Richard Wright

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Wright's Continuing Protest

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[The Long Dream is] a novel throbbing with the same racial traumas that have done much to compel for its author a large interracial audience ever since Native Son, the classic Negro novel of social protest. That book appeared in 1940, and, judging by his latest, Richard Wright is angrier than he was then.

The color motif dominates all of Mr. Wright's novels to the extent that the social-historical context outweighs the literary. It is not only because The Long Dream is a more uneven work than the poignant Native Son that it is so disappointing. Hot with the fumes of an incendiary counterracism, it could not have chosen a less propitious time to be "timely." Certainly it is the most racist of all of this author's anti-racist fiction.

Richard Wright's work has in general been more race-conscious than social-conscious; its crusading timbre has helped to placard him for some as the spokesman of the American Negro. For the last ten years he has been in Paris, yet the time of this novel, which is set in the Black Belt of a fictive Clintonville, Mississippi, is exactly this past decade of his absence.

Besides taking Jim Crow in their stride, the Negroes in this story incur virtually every indignity and injustice known to their kind in fact or literature. Yet Wright is not martyrizing them nor exposing their forbearance to easy sympathy; he is deprecating their compliant submission as equivalent to conspiring in their own abasement. As he proceeds to hammer out his thesis, his writing, measured against its earlier attainments, registers loss in narrative sweep, gain in psychological acumen, with these factors operating at cross purposes.

Through the boy "Fishbelly," six when the novel begins, eighteen when it ends, the psyche of the contemporary Deep South Negro is explored; he is the chief medium for the almost incessant editorializing, which all too often entails scrubby prose like: "The emotionally devastating experiences … hung suspended in his psychological digestion like stubborn, cold lumps." Mr Wright means to see that the niceties get home. There is even "aside" comment on dialogue directly following much of it, making it look staged; more is the pity because Wright is very strong on dialogue. Actually the pervading feeling is theatrical: Wright is always on top of his material, always at the top of his voice.

The onus does not wear well on the unfledged hero. Never in his speech and seldom in his behavior does Fishbelly substantiate the restive, questioning, introspective boy of the author's exposition. His "sensitivity" is not projected from himself, rather is imposed through the numerous abuses he suffers at white hands. In effect his white tormentors are the plot's activators, though they are seldom onstage and when so are no more than hypothetical actors. Thus the novel's focus is not the black-white conflict in itself but the divisions it creates within and among the blacks; and this is telescoped by the friction between the boy and his father.

Just as he is being brutally awakened to the ghetto reality in which the Negroes around him live, Fishbelly begins to see Tyree, his father, as he really is: a man desperately trying to buy a cynical respectability and independence from the white folks.

William Dunlea, "Wright's Continuing Protest," in Commonweal (copyright © 1958 Commonweal Publishing Co., Inc.; reprinted by permission of Commonweal Publishing Co., Inc.), Vol. LXIX, No. 5, October 31, 1958, p. 131.

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