Richard Wright, community, and the French connection

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

The Man Who Lived Underground, while catalyzed by a story in True Detective, is Wright's work that most clearly and extensively shows the structural, tonal, and imagistic grist that Barbusse's novels provided to the mill of Wright's imagination, although an important aspect of Native Son also bears traces of Barbusse's The Inferno.

In structure, The Man employs the "peeping Tom" device also found in The Inferno, which antedated his sharp turn to leftist social views. Barbusse's narrator is not underground but in a boarding house, where he discovers in one of his room's walls an opening that enables him to spy unobserved into the next chamber. In both novels, the device allows the same structure, a form the French called a roman-a-tiroir - a "chest of drawers" (Duclaux 172), independent episodes held together by a framework of some kind, not unlike the collage form that was emerging in Dadaist and Surrealist art, which Wright also became aware of in the early 1930s.

In both works what is espied by the protagonists is, as Barbusse's title makes explicit, hell: humanity with all its corruptions and limitations, man-made and natural, to which even the good are doomed. In both works, more noticeably in the various manuscript drafts of Wright's novella than in its published truncated version, is the lyric tone of pity, anguish, and helplessness felt by the protagonists confronted with the overwhelming evidence of the poverty of the human condition, partly because of its inability or refusal to come to terms with ephemerality. The Inferno's narrator speaks repeatedly in terms of his sense of "the tragedy of the Room" next to his and of his "lofty pain" because "what [he has] seen is going to disappear, since [he] shall do nothing with it," he being "like a mother the fruit of whose womb will perish after it is born" (250). Wright's underground man, especially in the longer, unpublished manuscripts, frequently puts his face in his hands and weeps when confronted with the immensity of the ignorance and carelessness that most people live in, a condition of unknowing regarding themselves, their significance, the sources of real meaning in their lives, in themselves.

This tonal similarity is impossible to demonstrate except by extensive quotations from both works. The same is true regarding specific imagery and motifs. At the end of this article quotations from Barbusse's works are collated with relevant quotations from Wright's works for this comparative purpose.

There are, to be sure, images in both Native Son and The Man notably similar to images in Barbusse's Under Fire as well. For example, the beginning of Under Fire, a "vision" of war that sanatorium inmates, "men of culture and intelligence, detached from the affairs of the world and almost from the world itself," have as they "look deeply . . . towards the unknowable land of the living and the insane" (2) is comparable to the vision the detached Fred Daniels has as he listens to war news on his underground radio in the published short story titled "The Man Who Lived Underground" (see quotations 1, 2) and to the air-raid imagery that surrounds the ending of The Man in the long manuscript version (unpublished), leading Daniels to think he no longer needs to show the policemen what he has seen and expressed in his collage in the underground sewer cave. This bombing and shooting are in some way what he has discovered. Space limitations, however, require looking in detail only at The Inferno.