THE LONG DREAM

READING THE LONG DREAM: Exploration #1

Six decades after its publication, Richard Wright's novel The Long Dream (1958) has not lost its power to impart lessons about the commerce of the American Dream.  The narrative is a frozen speech act of interconnected themes  --   the ethics of living Jim Crow; the ambiguous , often cruel, and destructive relationships between fathers and sons; the function of race in the crucible of capitalism; sexism and objectification of women;  the defensive and deceptive postures of the African American middle class in the Cold War South;  homophobia and androgyny;  the oppressive tactics  in the practice of "whiteness."  Reading the narrative thaws the ice of American propaganda . It  allows the story to go fishing in a reader's  consciousness.

Wright's artistry, his aesthetic, is uncanny in its relevance for our struggles to make sense of the intersectional nature of the actual. Even before  the emergence of critical race theory, a few readers, picking up clues from Albert Murray's The Omni-Americans (1970), had become a bit cautious and contra-theoretical  in reading and interpreting  literature.  If the assent of theory created distance between ourselves and texts, the skepticism  which trendy theory deserves  made old-fashioned close-reading desirable along with becoming more intimate with history.  The role of the middle-woman or middle-man in the business of literature is not exactly defunct.  It is simply less important than one's direct experience of a writer's text.

 In the case of African American literature, imaginative writing is neither married to nor divorced  from the permutations of humanity. Wright recognized that possibility far better than many of his peers.  And he doesn't mask the irony implicit in the phenomenology of reading (itself theoretical in its philosophical claims) that feeds desire to be more aware that representations  (fictions) trigger entanglements at many levels.  Richard Wright's body of fiction and non-fiction sufficiently integrated the humanities and the social sciences to be our touchstone. And it may be argued that The Long Dream is a better model of integration than Savage Holiday, The Outsider, or A Father's Law, because it's a capital example of how the American Dream should be  prepared for burial.

 Reading The Long Dream  invites our being very attentive to Wright's  use of language, especially his delight in creating images,  and to how images play a key role as we follow Wright's plotting of transactions among characters and  his creation of privileged transactions between the  focusing narrator and ourselves . The myth of transcending (i.e., getting away from brutal facts) doesn't seem to obtain in our reading of the novel, no matter how much we yearn for what a dream long or short refuses to deliver. Wright punches our inner eyes so we can see better.

READING THE LONG DREAM: Exploration #2

It is noteworthy that Keneth Kinnamon , one of Wright's most astute critics, judged the final sentence of the novel to be "badly overwritten poetic prose" ("Foreword," xii, Northeaster University Press edition). One might argue, of course, that self-conscious, occasionally stilted prose that threatens to become poetry, abounds in this novel.  Many readers might be "turned off" by that fact.  If we give passionate attention to the final sentence, we may be "turned on" by what we discover.  The overwriting has a purpose, a meta-interpretive function.  It is a correlative for the dissatisfaction very critical readers have as they weigh the propaganda constituted by the American Dream, which Wright relentlessly critiqued in the novel.

The final paragraph of The Long Dream, which stirs up memory of a certain kind of British Romantic poetry--more Matthew Arnold than William Wordsworth---, summarizes the goal toward which Wright moved : the reward for the rising middle-class black Southerners who embraced the American Dream as well as a bittersweet recognition that enshrouds dreamers. At some point in time, dreamers have to awaken to their positioning in American ideology and  cosmology.

"Nervous fatigue made him sigh as the waves of his emotions washed between shores of dread and desire, straining like the heaving, trapped sea in the darkness far below.  All that night he did not close his eyes and now and then his restless body gave a slight shudder as the images of his waking dream whirled tensely in their too-tight orbits. He peered out of his window and saw vast, wheeling populations of ruled stars swarming in the convened congresses of the skies anchored amidst nations of space and he prayed wordlessly that a bright, bursting tyrant of living sun would soon lay down its golden laws to loosen the locked legions of his heart and cast the shadow of his dream athwart the stretches of time."

Isolate segments of prose as you listen to the drumming of consonants and the concrete renderings of abstractions and the personification of natural and man-made objects ----

• emotions washed between shores of dread and desire
• the heaving, trapped sea in the darkness
• the images of his waking dream whirled tensely in their too-tight orbits
• vast, wheeling populations of ruled stars
• swarming in the convened congresses of the skies
• anchored amidst nations of space
• bright, bursting tyrant of living sun
• lay down its golden laws
• locked legions of his heart
• cast the shadows of his dream athwart the stretches of time

The dense accumulation is a Romantic surrealist portrait of man's location in the universe, his subservience to the imagined rule of law in cosmological metaphysics.  Those who remember that Claude McKay alluded  in his sonnet "America" to Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias" can figure out what Wright might have wanted us to do with his final paragraph of overwritten poetic prose.  Having arrived at the end of the novel, readers have to recuperate what its surplus of imagery has led them to think about people, race, corruption and the imperfections of law,  20th century history, the South, and belief in the American Dream. A serious reading and interpretation  of the final paragraph is itself a deconstruction of that dream.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            April 9, 2019