Black Lives Proposal

   Title:                  Richard Wright: An Unending Hunger for Life

Author:                                Jerry W. Ward, Jr., Ph.D.

                                Independent Scholar

                                1928 Gentilly Blvd.

                                New Orleans, LA 70119-2002

Series:                  Black Lives

Rationale:          

 However suspect  a concept "race" is, "race"  saturates our worldview and continues to inform our discussions of  imperial designs , colonial enterprises, and patterns of world order.  Revisionist scholarship in American history, cultural practices, and politics urges us to be alert regarding how dependent ideas of  continuity and change are on a vexed classification. "Race" was stamped into the founding documents of the American democratic experiment; it supported exclusionary interpretations of the United States Constitution, gave credibility to slavery and Jim Crow,  and provided grounds for continuing efforts to obtain civil and human rights, justice, and a modicum of equity. Whether they confronted racial issues or pretended such issues had a minimal role in human histories,  American citizens were, and still are, influenced  by why race matters in the reading of literature.  In the Age of Trump, new iterations of "race" (often disguised in the vague rhetoric  of "making great again") ordain divisiveness among citizens, a drift from democracy into fascism, and cultivation of reprehensible habits of the heart.  Reading and interpretation are not immune to these trends.

 In this climate of discontent , readings of twentieth -century literature and other arts which exploit the subjectivity of common sense  assume new significance.  We have no guarantee that reading qua reading yields positive, progressive results. Indeed,  there is the risk that common sense readings may give a certain credibility to bad faith. They can, on the other hand,  provide grounds  for trenchant critiques of the reductive and disabling  black/white binary which is pervasive in practices of everyday American life. They can sponsor questions that sandpaper the grains of tradition and the status quo. Examining literature that emerges from  African American lives is instructive.

Such works as Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) , Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark (1992), and Charles W. Mills' The Racial Contract (1997) intensify awareness of the role of "race" in American  literary and cultural criticism and the necessity of challenging the limits the  prism of race can authorize  in contemporary political thought.  Seemingly endless commentary  on "race" in the United States in all forms of media justifies new inquiries about the commerce between American writers and their  readers  at home and abroad.  If we assume, for example,  that  Richard Wright was a quintessential  American male,  examining  the legacy of his writings promotes a less than predictable conversation.

 Preoccupation with race  made Wright as representative an American literary and cultural figure as Nathaniel Hawthorne,  Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville,  W.E. B. DuBois, William Faulkner or Langston Hughes. Thus, in the territory of masculinity and sexist presuppositions, these men represented diverse, conflicting  ways of viewing  " problematic humanity, "  of thinking  about the troubling relationship of politics and art, of responding to humankind's recurring struggles  with moral and ethical problems.   Among American writers, Wright possessed extraordinary curiosity and breadth of vision about what ordinary people or nonacademic readers  needed to know.   It might be argued that he tried to make major contributions of American  cultural literacy.

When Wright spoke of "complex simplicity" in "Blueprint for Negro Writing" (1937),  he expressed insight regarding chaos, entanglement, and uncertainty, topics examined by such non-literary thinkers as Werner Heisenberg, James Gleick, Amir D. Aczel, and Edward N. Lorenz  .  Although we may think  these topics belong to the domain of  the natural sciences, Wright grasped their centrality in the human sciences better than many of his contemporaries.  Just as Virgil was Dante's guide through an imagined hell, Wright's works guide us through the ordinary  confusions of being human. Without apology, we can say "Wright, we need you at this hour. We need you to help us ask the right questions for the twenty-first century."

This book  investigates  Wright's robust creativity and challenging ideas from various disciplinary angles and explores certain  discrepant  academic and nonacademic uses of his legacy. One warrant for this engagement can be discovered  by juxtaposing  the 1945 ending of Wright's autobiography with the original typescript.

The compromise Wright negotiated with the Book of the Month Club in order to publish Black Boy involved ending the book with his departure from Memphis , possessing

"a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that the personalities of other should not be violated, that men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and that if men were lucky in their living on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for their having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars."

When the unused portion of the typescript was printed as American Hunger (1977), readers discovered that urban life in Chicago  and membership in the Communist Party cemented Wright's resolve "to build a bridge of words between [himself] and that world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that it seemed unreal."  His view of life was not hazy; it was deliberate, pointed.  It convinced him to be the engaged writer. "I would hurl words into this darkness," Wright concluded, "and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human."

The literary politics of 1945 had forced Wright to wear a mask, to pretend to be a black boy rather than a black man determined to write visions of what life could be. Does this oddity not continue in our contemporary uses of literature by African Americans?   It can be argued that American cultural politics created a strategic  abyss between what a few scholars knew about Wright's intentions and what a general readership would come to know when the full autobiography was published in 1991. Thus, one purpose of my book  Richard Wright:  An Unending Hunger for Life is to narrow the gap between general and specialized knowledge of Wright's legacy and to examine in detail why that legacy exposes certain dimensions of making or refusing to make choices about social action in the United States and elsewhere.  It is a book about reading.

Using Kenneth Burke's premise that literature is equipment for living and the ancient Greek meaning of aesthetic , it can be argued Wright created powerful aesthetic tools and/or blueprints for action based on readings.  We need to know more about them . To be sure, in the post-Cold War, terror-laden world order  of 2018, our ideological choices are less transparent than they might have been during the fifty-two years of Wright's life.  His legacy, which so often depicted complexity in accessible forms,  helps us to penetrate chaos and entanglements..  A book on Richard Wright that incorporates "biography, political and social commentary, and polemic" can be  a counterpoint to Ta-Nehisi Coates'  appropriation of Wright in making  Between the World and Me (2015) a successful  apology for social paralysis, or a facsimile thereof.  Skeptical reading of such apologia suggests why Wright's legacy provides better tools  for  rejecting defensive postures, for creating new terms of engagement, and  for continuing a quest for pragmatic  shaping of our  destinies. 

Table of Contents

Richard Wright: An Unending Hunger for Life will contain an introduction,  five chapters , and  a polemical epilogue. It is divided into three parts to reflect how key moments in Wright's growth as a thinker and writer occurred in the experiential geographies of the South and  the North (1908-1947) and during his  European exile (1947-1960).  The trajectory of his life history was determined by the imperatives endured  in differing degrees by all  African Americans, but the instructive import of that trajectory was shaped by his unique intelligence and choices.  That is the basic argument of the introduction.  The chapters develop this argument by discussing the forms and themes  of Wright's works as items of situated necessity.  The epilogue addresses how the totality of his published and unpublished works may  constitute blueprints for questions which encourage meaningful social actions.

Introduction

Part I: The Southern Mindscape/The Northern Catalyst

Chapter 1:  Mississippi: Discoveries and Defiance, 1908-1927

Chapter 2: Memphis, Chicago , and New York : Epiphanies  and Evolving Historical Consciousness, 1928-1940

Part II: The Challenges of Being Famous

Chapter 3: The  Obligations of Fame and the Choice of Exile, 1941-1947

Part III: Travels  in International Contact/Combat Zones

Chapter 4: Messages of Modernity, 1948-1953

Chapter 5:  Africa, Europe, Asia and Poetry , 1954-1960

Epilogue

Chapter Descriptions

Introduction

One of the intentions of my book is to focus on nonacademic  readings of Wright's works,  readings that occasion questions that may be hindered by theory, traditional study of his works in universities, or discussions which are little informed by the pedagogy of the oppressed.  These readings transgress the artificial boundaries of disciplines .  They emerge from a reader's individual life experiences.  The most profitable  questions establish a kind of shared authority between Richard Wright and the reader.  Is it possible to use will power to resist nihilism and dehumanization?  Are the themes in Wright's works ones that enhance social consciousness and a sense of responsibility; are they intimately connected to one's possession or lack of possession of a sense of ethnic histories as well as a sense of ever shifting prospects in what one assumes to be an American social contract?  Whose interests are served by ideologies?  What commitment is required to master skills that allow one to play what Wright called "a meaningful…role in the affairs of men"?   The answers that nonacademic readers may agree have some validity are most often the starting point of more questions governed by time, location, and multiple activities in the public sphere.       

Chapter 1:  Mississippi: Discoveries and Defiance, 1908-1927

This chapter focuses on Wright's childhood and youth from 1908 to 1927, on his discovery of visual wonders, folk wisdom, and the ethics of living Jim Crow.  Hunger physical and intellectual became  a primal metaphor for his creative expressions.  Attention will be given to his identification of hunger  with the desire to know what was forbidden and to explore the gothic, to  his maternal relatives'  alarm regarding his defiant traits, and to his suspicion regarding the debilitating effects of religious beliefs. Mississippi was the crucible wherein characteristics that define the qualities of his mind were born, particularly his penchant to be iconoclastic.  The texts of the unpublished essay "Memories of My Grandmother"  and the well-know "Ethics of Living Jim Crow" serve as the hub for analysis, as  primary sources for pondering how Wright was at once a typical and atypical native son of the South. He was the boy who would become the man who valued independence and  self-reliance to a much greater degree than complacent identity as an African American.  Ultimately, this chapter explores   his struggles to avoid becoming a black stereotype, a commonplace statistic.

Chapter 2: Memphis, Chicago , and New York : Epiphanies and Evolving Historical  Consciousness, 1928-1940 

 This chapter investigates the multiple forms of reading required to make sense of Richard Wright's emergence as an American writer who forged paradigms for continuing inquiry about what it means to be an African American.  Wright's 1927 discovery  in Memphis of H. L. Mencken and reading of Mencken's works  A Book of Prefaces and  Prejudices constitute an epiphany that enlightened him

about the power of words as weapons.  After his migration to Chicago, Wright worked assiduously to shape his historical consciousness of life in America.  I shall review  his proletarian poetry in leftist magazines , his being the principle author of "Blueprint for Negro Writing" (1937), and his penchant for depicting the social and psychological costs of daily life in Uncle Tom's Children (1938).  The core of this chapter, however, is a critique of the radical ethnography ---derived from his work with the WPA---which informed his writing of his first novel Lawd Today! (1934-35).  Were this novel accorded the same extensive criticism as Native Son, we would obtain a judicious understanding of Wright's intellectual prowess and the continuing significance of his writing in exposing the truth of human experiences. To cast a strong light on this possibility, I shall read Lawd Today! in tandem with Wright's 1955 lecture "The Artist and His Problems" as it is transcribed in Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference (2016) and contrast it with Native Son (1940).  We profit greatly from seeking to understand Wright's forging of a radical consciousness that unites Marxist analysis with the imperatives of African American cultural and political  nationalisms.

Chapter 3: The  Obligations of Fame and the Choice of Exile, 1941-1947

The remarkable success of Native Son (1940) made Wright famous, heightened his status as a social critic, and motivated his public break with Communism by way of the Atlantic Monthly article "I Tried to be a Communist" (1944). It inspired him to collaborate with Paul Green in writing the stage version of the novel which was produced by the equally famous Orson Welles, and  to write such remarkable works as 12 Million Black Voices ( 1941 ), the stories  "The Man Who Lived Underground" and "The Man Who Killed a Shadow,  and his autobiography Black Boy (1945). He deepened his earlier interest in the psychological causes of violence, juvenile delinquency,  and  criminality ; he evidenced his commitment to social justice in helping Frederick Wertham to organize the LaFargue Clinic in Harlem. Fame and a larger readership, however, did not protect Wright and his family from racism. After his 1946 experiences in Paris, he concluded that exile in Europe promised freedom and opportunity to  explore the human condition and world affairs  from international perspectives.  This chapter deals with the reception of Wright's work by the American public and special interest groups between 1941 and 1947.

Chapter 4: Messages of Modernity, 1948-1953

This chapter explores the discrepancy between the aesthetic and philosophical abstractions that belong to the category of modernism and the concrete details of African American life Wright depicted in The Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1954), The Long Dream (1958), and Eight Men (1961).  Those who criticized Wright for being "out of touch" with the gradual gains effected by civil rights advocacy in the United States failed to consider how thoroughly in touch he was with the least publicly discussed aspects of being Negro or "black" in America, namely the convoluted range of psychological expressions. The DuBoisian idea of "double consciousness" is an inadequate explanation of that range; Wright's later fictions provoke substantive  questions about it . Both academic and non-academic readings of his thematic emphases in these works bring to the foreground why  Wright's more than average intelligence and adamant resentment of enslaving ideologies  could indeed create a Cross Damon, a character who articulates his autobiographical desires through ethical criminality; why the absence (with one exception)  of black characters  in Savage Holiday provides clues about African American rejection of the myth of white superiority;  why in a segregated society the outcomes of upward mobility were so often matters of dishonesty and social tragedy, as is illuminated in the father and son drama of The Long Dream; why deep ironies abound in such stories as "The Man Who Lived Underground," "Man, God Ain't Like That," and "Big Black Good Man."  In addition, this chapter proposes that Wright's last novel A Father's Law constitutes an unfinished recuperation of his first novel Lawd Today! to specify both Wright's maturity as a fiction writer and the maturation of the black male subject from the 1930s to the 1950s. I contend that in his later fictions, Wright challenged readers to constantly resist the concept of "social death" as an adequate or ultimate  modernist explanation of ethnic  being in the world. . It is also necessary in this chapter to give brief attention to the irony of how the film Native Son (1951) distorts the message of the novel,  thereby forecasting more cynical distortions in Ketti  Frings' stage adaption of The Long Dream ( 1960) and the 1996 HBO version of "Long Black Song" as the castration of Wright's intentions  in his 1938 story regarding marriage, infidelity, sexuality, and racism. Such abuse of Wright's legacy exposes the downside of late modernism.

Chapter 5: Africa, Europe, Asia and Poetry, 1954-1960

In the last six years of his life, Wright devoted considerable energy to physical  travel in order to accomplish cultural detective work and to the  intellectual exploring needed   to produce approximately 4,000 haiku, 817 of which were published in Haiku: This Other World (1998).  Reading is never theory-free, but it is productive to put literary, political, and cultural theorizing aside as we try to hear, evaluate, and use what Wright was saying about the "actual" as opposed to the "imagined" in Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), Pagan Spain (1957) and White Man, Listen! (1957). In this chapter, I argue that these books raise salient questions about conditions during the Cold War period and provoke us to admit how uncertain are the perspectives we can have on democracy, fascism, international "liberation" struggles, reemerging neo-colonial enterprises (especially on the African continent), power contests among Asian nations, and evolving forms of terrorism.

 Wright's later non-fiction makes us  uncomfortable and awakens us to the dreadful possibility that the wretchedness of the earth is beyond resolution and redemption.  Wright articulated in the non-fiction works the pent-up desires of oppressed peoples everywhere to be free of constrictive management.  He did so with gusto and panache, and succeeded in being labeled "dangerous" by American, British, and French intelligence agencies.   Wright's immersion in writing haiku at the end of his life, as Jianqing  Zheng suggests in his introduction for The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku (2011), enables us to see how the co-existence of harmony and disharmony  between nature and human nature informs both the totality of his writing and our own unending hunger for life.

Epilogue

In addition to summarizing the main points of the book, the epilogue will be a provocative   "confession' of my uncanny affinity with Richard Wright and my belief that engaging Wright's legacy is the proper way to avoid enslavement to ignorance and the bliss of being stupid.

Similar Books and Anticipated Audiences

Since the publication of Constance Webb's pioneering Richard Wright: A Biography (1968), each of his biographers has stressed some aspect of his life that needs to be coordinated with other dimensions.  John A. Williams focused on Wright as a representative figure in The Most Native of Sons: A Biography of Richard Wright (1970); Michel Fabre's The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (1973) brought the notion of incompleteness to the foreground, while Margaret Walker mined the psychology of creativity in Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1988); Addison Gayle focused on Wright as an "object" of surveillance in Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son (1990), and Hazel Rowley's Richard Wright: The Life and Times (2001) drew attention to his international  importance as an enigmatic historic figure; Jennifer Jensen Wallach's Richard Wright: From Black Boy to World Citizen (2010) emphasized his complex humanity and creative achievements.  Richard Wright:  An Unending Hunger for Life weaves these biographical threads in a chronological narrative about Wright's ideas as wake-up calls for contemporary speculation and critical thinking in the diverse contexts of world affairs.

The book will be much indebted to the timeline provided in Richard Wright: A Documented Chronology, 1908-1960 (2014) by Toru Kiuchi and Yoshinobu  Hakutani, and it will  re-examine the applicability of   topics emphasized in specialized  studies published since the 2008 Wright Centennial ----The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku (2011), edited by  Jianqing Zheng,   Philosophical Meditations on Richard Wright (2012), edited by James B. Haile, Mary Helen Washington's The Other Blacklist (2014),  Yoshinobu Hakutani's Richard Wright and Haiku (2014),  William J. Maxwell's F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (2015),  Richard Wright: Writing America at Home and from Abroad (2016), edited by Virginia Whatley Smith, Earle V. Bryant's Byline, Richard Wright (2015), Indonesian Notebook:  A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference (2016), edited by Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher and Milton A. Cohen's forthcoming The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s (2018).

It can be taken as a given that the book will appeal to teachers and students of American and  African American literatures in the United States and to a smaller group of European and Asian scholars, particularly Chinese scholars and students familiar with my earlier adventures  in cultural criticism, The China Lectures (2014).  It is likely to attract the attention of historians and other social scientists who are revising narratives regarding the African Diaspora, globalization and transnationalism,  proletarian and exile literature, civil rights and the resurgence of white supremacy and fascism , Afro-pessimism,  social justice movements.  The ideal audience, however, will be general readers who are curious about how Wright's moral compass for action was forged from his blending of Marxist analysis, Pan-African ideals, and politically-oriented aesthetics and humanism.

Word Count

Richard Wright:  An Unending Hunger for Life will be limited to the count of 80,000 words requested by the Black Lives series.