To blot it all out: the politics of realism in Richard Wright's 'Native Son.'

Style, Spring, 1998 by Damon Marcel DeCoste

But if Bigger longs for such stimuli as an erasure of self and world, what these media in fact present him with is an alternative world, a vision of an existence beyond his experience but not, thanks to these conventional sources, his ken. What Bigger finds, and indeed loves, in the movie-house and pulp magazine is a portrait of life defined not, as is his own, by limitations, poverty, and impotence, but rather by possibility, wealth, and power. Bigger's immersion in popular culture thus emerges here not only as a denial of the realities of his own oppression, his own experience, but also as an identification with and endorsement of the wealth and power of those who oppress him. Happily watching the matinee newsreels, Bigger sees a world of white American luxury, a world of "the daughters of the rich taking sun baths in the sands of Florida," a sight that, the commentator informs him, "represents over four billion dollars of America's wealth" (34). Next to this vision, both his own experience and the feature film's portrait of "naked black men and women whirling in wild dances" (36) recede into insignificance. Bigger's mind is instead occupied with an awe-filled longing for that other world, that "real" world of Hollywood fantasies. Consciousness of self and world, as indeed of the black "savages" of B-movies, is here "replaced by images in his own mind of white men and women dressed in black and white clothes, laughing, talking, drinking and dancing" (36). Not only Trader Horn's African scene, but his own experience as a black American are effectively occluded by media-fostered dreams of a white world, a "realer" because desired reality of opulence and power.

But for Wright as realist, this erasure of self and world represents only Bigger's schooling in submission, an endorsement of the power others hold over him. In Native Son to accept the dream, to eschew realism, is only to perpetuate the realities of oppression. In Bigger's eyes, then, those well-dressed whites of his movie-house fantasies are "smart people; they knew how to get hold of money, millions of it" (36-37). The wealth and power of white America become here, in Bigger's attempts to blot out his reality, his own standards of value. In his mass media evasion, Bigger ends up not only retreating from his world, his people, indeed himself, but identifying himself with those powerful whites who, as he knows, will not let him do anything. Scorning poor whites as "stupid" for their inability to get hold of millions (37), Bigger spends his free time "playing white," assuming the roles of J. P. Morgan, the President, and white generals, speaking lines "heard . . . in the movies" (19). Having found his proper objects of respect and value in the wealthy whites he himself knows to own the earth, Bigger seeks a final erasure of himself in the dream of being these whites, of dispensing with their wealth, of making their decisions, of, indeed, dealing in their fashion with "the niggers . . . raising sand all over the country" (20). Thus if, as Wright himself describes him, Bigger is a man "trying to react to and answer the call of the dominant civilization whose glitter [comes] to him through newspapers, magazines, radios, movies" ("How Bigger" 513), he is one also who makes his answer by assenting to the values of those who oppress him, by, indeed, contradicting and denying the reality he suffers.