Words as Weapons: The Indeterminacy of Language, Race and Sexuality in Richard Wright

A Thesis

Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

Master of Arts

in English

University of Regina

by

Shane Derek Reoch

Regina, Saskatchewan

April, 1997

Copyright 1997: S.D. Reoch 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON KIA ON4 Ottawa ON K1A ON4 Canada Canada Your fiIo Votm nlférenœ

Our fi& Noire rdtdrence

The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence dlowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la fome de microfiche/nlm, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique.

The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts f?om it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. From his earliest novel, Lawd Todav! (unpublished until 1963)

to his last completed novel, The Lons Drearn (1958), American

novelist Richard Wright (1908-60)understood that even the most rigidly ordered society is not static. Power is never harnessed entirely by an individual or group. Rather, it circulates indiscriminately through society, across racial, sexual and monetary borders, leaving everyone vulnerable to

its flow. Authority may be fierce and oppressive, but it is ultimately unstable; al1 of Wright's fiction is based on this belief. The centrality of this belief to the Wright canon does

not, however, imply a lack of development in Wrightrs late fiction. Although authority is always unstable in Wright, the effects and contexts of this instability continually change throughout his writing. As well, Wright's application of this central belief becomes broader with each successive work. Whereas his early fiction illustrates the instability of power and authority by exploring race and sexuality, his late fiction focuses more specifically on how his characters use language. Wright has too long been dismissed as a historically significant but artistically meagre writer. In my analysis of power, race and sexuality in five Wright works, Native Son, Black Boy, "The Man Who Lived

Underground," Savase Holidav and The Lonq Dream, 1 will both illustrate the long overlooked consistency of the Wrlght canon and challenge the unfair negation of Wright's prose. -

This thesis would not have been possible without the two Graduate Scholarships and one Teaching Assistantship 1 received £rom the Facu-ltyof Graduate Studies and Research.

1 am also indebted to those who helped me in the course of my studies. 1 thank my thesis advisor, Dr. Ken Probert, for his sound advice and steady encouragement over the last four years, and 1 thank Mrs. Kelley Reoch for her endless support. Special thanks as well go to my readers, Dr. Troni

Grande and Dr. Bernie Selinger for their insight and enthusiasm. Abstract i

Acknowledgements iii

Table of Contents iv

Introduction: The Negation of Richard Wright 1

Chapter One: Shifting Sand: Indeterminacy of Sex, Race and Power in Native Son

Chapter Two: Beyond the Black Hero Proper: Universality in "The Man Who Lived Underground" and Savage Holiday

Chapter Three: "He Can't Howl if He's Dead": Power and Language in Black Boy And The Long Dream

Conclusion

Works Cited By his death at age 52 in November of 1960, Richard

Wright was widely dismissed by American critics as

yesterday's novelist. His early fiction--Uncle Tom's Children

(l938), Native Son (19401, and Black Boy (1945) --still lauded by critics, vaulted Wright to stardom and established him as the first commercially successful African-American novelist.

But his later fiction, The Outsider (19531, Savage Holiday

(1954) and The Lonq Dream (1958), written in France following

Wright's expatriation from America in 1947, sold poorly and received harsh, even vicious, reviews when published in

America. Wright's detractors based their criticism of his late fiction on the false assertion that his graphic portrayals of racism were not as applicable to America in the

1950's and 60's as they had been twenty years early. In his review of The Long Dream, for example, Nick Aaron Ford contends that, in his late fiction, Wright is out of touch with the American race relations.

This novel is written largely in the spirit of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Black Boy. . . . Those books were timely in their day. But that day has passed, and evidently Wright does not know it. His years in France have given him an excellent base for understanding the European, Asian and African minds. . . . But it has also cut him off from an understanding of the swiftly moving currents of racial attitudes and methods in America. (Gates and Appiah 60) ------. - - . - -- - . -- - - greatly oversimplify the significance of Wright's fiction.

Wright is not a merely a journalist documenting the often desolate conditions of African-Arnerican life in the forties and fifties, nor is his fiction somehow belated by the passage of the. Xe is an intensely theoretical novelist, less concerned with the intricacies of given social systems than he is with human conditions, conditions which transcend language, race, gender, time and culture. Wright' s brilliance as a fiction writer--as well as the consistency of the Wright canon--is found in his ability to identify and illustrate these conditions.

From his earliest novel, Lawd Today! (unpublished until 1963) to The Lonq Dream, Wright understood that even the most rigidly ordered society is not static. Power is never harnessed entirely by an individual or group. Rather, it circulates indiscriminately through society, across racial, sexual and monetary borders, leaving everyone vulnerable to its flow. Authority may be fierce and oppressive, but it is ultimately unstable; al1 of Wright's fiction is based on this belief.

The centrality of this belief to the Wright canon does not, however, imply a lack of development in Wright's late fiction. Although authority is always unstable in Wright, change throughout his writing. As well, Wright's application of this central belief becomes broader with each successive work. Whereas his early fiction illustrates the instability of power and authority by exploring race and sexuality, his late fiction focuses more specifically on how his characters use language.

More than Wright's first published collection of stories, Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son symbolically defines the terms of how Wright perceives power and authority. The novel traces the hard life, and even harder fall, of Bigger Thomas, a poor black youth who briefly and violently transgresses the narrow margins of American racism by murdering a woman. In his despotic behaviour, Bigger assumes the role of oppressor, a role coveted by whites. His ability to obscure the social placements of black and white is, for Wright, strong indication of the mutability of

American social order. Furthemore, Wright investigates in the novel the dichotornous role of sexuality in American racism. White patriarchy in Native Son attempts to enforce segwegation by controlling the sexuality of its citizens.

Wright reveals, however, that racial autonomy is always illusory; sexuality can never be absolutely policed. When the racial/sexual border is crossed--whether by consensus or 4 * - - and the foundation of racist society crumbles.

Wright continues to examine the instability of power

and authority in "The Man Who Lived Underground" and Savage

Holiday. However, by shifting his focus away from the

specifically racial context of Native Son and ont0 the

psyches of his cruelly oppressed protagonists, he better

accents the universality of this instability. Fred Daniels,

an innocent black fugitive in "The Man Who Lived Underground"

and Erskine Fowler, a white insurance executive in Savage

Holiday, are both unfairly oppressed by white authority.

When they are banished from society, each replicates the

violent behaviour of his oppressors. Such behaviour obscures

each characterfs association with societyfs oppressed and makes indeteminate the social placements of ruler and ruled.

Although their focuses differ from Native Son, "The Man Who

Lived Underground" and Savage Holiday arrive at the same

conclusion as Wright's first novel: total control and

complete innocence are equally impossible; everyone is

culpable.

Wright's vision of power and authority is again refashioned in Black Boy and--what 1 consider the writer's

second (albeit fictional) autobiography--The Lonq Dream.

Like Native Son, both texts depict the brutality of American - - in The Long Dream--are violently subjugated by patriarchal

authority. However, the currency of racism in these two

texts is language, not sexuality. Just as racist authority

attempts to police sexuality, it naively attempts both to

regulate the circulation of written texts across the racial border and to control signification in language for those whom it oppresses. As is the case in al1 of WrightCs fiction, however, authority in Black Boy and The Long Dream is vulnerable to the very thing it ventures to control.

Initially oppressed by (and through) language, Richard and

Fishbelly ultimately negate their own marginality by learning to use words as "weapons" (E 237). In their cunning subversions of white patriarchy, Richard and Fishbelly again illustrate the instability of authority; power is never completely harnessed, reality is never fully detennined.

My choice of material in this thesis stems in part from Arnold Rampexsad's curious exclusion of "The Man Who

Lived Underground," Savage Holiday and The Long Dream from the "Library of America" editions of Wright's fiction. In these omissions, Rampersad perpetuates the notion that

Wright's late fiction is somehow anomalous in the Wright canon. Since my goal in this thesis is to reinstate Wright's late fiction into the Wright canon, 1 have chosen to texts, Native Son and Black Boy. Wright's late fiction has been imprudently negated. Through a comparative analysis of selected Wright texts, 1 hope to challenge this negation. Shifting Sand: Indeterminacy of Sex, Race and Power in Native Son

In his often quoted essay, "How Bigger Was Born," Richard Wright harshly criticizes Uncle Tom's Children for being "a book which even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about" (874). Wright's early goal as a writer was to give an unflinching and graphic depiction of the racialized subject. But he also wished to illustrate the complexity of racism and, in doing SO, avoid the propagandistic trappings of ordinary protest literature. The critical response to Uncle Tom's Children, although predominantly favourable, convinced Wright that, in his first published volume, he had been overly sympathetic in his portrayal of African-Americans, and prompted him to write a book that "would be so hard and deep that they [readers and critics] would have to face it without the consolation of tears" (874). In the resultant novel, Native Son, Wright accomplishes his goal. He portrays the gross inequity in racist America, but he also creates Bigger Thomas, a fierce protagonist who obscures oppositions between right and wrong, oppressors and oppressed, black and white. Wrightls indictment of racist hegemony in Native Son is markedly more subtle than in Uncle Tom's Children. However, by mirroring racist society's vices in the despotic behaviour of Bigger, and by making indeterminate the placements of power, race and sexuality, Wright develops in Native Son a multifaceted study of Amexica as a culture that is based on and maintained through racism, but also undermined and ultimately doomed by its own racist assumptions. Like Lawd Today! and Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son portrays African-American men and women caught in a racial double bind. The Thomas farnily, emotionally and economically destitute, must choose between the social death of racial oppression and the actual death of challenging white, patriarchal rule. However, relations on/across the racial border are significantly more complex in Native Son than they are in Wright's earlier texts. Aithough the African- Americans in Native Son are externally oppressed, their most profound restrictions are interior. Wright adroitly reveals this in the sexuality of each character. He constructs the racially oppressed subject as a necessarily raped subject and portrays the plight of disenfranchised African-Americans to be fundamentally sexual in nature. With its dense sexual imagery and pervasive ambiguity, Wright's fiction prefigures the themes of much contemporary literary criticism, and it is in relation to post- structuralist theory that Native Son will be discussed here. In particular, this chapter will use Michel Foucault's "analytics" of power and sexuality in The History of Sexuality to emphasize the complexity of the racialized subject in Wright's novel. Foucault's theories enable critics to challenge long-held assumptions about literature and reconsider conventional readings of text(s). When his "analyticsn of power and sexuality are applied to Wright's Native Son, binary oppositions in the novel become unfixed; relations of power and sexuality between "whites" and "blacks" are revealed to be indeterminate. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault contends that since the eighteenth century, Western perceptions of power and sexuality have been erroneously based on a llrepressive hypothesis." After briefly chronicling the history of repression in Western discourse, Foucault attempts to supplant the pervasively negative representation of power and sexuality in Western culture: We shall try to rid ourselves of a juridical and negativerepresentation of power and cease to conceive of it in terms of law, prohibition, liberty and sovereignty. . . .We must. . . at the same tirne conceive of sex without the law and power without the king. (90-91) In place of "the repressive hypothesis," in which humanity is negatively bound by a tangible authority, Foucault offers "a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power" (5). Central to this new economy is Foucault's assertion that power is not a unified or static form, but rather a 'flocal and unstable" (93) condition :

[Power] must not be sought in the prirnary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate; it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are.always local and unstable. (93) For Foucault, power is unpredictable, ambiguous, and beyond the scope of any individual consciousness. Consequently, there is neither permanence nor solidity in society; al1 individuals are subject to the ebb and flow of power. In contrast to the traditional Western blueprint for society which firmly places rulers at the top/centre and ruled at the bottom/fringe, Foucault's mode1 reveals these placements to be unf ixed :

Power cornes Erom below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix. Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. (94-95) Wright's analysis of power in Native Son strongly prefigures Foucault's analyses in The History of Sexuality. Segregation in Biggerls Chicago is based on traditional, Eurocentric notions of power which situate white males at the top/centre and non-white peoples at the bottodfringe. However, as Wright illustrates throughout Native Son, power is not fixed on one side of the racial border. The physical separation of "whites" and "blacks" in Northern segregation is for Wright a futile attempt by whites to harness and regulate power . Wright illustrates the indeteminacy of power in the first chapter of Native Son by contrasting the way in which two gang menbers perceive authority. Bigger is painfully aware of his own marginality, and he laments to Gus, "They donlt let us do nothing" (Wright's emphasis 462). However, the source of his own powerlessness remains intangible to Bigger. He intuits that "something awfulls going to happen" (463), and he uses blanket terms like lltheylland "whites" to name his powerful opposition. Nevertheless, Bigger confesses to Gus that the forces which oppress him are rnetaphysical rather than exterior and identifiable: "You know where the white folks live?" "Yeah, " Gus said, pointing eastward. "Over across the\linef;over there on Cottage Grove Avenue." "Naw; they donft, l1 Bigger said. llWhat you mean?" Gus asked, puzzled. "Then, where do they live?" Bigger doubled his fist and struck his solar plexus. llRight dom here in my stomach, l1 he said. (464) Whereas Gus attempts to affirm a visible line between

(empowered) "white l1 and (powerless) "black, l1 Bigger incorporates the two positions into one body. For Bigger, the conflict between whites and blacks is real, but indeterminate; in Foucauldian tems, "there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled." Bigger's vision of power--and that of powerls own inscribed resistance--is echoed in Wright's description of the Daltonsv eastern Chicago mansion. When he arrives at 4605 Dxexel Boulevard, Bigger finds the Dalton home encased in "a high, black, iron picket fence" (486). The fence stands as a lifeless metaphor for Gusfs vision of segregation. The white centre and the black fringe are permanent, immutable placements. This architectural solidity is belied, however, when Bigger is given the responsibility of stoking the fixe in tne ualron rurnace , --BlacKness-- r ariu LU^: =VIA IL D~UWUI~~- to "whites") is not cold, rigid and outside, but rather hot, animate and at the heart of the white centre. Just.as whiteness is interior to Bigger, Bigger is interior to whiteness. Wright continues to play with the interiority of blackness and whiteness in his depiction of Bigger's Chicago. In Native Son, the Black Belt is mythologized by whites into a distant wilderness (Bodziock 35), a place of both wonder and fear that is set apart from white society. Mary and Jan beckon Bigger to take them to a "real place" (Wright's emphasis 509) on the South Side, and newspapers describe a war zone in the black community during the hunt for Bigger. In both cases, whites consider the black community to be distant from (and "other" to) the white community. However, the Black

Belt exists not outside, but rather within a larger white context; it is surrounded by non-black Chicago. Blackness is again interior to whiteness. Wright makes the Northern city (like the Dalton Mansion) a metaphor for the fragility of the racial border separating whites and blacks. The depiction of the interna1 racial border in Native -Son is less overt than Wright's graphic portrayal of Northern segregation. Nevertheless, through his correlation of racial oppression and rape, and in his depiction of the racialized subject, Wright reveals the primary site of racial conflict to be interior. Ail of the African-Americans in Native Son are racially divided, both pSyChOlOglcally ana pnysxally, aliu there is a violent undercurrent of racial tension in even the most private and domestic scenes in the novel. For example, the opening description of the Thomas women as "the black rnother and the brown daughter" (448) illustrates the sexual violence endemic to African-American families. Vera's lighter skin signifies both that the Thomas children are the products of rape (if not directly, then as the descendants of both raped black women and white male rapists) and that racial segregation is predicated on the dominance of white male (and the subordination of black male and female) sexuality. In his provocative study of sexual borders in Native -Son, Abdul JanMohamed writes, llregardlessof gender, the racialized subject is always already constructed as a 'raped' subj ect in Wright ' s view" ("Sexualityl'109) . Indeed, misogyny and racism are often indivisible in Wright, and rape pervades his fiction, functioning on both literal and symbolic levels. Rape in Native Son, for example, is both the literal description of what is done to women in a phallocratie society, and a metaphor for the violent marginalization of African-Americans by racist whites. Just as women are forcibly appropriated by rapists, blacks in America are-and have always been-forcibly appropriated by racists; both are denied human rights and freedoms and subjected to the will of their oppressor(s). Consequently, Wright's female and black characters often have shared experience. Wright's female characters are repeatedly subjected to and subordinated by white men, and his black characters are frequently made to feel inadequate by sexually intrusive white males. However, rape has an extremely complex role in a racist society and it is not enough to assume--as does Houston A. Baker Jr.--that "[rape's] signal presence in Afro-American history is an archi-sign for white male authority and domination1' (221). Rape is, for Wright, more than merely signification of white male authority. Just as white patriarchy is based on and maintained by rape, it is also fragmented and undermined by this same process. Wright implicitly places this paradox at the heart of Native Son. In "How \BiggerlWas Born," he portrays the United States as an empire based on the oppression (rape) of African-Arnericans. Wright subsequently proposes that, in violently suppressing African-Americans, America has made itself vulnerable to a revolution of oppressed peoples. Using Bigger Thomas as a symbol for the embittered, disenfranchised masses, Wright

granting the emotional state, the tensity, the Eear, the hate, the impatience, the sense of exclusion, the ache for violent action, the emotional and cultural hunger, Bigger Thomas, conditioned as his organism is, will not become an ardent, or even lukewarm, supporter of the status quo. (Wright's emphasis 866) Wright's warning that racist America will "reap what it sows" is profoundly realized in the actions of rapists in Native Son. Both Bigger and his white countexparts struggle to remain in power as the signification and consequences of their acts of rape (both symbolic and literal) proliferate. As a victim of white societyls symbolic rape of African- American women and men, Bigger is consumed by both fear and rage. When he inadvertently (and perhaps inevitably) murders a white woman and then has the temerity to frame a white man for the death, white authority finds that it is not in control and is unable to predict the behaviour of the people it has oppressed. Similarly, Bigger is undone by the interpretable remains of his victims. Ne disposes of Mary's and Bessiels bodies, but cannot control what their bodies signify; the raped and rnurdered victim both empowers and disempowers the rapist and murderer. Rapels double-edged role in Native Son is further illuminated by a discussion of the ideology of racism. American slavery and its post-Bellum equivalent, Jim Crow segregation, are predicated on the construction of a racialized other. With a (routinely suspect) scientific focus on the anatomical and cultural differences between "whites" and "blacks," prejudiced whites reduce the issue of race to a strict binary. The subordination of African descendants is legitimized through the false assertion that there is a natural and unbridgeable gap between (human) rulers and (less than human) ruled. In two very distinct ways, rape obscures the opposition between "whites" and llblacks"(and the slavery and segregation it engenders) . First, the binary opposition between "whitesVV and "blacksw becomes unfixed when the gene pool of each group is contaminated through rape. Racial supremacists stress the genetlc airrerence Decween Laces, ana rosr;er a uelLel LU LIE consubstantiality of African-Americans; blacks are believed to possess a singular, tangible quality which subordinates thern to whites. This belief is challenged when there is sexual intercourse between the two races. The rape victim is imbued with the essence of the rapist. As well, rape effects the hybridity of the viztim's offspring. Consequently, neither the rape victim nor the child conceived in rape can have a singular nature. With the "other" no longer a separate species, the placements of blackness and whiteness become indeterminate. Secondly, the racial border is undermined when black women are sexually desired by white men. For JanMohamed, "[the rnaster's sexual] desire implicitly admits the slave's humanity" ("Sexuality" 104); in other words, desire constitutes sameness. Consequently, the concept of otherness-- so fundamental to white dominance--is subverted when the sexuallracial border is crossed (whether violently or not). Although it may be contended that the other is incorporated through desirelrape, JanMohamedls equation of "the master's desire" and "the slave's humanity" is extremely contentious. For Angela Davis, rape in a slave society is used not for the fulfilment of the "master's" sexual fantasies but as "a weapon of political terror" (Women, Race 47) . Rapists desire power over women and not the women themselves:

"Rape was a weapon of domination, a weapon of repression, whose covert goal was to extinguish slave women's will to resist, and in the process, to demoralize their men" (Women, Race 23). For Davis, a woman is no more made human through rape, than livestock is humanised through domestication. Davis's vision of the dehumanized rape victim is echoed in Alice Walker's short story collection You Can't Keep a Good

Woman Dom. In "Coming Apart, " Walker ' s narrator contemplates the sexual subordination and fragmentation of black women in pornography. In pornographic pictorials (correlative to the rapistls perception of women), "black women are depicted as animals" (52). They are reduced to their sexual parts and fetishized into objects which can be bought or forcibly appropriated. For Walker and Davis, rape denies (rather than implies) a woman's humanity. Nevertheless, JanMohamedVs claims are not cornpletely dispelled by Davis and Walker. Both women suggest that rape is not necessarily predicated on the rapistfs desire for sameness. However, their theories do imply that violent male domination of women does obscure the opposition between black and white. In his desire to disempower and possess his victims, the rapist seeks to extinguish alterity, to destroy that which he neither understands nor controls. In the context of the plantation, the master wishes to take what is outside (and therefore, a threat to) his domain and domesticate it into something calm, obedient and reinforcing. Consequently, the rape or appropriation--although not necessarily a sign of sameness--always irnplies a desire for the abolition of otherness. mis 1s inaeea a cornplex ana paraooxlcal ueslre. Otherness is never eliminated; it is merely displaced, internalized by sameness. The raped slave becomes what Spivak terms the master1s "self-consolidating other" (Young 17). She/he is moulded in the master1s narcissistic self-image, but never allowed the master's rights and freedoms. For Wright (suggested in the above excerpt from "How Bigger Was Born"), this constitutes an enormous threat to white patriarchy and forms the basis for the plot of Native Son. By placing the outsider inside, the master not only accents the other's sense of depravity, he reveals his own paranoia and vulnerability. The master--1ike the plantation orner or the imperialist nation-4s always made unstable through his continua1 repression (rape) of otherness. The two most frequently discussed rapes in Native Son are Bigger's symbolic rape of Mary, and his actual rape of Bessie Mears. However, as Alan W. France notes, Biggerls violent treatment of Gus in Docls pool room constitutes a

third rape in the novel. In an effort to disguise his own fear, Bigger holds Gus at knife point and commands, "Lick it, 1 said! You think I1m playing?" (481). After licking Bigger's knife, Gus is forced to stretch his hands along the wall while

Bigger pushes the blade into his stomach. As a young African- American male, and as a member of Bigger's gang, Gus is constructed as Bigger's mirror image. Consequently, in Docls pool room, Bigger in effect rapes himself; he sexually violates sameness. This 'self-rape" is reinforced during the scene by the description of Bigger as "pregnant with anomer idea1' (481). Both Gus and Bigger are given feminine qualities in the scene. Gus--as raped subject--is feminized, and his aggressor--pregnant with ideas--is as symbolically female as he is male. Like his white counterparts, Bigger violates sameness when he rapes; his victim is interior. Hybridity and integration are parallel themes in Wright's fiction. Each signifies the crossing or erosion of the racial border separating blacks and whites: hybridity on the interior level of the body, and integration on a larger, social level. White hegernony's paranoia about each is subtly revealed in Native Son through the media's manipulation of facts in coverage of Bigger's custody and trial. In a fiercely bigoted newspaper account of the inquest into Mary's death, the Chicago Tribune writes of Bigger, Al1 in all, he seems a beast utterly untouched by the softening influences of modern civilization. In speech and manner he lacks the charm of the average, harmless, genial, grinning southern darky so beloved by the Arnerican people. (706) The column goes on to cite the opinion of two white males concerning the nature of "Negro" criminals. In the first reference, the Tribune writes, "An Irish police captain remarked with deep conviction 'I'm convinced that death is the only cure for the likes of himfl'(706.) The second expert source quoted by the paper is Edward Robertson, a racist newspaper editor from Jackson, Mississippi. Robertson offers the following theory on Bigger's criminal behaviour: 1 think it but proper to inform you that in many quarters it 1s believea tnac 'Inornas, aespice nis oeaa- black complexion, may have a minor portion of white blood in his veins, a mixture which generally makes for a criminal and intractable natureJ707) To construct Bigger as anything but a rare exception would be to admit shortcomings in white dominance. By equating Bigger with a "jungle beast" (706), the Tribune not only absolves western white culture of any responsibility concerning Bigger's behaviour, it seeks to reinforce white authority over non-whites. The implication is that, without the stabilizing presence of white hegemony, al1 African- Americans would be in a savage, anarchic state. The "average" African-American--"the Southern DarkyW--is "harrnless, genial [and] grinning ." He is "belovedu (and by implication, should be grateful) because he has been forcefully divorced from al1 "jungleffbehaviour. Consequently, reinforcernent of the master-slave binary between whites and blacks is subtly scripted by the Tribune as a benefit to both races. The Tribune masterfully exploits Bigger in order to strengthen white patriarchyls social agenda. First, by emphasizing his hybridity, the Tribune constructs Bigger as the perfect scapegoat. As a mulatto, Bigger represents the contamination of the white/black binary opposition. By disposing of the contaminant, white hegemony can again reduce race relations to a "black and white" issue and reaffirm the racial border. Secondly, the Tribune mirrors the inner and outer borders of race and makes Bigger's mixed blood a propaganaist metapnor ror tne crossing or tne social Doraer 01 segregation, If the mixture of black and white blood results in a "criminal and intractable nature," the commingling of the two races will sirnilarly result in violence. That Bigger murdered a woman from each side of the colour line graphically illustrates that the dissolution of the racial border is a threat to both whites and blacks. In short, no one is safe if blacks and whites are allowed to commingle. Nevertheless, the Tribune column subtly undermines its own racist assumptions by revealing that the oppositions between black and white are always arbitrary, not fixed (Gates

Jr. 237). As suggested earlier, the segregation of blacks and whites necessitates a belief in the consubstantiality of each group; whites and blacks must be anatomically, genetically distinct from one another. By specifying the ethnicity of the "Irish police captain," the Tribune not only reemphasizes white hegemonyls obsession with genealogy, it also illustrates the heterogony of the white race; the white population is no more ethnically or genetically unified than the black population. As well, the captain unfixes the association of whites with dominance and blacks with subservience. As an Irish man, he descends frorn a culturally and ethnically marginalized nation. Consequently, he has no more inherent relation to societyls oppressors than he does to societyls oppressed. In effect, the captain wishes to eliminate the contaminant (Bigger) from society and, in doing so, polarize white (s) and black (s) . However, by exhibiting qualities of each group, the captain ironically collapses the binary he wishes to reinstate. Still, the success of white subordination of non-white peoples cannot be understated. For over four hundred years non-whites in America have suffered inordinately at the hands of their white rulers, As implied by Wright in Native Son, such racial oppression does not merely dirninish with the passage of time. African-Americans are at a profound disadvantage throughout the novel and the black community is only weakened by the violent murders of Mary and Bessie. Book III of Native Son ends with African-Arnericans facing more rigid persecution than they endure in Book 1. White hegemony- -1argely through the efforts of State Attorney Buckley-- successfully uses Bigger's crimes to reassert and tighten its control over the South Side. Consequently, Wright's message in Native Son is notoriously ambiguous. He is widely considered a protest writer, but his first great novel ends with the seeming triumph of white hegemony. Wright's complex theorizing may be elucidated, however, by considering Bigger a symbol for white patriarchy. White hegemony masterfully contains Bigger's sexualized rebellion and strengthens itself by scapegoating the rebel. However, by synonymizing the source of Biggerls downfall and the source of white patriarchyls power, Wright subtly prefigures in Native Son the inevitable collapse of racist society. As well, Wright repeatedly reveals in Native Son that white patriarchy is not in complete control; something always escapes the perception of the person(s) wielding power. For example, the novel ends with Bigger awaiting execution, but the ultimate failure of Max to understand Bigger irnplies that white patriarchy has ultimately failed to appropriate (and eliminate the threat of) alterity. The instability of power states is even more clearly illustrated through Bigger's character. In his misogynous treatment of women, Bigger mirrors the behaviour of his white oppressors. When he is unable to maintain control of the consequences of his crimes, he becomes a metaphor for white patriarchy's impending doom.

II As implied by the title of the first book in Native Son ("Fear"), Bigger lives in constant fear of white castigation. The eldest of three children in a fatherless home, Bigger is compelled to assume a paternal role in order to support his

impoverished family . However, he is ff feminized" ("Sexuality" 108) by fear, and loath to accept the job of chauffeur to a wealthy, white family, the Daltons. Bigger finally accepts the job not out of concern for the Thomas family, but because he is afraid to "hold a gun on Blum" (my emphasis 457), a white-store owner whom Bigger's gang has planned to rob. Through the repetition of such phallic irnagery, Wright constructs the racially oppressed male as a castrated subject; fear becornes metonymic for the (feminized) condition of the racially oppressed subject. Liberation frorn fear comes amer Bigger accidentally murders the Dalton's teenage daughter, Mary. After incinerating her body in the furnace and

returning to his home in the "Black Belt, l1 Bigger frantically rehearses the story he will tell the authorities. When he feels his gun, Biggerts fear is replaced by a cool self-

assurance : He felt something heavy sagging in his shirt; it was the gun. He took it out; it was warm and wet. He shoved it under the pillow. They canlt say 1 did it. If they do, they canltprove it. (533) In the above passage, liberation and masculinization are synonymous; Bigger's emancipation from fear comes when he procures a phallus. The gun that he is afraid to use in the Blum robbery is now held--warm and potent--in Bigger's hand. In holding it, Bigger becomes ambivalent about the consequences of his crime. It is not surprising that Wright has been labelled "pathological" (Warren 72) in his handling of female characters. Indeed, the cost of male liberation in Native Son is immense. Nothing short of the life of a young woman is required for Bigger to feel fearless and masculine. However, Wright does not consider violence against women a practical response to racial oppression. The vampiric murder of Mary provides only psychological liberation for Bigger; he is no longer afraid, but he is still subject to the sexism and racism that is endemic to white patriarchy. According to JanMohamed, Native Son is "a profoundly specular novel [in that it] holds up a mirror to the structure and the economy of phallocratic society, but it is unable to escape or undermine them" (1992 111) . Bigger responds to the feeling of freedom following Mary's death not by threatening the white phallocratic system, but by replicating that systemls violent marginalization of Nnorities. He rapes and murders an African-American woman and scapegoats Communists by implicating them in Mary's disappearance. In each case, Bigger assumes a dictatorial role analogous to that of "the white master." In assuming this role, Bigger psychologically liberates himself from the marginality he suffers as an oppressed Black male. However, his assumption of the master1s vices serves to reinforce rather than undennine white male

Bigger's reinforcement of white patriarchy is foreshadowed in the first scene of "Fear." After awakening to the ominous ring of an alarm clock, Bigger and his brother

Buddy confront and kill " [a] huge black ratff (449) in the

Thomas's filthy, one-room apartment. A popular reading of this scene is offered by Keneth Kinnamon: Bigger kills a terrified black rat that ceases its flight and turns desperately on its antagonists when al1 avenues of escape are closed. This scene prefigures Biggerls own fate. (Bloom, Bigger 60) By focusing on its fear and blackness, Kinnamun considers the rat a symbol for Bigger. Bigger and Buddy are consequently given (white) patriarchal roles in the scene; the Thomas men must corner and kill a black rat that threatens the Thomas woxnen. Although Kinnarnon correctly asserts that Bigger's battle with the rat is a foreshadowing scene, his reading of the battle fails to account for the dense sexual imagery in Wright's prose. Careful consideration of this imagery unfixes the rat's signification in the scene, and lends support to JanMohamedls deconstxuction of later scenes in the novel, In the battle with the rat, Bigger is portrayed as a feminized

and castrated subject. Although he owns both a knife and a

gun, his sole defense against the rat is a skillet, As well, when he fails to kill the rat with his first assault, Bigger is bitten by the rat on his trouser-leg. Wright further

repeatedly describing the rat in phallic terms. After the rat 3s dead, Bigger and Buddy marvel at its enormity: The two brothers stood over the dead rat and spoke in tones of awed admiration. "Gee, but he's a big bastard." "That sonofabitch could cut your throat." "He's over a foot long." "How in the hell do they get so big?" "Eating garbage and anything else they can get." "Look, Bigger, there's a three inch rip in your pant-leg. " (450) In this exchange, the rat becomes a phallus which symbolically castrates Bigger. Like white phallocratie society, the rat has an insatiable appetite, and the violent (vaginal) "rip" in Bigger's trouser leg suggests that Bigger has been both consumed by the "rat," and ritually feminized for threatening the rat's consumption. Bigger's appropriation of the "rat" prefigures his seizure of the "gun" arter Mary's death. ln Dom cases, Bigger acquires a symbolic phallus after destroying a symbol of white patriarchy. His use of the phallus is sirniiariy misogynous in each case. Just as Bigger assumeç the patriarchal role of his white oppressors after murdering Mary, he terrorizes his frightened sister Vera after the rat is killed: The woman on the bed [Vera] continued to sob- Bigger took out a piece of newspaper and gingerly lifted the rat by its tail and held it out at am's length. "Bigger, take ' im out, " Vera begged again. Bigger laughed and approached the bed with the dangling rat, swinging it to and fro like a pendulum, enjoying his sister's fear. (450) Vera is as terrorized by Bigger's wielding of the rat as she is by the rat itself, Whether she is threatened directly by her brother or indirectly by Mr. Dalton (who owns the Thomas's dishevelled apartment), she is victimized by phallocentric males. The brilliance and complexity of the rat scene becomes apparent when it is more closely read in relation to Bigger's final meeting with Bessie. In both scenes, liberation from fear ends when a woman challenges Bigger's phallocentric behaviour, After taunting Vera with the rat, Bigger is symbolically castrated by his mother. She scolds hirn and commands, "Throw that rat out!" (451). After obeying his mother and laying dom the rat, Bigger is once again sullen and detached, Similarly, after the discovery of Mary's remains in the furnace, Bigger ' s (psychological and physical) freedom is threatened when Bessie becomes aware or nls aeceir. She accurately accuses him of murdering Mary, and his fear returns . The significance of Bigger's murder of Bessie has been hotly debated by critics. Alan France claims, "After Bigger is found out, Bessie is of no further use to him; she becomes disposable" (157). Darwin Turner similarly considers Bessie to be a narrowly constructed character whom Bigger kills to prolong his flight: "In Bessie, he [Bigger] sees the continuation of mental chains. She is still lazily amoral, timid, compliant--in short, the Sarnbo personality that

threatens the existence of the new Bigger" (Warren 66). Both critics read the rape and murder of Bessie as the superlative example of Wrightvsmisogyny; women in Wright's fiction are not allowed speech or development. However, it is Bigger (not Wright) who cannot let Bessie develop. Bessie is not killed because she is of no use to Bigger, nor is she murdered because she is to Bigger an embarrassing stereotype. She is murdered because she sees through and understands Biggervs bold facade. Bigger's liberation from fear (like white male authority) is predicated on the subordination of women. When Bessie desires sobriety instead of the numbing effects of alcohol and no longer passively submits to Bigger's vision of reality, she becomes threatening. Since his freedom requires her fear, Bigger cannot allow Bessie the same catharsis that he experienced after Mary's death; the 'otherl cannot be allowed fearlessness. After Bigger rapes Bessie, he crushes her skull with a brick and believes her to be dead. When she can no longer challenge his phallocratie behaviour, Bigger again feels free and empowered: llShe seemed limp; he could act now" (668). Before continuing his flight, Bigger throws her body dom the air shaft of an abandoned building. The cruel irony of this scene is, of course, that Bessie (according to State's Attorney Buckley) is not killed by Bigger's blows. During an interrogation, Buckley taunts Bigger with the "truth" surrounding Bessiels death: Well, boy, we found her. You hit her with a bxick,but she didn't die right away. . . . tl Bigger's muscles jerked him to his feet. Bessie alive! But the voice droned on and he sat dom. "She tried to get out of the air-shaft, but she couldnlt. She froze to death." (729) The deaths of Mary and Bessie similarly reveal the instability of phallocentric power states. In both murders, Bigger is unable to fully determine his victimsl fate or contain the signification of their bodies. Even before the discovery of Mary's charred remains, Wright reveals that Bigger is not in complete control of his (misogynous) crimes. After decapitating Mary so that she will fit into the furnace, Bigger resolves to also burn the Dalton's white cat: He [Bigger] made a move. The cat stood up; its white fur bristled; its back arched. He tried to grab it and it bound past him with a long wail of fear and scampered up the steps and through the door and out of sight. Oh! He had the left the kitchen door open. That was it. He closed the door and stood again before the furnace thinking, Cats cantt talk. . . . (My ernphasis 531) In this scene, Bigger again assumes the immoral and imperfect role of (white) master. He is powerful and ruthless, but always a little bit out of control; he leaves a door open and something escapes. Wright does not claim in "How Bigger Was Born," his own preface to Native Son, to know the solution to racial and sexual oppression. Consequently, he does not specify what constitutes an "open door" to African-Americans. However, Wright does leave the possibility for error on the part of white patriarchy. Like Bigger (in his failure to capture the white cat), societylsoppressors cannot absolutely control those whom they oppress. Something always escapes. It is difficult to see anything positive in Bessiels gruesome death. She survives the beating Bigger has given her, but she dies slowly from complications of that beating. However, she is not ultimately "contained" in the will of her oppressor. Bigger attempts to fix Bessie through death, but she survives; like Mary's cat, she transgresses the boundaries of Biggerls perception. Bigger's death is also foreshadowed by the escape of Mary's cat. In his closing statements, Bigger's lawyer, Boris Max, diagnoses Bigger's spiritual illness, and constructs a mode1 of society which will account for Bigger's criminal behaviour and depravity. He describes men like Bigger as "powerless pawns in a blind play of social forcest1 (811). Like Bigger, Max tries to fix the other. However, the solidity of Max's Marxist ideology 1s undermined by Bigger's [Foucauldian] perception of the lawyer's system as "shifting sand" (844). Biggerls epiphanic confession "what 1 killed for 1 am . . . . What 1 killed for must've been good!" (849) strikes terror into Max. The words are outside Max's system of thought . The double bind facing African-Americans is illustrated in each of Biggervscrimes and in his own death sentence. Like the cat, Bigger and Bessie transgress the imposed will of their oppressors. However, what lies outside the master's perception grimly resembles what lies inside it. Even the cat is symbolically caught in a double bind. Although she escapes Bigger's attack, she poses no threat to her attacker. The cat cannot speak and is therefore inslgnificant. Wright's capitalization of 'cats" in the sentence fragment "Cats canlt ta1k0' alerts readers to the scene's specularity. "Cat" is a Jazz Age colloquialism for an African-American male. By making a female white cat a metaphor for oppressed African- American males, Wright both plays with colour and gender signification and illustrates the bleakness for non-white peoples in American society. Even when a 'cat" escapes physical death, he/she has no recourse to the law, no freedom of speech; he/she is socially dead. Bessie briefly escapes Bigger's death sentence, but she dies an even more painful death. Sirnilarly, the price of Bigger's transgression is death. Al1 are doubly bound to suffer either "social" death, or "actual" (physical) death. Wrightvs determination to write a "hard and deep" novel stemmed from his belief that Uncle Tom's Children oversimplified racism, In each of the stories in the collection, Wright graphically depicts the subordination of African-Americans. His protagonists suffer disproportionately to Southern whites, and their stories sorrowfully reveal the inequity of Jim Crow segregation. Although Wright continues to depict the horror of racism in Native Son, he refuses to reduce racial oppression to simple binary oppositions. The color line in Native Son is indeterminate, as are the distinctions between white and black, empowered and powerless, oppressors and oppressed. Wright effects this indeterminacy by analyzing the nature(s) and circulation of power in a racist society. White hegemony in Native Son cruelly (and efficiently) places African-Arnericans in a racial double bind. However, Wright continually reveals in the novel that no person or institution is in complete control, Power can never be absolutely arrested. Although white hegemony is mighty, and its subordination of African-Americans is complex, like al1 power states, it is unstable and its collapse is imminent. Beyond the Black Hero Proper: U~versalityin "The Man Who Lived Undergroundffand Savaqe Holiday

In his austere preface to the Chelsea House collection of Richard Wright criticism, Harold Bloom contends that Native -Son (and, by implication, the entire Wright canon) is historically significant but aesthetically meagre. Citing the character of Bigger Thomas as the novel's major flaw, Bloom

Either Bigger Thomas is a responsible consciousness, and so profoundly culpable, or else only the white world is responsible and culpable, which means however that Bigger ceases to be of fictive interest and becomes an ideogram, rather than a persuasive representation of a possible human being. (Richard 4) Bloom considers the character of Bigger to be ambiguous and "overdetermined" (4) and ascribes these "weaknesses" to Wright's "customarily bad level of writing" (1). It is surprising (and disappointing) that a critic of Bloom's stature would reduce Wright's most notorious protagonist to a strict binary. By demanding that Bigger must be either guilty or innocent, Bloom overlooks what is perhaps the central tenet of Wright's fiction: there is no innocence, only a shared, universal guilt. In the ambiguous ending to Native Son, Wright neither absolves Bigger of guilt nor accords him sole responsibility for his violent crimes. The point of Wright's novel (a point that Bloom surprisingly misses) seems to be that everyone is "culpable." In the years after Native Son, Wright continued to develop an interest in, and experiment with, what he considered a "universal probleml' (Kinnamon and Fabre 236). Issues of race pervade Wright's fiction; there is always in his writing a strong undercurrent of protest against the subordination of non-white peoples. However, Wright's fiction reveals universal conditions, and his later protagonists are symbols not only for African-Americans, but for al1 of humanity. In a 1956 interview with Raymond Barthes, Wright claims that, by the publication of The Outsider (his third novel, published over a decade after Native Son), he had "already abandoned the black hero proper" (167). He describes The Outsider as a novel which is "concerned with problems that would beset anyone, black or white1' (167). Wright evokes the universality of suffering differently in each of his post-Native Son works of fiction. In the masterful novella "The Man Who Lived Underground," Wright creates Fred Daniels, a trickster protagonist who deconstructs and parodies social noms, and arrives at a messianic vision of humanity's fundamental, shared guilt. In his intriguing, and sadly overlooked, short novel Savage Holiday, Wright reveals the psychological shackles of Erskine Fowler, a white insurance executive. By creating in Savage Holiday an allegory for African-American servitude, and by carefully studying the bruised psyches of his characters, Wright universalizes Fowlerls sense of guilt and isolation. This chapter will consider "The Man Who Lived Underground1' and Savage Holiday as Wright's attempts to universalize the existential bleakness of oppressed African-Arnericans. "The Man Who Lived Underground" begins with the silent pronouncement of a nameless fugitive: "1 'VE GOT TO HIDE" (22). Wrongly accused of murdering an elderly woman and physically forced to sign a confession, Fred Daniels (he only later recalls his name) escapes police custody and seeks refuge in an underground sewer. While underground, he tunnels into the basements of buildings and subliminally affects the lives of countless people. As Daniels observes the disillusionment and corruption of others, he becomes convinced that he alone is innocent. Wright subtly illustrates this as Daniels cleans himself before urinating in a theatre washroom. After "meti~ulously~~scrubbing his hands, Daniels carefully avoids his own urine: "though he had tramped in the waters of the sewer, he stepped back from the wall so that his shoes, wet with sewer slime, would not touch his urine" (31). In both his compulsive hand-washing and the avoidance of his urine, Daniels stxuggles to absolve himself of any guilt, Like Dostoyevsky's figure in Notes £rom the Underqround, Daniels wishes (at least initially) to distance himself from what he considers a filthy and decadent society; he considers himself to be outside the "universal pr~blem,~~ and he will neither accept responsibility for his own (debased) condition nor willingly contribute to the collective waste that stains his shoes. Nevertheless, Daniels too is affected while underground. When his trickery results in a night watchmanls suicide, he realizes his own complicity in the violence and depravity of modern culture. Overcome with guilt, Daniels returns to society and, through confession of his underground crimes? attempts to enlighten humanity. Danielsr ascent on the third day, however, is more a parodic resurrection than the rise of a true saviour. He emerges from the manhole to find that he is no longer a murder suspect. Police have charged an "Eyetalian" (66) with Mrs. Peabody's murder and ended their search for Daniels. Nevertheless, Daniels is resolute about humanity's shared guilt and feels compelled to confront officers Murphy, Lawson and Johnson, his original assailants. When his acts of atonement and fellowship are misconstrued as threats to white authority, Daniels is shot by Lawson (the lawls son), who states cryptically, "You've got to shoot his kind. They'd wreck things" (74). Fred Daniels poses the same threat to Murphy, Lawson and Johnson that Bigger Thomas poses to hegemony in Native -Son. Both challenge authority by inadvertently rejecting white stereotypes about the behaviour of black men. Bigger is entrusted with Mary's welfare and is expected by the Daltons to be passive and dutiful. When he murders Mary and attempts to extort money from her family, Bigger undermines the racist assumptions of his white employers. In short, Bigger refuses to act as he is expected to act; he transgresses the behavioral limits irnposed on him by white hegemony. When Fred Daniels descends underground, he too, both literally and metaphorically, transgresses the limits of white authority's narrow perception. As a black man, Daniels is considered by white authorities to be either a criminal or a potential scapegoat. When he voluntarily returns from the underground to confront Lawson, Murphy and Johnson, Daniels threatens the officersl racist perception of blacks as predictable and inherently subordinate to whites. The police do not understand why Daniels has returned, and are anxious to regain control over him: "Who sent you here?ll Murphy demanded. ''Nobody sent me, mister, 'l he [Daniels] said. "1 just want to show you the room. . . .If "Aw, hels plumb bats, " Murphy said. "Let's ship him to the psycho." "No," Lawson said. "He ' s playing a game and 1 wish to God 1 knew what it was. l1 (68) Within the officers' racist assumptions, a lone black man would be unable to unsettle white authority. Murphy consequently assumes that someone else is behind Danielsf disturbing behaviour. When his charges are denied, the officer seeks to discredit Daniels by declaring him insane. Murphy implicitly equates white suprernacy with sanity and therefore presumes that anyone who threatens white assumptions is mentally unbalanced. Lawson is equally desperate to re- exert his authority over the presently more powerful black fugitive. When the officers are not determining the "game," they are msettled. Like Native Son, "The Man Who Lived Underground" curiously ends with the seeming tritmph of white patriarchy. Wright's novella, however, concludes more despairingly than the earlier text. Native Son ends with Bigger smiling a "wry, bitter smile1' (850), as he awaits execution. Conversely, in "The Man Who Lived Underground," Wright depicts the violent death of an altruistic hero; Bigger's demise is merely anticipated by Wright's readers; Fred Daniels' is experienced. As well, unlike Biggerrs execution, Fred Danielsr death will likely effect nothing. Like his nationally covered trial, Bigger's death will be publicized and discussed. By contrast, Daniels dies silently, in total isolation. The novella ends with the "muffled roar" of the police car fading in the distance, and the lifeless Daniels "alone in the darkness, veering, tossing, lost in the heart of the earthl' (74). Nevertheless, Wright carefully avoids fashioning "The Man Who Lived Underground" into a simple protest piece against racial discrimination and police brutality. He expands Daniels' story from an incident of racial prejudice into an intensely symbolic study of individual and collective guilt. Daniels is cruelly oppressed but, in his confession, "I1m guilty. . . . Al1 the people 1 saw was guilty" (64-651, he becomes a syrnbol for al1 humans. As Michel Fabre suggests in his notes to the novella, "the man who lived underground is a cont-rary ~ve-, as well as an avatar of the oppressed Blackl' (Richard Wright Reader 518, rny emphasis) . Fabre's statement does much to illuminate Wright's interests in "The Man Who Lived Underground." The portrait of Daniels addresses both the American racial situation and a universal human condition. However, it is important to note that Wright's main focus in the novella is on the latter. Wright is more interested in Daniels as a universal symbol than as the rnere ernbodiment of a specific (American) cause, and more intrigued by the macrocosm than the microcosm. As Fabre notes elsewhere, Wright's focus in the novella is clearly on the universality of the underground man: The hero is an outsider whose colox is no longer important, moving Wright to remark to [Paul] Reynolds [Wright's editor] on December 13, 1941, "It is the first time I1ve really tried to step beyond the straight black and white stuff. . . ."(Quest 240) Wright's original manuscript for the novella exceeds 150 pages and includes graphic description of Daniels being beaten and tortured by the three officers. By de-emphasizing police brutality and racism in his final, published draft, Wright makes Daniels' radical rnarginality a human condition. His focus subtly shifts from the scapegoated individual to the blighted comunity, "Everyblachan becomes Everyman'' (Mayberry 72). Throughout the novella Daniels grapples with a fundamental existential question: 1s man self-detexmined or responsible to the community? He is subject (and initially, even sympathetic) to communal authority, yet he revels in the underground illusions of absolute freedom and persona1 autonomy. This alone does not distinguish Daniels from Wright's earlier characters. They too wrestle with the dialectic of self versus community (Lynch 135) Nevertheless, whereas Jake Jackson (Lawd Today!), Bigger and, later, Cross Damon (The Outsider) exalt the individual over the group, Daniels ultimately celebrates the community. He dies trying to commune with the other(s), his police oppressors* In doing so, Daniels subordinates the smaller cause to the larger one: the regional to the global, the racial to the human. As he descends the manhole and begins his journey, Daniels symbolically passes through three stages: death, burial, and rebirth, Wright marks these stages by gradually reducing the size of Daniels' grave-like underground cavern; as his symbolic grave becomes shallower, Daniels becomes less associated with death. Upon entering the sewer, for instance,

Daniels is obsessed with his own mortality. He fears for his life and senses death everywhere: "He was in danger; he might slide into a dom-curve; he might wander with a lighted match into a pocket of gas and blow himself up; or he might contract some horrible disease. . . ."(24). Daniels associates the underground with death, and Wright reflects this association in his grave-like description of the sewer as "two steaming walls that rose and curved some six feet above his head" (23- 24). As Daniels grows less concerned about death, the sewer walls become smaller and less grave-like. 'Though he wanted to leave, an irrational impulse held hirn rooted, To the left, the convex ceiling swooped to a height of less than five feet8'(24). After Daniels confronts and kills "a huge rat"

(24), the grave becomes so shallow that he can no longer stand erect, He crawls through a narrow passage and is symbolically reborn into a large, dry room. When Daniels is finally able to stand straight, he feels as though he has travelled "a million miles away from the world" (25). Like Biggerls killing of the rat in Native Son, the rat scene in ''The Man Who Lived Underground" is manifoldly symbolic. By killing the rat, Daniels is either rejecting his aboveground identity, or he is metaphorically eliminating the force relations which combined to form that identity. Ultimately, however, the ratvs precise signification in the scene is unimportant. Whether the rat is a metaphor for the oppressed--1ike Daniels, it is forced.underground and persecuted fox its appearance--or a symbol for al1 that threatens Daniels aboveground, its death (and Daniels1 subsequent passage through the narrow tunnel) marks the completion of Danielsl passage into the underworld. Af ter "crossing over, " Daniels "negotiate [s] a series of dream-like trials" (Soitos 18) which serve to divorce him not only frorn the world aboveground but also £rom his om cultural assumptions. The first such trial cornes when Daniels hears the "strange and detached" (26) singing of a black church choir. As he peers voyeuristically at the congregation through a crevice, he is "crushed with a sense of guilt" (26). However, as Daniels continues to watch the service, he loses his fear that "God [will] strike hirn dead" (26) for blasphemy. Being familiar with "the churches in this areal' (26), Daniels has long been conditioned to accept Christian notions of humility and forgiveness. When he views the service for the first time as an outsider, he feels contempt for the congregation's "abysrnally obscenell (26) ritual of "singing with the air of the sewer blowing in on them" (26). Rather than challenging their oppressors, the church members calmly endure lives of poverty and squalor. Daniels is incensed by their passivity, and he becomes harshly critical of not only the community, but also his own acceptance of its will and methods : A vague conviction made him feel that those people should stand unrepentant and yield no quarter in singing and praying, yet he had run away from the police, had pleaded with them to believe in his innocence. (26) Subsequent visions further dissociate Daniels from his former identity. For example, when he finds a dead baby half- submerged in the sewage beneath a second manhole cover, he is forced to reconsider both his social ties and his cultural assumptions. The tiny corpse ushers Daniels away from the community and, like the choir, leaves him feeling alienated frorn collective interests, As well, the baby's lifeless posture foreshadows Daniels1 own death: 'Water blossorned about the tiny legs, the tiny arms, the tiny head, and rushed onward. The eyes were closed, as though in sleep; the fists were clenched as though in protest; and the mouth gaped black in a soundless cry." (27. Daniels sees in this vision the futility of protest. The childls cry--1ike the congreqation's repentance--will go unheard, and will accomplish nothing. Augmented by memories of his own soundless cry to the police, the muted voice of the infant convinces Daniels to discard his former self in favour of a new identity. He becomes a trickster with no Eaith in his own ability to effect change and, as a result, no regard for social convention or consensual morality. Since the childls race and sex are not specified, its muted protest signifies the desolate condition not only of African-Arnerican men but of al1 individuals in modern society. The extent to which Daniels existentialiy rejects collectivism and social convention is further illustrated as he wanders the underground channels. He tunnels into a movie theatre, a grocery store, a jewellery manufacturer and the embalrning room of a funeral home. In each case, Daniels scorns the convictions and parodies the behaviour of unenlightened people. He pompously concludes that the movie viewers are unthinking dxones whose laughter is self-directed and whose doom is imminent: "he could not awaken them. . . . these people were children, sleeping in their living, awake in

their dying" (31). He feels the same cold contempt for the caretaker whose lunch he steals and for a white couple who, mistaking Daniels for a grocer's assistant, give him money for gxapes, Daniels' ambivalence towards human suffering escalates to the point where he must struggle to control his laughter while he watches a boy being beaten for stealing a radio that Daniels has in fact taken: "There came to his ears the sound of another blow. It was so Eunny that he had to clap his hand over his mouth to keep from laughing out loud. They're beating some poorboy, he said to himself, shaking his head" (55). In his underground dwelling, Daniels flirts with an anarchic and egocentric view of the world. He disregards aboveground associations of wealth, worth and power, papering his walls with hundred dollar bills and adorning the room with objects he has stolen from various shops: a meat cleaver from Nick' s Fruits and Meats, jewelry, a holstered gun and a radio from Peer's Manufacturing Jewellers. Daniels values money and objects not for their currency, but because they are symbols of so much disillusionment aboveground: "He had no desire to count the money; it was what it stood for - the various currents of life swirling aboveground - that captivated him" (49). In turn, his rejection of hegemonic rules and assumptions prompts him to doubt the very existence of inherent value and morality: "Maybe anything's right, he mumbled. Yes, if the world as men had made it was right, then anything else was right, any act a man took to satisfy himself, murder, theft, torture" (52). In questioning the individual's responsibility to the community, Daniels assumes a role that is similar to that of "the Signifying Monkey" as portrayed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Situated on the margins of society, the Signifying Monkey undennines and subverts literal or consensual meaning by playing with (and therefore, making indeterminate) signification. He parodies cultural noms, reverses the intended meaning of symbols and metaphors, and lampoons social dogma, When Daniels decorates the sewer with riches and decoratively hangs the cleaver and holstered gun, he too signifies upon the associations of aboveground society. He "wreaks havoc upon 'the signified'" (Gates 287) . The Signifying Monkey's trickery stems from his belief in the infinitude of signs. As he unfixes signification and proliferates meaning, he discounts conventional religious and secular notions of reality. Put simply, for the Monkey, there is no natural order, no inherent correlation between signifier and signified. As Gates contends, "Signifying turns on the play and chain of signifiers, and not on some supposedly transcendent signified" (287). The denial of a transcendental signified is central to Daniels' ambivalence toward human suffering. He subordinates collective interests to individual acts and, by doing so, challenges the assumption that there is an absolute element of cohesion among humans. When Daniels scorns the congregation, shows disinterest in "the nude waxen figure of a man" (525) lying dead on an embalmer's table, and laughs at the boy's beating, he declares himself Eree of connection to other people. He perceives no common signified between hirnself and those whom he watches. Nevertheless, it should be noted that "signifying" (under Gatesf definition) is "the language of trickeryVf(288), and the signifier necessarily perfoms on a tropic level: "[the Signifying Monkey] dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language" (286). Daniels' trickery is primarily non-verbal. Consequently, his manipulation of symbols is not signifying in the Gatesian sense. As well, the Signifying Monkey is a "master of techniquef' (288), a deft trickster who intends to disrupt. Daniels can be mischievous and even incendiary, but- -being a mere character in a narrative, and not "a vehicle for the narration itself" (287)--he lacks the ubiquity and omniscience needed to perfom the signifying monkey's narratorial role. When Daniels manipulates language, he does

so inadvertently. In the jewelry store, for example, he plays with a secretary's typewriter: Remembering vaguely what he had seen others do, he inserted a sheet of paper into the machine; it went in lopsided and he did not know how to straighten it. Spelling in a soft diffident voice, he pecked out his narne on the keys: freddaniels. He looked at it and laughed. He would learn how to type correctly one of these days. (543) Danielsf subversion of conventional syntâx (signifying) in the above passage is, inadvertent, Although the absence of capital letters and spacing in 'freddaniels'' is symbolic of Danielsr divorce from aboveground convention, there is nothing in Wright's narrative to suggest that this symbolism is intended-or, much less, noted--by Daniels. He does not intend to burlesque the business world. Rather, he fails in a sincere attempt to mimic the behaviour of office workers whose duties and lifestyles have been denied him. Daniels' laughter is self-directed and stems from his own ineptitude with technology, not from delight in his ability to parody hegemonic language. Daniels' second attempt to accurately mimic aboveground language is also unsuccessful. Poised at the typewriter in the undergroundcave, Daniels can no longer recall his own name. Nevertheless, he grows indifferent to the further loss of his aboveground identity and directs his language play elsewhere: He laughed, then pecked slowly: itwasalonghotday. He was determined to type the sentence without mistakes . . . he discovered how to make spaces, then he wrote neatly and correctly: ~t was a long hot &y. Just why he selected that sentence he did not know; it was merely the ritual of perfomiing the thing that appealed to him. He took the sheet out of the machine and looked around him with a stiff neck and hard eyes and spoke to an imaginary person: "Yes, 1'11 have the contracts ready tomorrow." (548-49) Here Daniels more consciously parodies hegemony. He writes a sentence which adheres to conventional rules of grammar and punctuation, and then playfully performs what he perceives to be the role of an office woxker. However? the extreme irony in Daniels' performance is again inadvertent. When he writes a prosaic, literary sentence and then discusses it as a contract, Daniels seems unaware of the metafictional undercurrent in his association. His performance more closely resembles Bigger's and Gus's game of "play[ing] 'white111(461) in Native Son than it does signifying. Like Bigger and Gus, Daniels is cognizant of (and initially disheartened by) the distance between his om life and the lives of those whom he spies on, but he is unaware of the multiplicity of meaning in his role-playing. Jubilant in both his imitation of office workers and his heretical pasting of money to the underground walls, Daniels mocks society: "He slapped his thighs and guffawed, He had triumphed over the world aboveground! He was free!" (549). Daniels fails to realize, however, that his triumph is dependent upon the world aboveground. Far from the contented solipsist, Daniels continues to focus on how society perceives him. His proclamation of freedom is followed by the lament: "If only people could see this!ll (549). His departure from society signals his return to society; his emancipation is a form of bondage. As well, his so-called liberation is based primarily on objects taken from the world he seeks to escape. He re-values the radio, jewelry, weapons and money and defines himself in opposition to consensual values. However, in doing so, Daniels again affirms his own reliance on the world aboveground. After witnessing the boy's beating, Daniels returns to the jewelry store to see a night watchman brutalfy interrogated for the robbery of Peerls. Again Daniels fights the urge to laugh at anotherlsmisfortunes, Nevertheless, when the officers retire for a cigarette and the watchman shoots himself in the head, Daniels is shaken from his merciless self-absorption, He frantically emerges from the manhole with "the drive to go somewhere and Say something to somebody" (561). Following his banishrnent from church for interrupting a service, the need for fellowship brings Daniels to the police station: "He would go there and clear up everything, make a statement. What statement? He did not know. He was the statement, and since it was al1 so.clear to him, surely he would be able to make it clear to others" (562). Eagerly confessing both his own guilt (570) and love for those whom he spied on (571), Daniels leads the officers to the site of his crimes, where he hopes to enlighten them: If he could show them what he had seen, then they would feel what he had felt and they in turn would show it to others and those others would feel as they had felt, and soon everybody would be governed by the same impulse of pity. (574) However, as he beckons the officers to follow him underground, Daniels is shot by Lawson. Like Bigger and Cross Damon from The Outsider, Daniels is ultimately unable to articulate his enlightenment. He contends that everyone is guilty and he yearns for universal love and pity. However, he cannot verbally convey to others the nature and scope of his epiphany. The police (and Wright's readers) can only surmise what Daniels wishes to reveal in the underground catacombs. And yet, Wright's message is clear: humans are forced to be alone. Fabre inversely relates this seeming conclusion in the novella to Jean Paul Sartre's maxirn in No Exit: "Sartre's words 'Hel1 is others' are literally reversed [in "The Man Who Lived Underground"], since, for Daniels, damnation is the absence of othersw (214). When he witnesses the watchman's suicide, Daniels realizes both the interconnectedness of humanity and the need for communion. The paradox is, of course, that enlightenment for Daniels--realization of the horror of isolation--is, by necessity, an individual act. Like al1 humans, black or white, Daniels is doubly bound to suffer either the tonnent of isolation or the guilt of knowing that he is responsible for the same condition in others. II Wright's disdain for American racism culminated with the writer's migration to France in 1947. From the summer of that year until his death in November of 1960, Wright lived as an expatriate in what he considered "a climate of liberty and tolerance" (Fabre 131). This movement away from America coincided with Wright's literary shift away from themes of American racism. Although he continued to confront racial issues in both his fiction and non-fiction, the scope of Wright's expatriate writing always extends beyond an American context. His post-American fiction focuses more specifically on the universality of human suffering, whereas the suffering in his earlier fiction often seems specific to African- Americans. Similarly, in his four post-American essay collections--Black Power (1953), The Colour Curtain (1956), Pagan Spain and White Man, Listen! (both 1957)--Wright illustrates how American racism rnirrors the bigotry in other cultures. Wright's interest in discrimination also extends beyond the question of race. He contends that al1 of humanity is bound, even if the source of bondage may differ from culture to culture or nation to nation; oppression--whether racial or cultural--is universal. Consequently, for Wright, the master- -burdened by the llheritage of original sin" (Brignano 135)-4s bound by psychological shackles similar to those binding the oppressed slave. Wright develops this theme in his third and fourth novels, The Outsider (1953) and Savaqe Holiday (1954). In profoundly different ways, these novels universalize their protagonistsl feelings of desolation and depravity. Like Fred Daniels, the protagonist in each novel (Cross Damon in -The Outsider and Erskine Fowler in Savage Holiday) lives apart from others, suffering in isolation the tonnent of modern existence, Aiso like the underground man, their existential bleakness is not a distinctly African American condition, Theirs are "problems that would beset anyone, black or whiteff (Fabre 167) . In contrast to The Outsider, which has received considerable attention, Savage Holiday has long been dismissed as an artistic failure. The short novel was rejected by Harpers (publisher of al1 but two other Wright texts) and received only one American printing--and no reviews--when published as a paperback in America by Avon. The few Americans who have since reviewed Savage Holiday harshly criticize Wright for what they consider structural and aesthetic weaknesses in the novel. Edward Margolies considers Fowlerls story "obvious" (141), "contrived" (144) and full of 'unnatural conclusion [SI " (148). Russell Brignano similarly characterizes the novel as "faulty in structure and inappropriately melodramatic in plot" (133). The critical dismissal of Savage Holiday receives its most profound support from the Library of America which excludes the novel Erom Arnold Rampersad's recent edition of Richard Wrightls major works . There is merit to the daim that Savage Holiday is "an artistic failure" (148). Wright's characters are at times unconvincingly motivated. As well, the narrative is often didactic and overly reliant upon Freudian psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, the novel is important on several levels and marks a crucial phase in Wright's development as both a writer and a thinker. Like !'The Man Who Lived Underground," Savage Holiday is a masterfully subtle and playful allegory about human anguish and the universality of human isolation. It is also an anomaly in the Wright canon, the only one of Wright's fictional works in which the protagonist is not African- American; Fowler is a white insurance executive. Consequently, the progression of Savage Holiday is antithetical to that of Wright's other texts. Instead of using the plight of African- Americans as a metaphor for al1 human suffering, Wright graphically depicts the life of an upper-class, elite white man and subtly parallels his anguish with the anguish of African-Americans caught in the double bind of racism. The novel begins with Fowler's seeming retirement from a senior executive position in Longevity Life, a New York based insurance firm. Although he is only 43 years of age,

Fowler's illustrious career with the firm has spanned three decades. He is touted by his colleagues for his faithful service and presented by Warren (his senior official) with a gold rnedal bearing the inscription, WELL DONE, THOU FAITHFUL STEWARD OF OUR TRUSTw (11). However, Warren's public praise and affection mask the truth behind Fowler's departure from Longevity Life. As Fowler reveals, "the whole thing was a farce, a put-up job! " (18). Fowler l s retirement has been involuntary, his faxewell banquet a facade. Under threat, Fowler has acquiesced to Warren's will and become "a party to his own defeatl' (18).

In his third epigraph to "Anxiety," part 1 of the novel (each of the three sections has three epigraphs), Wright invites a Freudian reading of Fowler's retirement: "in the very nature of a holiday there is excess; the holiday mood is brought about by the release of what is forbidden. -Freud's Totem and Taboo." The retirement party not only signifies the end of Fowlerls employment; it more importantly marks the first tirne in his adult life that he will not be subject to the routine and structure of work. Thus begins Fowler's savage holiday. In the absence of an imposed order, he feels "trapped in freedom," caught by a "haunting sense of not quite being his own master" (30). Fowler is no longer able to repress the demons in his psyche, and, as he contemplates an unpredictable and indeterminate future, he lapses into a nightmarish existence in which past inequity and pain pervade in the present. In forcing him to consider what was once inconceivable (forbidden)--that is, the corruption of his senior executives--the retirement party places Fowler into what Freud calls "the holiday mood." He is displaced not only from work, but also from his convictions, his emotional security and his adopted morality. For Fowler, "the forbidden" is self-reflection. Thirty years of loyal service to Longevity Life have imbued in him an unflinching belief in authority and protocol. He no longer questions (or even considers) 'right" and "wrong," but rather trusts in what he perceives to be naturally encoded rules. After he is dismissed from work, Fowler must not only query the natural order of the law, he must for the first time question his own long accordance with what that law demands: his complete devotion to hegemonic authority. As Wright's narrator reveals in his first lengthy description of his protagonist's psyche, such (forbidden) inward questions strike terror into the hearts of men like Fowler: There are still men of a deeper and more sensitive nature who, in their growing up, introject the laws and mandates of society into their hearts and corne in time to feel and accept these acquired notions of right and wrong as native impulses springing out of the depths of their beings and, if they are ever tempted to violate the absorbed codes, act as though the sky itself were about to crash upon their heads, as though the very earth were about to swing catastrophically out of its orbit. . . . Such a man was Erskine Fowler. . . . (30-31) The dramatization of Fowlerls alienation is as well crafted and suspenseful as anything in Wright's more celebrated fiction. The morning after the banquet, Fowler mopes pathetically around his apartment, wrestling with the loss of his work schedule. Before taking a bath, he steps outside to retrieve the Sunday paper. When a sudden breeze from the open bathroom window blows his door closed, Fowler is trapped naked in the hallway of his apartment block. Predictably, he reacts with horror to a potentially comic situation. He shields his body with newspaper and tries unsuccessfully to find the building superintendent. Fleeing from voices in the rising elevator, he stumbles clumsily ont0 his outdoor balcony and startles Tony Blake, a five-year-old boy who lives in the apartment next door to Fowler. Tony lunges to avoid Fowler's "wet, hairy body" (51) and falls ten stories to his death. Fowler responds to the childls death by hoisting himself through the bathroom window: "regardless of what had happened to Tony, he had to seek shelter for his nakedness" (52). Fowlerls response to subsequent events is equally curious. He vacillates between feelings of guilt and remorse for Tony's death and feelings of harsh indignation for Tony's promiscuous single mother, Mabel, whom Fowler considers ultimately responsible for Tonyls fall. As well, Fowler publicly denies any involvernent in the childls death, but becomes emotionally unravelled in the days after the incident. His worst feelings are realized when he learns from the first of two anonymous phone calls that there is a witness to Tony's fall: "a thin, tinny voice wailed in his ear, '1 saw what happenedl" (110). Fowlerlsmadness can be mapped through his love-hate relationship with Mabel Blake. He abhors her "ignorantly lustful" (101) behaviour and dismisses her as "a little whore" (123). Nevertheless, as he becomes increasingly anxious about both the anonymous phone calls and the interna1 threat of his own repressed emotions, he moves closer to her. He consoles her by arranging Tony's funeral, and then impetuously proposes marriage. However, Fowler's relationship with women is both the cause and the effect of his anxiety, and his romantic overtures to Mabel only exacerbate his condition. Marriage cannot resolve his dichotomous image of women nor can it force Mabel to become what she is not. From the start, Fowlesls marriage proposa1 is a futile attempt to control Mabel, an effort to make her one thing: "Held ask her to marry him. . . It was an executive decision--moral, clean cut. . . . Sheld obey him! She was simple and, above all, he'd be the boss; he'd dominate her completely. . ." (130-131). Aç Wright's narrator suggests, Mabel is the object of al1 of Fowler's conflicting desires: "His desire for her was so close to his rejection of her that he couldnft separate the two" (135). Although he is "seduced by the persistent image of Mrs. Blake's nude, voluptuouçly sinful body" (86), Fowler strongly identifies with her neglected son Tony, and is repulsed by her promiscuity. The violent climax of Savage Holiday results from this unresolvable paradox. Driven by recurring memories of his own childhood abandonment by a lascivious mother, and incensed by thoughts of Mabel's sexual conduct (and her lack of need for Fowler to protect her), Fowler hacks at Mabel repeatedly with a stainless steel butcher knife. As is the case in earlier Wright fiction, violence has both a soothing and enlightening effect on the protagonist in Savage Holiday. Mabel's violent death not only liberates Fowler from his psychological anguish, it enables him to assume legal and emotional responsibility for his crimes. After vomiting and washing the blood from his hands, Fowler stares "into the kitchen with a kind of sullen, stolid pride at the nude, bloody body stretched on the table" (214). He then calmly walks to the police station to "surrender" (215). Fowler is further related to other Wright protagonists in his inability (or unwillingness) to articulate the insight he has received from his epiphanic act of violence. When asked by the officer why he killed Mabel Blake, Fowler exclaims, "1 can't tell you anything" (220). The novel ends bleakly with Fowler silently awaiting prosecution. Like Bigger Thomas, Cross Damon and Fred Daniels, Fowler does not comunicate with the authorities; he will die in isolation. Critics have persistently seen Savage Holiday not as a continuation of, but as a break from, Wright's early fiction. This tendency stems partly from Wright's willingness to distance himself from his own reputation and style. Anxious about being pigeon-holed as a black protest writer, and aware that he was known as much for his ethnicity as for his literary achievements, Wright deliberately chose to set Savage Holiday apart from his other writing. Fowler is rich, educated, the seeming antithesis of "the black hero proper" (Fabre Interviews 167) . As well, Savage Holiday focuses more on the psyche O£ its protagonist than do Wright's other novels. Wright was sufficiently anxious about how critics would respond to his construction of a white protagonist--and so determined to have Savage Holiday read for its own merits-- that he initially considered publishing the novel under a pseudonym. In an ironically ungrammatical letter to his agent, Paul Reynolds, in March of 1953, Wright discusses both his desire to be known primarily for his literary talents and his reservations about the manuscript which would become Savage Holiday: 1 was of a mind to Say try to publish this under another name. What I am worried about is that people will read this in a light of saying that it is a Negro writing about whites. Which is true. But they might read it with more a desire to find fault than just to be moved or interested in the story. (Fabre 379) Reynolds liked the novel, but strongly urged Wright to reconsider his protagonistrs motivation. In Wright's original draft, Fowler voluntarily resigns at age forty-three, a decision that Reynolds thought implausible considering the characterrsobsession with work. By changing the nature of the retirement, Wright could more convincingly develop Fowler's unbalanced behaviour. More importantly, the change enables Wright to realize in Savaqe Holiday his difficult goal as an expatriate writer: to write a novel which was distinct from his American fiction without divorcing himself entirely Erom the poignant themes of violence and oppression in his best work. By undermining the jubilance of Fowler's retirement with Warren's cruelty and deception, and by constructing Fowler as an unwilling participant in his own demise, Wright evokes in Savage Holiday a non-racial version of the master-slave dialectic that pervades his early, racially oriented fiction. Consequently, the novel is as typical as it is anomalous in the Wright canon. It is not as easily labelled a "protest novel" as was Native Son by James Baldwin, but it graphically illustrates the brutal effects of oppression. And, while it "studiously avoids the racial probleml1 (Bakish 72), it is fundamentally concerned with the inequity suffered by African-Americans. Both the strength of Savage Holiday and its placement in the Wright canon are evident when the novel is read in relation to Abdul JanMohamedls essay "Rehistoricizing Wright: The Psychopolitical Function of Death in Uncle Tom's Children." In this essay, JanMohamed uses Orlando Petterson's study of the master-slave dialectic to elucidate Wright's complex depiction of racial oppression in his first published volume. After a brief summary of Pattersonls thesis that the slave exists within the nasrow rnargins between social and actual death, JanMohamed lists Patterson's three facets of power relations in the master-slave relationship: first, the use or threat of violence in one individual's attempt to control another; second, the capacity to persuade another person to change the way he perceives his interests and circumstances; and third, the cultural legitimation of the authority that is used to translate force into "right" and obedience into "duty" . . . . (193) JanMohamed subsequently contends that Wright's African- American characters in Uncle Tom's Children have in cornmon a relationship with hegemonic authority that is based on and maintained through the power relations formulated by Patterson. Each of the five novellas portrays African- Americans who, whether bound by violence or discursive control, comply with hegemony because they are "unable to resistl1 (193). When they are inevitably forced to resist white rule, Wright's protagonists are either killed or violently beaten. In each story, "the complex relations between master and slave remain a sublated state of war"

In the first book of Savage Holiday, Wright constructs the paradigrnatic master-slave relationship between Fowler and Warren (attended by his son Ricky). Fowlerls oppressed state is analogous to the slave's condition of "radical liminality" (JanMohamed 1988 192), and Warren--with his ability to dissuade Fowler from ruining the banquet--has the patriarchal authority of the Hegelian master. When the three men meet privately before the banquet, Warren masterfully coerces Fowler to perform his 'duty," a duty which best suits Warren. When Fowler momentarily resists Warren's authority and, as a result, threatens the slave economy of Longevity Life, he is threatened violently: "Fowler, the banquet room's filling up. . . people are waiting. . . you canlt back out now. . . be honourable ---" "If you back out now ---' "We1ll fire you!" Warren had shouted in a brutal rage . "We'll kick you out! Embarrass us tonight, after we treat you like a right guy, and welll . . . .l1 Warren's face had turned a deep red. "Donlt cross me, Fowler. We've been damned good to you. Now, you play it straight ." (24) Wright reinforces F'owlerls similarity to his earliex protagonists by punning in the above passage with his own name. Fowler is indeed treated "like a (W)right guy." ~ike Silas in "Long Black Song," Taylor in "Fire and Cloud" and, among others, Bigger in Native Son, Fowler rnust live within the narrow rnargins between the master's oppressive will and

his own self-destructive pride. Fowler is safe from ruin only if he surrenders his own dignity and further strengthens the position of the oppressive Warrens. He has no worth outside the master's economy. However, Fowler is made an oppressed everyman not merely through his similarity to other Wright protagonists or by the ethnicity of his creator, but through subtle allusions in Savage Holiday which parallel Fowler's predicament to the plight of African-Americans. By thrice aligning Fowler to Abraham Lincoln during the course of the banquet, and by imbuing the Warrens and Fowler with racially distinct features, Wright invites an allegorical reading of Fowler's dismissal and subsequent psychopathy. The first description of Fowler in Savage Holiday cornes shortly after the introduction of coin-like gold medal "which bears the profile of Erskine Fowler" (Il) . In accordance with the Lincoln-like placement of his portrait, Fowler shares the

emancipatorls imposing stature. As he rises to speak, Fowler is described as such: 'A six-foot, hulkyf heavy, muscular man with a Lincoln--like, quiet, stolid face, deep-set brown eyes, a jutting lower lip, a shock of jet-black bushy hair. . . .Il (11). Fowler himself carries this association further by quoting in his retirement speech Lincoln's first inaugural address. He addresses a jubilant crowd: "You know, as well as 1, that in a strictly physical sense we have corne to the parting of the ways, but in a wider, deeper sense we can never really part. We will continue to commune together through what that great saviour of Our country, Abraham Lincoln, called the 'better angels of Our nature' !" (14) Wright's repeated allusions to Lincoln are masterfully ambiguous. Although they serve to strengthen Fowler's association with African-Arnericans (the above passage compels readers to consider the racial themes of Lincoln's original speech), the allusions may also be read satirically. The Lincoln-like protagonist of Savaqe Holiday is, after all, a psychopathic killer. As well, the speech in which Fowler utters the "great saviourlsffwords is given as part of a grand scheme to deceive the public. Nevertheless, Wright does not seek to resolve Lincoln's dichotomous reputation. He merely invites readexs to consider Savage Holiday, and Fowler's complex behaviour, in terms of the issues which characterize Lincoln's era: race, emancipation and the preservation of the Union. Aiso ambiguous is Fowler's physical appearance. Although he is Lincoln-like, he does not share Lincoln's lankiness. Rather, he is "hulky," "heavy," and 'muscular," As well, his "jutting lower lip" and "shock of jet-black bushy hair" are as much African-American stereotypes as they are Lincoln-like qualties. Fowlerls so-called African-American features are made infinitely more significant when the Warrens are described as having "thin lips.ll After leaving the banquet, Fowler recalls "the lying, oily phrases spewing from Warren's thin lips." When he later remembers the tightness of "Rickyls thin lipsl' (24), Fowler reveals that the son has inherited more than just his father's greed and volatility. Significantly, only the position of master in the dialectic between the Warrens and Fowler is racially specific. The Warrens--with "thin lips" and eyes as "cold and blue as twin icebergs" (24)--are unambiguously cast as white patriarchs, but those whom they politically oppress and financially exploit are both black and white. Wright further augments the above associations by reducing Fowler's behaviour to an African-Arnerican stereotype. When Mabel daims that she may have seen someone on the balcony, she is scorned by her meddlesome neighbour, Mrs. Westerman, who subsequently remarks to Fowler, "shels just like al1 these loose women; they're a dime a dozen. . . when somebody catches 'em with a man, they start yelling: 'Rape!' its a wonder she didnlt Say it was a nigger she saw. You understand?"(105). By comparing Fowler to a "nigger," Wright is able to address his important early themes--in this case, the economy of xape in a racist society--while continuing to innovate and develop new matesial. As well, he is able to cleverly equate the plights of white middle-class Protestants and African-Americans. Wright's veiled suggestion is that, in his nudity and self-hatred, Fowler has been forced into a dilemma analogous to that suffered by disenfranchised African- Arnericans. Both are denigrated in a capitalist system by powerful white males. Although "The Man Who Lived Underground" and Savalfe Holiday are not protest novels, both may be read as dramatizations of a central premise in Wright's early political writing. Wright's warning in "How Bigger Was Born" that the "dispossessed and disinherited" (866) carry with them the capacity for "violent action" is fully realized during both Daniels' underground sojourn and Fowler's savage holiday. The violent marginalization of each protagonist results in violence against the same patriarchal society from which they are cast. Fred Daniels cornes to realize that he is not only a victim, but also a violator, Similarly, Erskine Fowler is cruelly burdened by a heritage of neglect and ostracism, but also guilty of inflicting that same cruelty on others. In each case, violence and oppression are perpetuated across borders of gender, race, age and class, In short, they are universal. Wright depicts the universality of oppression in markedly different ways in the two works. In "The Man Who Lived Underground," a radically marginalized African-Arnerican man studies society from a subliminal position and, after causing a murder, arrives at a rnessianic vision of universal desolation. The protagonist in Savage Holiday has no such visions. When he surrenders to police, he does so without Daniels' prophetic zeal. However, like Daniels, Fowler becomes an oppressed everyman. He is both black and white, both victim and abuser. Through the brutality of his experience, Fowler, like Daniels, becomes a symbol for the disenfranchised masses and an emblematic victim of a "universal problem." ''He can't howl if he' s dead": Power and Language in Black Boy and The Lonq Dream

According to Robert Stepto, "while 'How Bigger Was Born' answered one question--how Wright came to know Bigger-- it unintentionally posed another: How did Wright come to

escape becoming a Bigger?" (76). Wright's own answer to this question--that literature alone had saved him--can be used to elucidate al1 of his later fiction. Wright believed that racist whites had long used language and literacy to oppress blacks. But he also believed that rnarginalized blacks could literally read themselves out of oppression (as he himself had done). Language and power are, therefore, analogous in Wright's fiction; each can enslave and liberate, but neither can be absolutely controlled. In his often misread final novel The Lonq Dream, Wright returns to the rural South of his youth to again explore race and sexuality within a racially segregated community. In contrast to his earlier work, however, Wright's focus in The Long Dream is the analogous roles of literacy and power in a racist econorny. By understanding that logocentrism is endemic to racist authority, Wright's African-American protagonist, Fishbelly Tucker, is able to escape imminent persecution and, for the first time, positively affirm his own identity. In an effort to contextualize and illuminate Wright's autodidacticism and literary achievement, Wright scholars have long cornpared Black Boy to the autobiographical narratives of r'reaer1cK uouglass. LiKe wrignt, uougiass was empowerea through his writing, and he similarly derived from literature the courage and conviction to contest (and eventually negate) his own marginality in racist America. As well, both writers boast in their autobiographies of escaping oppression by "stealing" the master's literacy, and their respective flights--Douglass from his Maryland master in 1838 and Wright out of the Jim Crow South one hundred years later --are as much journeys of language as they are physical exoduses . After being sold and shipped to the Auld family in Baltimore, Douglass is taught the alphabet by his initially benevolent mistress, Sophie. But Douglass' lessons end abruptly when Sophie is forbidden by her husband to further educate the slave. As Douglass attests, however, Mr. Auld's intervention cornes "entirely too late" (121). Determined to read, Douglass continues his education in the street, trading bread for lessons from literate white children. Reading prof oundly changes Douglass : the increase of knowledge was attended with bitter, as well as sweet results. The more 1 read, the more 1 was led to abhor and detest slavery and my enslavers. . . -1 was no longer the light-hearted, gleesorne boy, full of mirth as when I landed first in Baltimore. Knowledge had come. (124-125) Wright's initial reaction to literature is equally mixed: In buoying me up, reading also cast me dom, made me see what was possible, what I had missed. My tension returned, new, terrible, bitter, surging, almost too great to be contained. 1 no longer felt that the world about me was hostile; 1 knew it. A million times 1 asked myself what 1 could do to Save myself, and there were no answers. 1 seemed forever condemned, ringed by walls. (BB- 239) It should be noted that Douglass--as a slave--faces a harsher penalty for reading and writing than Wright. Nevertheless, the pursuit of literacy is for both writers a dangerous obsession. Like Douglass, Wright is forbidden by whites to read--blacks are denied access to the Memphis library--and, threatened by hostile CO-workers, he must keep his reading a secret. Furthemore, Wright too obtains books by cleverly manipulating white authority. Posing as an illiterate errand boy, he uses a forged note and the library card of a liberal white CO-worker to borrow books. The essays and novels of H.L. Mencken, Joseph Conrad, and Theodore Dreiser inspire Wright in the same way that the speeches of Sheridan, Lord Chatham and William Pitt inspire Douglass. He is afforded "new ways of looking and seeing" (E 238) and imbued with a sense of the disproportionate suffering of blacks in America. More importantly, however, Wright discovers through reading that "words [can] be weapons" (237), and that language is inherently political. The discovery that language is political both depresses and delights Douglass and Wright. Both writers grasp through reading the enormity of their burden as black men in America. However, they are "buoyed up'' by the awareness that the power of/in language is not limited to racist whites. No individual or group ultimately controls what words signify; African- Americans can also be empowered through language. The effect of this discovery on Wright cannot be understated. Not only does it compel him to write, it informs the central themes in his fiction. In al1 of Wright's major works, signification in language (and as a result, power) is indeteminate and unharnessed; none of Wright's characters (white or black) has absolute power over others. For example, white hegemony in Native Son is vulnerable to Bigger's deceitful use of language. Both in speech and in writing, Bigger scapegoats Jan Erlone for Mary's disappearance; using words as weapons, Bigger undermines white authority. Similarly, Cross Damon (The Outsider) prospers when others misunderstand and underestimate his use of language. Playing with predominant misconceptions about African-Americans as barely literate and as intellectually shallow, Damon cunningly usurps white hegemony of its power. In effect, he tells people what they want to hear in order to undermine their authority. Both Bigger and Cross are empowered through their political use of language. Wright's autobiographical persona uses words in precisely the same way; he manipulates others with language. And it is important to note that he does so throughout Black Boy. Long before he is literate, ~ichard'manipulates others

'since many of the episodes in Black Boy are purely fictional, it is important to differentiate between Wright and his autobiographical persona. To make this differentiation less disruptive, 1 will hereafter refer to with his speech. Consequently, for al1 of his praise for Mencken and Dreiser, Wright resists giving white writers full credit for the black boy's linguistic talent. Richard's literary epiphany in Memphis is mexely the consummation of what he has learned intuitively within the orality of Southern Black culture: that words can be used as weapons. Richard's first lesson in the power of language comes violently in the opening scene of Black Boy. Grandmother Wright is ill, and the four-year-old Richard has been confined to one room and told to be quiet while she sleeps. Out of boredom, Richard begins throwing broom straws in the fire. The game culminates with Richard accidentally setting fire to "long fluffy white curtainsl1 (my emphasis 5) that he has been forbidden to touch. Richard's family escapes the ensuing blaze, but their house is destroyed. For his infraction, Richard is "lashed so long and hard" (8) that he loses consciousness. Wright constructs the Wright family in Black Boy as a metaphor for the Southern racist economy and uses this opening scene to mark his persona's initiation not only into boyhood, but also into Jim Crow. Like a segregated community, the Wright house is based on taboos. The Wrights fetishize the white curtains and prohibit certain behaviour by Richard and his younger brother, Leon. Since any infringement of the law

Wright's persona as "Richard." poses a threat to the Wright home, the boys must live in constant fear of physical pain. When a law is broken, punishment is swift and excessively violent. Consequently, before he is even aware of matters of race, Richard is incorporated into the master-slave dialectic; he must obey his master or be severely punished. In the short term, the punishment is a success for Richard's parents. It leaves Richard subdued and forces him to defer to their authority. However, the beating ultimately weakens the Wright family by changing both the nature and the intensity of Richard's opposition to his parents. Punishment forces him to contemplate his actions and identity, and he emerges from the fever brought on by the beating with both a heightened sense of isolation and an artist's sensitivity to his environment. Time finally bore me away from the dangerous bags [of fever] and I got well, But for a long time 1 was chastened whenever 1 remembered that my mother had come close to killing me. Each event spoke with a cryptic tongue. And the moments of living slowly revealed their coded meanings . (9) Fittingly, Richard's first life lessons are speech-centred; it is not as reader, but as listener that he deciphers the "coded meanings" of Southern life. The world reveals itself to Richard orally with a "cryptic tongue," and, without literacy or formal education, he experiences it pell-mell. He recovers from the beating by opening his senses and studying al1 facets of his environment. In the page and a half following the above quotation, Wright depicts the "moments of living," and reveals his persona's childhood responses to the landscape, climate and culture of the South. For example,

There was the wonder 1 felt when 1 first saw a brace of mountainlike, spotted, black-and-white hoxses clopping dom a dusty road through clouds of powdered clay. There was the delight 1 caught in seeing long straight rows of red and green vegetables stretching away in the sun to the bright horizon.(9) These "moments of living" perform a tutorial role in Richard's childhood that is analogous to the role played by literature in his adolescence. Like the writings of Dreiser and Mencken, the South is a text that affords Richard "new avenues of seeing and feeling" (240), and his response to this text foreshadows his epiphany while reading in Memphis. Just as literature later inspires Richard to write, the text of the South enables him to experiment wîth speech. In both cases, he realises that his greatest weapon against oppression (parental or otherwise) is language. Richard's subsequent challenges to authority are not the mischievous acts of a bored child but, rather, strategic plots born out of a rebel's alienation and contempt. Richard's first successful challenge to his parents' authority cornes after the Wright family moves to Memphis in 1914. Wright explains: [my father] came fully into the orbit of my concern. He worked as a night porter in a Beale Street drugstore and he became important and forbidding to me only when 1 learned that 1 could not make noise when he was asleep in the daytime. He was the lawgiver in Our family and 1 never laughed in his presence. (12) Once again Richard's father is a symbol for white hegernony. He is important because, as Wright notes, he denies the ''black boy" speech. In the presence of patriarchal authority, Richard must compromise his own behaviour, just as he will later have to conceal his books when walking past his white boss's desk at the optical shop. As Richard proves, however, the father cannot control his sons in absentia. When he is awakened one day by a squealing kitten, the father commands his sons to silence the animal. "'Ki11 that damn thing!' exploded my father. 'Do anything, but get it away from

here! '11 (12) After the father retreats into the house, the sons discuss the meaning of his words. "He said for us to kill the kitten,ll 1 told rny brother . ''He didnlt mean it," my brother said. "He did, and 1 lm going to kill 'im. " "Then he will howl, 'l my brother said. "He canlt howl if hels dead," 1 said. (12) There is a murderous undertone in young Richard's words; he aims to symbolically kill his father. By subverting the

intended meaning of hiç father s "rash words" ( 13) , Richard-- to use Derridean terms--cornits patricide (Derrida 77); he symbolically kills his father by no longer recognising his parental authority. Like the dead kitten, the dead father

(killed by the usurpative son) "canlt howl ." While Wright struggles against the fatherls authority, his younger brother, Leon, seeks to reinforce it. In his struggle to preserve the father's intended meaning, Leon symbolises blacks who, having accepted "the master's" authority, facilitate their own oppression. Katherine Fishburn explains: As a result of living in constant fear and tension, the blacks enforce obedience to the code of behaviour drawn up by the whites, A black rebel lives briefly, often bringing disaster dom upon his own community before his death can be consummated by irate whites, (10) Leon fears his father and would rather indict Richard (his peer) than witness the violation of the father's system. To Save himself, Leon must dissociate from the rebel and tell his parents what Richard has done. Despite Leon' s (dis)loyalt y, however, Richard1s symbolic slaying is somewhat effective: the confrontation ends with the seeming triumph of the son over Eather. "You know better than that!" my father stormed. "You told me to kill 'im," 1 said. "1 told you to drive him away," he said. "You told me to kill 'im,ll I countered positively. "You get out of my eyes before 1 smack you dom!" my Eather bellowed in disgust, then turned over in bed. (13) It is the younger Wright's interpretation which stands at the end of the dialogue. The father's banishment ("get out of my eyes") warns the son not only to leave his father alone but to stop "reading" for him. In the dialectic between Richard and his father, Richard's intexpretation of "Ki11 that damn thing" becomes the thesis, and his father's intended meaning the anti-thesis. Knowing that he has been manipulated, the father naively demands through violence that he be given back authorial contxol over his own words. Richard does not entirely escape punishment, however. To the young boy's horror, he is forced by his mother to bury the kitten and repent to God in prayer: ll'Dear God, our Father, forgive me, for I knew not what I was doingW1'(15). The irony is that the young boy knows exactly what he is doing when he kills the kitten, and Wright's rnother, despite her efforts, cannot reinstate the authority of the absent "Father." Richard has learned the power of language; he has disobeyed his father and escaped a beating. The kitten incident typifies Richard's subversive approach to authority throughout Black Boy. By not subscribing to hegemonyvs reading of his environment, Wright undermines the authority that is based on that same reading. In church, Richard and his friends divest Scripture of its religiosity, using the words and rhythm of Bible passages in an unauthorised way. Sorne of the Bible stories were interesting in themselves, but we always twisted them, secularised them to the level of our street life, rejecting al1 meanings that did not fit into Our environment. And we did the same to the beautiful hymns. When the preacher intoned: Amazing grace, how sweet it sounds we would wink at one another and hum under our breath:

For Houston A. Baker, Jr., this passage shows Wright's persona "shaping a code that accords with the lean life of a black blues people's intense desire" (138). In their word-play, Richard and his friends supplant their culture's hegemonic text with a more personalised and colloquial code. As well, by re-wording Scripture, the boys change their cultural identity; they become authors--instead of passive recipients--of their culture ' s code. The lpfatherVs" text (the Bible) is replaced by the "sonls" secular, oral text. Of course, Richard's experiments with language extend beyond orality. It is, after all, as a writer that Wright will ultimately be known, However, Wrightls perception of language is fully realised in his persona's irreverent speech. Just as Richard uses words and phrases out of context, "re jecting al1 meaningVfthat does not fit into his environment, Wright continually subverts conventional rneaning and syntax when he writes. For example, when he uses Christian rhetoric in his prose, Wright strips away imagery that he considexs either incendiary or racially oppressive. While living with his pious grandmother, Richard is told by a "[black] preacher, draped in white robesf1(148), that he can be saved from mdarkness" (145) through baptism. When Wright later uses light and dark imagery in his prose, he does so with a sensitivity to the political power of language. In the final paragraph of "The Horror and the G.loryl' (the second section of Black Boy unpublished until 1977), Wright skilfully dissociates lVdarknesslVfrom its purely negative connotations while celebrating the ability of language to liberate the enslaved subject. 1 would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, 1 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. (365) The role of "darkness" in this passage is dichotomous. Like the preacher, Wright uses the term as a metaphor for anxiety and ignorance. However, he does not subscribe to the preacher's (pro-white) colour imagery; in the above quotation, words do not turn negative darkness into positive light. It is idfrom darkness that the echo sounds, bringing Wright both sustenance and self-awareness; darkness is the destroyer and healer . The preacher in the baptism vignette unwittingly facilitates his own racial marginality. Through colour imagery in his speech, he reiterates Jim Crow oppositions:

godliness/devilrnent, salvation/damnation. As a result, Jirn Crow social dogma is inscribed in the preacher's religious sermons. Conversely, Wright symbolically dissembles racist/sermonic language by rejecting in his prose purely negative representations of darkness. The most telling example in Black Boy of Wright rejecting hegemonic language is found in the title itself. As JanMohamed notes, "the publication and the literary success of Black Boy becomes an affirmation, a vindication of his [Wright%] strategy of negating racist negationl' (299). In short, Black Boy became what the "black boy" (according to white racistsl use of the term) is incapable of creating. By associating "black boyf' with literacy, introspection, and artistry, Wright symbolically strips the term of its Jim Crow definition. "Black boy" becomes in Wright's hands something positive, rather than something derisive and oppressing. II Critics have long considered The Long Dream (1958) as Wrightls second--albeit fictional--autobiography and have read the novel in relation to Black Boy. Edward Margolies, for one, suggests A reading of Black Boy alongside The Long Dream is instructive. . . . Whatever else may be said of -The Lena Dream it would be difficult to denv that Wright wasdonce again reliving deeply embedded-maories as a primary source for his new novel. (149-150) Indeed, there are many similarities between the two texts. Both are episodic portraits of a young black boy who, alienated £rom an adulterous father and a weak rnother, becomes disheartened by the brutality and inequity of Jim Crow. Wright himself invited autobiographical readings of The Long Dream. In a 1960 interview, he not only admits similarities between himself and the novel's protagonist, Fishbelly Tucker, but he also describes Clintonville--the novel's setting--as "a small Mississippi tom I know quite well" (Fabre 198). And the similarity between The Long Dream and Black Boy extends beyond setting and characterisation. Wright reworks Black Boy's central theme--the role of language (both spoken and written) and literacy in segregation--into The Long Dream and symbolically illustrates in the novel both the uncontrolled circulation of written text in a racist culture and the paradoxical ability of language to both sustain and destroy racist authority. Furthemore, Wright expands on Black Boy's themes by investigating in The Long Dream the relationship between textuality and sexuality in a racist society. Jim Crow in Clintonville is based on the naive assumption that white hegernony can both govern the sexual behaviour of those whom it oppresses and determine the signification of/in the discourse between blacks and whites. As in al1 of Wright's fiction, however, power in The Lonq Dream is never fully arrested by authority; despite its attempts to fully control rneaning and protocol, white hegemony in Clintonville is always vulnerable. Despite its many strengths, The Long Dream has been-- with the possible exception of Savage Holiday--the most neglected and harshly criticised of Wright's fiction. First published in October of 1958, the novel sold poorly and was almost uniformly panned by American critics. Phillip Bonosky declares the novel to be a "failure as fiction" (338), and criticises Wright for being "unsympathetic with his people." William S. Poster also finds the characters in the novel unrealistic and deplores the "lack of unity in Wright's perspective" (341). Many reviewers, however, had more than stylistic concerns about The Long Dream; Wright was repeatedly attacked in reviews for being out of touch with ~rnerican racial issues. In a 1958 review of the novel, Nick Aaron Ford

Wright is fighting a battle that has already been conceded. . . . the battle has moved up to a higher level. The targets now are equality of job opportunity, the right to vote in the deep South, integrated housing, and integrated schools. (60) Saunders Redding takes Ford's attack one step further, al1 but declaring Wright dead as an artist.

The Long Dream proves that Wright has been away too long. Severing his cruel intirnacy with the American environment, he has cut the emotional umbilical cord through which his art was fed, and al1 that remains for it to feed on is the memory, fading, of sighteous love and anger. Come back, Dick Wright, to life again! (Gates and Appiah 61) Ford and Redding make two cornmon mistakes in their reviews of The Long Dream. First, they base their criticism on political grounds rather than on close readings of the novel, In their desire to discredit the expatriate Wright, both critics understate the severity of racism in post-War America. By 1958, Jim Crow authority had conceded very little in the so-called battle between races. Southern Blacks were still denied employment equity, voting rights, adequate housing and proper education, and, as evidenced by well documented police brutality in, among others, the Birmingham (1963) and Montgomery (1965) civil rights marches, institutionalised racism was commonplace in the South long after the publication of Wright's final novel. Secondly, Ford and Redding--1ike most Wright critics--underrate Wright as a symbolist. Despite the strong psychoanalytical undercurrent in The Long Dream, neither critic identifies anything beyond the most basic of Freudian symbols in the novel. Furthemore, neither critic reads the symbolic opening to the novel for what it clearly is: an allegory for the subordination of African-Americans. Consequently, Wright's reputation has been unfairly tarnished by insensitive and chauvinistic reviewers, and the strength of The Long Dream has yet to be realised. The complexity of Wright's symbolism in The Long Dream can be elucidated through Derridean deconstructive techniques. In particular, this chapter will use Derrida's deconstruction of the Phaedrus in "PlatolsPharmacy" to facilitate an allegorical reading of Wright's novel. The purpose of Derrida's essay parallels my purpose here: to resurrect a text which, due to I1blind or grossly insensitive reading[sJ1' (Derrida 67), has been unfairly dismissed as an artistic failure. More importantly, the polemic about writing which erupts in the Phaedrus smoulders on a symbolic level thxoughout The Lonq Dream, and Derrida's deconstruction of this polemic can be easily applied to Wright's novel. For Derrida, Plato's Phaedrus is essentially "the trial of writing" (67). The text begins with Phaedrus entreating Socrates to consider the merit of logography, speechwriting. Initially neutral on the subject, Socrates comes to see writing as a phamakon--a drug which, depending on the translation, acts as either medicine or poison. He becomes increasingly wary of a written textvsparadoxical ability to both preserve and distort a writerls intended meaning, Socrates conveys his suspicions to Phaedrus through an Egyptian myth in which the god Theuth petitions King Thamus to endorse writing throughout his Kingdom. Thamus considers writing unnecessary; since his spoken orders are obeyed, he "bas no need to wsite" (76). As Derrida points out, however,

Thamus l rejection (and indeed Socrates' rejection) of writing (the phamakon) ultimately stems from his anxiety about the fidelity of written texts. Whereas spoken logos can be reiterated or explained if misunderstood, written logos can neither be qualified nor accounted for by its source and can mislead its audience. In short, writing can be unfaithful to its author. In his discourse with Phaedrus, Socrates uses male genealogy as a metaphor for the procession of logos. Writing and speaking are synonymous with fatherhood--as Derrida explains, "[the] Platonic schema. . . assigns the origin and power of speech, precisely of logos to the paternal position1' (76)--and logos (also always male) has a filial relationship with its source. The difference between written logos and spoken logos is found in the physical relationship each has with its source, Whereas the spoken word is always attended by its father, the written word is, by nature, an orphan; he is necessarily divorced from his father. Derrida explains: Logos is a son, then, a son that would be destroyed in his very presence without the present attendance of his father. His father who answers. His father who speaks for him and answers for him. Without his father, he would be nothing but, in fact, writing. (77) Whereas the speaker--always pxesent when his words are spoken- -can defend and clarify the meaning of his speech, the writer is always at the mercy of his readers; he can neither account for nor resolve the inevitable ambiguities in his text. Consequently, the written text is an orphan "whose welfare cannot be assured by any attendance or assistance . . . [and who] no longer recognises its origins, whether legally or morally" (77). Derrida extends the metaphor even further, declaring the orphaned text patricidal. When his intentions and authority are no longer recognised by the son, the father is, in effect, murdered. The issues of origin and paternity raised in the Phaedrus pervade Wright's novel on two levels. First, white hegemony wrongly assumes that it has authorial (paternal) control over written texts in Clintonville. Police Chief Cantley receives bribes from Fishbelly's father, Tyree, in the form of cheques. When he discovers that, contrary to Tyree's assurances, the cancelled cheques have not been destroyed,

Cantley realises that he is vulnerable to his own signature-- the endorsed cheques can used as evidence against him in a corruption trial. In Derridean terms, Cantley's unattended logos commits patricide by no longer recognising its origins. Secondly, the issue of filial piety is addressed directly in The Long Dream through Fishbellyls troubled relationship with Tyree. Their relationship becornes a metaphor for the connection between source and logos. When attended by the illiterate (speech-centred) Tyree, Fishbelly poses no threat to white hegemony; he is-to use Derrida's words again-- protected and sustained by his father. After he is orphaned by Tyree ' s murder, however, Fishbelly becomes ambiguous and threatening to Cantley. In their first meeting after Tyreels death, the chief exclaims, "You're one of these new kind of niggers. 1 donlt understand youtl(342). Fishbelly is not the father who attends and explains his own speech; he is the ambiguous, unattended son who fosters uncertainty and prevents clarity. He is the orphaned logos. These, of course, are not Wright's terms. However, they do perfectly reflect Wright's primary focus in The Long Dream: the relationship between authorheader and text. From the onset of the novel, Rex (he does not yet answer to Fishbelly) is both a student of his environment and a text which his parents and peers very narrowly interpret, In this metaphorical examination of (both written and unwritten) texts, The Long Dream closely parallefs Black Boy; both books resonate with themes of language and literacy while tracing the intellectual maturation of their protagonists. In tems of sexuality, however, the two books are remarkably dissimilar. Whereas Wright avoids discussing Richard's sexual maturation in Black Boy, he carefully studies the sexual growth of Fishbelly in The Long Dream. More than merely a thematic addition in a retelling of (the largely asexual) Black Boy, sexual growth is fundamental to Wright's examination of American racism in The Long Dream. Indeed, identity and sexuality are one and the sarne for Wright, and the exnotional stability, intellect and social status of his protagonist are al1 tied to--and are perhaps

consequences of--his sexual maturity. As Katherine Ann Fishburn suggests, "Wright seems to propose in The Long Dream that sex is the primary cause of racial tension, for Fish's agony and alienation are both intimately related to sex. His ritual initiation is always sexually orientatedM(14). Wright establishes the relationship between identity and sexuality early. In the novel's symbolic first chapter, Wright's protagonist loses his given narne when, due to sexual inexperience and naiveté, he rnistakes fish bladders for fish bellies. Rex's identity is contingent upon his ability to perform an absurd sexual ritual, and when his performance is unconventional, he is mocked and stripped of his name. When the novel begins, Tyree is away fishing, and a protesting Rex is forced into bed by Mrs. Tucker. Alone in the dark, the frightened child thinks about Eish: the only image he could fonn of one came from his picture book, which depicted them as wild, ugly, six feet ta11 and hankering to bite. He drifted toward sleep and dreamed that he saw a huge, angry fish waddling toward him with a gaping mouth. Yeah, he'd crack it over the head with a stick and make al1 the blood corne out. . . . (10) What follows is a dream in which Rex picks up a bat only to find that the fish has been replaced by Chris Sims, an older neighbourhood boy. Chris pitches a ball which Rex hits like l'a big-league player" (10) and is then, in turn, replaced by a seven-foot fish who hurls the ball, wedging it between Rexls teeth. With its undercurrent of violent repression, Rex's dream is both an allegory for the subordination of African- Americans and a foreshadowing of Tyree's return. After violently confronting the huge angry fish, Rex sexually matures; he handles his bat "like a big-league player." However, the fish cunningly weakens Rex's resolve by assuming the familiar guise of Chris Sims (phonetically close to Christians). The fish then grows bigger and more powerful, and subdues the frightened child. The fish's role in the dream is analogous to white authority's role in American history; through manipulation and brute force, the fish disarms and silences the other. The dream ends with a batless Rex trying in vain to scream as the fish moves closer to swallow him. He has been denied speech and symbolically castrated by his aggressor. The subjugation of Rex's sexuality continues in the waking hours following his dream. In the morning, Rex must swallow a "lump of terror in his thxoat" (10). This, the first of several fellatio metaphors in the chapter, posits the boy as a symbolically raped subject; in a state of feax, he must ingest the unwanted lump. Furthemore, Rexls sexual inadequacy is implied in his inability to either fit his foot into a slipper or put his am into the sleeve of his robe. Frustrated by failure, Rex falls back to sleep, only to be beckoned by his mother: his mother stood in the doorway, holding a strange object in her hands. "DonPt you want to see the fishes your Papa brought ? " Oh, she was holding a fish! With parted lips, he advanced and stared at a wxiggling, gray shape. (11) Like the rat in the opening scene of Native Son, Tyreels grey fish--even when held by Mrs. Tucker-is a complex (yet racially unspecific) phallic symbol. Rex approaches it with "parted lips," ready for the lesson in fellatio that his father will soon teach him. "Rex, you don't seem to like my fishes." His father fumbled in the heap of entrails. 'Watch me. 1'11 show you how to make a balloon." "For real, Papa?" His father unfolded a bit of sticky fish entrail and put it to his lips and puffed into it and, 10 and behold!, the translucent, grayish bal1 swelled slowly, glistening in the morning's Sun. "Aw. . . Can 1 make one, Papa?" he asked breathlessly. "Sure. " His father handed him a fish entrail. "What is it, Papa?" "It 's the fishr s bladder, " he father explained. "Go on. Blow into it. . . ." (12) Rex is thrilled with what his father shows him, and he begins inflating what he mistakenly calls fishbellies. The mistake results in the loss of Rex's given name; his mocking friends confer on him the name Fishbelly,: a name that stuck to him al1 of his life, following him to school, to church, tagging along, like a tin can tied to a dogvs tail across the wide oceans of the world. Soon he got used to it and, in time, actually forgot the origin of it. He became simply Fishbelly and answered that name without hesitation. Among his friends he became known as Fish. . . . (13) As in the dream, Rexls initial tentativeness with the fish is justified. And again, it is a familiar presence that weakens his resolve; like Chris Sims, Tyree lures Rex into defeat. As soon as Rex (sexually) embraces the fish, he loses his name and identity. Despite its profound importance in the novel, however, the loss of Fishbelly's given name is routinely ignored by Wright critics. Fishburn alone considers both the complexity of the loss and the ambiguity of Wright's intentions in the scene . An important portion of his identity has become blemished: the king has become a lowly fishbelly. . . One wonders just how far Wright meant to go with the associations tied to these names. The possibilities are extraordinary: for example, Jesus Christ was called both "King of the Jews" and a "fisher of men"; through this name Wright could be tying Fish to Christ. . . . at the same tirne, "Fish Tucker" is a name full of latent sexual overtones. . , . (21) Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more symbolic name than Fishbelly Tucker: a metaphor for both the whiteness of Southern authority and the class distinction of Southern Blacks-like the belly of a fish, Clintonville Blacks always face downward and rise to the surface only in death--the name aligns Rex with both sides of the colour Une. Both a Biblical allusion to Christ and the long-suffering Jonah and a sexually charged metaphor (one who tucks fish), the name confers to the boy both secular and religious significance.

There can be no unequivocal reading of the scene. Nevertheless, the loss of "Rex" is perhaps most compelling when read allegorically: Rex (the King) is sexually subdued by the "wild, ugly, six feet tall" fish. By the time the King learns that he has been raped, he is powerless. He eventually becomes so used to being sexually dominated by the fish that he forgets both the nature of their relationship and the shame that his new name evokes. By this point, he is a willing accomplice in his own oppression. Such is Rex's progression; after his initial reticence, he is excited about participating in Tyree's absurd ritual of distending fish bladders. He exclaims, going to make a big belly this time" (12). Whether he means to symbolically nourish the fish or impregnate it, Rex's inflation of the belly serves to strengthen the creature which, in his dream, is so threatening. He facilitates his own subservience. The importance of sexual imagery in Chapter One camot be overstated. Rex loses his name when both his perception and performance of the inherently sexual ritual of "making balloons" are mocked and rejected by others. In this loss, he becomes a symbol for Blacks who, from the onslaught of American slavery, were robbed of their cultural identity by sexually intrusive white oppressors. Just as Rex loses both his name--and al1 of its kingly associations--and the ability to recall the humiliation of this loss, millions of slaves and descendants of slaves lost not only their persona1 autonomy and cultural identity, but also the awareness that this loss had occurred. Rex's assimilation into the sexually and racially discriminatory culture of Clintonville is cornplete when his own name is foreign-sounding and unfamiliar: "Soon he got use to it and, in time, actually forgot the origin of it. He became sirnply Fishbelly and answered that name without hesitation" (my emphasis 13). As implied by Fishburn, both the collective plight of Africans and African-Americans and Rex's persona1 loss are for Wright sexual in nature; like a slave, Rex's identity changes when his own sexuality is forcibly cornprornised.

As previously discussed, The Long Dream is as much a study of laquage as it is a fictional biography, and it is in the pages following Rex's name loss that Wright indelibly links Fishbelly's sexuality with the characterls textuality (both as a fictional character in a novel and as a subjugated citizen of Clintonville). Just as Fishbelly comes to represent multiplicity through both his symbolic emasculation- -bis dream and bladder-blowing identify him as both a castrated and raped subject--and his ambiguous nickname, he becomes increasingly coupled in the novel with written logos through his obsession with the racist tenets of Jim Crow. The episodic first section of The Long Dream, "Daydreams and Nightdreams," climaxes with the violent lynching of Chris Sims. Based on the murder of Bob Greenly (a bellhop accused of sleeping with a white prostitute in Black Boy), the lynching turns into a day-long riot in which Blacks are driven off the streets by armed whites. Fishbelly is taken home from school during recess and ordered by the hysteric Tyree, "Yeu twelve years old and its time you know!

Lissen, Fish: NEVER LOOK AT A WHITE WOMAN! YOU HEAR?" (64). Crouched in darkness, Tyree continues what Fishbelly intuits as an initiation. "Son," he said slowly, "soon sapvs going to rise in your bones and you going to be looking at women . . . Look, son, BUT DONTT LOOK WHITE! YOU HEAR . . . .When you in the presence of a white woman, remember she Ïneans death! (64-65) The white woman is, for Tyree, Jim Crowls most recognizable symbol, and, in order to Save his son, he endorses racist authorityTs narrow interpretation of that symbol; white wornan is to mean one thing to black men: death. Wright further reinforces the textuality of white woman in the following scene. While waiting out the riot in the bathroom, Fishbelly finds a "stack of old, yellowing newspapers" ( 68 . On the dusty top sheet was a photograph of a white woman clad only in panties and brassiere; she was smiling under a cluster of tumbling curls, looking straight at him, her hands on her hips, her lips pouting, ripe, sensual. A woman like this had caused Chris to die. . . . The woman in the photograph was pretty; there was no hint of evil or death about her. (68-69) In this case, woman is literally text, but her sensuality in the photograph belies the death and sterility she represents to Tyree. Fishbelly is confused by the conflicting depictions of white woman, and, in an effort to understand the schizophrenia of Jim Crow sexuality, he tears out the photogxaph and places it in his pocket. He didnlt know why he had done that; he had acted before he had been aware of it. But he knew that he wanted to look at that face again and he would never be able to stop thinking of what happened to poor Chris until he had solved the mystery of why that laughing white face was so radiantly happy and at the same time charged with dark horror. (69) After the riot, Tyree continues Fishbelly's initiation at the family funeral parlour where Chris'ç mutilated body has been bxought. Asserting that "somebodyls got to die" when "white folks git al1 rousedl1 (70), he considers Chris1s death a hidden blessing for the black community. Once again, he is the strictest adherent to white demands. The ensuing autopsy augments Wright's equation of sexuality and textuality. Intended to signify the rigidity of the racial border, Chris's body is lacerated with grotesque symbols of the lynch mobvs hatred. His flesh is puffy, his teeth are broken, and his nose and right ear have been rernoved--"they had robbed him of al1 semblance of the human" (75). Like white woman, Chris is made into a text by racist whites, and, for the people witnessing the autopsy, the intentions of the textls authors are clear. While viewing the body, Doctor Bruce, Tyreeqs coroner, exclaims, "While killing this boy, the white folksl actions were saying: 'If any of you do what this nigger did, youlll end up like this!"' (76). In the lynching, whites attempt to control both black sexuality and signification in Clintonville. Wright subtly collates these two goals in Chris's castration. With his phallus gone, Chris1s body--to the whites, a symbol for al1 blacks--will be unable to disseminate; no discursive or unsanctioned interpretation of the corpse will arise, and there will be no further sexual transgression by black men. However, as Wright illustrates in his earlier writing, these are futile goals. Power cannot be arrested on either side of a colour line. Nor can language and sexuality be rigorously governed by one party. Just as neither Bigger nor white authority can control signification in the Chicago of Native Son, neither whites nor blacks can regulate sexuality or control signification in The Long Dream's fictional Clintonville. Christsbody--1ike the yellowing portrait of a white woman--affects Fishbelly in a way that is unintended by either white authority or its vassal, Tyree. Both texts-- white woman and lynched black man--are intended to be prohibitive, but Fishbelly will learn to use them as objects of change . This is not to Say, however, that Fishbelly's eventual rebellion occurs by chance. Rather, his rebelliousness is inscribed in the very laws which forbid rebellion. As Earle V. Bryant observes, it is, ironically, white authority's prohibitions that ensure the continua1 transgression of Jim Crow statutes: Wright is pointing up to the irony involved in white Americals sexual racism, since what America has essentially done by placing the white female on a pedestal and then issuing to black males a rigid hands-off policy is to instil into the consciousness of the black male an exaggerated sense of the white fernalel s intrinsic worth. (59) With their constant warnings to black males about white woman's untouchability, white males undermine their own segregationist intentions. Rather than push black men away, their edicts bring them closer. The texts--both literal and symbolic--which white authority deems prohibitive have the opposite effect on Fishbelly. Rather than sharing Tyree's reading of Chris's mutilated body, Fishbelly uses the lingering image of the corpse--coupled with his curiosity about white woman--as motivation to challenge authority and leave the South. Long after Chris1s death, Fishbelly and his friend Tony are arrested for mud-fighting on private property. Handcuffed in the police car, the boys wait while the two officers order Cokes from a drive-in restaurant. They dismiss the waitress as "A dime a dozen" (Ill), but take offence to Fishbelly gazing at her from the back seat. "You staring at that gal, nigger?" he demanded. "Nawsir," Fishbelly protested with a tense whisper . "Then take your goddam eyes off her!" he ordered. "Goddamit, nigger! Stop looking at that gal!" the ta11 one shouted. (111) When, due to sheer terror, Fishbelly is unable to answer their comrnands, he is violently threatened by the officer. "I'm going to fix you so you won't never look at another white gal," the white man vowed through bared, shut teeth and moved to the rear doox of the car and flung it open. "Nigger, I'rn going to castrate you!" An enormous curtain of black appeared and dashed itself against Fishbelly's eyes. He had fainted . . . . (111) Once again, there is a curious association between sight and sexuality. The officers demand an almost authorial control over what the woman signifies. She is a sacred text that Fishbelly is forbidden'to read. When Fishbelly's gaze challenges their autonomy, however, it is his penis--not his eyes--that they threaten to remove. Fishbelly's sexuality is threatening, for, according to the officers, it can script the woman into something that, in Jim Crow, she is not allowed to be. Fishbelly's penis--1ike Chris's-4s considered the object of dissemination, and, through castration, the police naively think that they can regulate sexuality and control signification. After he is revived, Fishbelly is no longer a threat to the officers; he has shown them fear and, in doing so, reinstated their authority. However, Fishbelly understands that their ire can return without warning. Fearing their discovery of the photographed woman in his pocket, he painfully ingests the tattered paper. In one of his most brilliant scenes, Wright further associates Fishbelly with both white and black femininity by portraying oppressive white males as rapists, Swallowing the wad of paper is a slow and agonising performance of fellatio: he had to swallow that wet wad or be lynched, He centred the lump on his tongue and threw back his head and tightened his lips to swallow; a mass of paper stuck in his throat and he gagged. Again he attempted to swallow it, to choke it down, but he gagged once more, leaning forward involuntarily, feeling on the verge of vomiting. But, no. , . .he had to get that thing down into his stomach. (114) Finally, after further struggle, " [the officer' s] reproving voice [chokes] the chunk of balled paper down his throat"

At the end of his rape, however, Fishbelly is strangely empowered: llYes, he had eaten it; it was inside of him now, a part of him, invisible1' (114). The violent act has left him truly hybridised. He is both black and white--even in the contrasting colours of print and paper-, both woman and man, both person and text. As in Native Son, rape in The Long Dream--whether metaphoric or literal--has an effect which is inverse to that desired by white patriarchy, Rather than contain and fixate "the other," the officers have fragmented and multiplied their victim. Far from simplifying their rule, they have made it more complex and unstable. There are many long and rather lugubrious episodes in The Lonq Dream, and many of the almost gratuitous plot twists following Fishbellyfs arrest offset the novel's many strengths. Nevertheless, Wright's almost Derridean examination of authorship and paternity in the remaining two sections of The Long Dream deserves close inspection. Particularly worthwhile is Tyree's struggle with Chief Cantley over possession of cancelled graft cheques following a July the Fourth fire in one of Tyree's brothels. With Cantley's help, Tyree has illegally operated the brothel for over ten years. But when 42 patrons die in the blaze, Tyreels affiliation with the old Chief becomes dangerous. Unable to procure the cancelled cheques and fearing indictment for his involvement in the deaths, Cantley has Tyree killed. His death changes Fishbellyls long association with logos; no longer his father's attended speech, Fishbelly is now an orphaned text. He is writing.

As the struggle for possession of the cheques intensifies and Fishbellyls identification with text continues, the connection between authorship and paternity becomes central to the novells plot. Just as Cantley wrongly assumes that he can indefinitely account for his signature on the cheques, Tyree wrongly assumes that he can determine his son's behaviour in absentia. For as long as he attends Fishbelly, Tyree can control him. He saves Fishbelly from incarceration over the mud fight, and he accounts for al1 of his .son's involvement in the family business. In death, though, Tyree cannot attend to either the safety of his son or the meaning of his words. On his death bed, he commands Do what they say! They ain't got no claims against you, 'less you make 'em scared. . . . You won't ever want for anything. . . . Look at that letter. . . . Itlsmy will. Make like you believe what they Say. Let this blow over , . . . (297) Tyree's words are clear, and they remain clear in his will after his death: Fishbelly must submit to white authority and carry on the family business, Nevertheless, Tyree has no posthumous control over the power of his words. Nor can he control the actions of his son from the grave. When Fishbelly finally inherits Cantley's cheques, he defies Tyree's wishes and hides them from the Chief. The decision costs him both his fatherls empire and his own freedom. His feigned ignorance about the cheques lands him in prison on a fabricated charge of rape. At Cantley's behest, Fishbelly must "either give up the checks or lie in jail and rot1' (354). The Chief's ultimatum restates Wright's earlier collation of sex and writing. Unsanctioned possession of writing is as threatening to white authority as is the dissolution of the racial/sexual border. In Jim Crow, textuality and sexuality are synonomous, and the violation of either by blacks constitutes rape to those in power. Although it is not overtly concerned with literature? The Long Dream has the same focus as Black Boy and Frederick Douglass' Narrative. Each book examines the continual circulation of language and power in segregated America. Fishbelly's secretive possession of Cantley's cheques echoes both Frederick Douglass' and Richard Wright's childhood concealment of books from white authority. In its naive and paranoid will to subordinate others, white authority in each text attempts to regulate the flow of literacy across the racial border. In their possession of writing and literacy and in their independent thinking, Douglass, Richard and Fishbelly illustrate the futility of such attempts. As in al1 of Wright's novels and short stories, neither signification nor sexuality can ever be ultimately controlled. Power is never static, for sornething always escapes authority's narrow perception. The Long Dreamfs similarity to Black Boy and My Bondage and My Freedorn is apparent during Fishbellyfs two-year prison term. While in jail, he receives two letters from Zeke, a childhood friend, who is stationed in Paris after serving in World War II, The letters are to Fishbelly what the speeches of Sheridan, Lord Chatham and William Pitt are to Douglass and the essays and novels of H.L. Mencken, Joseph Conrad, and Theodore Dreiser are to Wright. They offer him "new ways of looking and seeing" (BB- 238), and provide him unexpectedly with an escape from the misery of Southern racism. In the first letter, Zeke writes, "1'11 be glad to get out of the army, cause I'm thinking of settling dom for a spell in good old Paris. Man, it' s good to live in this grayness where Eolks don1t look mad at you because your black" (360). Following his release from prison, Fishbelly abruptly leaves Clintonville. In a parting letter to McWilliams, Fishbelly's civil libertarian lawyer, he surrenders control over the

cheques: 'lI1m sending you these checks for you to use any way you want" (381). Unlike Tyree or Cantley, Fishbelly understands the futility of trying to control logos. Although he is the author of their destination, Fishbelly cannot determine what the cheques will signify in his absence. He has learned the lesson that escapes proponents of Jim Crow: no one can fully determine reality. Those that try are doomed to failure. Conclusion

The historical and cultural significance of Richard Wright's prose cannot be understated. Seven years before Jackie Robinson played Major League baseball and fifteen years before Rosa Parks began the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, Wright broke the so-called colour barrier in the United States when his first published novel, Native Son (1940), became the first book by an African-American to be offered by the Book- of-the-Month Club. The novel was a commercial and critical success, selling over 215,000 copies in its first three weeks of publication, and few writers and critics question Wright's enomous influence on post-war African-American literature. With few exceptions, however, Wright's fiction has never been considered solely for its artistic merits. Early reviewers often focus more on Wright's ethnicity than they do on his prose. On the cover notes to the first edition of Native Son, for example, Henry Seidel Canby tempers his praise of the novel by stressing the "race" of its author: "To the growing list of artistic achievements of a high quality, by a race which is, perhaps, singularly gifted in art, Native Son must surely be added, with a star for notable success." Whatever Canby's intentions, his focus on race undermines the otherwise high praise he gives Wright's prose, He promotes Wright as a successful "Negro writer," rather than as simply a writer. Wright was sufficiently bothered by such derision that he endeavoured in the fifties to publish under a pseudonym. Perhaps more hurtful to Wright was the erroneous agreement among many critics in the fifties that he was a historically significant, but artistically shallow writer whose time had past. James Baldwin was the strongest proponent of this view, and he summarizes this criticism in his often searing 1961 eulogy, VVAlas,Poor Richard.' He refers to Wright's ideas and attitudes as "obsoleteVVand VVhistorical" (151), and questions Wright's talents as a writer.

Richard Wright was never, really, the social and polemical writer he took himself to be . . . his notions of society, politics, and history . . . seemed to me utterly fanciful. I never believed that he had any real sense of how society is put together. (148) The implication here is that Wrightfs success as a writer was somehow undeserved. False though it my be, this daim had broad appeal by the end of the 1950's; by his death in 1960,

Wright was widely considered yesterdayrs novelist and al1 but blacklisted from the literary community, both in America and in his adopted France. Despite renewed interest in the Wright canon, the criticism of Wright's fiction--particularly his late fiction-- continues in the present. This is, perhaps, understandable considering the brilliance of the African-American writers who followed Wright. His protégés, Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, write with a lyricism and eloquence not often found in Wrightfs prose, and, at a cursory glance, Wrightfs fiction can appear shallow by-cornparison. However, Wright is a deceptively brilliant writer, and the aforementioned notions about him--that he is more important as a Black pioneer than as a writer, and that he became somehow outdated as a social critic late in his career--do not stand up to close readings of his fiction. As this thesis contends, Wright is a masterful writer whose collected works axe uniformly strong and consistent. More than a mere forefathex of great African- American writers, Wright is a novelist and philosopher, deserving a place alongside the great writers of this century. My central thesis is that, for Wright, al1 human relations, whether sexual, political or linguistic, are unstable and unpredictable. No individual or group in

Wright's fiction can fully determine reality or harness power for any length of time. Consequently, society's oppressors, regardless of how fierce and regimented they may se-, are ultimately as vulnerable as society's oppressed; this is the philosophical basis of al1 of Wright's fiction. In my examination of Wright's fiction, 1 have drawn upon post-structuralist theory. The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault, "The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Signifying Monkey" by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Dissemination by Jacques Derrida are al1 texts which challenge traditional Western notions of power and discourse, and each theorist shares Wright's disbelief in the power of authority. 1 use their texts here to illuminate previously overlooked aspects of Wright's fiction. At the root of The History of Sexuality is Foucault's contention that, since the eighteenth century, Western discourse has been wrongly based on a negative representation of power and sexuality. Foucault's movement away from the centrality of patriarchal discourse is reminiscent of Wright's challenge to white, patriarchal notions of authority in Native -Son. Gates' essay on the signifying monkey is the basis for my discussion of Wright's often surreal short story, "The Man

Who Lived Underground." Like the signifying monkey, Wright' s protagonist in the story, Fred Daniels, is a trickster figure who subverts consensual reality and mocks authority. By "signifying" on convention, Daniels dernonstrates that white patriarchal authority is merely a construct; again, no one is ultimately in control. "The Man Who Lived Underground" marks Wright's movement away from the more overtly racial themes of his early fiction, a movement that he continues in Savaqe Holiday, his only novel with a white protagonist, and in his two autobiographical novels, Black Boy and The Lonq Dream. In my discussions of these two texts, 1 use Derridean deconstruction to analyze Wright's complex use of language. Wright shares Derrida's obsession with the flow of power thxough language, and his metaphorical equation of discourse--both in writing and in speech--predates Derrida's theories by over two decades. 1 have endeavoured in this thesis to elucidate aspects of Wright that, due to neglect or oversight, have never been adequately COnSidered. Wright's Legacy 1s SUU rne source WL considerable debate, particularly among scholars of African- American literature. Few can discount his success in the early 1940's or the doors that his success opened for other minority writers who followed him. However, his legacy is so much more than this, Wright skilfully interrogates barriers of race, gender and culture, and his ability to convey in his fiction both the complexity and the indeterminacy of human existence establishes him as one of the great twentieth century American novelists. Primary Texts

Douglass, Federick. My Bondaqe and My Freedom. Chicago: Johnson, 1970.

Walker, Alice. "Coming Apart. 'l You Can' t Keep a Good Woman Dom. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1981. Wright, Richard. Early Works. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: The Library of Arnerica, 1991. Wright, Richard. Late Works. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: The Library of America, 1991. Wright, Richard. "The Man Who Lived Underground." Eiqht Men. New York: Pyramid, 1969. Wright, Richard. The Richard Wright Reader. Eds. Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre. New York: Harper and Row, 1978. Wright, Richard. The Long Dream. New York: Doubleday, 1958. Wright Richard. Savaqe Holiday. New York: Avon, 1954. Wright, Richard. White Man, Listen. New York: Doubleday, 1957.

Secondary Texts

Baldwin, James. Nobody Knows My Name. New York: Dell, 1961, Baker, Jr ., Houston A. "Reassessing (W)right : A Meditation on the Black (W)hole." Bloom, 1987: 127-161. Bloom, Harold. ed., Bigger Thomas. New York: Chelsea House, 1990. Bloom, Harold, ed., Native Son. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Bloom, Harold. ed., Richard Wright. New York: Chelsea Wouse, 1987.

Bxignano, Russell Carl. Richard Wright: An Introduction to the Man and His Works. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970.

Bryant,- Earle V. "Sexual Initiation and Survival in Richard Wright's The Long Dream." The Southern Quarterly 21.3 1983. 57-66. Ciner, Elizabeth J. llRichard Wright's Struggle with Fathers." Ed. C. James Trotman. Richard Wright: Myths and Realities. New York: Garland, 1988, 125-136. Cleaver, Eldridge. Sou1 on Ice. New York: Dell, 1970. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledqe, Consciousness, and the Politics of Ernpowerment. London: Harper Collins Academic, 1990. Davis, Angela. Women, Race and Class. New York: Random House, 1981. Davis, Angela. Women, Culture, and Politics. New York: Random House, 1989. Derrida, Jacques, Dissemination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Fabre, Michel and Keneth Kinnamon. Conversations With Richard Wright. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1993. Fishburn, Katherine. Richard Wright's Hero: The Faces of a Rebel-Victim. Metuchen, N, J. : Scarecrow, 1977 . Ford, Nick Aaron. "A Long Way from Home." Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993. 59- 60, Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. New York: Vintage, 1978. France, Alan W, "Misogyny and Appropriation in Native Son," Biqqer Thomas. Ed. Harold Bloom, New York: Chelsea House, 1990. 151-160.

Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. "The Blackness of Blackness : A Critique of the Signifying Monkey." Black Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Methuen, 1984. 285-321. Gate s, Jr., Henry Louis. "Binary Oppositions in Chapter One of ~arrativeof the Life of ~GderickDouglass an American Slave Written by Himself." Theory into

Practice:- - A Reader in Modern Literarv Criticism. Ed K.M. Newton. London: Macmillan, 1992. 225-242. Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, and K.A. Appiah, eds. Richard Wright. New York: Amistad, 1993. JanMohamed, Abdul R. "Neqating the Negation: The Construction of ~ichardWright. " The ~itureand Context of Minority Discourse. Ed. Abdul JanMohamed and Lloyd. New York: Oxford UP., 1990. JanMohamed, Abdul R. flPsychopoliticalF'unction of Death in Uncle Tom's Children." Native Son Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. 191-228. JanMohamed, Abdul R. "Sexuality On/Of The Racial Border: Foucault, Wright, And The Articulation Of 'Racialized Sexuality."' Discourses of Sexuality: frorn Aristotle to Aids. Ed. Domna C. Stanton. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan P, 1992. 94-116. Johnson, Barbara. "The Re (a)d and the Black. '' Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993. 149-

Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. A Richard Wright Bibliography. New York: Greenwood P, 1988. Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. New Essays On Native Son. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990. Lynch, Michael F. Creative Revolt: A Study of Wright, Ellison, and Dostoevskv. New York: Peter Lana, 1990. Margolies, Edward. The Art of Richard Wright. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1969. Soitos, Stephen. "Black Orpheus Refused: A Study of Richard Wriqht's 'The Man Who Lived Underground."' Ed. C. James ~rofman.Richard Wright: Myths and Realities. New York: Garland, 1988. 15-25. Tanner, Laura E. "Uncovering the Magical Disguise of Language: The Narrative Presence in Richard Wrightvs

Native-- - Son." Richard Wriaht:a Critical Persrsectives* Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993. 132-148.

Warren, Nagueyalti. "Black Boys and Native Sons : Female Images in Selected Workes by Richard Wright." l1 Ed. C. J&S Trotman. Richard ~right: Myths and-~ealities. New York: Garland, 1988. 59-77. Young, Robert. White Mythologies. New York: Routledge, 1990. APPLIED IMGE. lnc - 1653 East Main Street ,-. Rochester, NY 14609 USA ------Phone: 71 6/482-0300 ------Fax: il61288-5989

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