Narrating Self-Abolition: On Richard Wright

Social movements have the capacity to shape the literary canon. They can bring down established authors who do not align with their worldview, or reappraise forgotten or neglected writers whose work articulates their vision of the future, makes the same demands, or inspires them to continue the fight. Often, there is a struggle within the movement itself over the formation of this counter-canon. Since the emergence of Black Lives Matter, James Baldwin’s legacy has benefited immensely from renewed attention to the Black literary tradition, leading some critics to declare a “Baldwin revival.” As welcome as this development is, it has also, until recently, been bad news for Richard Wright, whose career never fully recovered from Baldwin’s devastating critique of Wright’s best-known novel, Native Son (1940). When Rashid Johnson directed a stylish film adaptation of the book in 2019, many critics dismissed the source material by citing Baldwin’s 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” where he argues that Wright’s representation of the oppressive forces of white supremacy arrayed against Black life are so totalizing in their domination that they make a monster of the novel’s central character, Bigger Thomas, thus foreclosing liberatory change.1

Just two years later, however, this popular consensus was troubled. Wright received another wave of public attention after the publication of the complete, unedited version of The Man Who Lived Underground, a manuscript that was originally rejected by Harper’s in 1941 due to its graphic depiction of a police officer violently trying to force a false confession out of a Black man. Released on the day that Derek Chauvin was sentenced to over twenty-two years in prison for murdering George Floyd, The Man Who Lived Underground was praised for its relevance to the moment’s reckoning with white supremacy. In her review of the novel, Imani Perry admits that for most of her career she tended to favor Baldwin’s critique, but was now reconsidering Wright’s legacy. She suggests that Wright’s fiction had a “bleak prescience,” and that his “pessimism” should be reframed as “bearing witness” to a brutal reality.2

It’s true that Wright used his fiction as a way to represent the cruel injustices that Black Lives Matter protests forced back into mainstream discussion fifty years later: police brutality, a white-supremacist judicial system, and white vigilante terror. But to rest Wright’s reputation on that alone, significant as it is, would be to limit an understanding of his works and to miss vital messages that he tried to offer the social and political movements of his day. Wright was not just a witness to oppression but actively struggled against it. His writing career spanned from the 1930s until his death in 1960. These were the decades of Jim Crow, but also of efforts by the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) to organize against those harsh conditions, as Robin D. G. Kelly recounts in his classic book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. It was a period when the collapse of the stock market was met by mass unionization and numerous strikes across the US; when international brigades were formed to fight fascism in Europe; and when, in the final decade of Wright’s life, national liberation movements broke the chains of colonialism on the African continent. Despite living through the rise and fall of the Communist movement in the US and retaining a permanent spot on the FBI watch list for his ongoing commitment to Black liberation, Wright continued to pursue the mission he first gave himself in his 1937 “Blueprint for Negro Writing”: to “ask questions, to theorize, to speculate, to wonder out of what materials can a human world be built.”3

Richard Wright, portrait by Gordon Parks, 1943. Collection: Library of Congress.

What first appears as “pessimism” in Wright’s work can also be understood as hard-won, revolutionary hope. This is precisely what’s lost in the long shadow of Baldwin’s critique, notably penned before his own participation in the Civil Rights Movement. Such hope, cultivated in struggle but unapologetically aware of the violence to which it responds, may be uniquely suited to confront today’s conditions, as the rise of fascist movements around the globe meet a determined yet so far limited resistance. Wright had no illusions about the difficulties of revolutionary struggle. It involves not only a collective transformation of material conditions, but a transformation of the individual as well. It is this latter theme that Wright pursued most provocatively in Native Son, the story of a blundered attempt at interracial unity during the Popular Front period. To dismiss it as “fatalistic” is to miss what Hegel called “the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative.”4 Peter Hudis turns to the same line when describing Frantz Fanon’s perspective on revolution, but it applies just as well to Wright, whose works had a great influence on Fanon.5

Rather than depicting dramatic moments of struggle like the riot or the strike, Native Son investigates the nearly imperceptible shifts that occur in everyday battles that precede and inform those moments, the basic building blocks of a revolution, and the individual subjectivities that compose and carry it out. The novel narrates this tumultuous path of individual transformation from an alienated and atomized, gendered and racialized existence towards a communal culture of solidarity, mutual recognition, and historical agency—a journey that can be exceptionally taxing and injuring, with many false starts and dead ends, as Hannah Proctor documents in Burn Out: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat.6 This revolutionary transformation is necessarily a process of self-abolition that accompanies the broader struggle to abolish the institutions of white-supremacist, patriarchal capitalism.

As in any political struggle, just because the protagonist’s efforts do not end well does not mean that there were not bursts of potential and leaps of growth along the way. Endnotes, following Jacques Camatte, calls such “failed” scenarios “the production of revolutionaries without a revolution.”7 Riffing on Wright’s “Blueprint,” another way to articulate this is as the production of humans without a human world. In a period when revolutionary cycles are ebbing and a resurgent fascism has the upper hand, Wright’s literary style in Native Son suggests a potential role—not without difficulties—that literature can play in helping today’s social movements to work through, rather than around, internal divisions and limits, which is the only way forward.

“Looking and Feeling for a Way Out” in Native Son

Native Son tells the story of Bigger Thomas—a Black proletarian youth living on the South Side of Chicago—and his fraught relationship with two young white communists, Mary Dalton and Jan Erlone.8 Bigger and his friends spend their days hanging around a pool hall, occasionally committing robberies to fund their amusements. Eventually, Bigger is forced to get a job so that his family can continue receiving welfare. He is hired as a chauffeur by Mr. Dalton, a wealthy real-estate tycoon and a member of the so-called “progressive bourgeoisie” of the Popular Front. On the job, Bigger meets Mary, his boss’s rebellious, trust-fund radical daughter, who then introduces him to her boyfriend, Jan.

Shortly before Wright wrote the novel, the CPUSA had abandoned its demand for Black self-determination and exchanged it for the interracial slogan “Black and White, Unite and Fight!” Black-exclusive organizations run by the party were shuttered or integrated. The explosive narrative that follows Bigger’s encounter with Mary and Jan was a warning to the CPUSA that unity could not be so easily imposed from above. It had to be earned through struggle and trust. Eager to practice the new slogan, the couple attempts to befriend and recruit Bigger to the party, but their efforts are sabotaged by their own racial biases and general obliviousness to the racialized gulf separating them.

Canada Lee as Bigger Thomas in the Orson Welles production of Native Son, 1941. License: Public Domain.

Mary and Jan insist that Bigger take them to “one of those places where colored people eat,” and after an awkward night of drinking out on the town, Jan leaves Bigger to carry a drunken Mary to her bedroom alone, unaware of just how dangerous, even life-threatening, this is for Bigger. The novel briefly gestures to the fact that Bigger’s father was lynched in the South, which is most likely the reason his family migrated north along with millions of other Black people in the US during the Great Migration. In the South, the “myth of the Black rapist,” as phrased by Angela Davis, was invariably used to mobilize white lynch mobs.9 Black men have been killed for much less than finding themselves alone in a room with a white girl. Frustrated and fearful, Bigger tries to carry out the task in secret, but when Mary’s mother, who is blind, enters the room, Bigger puts a pillow on Mary’s face to keep her quiet and avoid detection, accidentally suffocating her in the process. The novel, already moving at a propulsive pace, shifts into a crime thriller as Bigger goes on the run with his girlfriend Bessie. In one of the most controversial scenes of the novel, Bigger rapes and kills Bessie after she learns the truth of what Bigger did and begins to question staying by his side. Soon after, Bigger is caught and faces trial, at which point the novel slows down into long passages of self-reflection by Bigger as he tries to make sense of the choices he has made. In an eleventh-hour attempt to make amends for past mistakes, Jan gets a lawyer from the CPUSA to defend Bigger, but the effort fails and Bigger is sentenced to death by a judicial system foaming at the mouth for blood.

Native Son caused a scandal upon publication, generating heated discussion among writers, activists, and academics. It was also an instant bestseller, the first of its kind for a Black author in the US.10 So popular was the novel, and so prominent was Wright’s position in US literature in subsequent years, that Baldwin would later describe his own contribution to the debate as an Oedipal struggle with Wright. Baldwin’s take was that Bigger was too narrowly conceived, that “all of Bigger’s life is controlled, defined by his hatred and his fear.” Going one step further, Baldwin attributes this flaw to protest fiction in general: “The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power.”11

Written at the start of the Cold War, Baldwin’s essay arrived at an opportune time, when anxious liberal literati were looking to distance themselves from the social-protest fiction of the 1930s, now tainted by its association with communism. They saw in the essay a new orthodoxy—that “Black literature ought to capture hope, possibility, beauty, and endurance,” as Perry writes—and widely promoted it.12 The essay’s mass circulation marked the beginning of the end for Wright’s career as well as Wright and Baldwin’s relationship. Living in Paris with the “F. B. Eye Blues” as he called it, Wright harbored paranoid speculations that his former mentee was a federal agent tasked with destroying his reputation. Ironically, as Ishmael Reed often points out, the essay’s arguments would later be used to bring down Baldwin as well, when he dared to call out the racism of the same liberal crowd that made his career. His 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, which included a sympathetic portrait of a Black Panther, was dismissed by Mario Puzo as protest fiction, and his popularity went into decline, making a “Baldwin revival” necessary fifty years later.13

What Baldwin seems to overlook in his essay is that while Wright purposefully writes Bigger as a character driven by hatred and fear, he also shows him struggling to overcome those feelings. When Bigger first appears in the novel, he’s a “fiery planet lost from its orbit,” as his lawyer eloquently describes him, spinning erratically between violent anger and timidity, which Wright captures masterfully in jarring free indirect discourse. During his first meeting with Mr. Dalton, Mary bursts in to make fun of her dad, calling him “Mr. Capitalist,” and tries to enlist Bigger to her side. “Isn’t he a capitalist, Bigger?” Bigger says nothing, fearing this could hurt his job prospects. When Mr. Dalton leaves the room for a minute, his response alternates between inner rage and outer meekness

In his heart he cursed the crazy girl. Maybe Mr. Dalton was deciding not to hire him? Goddamn! Maybe he would not get the extra five dollars a week now? Goddamn that woman! She spoiled everything! Maybe Mr. Dalton would feel that he would not trust him.

“Oh, Bigger,” said Mr. Dalton.

“Yessuh.”

“I want you to know why I’m hiring you.”

“Yessuh.”

“You see, Bigger, I’m a supporter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Did you ever hear of that organization?”

“Nawsuh.”14

This attitude changes after Bigger accidentally kills Mary. He incinerates her body in the Dalton’s furnace unnoticed and then makes his way back home to fall asleep in his bed. The power of whiteness is so great in his mind that he never conceived that he would not immediately perish upon harming a white person, let alone kill one. This is why, until this act of killing, Bigger and his friends never rob white people. It’s a fear of whiteness that he hides from others out of shame and covers up with a tough-guy persona among friends. Sitting at breakfast with his family he thinks to himself:

The thought of what he had done, the awful horror of it, the daring associated with such actions, formed for him for the first time in his fear-ridden life a barrier of protection between him and the world he feared. He had murdered and had created a new life for himself … Now that the ice was broken, could he not do other things? … He would know how to act from now on. The thing to do was to act just like others acted, live like they lived, and while they were not looking, do what you wanted. They would never know.15

Frantz Fanon would later call this the “dis-intoxicating” effect that violence against the oppressor can have on the oppressed—an idea he may have gotten while reading Native Son, and later confirmed during his psychiatric work with the colonized in Algeria.16 The oppressed see that the oppressor is not all-powerful, which bolsters their sense of agency. Bigger proceeds to take advantage of the situation, creating a fake ransom note to elicit money from the Daltons that he can use to skip town with Bessie. Though the scam fails, it serves to signal that Bigger is beginning to act confidently and creatively upon the world.

Refusing the Consolation of Tears

This is not the only way in which Bigger’s character expands over the course of the narrative. One area of his growth that has been misread is his changing relationship to his masculinity. In Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver, a leader of the Black Panther Party, celebrated Bigger’s violent masculinity as an expression of integrity in his struggle against white supremacy, only to then deploy this analysis in a shameful homophobic attack on Baldwin.17 Cleaver disregards the way in which Bigger comes to understand how his masculinity contributed to his undoing. While awaiting trial, Bigger becomes frustrated as he struggles to convey to the cops and his lawyer why he did what he did. Bigger is alienated from his own emotions, which in turn alienates him from others. In one of many lyrical passages from this section of the novel, he realizes that this is due to his upbringing as a man:

And why did not he hear resounding echoes of his feelings in the hearts of others? There were times when he did hear echoes, but always they were couched in tones which, living as a Negro, he could not answer or accept without losing face with the world which had first evoked in him the song of manhood.18

Attendees of the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists, Sorbonne in Paris. The Congress featured such speakers as Richard Wright, Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon.

Far from acts of integrity, Bigger sees his previous actions, up to and including murder, as “blindly” acting on his feelings, feelings that may not have had such control over him if he had simply talked about them with others. He resolves to not “move again unless he swung out from the base of his own feelings.”19 Readings like Cleaver’s ignore the robust communist feminist movement of Wright’s time that was pushing him and all the other male comrades of the CPUSA toward women’s liberation.20

To this end, Wright also attempts to show Bigger working his way out of his misogynoir—though, as argued by communist feminists at the time of the novel’s publication and by a later generation of Black feminists in the 1970s, this aspect of the novel is poorly constructed. The criticisms revolve around Bessie, who is little more than a device for highlighting this aspect of Bigger’s character. The novel gives us few details about her background and motivations before she runs off with him. Wright then tries to use her rape and murder to show how both the judicial system and Bigger himself have ignored the crimes against Bessie during the trial while focusing on the imagined rape of Mary. When the prosecuting attorney scandalously displays Bessie’s corpse to shock the jury, Bigger realizes he has forgotten all about Bessie. He becomes disgusted with himself and the ways in which white supremacy continues to shape him:

Not only had he lived where they told him to live, not only had he done what they told him to do, not only had he done these things until he had killed to be quit of them; but even after obeying, after killing, they still ruled him. He was their property, heart and soul, body and blood; what they did claimed every atom of him, sleeping and waking; it colored life and dictated the terms of death.21

This moment captures what Sylvia Wynter called the “inner eye” of white supremacy, which affects white perception but could also affect Black self-perception as well.22 To his credit, Wright nevertheless heard the criticisms of his portrayal of Bessie and greatly expanded her character when he wrote the screenplay adaption of the novel a decade later. In the 1951 film, Bessie takes center stage, quite literally, as an aspiring club singer facing her own challenges in pursuit of a dream. It’s a development in Wright’s writing that hasn’t done much for his reception, due in part to the ways in which the production and distribution of the film was repressed by the US State Department.23

In a way that anticipates Fanon’s description of the corrosive effects of racial domination on both colonized and colonizer, Wright also portrays the white characters as subject to and sometimes struggling against the alienating forces of racial capitalism. The white lynch mob whipped into a barbaric frenzy during Bigger’s trial is the most egregious example, but even the communist characters suffer as well. Bigger’s white, Jewish lawyer, Boris Max, gives a lengthy and didactic courtroom speech in a plea to save Bigger from the death penalty. He places the blame for Bigger’s crimes squarely on the United States, which has created “a separate nation, stunted, stripped, and held captive within this nation” for the twelve million Black people living in its territory, essentially making their “very existence … a crime against the state.”24 It’s a speech that aligns with the revolutionary anti-racist politics of the day, and yet, while Max is working on the plea, he ignores Bigger’s desire to defend himself. “[Bigger] tried to talk with Max, but Max was preoccupied, busy preparing his plea to the court to save his life. But Bigger wanted to save his own life.”25 Max is stuck within the procedures of a white-supremacist judicial system, acting upon Bigger or for him but never with him.

Of the white characters, only Jan is ever shown to experience intellectual growth, eventually coming to terms with the reasons for Bigger’s actions and his own complicity in them. While visiting Bigger in jail, he tries to hold himself accountable by confessing his mistakes and offering to help Bigger get legal support rather than leave him to face the judicial system alone. This act of solidarity, the first Bigger has ever receives from a white person, then helps Bigger overcome his own dehumanized vision of white people: “A particle of white rock had detached itself from that looming mountain of white hate and had rolled down the slope, stopping still at his feet. The word had become flesh. For the first time in his life a white man became a human being to him.”26

Tragically, any further acts of solidarity that could come from this mutual recognition are cut short when the jury delivers its verdict, sentencing Bigger to execution.

If there is one feeling that Wright wanted to leave the reader with at the end of Native Son, it was unease. The characters’ journeys out of alienation and toward unity are slow, tortured, and incomplete: the reader’s likely feelings of both revulsion and sympathy for Bigger are so tightly bound as to be inextricable. As he explained in his essay “How Bigger was Born,” Wright wanted the reader to face the events of the book “without the consolation of tears.”27 Not unlike German communist playwright Bertolt Brecht, who endeavored to awaken and engage audiences rather than render them emotionally mesmerized, Wright was concerned that aesthetic catharsis could demobilize readers. Instead of relieving them of their complicity by offering a purifying character to identify with or staging a desired outcome that triumphs over continuing injustice, Wright forces readers to consider their feelings of discomfort, and to imagine a different world which they must actively struggle to construct.

Wright’s intended readership was multiracial, especially those subjects who formed the coalition of the Popular Front. He wanted to wake up white progressives to the brutal reality of US racism, but he also wanted to help the Bigger Thomases of Harlem and the South Side of Chicago to throw off the psychic shackles of their oppression and become the revolutionary subjects he believed they could be. The emergence of Black liberation leaders like Malcolm X and Sekou Odinga, who came from similarly oppressive conditions of segregated urban poverty—even spending some of their early lives in street gangs just like Bigger—demonstrated as much. Native Son would continue to find this audience during the following generation of militancy, when it became required reading for new members of the Black Panther Party.

Wright’s Demonic Genius

Hungarian Marxist G. M. Tamás distinguishes between two prominent yet conflicting images of proletarians. On the one hand, there is an “angelic” image derived from Rousseau, which depicts a class whose morally superior culture makes it more fit to govern society than the bourgeoisie. On the other, there is a “demonic” image of the proletariat, derived from Marx, which is wretched and alienated. These are the proletarians who have nothing to lose but their chains.28 The former, he argues, must be unleashed against the enemy; the latter, abolished along with the enemy. For him, the former is more widely mobilized by socialists because it aligns closely with the moral indignation that draws most people to the socialist movement in the first place. Marx himself used the two images interchangeably in his writing.

Tamás’s analysis offers a productive lens through which to view the distinction between Baldwin and Wright drawn by critics. It also resonates with Margaret Walker’s claim that Wright had a “daemonic genius.”29 While Baldwin spends most of “Everybody’s Protest Novel” criticizing Harriet Beecher Stowe’s angelic representation in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he goes to great lengths in subsequent essays to substantiate his argument that the demonic image of Bigger is nothing but a product of Wright’s internalized white supremacy. In “Many Thousands Gone,” Baldwin argues that Bigger’s alienation from his own self and his own people is “the incarnation of a myth,” since Black life is defined by a “depth of involvement and unspoken recognition of shared experience.”30 And in “Alas, Poor Richard,” he faults Wright for playing into the “sexual myths” surrounding Black men. In Wright’s fiction, “there is a great space where sex ought to be; and what usually fills this space is violence,” Baldwin laments.31 In both instances, what Baldwin takes to be the writing’s shortcoming is in fact the phenomenon—the demonic conditions—that Wright deliberately chose to explore. Why is Bigger alienated from his friends, family, and community? And why does violence so often take the place of sex in a white-supremacist society?

James Baldwin, 1963. Courtesy: CSU Archives/Everett Collection.

This resistance to the demonic is not exclusive to Baldwin or socialist literature, as Tamás’s essay makes clear. Wright, to be sure, was intervening in both traditions with Native Son. In queer literature too, this disavowal holds sway—which Sarah Schulman describes as the “tyranny of the positive image.”32 It’s driven by any insurgent group’s desire to not give the oppressor anything that can be used against them. Flawed characters always offer the risk of perpetuating the myths, stigmas, or prejudices of the dominant culture, and many authors respond to this dilemma by creating positive representations. This is why, as Jackie Wang argues, social movements tend to mobilize around victims of injustice who they deem to meet “standards of authentic victimhood and moral purity”—an analysis that Mohammed El-Kurd has recently applied to the Palestinian struggle, refusing the compulsion to be “perfect victims.”33 In Wright’s first published collection of stories, Uncle Tom’s Children, he more or less adopted this literary strategy, bringing Eleanor Roosevelt to tears with stories about Black innocence beset by white terror and communists successfully uniting multiracial communities.

This affirmative and positive strategy, however, as Tamás argues, can hinder the development of revolutionary culture. It constrains the insurgent group—the worker’s movement of the twentieth century, in Tamás’s case—to accommodate itself to the existing system rather than negate and abolish that system altogether. In Native Son, Wright offers a different and dissident literary style. He is not interested in advocating for Bigger’s “humanity” because he doesn’t accept the inherently white-supremacist terms on which that debate takes place.

Here, the intersection of Wright’s fiction and his lifelong interest in psychoanalysis comes into focus. In A People’s History of Psychoanalysis, Daniel José Gaztambide emphasizes that several anti-racist and anti-colonial thinkers, including Wright, turned to psychoanalysis as a tool for liberation because they recognized a radical gesture at the heart of Freud’s project. In arguing that psychic life was determined by unconscious drives, Freud shattered the West’s self-conception of its humanity—one of rational self-mastery—and bridged the “illusory psychic gap” that the West had created between itself and the “irrational primitives” it saw in the colonies.34 From this perspective, the tyranny of the positive image is but another colonialist trap—an unreachable standard used to justify violence against colonized subjects as well as the working class in the colonial core.

Wright’s effort to establish a free psychiatry clinic in Harlem, to “turn Freud on his head,” was one way in which he put Freud’s insights into practice.35 The creation of the character Bigger Thomas was another. The third book of Native Son could be considered a portrayal of someone attempting to work through their unconscious determinants, albeit under the ruthless conditions of prison. To return to a previously quoted scene from the novel, when Bigger realizes that he has been acting “blindly” and resolves not to act again until he has “swung out from the base of his feelings,” he is, in his own way, expressing a desire that drives many people to seek psychotherapy. And when he becomes frustrated while trying to articulate his emotions, his state is not unlike being in the throes of the analytic process. If Marxism oriented Wright’s fiction toward the working class as a subject, psychoanalysis pushed him to see aspects of working-class life that broke with the angelic representations of the socialist movement.

In “How Bigger Was Born,” Wright explains that he had reservations while writing the novel but refused to abandon the project because doing so, he claimed, would make him no different than Bigger. “I must write this novel, not only for others to read, but to free myself of this sense of shame and fear.”36 Baldwin himself admitted the novel had the same effect on him, writing: “I found expressed, for the first time in my life, the sorrow, the rage, and the murderous bitterness which was eating up my life and the lives of those around me. His work was an immense liberation and revelation for me.”37 In the current moment, as social movements are beaten down to their nadir by an emboldened fascism, there are other kinds of sorrow, rage, and bitterness eating up those who have lived through the hopes and failures of the last cycle of struggle. What literature will liberate us from these feelings, help us to fight again, fight better?