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

Style, Spring, 1998 by Damon Marcel DeCoste

If Bigger here "identifies" with his family, it is only in terms of ascribing to them that shame and loathing he feels, a shame and a loathing that stem rather from his identification with the scorn he sees in the eyes of white onlookers. This dynamic of loathing and withdrawing from those who suffer as he does governs all of Bigger's relations with other African Americans, such that his dealings with them become rehearsals of rejection. Bigger does not "think enough of" the gang with whom he pulls his petty heists to care what they think of him, or ever to attempt to explain himself to them (47). Likewise, toward his "girl," Bessie, he feels, as he admits to Communist lawyer Boris Max, neither love nor hate; she is, in his own words, "just my girl. I don't reckon I was ever in love with nobody. . . . You have to have a girl, so I had Bessie" (408). And, indeed, precisely insofar as this compulsory "girl" assumes a human significance, a black face and a black life like his own, she is to be denied: "he felt that there were two Bessies: one a body that he had just had and wanted badly again, the other was in Bessie's face; it asked questions . . . He wished he could clench his fist and swing his arm and blot out, kill, sweep away the Bessie on Bessie's face and leave the other helpless and yielding before him" (159).(3) With family, friends and lover, Bigger can only re-enact that erasure of self he pursues throughout the novel, an eradication of a reality that is for him, looking on it through an admiration for and identification with a white American dream, not only unbearable but contemptible. What is to be sought instead is an identification with the oppressor in such dreams, an identification that may permit Bigger's assertion of difference from the weak and indeed from himself, but that marks the death of the very possibility of solidarity with the oppressed: "There were rare moments when a feeling and longing for solidarity with other black people would take hold of him. . . . [B]ut that dream would fade when he looked at the other black people near him. Even though black like him, he felt there was too much difference between him and them to allow for a common binding and a common life" (129).

Yet if Bigger's rejection of the reality he knows thus significantly sounds the death knell for any possibility of unity with those like himself, his admiration for the affluent whites of Hollywood film leads him to actual assaults on other blacks and, indeed, to that barely conscious act, the killing of Mary Dalton, which is his own undoing. For if Bigger is awe-struck in the face of those wealthy white figures in his movie-house dreams, it is awe holding terror as well as admiration, a terror which leads him to an actual and violent blotting out of black victims - and ultimately of himself. The white world with which he seeks to erase his own experience figures in Bigger's imagination no longer as a social system or an aggregate of individuals, but as a powerful, indeed fearsome, natural force; it is for him both the paradise of power and wealth and "that looming mountain of white hate," something both inhuman and terrifying in that very power he covets in it (333). Moreover, although Bigger himself sees this fearsomeness as somehow different from his imagining of this world in the pre-fabricated dreams of American cinema, his schooling there in an identification with the powerful white force that hates is itself also an education in terror before this force. While Bigger, when confronted with Mary Dalton in the flesh rather than in her celluloid projections, muses "in amazement how different the girl had seemed in the movie. On the screen she was not dangerous and his mind could do with her as it pleased" (62), the lesson he leaves the theatre having learned is one of fear rather than of empowerment. Identifying with the white power and affluence on the screen, Bigger becomes increasingly anxious about his gang's imminent robbery of a white man and leaves the theatre "with a mounting feeling of fear" (38). The mythical world with which he attempts to blot out himself and those like him becomes, in this very attempt, "a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead, or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one's feet" (129). It is as such a mythic force that this world becomes the motive behind the violence Bigger enacts on those closest to himself.