Native Son - Richard Wright [6]
Native Son is a story that is at one level a seedy melodrama from the police blotter and, at the same time, an illuminating drama of an individual consciousness that challenges traditional definitions of character. Although at least one critic has written eloquently about the tragic dimensions of Bigger Thomas, to many other critics the most that probably can be said in this respect is that, at the end of his ordeal, Bigger possesses glimmerings of the ideals that might have allowed him to be seen as a tragic hero. There are many critics of the novel who find unconvincing even the modicum of change in Bigger at the end of the book. To Wright, it was also absolutely necessary that Bigger should learn from his ordeal; the problem was to find the appropriate degree of redemption or growth for a character who had been established at such a low point on the scale of humanity. Perhaps the change is unconvincing, as some assert; but it is hardly excessive. Wright resisted the promptings of propaganda—for communism, or for the vaunted American way of life, or on behalf of black middle-class sensitivity—and of liberal sentiment, which could easily have led him to patronize Bigger and transform him, by the end of the novel, into what Bigger never could be: a sensitive, “normal” human being. Tough-minded to the end, Wright refused to compromise his commitment to the truth, as he saw it.
Virtually from the day of its publication, the artistry of Native Son has been questioned and found wanting. Citing a category of writing identified by R. P. Blackmur, one scholar-critic called the novel (the words are Blackmur’s) “one of those books in which everything is undertaken with seriousness except the writing.” This is a common accusation against naturalist writers, as well as the literature of social protest in general; Dreiser, for one, comes quickly to mind. Certainly, Wright took chances in the course of writing this novel. At one point, for example, in defiance of artistic common sense, he crowds into Bigger’s cell almost every principal character in his story (three members of Bigger’s family, three of his friends, his lawyer Max, his prosecutor, the Daltons, Jan Erlone, and a minister). Wright conceded the improbability of such a scene but gave as his reason for keeping it the fact that “I wanted those people in that cell to elicit a certain important emotional response from Bigger…. What I wanted that scene to say to the reader was more important than its surface reality of implausibility.”
The long speeches in summation by the state’s attorney and the defense lawyer also seem to some readers to be an unnecessary challenge to their powers of attention and to underscore Wright’s didactic purposes in Native Son. Wright knew the risk, but hoped that his readers would pay attention to the arguments; they were both pieces of verisimilitude that replicated the activity of a murder trial and, at the same time, indispensable extended statements of rival intellectual positions on the matter of race in America. In a way, these lectures prove Wright’s artistic power, since Native Son is already unforgettable long before they are delivered; and these speeches do not detract from the power of the last scene, and especially the last page, of the novel. With some justification, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who in her introduction to the first edition of Native Son compared the novel to Dostoevsky’s “revelation of human misery in wrongdoing,” declared that there is “no one single effect