380
MORRIS DICKSTEIN
classics in fiction were Hemingway, Faulkner and (perhaps) Fitz–
gerald; when every writer was summoned to the bar of style and
the test of inwardness and self-consciousness, of the private life
in
general, where both Dreiser and Wright were found wanting.
Nothing so clearly dates Baldwin's early essays, especially his
attacks on Wright, than the assurance that the novel has intrinsically
little to do with society but rather with "something more than that,
something resolutely indefinable, unpredictable . . . the disquieting
complexity of ourselves . . .
this
web of ambiguity, paradox, this
hunger, danger, darkness ... this power of revelation which is the
business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which
must take precedence over all other claims." I excerpt these phrases
from "Everybody's Protest Novel," Baldwin's famous attack on
Uncle Tom's Cabin
and
Native Son,
which still seemed persuasive
ten years ago but now, with its uppercase mockery of "Causes" and
a writer's "Responsibility," seems fatally marred by the end-of–
ideology mood that produced it.
It
is a nice question how a purely
formalist conception of the novel came to be articulated not so much
through Jamesian notions of craft - though there was much of that
- but through a pseudometaphysical rhetoric, a kitsch existential–
ism, bordering less on mysticism than on gibberish. Yet writers spoke
of the novel that way all the time, as a mysterious inward quest
toward some ineffable region of personality. Mailer spoke of the
novel that way, still does perhaps, and became the only one of the
band to make something of such haSh. What chance had Richard
Wright in that climate of "critical thinking"?
Native Son
is an untidy novel, many novels. It looks backward
to
An American Tragedy,
sideways to a lurid potboiler, fOlWard,
strikingly, to
L'Etranger
and the ideas of Sartre. Two-thirds of the
way through,
it
changes horses and devolves into a curious but inert
ideological essay on a novel that has essentially ended but that has
until
this
point been remarkably free of the cliches of proletarian
fiction and the party line. This immensely long and disappointing
coda has served to obscure the book and date it. The hidden strength
of
Native Son
-
hidden from formalist and Communist alike -
is
in essence Dostoevskian rather than Mike Goldian: a harrowing
mastery of extreme situations, of the mind
in extremis,
a medium
not so much naturalistic as hallucinatory, dreamlike and poetic.
