Native Son's Tragedy: Traversing the Death Drive with Bigger Thomas

Abstract

PETAR RAMADANOVIC Native Son's Tragedy: Traversing the Death Drive with Bigger Thomas He [Richard Wright] was, this argument tuns, led astray from the realistic and naturalistic styles of fiction to which his expetience in the segregated South gave rise by the heady influence of friends like Sartre and others like Blanchot, Mannoni, and Bataille, whose inappropriately cosmopolitan outlooks poured their corrosive influences on his precious and authentic Negro sensibility. . . . There is a further suggestion, shared by both those who exalt and those who have execrated Wright as a protest writer, that he should have been content to remain confined within the intellectual ghetto to which Negro literary expression is still too frequently consigned. His desires—to escape the ideological and cultural legacies of Americanism; to learn the philosophical languages of literary and philosophical modernism even if only to demonstrate the commonplace nature of their ttuths; and to seek complex answers to the questions which racial and national identities could only obscure—all point to the enduring value of his radical view of modernity for the contempotaty analyst of the black diaspora. Paul Gilroy, TL· Black Atlantic "Bigger, sometimes I wonder why I birthed you," she said bittetly. Bigget looked at her and turned away. "Maybe you oughtn't've. Maybe you ought to left me where I was." Richard Wright, Native Son What . . . does he who has passed through the experience of this opaque relation to the origin, to the drive, become? How can a subject who has ttaversed the radical phantasy experience the drive? Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis Arizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number 2, Summer 2003 Copyright © 2003 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-16 10 Petar Ramadanovic Paul gilroy's 1993 The Biack Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness is praised for offering a new understanding of Western modernity and of the black diaspora, and even for revamping Atlantic studies. Though no less path-bteaking, Gilroy's contribution to specific areas within the field of African American literature have not stimulated scholars with the same force. The fifth chapter of The Black Atlantic, '"Without the Consolation of Tears': Richard Wright, France, and the Ambivalence of Community," from which I have borrowed the above epigraph, shows, if nothing else, that a thorough reassessment of Wtight's oeuvre is long overdue. In this atticle I follow the general thrust of Gilroy's reading of Wright as I try to identify the basis for an alternative to the prevailing interpretations of Native Son and, in particular , to show why this novel should be read as a tragedy. PART I: TRAGEDY Apologue In what is perhaps the most revealing article in Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah's 1993 Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, Barbara Foley asserts that, as opposed to Theodor Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Richard Wright's Native Son is "grotesque rather than tragic, and Bigger's fate, emotionally gripping as it may be, is ultimately subordinated to Wright's bitter social commentary" (Foley 194). Foley thus affirms two commonly accepted claims about Native Son: first, that this novel bears many parallels with Dreiser's An American Tragedy, parallels which are also owed to the ur-text of both novels, Dostoievsky's Crime and Punishment. Second, that Wright's novel is a commentary on the social status of black people in the United States. Wright's protagonist's acts are determined, the logic goes, by the social position Bigger Thomas occupies as a black man in a racist American society. On this reading, Native Son is an excruciating testimony to the consequences of segregation. As Ishmael Read put it in a recent article, "Richard Wright knew what he was talking about. Not only had he been poor but as a youth worker he got to know many Biggers and, on the basis of this experience, was able to draw a character so convincingly that Bigger has become an archetype for the inner-cities' disaffiliated youth" (Read 169-70). The problem with which I want to start my re-reading of Native Son Native Son's Tragedy83 concerns Foley's understanding of tragedy, which is the basis of het judgment that Wright...