THE VENUS FLYTRAP OF LITERATURE PAST
By tacit but deliberate accident, the American
imagination of dubious color has been attracted to James Baldwin and Richard
Wright in 2015. On March 1, 2015, Ayana
Mathis and Pankaj Mishra published “James Baldwin Denounced Richard Wright’s ‘Native
Son” as a ‘Protest Novel.’ Was He Right?” in the New York Times Sunday Book
Review. More recently, one finds
Benjamin Anastas reporting in The New
Republic, May 25, 2015, on his
teaching of a course on Wright and Baldwin at Bennington College. His title “James Baldwin and Richard Wright
in the Ferguson Era” is a smokescreen.
There is no Ferguson Era any more than there is a Waco Era. We just have domestic terrorism and violence
that dates back to 1619. Anastas planned
his course “as a chance to revisit the work of two writers who loomed large in
African American literature of the twentieth century but who had fallen, in
recent years, out of favor and off of syllabi.”
In my circles of inquiry, Baldwin and Wright have never been out of
favor, and we think people who make such a claim inhabit a monstrous fib, an
item of Vermont fakelore.
Mathis, author of The
Twelve Tribes of Hattie, believes that Wright’s Native Son “is limited by a circumscribed vision that fails to
extend much beyond the novel’s moment in 1940.
Certainly the racism that made Bigger Thomas still exists, but, thank
God, Bigger Thomas does not ---he never did.”
She is wrong. She is right. Native
Son has extended indirectly into the lives of twenty-first century males
who are potential targets of selective profiling. It is true, of course, that the character
Bigger Thomas is a construction of words.
The words do not breathe; they have just “lived in” the thinking of many
males. Mathis has no obligation to be much concerned with nuances of male
matters.
Mishra, on the other hand, does have so gendered an
obligation. Yet, he fails in his
reluctance to admit that the protest novel in American English is not some
unique property of African Americans but a legacy that extends from James
Fennimore Cooper to John Grisham. It is
curious that Mishra embraces Baldwin for unmasking “treacherous clichés in
ostensibly noble programs of protest and emancipation” even as he reifies the
treacherous cliché of putting Baldwin and Wright into Ralph Ellison’s battle
royal.
Anastas admits to being a Baldwinite, but he does
recognize Wright’s comments on “police-induced terror” do bear a nightmare
relationship to “the United States of Trayvon Martin and ‘Stand Your Ground’.” What he does not recognize is how complicit
he is in what Baldwin identified as the crime of innocence, the state of
neither knowing nor wanting to know how one may be an author of human
devastation. Perhaps two or three of his
Bennington students were not caught by the Venus flytrap of literature past and
were able to detect what lurks in the heart of whiteness.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
June 6, 2015
