Haunted by innocence: the debate with Dostoevsky in Wright's 'other novel,' "The Outsider."

African American Review, Summer, 1996 by Michael F. Lynch

Despite some positive reviews, The Outsider received the first predominantly negative reviews of Wright's career, and critics generally dismiss it as third-rate, half-baked existentialism and much more seriously flawed than Native Son. Michel Fabre admits that its ideological importance "rivals that of Native Son" (Reader xiii), but he finds the story "lacking in substance and human atmosphere, for which the hero's ideological dissertations are no substitute" (Quest 372). Darwin Turner finds the thought of the novel "more persuasive" than that of Native Son but its artistry defective, for the book "fails to evoke the emotional intensity" of Wright's earlier work and lacks its "aura of uniqueness, originality, and artless spontaneity" (163). Like many critics, David Bakish objects to the novel's "plentiful" polemical interruptions and its plot bordering on "the melodramatic" (65). Edward Margolies sees Cross Damon as little more than "an intellectualized Bigger" (120) in a failed novel. For Russell Brignano, the novel has gained attention more because of its categorization as existential "than because of any aesthetic merits" (155). Robert Felgar concludes that, because of its "flaccid" prose and other faults, The Outsider and most of Wright's later works "do not warrant thorough examination because they compare so utterly unfavorably with Native Son" (iii).

Critical evaluation frequently and appropriately judges the success of one work according to the standard set by another of an author's works. But from these representative comments it seems that many critics required of the later novel not just the quality of Native Son but also conformity to its emotional tone and a repetition of its unique effects; in short, many seem displeased that Wright did not attempt to write another Native Son. In The Outsider the protagonist's race is of relatively minor significance in Wright's effort to offer a more explicitly universal theme. James Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room, in which he depicts all non-black characters, is similarly undervalued, largely because of the general critical attempt to restrict black writers to black characters and "race" issues. Part of the overwhelming critical disappointment at Wright's second novel maybe due to this confining attitude. Since black writers often are criticized from both sides of the race issue - i.e., both for art that confronts social inequities (under the charge of "mere protest") and for art that probes universal concerns more explicitly (under "abandonment" of social commitment) - it is understandable that the writers need to preserve their independence from such ideological mandates and that this need is sometimes realized in works which transgress artificially constructed boundaries. Objecting to the "stagnation" (6) prevalent in Wright scholarship, in which "too many scholars believe Wright was at his best when he wrote out of the anger" (5) of his experiences as a child and a young man, Joyce Ann Joyce identities this obsessive concern with judging the merits of a work of African-American literature through the prism of race. In Richard Wright's Art of Tragedy, Joyce argues that "numerous misconceptions" haunt Wright's novels. "Serious impediments to new, discerning studies of his works" have evolved from "the idea that Wright's creativity resulted primarily from his experiences in Mississippi and the implication that his political ideology was more important to him than the 'sedentary toil' which, so Yeats maintained, must go into great works" (27).

The Outsider has some serious artistic problems, most notably the rambling disquisitions, heavy use of coincidence, and (aside from the protagonist) weak character development. However, it is no more, and probably less, melodramatic than Native Son, which features powerful but typically Wrightian scenes of somewhat sensationalized violence, including the decapitation of the dead Mary Dalton in the furnace and Bigger's brutal murder of Bessie Mears, whose skull he smashes with a brick. The violence and suspense in The Outsider are central to Cross's story, and their details are neither gratuitous nor lurid. In a sense the novel provides higher emotional intensity than Native Son, focusing not just on fear, flight, and capture but on an tuner journey filled with dread and a confrontation with the darkest human impulses to be discovered in the self.

The few voices comprising the minority opinion on The Outsider are mostly mixed in their assessment. For example, Nick Aaron Ford finds the novel "inferior to its predecessor in plot construction, organization, and emotional depth" (147), but he also sees it as "more imaginative, more challenging, and more philosophical" (143) and concludes that "Wright has come a long way in the art of philosophic thought since Native Son" (148). Contrary to many who argue that the style of The Outsider is forced and weak, Ford notes that "the vivid diction, the effective sentence structure, and the pleasing rhythms are still predominant" (148). Kingsley Widmer claims that, although the novel ultimately fails, "it does achieve some wisdom" (180) and is Wright's most thoughtful and most interesting novel (173-74). Among Widmer's observations is that, while "all of Wright's books" are melodramatic, melodrama is appropriate to "philosophically insistent literature, as in Marlowe, Dostoevsky, and Sartre" (175). Probably the highest praise for the novel comes from Nathan A. Scott, Jr., who recognizes the novel's imperfections but holds that it is "yet (after Black Boy) his finest achievement and ... a book that deserves to have commanded a great deal more attention than it has" (158).