Escolar Documentos
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Cultura Documentos
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novella also tells the story of a metaphoricaljourney into the aesthetic undergroundof moder art. In the course of this journey,
Fred Daniels revisits the romanticconflicts dramatizedby Ishmael
and Ahab, Huck and Tom, on the one hand, and the post-romantic
ones voiced by Dostoyevsky's narratorand Conrad'ssailor, on the
other. Like these literarypredecessors,Fred Daniels confrontsreason and unreason, rationality and sensuality, society and nature.
Unlike them, he encountersthese aesthetic dilemmas throughthe
specific perspectiveof the African Americanexperience in a world
where reason and rationalityhave become synonymous with racism.5
While familiarto and valued by RichardWrightspecialists, The
Man is not known as a classic of Americanmodernism,despite the
numerousscholars who have recognized the great artistic merit of
the novella.6 In the estimation of these scholars, "The Man Who
Lived Underground"is "Wright's most accomplished piece of
short fiction (Bryant378)," one "woven of the same exacting perfection as a poem" (Fabre,"RichardWright's"220).7
Recognition of "The Man" as a modernistclassic of American
literature has been hindered by obstacles that have restricted
Wright's recognition within the American and African American
modernist canons.8 First, Wright is frequently classified as a
Southernauthor,his significance limited to having witnessed and
survived the lynching, terror, and violent segregation of the premodern Jim Crow South.9 Secondly, literary critics have voiced
ambivalentpraise for Wright's work and for the modernrealist poetics he represents.10Thirdly, critics routinely ignore what they
classify as Wright's "European"writings, the larger part of
Wright's output.Lastly, "The Man,"which was written before but
published after Wrightwent into exile in 1947, tends to be read as
an expression of Wright's encounter with French existentialism
ratherthan his ongoing reflection on alienation and racism in the
United States.'
These misguided views notwithstanding, literary critics have
produced a substantialbody of scholarshipon "The Man." Critics
have especially examined its themes and motifs, its style and ideas,
its biblical, classical, and moder themes, and its poetic, aesthetic,
and philosophical concerns.12They have debated whether the novella expresses despair or hope; whetherrealism and naturalismor
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Wright's novella expresses artisticallya preoccupationwith history that Walter Benjamin, in "Theses on the Philosophy of History," expresses philosophically and aphoristically(253-64). Benjamin reflects on the philosophy of history of traditionalJudaism
and of historical materialismin terms that illuminateWright's novella:
The truepictureof the past flits by. Thepastcanbe seizedonly as
an imagewhich flashesup at the instantwhen it can be recognized
and is never seen again. ... To articulatethe past historically...
meansto seize holdof a memoryas it flashesup at a momentof danger. Historicalmaterialismwishes to retainthat image of the past
which unexpectedlyappearsto man singledout by historyat a momentof danger.(255)
Benjamin's words capturethe predicamentof the reader of "The
Man"who, "singled out by history,"is engaged in a quest to recapture the past "as it flashes up at a moment of danger."Pointing to
Klee's famousAngelus Novus as the visual counterpartof the messianic philosophy of history of traditionalJudaism,Benjamin also
urges us to acknowledge the unpredictablepower of history and to
reclaim for the historicalclass its role as the messiah of society.
In his unpublished"Memoriesof My Grandmother,"Wrightreflects on the messianic vision of history of his Seventh-Day Adventist grandmother,and, more broadly, on the philosophy of history of black Christianity:
A man who worshipsin the Seventh-DayAdventistChurchlives,
psychologically,in a burningandcontinuousmomentthatneverends:
thepastis telescopedintothe now;thereis
thepresentis ever-lasting;
no futureand at any momentChristmay come againand then the
lived
anxioustensionof timewill be no more.... [Mygrandmother]
in
somewhere
off
with all of us, yet, psychologically,she hovered
space .... Alwaysshe seemedto be peepingout of Heaveninto the
worldwhile livingin the world.21
Within a journey that is characterizedby the protagonist'sfall into
a condition not unlike that of Wright's grandmother,the man's fall
out of history and time is punctuatedby flashes of memory evoked
at "moment[s] of danger."Only well into the journey do we be-
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come aware of the racial identity of the man; it is even later when
are we told, and then only once, that his name is Fred Daniels
(55).22
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powered by the distance that now separates him from the world
and by the special vision this distance has given him that he boldly
steps into the street. He is mistaken for an employee of the greengrocer by a white couple who, oblivious to the situation,hand him
a dime in exchange for some grapes. Exhilaratedby the mistake,
Fred Daniels throws the "dime to the pavement with a gesture of
contempt" (49), signaling with this gesture how removed he has
become from the social values of the world abovegroundthat are
epitomized in the coin. It is a magical moment, when terrorturnsto
laughterand contemptat the dime, a piece of metal that represents
the absurdvalues of the world aboveground.
This moment of intense alienationfrom the world aboveground
and from its absurdvalues is one among several of increasing intensity that signal the transformationof Fred Daniels, a once diligent servant, husband, citizen, and Christian, into a relativist, a
skeptic, and a nihilist. Just as suddenly, however, laughter turns
back into terroras he notices the headline of the evening newspaper: "HUNT NEGRO FOR MURDER" (49). This is another,just
as arbitrary,sign that expresses the values of the aboveground.His
distanced and alienated consciousness notwithstanding, Fred
Daniels is still, in the world aboveground,not a humanbeing. It is
also the first, not the last, time that the readeris invited to consider
whether modem art, and its alienated aesthetics, has the power to
defy the alienated and inhuman world that falsely accused Fred
Daniels of murder.
After stealing money, gems, and jewelry from the safe, and a
typewriter from an office, not for their value, which he has rejected, but as a way to express contempt for those values, Fred
Daniels himself begins explicitly to reflect on the relationshipbetween the world above and the world below:
He did not feel thathe was stealing,for the cleaver,the radio,the
money, and the typewriterwere all on the same level of value, all
meantthe samethingto him. Theywere the serioustoys of the men
who lived in the dead world of sunshineand rain he had left, the
worldthathadcondemnedhim,brandedhimguilty.(55)
Philosophically, Fred Daniels has fallen out of naive innocence.
Before the fall, he lived in a world that he assumed to be regulated
by reason and by God. He graduallydiscovers the essence of that
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reason to be wealth, and the face of that God to be the white man's
face.
In one of several scenes that have explicit and intense aesthetic
underpinnings,Fred Daniels visually expresses his alienation by
covering the walls of his undergroundcave with the dead objects
of the city aboveground:
He tookthe towelwithwhichhe hadtiedthe sackandballedit intoa
swabanddippedit intothe canof glueanddabbedglueontothewall;
thenhe pastedone greenbill by the side of another.He steppedback
andcockedhis head.Jesus! That'sfunny..... He slappedhis thighs
and guffawed.He had triumphedover the worldaboveground!He
was free!... He hadnot stolenthe money;he hadsimplypickedit up,
just as a manwouldpick up firewoodin a forest.And thatwas how
now seemedto him, a wild forestfilled with
the worldaboveground
death.(62)
Having escaped from the alienatingobjectivityof the racist society
above into the irrational subjectivity of the world below, Fred
Daniels createsa new version of the Platonic cave of deceptionand
darkness.Earlier in the journey, Fred Daniels had expressed contempt for the congregationof the black churchand for the audience
of the movie theater, whom he despised for being enchained by
fears, guilt, and shadows, for being prisonersof a Platonic cave of
deception, the deception of religion and of mass culture. The collage expresses that contempt through the self-conscious artistic
languageof modernismand avant-gardeart.23
In the footsteps of the Romantic artists and of their postRomantic descendants, Fred Daniels comes to rely on his senses
ratherthan on his mind in order to reject the values of the aboveground. In a crescendo of sensations that quickly die and just as
quickly must be replaced by new and more intense sensations, he
soon reachesthe final destinationof his quest for freedom:
Maybeanything'sright,he mumbled.Yes, if the worldas men had
madeit was right,thenanythingelse was right,anyact a mantookto
satisfyhimself,murder,theft,torture.
with a start.Whatwas happeningto him?. .. He
He straightened
was goingto do something,butwhat?Yes, he was afraidof himself,
afraidof doingsomenamelessthing.(64)
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As it turns out, the philosophical rejection and the aesthetic dissolution of the abovegroundproduces in Fred Daniels a mysterious
and intense fear of himself. He attempts to alleviate this fear by
turningon the radio, his last contact with the abovegroundhe has
rejected and with the human beings who inhabit that world. The
radio broadcastbrings to Fred Daniels and to the darkestrecesses
of his undergroundhideout yet another estranged vision of the
aboveground:
To controlhimself,he turnedon the radio.A melancholypiece of
musicrose.Broodingoverthe diamondson the floorwas like looking
up intoa sky full of restlessstars;thenthe illusionturnedinto its opposite:he was highup in the airlookingdownat the twinklinglights
of a sprawlingcity. The music ended and a man recitedthe news
events.In the sameattitudein whichhe hadcontemplated
the city, so
now, as he heardthe cultivatedtone, he lookeddownuponlandand
sea as menfought,as citieswererazed,as planesscattereddeathupon
open towns, as long lines of trencheswaveredandbroke.He heard
the namesof generalsandthe namesof mountainsandthe namesof
countriesandthe namesandnumbersof divisionsthatwere in action
on differentbattle fronts.He saw black smokebillowingfrom the
stacksof warshipas theynearedeachotheroverwastesof waterand
he heardtheirhugegunsthunderas red-hotshellsscreamedacrossthe
surfaceof nightseas. He saw hundredsof planeswheelinganddroning in the sky and heardthe clatterof machineguns as they fought
eachotherandhe saw planesfallingin plumesof smokeandblazeof
fire. He saw steel tanksrumblingacrossfields of ripewheatto meet
othertanksand therewas a loud clang of steel as numberlesstanks
collided.He saw troopswithfixedbayonetsandmengroanedas steel
ripped into their bodies and they went down to die .... The voice of
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Daniels's undergroundart. It is also the reverse of Conrad's aesthetics, which is embodiedin the programof aestheticism,the most
rarefied, civilized, idealized, and rationalized form of sensuality
and irrationalismavailableat the turnof the century.
Conrad's grandiloquentand old-fashioned first-personnarrator
tells a story whose meaning escapes him just as it escapes Marlow
and, by the author'spremeditatedchoice, it escapes Conrad'sreaders. Heart of Darkness expresses its author's position of distrust
that any meaningfulalternativeexists to eitherthe Europeanlies of
rationalismand the enlightenment,or the romanticprimitivismespoused by Kurtz and barely escaped by Marlow. Conrad's comment to his socialist friend R.B. CunninghamGraham, dated 8
February1899 and written as he was completingthe novella, is revealing: "Thereare two more installmentsin which the idea is so
wrappedup in secondarynotions that you-even you! may miss
it" (qtd. in Glenn, 238). Conrad's idea continues to elude critics.
Hidden behind the narrativescreen of two narrators,the anonymous narratorand Marlow, neither of whom represents the author's view of the world and especially of art, and both of whom
representnegative instances of those views, Conrad'sconservative
critique of modem primitivism and irrationalism"is so wrapped
up" that literarycritics-even literarycritics!-continue to miss it.
By contrast, Fred Daniels returns to tell the truth, a truth for
which he is killed. That Fred Daniels is killed for trying to tell the
truthand that the story is neverthelesslucidly told makes Wright's
act of narrationan act of hope in sharpcontrastto the cynicism of
Conrad's narrativechoices. Wright's radical critique of aestheticism also continues to elude literarycritics. His message, however,
was not intentionallyhidden. It is simply invisible to literarycritics
who are themselves, possibly, too "wrappedup" in the philosophy
of artthatWrighthere questions.
The difference between these two novellas is the difference between aestheticist despair and messianic hope. Fred Daniels's
physical death was finally a death full of hope in the future.27In
telling the story of his failure to communicatehis vision and truth,
the narratorexpressed a measure of hope in a better future. This
hopeful failure has more in common with Dostoyevsky's Notes
from Undergroundthan with Conrad's "deracinated"sailor.28The
failure of both Fred Daniels and Dostoyevsky's undergroundman
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leaves to the novella, and specifically to the reader,the responsibility to tell that truth,and to communicatethe vision these two men
earnedat the price of death and in the darkestunderground.
"The Man Who Lived Underground"contains a powerful critique of the irrationalistic,subjectivistic solutions that moder art
and philosophy have embraced to escape our alienating society.
Like Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground,in Georg Lukacs'
memorablecharacterization,it is a novella that attacksboth rationalism and irrationalism.29
Formulatedfrom within the author'sown
modernist formation and allegiance, Wright's critique of aestheticism also reveals his profound commitment to and equally profound ambivalence towards moder art. Wrightwas committed to
the practice of modern realism and radical modernism.The fear
that this poetics would become untenableduringthe Cold War informs both "The Man Who Lived Underground"and Black Boy
(1945). In "The Man Who Lived Underground,"Fred Daniels is
chased away by the black church congregation.In Black Boy, the
narratoris chased away from the May-Firstparade by black and
white fellow party members. These are eloquent scenes. They express Richard Wright's fear, at the end of the 1930s and at the
dawn of the Cold War era, that his own art and moder art in general were destined, like FredDaniels, for the underground.
Notes
1. According to Fabre, "The Man" was written in the fall of 1941, shortly after
the staggering success of Native Son (1940). The idea for the story came to
Wright from reading a True Detective story entitled "The Crime Hollywood
Couldn't Believe." The story was about a series of mysteriousthefts all within
one neighborhoodand, as it was discovered, carriedout by the same person. The
burglarhad tunneled his way throughthe basements and had created a cave of
riches worthy of Ali Baba. Fabrenotes that "The short story is thereforesituated
in the heartof a culminatingperiod in Wright'sproduction,between the adaptation of Native Son and the composition of the unpublishedBlack Hope and
Twelve Million Black Voices on one hand, and the birth of Black Boy on the
other" ("RichardWright"210). Also see Fabre, The Unfinished Quest, 238 ff
and Bakish, 42 ff.
2. While critics have recognized, in passing or at length, the significance of
various Europeanwriters and philosophers as sources of inspirationfor the novella, no one to my knowledge has explored its debt to these classics of American literature.
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3. The novella was famously rewrittenby Ralph Ellison as his well known Invisible Man (1952). Borrowingfrom "The Man"the metaphorof invisibility and
the literarydevice of the journey, Ellison was doing so, in the early fifties, in the
context of a radicallyalteredpolitical and social context. Ellison's Invisible Man
closes on a figure who, for the time being, intends to remain invisible and underground,the radio waves being the only link with humanityhe is willing to
trust.Comparedwith Ellison's Invisible Man, Wright'stragic novella seems like
a happy-endingfairy tale.
4. I am borrowingthe image of "the veil" from W.E.B. Du Bois' classic The
Souls of Black Folk (1903), a work that is, like "The Man,"the recordof a journey, literally to the deep South, figuratively to the invisible underworld of
Southernblack poverty. I am also borrowingthe image from Georg Lukacs' The
Theory of the Novel (1916), a philosophical essay on the conditions of consciousness and alienation in the modem novel that remains unsurpassed.The
theme of the journey to the underworldwithin African American literatureis
discussed by Thorton and by Dixon.
5. Classic and more recent discussions of modernism, aestheticism, and the
avant-gardeart movements of the early twentieth century can be found in Lukacs, Poggioli, Burger,Gaggi, and Larsen.
6. The novella is not widely known to literarycritics and scholars of American
and African Americanliterature;nor is it known to a wider public of American
and internationalreaders generally familiarwith Native Son (1940), Black Boy
(1945) and the earlier Uncle Tom's Children (1938). "The Man" is also not
available in a separatetext-book edition, and oddly it was left out of The Library
of Americaedition of RichardWright'smajorworks.
7. See Howe, "Eight Men;" Fabre, "RichardWright;"Dorothy Lee; Gilyard;
Bryant;Gilroy,Black Atlantic;and Weiss.
8. Overviews of the critical fortunes of RichardWright can be found in Fabre,
"RichardWright's Critical Reception;"Rampersad;Butler; Kinnamon,"Introduction;"Miller; Fabre, The World;Hakutani, Critical Essays; Gayle; Reilly,
Critical Reception; Fabre, The Unfinished Quest; Kinnamon, The Emergence;
and Bone.
9. This ignores the fact that much of Wright's work is set and addressesracism
and social injustice in the "modem"cities of the United States and in the postWorld-War-IIsocial order of first- and third-worldcountries. Wright's great
significance in the context of the thirdworld is discussed by Dissanayake;Folks;
Cobb;Reilly, "RichardWright'sDiscovery;"and Moore.
10. For specific interpretationsof the critical neglect that Richard Wright has
sufferedsee: Gilroy, TheBlack Atlantic, 146 ff.; Cappetti,182 ff.; Portelli "Everybody's; and DeCoste. Portelli suggests that as "salvific transcendence"and
"linguisticheroism"have become the favored conceptions of history among literarycritics, the inarticulatevictims of Wright'swork have become less and less
popular. While Portelli points to various forms of "post-modem idealisms" as
the cause of Wright's critical disfavor, DeCoste points to post-structuralismas a
new tool that expresses an old disfavor towards realism and referentiality.De-
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Works Cited
Baker, HoustonA. Jr. TheJourneyBack: Issues in Black Literatureand Criticism. Chicago:U of Chicago P, 1980.
-. "Reassessing(W)right:A Meditationon the Black (W)hole." 1984. Richard
Wright.Ed. HaroldBloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 127-61.
Bakish, David. Richard Wright.New York:Ungar, 1973.
Baldwin, James.Nobody Knows My Name. New York: Dial, 1961.
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"Memoirsof My Grandmother."
Unpublishedms. No date. Courtesyof
JuliaWright.
-. Native Son. 1940. New York: Harper& Row, 1960.
. The Outsider.1953. New York: Harper& Row, 1989.
. "To FrenchReaders."1959. Mississippi Quarterly42.4 (1989): 359-64.
. Uncle Tom's Children.1938. New York:Harper,1978.
-.
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