The first time I read Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy, I was made to believe that the engaging singularity of the main protagonist, the boy Richard, was simply a good example of a skillfully crafted by-product of the author’s use of the Marxist parable paradigm. In that respect, the boy Richard and the author Richard Wright were two distinct (almost opposing) entities, the latter molding the physicality and the emotional text of the former through the skillfulness of his craft. I suppose that this rather limiting interpretation of a text whose body transcends the confines of the page suited the design of my high school’s literature curriculum, firmly positioned in the trenches of a socialist reading of western fiction as produced by its own social outcasts, dissidents or self-exiles, emigrants. However, after having myself immersed in Black Boy’s structural tapestry with all of its nooks and crannies, I could not freely juxtapose Wright’s text to Gorky’s spin-off of the ‘genuine’ Marxist parable, given as such in The Mother.
So when I entered university, I came to it anticipating a broader understanding of the literary values and aesthetics; my grandparents had promised that such revelations would indeed come. In my third year, I took a course on African American Literature that did help heal my initial dissatisfaction with the interpretation of Wright’s text. The instructor pointed out the obvious autobiographical nature of the novel, a sentiment that had escaped me before, yet he persisted on guiding our discussions towards a satisfying comparative literature ideal. As we read Black Boy for the second time (it seemed that most of us had a similar initial contact with the novel), we looked at its cryptic stance as a prerogative for the intended individual historiography of an alienated existentialist in modern society. Dostoyevsky and his Notes from Underground served as our ‘objective correlative(s)’.
Now, as I visit the text for the third time, with a new agenda in front of me, I am beginning to sense our (my classmates and mine) misguided analyses of Wright’s autobiographical text. Even though I still believe that this novelesque narrative allows us to position it next to Dostoyevsky’s Notes , while reading Black Boy for the third time, I realize that in order to carry out a comprehensive comparative study I must question what this autobiographical narrative stands for on its own. In other words, to come full circle, I have to begin by looking at the narrative from the perspective of a life-story and all that such a perspective ascertains.
To complicate things further, if we look at Wright’s age when he wrote Black Boy (he was approaching his fifth decade), and his choice for the story’s ending (Richard as a nineteen-year-old youth, moving from Tennessee to the North), what we are left with is a rather unusual attempt at employing ‘standard’ autobiographical techniques. Nonetheless, the conscious choices that Wright makes as he weaves in his life’s story bring us closer to his autobiographical self than we have come initially to expect.
Donald B. Gibson’s essay, titled ‘Richard Wright’s Black Boy and the Trauma of Autobiographical Birth’ attributes several of the text’s discrepancies, regarding the actual life of young Richard Wright (namely, his lack of boyhood friends as presented in the text, which was not the case in his real life), to Wright’s determination to create his early life as a product of incredulous will power and unbending individualism. This fierce commitment to the power of ‘one’ (exhibited by Richard, age four, six, eight) is seen by Gibson as an almost direct result of Wright’s relationship with his parents and, to an extent, with his maternal grandmother: ‘Falling to find the necessary support and sustaining function in adults or in a community, he had to rely upon himself – to cultivate those qualities in himself, to become self-reliant, a strong individualist. That is why in the book Wright differs from every other black person who appears in that world.’ (493) Therefore, Wright’s Richard is not to blame for the lingering sense of separateness between his and his community. He didn’t have a saying in the outcome; it came as a direct response to his parents’ failure to provide shelter, comfort, understanding and courage to his as a young man. Consequently, ‘Black Boy is at once an explanation and defense of Wright’s separateness from a black community and a strong protest against the plight of all the black boys and girls, men and women subjected in his words, to “ethics of living Jim Crow”.’ (494)
As Gibson singles out Richard’s presence from that of his parents, his brother, his grandmother, the other participants of his early and late childhood days, through the boy’s undeniable sense of self, set in opposition to the other selves, we are drawn to examine the narrative even closer. We can almost see the fire, sense the hunger, the fear of sexuality, the constant threat of violence, all of the actual and metaphorical associations of Richard’s existence, how they affirm his self-recognition and help acknowledge the absence of a warm, comforting motherly love. On that note, Albert E. Stone’s study, titled ‘The Childhood of the Artist: Louis Sullivan and Richard Wright’, considers young Richard’s resolving of his Oedipal complex as he discovers his artistic calling. Stone views the ‘freezing’ of Wright’s love for his mother as an ‘antithetical and necessary sequel to the fire previously felt for her.’ (138) ‘Hot’ is replaced by ‘cold’ in an almost matter-of-fact way. But the conventional explicitness, Stone argues, is needed to ‘complete the transformation of the deep fantasy at the core of Richard Wright’s life and identity into the manifest “meanings” of his life and career.’ (142)
These ‘manifest meanings’ of Wright’s penmanship are imbedded in Black Boy as in no other of his later works. They teach us about American injustice, bringing us to bear witness to a young adult’s struggle while forming his black subjectivity amidst a racist society. Abdul R. JanMohamed’s article, titled ‘Negating the Negation as a Form of Affirmation in Minority Discourse: The Construction of Richard Wright as a Subject’ explores Wright’s writing as a successful attempt to repel hegemonic formation by turning himself into a ‘mirror that reflected the negation back at the hegemony.’ (108) JanMohamed disassembles Wright’s text, in reference to the author’s personality and the socio-political circumstances of his formative and later years, to conclude that Black Boy stands as a triumph of ontogeny over phylogeny, its publication and literary success representing ‘an affirmation, a vindication of his strategy of negating the racist negation.’ (121)
All things considered, Black Boy exerts on the behalf of the reader a nuanced approach, one which takes us away from our comparative literary enclaves and into the interpolating layers of the text itself, literal and metaphorical, historical and imaginary, eponymous and symbolical, creating their own tapestry within the discourse of a single life-story. Only by recognizing the plurality of this text’s make-up may we further our sense of a comprehensive comparative literary knowledge and render it a truth-worthy cross-cultural representation.
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