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

Style, Spring, 1998 by Damon Marcel DeCoste

Yet if this myth of the black rapist, a myth that bears strange if real and bloody fruit, is thus part of the fantasy Bigger himself pursues as the erasure of self and experience, its issue once more is a deadly terror. For if Mary Dalton dies unviolated, she dies because of the myth of the black violator and the fear it inspires in Wright's desperate dreamer. Indeed, the scene of Mary's death is scripted by this myth, which, for Bigger, as much as for the whites with whom he identifies, is accepted as truth. Having carried the drunk Mary to her room, Bigger is caught in her bedroom as the blind Mrs. Dalton enters. Knowing all too well the lethal power of a fantasy that would label him criminal and rapist here, Bigger is seized by "a hysterical terror" (97), a terror itself part of his immersion in a fiction whose true effects he knows by heart: "He felt strange, possessed, or as if he were acting upon a stage" (95). Gripped by the fear this fantasy produces, seemingly bound by the role it would assign him, Bigger, in a desperate attempt not to be discovered, silences Mary with her pillow, inadvertently smothering her (100). Here the very terror produced by his understanding of the racist myths of his coveted white world pushes Bigger toward a final blotting out, and towards his assumption of that very role, that of the black criminal, such myths would assign him. And, significantly, Bigger himself assents to the logic of these myths, assumes that identity they insist upon: "He was black and he had been in a room where a white girl had been killed; therefore he had killed her. That was what everybody would say anyhow" (119).

If this killing reveals the murderous aspect of Bigger's programme of denial, it also marks the fulfilment of his greatest wish, his immersion in that world of white American fantasy he has always admired and feared. Indeed, Bigger himself, in assuming that identity of murderer and rapist which is his in this world, revels in this immersion. It is, for him, the beginning of a new life, the erasure of the old. Now he is, in his own eyes, the self-made and powerful man of Hollywood's American story, and one moreover on the make and on the rise. With this act, he feels, he has made "a new life for himself. It was something that was all his own" (119).(4) By this act, he sees himself as having become that man of action and power he has never been but has dreamed of being, the hero of that American movie narrative of wealth, power, and success with which he has identified in the past. Now in possession of the money roll from Mary's purse, he flatters himself as the man of wealth and power looking forward to his next enterprise: "he was a man who had come in sight of a goal, then had won it, and in winning it had seen just within grasp another goal, higher, greater" (148). That this higher, greater goal is his plan to extort more money from the Daltons, by leading them to believe Mary kidnapped by the Communists, is itself significant. For in having arrived, by way of dreams and the fear they foster, as the man of power and decision, Bigger himself conceives and enacts this new identity as a living of the lie. The great insight won over Mary's body is one of universal delusion, a blindness from which he alone, he feels, is exempt. People, he now "sees," are "blind to what did not fit. They did not want to see what others were doing if that doing did not feed their own desires" (120). The lesson here, for Bigger, is to use this blindness to one's own advantage, to perform the quotidian, all the while pursuing that higher goal of personal satisfaction; the new self-made man of his own Hollywood drama, his task is "to act just like others acted, live like they lived, and while they were not looking, do what you wanted" (120).