Richard Wright, community, and the French connection

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1995 by Eugene E. Miller

Literary-influence studies, in light of current theories that posit the pervasiveness of intertextuality, that discount "author" and its concomitant notion of "authority," are no doubt as inconclusive as any other form of research into or interpretation of imaginative literature. Richard Wright, unhampered by such theories or "anxiety of influence," admitted many European influences during his formative years. These influences show up in his deliberately cultivated, pseudo-cynical youthful "European" attitudes that allowed him in his early years to admire only those literary images of life that were foreign, and in the extensive bibliography of works he learned from, in order to develop his own art. Many of these works were by French writers.

His debt to French writers, as well as his appeal for the French, is signaled also by such things as his remark to Gertrude Stein that he always felt he would live in France some day. This comment was perhaps merely politeness, but perhaps also indicated an affinity between certain French aesthetic sensibilities or casts of mind and those of Africans and African Americans. Other suggestions of this affinity are the French early appreciation of jazz and the interest in African American writers by such French scholars as Jean Wagner, Genevieve Fabre, and especially Michel Fabre, whose thorough and admirable attention revived an interest in Wright when he was out of vogue in American literary study. Such an affinity might also have something to do with these two cultures' view of language.

Long before the current rash of deconstructionism, Henry-Frederic Amiel in 1873 discerned that

L'erreur fondamentale de la France est dans sa psychologie. Elle a toujours cru qu'une chose dite etait une chose faite, comme si la parole etait l'action, comme si la rhetorique avait raison des penchants, des habitudes, du caractere, de l'etre reel, comme si la verbiage remplacait la volonte, la conscience, l'education. (Journal, 23 May 1873, qtd. in Bauer 118).

[The basic error of France is in her psychology. She has always believed that a thing said was a thing done, as if speech were action, as if rhetoric held the essence of tendencies, of customs, of character, of real being, as if a manner of speaking replaced will, conscience, education (my trans.).]

The same idea has been more modernly expressed in a remark I read somewhere that the fall of France at the beginning of World War II occurred so easily because the Maginot Line was said to be impregnable and therefore in the minds of the French was unbreachable. A lighter observation of the matter is from Lerner and Loewe's Henry Higgins: the French don't care what one does, as long as it is pronounced properly. This has some connection surely with Zora Neale Hurston's more serious attention to an analysis of the African American cultural tradition of "lying." In an analysis of her Jonah's Gourd Vine, for example, she stated that "merely being a good man is not enough to hold a Negro preacher in an important charge. He must also be an artist . . . a poet" (Qtd. in Hemenway 194). Her biographer's elaboration on that novel (applicable to most all her work) hails its emphasis on "linguistic moments" taken from the cultural tradition that "loves language as an end in itself," and presents "a theory of language and behavior" indicating "a life of profound wisdom despite observable human failings" (Hemenway 194-95).

Wright himself, in Black Boy and American Hunger, ascribed astonishing effects to language, a magical power to create new feelings and perspectives - indeed, new worlds more real than his common physical one. Fabre, perhaps with characteristically French astuteness, picked up in Wright an "unshakable belief in the power of words" (291).

In light of such considerations, one can imagine the impact on Wright's still forming sensibilities when in the fall of 1933, almost simultaneously with his joining the John Reed Club, he probably had contact with a best-selling modern French novelist and Communist VIP, Henry Barbusse.

Largely unknown in the United States, Barbusse was important enough to Wright to be included in his 1937 "Blueprint for Negro Writing" roster of authors that every African American writer should be familiar with. Investigation of Barbusse's career and works turns up signs of an influence on Wright that lasted longer than did, say, Stein's or Joyce's, as these latter appear in such apprentice works as Tarbaby's Dawn and Lawd Today. Barbusse's shadow is plausibly discernible, directly and indirectly, in Native Son and in what can be considered the apogee of Wright's creative writing, The Man Who Lived Underground (unpublished), as well as in some of his ideas about imaginative writing and its relationship to society.

One of the more indirect signs of Barbusse's influence is a reference in Wright's unpublished, circa-1935 aesthetic manifesto, "Personalism," to another French author, Jean Richard Bloch, a contemporary of Barbusse and one whom possibly Wright learned of from Barbusse. Wright speaks of Bloch's novel, "- & Co.", in the context of a "personalist" creative work: a novel basically made of images - emotional perceptions of reality - but philosophically and emotionally united to such an extent that the unity itself becomes the "ruling symbol" of the work. This all-controlling unity symbol carries any "message" or "judgment" the author makes. Wright was expressing here a concern about the problem of authorial intrusion into fiction, one he was still to be struggling with in the late 1950s. Bloch's "- & Co." is mentioned as an example of "complex unity." In Bloch's novel this symbol is obviously signaled in the title, which stresses "company," and in the scenes imaging the ethnic and family ties that stifle even as they foster. Moreover, Native Son very possibly owes something to some of the images out of which this unity of "- & Co." grows.