526
PARTISAN REVIEW
the highly eroticized scene of Bigger putting Mary Dalton to bed) were
deliberately designed by Wright to shock nearly everyone in his audience
- his entire white readership (whose shock would take the form of "we
knew this was what they were like all the time, but one of them had
never told us before") and the black middle-class that Wright knew
would be offended and that he wanted to offend -
to
make it impossi–
ble for those bankers' daughters to weep over
this
hero.
Black Boy ,
however, is another story, and here I think the editorial
decision to tack what we can call either
American Hunger
or "The
Horror and the Glory" onto
Black Boy
was wrong. It has recently been
asserted that
Black Boy
is both a
Bildungsroman
and a
Kanstlerroman,
and
I think that this says something important about the necessary structure
of the book. When he came to write
Black Boy,
Wright was at a con–
siderable remove from the life he had known in Arkansas, Mississippi, and
Tennessee - in Chicago and New York he was a writer shaping experi–
ence rather than only a victim buffeted by experience. That remove al–
lowed him to understand his previous life as material for his art in a way
that he could not have understood it while he was living it. From well
after the fact, Wright tells a coherent story of his Southern experience;
he can place it. But his experience in Chicago, as portrayed in
American
Hunger
(primarily his involvement with Communism) is simply too close
to the writer: it is right up against Wright's face and so cannot be
placed, understood or judged.
American Hunger
reads as
Black Boy
would
have read if the latter had been written by the sixteen-year-old Richard
Wright: uncertain, confused, incomprehensible, and difficult to follow . A
Bildungsroman
requires that the author be able to see how the protago–
nist's character was formed; a
Kiinstlerroman
requires that the author be
able to see how the artist came into being and that the developed
artistry be demonstrated in the book being written. All of this Wright
does in
Black Boy,
but little or none of it is possible or accomplished in
American Hunger .
There is still another reason why the shape of
Black Boy
is preferable
to the semi-shapelessness of
Black Boy (American Hunger).
(The very
hanging of the parenthesized title on the end is a clear giveaway: the
two are categorically dissimilar.) If one looks at
Black Boy
not only in
the context of Wright's career but also in the context of the African–
American literary tradition, it emerges as nothing less than an archetypal
account of a story repeated countless times in African-American experi–
ence and, when most successful, always with much the same shape to it.
This is in the first instance the shape of the slave narrative which typically
