[In the following essay, Mason offers an assessment of Wright's literary reputation, remarking on the confluence of contemporary influences on his work.]

In her essay on Richard Wright, Deborah Barnes' essay moves us happily, in the main, toward a reconsideration of African American literary and cultural history from the mid-twentieth century. One of the curiosities of that history is the fashion in which New York in general and Harlem in particular seem to dominate out of proportion to their real significance. In the symbolic geographies of our collective literary and cultural history Harlem appears just as New York does in that now famous cover of The New Yorker, where the shift in perspective suggests that there is nothing between Manhattan and California. In the same sense that any cartographical projection implicates a particular ideological positioning, so to do the “projections” of our various cultural mappings implicate informing critical perspectives, if not more.

Something similar may be said for an implicit argument in Barnes' essay. Relatively early in her discussion of Wright's relation to the Chicago School, Barnes indicates the composite authorship of “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” The surprise of Margaret Walker, perhaps among others, that Wright “had published the essay as his own,” may well be something of a figure for Wright's relation to African American literature as a general proposition. That is, our veneration for Richard Wright sometimes has a tendency to obscure the contributions of many of the writers Professor Barnes mentions (and others as well). We are speaking here of the politics of literary reputation, as well as the politics of criticism and theory. In this particular respect, Wright offers us an impediment, just as he offers us an opportunity. I would like to emphasize the opportunity afforded us to reassess Wright's literary reputation. His history gives us a chance to see the difficulties presented by a writer in motion, one rarely standing in one metaphorical space for any great length of time, a writer whose work evidences a matrix of influences.

From quite early on in the public critical discourse concerning Wright's career there has been an inclination to turn him into a far more static figure than he may actually have been. The argument I would like to advance here is that a study of Wright's career reveals as much about the sort of mapping we do as critics and theorists as it does about his work.¹ One thinks, for instance, of both Ellison's and Baldwin's explicit and implicit readings of their respective relationship to Wright. Even Ellison's well-known sidelong reference to “narrow naturalism” in “Brave Words for a Startling Occasion,” has come to be something of a figure for Wright's entire oeuvre. Something of a similar flavor happens in Henry Louis Gates' remarks on Wright in Signifyin(g) Monkey, though his is a far more nuanced treatment, and one I find persuasive. In all of these readings of his work, Wright seems more like writer, than a writer with a large and varied body of fiction.

Deborah Barnes' reading of Wright and of the Chicago School shares this inclination to “freeze” Wright in ways that ought make us perhaps a bit uncomfortable. Ironically, Wright and the Chicago School (but especially Wright) find themselves made more static in the middle of a critical destabilizing of the Harlem Renaissance's hegemony. One of the interesting things about “I'd Rather Be a Lamppost in Chicago” is its inclination to force us to rethink the horizons implied by our critical geographies. This essay joins previous discussions of the Harlem Renaissance in decentering that movement by means of a powerful critical skepticism. (One thinks here of David Levering Lewis' When Harlem Was in Vogue and Houston Baker's responses to it, especially in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance.) A suggestive error in Professor Barnes' essay indicates something of the static quality I'm trying to point out. When Barnes reads Lawd Today as “essentially a fictive adaptation of 12 Million Black Voices,” it is easy to understand what she imagines, given the connections between the fictive and documentary renderings of the black urban lumpenproletariat. But, in fact, what we have here is an anachronism, since Wright's work on Lawd Today dates from the early and middle 1930s (he unsuccessfully shops for a publisher in 1936).² Reading the manuscript as a reworking of the 1941 12 Million Black Voices may well be an error, but it suggests more powerfully something rather interesting and extremely problematic—the inclination to read Wright as an insistently realist or naturalist writer throughout his career, from the earliest days of Lawd Today's composition, titled “Cesspool” in original manuscript form, up to and including The Outsider (1953), a span of approximately two decades. Moreover, “I'd Rather Be a Lamppost in Chicago” constructs Wright as someone inclined to center a nationalist (as opposed to a strictly Marxist) reading of history, so that his fiction registers a “commitment to ethno-centered writing.”

To be sure, Wright places powerful emphasis on the place of black people in America's politics, its economy, and its racial imaginary. Just as surely, Wright experiments with modes of writing that might be called realist or naturalist. On the other hand, he may well be better seen as one who understood cultural nationalism and literary naturalism (realism, too) as modes of discourse more disabling than enabling. Put another way, a good deal of the Richard Wright's work cited in “I'd Rather Be a Lamppost in Chicago” can be seen as unpacking the very assumptions that seem to inform that work itself. In this light, two works characterized as most indicative of Wright's allegiance to the Chicago School—Native Son and The Outsider—actually spend a good deal of their time indicating the shortcoming of naturalism as a literary mode and current social science as a mode of inquiry, Wright's later public statements notwithstanding.

Both of these texts take as a central issue the insufficiency of the idea of law (legal, cultural, scientific, et al.) to account for the modern condition of blacks (and others as well). Wright's representation of Bigger, for instance, as unfathomable and unexplainable by conventional ways of understanding identity—race, religion, ideology, etc.—indicates that the society of 1940 has no way of accounting for him (and for all the other Biggers, both black and white, American and otherwise). The two modes of ideological discourse, white supremacist and Marxist, both fail. When Boris Max “groped for his hat like a blind man,” Wright makes explicit what has been implicit throughout the novel. Bigger is in some sense beyond ideology (supremacist, nationalist or Marxist) and as such indicates the failure of the social scientific perspectives grounding those ideological modes of thought. When Wright and Bigger rework Descartes' cogito, so that it now reads “What I killed for, I am,” they indict not only the social and economic conditions created by supremacist ideology, but also indicate the inability of social science to analyze the problem, much less to handle it.

In the same way that Bigger is too “big” for the conventional social scientific categories that would try to account for him, so too is Cross Damon. However, Damon's portrait expands the field of reference to include the black intellectual (and presumably the black writer). Throughout the novel, Wright's protagonist demonstrates the insufficiency of contemporary modes of understanding—one reason Damon's crimes remain unsolved is that they cannot be imagined. One doesn't need to be too much of a Derridean or a Foucaultian to recognize what Wright is up to here. He acknowledges the effects of supremacist ideology on black people and black culture, just as he does in Native Son. At the same time, however, he more powerfully indicates a willingness to see the problems of blacks within the context of larger and more complex frames of reference. Just as in the earlier novel, The Outsider implicates not only racism, but also (and just as powerfully) the oppositional strategies designed to counteract racism's effects, especially those grounded in social science and conventional philosophy.

In short, one way of imagining Wright is to see him and his works always in a state of “moving on,” never satisfied with where he is or what he has become, never content with how or what he is writing. What the act of writing does is in some measure unpack itself. Specifically, writing realism and naturalism reveals their shortcomings as modes of representation. Something similar may be said for Wright's relation to the Chicago School. Even as he made a place for himself in that real geographical space, in the realm of the symbolic geography, he was already on his way to being an expatriate.

Notes

1. I should make clear that by saying this I am not at all denigrating criticism and theory. Both are obviously indispensable exercises. Personally, I tend to be suspicious of the ‘elevation’ of the ‘primary text,’ especially since what constitutes that text (or any texts) is always open to debate.

2. See Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, 2nd. ed. (1973; Rpt. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993), 135-36.