Native Son still raises the right questions

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SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 1985 15 NewsmakersRichard III has been acquitted of murdering his two little nephews. The former monarch, depicted by Shakespeare as a cringing villain, and thought by many to be the prototype of Richard Nixon, was found not guilty in a jury trial broadcast by London Weekend Television.

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Hail Mary's before the mirror every morning. rotested that Sir Thomas More, his nouthpiece for Tudor propaganda. to give testimony, the jury cleared proving once again that the System Native Son, by Richard Harper and Row, New York, $1.95.

Richard Wright's 1940 novel depicts a Black youth from Chicago's South Side ghetto who kills two women and is tried in an atmosphere of racist hysteria. Wright was a disgruntled member of the Communist Party when he wrote "Native Son, which has become almost the only book by a Marxist-oriented Afro-American accepted into the official "canon" of United States literature. However, its full potential for raising political questions among friends, co-workers, and students is not generally recognized by radicals.

For example, the startling frankness of Wright's prose and the inherent drama of the plot will engross people who do not usually read 400-page books. Many have told me that "Native Son" is the first "serious" novel that they have ever enjoyed. Among the many provocative questions raised by the book is: Who is ultimately responsible for the two murders-Bigger Thomas, the protagonist, or the society that conditioned him to kill when he experiences fear? Trying to resolve this question leads to a highly political discussion that naturally elicits a consideration of the Marxist method of social analysis.

"Native Son" also provokes debate Wright. about matters such as the function of mass media, movies, and religion in shaping the consciousness of the oppressed in capitalist society; the nature of business enterprises such as urban housing projects (particularly through the centrality of the South Side Real Estate Company in all aspects of the plot structure); and the existence of interrelated but also semiautonomous Euro-American and Afro-American cultures in the United States.

Students of literary theory will find "Native Son" to be a useful vehicle for exploring the difficulty of integrating the subleties of political thought into imaginative literature. Other readers may want to explore parallels between the experience of oppressed people who live under "domestic colonialism" such as Afro-Americans, and those who live in the external colonies of imperialism, such as Africans.

Paul N. Siegel does this at the conclusion of his excellent chapter on Wright in "Revolution and the 20th Century Novel" (Pathfinder, 1979). He demonstrates that Fanon's thesis-that the violence of the oppressed may be part of a psychological struggle against dehumanization—is anticipated in Wright's view that Bigger Thomas is not a criminal but a victim driven to the only form of rebellion and self-affirmation available to him.