The Outsider by Richard Wright

A Review by Charles Johnson

One of the criticisms that Ralph Ellison made of his mentor was that Richard Wright never wrote a story with a protagonist as complex as himself. With The Outsider, Wright corrected this problem (if indeed it was a problem) in his character Cross Damon (that name is just freighted with symbolism; and it's where I got the name for Faith Cross in Faith and the Good Thing). It's my understanding that with this novel Wright hoped to recreate the success he had with Native Son.

 Now, it's been a long time since I read The Outsider, but I will never forget its first 90 to 100 pages because they are a perfect example of a compelling premise or "ground situation," and of "organic story flow," which every writer strives to achieve.

When the story opens Cross, an intellectual who works at the post office in Chicago (a job Wright hated and described often with contempt), is mired in problems that range from being a black man in the racist era of segregation to being married and having a pregnant, teenaged girlfriend he met at a liquor store. He is as alienated as a man could possibly be, and reads dense, canonical works of philosophy secretly because his less educated black coworkers would see him as being strange for doing so. All the black misery of Native Son and Lawd Today! (the original title for which was "Cesspool") is here in Cross's life. But when he is riding on the subway, a freak accident occurs on the train (that symbol of modernity), killing many around him. He escapes the carnage and realizes that he is assumed to be among the dead. In one stroke, he is freed from his former life, is tabula rasa, and can recreate himself as he pleases. (Or so he thinks.)

From a creative writing standpoint, and from that of existentialism (Wright was pals with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in Paris when he wrote the novel, and was studying Husserl's Phenomenology), these first 90 pages are what John Gardner would call "a vivid and continuous dream." Everything one could want in a story is there. Ideas crackle and hum beneath concrete action.

 But when Cross checks into a hotel to ponder his new freedom, he encounters someone who knows him (if memory serves), and he commits the first of many murders, thus inscribing into his new "essence" (the meaning of his life) the worst of all possible actions. It's at this point, I believe, that Wright's novel begins to fall apart. The story and most imaginative possibilities slip away from him with that first murder. Wright cut his teeth as a child in Mississippi on violent stories in the pulps, and nearly all his stories resort to some form of violence to move the plot along, which prompted James Baldwin to remark that in Wright's fiction violence takes the place where sex would normally be.

Worse, as The Outsider progresses, Wright falls into didactic, essayist dialogue—long, tedious speeches—which is one of the things that simply ruins a philosophical fiction. That is, the abstract ideas (and lecturing the reader) overwhelm character and event. The perfect embodiment of ideas in character and situation in the opening 90 pages is lost, giving way to Cross talking for pages and pages about ideas, which Wright fails to imaginatively dramatize. What is the principle here? Ideas must be given flesh, incarnated in character, setting, props, even in the weather and, most important of all, by showing us characters revealed through action.

The old saying about novelists, "heroes in the beginning, cowards at the end," applies, sadly, to The Outsider. It happens often that a writer begins with a powerful premise in Act One of a story, but fails to make the best choices in developing it in Act Two, then toward the end simply wills the story forward in order to finish it (This happens, sad to say, in Andre Dubus III's House of Sand and Fog, which is wonderful until the last third of the story), manipulating his (or her) characters like puppets and putting into their mouths exposition instead of speeches they would naturally make. To a degree we see this problem in Native Son. The first two books are all dramatization, showing not telling. (It's all scene after scene, as in a well-made play.) However, in the third book, much time is taken with explanatory speeches by Bigger's lawyer. Max tells us what we've already powerfully experienced. There, didactic, essayist dialogue is perhaps less offensive than in The Outsider because—well, because lawyers in fiction and film do give windy speeches. But in The Outsider, that approach is less forgivable. 

 I think I understand the problem Wright faced. I wrote a quick, first draft of Middle Passage. Things worked well through the mutiny when the Allmueri take over the ship, the Republic. But after that, I lost control of the story. I had the remaining crew and Africans stop at an island during their wanderings, where they meet an entirely new tribe of people (I was still thinking at that time of Gulliver's Travels since the novel's working title was Rutherford's Travels), and First Mate Peter Cringle stays with these newly introduced people in that version. The others wander on, encounter a ghost ship, and it is the cabin boy Tommy (not cook Josiah Squibb) who returns to New Orleans with Rutherford, where after a year they discover Isadora has married Rutherford's very spiritual brother Jackson (Think about it; he's far better suited for her than Rutherford, and in this version came to New Orleans looking for him), and they have a child they name after Rutherford, who they believe was lost at sea. Rather than let these two people he loves most in the world know he is alive, and thereby disrupt their apparently happy lives, he and Tommy go back to sea. He is, after all, a true sailor by that time.

But that plotting of the second half of the novel, while fun to play around with, was wrong. Just wrong. A mistake. (But one can't really know it's a mistake until one sees it on the page.) The unfolding of events in a story should feel, not arbitrary, but inexorable and relentless and driven by cause and effect. (And an episodic plot, which would be perfectly fine for, say, comedy, would also have been wrong for a rousing sea adventure story.) So I ditched all those pages and decided that after the slave ship leaves Africa, Rutherford would not again set foot on land for the rest of the story. That little excursion to the aforementioned island broke the suspense that comes from knowing at any moment the characters might all wind up at the bottom of the briny. And as I re-plotted the story, I discovered the parallel mutiny against Captain Falcon brewing among the white crew. Furthermore, I decided Rutherford and Isadora had to be reunited by the novel's end, like Odysseus and Penelope, because they deserved that reconciliation.

All of this is simply to point out (I'm wearing my creative writing teacher hat now) that plot, as John Gardner once wrote, is the novelist's equivalent to the philosopher's argument. Plot must have internal coherence. And developing that takes time (time to be surprised by the characters, time to be ambushed by possibilities not in one's original outline for the story) and often several false starts. (For example, Hermann Hesse put Siddhartha aside for a year because he wasn't sure how to end the story.)

Responses

The Outsider is absolutely the most powerful and insightful novel I have read by Wright, or any other writer, for that matter. It has something major to offer those in the humanities and the social sciences. I am a student of Africana politics and political philosophy. As philosopher, Lewis Gordon, informs us, Europeans do not have a monopoly on philosophies of existence. Although criticized for it by some reviewers, Wright made significant contributions to radical black existential thought. He also offered a thorough going critique of the US system of (in)justice, exhibited by a hunchback district attorney who is sworn to uphold the laws of society—laws that he fails to respect. Indeed, the DA is aware of this legal hypocrisy in having respect for those who break these laws, yet who think they are innocent. Wright (Damon) holds that laws are constructed by those with criminal intent! Personally, I find this radical insight brilliant and defiant, especially when Wright puts forward this perspective in the early 1950s. Perhaps one also sees similar views in Native Son.—Floyd W. Hayes

Maybe Wright wrote the novel he wanted to write. Why should we assume that time or the lack of literary principles caused the novel to be written the way that it is? Our dislikes about the novel may indeed be just our dislikes.—Rudy

Rudy, Wright wrote the novel he wanted to write. The audience for his work then and now is most likely not those who embrace art for art's sake principles or who, to some degree, may be in denial about the horrors of human life.—Jerry Ward

Aside from some things, what's notable and (sigh) rare about those Miller & Charles Johnson interviews is that we so rarely get to witness "big-time" writers and actually any novelist at all go on at length about a black novel and novelists like Johnson does with The Outsider.

I was in your class, by the way, when I first read The Outsider. Let me tell you...I was really affected by those "first 90 pages" and more.—Howard Rambsy 

I really don't mind the demonic character of some of Wright's protagonists, most especially Bigger Thomas and Cross Damon. The forced transformation of our ancestors, from captured African slaves (from numerous nations and cultures) to their American descendants up to this very moment, has been a traumatic experience. The dehumanizing process of enslavement had to produce some blacks who would become angry, resentful, rebellious, nihilistic, violent, etc. In Black Boy, Wright narrated the impact of enslavement on blacks in the post-slavery era. How could one experience the trauma of living Jim Crow without becoming a revolutionary demon, wickedly seeking to engage in anti-racist struggle against the oppressive and capitalist power structure? Of course, many of our folks also became submissive, obsequious, and reactionary.—Floyd W. Hayes

Dear Valjeanne, Richard Wright would be profoundly disappointed if you "liked" Bigger Thomas. He did not wish for us to like Bigger; he wanted us to understand how conditions in early twentieth-century America could possibly shape its nati...ve sons. In Wright's mind, Bigger was a template for how young males of all races and ethnicities in the United States might be shaped. In 2011, Bigger Thomas is something more than a character in a novel; he is now an adolescent who harms himself and others in the streets of the United States.—Jerry Ward

Jerry: excellent point. Bigger is definitely an archetype of many youngsters, male and female, that roam our streets today. They are monsters created by our society, our schools and their parents. Raina Leon once wrote a poem (I hope I'm not misquoting her) about children "walking between the teeth of demons." This is just another example of how brilliant and prophetic Richard Wight's work was.—Valjeanne Jeffers

Jerry, you have expressed my views much eloquently than I. I must say to Valjeanne, also, that although differently located in time and place from Wright, I am as angry (perhaps more) as his major male characters. My life experiences and my studies have made me so. Perhaps that is why I have identified so with those characters. I just don't think that Wright was concerned about whether folks liked them, or even him. Recall that in White Man Listen! , Wright told us that he was "a rootless man" and that he didn't deal in happiness, but in meaning. Yes, Wright was brilliant and prescient. I run into so many young black men today that seem to embody Bigger or Cross.—Floyd W. Hayes

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