Getting Wright Right

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GETTING RICHARD WRIGHT RIGHT

 

It is not exactly easy to get Richard Wright right, to minimize the filters of our prejudices. In an  urbane commentary on The Man Who Lived Underground in the June 2021 issue of The Atlantic, pp. 83-84,  Imani Perry succeeds almost absolutely in persuading us that Wright's novel is "a Protestant work, as much about God as it is about Black people, as Wright himself explains in an accompanying essay about the novel's origins titled "Memories of My Grandmother" (84).Throughout the commentary, Perry employs olive branches of qualifications and reminds us of the need to read the olive branches in Wright' s White Man, Listen!  Perry foregrounds Wright's "bleak prescience" (83) and comes to a logical conclusion about the protagonist Fred Daniels: " He finds himself encountering the world, unfiltered by established terms of order, and acquires a tenderness for all people.  In the end, his Black existence presents a particular window and a universal predicament  ---  and a reminder.   Surrounded by ghastly forces every day, we destroy life with many idolatries and illusions" (84).  Wright shared the human foibles that Perry identifies, but his prescience and iconoclasm to manage idolatries and illusion in a genuine effort to provide instructions for a future.  It is in Wright's pre-future management that much of his relevance for the 21st-century resides and replicates itself in our consciousness of things in this world.  For Perry, Wright's relevance speaks to our intimacy with the familiar. "We see it on our screens regularly: the snuff films of white supremacy.  Perhaps we have too readily judged Wright's bearing of witness to be reductively stark and fatalistic.  What he observed is still happening, despite all those generations of unyielding hope" (84).  Wright did not film snuff movies.  He simply alerted his immediate and future audiences that they were and are actors in a cinematic obscenity, a visual record of what obviously exists in 2021.

The concept and production of snuff films may bear some puzzling relationship to film noir; perhaps Wright recognized as much with greater accuracy than we do today.  Perhaps.  And that uncertainty is brought to the edge of the stage by Joseph Ramsey's commentary in today's issue of The Nation.  Ramsey argues, with less academic caution than Perry, that "Wright knew painfully well, revolutionary  aspiration alone  did not inoculate comrades from reproducing the very evils that, when perpetuated by cops, they so rightly decried.  To truly transcend the carceral state , then, would require uprooting not only blatant police abuse ---and the institutions that enable them  ---  but also also suspect and punitive practices in the left's own ranks." Thus, Ramsey alerts us that reading Wright rightly is an endless  project. Do not embrace  soi-disant illusions and idolatry.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            May 20 , 2021