A Footnote for A Work-in-Progress
Doreen Fowler’s Drawing
the Line: The Father Reimagined in Faulkner, Wright, O’Connor, and Morrison
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013) is a prime example of how
lost in the wilderness one becomes by following psychoanalytic maps of
non-referentiality. Some critics find
psychoanalytic theories to be useful in reading texts, because those theories
sanction language being in conversation with language. One need not deal with the
messiness of referentiality fiction and non-fiction invite. One can momentarily
escape the horror of knowing that signifiers co-exist with the material presences
which negate signification.
As a Wright scholar, I profit from efforts to link Wright’s
works with contemporary criticism. My
profit from reading Fowler’s chapter “Crossing a Racial Border: Richard Wright’s
Native Son” is disappointment. I am disappointed that Fowler uses
psychoanalytic theory as an excuse to avoid dealing with the totality of Wright’s
reimagining the father, a rich and insufficiently explored topic in Wright
studies.
Fowler travels into the dense terrain of Native Son by following paths mapped by
Freud, Lacan and Kristeva. She either
deliberately or inadvertently ignores the “map” drawn by Wright’s authoring of
and authority in a text that reimagines the father of all its characters as
early twentieth-century American society, a deadbeat parent. Fowler’s assertion that “Wright’s novel also
has mapped out a way to reconcile competing drives for culturally specific
identities and for solidarity with others” (71) is not illogical. It is limited. It supports the view that the
lawyer “Max embraces Bigger as a son” (71). In terms of psychoanalytic theory,
this morphological feature of the text is significant. It draws sharp notice, however, to the
embrace as a single move in a game of language. It confuses the referential
import of Wright’s blistering critique of American patriarchy with the theoretical
objectives of such feminist thinkers as Kristeva and Jessica Benjamin. This
accidental hegemony leaves the act of reading in the wilderness. And Fowler
should have been more cognizant of what Shoshana Felman sees as traps and dupery
in psychoanalysis.
The extensive map to lead us out of the wilderness is
constituted by Wright’s reimagining of the father in The Outsider, The Long Dream, Savage Holiday, and A Father’s Law. Without that map, readers
are stuck in the critical funhouse, unable to articulate what Wright language
games tell us about American social and cultural histories.
Jerry W. Ward,
Jr. October 22, 2013
