Mississippi Writers Guild Jerry
W. Ward, Jr.
November 2, 2013
Natchez, Mississippi
Spin, Specificity, and a Man from Mississippi
Given
my admiration for Richard Wright, it was a “done deal” that I would say “Yes”
to the generous invitation from Mark LaFrancis and the Mississippi Writers Guild
to address the symposium Richard Wright: The Man and His Legacy. The
theme of the symposium echoed so much that I had talked about for many years. Therein lay a difficulty. Could I say, especially to fellow writers,
anything fresh and stimulating? Could I
formulate new ideas and articulate them?
Surprisingly, the answers came from the sciences and not directly from
literature. They came from thinking
about Cornel West’s critique of a lack of specificity in certain Marxist
discourses about the affairs of the world.
They came from some reflection on what many writers from Mississippi
donate to that world.
When
a writer is in doubt about what to say, she or he should spin. Spiders and writers intrigue us with their
spinning of artful designs. The spiders,
of course, often get rewards for their labor which are more immediate than
those earned by writers. What spiders
may happily catch can be consumed and transformed into more material for
spinning. Writers, no matter how great
the attention they capture, must often wait much longer for rewards to
come. And many of them are dead when the
rewards arrive. We have to take comfort
in the fact that the spider’s delicate art is easily destroyed. The writer’s art gets preserved in memory,
however dim memory becomes; it becomes semi-permanent in print, or in the 21st
century in audio forms and website archives.
The question that interests me is at once simple and difficult to
answer: what drives a writer’s imagination to create a piece of writing that
can simultaneously delight and entrap?
Part
of the answer resides in concept of “spin” as that word is used in the
discipline of physics. In quantum theory, spin refers to the angular momentum
of a subatomic particle ---electron, proton, neutron ----which continues to
exist even when the particle comes to rest.
According to theory, a particle in a specific energy state has a
particular spin. That is the work of
Nature. In the realm of writing, on the
other hand, the particles are at once pieces of writing and the people who
read, make sense of, evaluate, and reject or ingest what the other particles
engender. The governing principle is how
writers endow thought and ideas with possible spins or angles of
interpretation. The analogies are promising,
to the extent it makes any sense for writers and writing to exist under the
influence of laws of thermodynamics.
One
can say something new about Richard Wright and his readers from that vantage.
Wright’s legacy is more than his works that are in-print and the unpublished
works that are at rest in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library. Legacy has an active dimension, the diverse negotiations we have with
materials that constitute a legacy. From
time to time we read portions of the legacy.
These interactions quicken curiosity about why Wright chose to write and
the life experiences that informed and gave shape to his writing. The
interactions provoke questions and speculations. Our lack of sufficient evidence to answer all
of our questions does not hinder our endless
speculating, our ongoing wondering about the role of his legacy in our
history and culture-bound lives. Despite what we may have been taught about
“correct” responses to writing (the writing identified as literature) and the
transcendent values of “correct”
aesthetic responses, most of us are not paralyzed or imprisoned by correctness,
nor is the value of our engagements with the work of any writer negated by what
literary and cultural critics tell us we are supposed to think. Reason and common sense, I admit, can
persuade us that certain interpretations are less erroneous than others. Yet, once writing enters the public domain,
the writer can’t control misinterpretations.
That is one reason Wright published his manifesto “Blueprint for Negro
Writing” in 1937;* it was a guide for his practice as a writer. It is now very
useful as a guide for how his readers,
especially those who themselves write, can deal with his legacy and their own
angles of interpretation, their own spins.
*All quotations from “Blueprint for Negro
Writing” are from The Richard Wright
Reader (New York: Harper & Row, 1978): 36-49.
Although Wright does not use the
word “specificity” in his manifesto, it is obvious that when he gave us a
description of perspective, he had attention to details and avoidance of sloppy
generalizations in mind. Indeed, it is the specificity that comes from exacting
calibration that is important. In item
7, “The Problem of Perspective,” in
the blueprint, Wright suggested:
Perspective is that part of a
poem, novel, or play which a writer never puts directly upon paper. It is that fixed point in intellectual space
where a writer stands to view the struggles, hopes, and sufferings of his
people. There are times when he may
stand too close and the result is a blurred vision. Or he may stand too far away and the result
is a neglect of important things.
Of all the problems faced by
writers who as a whole have never allied themselves with world movements,
perspective is the most difficult of achievement. At its best, perspective is a pre-conscious
assumption, something which a writer takes for granted, something which he wins
through his living.
Specificity demands upon management
of the spin. Wright had much to say in a few well-chosen words to writers of a
future, to writers of the 21st century, to us. With my fellow writers, I often have
discussions of perspective or what might increase our managing our
visions. I have such conversations
weekly with Kalamu ya Salaam in New Orleans. He is convinced (and has almost convinced me)
that unless a writer has a few palpable or figurative scars to show from having
been allied with a movement or struggle, he has little to say that the world
should notice. Wright might certainly have written his magnificent poem “Between the World and
Me” without having been allied with left-wing movements of the 1930s. Lynching
was part of his inheritance as a Mississippian. Margaret Walker wrote her signature poem “For
My People” without having been allied as much as Richard Wright with
Marxism. Nevertheless, these two poems
grip us because the perspectives they give us were influenced by the engagement
Wright and Walker had in Chicago with the New Deal and the Federal Writers’
Project (Illinois subsection) as part of the WPA, the Works Projects
Administration. That program was very
much about documenting details of American life. Read Ira Katznelson’s recently
published Fear Itself: The New Deal and
the Origins of Our Time. That book illuminates the early context for
appreciating Wright’s legacy.
There are ten items in Wright’s
blueprint. Like item 7, the other nine can
assist us in reading Wright’s legacy and writing our own.
Item 1. The Role of Negro Writing: Two Definitions
For Wright, Negro writing was
either (1) “a sort of conspicuous ornamentation, the hallmark of achievement”
or (2) “the voice of the educated Negro pleading with white America for
justice.” If one merely samples Wright’s
early proletarian poetry, Uncle Tom’s
Children, and Native Son, one is
mislead into thinking he was only pleading with the American numerical majority
for justice. Properly read, Native Son is less a plea than a
scathing critique of what was pathological in America’s majority cultures.
Native Son is iconic. It is not a
stereotyped “protest” novel but a thesis novel . If you think William Faulkner’s trilogy The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion is devoid of protest and
propagation, your reading spin is entropic,
a measure of perceptual disintegration.
Wright believed the best African
American writing should have been “addressed to the Negro himself, his needs,
his sufferings, his aspirations.” Under
the rubric of science, we writers produce our best writing by addressing the
needs, sufferings, and aspirations of people. When Tan Huijuan writes from
Hangzhou that “China is undergoing such radical social
changes and reforms that some tragic events are definitely inevitable , since
Chinese institutions are much less perfect than that [those] of the United
States, and the high population density in some Chinese cities is also the
social problem that drive[s] some people into despair. There is Thomas Bigger
everywhere, in American and in China,” (Email to Ward, dated October 30, 2013) I conclude that Native Son’s value, like that of its specific companion Rite of Passage (1994), is
transnational.
Item 2. The
Minority Outlook
Wright worried about “the
enervating effects” of a split between black writers and the social and
economic consciousness of workers, those who kept the machinery of capitalism
running. A cataloging of past achievements was not productive. “An emphasis
upon tendency and experiment,” Wright argued,” a view of society as something
becoming rather than as something fixed and admired is the one which point the
way for Negro writers to stand shoulder to shoulder with Negro workers in mood
and outlook.” Wright is quite specific
about labor in his photo-documentary folk history 12 Million Black Voices (1941)
and his autobiography Black Boy
(1945) and in the Mississippi-grounded novel The Long Dream (1958).
Contemporary writers in America
constitute a minority within our nation’s total population; we do not go astray
if we narrow the gap between ourselves and everyone else by using our own
“minority” outlook to explore the hidden dimensions of what counts as “work” in
an age of excessive data.
Item 9. Autonomy
of Craft
Wright was adamant in claiming “the
relationship between reality and the artistic image” is complex, that artistry
must not be submerged by didactic sloganizing.
For him, “image and emotion possess a logic of their own.” His first novel Lawd Today! (written circa 1934/1935 and published in 1963) wove
together American naturalism with some avant garde techniques from James Joyce
Ulysses; in his novels and short fiction
after 1947, The Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1954), The Long Dream (1958), and Eight Men (1961) and A Father’s Law (2008), the aesthetic and
the didactic are something of a double helix, an entanglement that tests our
powers of interpretive unraveling. And in his travel writings –Black Power (1954), Pagan Spain (1957), The Color
Curtain (1956) –the persona or Wright’s creation of a narrative voice of
Richard Wright ensures the complexity of relationship between image and the
mediation of reality.
Craft was autonomous for Wright,
but it carried an odd stipulation: “Writing has its professional autonomy; it
should complement other professions, but it should not supplant them or be
swamped by them.” The permanent
challenge of his legacy for 21st century writers is how to configure
the demands of engagement with the demands of technique.
Item 10. The
Necessity for Collective Work
Wright inevitably wrote about
collective work within the operative boundaries of race in the 1930s. “On the shoulders of white writers and Negro
writers alike,” he asserted with optimism, “rest the responsibility of ending
…mistrust and isolation” among all writers. “These tasks are imperative in
light of the fact that we live in a time when the majority of the most basic
assumptions of life can no longer be taken for granted. Tradition is no longer a guide. The world has grown huge and cold. Surely
this is the moment to ask questions, to theorize, to speculate, to wonder out
of what materials can a human world be
built.” Is he speaking of 1937 or 2013? The
imperatives for writing are fairly constant, but the community of writers now
is larger, dramatically diverse, somewhat beyond the boiling point of
contention.
The unmistakably Marxist items --- Item
3. A Whole Culture; Item 4. The Problem of
Nationalism in Negro Writing; Item 5. The Basis and Meaning of Nationalism in
Negro Writing; Item 6. Social
Consciousness and Responsibility; Item 8. The Problem of Theme---constitute the
most problematic portion of “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” They are excellent
for orienting the spins involved with interpretation of Wright’s works. The temporal specificity of the items,
however, is a field saturated with explosive devices, because Marxism is
ill-equipped to deal with the material specificity of African American
oppression.* In item 6, for example,
Wright noted that Marxist analysis produced the skeleton to which the writer
must add flesh (language), and he echoed that point in Black Boy when he told
his mother that the Marxists had ideas but he had the language.
*I am indebted for this idea to Cornel West’s essay “Marxist
Theory and the Specificity of Afro-American Oppression” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and
Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 17-29.
Wright’s works, including the
outpouring of haiku during the last two years of his life (Haiku: This Other World,
1998), contains his ideas about intra-ethnic class struggles (divisions between masses of black people and
the always “rising” black bourgeoisie) that magnify the divisiveness of
American culture; his reasons for relegating political and cultural nationalism
to the realm of folklore, that vast body of transmitted wisdom which has “[the]
vital beginnings of a recognition of value in life as it is lived, a recognition that marks the emergence of a new culture in
the shell of the old.” African American
writers and all writers work in bad faith if they ignore the numerous
disruptions of society and history. But
Wright was so specific that he offered a “mission impossible” to black writers.
Wright used the word “theme” in a
way that refers simultaneously to our traditional meaning of “theme” as the
main idea in a piece of writing and to what in classical rhetoric might have
been called “special topics,” the subjects distributed among deliberative,
judicial, and ceremonial discourses.
Wright created a symbolic “black hole” by proposing
Theme
for Negro writers will emerge when they have begun to feel the meaning of the history
of their race as though they in one life time had lived it themselves
throughout all the long centuries.
Wright spoke of theme as if it had
a single manifestation rather than many manifestations in texts. While he gave the appearance of possessing or
feeling the whole by projecting his ideas through the narrative device of the
collective “we” in 12 Million Black
Voices, the appearance was very clearly an appearance. As he evolved as a writer in his later works,
he often positioned himself as the representative voice of the oppressed of
this earth. Yet, in Black Power, Wright had to confess that he was a man of the West,
forged on the smithy of Western presuppositions. This confession prevented his being sucked
into the black hole of insane longing for the impossible. To be sure, he was a world citizen, but he did
not have the lived and specific experiences of all citizens of the world.
Contemporary writers who would
hazard speaking for others should take note of Wright’s retreat in 1953/54 from
the brash proposal he made in 1937.
Writers do learn from their errors and can correct or adjust their spins.
Despite conflicts, writers can spin like a guild of textile workers. The legacy of a man from Mississippi still
affirms that the effort to collaborate with civility is a good thing. I have
punned on the words “spin” and “specificity” with a purpose. Writers can learn from Richard Wright that
the most difficult thing in the world is to tell the truth. As Huckleberry Finn said about Mr. Mark Twain,
he told the truth mainly.
