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

African American Review, Spring, 2003 by Brannon Costello

Jake never manages to articulate his feeling of alienation, which he also feels both as an unexplainable nervousness and as a lack, a hunger. During a lull in the opiatic distraction of conversation and bridge with his friends, he feels "empty, missing something," and thinks, "I'm getting neruous as hell. And he knew that as long as he sat this way his nervousness would increase. Jake's mind fished about, trying to get hold of an idea to cover his feeling of uneasy emptiness" (89). Elsewhere, lake thinks that "he wanted something, and that something hungered in him, deeply" (68), and he feels "a haunting and hungering sense of incompleteness" (51). When he faces his shift at the post office, he feels "a dumb yearning for something else; somewhere or other was something or other for him" (116). The vagueness of Wright's language here appropriately reflects the haziness of Jake's desires. Although, when a white supervisor criticizes Jake for improperly sorting several letters, Jake thinks that "It ain't always going to be this way!" he can get no further than that rudimentary expression of frustration:

His mind went abruptly blank. He could not keep on with that thought, because he did not know where that thought led. He did not know of any other way things could be, if not this way. Yet he longed for them not to be this way. He felt that something vast and implacable was crushing him; and he felt angry with himself because he had to stand it. (142-43)

This inability to articulate or even understand his feelings, this loss of meaning, plagues Jake in other ways over the course of his day. In the dream that opens the novel, Jake endures a Sisyphean torment, running frantically up a flight of steps at his boss's urging but never making any progress. Though the dream carries (for us, anyway) an obvious symbolic meaning relating to Jake's racial and economic exploitation, he spends much of the morning just trying to remember what he dreamed in the first place: "Now what was I dreaming? He tried to think, but a wide gap yawned in his mind" (6). Worse, when the sight of some children playing on a flight of stairs reminds him, he does not ponder over any possible social significance the dream might have had, but instead uses it as a guide for picking numbers for a "policy" game, an elaborate numbers racket. Even more problematically, Jake cannot intuit the numbers from the dream himself; instead, he must go through two intermediaries. He tells one woman, Mabel, hi s dream, and she picks out the important elements; then she shouts those elements to a woman named Martha, who matches them up with the numbers found in King Solomon's Wheel of Life and Death Dream Book. Jake is not allowed to see this book, so he must get the information thirdhand before he bets his money. Finally, complete recovery of the dream's meaning is not possible even in the terms of this corrupt system, because "a dream sometimes had so many possible interpretations, it referred to so many different: combinations of numbers, that it was impossible to 'cover' the dream" (45). Jake can only access as many different interpretations of the dream as he has money to spare.