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

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

But much more than an exercise in admiration or emulation, The Outsider qualifies as a serious and accomplished philosophical novel in its own right. While Turner argues somewhat vaguely that The Outsider is "a revision and a redefinition of Native Son" (164), it is more clearly Wright's revision of Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov and Cross undergo a similar "inward catastrophe from which new souls take their beginning" (Berdyaev, Idea 202). But the originality and force of Wright's approach lie in his reversal of Dostoevsky's thesis as he represents the murderer who never discovers any limit to his right to any action but who nonetheless becomes horrified not at his guilt but at his very innocence. In an interview in 1960 Wright expressed his fascination with and even admiration for Dostoevsky's protagonist, stating "Raskolnikov is one of my heroes" (8). Writing of Raskolnikov, Berdyaev summarizes the central question for him and for Cross Damon: "Are there norms and limits in my nature, or may I venture to do anything?" ("Dostoevsky" 574). While Raskolnikov resists his growing unconscious knowledge that these limits exist, Cross finds, in one sense to his profound disappointment, that they do not. Like Kirilov in The Devils, a work which Wright claimed "revealed new realms of feeling" for him (American Hunger 19) and which he studied very closely (Fabre, Quest 175), Cross is a pioneer in this relatively new metaphysical world, which can acquire meaning only through the enthronement of individual will. But Kirilov's suicide, an act which is supposed to prove his perfect freedom and godhood, is interrupted by his mystical awakening, whereas Cross experiences no such epiphany. Cross is also related to Stavrogin, who with conscious amorality determines to commit hideous acts in order to test whether he can be revulsed by extremes of "evil" behavior. But whereas Stavrogin recovers his sense of good and evil just before his suicide, an act of self-punishment, Cross remains adamantly innocent, and consequently despairing.

In a sense, Cross succeeds in exactly the materialistic task Raskolnikov sets for himself, but fails - namely, to prove that, for the extraordinary individual, there is neither good nor evil, and therefore no guilt. Cross finds, as Raskolnikov does not, that he is such a one, like the elite few of the Grand inquisitor's hierarchy and like the godlike enslavers of humanity whom he despises so much who dominate communism and fascism. Yet in another sense, this success is Cross's failure, for despite his gains in freedom and power, he hates his new identity as a corrupt little god, and he loses his chance at new life with Eva. Dostoevsky depicts a metaphysical or spiritual individualism which must either find a transcendent value or destroy itself. In contrast, Wright portrays a materialistic individualism whose both license and duty is to transcend all accepted values and which must rely solely on its own variable strength for survival. In his notebooks for Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky views crime paradoxically as a potential source of the individual's "moral development," for crime raises "the possibility of such questions as earlier were impossible" (473). He demonstrates with Raskolnikov and others that "out of despair comes a new perspective" (472). Wright offers evidence of considerable development in Cross's sense of self and freedom, but he carefully withholds any hint of what might be called "moral growth"; in fact, he emphasizes Cross's deepening despair, the condition Kierkegaard (whose definition of dread opens Book One of the novel) refers to as "the sickness unto death."