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Books by Richard Wright
Richard Wright: Early Works
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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!
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Mr. Wright’s new book is a novel of ideas
which examines life in the light of modern philosophies. It
struck this reviewer as a sort of morality play with ideologies
acting the vices—and the virtues left out.
The hero of The Outsider, named with
rather fuzzy symbolism, Cross Damon, represents twentieth
century man in frenzied pursuit of freedom. Cross is an
intellectual Negro, the product of a culture which rejects him.
He is further alienated by his “habit of incessant
reflection,” his feeling that the experiences and actions of
his life have so far taken place without his free assent, and a
profound conviction that there must be more to life, some
meaning and justification which have hitherto eluded him.
When Cross is introduced in the first pages
of the novel he is drinking too much, partly in an effort to
forget his problems (of which he has many) but mostly to deaden
the pain caused by his urgent and frustrated sense of life.
There is an accident in which he is reported dead and so he sets
out to create his own identity, and thus, he hopes, to discover
truth.
This search for the absolute compels him to
four murders and ends in his despair and violent death. En
route, he encounters totalitarianism in its
most-likely-to-succeed form, Communism. Though he agrees with
these other “outsiders” that power is the central reality of
society and that “man is nothing in particular,” he is
outraged by their acceptance and cynical exploitation of these
“facts.” “That’s enough,” he screams before he kills a
Communist who has just told him that there is no more to life.
And in the same conversation he asks, “What’s suffering?”
Having rejected religion, the past and
present organization of society, the proposed totalitarianism
alternative and the kindred uncontrollable violence of his own
behavior as a “free” man, Cross abandons ideas and pins his
last hope on love. But his mistress commits suicide when she
sees him as he is.
There follows a fascinating chapter in which
the law, personified by a hunchbacked district attorney who
understands Cross Damon, convicts him of crime and condemns him.
But is powerless to give his life significance by punishment.
After this Cross is murdered and dies murmuring, “It was
horrible.”
In spite of the analytical clarity with which
the roots of the modern dilemma are exposed, this is a confusing
and unconvincing book intellectually. Rationalism is evil, it
seems to say, a road leading nowhere traveled by a monstrous
superman; but around the very next bend truth may perhaps be
found and superman will then be free and good—perhaps.
Mr. Wright, or at least Mr. Wright’s hero,
is so hypnotized by the evil man does individually and socially
that he is aware of little else. None of the chief characters is
consistently believable as a human being, though this is perhaps
inevitable in a novel of ideas. The writing is marred,
particularly in the first chapters, by clinical shortcuts,
little paragraphs describing character in psychoanalytical
terms.
Nevertheless, The Outsider is a work
of tremendous emotional power. It elicits the feel of the
chaotic twentieth-century—frustration, confusion and paralysis
in thought, all the terrible panic of man in a shaken
world—with a breadth and accuracy that are almost
overwhelming. And the interior life of proud Cross Damon, with
its dark descent through doubt and fear to anguish, despair, and
emptiness, has a harrowing reality which could be achieved only
by an artist of exceptional sincerity and unusual perception.
Source: The
Commonweal (April 10, 1953) * * * *
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updated 11 June 2008 |
