Celebrity as Identity: Richard Wright, Native Son, and Mass Culture

CELEBRITY AS IDENTITY: RICHARD WRIGHT, NATIVE SON, AND MASS CULTURE Ross Pudaloff* In his 1965 introduction to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, Stephen Spender suggested that "someone should write a thesis perhaps on the influence of the cinema on the novel—I mean the serious novel."1 Since then there has been no lack of scholarly research and criticism on the relationship of literature and film. Still, most of the criticism devoted to the influence of film on literature has taken as its major texts the work of high modernist art with particular emphasis on such authors as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf.2 Such criticism tends to evaluate the cinematic in literature, the fundamental premise of which is the complexity of individual consciousness in an age of mass culture. As a result, both criticism and literature tend to celebrate consciousness at the expense of the external world. These critical approaches repudiate the function of both novel and film as the expression of mass culture and thus a challenge to other art forms. The work of Richard Wright is particularly significant in this regard, especially his most famous novel, Native Son. Bigger Thomas' story is the presentation of the fate of a young man who takes his values from a society dominated by movies, magazines, newspapers, and detective stories. Every critical episode in Native Son, from the initial scene in which Bigger confronts the rat to his capture and execution, is framed, perceived, and mirrored in and through the images provided by mass culture. Bigger knows only the self and the world mass culture presents to him. As such, Bigger lacks the depth of character that traditionally marks the protagonist of the modern novel and whose presence in a literary character has often been used as a standard for the success or failure of a literary work. Instead, Bigger lives in a world of images and external gestures and is himself seen in this stereotyped way by the other characters. Native Son may be said to succeed insofar as that absence of inherent character disturbs the reader by deranging his traditional conception of novelistic character. Remarkably few critics have attempted to gauge the influence of mass culture on Richard Wright. Of these, most observe the conventional distinction between high and mass art, seeking the moment when Wright passed from the Argosy All-Story Magazine and Flynn's •Ross Pudaloff is an Assistant Professor of English at Wayne State University. 4 Ross Pudaloff Detective Weekly of his youth to the Theodore Dreiser, Gertrude Stein, and Marcel Proust of his adult life.3 For Michel Fabre, whose biography of Wright is the most authoritative and exhaustive available , this crucial transition occurred while Wright was living in Memphis . There "Wright did not suddenly discover his literary talents so much as he discovered good literature, represented by the great novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in opposition to the detective stories, dime novels, and popular fiction that had been his usual fare."4 A glance at Wright's autobiographical writings not only confirms his stated preference for literature over popular culture but also reveals the political basis for such a preference. When he first came to Chicago in the late 1920s, Wright was astounded by more than the absence of legal segregation. In "Early Days in Chicago" he reflected upon the waitresses with whom he had worked; in his words, they would "fix their eyes upon the trash of life," an act which "made it impossible for them to learn a language that could have taught them to speak of what was in theirs or others' hearts."5 In the same essay, he went on to speak of "the Negro" as sharing that "lust for trash," a lust which for Wright "condemns him" to the same fate as his white counterpart.8 Wright's condemnation of mass culture, however, does not mean that he felt free to disregard its effects on the individual while he went on with the business of writing literature. In his daily life he remained fascinated as well as entertained by the movies, and the interviews he gave after the publication of Native Son reveal his...