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COPYRIGHT 2006 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
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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:
He had merely shifted his cares from without to within him, from that which he could deny to that which he could not. Imprisoned he was in a state of consciousness that was so infatuated by its own condition that it could not dominate itself; so swamped was he by himself with himself that he could not break forth from behind the bars of that self to claim himself. (149)
As Cross struggles to free himself from the anguished narcissism of imprisoned desire, he meets several men, all powerful, ruthless, and white. They include District Attorney Ely Houston--a fellow outsider, possessed of outlaw urges--and several Communist leaders. Cross is drawn to these men; he finds recognition, in the Hegelian sense, in alienation and the lust for power. But through his blackness--a status that places him both inside and outside the West--he surpasses them, moving beyond the bounds of modern ideology to become a man who murders not for an idea, but on a whim: an "individual mob" (564). As Cross's gestures of freedom--his Nietzschean deeds--begin to reconnect him to the world, he enters a new narrative in which his erotic and murderous desires become fatally marked by race. He enacts, for example, the role of black Oedipal son to a Communist couple. The Outsider ends, moreover, in the fatal entrapment of the black body by modern ideology, as Cross is gunned down for the murder of two Communist leaders. Through the portrayal of a young black man who has moved beyond the skepticism of the modern West, Wright examines the Western project of freedom, which remains incomplete because it is enmeshed in the lust for power and the ideology and symbols of race.
Recent critics have called for a reassessment of Wright's later work in view of his philosophical project. Notably, Paul Gilroy has argued that "the depth of his philosophical interests has been either overlooked or misconceived by the almost exclusively literary enquiries that have dominated analysis of his writing." (12) Although I concur with Gilroy's assessment, in my view The Outsider remains, significantly, a novel: Wright's philosophical concepts assume their full meaning as the thoughts and actions of characters inhabiting a world demarcated by race. The concept of an embodied speaking position accords with Wright's definition of "objectivity," described in the essay "Tradition and Industrialization":
The basic assumption behind all so-called objective attitudes is this: If others care to assume my mental stance and, through empathy, duplicate the atmosphere in which I speak, if they can imaginatively grasp the factors in my environment and a sense of the impulses motivating me, they ... will be capable of apprehending the same general aspects and tones of reality that comprise my world, that world that I share daily with all other men. (13)
Given this view, it is not surprising that Wright turned to the novel and its focalizing structures as a forum for his philosophical concerns. Like Native Son, The Outsider reveals the world through one consciousness alone; but in his second published novel, Wright was less successful in persuading others to apprehend the world as he does. For many critics, The Outsider remains a failed philosophical novel, a "mixture of melodrama and rhetorical exposition." (14) They have never accepted Wright's premise of the correspondence between European existentialism and the experience of black Americans. Others, while acknowledging this correspondence and Wright's response to existentialism in The Outsider, have given scant attention to the intersection between the novel's philosophical concerns and its analysis of modern ideologies, especially Communism and the racial ideologies informing the plot and relations between the characters. (15) My project in this essay is to examine Wright's philosophical concerns, as they are elaborated in the context of the racially structured world of The Outsider.
In The Outsider Wright interprets subjective experiences and desires, along with the opposing mechanisms of social control, through existentialist and Freudian theories of consciousness that are less consonant with realism than the sociology informing Native Son. The novel was therefore rejected by a number of contemporary American reviewers, who charged that Wright had abandoned realism for a European discourse incompatible with black American life. J. Saunders Redding argued that existentialism is "no philosophy to accommodate the reality of Negro life." (16) Max Eastman, claiming that facts inevitably exceed ideologies and philosophical systems, attacked The Outsider as lacking in verisimilitude and termed existentialism a "literary swamp," "a product of the purely literary mind, a mind interested in having ideational experiences and making art works or commodities out of them, rather than in ascertaining facts and using ideas for guidance among them." (17) These arguments charge that Wright's philosophical interests and his exile in France had removed him from the sources of his art--that is, the facts of black American life.
Yet in the early 1950s, Wright was hardly alone in the project of appropriating philosophical concepts for an analysis of racial ideologies. In the aftermath of the Nazi genocide, philosophers such as Sartre and Hannah Arendt were producing important analyses of anti-Semitism and mob violence as central expressions of European modernity. Wright had met both Sartre and Arendt and was familiar with the arguments of Anti-Semite and Jew and The Origins of Totalitarianism. (18) Moreover, his concerns in The Outsider and White Man, Listen! resemble some of Arendt's arguments and themes, perhaps too much so for the similarities to be merely coincidental. (19) The Outsider contributes to the postwar analysis of modernity by examining the existential meaning of blackness in the West. A major concern for existentialism is how consciousness experiences its relation to the world of others, which it inhabits as a negation. Wright viewed his own position--as both inside and outside the West--as an epitome of this experience of negation. Through an interest in forms of consciousness that arise within hostile, negating conditions of oppression, he appropriated modern discourses of consciousness, especially existentialism and Freudian theory, for his claim that the experience and ideology of blackness in the West are integral to modernity. In The Outsider, Wright has embedded his existentialist narrative in a popular genre plot of murder, flight, and fraudulent identity; this plot becomes a site for recasting purportedly universal philosophical and psychological theories of consciousness within a world structured by race and centered on criminal acts and police investigations and profiles. By recasting European theories of consciousness within an American scene of racial fact, Wright establishes a correspondence between their universalist paradigms and the racially structured world of modernity.
Wright had been interested in modern consciousness since at least the late 1930s, when he still wrote from within the ranks of the Communist Party. Although Native Son has been commonly understood as a work of sociological realism, Wright's famous novel probes deeply into the mind of Bigger Thomas. Wright never fully adopted literary realism and, from the beginning, used the novel to explore forms of modern black consciousness. Once in France, he did not progress--or digress, as Eastman argued--from facts to ideational experiences. Rather, with The Outsider we move from Bigger Thomas--inarticulate, ensnared in the physical world, objectified by the white gaze--to Cross Damon, a man whose...
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