Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. - Review - book reviews

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by Alessandro Portelli

Hakutani's extended and accurate comparison between Camus's The Stranger and Wright's The Outsider might thus be supplemented by placing them in historical, as well as philosophical, context. Hakutani skillfully shows how Wright's novel could not be entirely subsumed under the philosophy of existentialism, both because of the persistence of Wright's naturalistic approach to storytelling and because of his character's striving toward meaning, as opposed to Mersault's vision of the absurd. The fact is that, as a Western, European man, Mersault has already been through the individualism that Wright's character is trying to achieve; and has found it wanting.

Hakutani's insight - for Wright, human values had to be fought for, could not be taken for granted - describes what is both an historical and an existential experience. As the Italian ethnologist Ernesto de Martino (himself influenced by existentialism) was writing in those very years, the Western individual's assurance of being-in-the-world as a personal subject is the result of a specifically Western history, grafted on the background of a human sense of precariousness (Ellison's "invisibility" also comes to mind), the risk of losing one's "presence" in the face of what in "primitive" societies may be natural or supernatural forces, but which De Martino increasingly saw as the result of power relationships both in the colonial setting and in the heart of the West itself.

Hakutani's analysis indicates that the latter is the case in Wright's racial discourse: Racial and colonial oppression flattens black individual presence, and induces the black communities to suppress the individuality of their own members; individuality, therefore, must be wrested both from white oppression and from black subjugation. Mersault, on the other hand, is a citizen of a French state in which his individuality has been taken for granted at least since the time of Descartes; and yet, this historical privilege of Western man is finally revealed to be meaningless. One may find Cross Damon's "unfinished quest" more hopeful than Mersault's "indifference." The palpable confusion of The Outsider (revealed also in its linguistic and stylistic inconsistencies) is perhaps the result of Wright's (and Cross's) awareness that the individuality/individualism that has been denied them and must be striven for is already meaningless, and all the alternatives are denied. Thus, we cannot dismiss the fact that Cross's quest, like Bigger's process of self-discovery (and like the Invisible Man's deferred project to affirm the liberal principles on which America was founded), remains unfinished.

Echoing the consensus of recent Wright criticism and quoting from Wright's own journal, Hakutani concludes his chapter on "The City: Quest for Freedom" by saying: "Bigger and Cross have walked different avenues in the city, but in the end they have both been able to 'uphold the concept of what it means to be human' in America." Bigger is killed on the electric chair. Cross dies in confusion. Is that what it means?