Native son vocabulary

LECTURE NOTES - March 6, 2017 Literary Criticism on Richard Wright’s Native Son James Baldwin Denounced Richard Wright's Native Son as a 'Protest Novel.' Was He Right? Ayana Mathis and Pankaj Mishra The New York Times Book Review. (Mar. 1, 2015): Arts and Entertainment: p31(L). From Literature Resource Center. Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com Full Text: Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Ayana Mathis and Pankaj Mishra discuss James Baldwin's reaction to Richard Wright's ''Native Son,'' which was published 75 years ago. By Ayana Mathis I don't imagine many black people would have embraced such a grotesque portrait of themselves. James Baldwin excoriated the protest novel as a pamphlet in literary disguise, tenanted by caricatures in service to a social or political agenda. Its failure, he wrote, lay in ''its insistence that it is . . . categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.'' Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright's ''Native Son,'' cannot transcend blackness, and his blackness, in Wright's hands, is as ugly and debased a thing as ever was. Whether the book is a protest novel, or even whether it fails as a work of literature, are questions unworthy of a groundbreaking work that continues to inspire debate 75 years after its publication. More relevant is the matter of its resonance in our time, so distant from Wright's own. ''Native Son'' sold an astonishing 215,000 copies within three weeks of publication. Thus, a great many people received a swift and unsparing education in the conditions in which blacks lived in ghettos all over America. Of course, black people already knew about all of that, so it is safe to conclude that Wright's intended audience was white. And, in any case, I don't imagine many black people would have embraced such a grotesque portrait of themselves. Bigger Thomas is a rapist and a murderer motivated only by fear, hate and a slew of animal impulses. He is the black ape gone berserk that reigned supreme in the white racial imagination. Other black characters in the novel don't fare much better -- they are petty criminals or mammies or have been so ground under the heel of oppression as to be without agency or even intelligence. Wright's is a bleak and ungenerous depiction of black life. Wright knew this, of course -- his characters were purposely exaggerated, in part to elicit a white audience's sympathy and to shock it into racial awareness and political action. But where does that leave his black subjects? Let us consider some other works published in roughly the same era: Zora Neale Hurston's ''Their Eyes Were Watching God,'' Jean Toomer's ''Cane,'' Ann Petry's ''The Street.'' Like Bigger Thomas, the protagonists in these books are black, suffering under segregation and, for the most part, poor. Unlike Bigger Thomas, they are robust and nuanced characters -- not caricatures endlessly acting out the pathologies of race. Much of the black literature of the 1920s, '30s and '40s, explicitly or implicitly, was concerned with race in America. How could it have been otherwise? For better or worse, many of the characters in the literature of that period were representational to some extent -- black people in the real world were the correlative to black characters on the page. And this is significant, because when black writers affirmed their black subjects' full humanity, the scope of their novels included the expectation that the real world would change radically so that it too could affirm and acknowledge that humanity. I am led to wonder, then, about a character like Bigger Thomas. What future, what vision is reflected in such a miserable and incompletely realized creature? It would be absurd to deny the accomplishments of ''Native Son'' or to protest its distinguished place in the literary canon. With Bigger Thomas, Wright courageously defied those who would have preferred a milder character, a less provocative commentary on the ''problem of the color line'' (as Du Bois called it), one that would reassure white readers rather than terrify them.