A Reordering of Violence in “The Toilet”

Anthony Burgess wrote in the 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange that, “The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities” (Burgess). Such is the dichotomy that makes Amiri Baraka’s 1964 play The Toilet so revolutionary.

Upon its release, Baraka’s work was received negatively by critics for its unabashed portrayal of violence. A 1964 article in Newsday written by George Oppenheimer called the characters portrayed, “a bestial collection of savages,” (Oppenheimer) as quoted in Melinda Wilson Ramey’s essay “Return to The Toilet” in the Continuum Journal.

This is not the first time that a work of art has mistakenly been characterized as obsessed with or fixated on violence as opposed to questioning its place in social order; Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange was met with much of the same criticism upon its release, and even more so when Stanley Kubrick adapted it into a film in 1971.

Such vehement opposition begs the question; why is the portrayal of violence received as controversial in such works as these when it pervades the socio-cultural context of the characters portrayed? Furthermore, how does the portrayal of violence in works such as The Toilet impact the audience’s understanding of the socio-cultural dynamic examined? In The Toilet, Amiri Baraka uses violence and its place in the social order of the play to directly question the audience’s perception of the characters and the interracial dynamics of 1960’s America.

The cultural context of The Toilet alters the audience’s understanding of its use of violence as opposed to a literal reading of the play. Baraka follows a group of mostly young black men in a school urinal as they wait for a young white homosexual student, James Karolis. The coda follows a fight between Karolis and Ray, a young black man. Upon its release, critics were appalled by the brutal interaction between Karolis and Ray and read this interaction as a “obsession with… hatred,” (Gottfried) in Women’s Wear Daily as critic Martin Gottfried put it.

However, to read the Karolis-Ray interaction as one purely based out of hate or prejudice is to ignore the context preceding their dynamic. To assume that the brutalization that the two boys inflict on each other arises purely from some savage nature is to ignore the interracial dynamic that the boys were born into. Baraka’s characters in The Toilet do not exist in a vacuum; just like the rest of America in the 60’s, their values and actions are as much shaped by the values society has held up, and much personal volition in their actions is shaped by their internalizations of social order.

In 1964, the Civil Rights movement was in the peak of its activity, with the Civil Rights Act being signed in July of the same year. It prohibited such racial inequalities as disproportionate voter registration requirements, and racial segregation in schools, workspaces, and public spheres. It is of note that one of the major conflicts in the Civil Rights movement was that of school segregation; many whites in America vehemently opposed the introduction of black students into predominantly white schools. It is because of this “boiling point” of interracial dynamics in school segregation that Baraka’s choice to set The Toilet in a school carries so much significance. In many ways, schools act as a microcosm of societal values. They ideally act as a place where societal values are imparted on youth in preparation for their experiences in the adult world.

The young men written by Baraka can be seen as merely performing the societal order fed to them by the larger societal entity of the school and not acting solely out of a savage nature. The use of a school as a setting begins to tease out why Baraka utilizes violence as a means for meditation on the state of racial relations in America. To have a “bestial” nature, as an earlier critic stated, is to perform an act of violence with no context and under pure agency.

Both Karolis and Ray act not purely out of agency, but in response to the social order each has internalized. Ray and the many other young black men who surround him were born into a setting of prejudice, and have grown up and adapted to this setting accordingly. Whites have wanted to keep them out of their schools, and segregate them from their lives to the greatest extent possible. To enact an act of violence against a white student such as Karolis is not something that each boy consciously decided was necessary based solely on the nature of their characters. Rather, it is a response to the hatred on the part of whites that holds them captive and shapes their very identity.

Within the microcosmic nature of their dynamic, Karolis’ character is also held captive by the societal order he has internalized. Although the homosexual overtones of Karolis and Ray’s relationship revealed during the coda of The Toilet fracture open yet another socio-cultural context of the time period, the fact that Karolis’ love for Ray goes directly against the racial prejudice fed to him as a white student reduces his own agency as a character.

The brutality that each character inflicts on one another is a reflection of the extremity of the social order they have been born into. It is a reflection of a conflict between their nature and the performative identities they show throughout the play. The conflict of the play, however, is not a reflection of a singular nature of the characters portrayed. Otherwise, Baraka’s work would carry little socio-cultural relevance to the Black Arts Movement or the Civil Rights Movement if it acted as a literal character study. At its best, a portrayal of a certain subject in a piece of art may cause the audience to question their own perception of said subject. Functionally, Baraka’s The Toilet serves a piece of revolutionary black theatre because it questions the very social order that both blacks and whites in the audience will identify with. For a white audience, Baraka’s work and its use of violence may be read in a number of ways.

As seen before, many white critics see the young black men enacting acts of violence upon a white character as “bestial” creatures acting out of hatred and personal volition. On the other hand, a white audience may see the black characters as agents of a social order and may begin to question their own place in said social order. The way in which the play is read essentially acts as a mirror to the audience; the way in which one perceives the violence and the characters written by Baraka illuminates the willingness to buy into or the dissatisfaction with the social order presented to the audience.

This is why the inclusion of violence in Baraka’s work is so significant on its impact on the audience in terms of the socio-cultural context of the play. In 1964, the threat of violence was all too much a reality for those involved in the Civil Rights movement. Many protests against segregation resulted in whites brutalizing blacks out of racial prejudice.

When one views the acts of violence in the play as a fixation on hatred, they choose to factor out the cultural pastime of racial violence that has shaped the black characters in the play. Just as well, we are not only asked to question the motivations of the black characters in Baraka’s work, but we are also asked to question the actions of Karolis towards the end of the play. At first, Karolis is characterized by Baraka as weak and bloodied, making him an easy target for Ray and the rest of his friends.

The timid and withdrawn nature of Karolis acts as a direct foil to the uber-masculine identities that the young men are so eager to stage to each other earlier in the play. However, after it is revealed that Karolis and Ray are lovers and that Karolis wrote a letter expressing love to Ray, Karolis begins to subvert his own established nature by brutally beating Ray himself. By initially painting Karolis as an easy target for the young black men to brutalize, it becomes easy for the audience to discount the context of the setting. But by having Karolis execute his own act of violence against Ray, Baraka suggests the conflict between Karolis’ place as a young white man with his homosexual feelings towards a young black man. He acts not out of hate, but out of anger that the rigid dynamics forced on Ray and himself keep them from being together.

With this revelation, we are forced to reevaluate the motivations of the characters. By reevaluating their motivations, we are therefore forced to come face to face with the very system that shapes their motivations and pushes them to violence. The inclusion of violence in this setting serves as a mere backdrop for the dynamic that shapes the identity of black Americans in the Civil Rights era, and this is why violence is so important in framing Baraka’s work as one of importance in the Black Arts Movement. While the argument that The Toilet speaks to racial dynamics in America during the 1960’s is one that can be made under the frame of Baraka’s intentions as a playwright, there is also a certain vague notion to the “interracial dynamics” that pervade works of the Black Arts Movement.

This calls into question the choice of Baraka to include violence as a means for establishing his setting as a microcosm for race relations in America. For a concept that is so overarching and gargantuan in examining black characters, large terms such as these must be deconstructed in order to gauge the true intentions of the artist. Although the play can be viewed as a microcosm for the state of racial relations in America, can we view the two opposing entities of the play, the black and white characters, as monolithic representations of a “black” or “white” experience? Can the experience of Ray speak to every member of a black audience? Such questions can be teased out of Baraka’s work by examining not only the racial overtones of his work, but the homosexual overtones of his work as well. The experience of a queer black body as opposed to a straight one may radically alter said characters’ experiences of racial injustice.

In addition to questioning the dynamics between blacks and whites in 1960’s America, Baraka also challenges the systems of masculinity that are imposed on black men by having Ray be unable to be honest about his history with Karolis. The beginning of the play is set up by introducing characters who engage in performative masculinity; the young men use vulgar language and play-fight to establish their masculinity.

Just as the interracial dynamic that plays out over the course of the play is taught to the young men in staging grounds such as schools, masculinity is taught to these young men as well. By making the choice to have Ray engage in a relationship with Karolis, Baraka attempts to convey to the audience that the motivations behind the violence between the characters stems from a complex interplay between societal expectations and the conflicts that arise from the individual identity of the characters. Even if it is reductive to consider the play a microcosm of race relations in America, it does attempt to show the audience that the violence it portrays stems from an interplay of societal expectations.

This is why the statement that Baraka attempts to exploit the “bestial” nature of the young black men ignores this intention under which the play is framed. Ray is forced to brutalize Karolis not only because of a social order that takes into account his race, but his sexual orientation as well. While Karolis acts as an agent and representation of the interplay between white America and sexual orientation in Ray’s identity, the other black men serve as a representation of the masculine identity that black America forces on Ray. Even with this added complexity, Baraka seeks to show above all that the opposition between a black and queer moral entity puts into question Ray’s agency in his own actions against Karolis. Perhaps the reasons for which Anthony Burgess wrote about the “grinding opposition of moral entities” (Burgess) in A Clockwork Orange are different under the context of that novel as opposed to the interplay that Baraka brings out in his characters.

The violence that Burgess’ character Alex DeLarge inflicts on people is concerned more broadly with the opposition of “evil” and “good”. Baraka seeks to use violence as a means for bringing out the opposition between races and orientations in 1960’s America. However, both use violence to hold a mirror up to their respective audiences and question their own perceptions of the violence seen in these works.

In the end, after all the moral outrage that both Baraka and Burgess stirred in the release of their respective works, critics were left with the question of why violence needed to be included so prominently in these works of art. At its best, art questions a system that influences its subjects. To automatically carry a moral outrage towards the violence portrayed in Baraka’s work is to be ignorant of the system that aided that violence, and this is where Baraka and Burgess finally converge; they use violence to question that very system.

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