourselves," the only real concern for the artist is "to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art" and "to describe things which other people are too busy to describe." Baldwin is unequivocal in declaring this to be "a special function" and that "people who do it cannot by that token do many other things."
Additionally, Baldwin advocates explicitly a conception of literary art involving both personal and social responsibility.
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