The Outsider by Richard Wright

Since this is Black history month, I’m going to depart from my usual practice of reviewing contemporary fiction and, instead, talk about an often misunderstood novel by a truly great American black author, Richard Wright.

Most readers know of Wright because of his early works, Native Son and Uncle Tom’s Children. Some have also read the first part of his autobiography, Black Boy (the second half of which was intentionally suppressed because of Wright’s affiliation with the Communist Party, and only much later published under the title American Hunger). But for many and rather complex reasons, the novel that most explicitly states Wright’s philosophical views, as well as his understanding of and fascination with psychoanalysis, has been largely ignored. He called the novel The Outsider, and it is indeed an incredible exploration of a bright and deeply troubled man who is on the outside in almost all ways. He is outside the powerful white culture simply because he is black, and no one understands better than Wright the economic and social oppression of American Blacks. But he is also outside the black community that he lives in, because he is an atheist, and harshly critical of religion as simply a flight into illusion and myth in the face of this oppression. And finally, he is a morbidly self-reflective man with an acute sense of his own existential isolation and who understands always the distorting lenses through which others, both white and black, view him.

This novel was published in 1953, when McCarthyism was at a fever pitch in this country. No doubt anti-communist sentiment had much to do with the initial response to the book, along with a fear of even appearing to be interested in anything tainted with communism. But the novel was also met with suspicion on the Left, at least partly because Wright had severed his ties with the Communist Party and was thereafter overtly critical of Soviet style communism. Like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French Marxist who felt impelled to criticize the lack of democratic process in the Soviet controlled CP, and eventually to expose the Siberian work camps, Wright insisted that it was his very understanding of Marxism that led him to reject the Soviet Union and the control it exerted over the CP. Jean Paul Sartre, too, although not wanting to alienate French workers, and thus always portraying himself as a Fellow Traveler with the CP, used plays as a mechanism for criticizing the authoritarian structure of the Party. So, both left and right were uneasy with this dark and violent novel, and academicians in this country (including those in philosophy departments) were so resistant to European existentialism (especially French existentialism), that by and large they simply ignored it—literally rejecting it out of hand, that is, without bothering to read it.  Wright, on the other hand, had both read and comprehended the major themes in existentialism, understood it on an emotional as well as intellectual level. Iris Murdoch once said that Marx and Freud changed the course of intellectual history forever, and I would certainly argue this to be the case in Wright’s development as an intellectual.

Damon Cross, the lead character in The Outsider, is a very bright and very dangerous man. He is also the spokesman for Wright, and in long, intricate passages lays out both a thorough understanding of the existential condition and a total rejection of theological consolations. The story, itself, is a long and complicated one, and I have no intention of giving away the twists and turns of the plot. I will say however that Damon Cross, not by divine intervention, but by chance intervention, is given the opportunity to begin anew, in Sartre’s words, to become the author of his own existence, to be really and truly and frighteningly free.

Damon is trapped in a low paying civil service job; trapped by a deeply religious and disappointed mother whom he both loves and resents; trapped by an early marriage to a woman with whom he feels no commonality, but with whom he has three children; trapped by a sexual relationship with a very young woman whom he comes to learn is not even of age, but pregnant and insisting that Damon get a divorce. Alienated from his co-workers and lost in a whirl of alcohol and daily thoughts of suicide, chance delivers him via a subway accident that leaves many dead, one of whom Cross manages to switch identities with. He is abruptly free; no past, no identity. His insurance money will go to his wife, so he is more valuable to her dead than alive. The girlfriend, Dot, will now have to do the sensible thing and get an abortion that she has so far refused. Even, he thinks, less a disappointment to his poor mother dead than he would be alive.

Now a stranger in this very strange land, Damon Cross flees from Chicago to New York and becomes Lionel Lane, black intellectual working for the Communist Party.

As the train wheels clicked through the winter night, 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.

Cross, like Wright, is an intensely proud man who cannot be made to feel or act inferior because of his blackness, nor to blame race for his own condition. But he sees how racism affects others, and he bridles at the injustices he witnesses much more than at anything that has happened to him. He sees how powerful white men in the CP use black people for their own ends, how they distort and misuse the very Marxist principles that he admires simply in order to further an agenda that in the end supports an authoritarian power-structure, denies the importance of the individual, and thwarts democratic process at every turn.

In describing a character in the book, Wright could well have been describing himself:

…he had the kind of consciousness that could grasp the mercurial emotions of men whom society had never tamed or disciplined, men whose will had never been broken, men who were wild but sensitive, savage but civilized, intellectual but somehow intrinsically poetic in their inmost hearts.

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Richard Wright

Since this is Black History month, I want to talk to you this morning about a Black writer. There are so many to choose from, both contemporary and from the past. In talking to a fellow-Ole Mole contributor, Jan Haaken, I was reminded again about how few people, even people in the Left, know much about Richard Wright. In my opinion, Wright is one of the most important writers of all time. Still, though many leftists know enough about him to associate him with the Harlem Renaissance artists, few know that he was born and raised in the deep south, and only ‘escaped’ to Chicago and thence to Harlem when he was in his late teens. Wright lived both in very small, rural towns and in some larger southern cities, but even in the city, he could not, as a Black person, own a library card! Over the course of many months, while working in an optical grinding company, he came to trust one white man enough to ask if he could borrow his library card. This man had sent him, on occasion, to pick up books for him, giving Wright a note with the names of the books he wanted. By pretending total ignorance, adopting the shuffle that he so hated and had so much trouble adopting (though his smarter ‘city-wise’ friends, who had as much contempt for the white people as he, tried to teach him how to turn the shuffle against the white man, how to use it for gain)—at any rate, by bowing and shuffling and pretending not even to be able to read, Wright began checking books out of the library in a self-education program that is almost unbelievable. Without any formal training, he read not only the great novelists, but also Marx and Freud and Hegel and Heidegger. And he didn’t just read them. One cannot read his truly great works without seeing how thoroughly he understand European philosophy and political theory.

I think the problems of promoting a good understanding of Wright and his work are compounded by the fact that his 1940 novel, Native Son, was made into a decent but not good motion picture that scared people, but did not (as Wright so carefully does) point out the rationality of the fright and the social steps required to meet the very real problems. Indeed, even as a novel, unless one really understands Wright and what he is about, one could easily be depressed and frightened without knowing what we might call the lesson of the novel. An additional and very much avoidable problem (though the failure to avoid it is a symptom of the economic oppression Wright tries to expose) is that only the first half of Wright’s autobiographical novel was published in the late thirties and early forties. Wright gave the entire manuscript to his publishers under the title Hunger in America. And he was speaking of a hunger both physical and (if you will) spiritual. While the first half, published under the less inflammatory title, Black Boy, is a powerful and wonderfully drawn piece, it ends just as Wright is about to move to the big cities of the East, and where he was immediately and permanently politicized. The second half (not published at all until 1977—except for a few segments published separately in the forties), given the title American Hunger, deals with Wright’s discovery of other like-minded artists in the John Reed Club and his eventual involvement with the American Communist Party. This second section was far too political for the comfort of the publishers, and with lies and evasions, the first half was published and promises made about the second half. (Only in the last couple of years has there finally come out a recombining of the two halfs into one.)

So, were I to recommend what of Wright’s to read and the order in which to read it, I would suggest beginning with the two halves of the autobiography, and then turning not to the Bigger Thomas stories or Native Son, but to his highly autobiographical novel The Outsider. Perhaps even better than American Hunger, The Outsider describes the later parts of Wright’s life in Chicago and New York City, and it also displays his profound understanding of Marxism, the racism and blatant use made of Black struggles by the American Communist Party, and his (to me) almost incredible grasp of European existentialism and what is usually called phenomenology. Wright understands very well the Marxian notion of alienation, one based on the worker’s alienation both from the product of his/her labor and other workers with whom s/he toils under the capitalist mode of production, but Wright also understands and refuses to ignore or explain away other more primordial causes and forms of alienation.

Without saying too much of the novel here, the lead character is, like Wright once was, a Black postal worker, alienated from white people and the white corporate structure for sure, but also alienated from the black community in which he lives. His constant reading of philosophy and political theory makes him appear odd to his fellow workers and even to his own family. And, of course, he is not merely reading these works; he is living them—he is in the deepest and best sense an intellectual who is trying to understand and to bring out of concealment the sociopolitical world he finds himself in. This strange man, an outsider in almost all ways, is in the grip of an angst that he cannot even describe to those around him. Although it is Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus who are most famous for their descriptions of a kind of fundamental existential predicament, a struggle to find and/or create meaning in the midst of the material realities one finds oneself in, Wright’s description is so much more real, so much less the rather excessive complaints of intellectuals who, in many ways, are already protected from some of the harshest aspects of their world. What I want to say is that Wright’s is a mature, adult account of political and existential struggle. Simone de Beauvoir has pointed out so lucidly how naive she and Sartre (and Camus) were when Sartre became famous for Nausea and the early plays. She says that, at the time, they thought everyone was as free as they were, so that once they transcended their kind of existential predicament, they could become authentic. To her credit, she says later that they should have talked more of bread and less of existential freedom. It took Sartre another ten or twenty years to even begin to understand how to reconcile his existential philosophy and his dawning allegiance to Marxism (as well as a deep suspicion of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party); the fusion of these things is apparent in Wright as early as Black Boy , and articulated clearly in The Outsider.

I think The Outsider has been less widely read and commented on precisely because it is a deep and difficult book, but it is also well worth the effort. Even the storyline is an intriguing one: this character, so misunderstood by all those around him and feeling so much circumscribed by their expectations, suddenly (and quite literally) has the chance to escape his identity, his life, and take up a new one. I leave it to you as a reader to decide how well he does with his second chance.

Finally, I would commend to you too an essay entitled “White Man Listen.” Wright warns us all just what the consequences of brutal economic oppression will do over the course of time, just what it will produce. Again, I think reading this essay before one reads Native Son and the Bigger Thomas stories will give important keys to the author’s intentions in this, his best known, novel. As well and as clearly as Franz Fanon, Wright recognizes what happens when oppressed people, in this case Black people, take on the values of the oppressor. Let me close by reading just a short passage from an early section in American Hunger.