Richard Wright's Lawd Today! And the political uses of modernism

African American Review, Spring, 2003 by Brannon Costello

But would it have? Drawing on recent leftist revisions of the literary history of the 1930s, I would like to argue that stereotypically modernist subject matter and aesthetic strategies were actually available and indeed very attractive to Wright at this time. Further, far from being an apolitical or anti-leftist anomaly in Wright's 1930s' output, Lawd Today! is actually very much in keeping with Wright's original conception of the relationship between his art and his political ideology. In Black Boy, Wright writes,

The Communists, I felt, had oversimplified the experience of those whom they sought to lead. In their efforts to recruit masses, they had missed the meaning of the lives of the masses, had conceived of people in too abstract a manner. I would make voyages, discoveries, explorations with words and try to put some of that meaning back. I would address my words to two groups: I would tell Communists how common people felt, and I would tell common people of the self-sacrifice of Communists who strove for unity among them. (377)

This passage is frequently cited in critical surveys of Wright's work, often as a way of introducing his overtly Communist-influenced 1930s' writings, especially the short-story collection Uncle Tom's Children. Such studies tend to focus on how Wright addresses the second of the two groups that he discusses, how he makes Communism a palatable and viable strategy of resistance to the "common people." (5) However, I would argue that a fuller consideration of the first part of Wright's plan--to "tell Communists how common people felt" -- is appropriate to help us better understand Lawd Today!

In Lawd Today!, Wright focuses on the modernist dilemmas of "fragmentation, alienation, sense-making; the shoring up of fragments against our ruins; what to make of a diminished thing" (Werner 11) to describe not just the social, political, and economic disenfranchisement of African Americans fleeing from the South to Chicago in the Great Migration, but also the personal, spiritual disenfranchisement that comes from being separated (or, sometimes, from separating themselves) from the forms of community and means of connection with each other--church and folklore, for example--that sustained them in the South. Though not a proletarian novel in Mike Gold's formulation, the novel does serve a political purpose: It shows how the popular myths of consumerist, capitalist American culture have disrupted these forms of community and stresses the need for new forms or for the revival of the old. Ultimately, to paraphrase Wright, Lawd Today! tells Communists how common people feel so that they might not oversimplify th e experience of the masses and that they might better know how to appeal to them.

In recent years, leftist historians and literary critics have begun to challenge the narrow definition of proletarian literature and the stereotypical view of the Communist Party that I have outlined above and that is implicit in many dismissals of Lawd Today!. Barbara Foley's Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941, offers perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of this issue. Foley criticizes "the model of a philistine, coercive, and anti-modernist party [that] has routinely been invoked in treatments of the relationship between writers and the organized left" (46). This inaccurate model, says Foley, promotes the view that "through writer's foundations and critical organs where their influence dominated - . . the party critics who were based in the New Masses issued directives about matters ranging from politics to subject matter to style" (45). Moreover, "it is charged [that] writers were cut off from the most exciting and productive developments in contemporary l iterature and consigned to a sterile, banal, and-ironically--conservative realism" (54). Foley, however, argues for a radically different model of the relationship between the Communist Party and leftist literary production. She contends that, although the party did offer directives, and though prominent members such as Mike Gold argued long and loud for the inherent decadence of modernism, the notion that American literary proletarians "repudiated literary innovations simply does not stand up under the evidence" (57). Foley argues that, "although the 'commissars' of leftist criticism have been criticized for dogmatism and arrogance, they were quite ready to acknowledge that not merely proletarian literature but American Marxist criticism was in its infancy" (51). Indeed, even "the organs most closely identified with the Communist party--the New Masses and, especially, the Daily Worker--were quite hospitable to literary innovations of various kinds" (58-59). As she puts it, "In short, much Depression-era lite rary radicalism was intimately involved in the project of 'mak[ing] it new'" (62). (6)