Chester Himes as Naturalistic Writer in the Tradition of Richard Wright and Theodore Dreiser
In a defense of naturalistic writing, Donald Pizer says that the naturalistic novel “can be written by mature male and female authors,” and he acknowledges that naturalistic writing is known to appear more frequently during periods of economic or social hardship.1 Pizer's first statement, a defense of female naturalistic writers, also seems to invite exploration of other previously marginalized groups of writers such as African Americans, a group historically subject to chronic economic and social hardship. Such an exploration could then trace naturalistic techniques and influences through mainstream American and African-American literary tradition to Chester Himes, a post-World War II African-American writer whose work bears further study.
A comparison of examples of African-American literature to some accepted standard of naturalistic literature would tend to support a hypothesis of naturalistic writing by African-American authors. Any evidence of the literary use by African-Americans of naturalistic and deterministic techniques should become apparent through a comparison of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy to both Richard Wright's Native Son and Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go.
Theodore Dreiser's influence on African-American writers seems a good place to begin a study of African-American naturalistic writing because Dreiser is more or less the accepted godfather of the naturalistic novel, and his most studied protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, is likewise the prime example of the deterministic character. Support for the premise of influence from Dreiser to Wright to Himes is easily traced. Wright was a self-educated man who definitely read Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others.2 Although Himes describes Wright as more friend than influence, he admits to reading Black Boy, Native Son, Uncle Tom's Children, and The Outsider as a young man,3 and Himes's frank admiration for Wright shows through in several of his interviews. From any writer's perspective, such extensive reading and admiration would have to result in some degree of influence of the admired writer upon the younger. Such influence carries Dreiser's readings of Spencer and Darwin through Wright to Chester Himes, who wrote If He Hollers Let Him Go in 1945.
Dreiser opens An American Tragedy with a commonly used and quite effective naturalistic trap: poverty. Through the introduction of the Mission and Clyde's poor family, ignored on the street by an indifferent society, Dreiser begins the inevitable development of Clyde's socioeconomic determinism. Clyde's deterministic nature is formed through the interaction of his family's poverty and his experiences at the soda fountain and the Green-Davidson Hotel; however, his so-called development actually presents a plot of decline. As Philip Fisher notes, “Behind the plot of decline is the Darwinian description of struggle, survival, and extinction. … Species sometimes survive, individuals never.”4 To reach the higher level of prosperity he seeks, Clyde must, within the confines of an indifferent or hostile world, survive both his poverty and his deterministic nature. He can survive neither. Neither can Bigger Thomas, Wright's protagonist in Native Son.
Wright also opens his novel with a description of the trap of poverty. Bigger lives in a tenement—a parallel to the Mission in Dreiser's novel—and his first duty of the morning is to kill a large rat that threatens his family. As the rat tries to flee and survive, so do both Bigger and Clyde later in their lives. In fact, the brutal hunter-prey nature of the scene mirrors one of the bases of Darwin's theories of evolution. Individuals that cannot adapt die off, frequently as prey to those...
(This entire section contains 2579 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
that can adapt. The rat, then, foreshadows the later situation of Bigger (as well as Clyde, in the parallel situation) as he struggles in vain against a hostile society, represented ironically in Wright's opening scene by Bigger's family.
Dreiser also uses space to symbolize the nature of the naturalistic trap in An American Tragedy. Both the Mission and Esta's small room so function symbolically. The pregnancy seals the trap for Esta, and Clyde realizes it finally: “Yet now he sensed quite clearly that she was not married. She was deserted, left in this miserable room here alone. He saw it, felt it, understood it.”5 Dreiser's influence is clearly seen here. Esta's situation foreshadows Roberta Alden's pregnancy with Clyde, just as the rat's flight foreshadows Bigger's later flight.
Wright's similar use of space occurs in the first scene of Native Son. The single, shabby room in which Bigger, his mother, sister, and brother live illustrates the trap of their poverty. Wright describes their morning ritual:
A brown-skinned girl in a cotton gown got up and stretched her arms above her head and yawned. Sleepily, she sat on a chair and fumbled with her stockings. The two boys kept their faces averted while their mother and sister put on enough clothes to keep them from feeling ashamed; and the mother and sister did the same while the boys dressed.6
Chester Himes also uses space to introduce the concept of the socioeconomic trap in If He Hollers Let Him Go. His protagonist, Bob Jones, awakens in his small room rented from a poor family, where he can hear the family awaken through the thin partition.7
Himes adds another variable to the theme of entrapment, however, a reflection of his times: traffic. As Bob Jones and his work crew car pool to the shipyard, Himes sets a scene of rush-hour isolation and fierce Darwinian competition for space. The scene presents a social manifestation of what Darwin considers the fiercest natural struggle. In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin says, “It is the most closely allied forms … which, from having nearly the same structure, constitution, and habits, generally come into the severest competition with each other.”8 In addition, instead of poverty as the oppressive element, Himes uses racism which is directed toward Jones and his crew even by pedestrians:
I sat there looking at the white couple until they had crossed the sidewalk, giving them stare for stare, hate for hate. Horns blasted me from behind, guys in the middle lanes looked at me as they passed. … After that everything got under my skin. I was coming up fast in the middle lane and some white guy in a Nash coupé cut out in front of me without signaling. I had to burn rubber to keep from taking off his fender; and the car behind me tapped my bumper.9
Of course, Hime's scene is not without precedent in An American Tragedy. At the end of Book One, Dreiser also uses automobiles in a chase, the archetypical fight for survival. After Sparser hits the girl, the car in which Clyde is riding becomes the rat pursued by a suddenly awakened and enraged society:
And the policeman at the next corner seeing the car speed by and realizing what it meant, blew on his whistle, then stopped, and springing on the running board of a passing touring car ordered it to give chase. And at this, seeing what was amiss or awind, three other cars … joined in the chase, all honking loudly as they came.
(139)
The device or scenario changes slightly, but in all three novels, the themes of chase and survival of the fittest repeat. In all three novels, therefore, the naturalistic writer presents like creatures in a social struggle for limited resources, be they prosperity, power, or simple social acceptance. Nowhere does Dreiser interpret Charles Darwin's “Extinction Caused by Natural Selection” theory better than through Cowperwood's Chicago battles in The Titan, and nowhere does Himes continue the technique better in If He Hollers Let Him Go than with Bob Jones's struggles in the shipyard to keep his position as Leaderman.
These themes of Darwinian struggle are always joined in some way with the naturalistic concept of entrapment. Pizer says that Dresier seeks to “depict some of the limitations placed on human freedom by the social and moral nature of late nineteenth-century American life.”10 In An American Tragedy, Clyde faces economic and moral limitations or constraints; in Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton, Archer faces social limitations;11 Wright and Himes present characters facing the same limitations generated most often (but not always) by racism.
William A. Proefriedt says, “Wright perceived the deception and despotism at the heart of the laws and institutions of the white society, and its cynical purposes in assigning demeaning roles to blacks.”12 Following Wright's lead, Himes continues the Dreiserian form of naturalism within the African-American context. Stephen F. Milliken says, “Himes had undertaken to demonstrate how a particular set of social circumstances can break a man, and he assembled the assorted disasters that demolish Bob Jones with the skill of a Grand Inquisitor.”13 Generally, African-American writers such as Wright and Himes seem to use racism to define naturalistic entrapment; the technique clearly evolves from Dreiser's use of poverty for the same purpose. However, of the two—Wright and Himes—Wright may be the more subtle and, paradoxically, the more powerful writer in his use of racism as entrapment.
Wright's novel Native Son actually comes closer to the naturalistic ideal developed by Dreiser. White characters rarely enter the everyday lives of blacks; when they do, they are typically benevolent in intent and sympathetic in authorial design. In Native Son, the Dalton family and Jan Erlone genuinely want to help Bigger to improve himself, just as Oscar Hegglund, Clyde's mother, and Samuel Griffiths genuinely want to help Clyde. In both novels, the intended help is actually damaging because none of the characters involved is aware of the depth and breadth of racism and poverty in society.
Here is the tragedy presented respectively and so well by both writers: racism and poverty have become social traditions. According to James A. Robinson, “Tradition rules, just as in primitive societies, and determines social behavior.”14 By extension, social behavior guides both the indifferent society and the deterministic individual in the naturalistic novels of Wharton—Robinson's subject—Dreiser, Wright, and Himes. Dreiser and Wright, in their masterpiece novels, have shown the destructive power of insidious traditions so deeply laid into the culture of society as to be as invisible as a virus.
Both Wright and Himes also follow Dreiser in the creation of deterministic characters. Dreiser himself defines the nature of his deterministic characters from his perceptions of life: “[M]an responds quite mechanically, and only so, to all such stimuli as he is prepared, or rather constructed, to receive—and no more and no less.15 Such is Clyde's life, each of his responses emanating from his innate desire for prosperity combined with his street education at the soda fountain and the Green-Davidson Hotel. Clyde does not know why he responds in the way he does to any given situation, and if he has no ready mechanical response, he becomes confused, angry, frustrated. According to Dreiser, “[i]n such instances the will and the courage confronted by some great difficulty which it can neither master nor endure, appears in some to recede in precipitate flight, leaving only panic and temporary unreason in its wake” (Dreiser, Tragedy 463).
Bigger Thomas, in Wright's novel, and Bob Jones, in Himes's novel, act in the same limited, mechanistic way. In Book One of Native Son, we learn of Bigger: “He was sick of his life at home. Day in and day out there was nothing but shouts and bickering. But what could he do? Each time he asked himself that question his mind hit a blank wall and he stopped thinking” (11). Bigger sounds like Clyde mentally debating the Roberta question. Bigger's life, in fact, mirrors Clyde's from the accidental murder to the chase to the trial and conviction, and finally to the heightened degree of awareness at the end. Like Clyde, Bigger reacts mechanically to stimuli as per his street education and nature.
Bob Jones behaves similarly. In If He Hollers Let Him Go, Bob is subject to an upbringing and life within a social tradition of racism and poverty. Like Clyde, he wants something more. He wants the dignity and social equality that he sees others enjoying as much as Clyde wants the wealth and social position he sees others enjoying. Neither realizes that to have those things is impossible for them. Milliken describes Bob as “a black man who stubbornly refused, for reasons he himself could not quite understand, to acknowledge the existence of the plainly marked lines of discrimination.”16 Like Clyde, Bob finds no help among those who care for him but cannot understand him because they themselves are also deterministic characters reacting mechanically. Alice's mother, for instance, who is a black woman, says, “You know yourself, Bob, a lot of our people are just not worthy, they don't deserve any more than they're getting. And they make it so hard for the rest of us” (52). She is a part of the social tradition and is unable to break away as is Archer in The Age of Innocence. The tragedy is that Alice's mother lacks even Archer's awareness of the entrapment.
Clearly, then, characters such as May and Lawrence Lefferts in The Age of Innocence, Elvira Griffiths, Oscar Hegglund, and Samuel Griffiths in An American Tragedy, Mrs. Thomas and Buddy Thomas in Native Son, and Alice, her mother and Homer in If He Hollers Let Him Go have all managed to adapt and live within the confines of accepted social behavior. The deterministic characters Newland Archer, Clyde Griffiths, Bigger Thomas, and Bob Jones are what Darwin would label variations—in their case harmful to the social order. According to Darwin, “we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed.”17 In the aforementioned novels, the only characters to survive—Newland Archer and Bob Jones—do so by recognizing themselves as products of society and accepting its conventions.18 One may, however, view it as a sign of progress that whereas Archer's capitulation is permanent, Bob Jones's seems temporary with his entry into the Army.
Despite what Wharton may have defined as necessary social and cultural progress, however, the naturalistic novel seems to have survived the years from Dreiser's turn-of-the-century writing to Himes's post-World War II novels as well as the shift from mainstream to African-American literature.
Notes
Donald Pizer, “American Naturalism in Its ‘Perfected’ State: The Age of Innocence and An American Tragedy,” Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, ed. Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (New York: Garland 1992) 131, 128.
Michel Fabre, The World of Richard Wright (Jackson, MI: UP of Mississippi, 1985) 27.
Michael J. Bandler, “Portrait of a Man Reading,” Conversations with Chester Himes, ed. Michel Fabre and Robert E. Skinner (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995) 108.
Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford UP, 1985) 171.
Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (New York: New American Library, 1981) 96. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper, 1940) 3-4. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (New York: Thunder's Mouth P, 1945) 4. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (New York: New American Library, 1958) 110.
Himes 13.
Pizer 131.
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (New York: Barnes, 1996).
William A. Proefriedt, “The Immigrant or ‘Outsider’ Experience as Metaphor for Becoming an Educated Person in the Modern World: Mary Antin, Richard Wright, and Eva Hoffman,” MELUS 16.2 (1989-90): 83.
Stephen F. Milliken, Chester Himes: A Critical Appraisal (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1976) 77.
James A. Robinson, “Psychological Determinism in the Age of Innocence,” Markam Review 5 Fall (1975): 1.
Theodore Dreiser, “What I Believe,” Forum 82 (1929): 319.
Milliken 75.
Darwin 88.
Robinson 4-5.
‘No Land of the Free’: Chester Himes Confronts California (1940-1946)
Expatriate Genius
