Authors: Louis Menand
American Studies (9 page)
R
ichard Wright was thirty-one when
Native Son
was published, in 1940. He was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in Mississippi and grew up in extreme poverty: his father abandoned the family when Wright was five, and his mother was incapacitated by a stroke before he was ten. In 1927 he fled to Chicago and eventually found a job in the Post Office there, which enabled him (as he later said) to go to bed with a full stomach every night for the first time in his life. He became active in literary circles, and in 1933 he was elected executive secretary of the Chicago branch of the John Reed Club, a writers’ organization associated with the Communist Party. In 1935 he finished a short novel called
Cesspool,
about a day in the life of a black postal worker. No one would publish it. He had better luck with a collection of short stories,
Uncle Tom’s Children
, which appeared in 1938. The reviews were admiring, but they did not please Wright. “I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep
over and feel good about,”
1
he complained, and he vowed that his next book would be too hard for tears.
ichard Wright was thirty-one when
Native Son
was published, in 1940. He was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in Mississippi and grew up in extreme poverty: his father abandoned the family when Wright was five, and his mother was incapacitated by a stroke before he was ten. In 1927 he fled to Chicago and eventually found a job in the Post Office there, which enabled him (as he later said) to go to bed with a full stomach every night for the first time in his life. He became active in literary circles, and in 1933 he was elected executive secretary of the Chicago branch of the John Reed Club, a writers’ organization associated with the Communist Party. In 1935 he finished a short novel called
Cesspool,
about a day in the life of a black postal worker. No one would publish it. He had better luck with a collection of short stories,
Uncle Tom’s Children
, which appeared in 1938. The reviews were admiring, but they did not please Wright. “I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep
over and feel good about,”
1
he complained, and he vowed that his next book would be too hard for tears.
Native Son
was that book, and it is not a novel for sentimentalists. It involves the asphyxiation, decapitation, and cremation of a white woman by a poor young black man from the South Side of Chicago. The man, Bigger Thomas, feels so invigorated by what he has done that he tries to extort money from the woman’s wealthy parents. When that scheme fails, he murders his black girlfriend, and even after he has finally been captured and sentenced to death he refuses to repent. Nobody in America had ever before told a story like this and had it published. In three weeks the book sold 215,000 copies.
was that book, and it is not a novel for sentimentalists. It involves the asphyxiation, decapitation, and cremation of a white woman by a poor young black man from the South Side of Chicago. The man, Bigger Thomas, feels so invigorated by what he has done that he tries to extort money from the woman’s wealthy parents. When that scheme fails, he murders his black girlfriend, and even after he has finally been captured and sentenced to death he refuses to repent. Nobody in America had ever before told a story like this and had it published. In three weeks the book sold 215,000 copies.
It will give an idea of the world into which
Native Son
made its uncouth appearance to recall that at almost the same moment that Wright’s novel was entering the best-seller lists—the spring of 1940—Hattie McDaniel was being given an Academy Award for her performance as Mammy in
Gone with the Wind.
McDaniel was the first black person ever voted an Oscar, and she gave Hollywood (as Oscar winners ideally do) an occasion for self-congratulation. “Only in America, the Land of the Free, could such a thing have happened,” the columnist Louella Parsons explained. “The Academy is apparently growing up and so is Hollywood. We are beginning to realize that art has no boundaries and that creed, race, or color must not interfere where credit is due.” She did not go on to note that when McDaniel and her escort arrived at the Coconut Grove for the awards ceremony, they found that they had been seated at a special table at the rear of the room, near the kitchen.
2
Native Son
made its uncouth appearance to recall that at almost the same moment that Wright’s novel was entering the best-seller lists—the spring of 1940—Hattie McDaniel was being given an Academy Award for her performance as Mammy in
Gone with the Wind.
McDaniel was the first black person ever voted an Oscar, and she gave Hollywood (as Oscar winners ideally do) an occasion for self-congratulation. “Only in America, the Land of the Free, could such a thing have happened,” the columnist Louella Parsons explained. “The Academy is apparently growing up and so is Hollywood. We are beginning to realize that art has no boundaries and that creed, race, or color must not interfere where credit is due.” She did not go on to note that when McDaniel and her escort arrived at the Coconut Grove for the awards ceremony, they found that they had been seated at a special table at the rear of the room, near the kitchen.
2
“The day
Native Son
appeared, American culture was changed forever,”
3
Irving Howe once wrote, and this remark has been quoted many times. What Howe meant was that after
Native Son
it was no longer possible to pretend, as Louella Parsons had pretended, that the history of racial oppression was a legacy from which Americans could emerge without suffering an enduring penalty. White Americans had attempted to dehumanize black Americans, and everyone carried the scars; it would take more than calling America “the Land of the Free” and really meaning it to make the country whole. If this
is what, almost sixty years ago, Wright intended to say in
Native Son,
he isn’t wrong yet.
Native Son
also stands at the beginning of a period in which novels (and, more recently, movies) by black Americans have treated the subject of race with a lack of gentility almost unimaginable before 1940. In this respect, too, Wright’s novel casts a long shadow. But if we consider
Native Son
primarily in the company of works by other black artists, we’ll miss what Wright was up to, and why he is such a remarkable figure.
Native Son
appeared, American culture was changed forever,”
3
Irving Howe once wrote, and this remark has been quoted many times. What Howe meant was that after
Native Son
it was no longer possible to pretend, as Louella Parsons had pretended, that the history of racial oppression was a legacy from which Americans could emerge without suffering an enduring penalty. White Americans had attempted to dehumanize black Americans, and everyone carried the scars; it would take more than calling America “the Land of the Free” and really meaning it to make the country whole. If this
is what, almost sixty years ago, Wright intended to say in
Native Son,
he isn’t wrong yet.
Native Son
also stands at the beginning of a period in which novels (and, more recently, movies) by black Americans have treated the subject of race with a lack of gentility almost unimaginable before 1940. In this respect, too, Wright’s novel casts a long shadow. But if we consider
Native Son
primarily in the company of works by other black artists, we’ll miss what Wright was up to, and why he is such a remarkable figure.
Wright’s intentions have been difficult to grasp, because many of his books were mangled or chopped up by various editors, and their publication was strewn over five decades.
Lawd Today!
(the retitled
Cesspool
) was not published until 1963, three years after Wright’s death, and then it appeared in a bowdlerized edition. One of the stories in
Uncle Tom’s Children
was rejected by its publisher and did not appear in the first edition of the book; it was added to a second edition after
Native Son
became a best-seller.
Native Son
itself was partly expurgated, and a significant episode was dropped, at the request of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Half of Wright’s autobiography,
Black Boy
(published in 1945), was cut, also in order to please the Book-of-the-Month Club, and remained unpublished in book form until 1977, when it appeared under Wright’s original title for the entire work,
American Hunger
. And the long novel
The Outsider
was heavily edited, and some pages were dropped without Wright’s approval, when it was first published in 1953.
Lawd Today!
(the retitled
Cesspool
) was not published until 1963, three years after Wright’s death, and then it appeared in a bowdlerized edition. One of the stories in
Uncle Tom’s Children
was rejected by its publisher and did not appear in the first edition of the book; it was added to a second edition after
Native Son
became a best-seller.
Native Son
itself was partly expurgated, and a significant episode was dropped, at the request of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Half of Wright’s autobiography,
Black Boy
(published in 1945), was cut, also in order to please the Book-of-the-Month Club, and remained unpublished in book form until 1977, when it appeared under Wright’s original title for the entire work,
American Hunger
. And the long novel
The Outsider
was heavily edited, and some pages were dropped without Wright’s approval, when it was first published in 1953.
These five books were only restored to their original condition in 1991, by Arnold Rampersad, in the edition of Wright’s work published by the Library of America. (Wright produced more work after
The Outsider
than the Library of America edition included: in the last seven years of his life he wrote two novels, a collection of stories, a play, several works of nonfiction, and some four thousand haiku.) The result gave readers the core of Wright’s work not as it was first seen, but as it was first intended, and there turned out to be a difference.
The Outsider
than the Library of America edition included: in the last seven years of his life he wrote two novels, a collection of stories, a play, several works of nonfiction, and some four thousand haiku.) The result gave readers the core of Wright’s work not as it was first seen, but as it was first intended, and there turned out to be a difference.
Putting the expurgated material back in gives all three of the novels a grittier surface; and in the case of
Native Son
it also adds a dimension to the story. In the familiar version of the novel, a puzzling
line appears during a scene, late in the book, in which the state’s attorney tries to intimidate Bigger by letting him understand that he has information about other crimes and misdeeds Bigger has committed, including, he says, “that dirty trick you and your friend Jack pulled off in the Regal Theatre.”
4
The reference is opaque. Bigger and his friend do go to the Regal Theatre, a movie house, early in the novel, but no dirty trick is described. In the original version, though, after Bigger and his friend enter the theater they masturbate (the state’s attorney’s comment is now revealed to include a pun) and are seen by a female patron and reported to the manager.
Native Son
it also adds a dimension to the story. In the familiar version of the novel, a puzzling
line appears during a scene, late in the book, in which the state’s attorney tries to intimidate Bigger by letting him understand that he has information about other crimes and misdeeds Bigger has committed, including, he says, “that dirty trick you and your friend Jack pulled off in the Regal Theatre.”
4
The reference is opaque. Bigger and his friend do go to the Regal Theatre, a movie house, early in the novel, but no dirty trick is described. In the original version, though, after Bigger and his friend enter the theater they masturbate (the state’s attorney’s comment is now revealed to include a pun) and are seen by a female patron and reported to the manager.
The Book-of-the-Month Club, Wright’s editor informed him, objected to the scene, which, the editor thought Wright would agree, was “a bit on the raw side.”
5
Wright obliged the club’s sense of propriety by removing the “dirty trick.” But he hadn’t intended Bigger’s public masturbation to be simply a redundant example of his general sociopathy. In Wright’s original version, after Bigger and Jack masturbate they watch a newsreel featuring the woman Bigger will accidentally kill that night, Mary Dalton. She is shown on vacation on a beach in Florida, and Bigger and Jack decide (as the newsreel encourages them to) that she looks as if she might be “a hot kind of girl.”
6
Wright cut this episode as well (he had Bigger watch a movie critical of political radicalism instead); and he also eliminated a few lines (apparently too steamy for the Book-of-the-Month Club) from Bigger’s later encounter with the flesh-and-blood Mary which made it clear that Bigger is sexually aroused by her.
5
Wright obliged the club’s sense of propriety by removing the “dirty trick.” But he hadn’t intended Bigger’s public masturbation to be simply a redundant example of his general sociopathy. In Wright’s original version, after Bigger and Jack masturbate they watch a newsreel featuring the woman Bigger will accidentally kill that night, Mary Dalton. She is shown on vacation on a beach in Florida, and Bigger and Jack decide (as the newsreel encourages them to) that she looks as if she might be “a hot kind of girl.”
6
Wright cut this episode as well (he had Bigger watch a movie critical of political radicalism instead); and he also eliminated a few lines (apparently too steamy for the Book-of-the-Month Club) from Bigger’s later encounter with the flesh-and-blood Mary which made it clear that Bigger is sexually aroused by her.
Restoring this material restores more than a couple of scenes. Bigger’s sexuality has always been a puzzle. He hates Mary and is afraid of her, but she is attractive and is negligent about sexual decorum, and the combination ought to provoke some sort of sexual reaction; yet in the familiar edition it does not. Now we can see that, originally, it was meant to. The restoration of Bigger’s sexuality also helps to make sense of his later treatment of his girlfriend, Bessie. He repeats intentionally with Bessie what he has done, for the most part unpremeditatedly, to Mary: he takes her upstairs in an abandoned building, kills her by crushing her skull with a brick, and disposes of her body by throwing it down an airshaft. But before Bigger
kills Bessie he rapes her, and if the scene is to carry its full power we have to have felt that when Bigger was with Mary in her bedroom, he had rape in his heart.
kills Bessie he rapes her, and if the scene is to carry its full power we have to have felt that when Bigger was with Mary in her bedroom, he had rape in his heart.
Wright was a writer of warring impulses. His rage at the injustice of the world he knew made him impatient with the usual logic of literary expression. He was a gifted inventor of morally explosive situations, but once the situations in his stories actually explode he can never seem to let the pieces fall where they will. His novels suffer from an essentially antinovelistic condition: they are hostage to a politics of outcomes. Wright tries to order events to fit his sense of justice—or, more accurately, his sense of the impossibility of justice—and when the moral is not unambiguous enough, he inserts a speech. At the same time, Wright loved literature intimately, as you might love a person who has rescued you from misery or danger. Literature, he said, was the first place in which he found his inner sense of the world reflected and ratified. Everything else, from the laws and mores of Southern apartheid to the religious fanaticism of his own family (he grew up mostly in the house of his maternal grandmother, a devout Seventh-Day Adventist, who believed that storytelling was a sin), he experienced as pure hostility.
After he moved to Chicago, he discovered in Marxism a second corroboration of his convictions, and he joined the Communist Party. But he believed that Marxist politics were compatible with a commitment to literature—and the belief led, in 1942, to his break, and subsequent feud, with the party. He had an appreciation not only of those writers whose influence on his own work is most obvious—Dostoevsky and Dreiser and, later on, Camus and Sartre—but also of Gertrude Stein, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Turgenev, and Proust. From the beginning of his literary career, in the John Reed Club, until the end, in self-exile in France, he participated in writers’ organizations and congresses, where he spoke as a champion of artistic freedom; and he was a mentor for, among other young writers, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Gwendolyn Brooks.
It’s true that Wright’s convictions flatten out the “literary” qualities of his fiction, and lead him to sacrifice complexity for force. His novels tend to be prolix and didactic, and his style is often dogged. But force is a literary quality, too—and one that can make other limitations seem irrelevant. Wright’s descriptions, for example, are almost all painted in primary colors straight out of the naturalist paintbox; but the flight of Bigger Thomas through the snow in
Native Son—
a black man seeking invisibility in a world of whiteness—is one of the most effective sequences in American fiction. The apparent indifference to artistry in Wright’s work has seemed to some people a thing to be admired, a guarantee of literary honesty. It’s the way a black man living in America should write, they feel. This interpretation is one of the ways Wright’s race has been made the key to understanding him; and it’s a position that, in various guises and more subtly argued, has turned up often in the long critical debate over Wright’s work—a debate that has engaged, over the years, Baldwin, Ellison, Howe, and Eldridge Cleaver.
Native Son—
a black man seeking invisibility in a world of whiteness—is one of the most effective sequences in American fiction. The apparent indifference to artistry in Wright’s work has seemed to some people a thing to be admired, a guarantee of literary honesty. It’s the way a black man living in America should write, they feel. This interpretation is one of the ways Wright’s race has been made the key to understanding him; and it’s a position that, in various guises and more subtly argued, has turned up often in the long critical debate over Wright’s work—a debate that has engaged, over the years, Baldwin, Ellison, Howe, and Eldridge Cleaver.
It is not a position that Wright would have accepted. His heroes were the major modern writers (nearly all of them white), and he wanted to serve art in the same spirit they had. He was frank about the models he relied on in making
Native Son:
“Association with white writers was the life preserver of my hope to depict Negro life in fiction,” he wrote in the essay “How Bigger Was Born,” “for my race possessed no fictional works dealing with such problems, had no background in such sharp and critical testing of experience, no novels that went with a deep and fearless will down to the dark roots of life.”
7
He made it clear that his greatest satisfaction in writing
Native Son
came not from entering a protest against racism and injustice but from proving to himself (he didn’t care, he said, what others thought) that he was indeed a maker of literature in the tradition of Poe, Hawthorne, and Henry James. In “the oppression of the Negro,” he said, he had found a subject worthy of those writers’ genius: “If Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.”
8
Native Son:
“Association with white writers was the life preserver of my hope to depict Negro life in fiction,” he wrote in the essay “How Bigger Was Born,” “for my race possessed no fictional works dealing with such problems, had no background in such sharp and critical testing of experience, no novels that went with a deep and fearless will down to the dark roots of life.”
7
He made it clear that his greatest satisfaction in writing
Native Son
came not from entering a protest against racism and injustice but from proving to himself (he didn’t care, he said, what others thought) that he was indeed a maker of literature in the tradition of Poe, Hawthorne, and Henry James. In “the oppression of the Negro,” he said, he had found a subject worthy of those writers’ genius: “If Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.”
8
What Wright took to be his good fortune was also his dilemma. Poe was, in a sense, the luckier writer. The moral outlines of
Wright’s principal subject matter were so vivid when he wrote his books that efforts to complicate them would have seemed irresponsible and efforts to heighten them melodramatic. Some of the stories about black victims of Southern racism in
Uncle Tom’s Children
have memorable touches of atmosphere and drama, and some are morality plays, but in all of them the action is determined entirely by the unmitigated viciousness of the white characters. When the subject is violent confrontation in a racially divided community—as it is in those stories and in
Native Son
—a “literary” imagination can seem superfluous. In the last section of
Native Son
, for example, Wright has Bigger read a long article about his case in a Chicago newspaper, in which he finds himself described in these terms:
Wright’s principal subject matter were so vivid when he wrote his books that efforts to complicate them would have seemed irresponsible and efforts to heighten them melodramatic. Some of the stories about black victims of Southern racism in
Uncle Tom’s Children
have memorable touches of atmosphere and drama, and some are morality plays, but in all of them the action is determined entirely by the unmitigated viciousness of the white characters. When the subject is violent confrontation in a racially divided community—as it is in those stories and in
Native Son
—a “literary” imagination can seem superfluous. In the last section of
Native Son
, for example, Wright has Bigger read a long article about his case in a Chicago newspaper, in which he finds himself described in these terms:
Though the Negro killer’s body does not seem compactly built, he gives the impression of possessing abnormal physical strength. He is about five feet, nine inches tall and his skin is exceedingly black. His lower jaw protrudes obnoxiously, reminding one of a jungle beast.
His arms are long, hanging in a dangling fashion to his knees … . His shoulders are huge and muscular, and he keeps them hunched, as if about to spring upon you at any moment. He looks at the world with a strange, sullen, fixed-from-under stare, as though defying all efforts of compassion.
All in all, he seems a beast utterly untouched by the softening influences of modern civilization. In speech and manner he lacks the charm of the average, harmless, genial, grinning southern darky so beloved by the American people.
9
9
The passage may strike readers today as a case of moral overloading—a caricature of attitudes whose virulence we already acknowledge. In fact, as one student of Wright’s work, Keneth Kinnamon, has pointed out, Wright was using the exact language of articles in the
Chicago Tribune
about Robert Nixon, a black man who was executed in 1939 for the murder of a white woman.
10
Chicago Tribune
about Robert Nixon, a black man who was executed in 1939 for the murder of a white woman.
10
For the Wright who wanted to expose an evil that other writers had ignored, the starkness of his material made his job simpler; for
the Wright who wanted to write novels, the same starkness made it harder. In
A Passage to India
, E. M. Forster took a situation very like the one Wright used in
Native Son
—impermissible sexual contact between a white woman and a man of color—and built around it a textured, essentially tragic novel about the limits of human goodness. Forster’s sensibility was very different from Wright’s, but he could work his material in the way he did in part because his “racists” were people who imagined themselves to be enlightened, and this allowed him to tell his story in a highly developed ironic voice. The kind of racism that figures in most of
Native Son
, though, is not tragic, and it is not an occasion for irony. It is simply criminal.
the Wright who wanted to write novels, the same starkness made it harder. In
A Passage to India
, E. M. Forster took a situation very like the one Wright used in
Native Son
—impermissible sexual contact between a white woman and a man of color—and built around it a textured, essentially tragic novel about the limits of human goodness. Forster’s sensibility was very different from Wright’s, but he could work his material in the way he did in part because his “racists” were people who imagined themselves to be enlightened, and this allowed him to tell his story in a highly developed ironic voice. The kind of racism that figures in most of
Native Son
, though, is not tragic, and it is not an occasion for irony. It is simply criminal.
Wright seems to have recognized this difficulty partway through
Native Son
and to have responded by giving his work a sociological turn. In
Lawd Today!
(about a black man who is not only a victim of bigotry but a bigot himself), in
Uncle Tom’s Children,
and in the first two parts of
Native Son,
he had tried to describe the conditions of life in a racist society; in the last part of
Native Son
he undertook to explain them. He therefore introduced into his novel a character who has never, I think, won a single admirer: Mr. Max, the Communist lawyer who volunteers to represent Bigger at his trial. Max’s bombastic and seemingly interminable speech before the court (twenty-three pages in the Library of America edition), in which he proposes a theory of modern life meant to explain Bigger’s conduct, is almost universally regarded as a mistake. The speech is surely a mistake, but the error is not merely a formal one—putting a long sociological or philosophical disquisition into the mouth of a character. Ivan Karamazov goes on at considerable length about the Grand Inquisitor, and few people object. The problem with Max’s oration isn’t that it’s sociology; it’s that it’s boring. And it’s boring because Wright didn’t really believe it himself.
Native Son
and to have responded by giving his work a sociological turn. In
Lawd Today!
(about a black man who is not only a victim of bigotry but a bigot himself), in
Uncle Tom’s Children,
and in the first two parts of
Native Son,
he had tried to describe the conditions of life in a racist society; in the last part of
Native Son
he undertook to explain them. He therefore introduced into his novel a character who has never, I think, won a single admirer: Mr. Max, the Communist lawyer who volunteers to represent Bigger at his trial. Max’s bombastic and seemingly interminable speech before the court (twenty-three pages in the Library of America edition), in which he proposes a theory of modern life meant to explain Bigger’s conduct, is almost universally regarded as a mistake. The speech is surely a mistake, but the error is not merely a formal one—putting a long sociological or philosophical disquisition into the mouth of a character. Ivan Karamazov goes on at considerable length about the Grand Inquisitor, and few people object. The problem with Max’s oration isn’t that it’s sociology; it’s that it’s boring. And it’s boring because Wright didn’t really believe it himself.
Max’s thesis is that twentieth-century industrialism has created a “mass man,” a creature who is bombarded with images of consumerist bliss by movies and advertisements, but has been given no means for genuine fulfillment. The consequence is an inner condition of fear and rage which everyone shares, and for which black men like Bigger are made the scapegoats. This fits neatly enough
with much of the story for it to sound like Wright’s last word. But it is not. Max’s courtroom performance is followed by a final scene, in which Bigger talks with Max in his jail cell. They carry on a rather broken conversation, at the end of which Bigger cries out:
with much of the story for it to sound like Wright’s last word. But it is not. Max’s courtroom performance is followed by a final scene, in which Bigger talks with Max in his jail cell. They carry on a rather broken conversation, at the end of which Bigger cries out:
“I didn’t want to kill! … But what I killed for, I
am!
It must’ve been pretty deep in me to make me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder … .”
am!
It must’ve been pretty deep in me to make me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder … .”
Max lifted his hand to touch Bigger, but did not.
“No; no; no … Bigger, not that …” Max pleaded despairingly.
“What I killed for must’ve been good!” Bigger’s voice was full of frenzied anguish. “It must’ve been good! When a man kills, it’s for something … . I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em … . It’s the truth, Mr. Max. I can say it now, ’cause I’m going to die. I know what I’m saying real good and I know how it sounds. But I’m all right. I feel all right when I look at it that way … .”
Max’s eyes were full of terror. Several times his body moved nervously, as though he were about to go to Bigger; but he stood still.
“I’m all right, Mr. Max. Just go and tell Ma I was all right and not to worry none, see? Tell her I was all right and wasn’t crying none … .”
Max’s eyes were wet. Slowly, he extended his hand. Bigger shook it.
“Good-bye, Bigger,” he said quietly.
“Good-bye, Mr. Max.”
11
11
That Bigger should have the book’s last word and that what he has to say should terrify, and apparently baffle, Max has seemed to some critics to be Wright’s way of saying that not even the most sympathetic white person can hope to have a true understanding of a black person’s experience—that the articulation of black experience requires a black voice. “Max’s inability to respond and the fact that Bigger’s words are left to stand alone without the mediation of authorial commentary serve as the signs that in this novel dedicated to the dramatization of a black man’s consciousness the subject has
finally found his own unqualified incontrovertible voice,”
12
is how one of these critics puts it. This academic excitement over a black character’s saying something “unmediated” ought to be followed by some attention to what it is that the character is actually saying. For what Bigger says (and Max understands him perfectly well) has nothing to do with negritude. It is that he has discovered murder to be a form of self-realization-that it has been revealed to him that all the brave ideals of civilized life, including those of communist ideology, are sentimental delusions, and that the fundamental expression of the instinct of being is killing. Two years before Wright formally broke with the Communist Party, he had already turned in Marx for Nietzsche.
finally found his own unqualified incontrovertible voice,”
12
is how one of these critics puts it. This academic excitement over a black character’s saying something “unmediated” ought to be followed by some attention to what it is that the character is actually saying. For what Bigger says (and Max understands him perfectly well) has nothing to do with negritude. It is that he has discovered murder to be a form of self-realization-that it has been revealed to him that all the brave ideals of civilized life, including those of communist ideology, are sentimental delusions, and that the fundamental expression of the instinct of being is killing. Two years before Wright formally broke with the Communist Party, he had already turned in Marx for Nietzsche.
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