欧宝娱乐

Richard Wright's Native Son is the story of a crime, though not so much the story of the crimes of the book's protagonist, Bigger Thomas, the directionless, impoverished amoral black youth eking out an existence in a cold and dark Chicago in the late 1930s. The crime, it goes without saying, is the subjugation of black people and the differing set of disadvantageous rules proscribed for them in the United States.

A book review on this topic could, with great ease, spill over the boundaries of 欧宝娱乐' 20,000-character limit, an unfortunate thing to realize, since the issues would have to touch on the fact that -- even though many things have improved in the nation since this book was published in 1940 -- there are too many fundamental problems that remain.

Wright did a brave thing with this book. He created a black male protagonist who commits two brutally violent crimes against human beings, against women, against black and white women, against two women who were trying to help him, no less. In other words, if Bigger Thomas is supposed to represent the de-facto "heroic" victim of white oppression, Wright has chosen to make that victim someone who is almost impossible for us to like or sympathize with. Today, it is easier for us to take a more sophisticated view of things and realize the moral complications inherent in Wright's conundrum. In 1940 though, this was dynamite, and not so easy to parse, both for black and white Americans who were either on the sides of fighting prejudice or sustaining it. Racists could point to Bigger Thomas and say, "See, that's how they are, at the end of the day." Social-justice whites and blacks could say, "Mr. Wright, we need all the help we can get right now, so why are you writing a novel about the black plight in America by showing the worst of the race? People won't understand this. Give us a hero."

In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (a book I liked far more, admittedly), the protagonist seems to have a right to his righteous indignation because even after he has done what he's supposed to do he finds out it's all a game designed to keep him down. He's intelligent, sensitive, sophisticated, and can articulate his outrage -- in other words, not "deserving" of the treatment he receives. He "deserves" equality.

Bigger Thomas deserves equality, too, of course. But as the product of an oppressive system, he is warped, damaged, confused, ill-informed, and misinformed -- a genetic mutant in a helix contaminated by toxins that infect the entire body politic. Wright dares us to look past Bigger as an individual, or, more accurately, to look past his unforgivable crimes. He seems to say: this is the worst of us, and who among you doesn't have ones like him? He is not us, and yet, to a degree, he is us. He's just as much a product of America as the Ford automobile. Where does Bigger's free will and his conditioning converge and diverge? Is he really wholly responsible?

One of the most interesting passages in the book occurs just as the police are about to close in on Bigger. He is hunkering down in an unoccupied tenement unit in hiding, and through the walls he hears a heated conversation between two South Side residents, both black, and both with definite opinions about Bigger and what he represents. One argues that, no matter how bad Bigger is, he is black and I would never turn in a fellow black man, solely on the principle that we, as a people have been oppressed by Whites for so long that I simply won't help them out. The other man argues that Bigger is a criminal who deserves to be punished, partly because he has brought even more wrath down on the black community. It's an interesting argument, and neither of the participants is wholly wrong or wholly right.

As the book painstakingly details the slow, inexorable, unremittingly bleak arc of Bigger's hopeless final days, we begin to understand, at least on some level, his angry sense of rebellion borne of his frustrations at his lack of viable choices in life. The story is even sadder when you realize his first murder is not premeditated, but is the result of a panicked response to protect himself from a known racial taboo. He is helping a white girl, but by being in her bedroom he has transgressed beyond the acceptable pale. Hiding that only exacerbates the crime into something that is conflated far beyond what he actually did -- it provides the racist legal system a field day, and who wouldn't believe that system over Bigger?

Native Son is a landmark, and, a must-read. It would be folly to even challenge its importance to black literature and to American literature in general. But, as is my right, I have to say I simply didn't love it. In some ways, I felt like it contained *too much* story. That's what I preferred about Invisible Man -- its impressionism rather than a reliance on plot imperative. Often, Native Son feels rather stolidly Dickensian. It is the anti-Great Expectations, and might easily have been titled No Expectations, and yet both books have the same narrative style, at least as far as it seems to me. For a 19th-century novel, that's OK; for something more modern, it feels a little quaint.

As I read this, I couldn't help also being reminded of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov comes to believe he has the right to kill, and finds idealogical justifications for it. Bigger Thomas is not much different from that. Both men stew in a kind of guilt, awaiting their fates in dark hiding places that cannot remain dark forever.

There also were times in Native Son where I felt I had stumbled into a pulp crime novel of the '40s, with its fast-talking unscrupulous reporters and tough-talking brutish cops. Oddly, I couldn't help but ascertain parallels between the book and Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's well-known play of the time, The Front Page, which was made into a great film called His Girl Friday in 1940, the year this book was published. Both touch on burgeoning radical movements of the time (though Communism is not mentioned outright in the film) and the killers in hiding in both are seen as products of their environment, poorly educated lower-class outsiders being manipulated by all sides of the political spectrum. Bigger is used by both left and right-wing forces in pushing their ideological agendas, and so is the inarticulate immigrant criminal in His Girl Friday.

One thing about the book that struck me as problematic is Wright's authorial need to overlay meaning to Bigger's plight or to plant grand thoughts in his head, in ways that are sometimes forced or obvious. Bigger, as is well established early on, is a limited thinker, an undereducated and unsubtle person. Yet, later in the book, relatively sophisticated philosophical ponderings about life and death seem ascribed to his thinking. It's perhaps possible when facing such looming issues in one's life that one might experience a sea-change in one's thought patterns or in one's knowledge of life, but I'm not quite convinced of the veritas of it here. What Wright says about what Bigger thinks may be true, but his character as previously described in the earlier parts of the book doesn't support this well. I don't begrudge the right or necessity of Wright to say things that cried out to be said, but the vector he chooses just didn't fully convince me.

I was moved, though, by the feelings of epiphany and regret within Bigger after his long jail discussion with Max the lawyer. For the first time in his life, Bigger has engaged in a thoughtful dialogue with another human being, someone supposed to be the enemy, and at that moment comes to realize the sad unrealized possibilities in life for himself and his people. It was probably best expressed later in the 1970s, when the United Negro College Fund TV advertisements intoned: "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." At this moment in the book, Bigger gains a taste of what a "realized" mind, within a context of a just society, might actually feel like. For the first time, he wants to live again. But it is fleeting and unreal.

Wright's occasional tendency to stack the deck at times can't be ignored, though. Possibly the worst example in the book is a newspaper article Bigger reads in jail while awaiting his trial. The article describes Bigger in such outlandishly racist ways, and quotes absurd white supremacist sources so heavily, that it simply comes off as unbelievable. No Chicago metropolitan newspaper in the modern era of 1940 would have published such a patently biased article. The article may have been more subtly racist, but not this much. Unless someone can produce evidence of such articles like that existing in a metro Chicago daily of the time, I'm simply not buying it. Wright cheapened his art with such things.

Wright's most over-arching argument about the history of oppression is placed in the mouth of, Max, the lawyer defending Thomas in the trial. In defense of Thomas, or more precisely, in defense of all black people, Max orates a beautiful, long, eloquently presented monologue, allowing Wright to say what he can't within the plot confines of the story. Even as I was admiring the speech -- what it said and how it was written -- I kept thinking: Are long-winded self-serving speeches like this actually allowed in real-life testimony, or do they simply exist in dramatic novels and movies?

I have to admit, the character in this book I would most like to read a novel about is Bessie, Bigger's tragic girlfriend. Unappreciated, hard-working, tender-hearted; her fate is perhaps the least deserved of all. On top of everything, she is dragged into a vortex that her faint protestations cannot stop. She gives us keen insight into the rationalizations of a woman sticking to an abusive relationship. Like Bigger Thomas she has few options, but as a black woman, she has even fewer.

Ultimately, Bigger Thomas finds the only sense of freedom he has ever known in the act of killing. He not only did what he's not supposed to, but he did the worst thing you could do, and nobody -- for once -- could stop him. And in submitting to his own death, he attains a freedom from the control of others. No one can ever get at him anymore.

This is a tough book, depressing as hell. I can't fight the feeling that I didn't love it. But I am rational enough to know that it's a must-read. Anyone who can get through this stark magnum opus deserves some credit for dedication. It forces us to face head on issues that people still deflect, deny or lie about.

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(KR@KY 2016)