imbalance

IMBALANCE: a situation report

A casual glance at recent commentary, criticism, and scholarship on Richard Wright encourages us to think that imbalance marks attention to Wright's legacy.  Consider the overwhelming "buzz" before and after the Sundance  2019 premiere of "Native Son," a cinematic  reimagining of the 1940 novel (directed by Rashid Johnson based on a screenplay by Suzan-Lori Parks ).  Buzz here, there, and everywhere----contemporary dislocation of what  many thinkers of my generation believe were Wright's original intentions: awakening his nation to the horrors of systemic racism in the United States of America.  Much to my dismay, this reification of attention to Native Son undermines what younger generations should know about the continuing relevance of Wright's works.  They should know that Wright was always asking questions that a Bigger Thomas with green hair and painted fingernails is incapable of addressing.  The ease with which an adaptation can effectively incarcerate Wright's legacy is frightening, because the adaptation is justified on grounds that ultimately trivialize the corrective responses Wright wanted to provoke among his fellow citizens.  Nevertheless, I deem it a matter of bad faith and cowardliness to be complicit in the justification.  I do not condemn the entitlements of artistic freedom or freedom of any kind.  I do not condone flagrant abuse of freedoms in the guise of flashes of the spirit in a copper kettle.

I emphasize that many people who proclaim to know a great deal about American literature and culture are too willing to entertain reductive visions of Wright's legacy, to swallow imbalance as a norm.  They may tell us it is sufficient to be conversant with Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, and Black Boy; for them, there's no quintessential necessity in being conversant with The Outsider, The Long Dream, Savage Holiday, A Father's Law, Black Power, Pagan Spain,  and The Color Curtain.  Perhaps I am alone in finding this rejection of necessity to be abnormal and annoying.  So be it.  I am alone.  But it is from the abyss of aloneness that I seek to correct imbalance by writing a book on Wright.

My sense of aloneness is refuted by the fact that a few people do actually share my quest in seeking to understand Richard Wright more fully than he can be understood from reading biographies and existing critical works up to 2019.  It is refuted in commendable ways by scholars who wrote chapters devoted to fresh thinking  for

Carpio, Glenda, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

and by Glenda Carpi's recognizing  that Wright was no mere writer of protest.  He was "also a daring artist whose dazzling formal innovation was central to his politics, grounding a precocious exploration to the intersections between race, gender, class, and imperialism.  This made him at once an inviting sparring partner for contemporaries and a model for younger writers to live up to or transcend"(1).` I have yet to find a younger writer who has unquestionably transcended Richard Wright.  I own my prejudice with pride. I add that chapters in the Cambridge Companion send me back to Claudia Tate's insights about Savage Holiday in Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) and Ayesha K. Hardison's observations about Wright's unpublished typescript "Black Hope" in Writing Through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).

In forging a meaning future for Wright studies, we have to give sustained attention to both his pre-1945 and  his post-1947 writing.  Exploration of his creativity and powers of critical thinking must include attention to many unpublished works, to the hidden dimensions of his mind that those works can reveal.

Very little about those dimensions  but much about the limits of "orthodox" and "ideologically correct" tradition is revealed, for example, in

Milton A. Cohen. The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s.

Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2018.  ISBN 978-0-8262-2163-6,pp, 373. $50.00  (hardback)

                Given the urgency of explaining how art and politics have a long history of being linked and of illuminating how the pull of early twentieth-century American politics shapes peculiar problems of interpretation in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, Milton  Cohen has made a genuine contribution to ongoing literary and cultural discourses.  His primary objective is to direct attention to what one might argue is a fortunate occurrence  in American literary history, namely the confluence of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) and Ernest  Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). As contemporary scholars grapple with uncertainty and the ethics of ambiguity, Cohen provides his readers  with  a case study of how writers make deliberate choices at one moment in history and may later, for sundry reasons, depart from those choices as they navigate the motions of history. In addition to enlarging or revitalizing cultural memory of the 1930s, The Pull of Politics nudges one to consider the implications of that past for thinking about  American politics and art in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.  Cohen is clear about his  purpose, but  the relativity of history may resist assumptions of clarity and expose limits which challenge purpose and explanation.

                In Cohen's discriminating choice of words, the book "situates each novel within the political development of its author: the personal and historical events that awakened his commitment to a leftist cause; his earlier literary works reflecting stages of that commitment; and following analysis of his major novel, the biographical and historical events that ultimately severed that commitment" (4). And Cohen is much aware that one must qualify conclusions about severing, because they are subject to debate and refutation.  That Steinbeck, Wright, and Hemingway did indeed in the 1940s move away from what Cohen identifies as "the comforts ---and complications ---of a leftist political cause or organization" (314) doesn't liberate us from accounting for their transmuting the traces of commitment into different forms of engaging aesthetic and social issues. Cohen's cautions are instructive.  How one situates research , selects evidence, and  arrives at provisional conclusions are crucial aspects of literary and cultural scholarship.   

                The Pull of Politics is divided into three parts.   Part 1, Chapters 1-3, entails biographical analyses of what motivated Steinbeck (1934-1939), Wright (1933-1939) and Hemingway (1932-1939), and Chapter 4 summarizes the artistic and ideological differences as well as the kinship among the three writers as they embraced the Left.  Their choices were determined, in various ways, by communist and non-communist literary politics and their desires to use art in producing social change. They did not simply jump on the bandwagon of leftist fashion.  They were concerned with capitalist exploitation; with  labor, systemic racism; environmental and ecological changes in the United States; the horrors of war and fascism, within and beyond the dictates of the Communist Party USA.  Part 2, Chapters 5-7, consists of special readings of The Grapes of Wrath, Native Son, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, readings that combine textual analysis with relevant historical information.  While the readings of the novels are generally persuasive, they might have been richer had Cohen supplemented use of secondary sources with examination of archival resources.  His silence about archives is intriguing, especially in light of  growing conviction among cultural  scholars that using manuscript collections and  archives can move us toward a bit more certitude about what is at stake in interpretation and the making of literary histories.  Part 3, Chapter 8, provides a very good overview of the multiple reasons ---including harsh criticisms from both the Right and the Left ---Steinbeck, Wright, and Hemingway had for dissociating themselves from overt leftist commitments.  In itemizing reasons, Cohen makes an observation that invites commentary beyond the scope of The Pull of Politics:  "Significantly, in shedding their links to leftism, all three writers moved ---or returned ---to a belief in individualism" (266).

                Is the gesture of return to be dealt with a prelude to postmodernism?  Was the renunciation for Steinbeck and Hemingway a return to a conservative liberalism or a reification American exceptionalism in the arena of politics and art?  Was  it for Wright a new beginning of or return to his penchant for unfettered radical thinking?    It is judicious that Cohen does not distort his objective with meditation on such questions but places the onus of the questions on the shoulders of his readers.  In this sense, Cohen's study might inspire Steinbeck, Wright, and Hemingway scholars to compare his speculations with Michael Szalay's more theory-driven  analyses of works by  Wright, Steinbeck, Hemingway, and other writers of their generation  in New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham: Duke University Press,  2000). Both books are necessary and rewarding as scholars look back on the 1930s from the vantage of the twenty-first century and inquire, as Szalay bids us, about the significance of "aesthetic paradigms based on their supposed hostility to a concept as unrelentingly abstract as 'the market' "(265).  Perhaps  the pull of politics obligates us to shop in the supermarket of the dialogic imagination.

The trope of shopping may indicate that a number of Wright's scholarly champions will leave Cohen's tendentious conclusion on the shelf.  Cohen asserts that in Wright's taking a last shot at the CPUSA in The Outsider we should find Wright "couldn't quite shake the hold his involvement with the Communist Party exerted on his mind" (308).  Let us be more nuanced.  Let us argue that what Wright did not shake were aspects of Marxist analysis.  These are  not to be confused with Communist policies and applications.  Wright absorbed and transformed those aspects into the complex simplicity ( reread the use of that wording in "Blueprint for Negro Writing" ) of strong writing.  What a difference occurs when one substitutes "Marxist analysis" for Cohen's "Communist Party."  The substitution is crucial if we truly want to have a viable arena for Wright studies.  Otherwise, we may find ourselves bathing in a cesspool of  literary trendiness.

As I  prepare myself to write a book on Wright, I write one blueprint after another in conscious imitation of what he did in 1937, and I begin to feel that those blueprints are figurative  spiderwebs, or devices  for capturing ideas and information for later use.   Things captured ----research questions, notes on reading, lists of what must be read in the Wright Papers at Yale, Wright's sketches for screenplays, his many unfinished projects ----grow and grow and demand efforts to explain.  And above all, I am coming to appreciate why Wright's being tormented by surveillance from agencies in Great Britain, France, and the United States of America destroyed his body but not his spirit from which we still collect dividends.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            July 10, 2019