3Sb
MORRIS DICKSTEIN
never the sort of repulsive figure Baldwin describes. One blatantly
wrong sentence especially stunned me as I reread Baldwin; it misses
a good deal more than Wright's tone or intention. "All of Bigger'S
life," says Baldwin, "is controlled, is defined by his hatred and his
fear. And later, his fear drives him to murder and his hatred to
rape." The fact is that Bigger, though briefly tempted, never commits
rape
in
the novel. Not without sexual overtones he kills Mary Dalton
instead, but strictly by accident.
It
is only the white world - press,
prosecutors and public - that universally assumes both rape and
deliberate murder, and since Bigger in his panic has destroyed the
body, he never manages to prove otherwise. Baldwin's hostility to
Bigger, his horror at the violent street nigger, causes him unconsciously
to take over the white man's perspective, to project the same sexual
fantasies that he debunks so brilliantly when they are applied to
himself. Cleaver, for
his
part, is even more eager to sexualize Wright's
characters than Baldwin: he and
his
contemporaries are determined
to reclaim the very myths that Baldwin did so much to question.
To Cleaver the Negro homosexual is a historical interlude, an aberra–
tion, a disease. He comes forward as the proud black stud, the veri–
fication of the myth, the fantasy made real. One recalls with a jolt
that Cleaver began his career as a rapist, "an insurrectionary act" he
calls it in
Soul on Ice,
a book which at its best enacts
his
conversion
to other, more humane forms of insurrection.
It
was Cleaver's book that occasioned Richard Gilman's con–
troversial essays, which discerned - in Cleaver, in Malcolm X, in
Fanon - a new mode of writing not simply by blacks but of them
and for them, standing outside the white tradition and its audience.
The aim of these books, as he saw it, was not the production of
literature but the creation of new myths, the production of new
modes of consciousness. But Gilman's refusal to judge, his stance of
silent wonderment, caused him to patronize somewhat what Cleaver
was actually saying, a luxury which blacks themselves, especially
black writers, have not been able to afford. All have been marked in
some way by the new consciousness. The wheel of black culture has
been turning rapidly, however, and in the three years since Gilman
wrote a whole new generation of writers has emerged, a fourth gen–
eration, so to speak, that seems to me almost as distinct from Cleaver
and Ma1colm X as they are from Baldwin, as he was from Wright.
