The vanguard of modernity: Richard Wright's The Outsider.(Critical essay)

(1)

When Richard Wright became nationally known through the publication of Native Son in 1940, he had already assumed a "central place in the radical political culture of the international communist movement." (1) Moreover Native Son and Black Boy influenced the existentialist philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, who shared Wright's emphasis on alienated consciousness. (2) During the 1940s Wright's public affiliations continued to move away from the American scene that had formed the context for his early writing. He resigned from the Communist Party in 1944, citing its control of his political and aesthetic decisions; he formed connections with leaders of the Pan-African movement, including C. L. R. James and George Padmore; (3) and in 1946, he moved his family from New York to Paris to escape American racism and intrusion by the FBI. (4) From his exile in France, Wright produced an ambitious analysis of the modern West in a series of works published between 1953 and 1958: The Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1954), Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), Pagan Spain (1957), White Man, Listen! (1957), and The Long Dream (1958). Together they offer a wide-ranging analysis of Europe's colonial adventure and its impact on European and non-European peoples alike, integrating philosophical and psychological factors with political, economic, and cultural ones. The Outsider, with its existentialist concerns, rejection of realism, and attacks on Communist Party leaders and methods, marks Wright's transition toward a postwar stance of internationalism, nonalignment, and anticolonial analysis of the modern West.

Wright described his exile as "more than a geographical change. It was a break with my former attitudes as a Negro and a Communist.... I was trying to grapple with the big problem--the problem and meaning of Western civilization as a whole and the relation of Negroes and other minority groups to it." (5) The Outsider examines the philosophical and psychological forms of alienation shaping the quintessentially modern agent, the mob. During the early cold war years, the concept of "the mob" suggested mass movements of the 1930s: the Nazi and Communist movements, and southern lynch mobs. Michel Fabre has therefore argued that Wright's ideological concerns in The Outsider were "a means of obliterating the past, not of announcing the future." (6) But the mob had not disappeared with the defeat of Nazism, and as colonialism and industrialization deepened their assault on traditional ways of life, the danger posed by totalitarian movements would continue to grow.

As I argue, Wright's black outsider, Cross Damon, embodies the forces of alienation that were created by the modern West and threatened to destroy it, along with what Wright termed the "islands of the rational." (7) Cross defies both the moral institutions and revolutionary movements of the West, passing beyond all ethical laws to become a vanguard of modern consciousness. He is the product of a random process of evolution, the representative, cosmopolitan figure of an indeterminate future. Amid the mounting, but frustrated, postwar demands for a more democratic and inclusive modernity, Cross's thorough skepticism and endless desire test the principle, articulated by the revolutionaries of 1789, that "all is permitted." (8) Nietzsche argued, in a philosophical elaboration of this political principle, that the rebels of nineteenth-century Europe were not truly free, since they continued to believe in rational truth. (9) And he contrasted them with an eleventh-century Islamic sect, the Assassins, for whom "nothing is true, everything is permitted." (10) Similarly, Wright strips Cross's revolt of the mask of ideology; it is the adventure of a rational and disillusioned outsider who grasps a desperate freedom. Wright's concern with the situation of black intellectuals in the West, and his increasing engagement with existentialism and psychoanalysis, led him to the central problem of The Outsider--a black man's attempted escape from stable, essentialist forms of identity, including race. Fleeing his former life, Cross enters new spaces--a passenger train, the Communist Party--that permit the blurring and destabilizing of identities. As he forges a new self founded on desire and masculine empowerment, he encounters recognition, in the Hegelian sense, in characters who are white. However, the institutional meanings of race remain, imposing prohibitions and paranoia on Cross's self-consciousness. As I argue, The Outsider exemplifies the intersection between the postwar writing of identity and a major philosophical premise of that era--that consciousness is necessarily embodied. Cross cannot escape the body: he runs aground on the lure of power--the temptation to control man through deep sensual needs--and on the modern symbols of race, which have supplanted discarded religious beliefs. His postmodern adventure ends in entrapment and death.

As the novel opens, Cross's life as a Chicago postal worker and student of philosophy has hit bottom. He is estranged from his wife, mired in debt, and threatened by his girlfriend with charges of statutory rape. He moreover struggles with existential dread, which has led him to the study of Nietzsche and other modern philosophers. Suddenly one evening, Cross is trapped in a subway wreck. He escapes from the darkened and overturned car, leaving behind his coat and identification papers, which are later matched with the body of a dead man. Offered a chance to shed the past and invent a new identity, Cross withdraws from the world he has known. He begins by disappearing into a hotel. When he meets a friend in a hallway of the hotel, he murders the man on impulse to ward off discovery. Cross, who is now severed from the past, flees to New York on an adventure of self-fashioning and desire. At first, it is an internal journey shrouded in uncertainty and dread:

 
  The outside world had fallen away from him now and he was alone at the 
  center of the world of the laws of his own feelings .... he knew where 
  his sense of dread came from; it was from within himself, within the 
  vast and mysterious world that was his and his alone, and yet not 
  really known to him, a world that was his own and yet unknown. And it 
  was into this strange but familiar world that he was now 
  plunging. (11) 

Cross has withdrawn into an internal world, where he is submerged in a new form of dread: