502 Making It New: 1900–1945several shades of meaning. Bigger is “a scared colored boy from Mississippi,” as his
lawyer calls him. He is a modern instance, a product of certain racial, social, and
economic practices. He is a historical paradigm, in that Wright clearly asks us to
connect the paths of “hate” and “hope” to the larger, historic possibilities of fascism
and socialism, the black nationalist movement and internationalism. He is even
a classic American hero to the extent that the “two worlds” between which he is
divided recall the two that have divided many other American protagonists, black
and white – and which have been traditionally figured as the wilderness and the
clearing. All of which is by way of saying that Native Son is as rich in meaning as it is
in terms of narrative medium. A fiction burning with a fierce sense of racial and
social injustice, it is also a major historical novel and a narrative fully and
provocatively in the American grain. Bigger may finally lack the “words,” the capacity
properly to articulate and so understand his plight. Utterly the reverse is true of his
creator who, in finding precisely the right words, wrote one of the most complex yet
coherent works about the indelible connection between where and who we are – our
being in the world and our knowledge of ourselves.
Following the publication of Native Son, Wright left the United States for Mexico.
Then, in 1946, he moved to Paris, where he spent the rest of his life. In Paris he
became associated with Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir.
They may have influenced his gravitation toward forms of existentialism noticeable
in his 1953 novel, The Outsider, about the search of a self-conscious black intellectual
for identity. Other fiction followed: Savage Holiday (1954) and The Long Dream
(1958). So did works of nonfiction that placed social oppression in a global context,
linking racism in America to colonialism in Africa and Asia: Black Power (1954), The
Color Curtain (1956), and White Man Listen! (1957). The move toward black
nationalism in many of these later works was to attract the Black Aesthetic writers of
the 1960s, who claimed Wright as a favored ancestor. What they valued in these
works, and in another way in Native Son, was what they saw as Wright’s militancy:
his willingness, even eagerness, to use art as a weapon. That militancy was and is
undeniably there. “A Negro writer,” Wright had written as early as 1937 in “Blueprint
for Negro Writing,” “must learn to view the life of a Negro living in New York’s
Harlem or Chicago’s South Side with the consciousness that one-sixth of the earth’s
surface belongs to the working class.” This meant, he explained, that “a Negro writer
must create in his readers’ minds a relationship between a Negro woman hoeing
cotton in the South and the men who loll in swivel chairs in Wall Street and take the
fruits of her toil.” “Negro writers,” in short, “should seek through the medium of
their craft to play as meaningful a role in the affairs of men as do other professionals.”
But to this Wright always added a caveat. “Writing has its professional autonomy,” he
admitted; “it should complement other professions, but it should not supplant them
or be swamped by them.” The relation between the world and the book was “not
always direct and simple.” “If the sensory vehicle of imaginative writing is required
to carry too great a load of didactic material,” Wright pointed out, “the artistic sense
is submerged”; and, in any event, art was “not a carbon copy of reality.” For Wright,
literature was coextensive with life. And the major task in each was to make a mark,GGray_c04.indd 502ray_c 04 .indd 502 8 8/1/2011 7:54:06 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 06 AM