The Racial / Texual Politics of Richard Wright's Native Son

Autor:	Ou-Yang, Hsing-Hua, 歐陽星華
Rok vydání:	1997
Druh dokumentu:	學位論文 ; thesis
Popis:	85 Richard Wright's Native Son, published in 1940, has been a highly disputed work with Bigger Thomas being one of the most representative literary characters in American literature. The criticisms have been legion since the publication of the novel. The sources of the arguments among critics for the past decades are mainly that the way of Wight's portraying Bigger potently challenges and thus subverts the stereotypical images of most black characters prior to and contemporaneous with 1940, as well as that his distinct political stance makes most conservative and orthodox writers during the forties take him as an object of hate. These obstacles and attacks, in reality, were envisioned by Wright in the process of his writing, but, as a very self-consious and conscientious writer, he overcame this fear of censorship and would risk being denied and calumniated by his own folk only because he had to tell the truth-- nothing but the truth--to his country people however dark and horrible it seemed. The reality he strived to convey was that the dark-skinned minority had been oppressed too long and too severely by the irrational capitalism and inhuman racism of white Americans that the seeds of rebellion through murderous violence had been planted in the heart of the black Americans. It was high time for all Americans to honestly look at their raw, open wounds and try to heal them if they desired a wholesome and integrated country in the future. Wright's heavy use of violence, however, beomes the most debate point of the novel. As Robert James Butler reviews the motley criticisms in "The Function of Violence in Native Son': Malcolm Cowley…worried that "the author's deep sense of the inequitis heaped upon his race" would result in his "revenging himself by a whole series of symbolic murders" would result in his"revenging himself by a whole series of symbolic murders" in his fiction. David Daiches complained…that the novel's thesis was seriously undercut because the killing of Mary Dalton was so"violent and unusual." James Baldwin put the case…that…Native Son is Wright's "gratuitous and compulsive" interest in violence of the book…Nathan Scott complained in 1970 that Wright's obsession with "the raging abysses of violent criminality" forced him "to practice a terrible brutalization upon his characters.” And Cecil Brown objected in 1968 to Wright’vs “gratuitous” use of viloence…Addison Gayle was aesthetically uncomfortable with the murder of Bessie Mears…(103) My thesis is then to demonstrate that Wrihgt has his good reason and is in full control of the employment of violence; in effect, violence is only the point of departure from which he attempts to find out what and who the Afro-American is in relation to the large context of America in the thirties. He believes that the socalled Negro Problem should not be seen and readily explained away by the selfconceited dominant whites, but rather should be X-rayed and probed through historical, socio-economical, political and psychological perspectives; that is to say, there should not be only one segmented dimentsion but several scopes to reveal the true nature of the Negro Problem. Only by this kind of holistic studies can there emerge the possibility of resolving the split consciousness of the many Bigger Thomases and the divided personality of the whole America. Instead of making Native son merely as an ahistorical object of entertainment, Wright anchors it in specific socio - conomical and historical conditions with a very clear historical sense. This kind of historical depth distinguishes him from other black writers anterior to him. This method of writing fiction and his distinctiv ideological assumption are so unconventional that Wright is qualified to be entitled as a revolutionary writer of the forties. The genesis of Wrihgt's special vision comes from his personal experience as a poor and discrimianted person in America as well as from his being inspired by Marxism during the time he served in the John Reed Club. Born in Natchez, Mississippi, one of the most repressive states or Afro-Americans in the United states, Wright was often puzzled to find that he and his people had to ldad a life like walking a tightrope lest the white people on the other side of the “line” should grow wrathful, and maim, lynch or kill hem. Wright just could mot figure out what his folk had done to make the white world ostracize them and why the white people lived in better homes and had more possessions. Usually his mother would shun these touchy questions and force him to memorize the ethics of Jim Crowism. However, from childhood, as recorded in his autobiography Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, at home Wrihgt was a recalcitrant son of his invertebrate father. The act that he dared to challenge the paternal authority heralds the recurrent motifs in his later works of quesioning and criticizing the injustices that he had suffered and endured as a black boy. Never did he cease to ask the question, “Who am I?” and “What am I?” under the threat of white violence. Never would he stop cultivating his literary skills and critical thinking so as to make the world different--to change the world--some day. This aspiration had been sustaining him to “drive coldly to the heart of every question and lay it open to the core of suffering,”to“ love burrowing into psychology, into realistic and naturalistic fiction and art, into those whirlpools of politics,” and most of all to direct his loyalties ”to the side of men in rebellion” (112). During the Great Depression years. Wright had to stand in line with the hungry people waiting for the government relief. It was the first time in the parks of Chicag that he chanced to hear many speakers talking up the benefits of Communism. Its philosophy makes mandatory a strong central government in practice on the one hand, and the abolishment of private property in theory on the other. As a deprived young man in a system regulated by discrimination, with little real hope o achieving his goal to become a writer, Wright felt that those speakers struck a sympathetic chord in him, because they questioned the economic system that had permitted a great and rich nation to fall into the depths of depression. He wondered why there had never been voices from the whites to condemn the was their society functioned while they ervently upheld the Constitution as the genuine manifestation of the spirit of democracy. The only voices Wright heard were the voices of Communists, and they then spoke the trush as he knew it and felt it. Through some friends, Wrihgt finally had the chance to learn what Marism was at the John Reed Club of Chicago. It seemed to Wrihgt that this organizaion was one that really cared about A.Williams quotes Wright in A Biography of Richard Wriht: The Most Native of Sons: The Communists seemed to me the only ones who really meant what they said, and I joined the John Reed Club in Chicago in 1934, where, for the first time in my life, I heard of T.S.Eliot and many others. I wrote some wild stuff which was published as political poems, them stopped. (60) Wright's membership in the Club granted him the likelihood to help his people and at the same time created a forum for his writing. His pieces of writing were very meaningful to the Party at the time when it made a great effort to enlist the black masses to realize its goal of liberating the humanity, which is by first liberating the enslaved workers from the grip of oppressive capitalism of America. This envisioning is just the objective of Communists, the disciples of Marxism. For Marx, to effectively undermine the self-justified domination of the bourgeoisie necessarily takes a brand new perspective to reflect on the existent state affairs. Since the Western traditon has been based on and flourished from an abstract metaphysical realm, Marx inverts the legislated modality of conceptualization so as to establish the truth of this world by invalidating the other-worldly truth. That means he attempts to secularize the prevalent metaphysical thinking led by those German Idealists and bourgeois economists. The immediate task of philosophy is to unmask human self-alienation in its secular and material form indtead of a sacred and platonic form. With these in mind, Marx takes pains to analyze the inseparable relation between historical consciousness and the actural forms of hisorical existence, i. e., between human self-identity and their material conditons and environment. In Marx’s hypothesis, the theory and practice of human consciousness are intimately linkeda to the theory and practice of the society in which it arose. In primitive society, human beings live on nature. They appropriate nature to maintain their physical existence in a free and consicious was. Just as the external objects and phenomena constitute a part of human consciousness in the realm of theory, so too in the realm of practice they comprise a part of human life and human activity. The content and development of human consciousness are hence interrelated with the external various productive activities in which human beings participate in nature according to their physical organization. In this stage, human being are unified in themselves and in their cooperation with one another to utilize nature; their consciousness resembles an “animal consciousness,” a sheep-like or “herd” consciousness by existing in the primordial form of tribal society. The origin of their schism in consciousness is derived from the devision of labor, which is synonymous with ownership of private property. The division of labor in its initial form is “nothing but division of labor in the sexual act, ” thenj develops “spontaneously” into a division of mental and meterial labor (“The German Ideology”158-59). From now on human consciousness becomes something more than consciousness of actural material existence; it can transcend to a higher plane of consciouness by speculating on immeaterial objects of thought such as theology, ethics, and so on. This division of labor naturally leads to two classes in society with one doing intellectual activity in opposition to the other studied with the history of different modes of division of labor. Therefore Marx proclaims in “history of class struggles” (473) with different antagonistic forms between status groups in different historical periods from the Primitive Communist era to the Slave, Feudal and Capitalist. In the division of labor can also be found the seed of human alienation in the sense that the laborer is not free to emgage in the economic activeities and is subjected to the products of his labor in, through and after the process of producction. His labor produces not only commodities but produces itself and the laborer as a commodity. In brief, the laborer commodifies -- objectifies -- himself when producing. Since his life-activity is not out of his tree will and consious drive, the more he produces, the more he feels depleted and cheapened, because he cannot prove of and identify with what he is doing. Therefore what he produces confronts his “as something alien, as a power independent of the producer” (“Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844"71). This alien power becomes greater and more unmanageable in proporition to the greater degree the worker puts his labor into it. That is why he is estranged from what he manufactures and also he alienates himself fron historically created human possibilities, especially from the human capacity for freedom and creativity. In a capitalist mode of society, this sense of alienation on the part of the laborer is especially acute because is boss, the capitalist recognizes the worth of the laborer only by measuring how many commodities he can produce, how much exchange value he can beget since he aleady falls into the state of a commodty controlled, controlled, calculated and distributed by his boss. As Marx points out that on the basis of political economy, the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands...and that the distinction between capitalist and land-rentier...disppears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes-- the property-owners and the propertyless workers. (“Maniscripts” 70) We can infer from the passage that the concentration of capital, (or wealth) in few hands leads to the concentraiton of political power in few people, who then become the ruling class of society in possession of adventageous military, economic and politacal power. The ruled calss, the proletariat, will remain trapped, disinherited and exploitable under the mode of capitalist production. The only way to overturn the existing relations of production, then, is by making revolutions on a large scale. As a matter of fact, the notion of self-alienation is not merely a descriptive term, it is also an appeal, or a call for a revolutionary change of the world to achieve de-alienation. For Wright, whose keen sense of alienation and self-alienation arises from his ethnic status, the theory and praxis of Communism ignited somewhere deep down in him the smoldering embers of new fires and made him perceive what he had not seen before. Though eager to deliver his people out of the state of a divided life with a divided consciousness, Wright realized that the task was actually tremendous and diffucult. The first overt obstacle was that, by the time of the thirties, the twelve million black presences had been deliberately obliterated by almost all the official versions of American history and literary history composed by the whites. The Afro-Americans became thus a people without language of their own. Fpr these people there was a big hole in history, a stretch of centuries whose content had been interpreted only by the whites. In short, these people had no vocabulary of history and were historical victims of a sort. Not to mention that the Afro-American masses were mostly illiterate so they could not read and write, even the black intellectuals and artists were silent when theyt saw that the point of view of the imperial power dominated the values of culture and life, The world confronting them nagated their humanity, yet they felt it was useless to protest with words. Even if they did protest, their tone became childish and exaggerated to the ear of the whites, Wright admitted in the Introduction “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born" that he himself had made an awfully naive mistake when he published the book Uncle Tom's Children, which “even bankers” daughters could read and weep over and feel good about.” Therefore he resolved to write another book, i. e., Native Son, that would be “so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears” (xxvii). The second observable barrier to emancipate the blacks was that under the long term of control and intimidation of the white racists, the Afro-Americans had inescapably interiorized the views and value judgements of their ruler. They had been forced into a straitjacket which carsed their psychological crisis and thus crippled them to assert their true identity. They felf ashamed, bitter, resentful, sullen, and depressed. Whenever they met the gaze of the whites if they had the chance, they felf being reminded of their discepancy and degradation. To survive, according to Frantz Fanon, they had two alternatives left: either to publicly rebel against the while rulers or to seclude themselves in their tradionnal culture by developing various mechanisms of compensation. For the oppressed minority group of thet hirties, most of them would react to their situation by adopting the latter stance. But Fanon prefers to stress the aspect of open violence directed spontaneously against the colonizer so as to do away with their psychological torpor and alienation. At any rate the prerequisite for the true emancipation of the Afro-Americans was their liberating themselves form their own impvisoned consciousness long fixed to their white masters. And this was just the message that Wright wanted to convey to his folk. Although the whites could not absolve selves from their responsibility for enslaving the dark-skinned people physically and mentally, what might be of the greatest importance for the enslaved was that they had to seek an exit by ecultivating a perception of themselves. For a long time the oppressed had been too engrossed in either assimilating into or attacking the whites that they had no time left to be themselves. In Native Son, therefore, the scene in which Bigger has come to a state of self-acceptance and self-consciousness before he dies becomes quite symbolic and prophetic. By writing the story of Bigger Thomas, Wright in fact rewrote the history--or, wrote another history dialectical to the prevailing historical conscousness-- of his people by implicitly subvering the traditional official method of writing history. Wright's fiction proved more powerful and authenticated in its telling a historical truth that both racial groups in America had long been pretending not to know or even feeling too traumatic to listen to. My thesis aims to delve into the roots of the dilemma for the Afro-Americans to declare their particular identity under stresses peculiar to them and their status of America. The terms "nogro," "nigger," and "black" used in this thesis does not contain any derogatory implicaiton; rather, they are employed here as a strategic necessity. A dramatic effect of hostility and antagonism between the races will be intensified by contrasting these "color-ful" terms. Wright himself unambiguously points out in his 12 Million Black Voices that the word "negro" is nothing but a "psychological term," a "fiat" most unanimous in all American history that "artificially and arbitrarily defines, regulates, and limits in scope of meaning the vital contours" of the lives of his people and their generation (30). Chapter One of my thesis focuses on discussing Bigger's plight from a historical and social perspective based on Marxist theories. This chapter is essentially confined to discussing the first three parts of Native Son: "Introduction," "Fear" and "Flight." Chapter Two continues to analyze the fourth part of the novel, "Fate," by demonstrating the considerable effect of Wright's political activity on the portrayal of his fictional characters. Chapter Three seeks to redefome the literary position of Wright in American literary history by clarifying his poetics. This section is primarily an exploration into the subtle an complex psychology of the discriminated Bigger Thomas and his folk in terms of Fanon's theory. These related issues would be better understood in this manner of separate discussion and would unveil a more complete picture of how native Bigger Thomas and Richard Wright are to America. The Conclusion will make a summary of the main arguments of my thesis as well as a brief reflection of how far America has advanced in the road to true egalitarianism. I hope that what I have to say about Bigger and Wright is offering a new and refreshed critical perspective. For anyone who attempts to pursue the studies of Afro-Americans literature, Richard Wright's Native Son certainly can provide a thrilling and inspirational reading experience--thrilling because Bigger is so violent and bloody, and inspirational because it unmasks the Janus-face of America. Curiously, however, racism is never solely America's plague but has overwhelmingly stuck many other countries in the world for so long, especially in modern days when racism is viewed from the perspective of the people living in the Third World. This problem of segregation and discrimaination based on epidermal defference has vexed among many individuals in many subtle ways at any time and place in our daily lives. In spite of the fact that up till now the various disciplines devoted to the studies f human behaviors have greatly progressed in sophistication and precision, there is always an element in the human mind irrational and enigmatic enough for experts or scholars to fully grasp. That is why an anatomy of racism will never be exhaustive and is thus worth pursuing all the time.
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