The Outsider (2 page)

Wright tried writing a story about the Brewer case, just as
Native Son
had been based on the Robert Nixon case in Chicago. But Wright had taken this kind of story as far as it could go within his current thinking. The experiences of his middle years—personal, political, and intellectual—required a different aesthetic response.

Wright's move to Paris provided an appropriate context for this change to take place. The decision to leave the United States seems to have been based on several things: his break with the Communist party, which he had made official by publishing “I Tried to Be a Communist” in
Atlantic Monthly
in 1944, thus cutting ties of long standing; his need to find a less hostile environment to live in with his wife and growing family; and the warm reception and contacts he had made on his earlier visit to Europe.

By moving to Paris, however, Wright was departing for the first time from the archetypal migration pattern that characterized the lives of most black people of his time. He had moved from Mississippi to Memphis and then on to Chicago and New York. This trek provided him with the objective basis for bringing to consciousness effects of the particular class and racial phenomena he had experienced. On the other hand, the move to Paris provided an environment where he could become a world-class intellectual, where the issues of race and class could take on greater significance as he became more knowledgeable about the independence movements in colonial countries and developed friendships
with those who would play leading roles in the anticolonial movements in their respective homelands. Wright did not write about Paris, nor did he speak French fluently. But Paris gave him something he didn't have: a view (vision) of the black experience and of the colonized world from an international perspective. His anti-racism became more solidly anti-imperialism; his interest in black people in the United States became a Pan-African and Third World interest.

Wright's contacts with West Indian and African intellectuals brought him in touch with
Presence Africaine
, an important magazine founded in 1946 which promoted racial and Pan-African solidarity, especially the ideas of the Negritude literary movement espoused in the works of its founding members, Leopold Senghor, Aime Ce-saire, and Alioune Diop. Good friendships developed with George Padmore and C. L. R. James, two black revolutionaries who, like Wright, had been members of the Communist party.

His friendships with Gertrude Stein, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus exposed Wright to the core of French existentialism. The intensity of the African-American experience gave both meaning and expression to this philosophy, which provided another window through which he could see the inhumanity and negative consequences of racism and oppression. Like his conversion to Marxism, Wright accepted existentialism as an ideology that could be developed for and applied to those who were oppressed.

The Outsider
must be seen against this background of anti-colonialism, anti-fascism, and anti-racism, sentiments all shaped by Cold War politics and Wright's own personal experiences in organized political movements. In looking both backward and forward in terms of Wright's career,
The Outsider
marks a critical turning
point. Speaking about her father, Julia Wright suggests that
The Outsider
broke a silence, embodying “new inflections, greater maturity, and the texture of alien psychological, emotional, and cultural roots.”
³
But why the silence? Just what is the “old” Wright in this novel? And what indeed is the “new”?

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 is 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 de
bates 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).