The Outsider

by Richard Wright

  The silence is perhaps easiest to explain. Wright had come to Paris as an ex-Communist, openly critical of the Party. He found himself under attack by the very people who had promoted his early works throughout the world. This, combined with being a black American in a strange land, could understandably make him quieter and more reflective than usual. If we read The Outsider in this way, as a book which emerges after an important period of growth and change in Wright’s life, a book in which Wright is speaking directly to us out of his own experience, we can see in it a kind of evolution of the author’s vision and craft.

  The Outsider shares with Wright’s earlier works a basic structure and theme: a series of graphic and dramatic reproductions of a race- and class-based system of oppression, where the code words “rich” and “white” are synonymous with the dominant cultural values. Depictions of powerless individuals abound and the struggle to gain power supplies most of the narrative line. The five-part structure of The Outsider, though slightly extended from that of Native Son, frames the familiar tale: Highly motivated and intelligent, Cross Damon sees his ambitions thwarted as the boundaries of his existence become dictated by others (his mother, his wife Gladys, his job at the Post Office, and his girlfriend, Dot); he becomes alienated from his family and friends; a freak accident on a Chicago “L” train leaves him with a choice: He can either set himself free by claiming a new identity or turn himself in as a survivor of the wreck. He chooses the former, finally taking on the identity of Lionel Lane, whose name he takes from a grave. This sets in motion a series of interrelated events. After assuming a variety of masks—comic Negro, defender of human rights, black intellectual—Cross meets a black West Indian worker who invites him to meet fellow Communists.

  Cross immediately falls in love with Eva Blount, a white artist and wife of Gil Blount, Party Central Committee member. Cross becomes increasingly critical of the Party the more they try to recruit him, finding their attitudes racist and condescending. He is especially scornful of Gil, who followed orders to marry Eva so that the Party could benefit from her talents. Cross’s murders of Gil Blount, to free Eva, and Jack Hilton, another leading Party member, add to the murders he has already committed. His confession to Eva drives her to suicide. In the end, Cross is free to go, for Ely Houston, a disabled (hunchback) district attorney, thinks that permitting Cross to live according to the rules he himself has created is appropriate punishment. In the final scene in the book, Cross had been found out by the Communists as well; and he dies from a bullet wound inflicted by an assassin, pleading his own innocence, understanding and accepting what he has done in terms no one can understand except Ely Houston.

  The central image in the story is the “outsiderness” of Cross Damon, represented by Wright as an extreme case. His “alienation from himself and society is complete,” says Robert Coles. “Damon is racially outside (a black man living outside of a dominant white racist society), spiritually outside (an atheist living outside of Christianized Western society), materially outside (a postal worker who is deeply in debt), and emotionally outside (involved in a marriage-family situation which he abhors).”4 In short, Wright had made a grown-up Bigger Thomas, and one whose characteristics are as uncommon in contemporary society as Coles would have us believe. Cross Damon may have occurred to Wright as an outsider but he presents us with an inside view of some of the problematic aspects of working class and black existence.

  This reconfiguration of a black protagonist suggests several things: first, that Wright was deepening his analysis of modern racism through the useful prism of philosophical existentialism; second, that he was very conscious of framing the character in a way so as to make Cross distinct from Bigger; and third, that Wright intended for the reader to understand Cross through the questioning of his own condition and motivations.

  Cross Damon, like Bigger Thomas, is introduced to us as an individual powerless to act, inevitably trapped within images that others have constructed of him and obliged to destroy that which devalues him. But the enemy is not so easily identified as being white people as it is in Native Son. The novel forces the reader to see a complex of issues pertaining to Cross’s relationships with a number of people, both black and white. More fully aware of his subjective reactions, Cross seeks to understand and analyze each experience and relationship in light of an entire social, political, and ideological system. In his extreme self-consciousness, Cross signifies for Wright the black intellectual without privilege. Rooted in neither the black middle class nor the conventional folk culture of the rural South, this prototype of the black worker-intellectual is a mirror of Wright’s perceived self-identity. Wright wanted “to demystify the ideology of Left and Right for his readers,” according to John Reilly. “He created a protagonist formed out of his own experience…. Wright provided Damon with the insights of the author.”5

  Wright’s disillusionment with the Communist party plays an important part in the overall plot. But it is not sufficient to see The Outsider as a transcription of this one moment in Wright’s life. It is perhaps more correct to say that Wright reached a new understanding about the meaning of his own independence, a moment of immense personal and historical significance. Just as he had always created texts that brought to consciousness the particular effects of cultural and social phenomena, reflecting various stages of his own understanding of the world, Wright in The Outsider found a literary equivalent for his expanded consciousness, broader political concerns, and intellectual perspectives.

  If this literary equivalent appeared more ambivalent than his previous fiction, it is important to remember that Wright’s protagonists can always be seen from two perspectives—the way they are seen by others and the way they wish themselves to be seen. This kind of double vision or ambivalence is what Du Bois called “double consciousness,” one of the central themes in African-American literature. It is this theme that Wright expands upon in The Outsider. By putting Cross in charge of his own fate, the ambivalence or double consciousness is intensified. The ambivalence is double-edged, however. Not only does Cross expose the contradictory attitudes that whites have of him as an intelligent black person, but he is also as ambivalent about the new self he has created as he is about the old self that he has rejected.

  The problem of audience also complicated Wright’s presentation of Cross Damon. Wright had been much clearer about the two audiences for whom he was writing in Native Son. “I would tell Communists how common people felt, and I would tell common people of the self-sacrifice of Communists who strove for unity among them,” he commented in American Hunger. Now Wright’s audience—or at least his understanding of it—was a world that was more diffuse, more complex. And this world was undergoing sweeping changes involving left and right. The dramatic tension created in The Outsider stems from being in a state of emotional and intellectual turmoil, an in-between stage both for Wright’s character and for black people as a whole.

  For other reasons, Wright had to move beyond the image of Black Boy and Native Son as well. Having failed to convince his publishers to publish the entire manuscript he had submitted as the original autobiography, Wright accepted the shortened version, which became Black Boy. One critic has suggested that in agreeing to a generic designation, Wright was indeed acknowledging the “reductive manner in which all black men are perceived by a racist society.” But this is also a “synonym, an external mark for the title of the second book, American Hunger, designating the inner affliction suffered by all blacks.”6

  Cross Damon’s story became the expression of that inner affliction, the difficulty of making choices when faced with the full range of possibilities of human knowledge. Although the story of Wright’s own turbulent coming of age represented a striking contrast to that of Bigger Thomas, whom racism transforms into a symbol of its own defeat, both are images of black men as “boys.”

  The Outsider went further in exploring the meaning of freedom, unrestricted and non-ideologized. Presenting Cross Damon as someone who i
s an oppressed victim, Wright also gave him the possibility of becoming the agent of his own liberation in a way different from Bigger Thomas. If freedom for Bigger meant the ability to act decisively, to kill that which was killing him, for Cross Damon it meant escape from all repressive structures, including the ideology of communism which is integrally woven into Damon’s life and death. While Bigger kills for survival, Cross kills to permit transformation.

  Many of the restored sections of the present text heighten the contradictions we see within Cross’s consciousness at the same time that they give us further insight into his character. While he is certainly psychotic, he is also compassionate and demonstrates a strong moral sense regarding the exploitation of others. In an important scene which was deleted from earlier editions, Cross attempts to intervene in a real estate scam that his landlady, Hattie Turner, has become involved in. Although it is Hattie’s own greed that gets her into the situation, Cross recognizes that she too is being exploited and exposes the two men who are trying to cheat her. The restoration of this scene is crucial because it gives us a glimpse into Cross’s relationships with other black people, especially another woman, for reasons other than his own self-interest.

  Although Damon is guilty of physical violence, he presents an occasion for seeing another kind of violence, perhaps more dangerous and deadly. Prefiguring the debates in a variety of disciplines as well as the historical events of the 1960s, Cross’s world is characterized by what may be called symbolic violence, or various ways in which authority and power over his life become the domain of others. He has a dead-end, low-paying job at the Post Office which requires that he stop taking his evening classes and undergo the humiliation of borrowing money on a regular basis. In addition to having to confront the racist insults and paternalism of his white superiors, Cross finds that his personal business—his girlfriend’s pregnancy and his wife’s complaints—is public information in the Postmaster’s office. In the end, he is regarded as just another “colored boy” who can’t get his act together. Cross experiences these forms of domination which are equally as terrifying as physical violence or coercion. His desire to escape from this domination is also symbolized through violence; Cross understands that a symbolic death, perceived as real to others, can give him an opportunity for a new life, one that he himself can control, one that will not be subjected to the domination of others. But this is also precisely the moment when Cross first perceives of himself as a criminal (105).

  Cross’s articulation of issues of domination, violence, and victimization makes him a uniquely crafted individual and contributes to Wright’s importance in changing the direction of literature which sought to interpret social and psychological phenomena.

  In the early sections of the book, Cross is aware that victimization can stimulate violent aspects of one’s character, and he engages in violent actions as an effective means for releasing himself from the control of others. Thus, Cross is growing increasingly aware of the way violence can be used against him as well as the way he can employ it for his own ends. He traps Gladys by pretending insanity and abusing her, hoping she will want to divorce him; in turn, he is trapped by his girlfriend Dot, a minor, who falsely accuses him of the violent act of rape, hoping to coerce him into child support. These examples further problematize the meaning of violence. For once violence—ideological, symbolic, or physical—is understood to be an acceptable tool of domination, then the categories of “resistance” and “accommodation” are not what they appear to be.

  In the latter portion of the book, and especially in the restored sections, Cross’s resistance to the power and authority of others becomes stronger as does his desire to become the agent for the liberation of others. He refers to his acts as “ethical murder” but decides he cannot confess, and is obliged to “lie, to dodge, to blend with the changing hues of the foliage…” (311). He queries Menti, a Communist functionary who has been discharged to spy on him, “But…don’t you feel that you’ve got some value that’s yours and yours alone?” (372) Such instances are telling, for we realize that Cross’s actions are inspired by his desire to empower himself and others.

  Because of the death-rebirth symbolism and the moral tone which Cross adopts, many critics have chosen to read this story as Wright’s attempt to reinscribe a politically corrupt world with a moral message. Just as Cross Damon, himself demonic, is born again, so too must the ideas of humankind be grounded in morality. I would prefer to read Wright’s presentation of the complex social world in which Cross Damon lives and the psychological state that breeds his criminality as a cautionary tale about the excesses of individuality and the dangers of human alienation. In the end, Cross has no appropriate context in which to give meaning to his actions, other than one he himself has created.

  By demonstrating the consequences of human alienation—irrational, irresponsible murder and death—in a racist society, Wright highlights the inadequacy of interpretations which privilege individualism, even at the risk of being self-critical. Cross’s fatal flaw is ultimately his individualism. When carried to its logical conclusion, he has nothing left.

  If for no other reason, therefore, reading a book like The Outsider is a challenge to our understanding of the past. And it demands that we reassimilate into the critical present a writer whose fiction articulates moments of discovery and change which have profoundly affected the way we construct the political discourses of our own day and time.

  If the dominant theme in twentieth-century literature is the search for identity, then Wright reinterprets this theme for his own work by electing to have his characters search for their freedom in ways as complex and ironic as the history of racism itself. It is this that forms the crux of Wright’s stories from the beginning of his career to the very end. Moving inside and outside of the realities of people’s lives becomes an abundant source for writers of fiction. When these realities are complicated by a carefully woven blend of historical fact and knowledge about domination—social, cultural, ideological, or otherwise—the results can be explosive, as they were for Wright.

  This then is the context for revisiting The Outsider—a novel in which we see inscribed Wright’s increasing desire to explore human reactions to oppression and domination and to find a way perhaps to mirror his own feelings of marginality, the spiritual exile of Paris, and the alienation from the land and the people of his birth.

  MARYEMMA GRAHAM

  NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY

  BOOK ONE

  DREAD

  Dread is an alien power which lays hold of an individual, and yet one cannot tear oneself away, nor has a will to do so; for one fears what one desires.

  —KIERKEGAARD

  FROM AN INVISIBLE February sky a shimmering curtain of snowflakes fluttered down upon Chicago. It was five o’clock in the morning and still dark. On a South Side street four masculine figures moved slowly forward shoulder to shoulder and the sound of their feet tramping and sloshing in the melting snow echoed loudly. The men were warmly dressed and wore mufflers about their throats. The brims of their hats, encrusted with snow, were pulled down at rakish tilts over their eyes. Behind turned-up overcoat collars their gruff voices exploded in jokes, laughter, and shouts. They jostled one another with rude affection and their hot breaths projected gusts of vapor on to the chilled morning air. One of the men threw out an arm and grabbed a companion about the neck and crooned:

  “Booker, let me rest this tired old body on you, hunh?”

  “Hell, naw! Stand on your own two big flat feet, Cross!” Booker, a short, black man protested with a laugh.

  The man called Cross turned and flung his arm about the shoulders of a big, fat, black man and said, “Then how about you, Joe?”

  “Look, Crossy, I’m tired too,” Joe defended himself, shying off. “Why pick on me?”

  “’Cause you’re soft as a mattress and can stand it,” Cross explained.

  “If you’re cold, it’s your own damn hard luck,” Joe said. “You don�
�t take care of yourself. Me, I ain’t never cold. I know how come you’re always so cold, Cross. You drink too much. Don’t eat enough. Don’t sleep. But, me… Ha-ha! I eat and sleep as much as I can. And my good old fat helps to keep me warm. Ain’t that right, Pink?”

  The man called Pink did not reply at once; he was reddish in color and older than the other three.

  “Cross,” Pink said seriously, “you ought to take some vitamins or something. Man, you couldn’t be cold now. Hell, we just left that steamy Post Office twenty minutes ago.”

  Cross swiftly pulled the glove off his right hand and, grabbing Pink’s shoulder, rammed his bare fingers down the collar of Pink’s neck.

  “How do they feel, Pink?” Cross demanded.

  “Jeeesus! Your fingers’re cold as snakes!” Pink gasped, his eyes lit with concern. “They ought to call you Mr. Death!”

  “I just need some alcohol,” Cross confessed grimly. “My old engine won’t run without it.”

  “You better quit that bottle, Cross,” Joe, the big, fat, black man warned. “When you start living on alcohol, you’re traveling a road that ain’t got no turning. You been hitting that bottle heavy for a month now. Better let up, boy.”

  “Man, whiskey ain’t never hurt nobody,” Pink said; he broke into song:

  If the ocean was whiskey

  And I was a duck

  I’d dive right in

  And never come up

  A rich, rolling laughter erupted and died away over the snow-blanketed sidewalks.