I read Native Son when I was in high school in Philadelphia, a long long time ago. WOW. One of the best pieces of literature, incredibly powerful. Often ghettoized into "Black Studies" courses, this is totally unfair to this great book.

Don't try to shift the blame to Wright, Chucky.

Good Afternoon Charles,
I too, enjoy Richard Wright. I fine writer indeed. He wrote/contributed an essay to "The God That Failed" edited by Richard Crossman circa 1950. It's a collection of personal essays from mid-20th century intellectuals like Wright, Andre Gide, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler among others describing their intial embrace of Communism and eventual disillusionment. I read (and still possess) that book in college and recommend it.

Me too. When reactionaries moan about the existence of black lit courses or departments in colleges, they ought to take notice of how many minds have been opened up by having these programs. The white cannon taught in English departments before that was never going to get around to including Richard Wright without an ethnic studies insurgency.

Great post, Charles!

These two well-crafted, succinct paragraphs are easily the equivalent of about 3 semesters' worth of graduate seminars... Terrific insights, seriously.

I'm-a hafta pick up some of these stamps. My stamp supply is getting kinda low, what with being the only one in the house with actual Snail Mail stamps and all..

Charles, hope you are ok my friend. Yes, i think the idea has more to do with the thinking of such people as Ryle and his concept of the Ghost in the Machine, something that authors such as Koestler later took upon, I'm skeptical about it being linked to concepts related Africanisms, although it is possible it makes much more sense for what you call the darkness of the concept to be directly related to Ryle's.

@5

Spelling flames are for people with nothing to say.

Lovely.

As much as I loved Black Boy, my first thought any time I hear Richard Wright is "the keyboard player for Pink Floyd", not "novelist". This can be frustrating when working in a bookstore.

Charles

'Fraid not. Bigger-as-Monster/Ape comes not so much from Poe as from Wright's self-conscious decision not to continue his path as a writer, a path that started with Uncle Tom's Children and was then in the Marxist phase of his career. He set out to write a book where White Racist Fears--the Black Male Rapist--were both fulfilled and contested at once (go look again at the moment when Bigger realizes he's killed Mary Dalton; and when he accepts the fact (after Bessie tells him so) that everyone will assume he'd raped her . . . ). Wright takes the racial/sexual politics of its day and explodes it (but you can only see this in the Library of America Restored Edition (ed. Rampersad). The cuts Wright had to make to satisfy the Book of the Month Club excised the sexual angles almost entirely.

Wright's aesthetic meant challenging Black sensibilities as well--the book was denounced from many an AME church pulpit as playing into the hands of the KKK and white supremacists. Bigger Thomas is both white and black America's nightmare--and that was Wright's point. The two nightmares are one.

Finally, re-read Rampersad's intro: in it, he makes two factual errors (ie, he attributes things to the novel that ARE WRONG--that Bigger's father is never mentioned (he is: he was lynched in the South before the family came north) and that Bigger masturbates in the movie theatre AFTER seeing the newsreel of Mary Dalton--when he did so before seeing her image) which show the power of the mythology of the black rapist, even among scholars wholly sympathetic with Wright and his project.

Back to the original text, which I teach and re-read annually.

Cheers

Bill

i'm not touchin this one with a ten foot pole.

@12: Probably a wise choice. :-P

@11: I had a teacher named Bill who taught this book in high school, when I first read it. Interesting...

I too read Native Son as a deconstruction of the 'brutal, bestial savage' trope at the heart of racist discourse. That doesn't mean he's not drawing character and narrative elements from Poe's story: Bigger obviously invokes the savage ape, a "black rage [imagined] in very racist terms," but as you point out this doesn't mean Wright is endorsing it. The paradox of postmodern/post-structuralist writing is that one cannot deconstruct a trope without simultaneously invoking and, potentially, especially for certain audiences, reinforcing that trope. This paradox becomes especially problematic when we're dealing with something like racism that defies all rational and self-reflective thought: it becomes impossible to satirize or deconstruct a trope like the black man as killer ape when the absurdity of the representation is lost on an audience that really believes even the impossible or senseless aspects of one's representation. As you point out in mentioning the inaccuracies in the introduction, even those who should know better and are receptive to the aims of the project can fall victim to this trap.

What's important are the complexities of motivation that expose Bigger not as the uncontrollable, "naturally" wild beast, but as the specific and inevitable product of a racist cultural discourse: his actions are ultimately beyond his control (and represented as such) not because of a natural drive but because of his social production. He is constructed as the embodiment of a feared black rage, and so that's what he is (the murder scene itself really drives this point in).