The Transmedial Narratology of African American Protest Chris Hall
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A “Savage Mode”: The Transmedial Narratology of African American Protest Chris Hall University of Kansas (US) Abstract This article explores narrative in African American protest art by examining Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Chris Hall is a PhD candidate and Hall Center for the Humanities Native Son, alongside 21 Savage (Shayaa Abraham-Jo- Doctoral Fellow at the University of seph) and Metro Boomin’s 2016 rap album Savage Kansas (US). Hall’s work has appe- Mode. I open with a discussion of Native Son as a proj- ared in the International Journal of Transmedia Literacy and the SFRA ect of protest and with James Baldwin’s criticism of the Review, and is forthcoming in Ufa- novel, and of protest fiction at large. Centring Baldwin’s hamu: A Journal of African Studies; critique, this article explores the violence and horror of his dissertation, Worlding Moder- nism: The Political, the Postcolonial, the narrative worlds of Wright’s Bigger Thomas and and the Modern Body, focusses on Abraham-Joseph’s 21 Savage, in an effort to discover gender, race, and the nonhuman in if these works are capable of complicating Baldwin’s modernism and modernity, and on allying modernism with the postco- claims and expanding notions of what protest is and lonial and biopolitics in the creation how it operates. of new political possibilities. Hall By applying Marie-Laure Ryan’s concept of sto- also serves as Managing Editor for the Journal of Dramatic Theory and ryworlds, and the attendant “principle of minimal de- Criticism. parture,” the article lays out a narratology of protest. The social protest of these works, I find, is rendered [email protected] uniquely efficacious by the violence that takes place within their storyworlds, violence that operates as Facta Ficta Journal a visceral, unignorable force urging real-world change. of Narrative, Theory & Media nr 2 (2) 2018 Because of its impact on the reader or listener, violence and discomfort within these narratives directs that user toward extra-narrative action. In building on the trans- medial approach that Ryan encourages, and examining 156 FACTA FICTA JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE, THEORY & MEDIA TRANSMEDIALITY Savage Mode as a contemporary work of protest that shares a narrative technique with Native Son, the ar- ticle also discusses some recent engagements with rap music in traditional scholarship and popular writing. Throughout, I put forth the argument that both Savage Mode and Native Son function as powerful works of protest against real-world conditions, protests that operate via narratives that empathically involve their users in violent storyworlds. Abraham-Joseph’s protest, then, furthers Wright’s, as both are works that operate in a “savage” narratological “mode”—one of in- tense violence and discomfort which, read as protest, has the capacity to prompt an activist response in the user. Keywords rap and hip-hop; storyworld; Richard Wright; Native Son; James Baldwin; African American literature Published by Facta Ficta Research Centre in Wrocław under the licence Creative Commons 4.0: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). To view the Journal’s policy and contact the editors, please go to factafictajo- urnal.com DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3515123 TRANSMEDIALITY FACTA FICTA JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE, THEORY & MEDIA 157 “The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015: 32) Introduction Protest has been a central focus of African American literature and art since before the time when it began to be categorized as such. Writers in the mod- ernist period, such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, carried on and refined the struggles against slavery and legalized segregation of their fore- bears, reacting to the racial violence, hatred, and discrimination they encoun- tered in their own time. As they did so, these writers outlined an approach to artistic social critique that became a foundation for African American art to come. This article, which is founded on a narratological examination of protest in Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son (2005b), draws out some key elements of the narratology of protest by focusing on the various “worlds” created in African American protest projects. That is, it explores the machin- ery of protest by focusing on narratives through which protest is conveyed, especially on the reader’s (or “user’s”) experience of the characters, events, and sensations that make up those narratives, and the resulting experiential worlds constructed for an audience. By using the world-building theory of Marie-Laure Ryan (2014) to ground the distinction between the real world, in which an artist lives, and the artistic world they craft in order to critique reality, there is fleshed out below a widely applicable structure of the form of protest. This structure provides a framework from which to initiate discussions of realism, violence, and perfor- mance in Wright’s protest work and in that of other protest artists. The article also uses this framework to work transmedially – a technique encouraged by Ryan’s theory and her drive for wider consciousness of narrative in media – by investigating world-building as an act of narrative protest in contemporary rap 158 FACTA FICTA JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE, THEORY & MEDIA TRANSMEDIALITY music, through a parallel examination of artist 21 Savage’s 2016 album Savage Mode. The project demonstrates, as it explores these narratives, both the me- chanics of protest in narrative-based art at large and the continued workings of African American protest in the contemporary moment, showing how current African American art accesses a historically established “mode” of protest that emerges in forms and genres often discounted from scholarly discussions of social critique. Though each of these works possesses its own narrative world, with its own set of characters, conventions, and circumstances, their narratives participate in a shared endeavour to reflect critically on the real world. Native Son and Wright’s protest “The Negro writer”, Wright argued in 1937: who seeks to function within his race as a purposeful agent has a serious respon- sibility. In order to do justice to his subject matter, in order to depict Negro life in all of its manifold and intricate relationships, a deep, informed, and complex consciousness is necessary (1999: 86). In publishing Native Son three years later, Wright sought to do just this, bringing his own “complex consciousness” of the history and circumstances of African American life to bear on the struggles of protagonist Bigger Thomas. These struggles – from the opening scene of the cramped apartment Bigger shares with his mother, brother, sister, and a “huge black rat” (Wright 2005b: 5), through Bigger’s employment by Mr. and Mrs. Dalton and his subsequent murder of their daughter Mary, through Bigger’s murder of girlfriend Bessie and his flight from and capture by police, all the way to the trial that follows and ends in a sentence of death – mark Native Son as a quintessential novel of protest. As Wright put it in his essay on the origins of the novel’s central figure, “the conditions of life under which Negroes are forced to live in America con- tain the embryonic emotional prefigurations of how a large part of the body politic would react under stress” (2005a: 447). David Britt, reflecting on Native Son as a “watershed” moment in African American protest writing nearly thirty years after its publication, frames this protest a bit more specifically (1967). Britt notes that in Native Son it is “clear that white prejudice has instilled into Bigger the rational fear which results in the Dalton tragedy” (1967: 4). That is, by displaying the horrific conditions of Bigger’s life and bringing their im- pact on a human subject to a logical conclusion through the character, Wright sought to demonstrate that immense social and political changes were needed. TRANSMEDIALITY FACTA FICTA JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE, THEORY & MEDIA 159 Baldwin and critical responses Native Son was and remains controversial because of the brutal lengths to which it goes in demonstrating the monstrosity of what it meant to grow up African American in the first half of the twentieth century. As Kadeshia L. Matthews put it, “Bigger Thomas’s answer to the question of how a Negro becomes a man is violence” (2014: 277). James Baldwin, in his famous attack on Native Son and the protest novel at large in Notes of a Native Son, focused his critique on Bigger’s “hatred and his fear”, through which “All of Bigger’s life is controlled [and] defined” (1984: 22). It is this fear that “drives [Bigger] to murder and his hatred to rape” (Baldwin 1984: 22). Robert James Butler opened a 1986 article on Wright’s novel with an overview of critical respons- es to the brutal violence in Native Son, including discussion of several critics who, like Baldwin (1984), have lamented that Wright’s use of overt violence is detrimental to the efficacy of Native Son’s protest of systemic social injus- tice. Butler, however, uses a different tactic, mounting a case that inNative Son Wright “uses violence extensively but as a necessary and powerful reflec- tor of the deepest recesses of its central character’s radically divided nature” (1986: 10). The novel is one of incredible brutality and contains, for exam- ple, a detailed description of a young woman’s head being sawed from her already-dead body (2005b: 92). In Butler’s approach this empowers, rather than hinders, the novel’s message of protest. Baldwin concluded his takedown of the protest novel by claiming that its “failure […] lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended” (1984: 23).