Native Son - Richard Wright [2]
If Wright took quickly to naturalism, two other intellectual forces modified his understanding of its ideas and helped to shape Native Son. The first was communism, or dialectical materialism; the second was Wright’s almost instinctive sympathy for and identification with the germ of the modern philosophy called existentialism—a sympathy and an identification that predate his years of residence in Paris following his emigration in 1947 and his friendship there with some of the most famous existentialist philosophers and artists. Communism and existentialism exist, in certain ways, in tension with naturalism. The former defines identity mainly through the instrument of economic determinism; economic, social, political, and historic factors, above all, determine consciousness. The latter, existentialism, shares with naturalism a gloomy sense of fundamental human relations but emphasizes the power of the will in creating identity. In his rise to intellectual maturity as represented by Native Son, Wright took upon himself the daunting task of reconciling sometimes conflicting elements of these intellectual traditions in order to represent reality as he understood it. Above all, he undertook to achieve as an artist, working in the form of the novel, a synthesis he would have found virtually impossible as a philosopher or an ideologue.
Between 1933 and 1940, or during the first major stage of his literary career, communism was clearly the major intellectual and political force of Wright’s life. In Chicago he seemed headed for a career in the post office but was also determined to become a writer. In that city (the setting of Native Son), he found a circle of like-minded young men and women when, in 1933, he joined the recently formed local branch of the John Reed Club, a nationwide organization founded by the party precisely to attract writers and artists to its ranks. If, as Wright later claimed, he had learned from the iconoclastic journalist H. L. Mencken how one could use “words as weapons,” the Communist party offered him and other writers, in the midst of the Great Depression, a sense of ideological and political purpose and consistency, as well as international connections.
As a creative writer, Wright started out as a poet, singing, sometimes in a fashion that showed the influence of Walt Whitman, the revolutionary potential of the masses, including the black masses. When he turned to fiction, however, in the novel Lawd Today! (posthumously published), the radical socialist fervor that marked his poetry was severely modified by a different vision, that of a particularly bleak urban naturalism mixed somewhat uneasily with elements of modernist fictional technique borrowed from various sources, including James Joyce’s Ulysses. Lawd Today! tells the story of one day in the life of a black postal worker and his three closest friends, also male black post office employees, in Chicago’s South Side. Dominating the lives of these men is a chronic desire for sensual gratification, mainly in the form of food, alcohol, and sex. If in a sometimes heavy-handed way, Wright seeks to document a typical day in their lives, the better to show the extent to which they are ignorant of any moral, intellectual, esthetic, or religious idea or ideal worthy of the name. The action of the novel, which takes place on Lincoln’s Birthday, is juxtaposed against a solemn tribute to Abraham Lincoln that casts a further pall over the aimless lives of these men.
Lawd Today! was rejected by at least a half-dozen major American publishers. When Wright’s first book, Uncle Tom’s Children, finally appeared, it comprised four stories or novellas; a revised