In the early years of the twenty-first century, a discussion of the American protest novel or of Richard Wright as a protest novelist is an exercise in retrospection. It seems from certain angles of critical thought that literary history demands a deliberate, not always happy, effort to remember things past. The glance back privileges the claims of history over the speculations of aesthetics. It is especially necessary to let history speak in the case of Wright and the African American novel. Our postmodern sense of aesthetics can betray us and muddle our understanding of the necessity for protesting social policies and cultural beliefs through the mechanism of the novel. Looking backward helps us to remember at least two points. The African American novel originated in the nineteenth century as the use of literacy and writing more for purposes of enlightenment than for the pleasures of entertainment. Richard Wright stands in a special relationship to the form he sought to develop, because he did not abandon the original purposes of the black novel for the sake of being modern. He stuck to the purpose of using fiction to illuminate conditions and possibilities as they affected blacks and whites in America, particularly in matters of social psychology. The novel, for Wright, was a weapon against culturally sponsored ignorance as well as a medium for expressing his intellectual and artistic vision.
Contemporary criticism of fiction can still find some salience in examining the problem novel, the sociological novel, or the novel grounded in social realism. To understand Richard Wright historically, we must deal with artistic uses of language that have special targets. It would be rare to find any fictions, especially those from former imperial domains, described simply as works of protest or complaint. They are more commonly considered as instances of writing back, a gesture involving more parity than does the asymmetrical power relation implicit in the very notion of protest. Wright was indeed writing back. In twentieth-century literary usage, “protest,” a word inextricably associated with “race,” might be taken as a pure product of America. Protest was a pejorative code word for work of inferior artistic accomplishment. Unless we want to play games that ignore or blatantly revise the language of history, we initially accept that Richard Wright’s novels from Native Son (1940) to The Long Dream (1958) are instances of protest fiction. We thereby admit a “fact” about the reception of Wright’s novels within his lifetime, and that “fact” compels us to remember that African American fiction was as excluded from the canon of American literature as were African American citizens from the right to vote in Mississippi. Thus, we acknowledge the books were read at the time of their publication more closely as documents that had a kind of outlaw status in the republic of letters than as genuine examples of literature. The admission begins to expose something about ideological commitments and reading habits in the past. And it may inspire us to take a fresh look at what the word “protest” obscures.
At the same time, we must assert that Wright’s novels do not fit well in a box marked “protest,” the confining space accorded them in the 1940s and 1950s. Protest is a position, not a genre. Wright’s novels can be read more fruitfully outside that racist box, and we do not need to beg the question of whether Wright created propaganda or literature. His novels instruct; they challenge beliefs about the human condition. They remain in dialogue with the past and the present, responding to and transcending the situational imperatives of their time. They enable us to trace dynamics and thematic strategies in the tradition of African American fiction. Wright’s unique development of the thesis novel or the novel as essay was a landmark moment in American and African American literature. In a sense that readers are only recently beginning to understand, Wright did succeed in the task of writing everybody’s protest novel.
To cast light on why Wright’s novels were almost simultaneously praised and condemned as instances of protest fiction, we might contrast James Baldwin’s seminal essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949) with Ann Petry’s “The Novel as Social Criticism”(1950). Baldwin and Petry describe the minefield and the boundaries that Wright chose to risk crossing. First published in the June 1949 issue of Partisan Review, Baldwin’s essay was a brief against the American protest novel, the epitome of which he took to be Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Baldwin demanded that there be a distinction among genres. The protest novel, he contended, too often resembled the pamphlet, and the demands of pamphleteering hindered the novelist in his true pursuit, the discovery and revelation of truth. Truth, for Baldwin, was not reducible to a proposition or an assertion. On the contrary, it was a constituent of lived action, a willed commitment to “the human being, his freedom and fulfillment; freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted.”1 Baldwin’s protest against protest fiction, then, is balanced upon understandings of what freedom and fulfillment might be. However the words freedom and fulfillment are defined, it is clear that Baldwin objects to the impossibility of protest loosening them from the constraints of its own discourse. Protest also fails to be an adequate pathway toward “truth.” It champions the importance of rules, of that which can be legislated and charted (or perhaps chartered). The protest novel, with its avowed aim of bringing greater freedom to the oppressed, displaced “truth” with matters that ultimately would cause the death of freedom. The protest novel did violence to language and credibility. To argue for the value of the protest novel on the grounds of its intentions and on the premise that the good of society took priority over style or characterization led to the confusion of literature with sociology. Like others who have argued from such aesthetic principles, Baldwin was convinced literature must not be tainted by social use.
In arguing against the validity of the protest novel because it blurred generic boundaries, Baldwin was not promoting an African American view of what literature should be. The very utility many black readers assumed was a given in literature made protest novels self-defeating. Like sociology, the protest novel supported a passion for categorizing. Thus, human beings are transformed into ciphers and real problems are made comfortably remote. Baldwin accused Native Son of falling into the trap of the protest novel, of reinforcing the social framework it was designed to challenge, of failing to destroy the myth of black inhumanity. Wright failed because Bigger Thomas was less a character than a categorization unable to transcend the status of stereotype.
By linking the problems of art and sociology with problems of philosophy and theology, Baldwin indeed raised complex questions about the limits of the protest novel as a genre, about the status of Wright’s fiction, and, by extension, the interrelations of black and white American literature. Baldwin’s specialized use of language precluded his seeing alternative meanings of protest in the realm of literature, meanings that Ann Petry read accurately.
Writing in defense of her own novel, The Street (1946), as a work involving social criticism, Ann Petry was keenly aware that critical dismissal of protest literature was a matter of fashion, a way of promoting the idea of art for art’s sake. She argued that all great novels were a species of propaganda, reflecting the writer’s awareness of the political, economic, and social events of her or his time. Dickens, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, and Wright all projected such an awareness in the medium of fiction.2
Petry confronted what Baldwin ignored. Uncle Tom and all his children were icons of accusation in the context of American literature. Proposing that the story-line for many novels of social criticism emerged from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Petry pointed to a crucial matter in reader-response. Attitudes toward African Americans in the 1940s were still influenced by arguments to justify slavery, and these attitudes could not be divorced from how a largely white readership in the 1940s and 1950s read literature. Consigning protest novels to the status of the extra-literary was clearly a defensive posture, a way of denying the importance of the emotional pain and guilt readers actually experience. Literature does not evade truth; it may provide readers with an overdose of “truth,” real and imaginary.
Committed to the full range of truth, Petry championed Native Son as a fine example of the novel as social criticism. Wright’s characterization of Bigger Thomas was remarkable. People might talk about Bigger as if he actually existed. She recommended that any novelist planning to write about race relations in America should “reread Native Son and compare the small talk which touches on race relations with that found in almost any novel on the subject published since then [1940]” (1117). It was Wright’s fidelity to the language of human interaction that made his novel powerful; his mastery of technique was, from the perspective of a fellow novelist, more important than his “sociology.” If readers failed to discriminate between documents that were the results of disciplined investigation and works that came from a novelist’s social awareness, blame should be located in the community of writers. The confusion was in the mental “eye” of the beholder, not in the creative imagination of novelists. Petry made clear why a description of Richard Wright as a protest writer secures his place in literature as a tradition. And her retort to the position Baldwin held should make us aware that the critical response to African American novels was often a deformation of how they were actually read. This is particularly true of the critical response to Richard Wright.
After the publication of Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), short stories that were powerful depictions of the racial climate in the American South, Richard Wright was acclaimed as an extraordinarily gifted and promising young writer. When his second book, Native Son, was published in 1940, it was received as a rare first novel, a magic mirror which revealed as yet unexamined psychological monstrosities to the American public. Everyone who read it was forced to acknowledge the uncanny accuracy of Wright’s vision or to become exceptionally defensive in retorting that such horrors as Wright described could not happen in America. Given the dynamics of racial understanding and misunderstanding in 1940, Wright’s novel was indeed a phenomenon, being just enough of a work of art and just enough of a polemical treatise to keep readers off balance. Wright made the nemesis of race in the United States the subject of his novel. It was impossible for American readers to be untouched by its stinging indictment and by the specter of the novel’s main character Bigger Thomas.
Native Son appeared one year after John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and the social criticism in both novels invited comparison. Both were indebted to the kind of fiction proletarian writers produced in the 1930s. Yet, Steinbeck’s critique of the American economy, of labor exploitation, and the plight of those forced to migrate from the Midwest to California because of drought and a flagging economy did not stem from the same political tradition as Wright’s novel. Steinbeck protested the harshness of nature, class discrimination, and capitalism. He was not protesting about the emotionally charged subject of race and environment. Like Wright, he provided an uncompromisingly realistic story about unfortunate people; on the other hand, Steinbeck did not explore areas of feeling and social concern as incendiary as those Wright surveyed. Native Son was a novel designed to induce fear and trembling.
Out of his experiences in the South and the North, out of a vision of social realities fine-tuned by his association with the Communist Party, Wright boldly outlined a frightening aspect of race in America: the possibility that incipient pathology among young adolescents who were consistently denied the chance to develop healthy psycho-social identities might manifest itself in extreme violence. Native Son asserted that deferred dreams might explode in the Bigger Thomases of America.
The question raised by the novel’s thesis was ultimately this: given the racial mores of America or the racial contract3 that governed life in the United States, would it ever be possible for black men and white men who were linked by a common history to achieve a common humanity? As Wright would propose five years later in Black Boy (1945), the answer depended on whether the language and concepts used by whites and blacks came to have identical referents. The question was not new, but Wright’s posing the question from the perspective of a “bad nigger,” a nihilistic teenager, was. Wright had created a new kind of African American novel, one that invited not sympathy but pangs of complicit, national guilt. Wright added a new twist to the penchant in certain nineteenth-century black novels for integrating recognizably literary discourse with arguments often kept at a safe distance from “literature.” The first two parts of the novel, “Fear” and “Flight” were a ripping story of despair and crime. “Fate,” the third part, was a full-blown essay on economic determinism and racial outcomes disguised as a lawyer’s defense of a guilty client. Wright had stripped the black novel of the literary decorum obtained in earlier works by such novelists as Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes. In its palpable violations of the expected, Native Son was a formal objective correlative for its subject matter. Wright was demanding that his readers refashion their reading habits and feel the onus of his question.
Wright had slipped the yoke and changed the joke with regard to the criteria for literary judgments. Native Son provided a fine dilemma. Critics and general readers were obligated to select new criteria in accord with their political ideas, beliefs about literature, and racial identification. Interpretation of Wright’s shocking presentation of race was the crucial problem. Race was an old theme in American fiction, a major theme since the appearance of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels in the early nineteenth century. But race in America was more than a mere concept of classification.
It was an ingrained feature of the American mindset, at once overwhelming and personal. Did the unrelenting “objectivity” of Native Son overshoot the bounds of literary realism and naturalism?
Judging from the initial critical responses to Native Son, we might surmise that critics knowingly mixed their concerns for the novel as art with their deeper concerns regarding emotional reaction and racial actualities. Moreover, both Marxist and non-Marxist critics set up Wright as a golden calf for the sake of literary politics. Wright’s own intentions to express spiritual hunger, oppression, and some of the horrors in American life in writing the novel, which he spelled out in the essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” were overvalued or undervalued or ignored. Many of the newspaper reviews emphasized the “power” of the novel to thrill or frighten. Used loosely, the word “power” might describe any number of states of feeling.
Such description allowed critics to avoid dealing seriously with Wright’s novel as art. Some reviewers took a clue from Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s introduction to the novel. Fisher located the novel’s primary value in its treatment of black adolescent psychology. Wright had sought to obviate a simple reading of relations between the oppressor (Dalton, the slum-lord philanthropist) and the victim (Bigger Thomas) through a careful use of symbolism. Fisher vacillated between admitting that Wright’s novel was comparable to the work of Dostoevsky in its wrestling with a human soul in hell and describing the novel as “the first report in fiction we have had . . . from those whose behavior-patterns give evidence of the same bewildered, senseless tangle of abnormal nerve-reaction studied in animals by psychologists in laboratory experiments.”4 Fisher set the pattern for interpreting Wright’s novel as an imaginative social document, as a book worthy of comparison with a major Russian novelist, and as an innovative contribution to American literature. Wright’s accomplishment was compared with that of Dostoevsky, Dreiser, and Steinbeck. It was noticed that Wright, unlike Dreiser, did not permit readers to think out his main character in realistic terms, because he insisted on making authorial interpretation of character. Authorial intrusion made Bigger Thomas too articulate and not recognizable as a stereotype of the lower-class Negro. This spoiled the story and the possibility of sympathizing with the tragedy of the Negro race. It was precisely Wright’s intention to preclude such sympathy. As he had recognized in his “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937), one of the major faults of the African American novel up to the early twentieth century was its begging white America to acknowledge the humanity of black people. If Native Son had the potential of alienating white readers and aggravating existing prejudices, it was a risk Wright could not avoid.
It was not the possibility of alienating black or white readers that figured strongly in the response by most black critics. Alienation was one of the costs of telling the truth. The dominant idea that recurred in African American reviews of Native Son was that literature had moral effects, that these effects could be translated, if the readers were “responsible,” into social action. The Platonic notion that literature could change society was shared in varying degrees by liberal white and Marxist critics. However, for many of the Marxists, Native Son was not sufficiently proletarian. Some black critics took the notion to its logical extreme: Native Son was neither “literature” nor social document but a literal weapon in racial struggle. This radical view is instructive, for it reminds us that Wright’s work was then and continues to be caught in the cultural wars between those who hold fast to some form of black nationalism in their literary politics and those who insist that all literature should function within the shadows of the universal.
One of the great moments in American literary politics that has much to reveal about responses to the African American novel and to Richard Wright himself was initiated by David L. Cohn’s review in the Atlantic Monthly and Burton Rascoe’s “Negro Novel and White Reviewers” in The American Mercury. These provoked Wright into making public replies.
Cohn took the position that Wright had written a study in hate that did not discriminate between good and bad whites and that used Bigger Thomas as a racial symbol. Wright’s placing the responsibility for Bigger’s plight on white society did not conform to fact. Fact, for Cohn, was that black rights were gradually being extended throughout the United States and that blacks had no monopoly on injustice. He could not understand why Wright seemed to call for a second Civil War to free the black masses. Cohn conveniently forgot that there was a quite legitimate struggle for civil rights in the United States. He was offended that Bigger’s lawyer was a Jew, because it seemed that Wright was not paying sufficient attention to Jewish history and several centuries of oppression. No Jews behaved like Bigger Thomas. Cohn accused Wright of lacking an adequate vision of history and the laws of expedience; the end result of the novel would only make what Cohn called “a tolerable relationship intolerable.”5
Wright replied to Cohn in the June 1940 issue of Atlantic Monthly. He was keenly aware that the social climate of America made it more difficult for a black to reply to a Jew than to a white American. He refused Cohn’s recommendation that black action be modeled on Jewish experience, because expedience did not guarantee liberation. Moreover, Wright understood that Cohn implied he should judge the plight of blacks in a relative rather than a specific sense. Wright was forthright in saying he did not wish to be a traitor to his race or to humanity, that he was an artist, not a scientist. If Cohn’s recommendations were a model of how racial history ought to be conceived, they went against the grain of Wright’s social experiences and beliefs.
Reacting negatively to the praise Wright’s novel had received, Rascoe saw intellectual anarchy among critics who went haywire about anything that seemed to be a social document exposing so-called “conditions.” Rascoe lashed Wright for his violations of aesthetic decorum. In addition to aesthetic violations, Wright had written a novel in which the message was loathsome. Just as Cohn invoked the collective Jewish experience to undermine the validity of Wright’s historical expectations, Rascoe used his personal experience to prove that Wright’s thesis about the impact of environment was unfounded. He had observed Wright’s very civilized behavior at the Dutch Treat Club and Wright’s success in making money.6
In a letter to the editor of The American Mercury, Wright suggested that Rascoe had introduced unheard-of criteria into literary criticism. His personal life had nothing to do with the merits of his novel. Wright asserted that he did not create literature to satisfy aesthetic expectations or pander to public tastes. He wrote out of the background of his experiences, and he had the right to depict the actions of people he did “not agree with, Aristotle to the contrary!”7
Wright’s treatment of the nemesis of race in Native Son did secure him a place in American literary history, but it also made him subject to the oppressive forces operative in the literary establishment of the 1940s. The pressure of being the most visible black novelist in America might have hastened his decision to choose exile.
The novels Wright produced during his exile in France (1947–1960) bear the marks of his quite different experiences as a black man in the United States and as an acclaimed writer in Europe; they are also testaments to Wright’s maturation as an artist. The Outsider (1953) and The Long Dream (1958) received mixed responses. When read in relation to Wright’s earlier fiction, the first seemed a radical departure and the second, an attempt to recover the thematic rhythms of his early short fiction about the American South. Savage Holiday (1954), which gave evidence of Wright’s strong interest in psychoanalysis and the need to free himself from matricidal impulses, was deemed a potboiler that did not merit critical attention.8
It is not difficult to understand why critics avoided Savage Holiday. Initially published as an Avon paperback, the novel explored the psychological illnesses of Erskine Fowler, a white insurance executive in New York. Behind a mask of harmony and order, Fowler is a most insecure person. He is simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by his neighbor Mabel Blake, a woman of easy virtue, who provokes his long repressed Oedipal impulses. Fowler is responsible for the accidental death of her son Tony, and he feels tremendous fear and guilt. He transfers his guilt feelings to Mabel, blaming her for being a bad mother and a loose woman. At the height of his outrage, he murders her with a butcher knife and then surrenders himself to the police. Wright’s surgical exploration of Fowler’s psychopathology was well written, but the critics remained silent about the novel. They seemed to know that a black writer’s exposure of potential criminality among the model citizens of America would have little success with postwar readers in the early 1950s.
From the vantage of critical evaluation, The Outsider was a worthier target. How did Richard Wright’s distance from his native land and from the Communist Party affect his fiction? Was his second novel technically superior to Native Son? Had Wright become a world-class artist? The critics who interpreted The Outsider most successfully were those who saw it as an experiment in representing a larger sense of human possibilities than was present in Native Son. Influenced by his reading of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Camus’s The Stranger, Wright departed from the expected limits of protest to present a complex meditation on the spiritual malaise of the twentieth century.
In the story of Cross Damon, a working-class intellectual, Wright embodied a critique of Communism through the prisms of race and existential longing. Damon is a man quite dissatisfied with the “normal” responsibilities of a social being; he longs for the absolute freedom that is possible only outside the process of history. When a subway accident frees him to fashion a new identity, Damon finds himself caught in a web of protective lies, political bad faith, and cold-blooded violence. By shifting the grounds for violence from the sociological domain of Native Son to the realms of philosophy and the human condition, Wright advanced the black novel in a new literary dimension. Those who expected Wright to be the voice of his people or to rehash stereotypes were disappointed.
The young, radical Lorraine Hansberry considered Cross Damon to be “the symbol of Wright’s new philosophy – the glorification of – nothingness.” Indeed, in a moment of ideological correctness, Hansberry accused The Outsider of being “a propaganda piece for the enemies of the Negro people, of working people and of peace” and Wright of having become a writer who negated the reality of the black struggle for freedom.9 Wright’s new interest in philosophy was not welcomed by critics who felt he should focus on matters of race. Writing for the influential Saturday Review, Arna Bontemps dismissed the novel’s philosophical importance with a provocative metaphor: “He [Wright] has had a roll in the hay with the existentialism of Sartre, and apparently he liked it.” In a strained attempt to redeem The Outsider for Negro literature, Bontemps identified Cross Damon’s problem as woman, not the problematics of alienation.10 Critical assessment of Wright was again swinging between the poles of art and propaganda, for his achievement was being measured against the backdrop of spectacular anti-Communist witch-hunts in the American Congress and the growing momentum of black demands for civil rights.
One of the more balanced assessments came from Henry F. Winslow’s review in The Crisis. Winslow recognized that Cross Damon had “the peculiar perspective of standing at once inside and outside of our culture.” Winslow judged The Outsider to be worthy of comparison with the work of Homer and Strindberg, an achievement “hardly equaled by any other American novelist who ever lived.” He concluded that Wright’s novel was “an eloquently articulate reading of the handwriting on the iron walls of contemporary civilization.”11 A few of the positive reviews gave special notice to the fact that although Cross Damon was a Negro character, the subject matter of the novel was not the plight of the Negro. Orville Prescott applauded this fact, because it allowed readers to take a greater interest in Wright’s ideas, in Wright’s finding cogency in the nihilistic depths. “That men as brilliant as Richard Wright,” Prescott asserted, “feel this way is one of the symptoms of the intellectual and moral crisis of our times.”12 In his sophisticated review of the novel, Granville Hicks noticed that it was “one of the first consciously existentialist novels to be written by an American.” Despite what Hicks called Wright’s “persisting clumsiness of style,” he was pleased that The Outsider, like Invisible Man, was only “incidentally a book about Negroes.” It was a book about twentieth-century man, one that “challenges the modern mind as it has rarely been challenged in fiction.”13 It is indeed remarkable that what is arguably Wright’s most powerful and haunting work of fiction was positioned between the rock of racial and political specificity and the hard place of the universal.
In The Long Dream (1958), the last novel published before his death, Wright returned to the American South as a primal scene for the drama of race, and he drew upon his memory of the South to create for his protagonist, Rex “Fishbelly” Tucker, a childhood and a youth that actual circumstances made it impossible for him to enjoy. To be sure, The Long Dream was a return to the subject of relations between blacks and whites that Wright had explored in Uncle Tom’s Children. A far more accomplished writer than he had been twenty years earlier, Wright focused his story on the problems of growing up as a black male in a Southern middle-class environment, on the bonding between father and son, and on racial hypocrisy. To the extent that we might argue for an autobiographical dimension in the novel, it would concern Wright’s unattainable dream of a positive relationship with his own father.
In his exploration of the family narrative, Wright created a novel that seems to complement Chester Himes’s The Third Generation (1954), a powerful exploration of an ill-fated relationship between a mother, visually “white,” who abhors the fact of her blackness, and a son, who is ultimately unable to deal with the contradictions of color-consciousness. Nevertheless, it was not Wright’s aim to probe that kind of social pathology. The pathology he did explore was that constituted by de jure segregation and by the fact that some whites were willing to sponsor black criminal activities when they could share the profits. The stakes for such transgressions of racial mores are high. Fishbelly’s father is murdered by his silent partner, the local Chief of Police, when it is discovered he has been smart enough to save incriminating evidence regarding their complicity in illegal practices. The novel is an elaborate tale of living the ethics of Jim Crow, a fleshing out of the autobiographical sketch that had been appended to the second edition of Uncle Tom’s Children. Unlike Native Son, The Long Dream had no comprehensive ideology or philosophy embedded in its structure. It was a multilayered exposure of dilemmas that always deferred the American Dream for a Southern black family that yearned to be upwardly mobile. It was to some degree Wright’s coming to terms with his feelings about race in America after more than a decade of exile from his native land. Well informed about the struggle to secure civil rights after the United States Supreme Court decision of May 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, regarding equality in educational opportunity, Wright was not blind to the fact that the American South was changing rapidly. At the same time, Wright knew that change could be cosmetic rather than systemic. What he exposes in The Long Dream are the deep structures of racial behaviors and the habits of the heart that remain constant despite change, that transform dreams into nightmares. Given that the protagonist, like Wright himself, chose exile in France, the novel sent a message that not enough had changed in America since 1946. It was not a message to be welcomed by those most optimistic about racial progress.
One of the major criticisms of The Long Dream was that Wright himself had refused to change. Saunders Redding, one of the most respected black American critics of the time, found numerous flaws in the narrative. There was too much repetition, apathy displaced knowledge, and the characterizations were not convincing. The book was sensational, and the plot moved with “spasmodic haste.” Redding associated the technical flaws in the novel with what he took to be the deadly effects of Wright’s exile.14
Redding associated Wright’s technical flaws or shortcomings in verisimilitude with a lack of adequate information about progressive change in America’s racial contract. Or, as James Baldwin might have repeated, Wright was once again rejecting the artistic obligation to accept life. From hindsight it does not surprise us that Wright’s severest critics in the late 1950s received The Long Dream as a brash violation of the “rules” for acceptable African American fiction. We must recall that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) had set new standards for representing the Negro’s life experiences in the United States. Mining classical western motifs and narrative structures, the potentials of symbolism, and the potential of American humor to provoke laughter, Ellison had succeeded in convincing readers that black Americans were thoroughly integrated in the fabric of American civilization.
Baldwin’s novel had exploited the ancient themes of guilt and conversion. Even if these themes were elaborated in a world apart, the murky world behind the racial veil, they were sufficiently related to matters that preoccupied Hawthorne and Faulkner and narrated in a manner Henry James might have found appropriate for the art of fiction. Neither novel protested overmuch about the dominant, complacent sentiments of mid-twentieth-century Americans. The Long Dream was an assault, a throwback to the jeremiads of the 1930s, a wake-up call for which the liberal readers of the late 1950s did not feel prepared.
The reviewers for such pacesetting intellectual journals as Commonweal and Partisan Review were forthright in claiming that Wright was a crusader, not a writer, that The Long Dream was a mere “scaffolding of an idea,” not a work of art. Wright spent his talent for ideas, not art, and he could not deliver a balanced judgment because his vision of race reflected a black point of view. Indeed, William Dunlea, the reviewer for Commonweal, felt that Wright’s racial interests outweighed his concern for art to the extent that The Long Dream was “the most racist of all the author’s anti-racist fiction.”15 Writing for Partisan Review, Irving Howe was discerning enough in his judgment to note that the novel was deeply psychological, “a nightmare of remembrance.” And Maxwell Geismar likewise noted that Wright was returning to the trauma of his early youth and adolescent experiences. The novel was uneven as fiction, but it was “true” in the sense that literature about depression and tragedy is true.16
Granville Hicks saw a new direction in Wright’s work. He was convinced Wright was moving closer to Ralph Ellison, subordinating racial preoccupations to more existential concerns. Nevertheless, The Long Dream was closer to Native Son than to The Outsider. Wright had not moved close enough, had not put sufficient distance between himself and the urge to illustrate what it meant to be a Negro in America. Wright’s interest in violence could be understood but not admired on literary grounds. In a surprising twist of the critical knife, Hicks contended that the source of Wright’s power, his use of symbols, was problematic; Wright was not a realist but a person who used and was used by symbols. Despite the fact that Wright was fully capable of touching his readers’ emotions, Hicks believed there were few signs of growth in Wright’s artistry.17 Wright, to be sure, was deeply wounded by criticism that suggested he had not moved as a novelist far beyond the limits of Native Son.
Just as in a qualified sense Wright might be acclaimed as the novelist who wrote everybody’s protest novel, equally strong qualifications must be used in speaking of the era of Richard Wright. It is a bold act of critical license to propose that Richard Wright dominated the African American sector of the American literary scene between 1940 and 1958. Wright’s steady production of fiction and nonfiction from the publication of Native Son to his death in 1960 did ensure that he was discussed by serious readers and considered the leading black writer of the time. His early association with the Communist Party, as Addison Gayle has described in detail, did make him one of the favorite targets for such government agencies as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the US Department of State during the Cold War period.18 Fame alone, however, is not a sufficient warrant for hasty fabrication of literary periods. It does not honor Wright to give his name to a moment of literary history that can all too easily be deconstructed.
Our understanding of the African American novel deepened by considering the period 1940 to 1960 as one of complicated transitions. Black fiction was evolving in concert with the efforts of black Americans to secure their constitutional rights as full citizens of the United States and to destroy the legal and extralegal barriers that precluded full participation in American social and political life. Novelists were as varied in their aesthetics and ideas about the function of literature as were the social activists who operated under the umbrella of the Civil Rights Movement. The ideas of solidarity and unity of purpose that emerged after 1960 with the advent of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic Movement did not obtain for most African American novelists of the 1940s and 1950s. They pursued their craft much along the attitudinal lines Langston Hughes had drawn in his 1926 manifesto “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” What did obtain for the novelists was Richard Wright’s leadership in providing models of yoking literary experimentation with social criticism of America’s racial problems.
Wright’s novels were examples of how one might incorporate ideas about history and race, philosophy, modernism and change, human psychology, politics and capitalism in a racist culture, gender, sexuality, language, and action in fiction. Wright was indeed singular in his sustained commitment to creating fiction that assaulted consciousness, an American literature that sought to provoke and strengthen human awareness of the struggle for meaning in a world that seemed progressively alienating.
It is most judicious to read the novelists who followed Wright in time as artists who are linked to him within the pattern of call-and-response, which is a central feature of African American literary tradition and of situated uses of literacy in African American cultures. To be sure, Wright’s influence can be traced in works that overtly deal with his dominant themes as well as those novels that offer strongly contrasting perspectives on being and race. For example, William Attaway’s second novel, Blood on the Forge (1941), shares Wright’s concerns with the negative rewards for Southerners who migrate to the North in quest of “better opportunities,” but Lloyd L. Brown’s Iron City (1951) is a counterweight to Wright’s preoccupation with the black character as victim. The early novels of Chester Himes – If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), Lonely Crusade (1947), Cast the First Stone (1952), and The Third Generation (1954) – do have affinities with Wright’s use of naturalism in addressing the racial situation in America; Himes, however, was far more committed to the portrayal of individual characters and less to the task of integrating a thesis with an imaginative narrative. Despite Ellison’s denials, it is apparent that he embeds the special perspective of Wright’s novella “The Man Who Lived Underground” in the structure of Invisible Man. Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) may be considered a womanist or feminist complement to Wright’s exploration of the city and race, but it is more important that Petry’s novel is itself within the tradition of black women novelists’ engaging issues of race, gender, and class as is Dorothy West’s The Living Is Easy (1948). And it is sobering to remember that Gwendolyn Brooks’s novel Maud Martha was published in the same year as Wright’s The Outsider. With its fine poetic techniques and focus on the inner life of a woman, Maud Martha is quite remote from Wright’s masculine, polemical interests in existentialism and the impossibility of absolute freedom. Brooks did not use fiction as a megaphone for announcing rage. In short, the works by Wright’s most immediate contemporaries are not exactly in a school of naturalism and social realism for which Richard Wright served as headmaster. Our ongoing study of the African American novel must respect the integrity of their individual talents. It is far better to honor Wright for the place he quite obviously occupies in the tradition of African American novels: that of the twentieth-century Prometheus who appropriated the fire writers still use in exploring the universe of fiction and protesting its absurdities.
1. James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 15.
2. Ann Petry, “The Novel as Social Criticism,” Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition, eds. Patricia Liggins Hill, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), pp. 1114–1119.
3. See Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
4. “Introduction,” Native Son (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940), p. x.
5. David L. Cohn, Review of Native Son, Atlantic Monthly (May 1940)): 659–661.
6. Burton Rascoe, “Negro Novel and White Reviewers,” The American Mercury (May 1940): 113.
7. Richard Wright, “Rascoe-Baiting,” The American Mercury (July 1940): 376–377.
8. See Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Tate’s brilliant discussion of Savage Holiday is invaluable for reassessments of Wright’s life and works.
9. Lorraine Hansberry, Review of The Outsider, Freedom (April 1953): 7.
10. Arna Bontemps, Review of The Outsider, Saturday Review (March 28, 1953): 15–16.
11. Henry F. Winslow, “Forces of Fear,” The Crisis (June–July 1953): 381–383.
12. Orville Prescott, Review of The Outsider, New York Times (March 18, 1953): 29.
13. Granville Hicks, “The Portrait of a Man Searching,” New York Times Book Review (March 22, 1953): 1, 35.
14. Saunders Redding, “The Way It Was,” New York Times Book Review (October 26, 1958): 38.
15. William Dunlea, “Wright’s Continuing Protest,” Commonweal (October 31, 1958): 131.
16. Irving Howe, “Realities and Fictions,” Partisan Review (Winter 1959): 133; Maxwell Geismar, “Growing Up in Fear’s Grip,” New York Herald Tribune Book Review (November 16, 1958): 10.
17. Granville Hicks, “The Power of Richard Wright,” Saturday Review (October 18, 1958): 13.
18. See Addison Gayle, Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980).