|
Books by Richard Wright
Richard Wright: Early Works
/
Black Boy /
Native Son /
Uncle Tom's Children /
12 Million Black Voices /
Richard Wright: Later Works
The Outsider /
Pagan
Spain /
Black Power /
White Man Listen! /
The Color Curtain /
Savage Holiday /
The Long Dream
Eight Men: Short Stories /
Haiku /
American Hunger /
Lawd
Today!
* * * *
*
A
Brief Defense of Richard Wright and Other Writers
By Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Robert
Lashley, whom one might call an angry
critic, wrote a blistering review of Richard Wright’s Lawd
Today (1963) and posted it on his blog [ http://aliterarythugsart.blogspot.com]
on July 18, 2005. Had the review not been attached to another
blog located on www.nola.com,
it might have remained relatively unknown.
The review, however, now circulates in the
public sphere. It must be treated as an item in the reassessment
of Wright prior to celebration of the Wright Centennial in 2008.
Lawd Today does not satisfy Lashley’s aesthetic
expectations; the novel contains structural flaws. That is a
fair judgment made on the basis of taste.
What is unfair in the review is Lashley‘s
poorly nuanced and racially problematic flagellation of
Wright’s misogyny without any mention of Wright’s critique
of misogyny in Savage Holiday (1954). Even more unfair is
Lashley’s excoriating other male writers, who may share some
of Wright’s assumptions about the functions of art, for
bringing dishonor to African American literary tradition.
As a critic, Robert
Lashley must bear the
onus of dishonor, because his vision of our literary history is
at best myopic. He is a critic who has not been violated by
scholarship. Had he acknowledged that the manuscript of Lawd
Today was originally entitled “Cesspool” (c. 1934-35),
he would perhaps have understood the folkloric and psychological
accuracy of Wright’s unflattering portrayal of Jake Jackson.
Such an admission would not have changed Lashley’s aesthetic
conclusions; it would have moderated his passion for hasty
generalizations that insult cultural literacy.
Lashley’s diatribe fails to acknowledge
that our literature is more than the expression of individual
talent or the lack thereof. Literature is part of a historical
process of reflecting prevailing attitudes as well as personal
visions; literature is an integral part of the practice of
everyday life. Our responses to what we believe literature
represents may often reveal more about our personal desires than
about our genuine concern that literature continue to delight
and instruct us. By our use of literature and literary figures
shall we be known.
Lashley
has perfected the art of writing
rants, and rants sometimes do deserve a reaction. His negations
(or spoors of self-hatred) are such that I surfed the Internet
to discover more about him. I did find some of his remarkable
postings on http://www.beatrice.com
In response to Ron Hogan’s “Stanley
Crouch Is a Punk,” Lashley
wrote on July 21, 2004 that Crouch
has “been coning and getting over on people by kicking Black
artists [sic] ass since 1979.” He ended his posting with
“Sorry for the rant, I just hate Crouch.”
He thought that Crouch is the contemporary
version of George Schuyler and announced in a separate posting
that after Schuyler’s initial success as an iconoclast, his
credibility was diminished when a “more liberal generation
came along and saw that George was completely full of shit.”
On July 23, 2004, Lashley
provided more commentary on Crouch
along with remarks about Charles Johnson, Ellison, Bellow,
Morrison, and Baraka. Lashley was truly on a roll.
We find a posting from July 29, 2004 in which
he rants about sexism in literature, replete with a
spleen-flavored remark about Ishmael Reed: “I have never seen
a male writer turn into a babbling incoherent sociopath in the
prescence [sic] of strong women as I have seen Reed.” And he
ends his outburst with “Sorry for the rant, I just fucking
hate Reed.”
Lashley’s railing is quintessentially
post-reason rather than post-modern. His use of the Anglo-Saxon
profane as grace notes should warn us of something, and I think
the warning has much to do with Lashley’s refusal to recognize
that he is in the tradition of speech acts committed by Schuyler
and Crouch in deodorized English. He has fashioned his critical
persona as the hip-hop reincarnation of Schuyler.
In other postings on his own blog, Lashley
generalizes about writers, literature, and music to the max. It
is his right to do so. Like Candide, he has the right to
cultivate his garden. He has the right to distribute toxic
commentary on everyone, but he should also expect that his
commentary might be greeted by some readers, especially those
from New Orleans, with spore remediation.
I would offer Lashley’s review to my
students as one example of how poverty-stricken criticism can be
without scholarly information. If Lashley
wants to persuade his
readers that “Wright’s worst aesthetic flaw” is “his
tendency to pad a story for length’s sake,” he should note
that one of Wright’s probable models for writing the story of
Jake Jackson is James Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel that is
stuffed with padding.
Wright’s failure is that of the young
writer who is still in the apprentice stage of his career, and Lawd
Today is one of the touchstones we might use to measure the
failure or success of early twenty century efforts to adapt
modernism in the African American novel. Lashley’s own flaw is
his demonizing of Wright and other black male writers without
necessary and sufficient cause, his ranting. A rant is to
genuine cultural criticism what a matchstick is to a blowtorch.
Lashley
is most annoying in the penultimate
paragraph of his review. He finds “incoherence and downright
evil “ in the work of Chester Himes, “crass sexual and
racist realpolitik” in the work of John Oliver Killens and
John A. Williams, and “maddeningly brutal misogyny “ in the
work of Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Cecil Brown.
Lashley
speaks ex-cathedra as he puts all of
these writers under his “dark cloud of animosity.” These men
are neither saints nor demons. We cannot ask them to be more
perfect than we are. They are writers, who for whatever faults
they possess, have struggled with the situated necessities of
African American and American literatures and with how language
constantly resists our efforts to utter a “truth.”
They are not, to borrow a phrase from Countee
Cullen, “immune to catechism.” They are, like Richard
Wright, significant players in the game of literature, bearers
of various parts of our cultural memories and re/memberings.
They deserve better than Lashley’s reductive hysteria and his
hatred.
What I suspect Lashley
hates is the discovery
that more than one grain of truth is contained in literature and
that literature is often a brutal mirroring of who and how we
black males are as we participate in endless and unrelenting
historical processes.
* * *
* *
Other Responses
What the f!&$k??? Who is this Robert
Lashley?
I just sent this out to some other black
writers and are curious to hear there response. But - holy Jesus
(and I never say holy Jesus) - this is beyond an attack on
Wright, as you warned, its an attack on Black Literature -
period.
Someone is definitely looking for an ass-whupping.
I am not a pacifist - although I hope one day I will be. I
don't like guns and I don't believe in murder, but I do believe
in a good brawl. It seems to me - that it is one of the lost
art-rituals of our time: just punching your opponents - real and
honest. Sometimes a little blow flow re-aligns the senses.
And sometimes a good old-fashioned beating
does wonders for the brain.
I have never read something such a ridiculously
open-lynching piece of literary "criticism" in my
entire life. Lashley
has major problems within himself and
his bigotry has the same feel of Anne Coulter's and there is
something chillingly alarming that Lashley
feels so
"free" to write and piss all over such great
artists. I hope he welcomes the responses.
I need to pull myself together and think
about what I could write, I am bad at this type of
thing...Keep me posted. Damn. In the struggle, Dennis
* * *
* *
Rudy,
I did a quick google search on this cat 'cause I just knew that
I read him before. He's a blogger, does his thing at Literary
Thug http://theliterarythug.blogspot.com/.
From what I gather he's around 27 years old, a self-described
pragmatic conservative. Sometimes defined as moderate. Some of
his stuff is circulating on the web. I think Jon could probably
hand out one well of an ass whoopin' whenever he got the chance.
Peace, Rodney D. Foxworth, Jr., Associate Editor, LiP
magazine
*
* * * *
I hope this dude never gets hold of my book.
I think he makes a few good points, but he is
extremely harsh, and includes writers I would consider worthy of
praise, not scorn. James W. Coleman, author of
Black
Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban (Caliban, a
Shakespeare character portrayed in his work The Tempest, is a
black, ignorant slave who lusted after his master’s daughter,
and was a general threat to civilization), says that “As
contemporary black male fiction writers have tried to free their
subjects and themselves from this legacy to tell a story of
liberation, they often unconsciously retell the story, making
their heroes into modern-day Calibans.”
Wright in my opinion has created more than a few
“Calibans” in his lifetime, but it is also necessary to
respect our elders, ancestors and all those involved in telling
our story whether you agree with them or not. Because
Lashley has not, his strident tone distracts from any cogent
points he might have made.
J. Everett Prewitt, Author
Snake
Walkers * * * *
*
posted 22 February 2006 / updated 9 April 2008 |
