James Baldwin Denounced Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son’ As a ‘Protest Novel.’ Was He Right?

Baldwin was right until The Modern Library edition replaced the sections that had been removed in the book’s first editions. The new edition changes the novel considerably. Also, it’s necessary to understand the basis of Baldwin’s criticism of Wright. When Baldwin arrived in Paris penniless and homeless, it was Wright who embraced him. But Wright also criticized Baldwin for what he considered Baldwin’s youthful exuberance, and the libertine ways he was expressing his newfound sexual freedom; cautioning Baldwin that Black Americans in Europe had less freedom from the US government than they had in America. Baldwin took offense and attacked Wright’s writing. Years later, after Baldwin understood the reasons the US government had undertaken efforts to diminish Wright’s standing—Wright’s influence among the European left, Third World intellectuals and Wright’s stands against colonialism--Baldwin tempered his criticisms. He would acknowledge his critique of Wright was partially done for non-literary reasons but never published his apologies.

Yes, Wright's intended audience is white - - just as Jean Toomer's experimental Cane was aimed at white readers. Arguably, the same could be said for both Hurston and Petry (and the un-mentioned Ralph Ellison) - - all of these writers understood that they could never escape a white readership and, so, like Wright, wrote within the confines of Du Bois's "double consciousness."

Wright understood the "white racial imagination" very, very well. And, so does his character, Bigger. Far from being just a "miserable and incompletely realized creature" "without agency or even intelligence," Bigger understands racist society so well that he uses its prejudices to disguise his guilt, elude the authorities, and attempt to shift blame to others. The real pathology in the novel is a white America that sees only the stereotypes that render Bigger both starkly visible and completely invisible at the same time.

Baldwin, of course, had his own literary and political axes to grind in "Everybody's Protest Novel" - - notably his anti-communism and anti-naturalism. Yet, in his eulogy for Wright, published only 15 years after ""Everybody's Protest Novel," Baldwin declared of Wright: "His work was an immense literation and revelation for me. He became my ally and my witness, and alas!, my father." How disappointing then that both "bookenders" completely fail to comprehend the power and importance of Wright's art, the very things that Baldwin himself acknowledged and cherished.

I love Baldwin and teach his works and Wright's in the same class. And I think Baldwin was wrong about Native Son. Wright's classic was written in 1940 and his intention was to expose a realistic vision of how a young black man was perceived by white America and how well the young man knew how he was perceived (and used it). Bigger Thomas is a composite of 5 young men that Wright knew; Wright explains this at the end of one edition of his novel. He also states that he did not want his white readers to sympathize or sentimentalize Bigger Thomas; he wanted readers to SEE him. The best essay I've read on this topic is Donald Gibson's "Wright's Invisible Native Son," in which he addresses Baldwin's essay and adds this quote from Wright himself to an unfriendly reviewer: "If there had been one person in the Dalton household who viewed Bigger Thomas as a human being, the crime would have been solved in half an hour. Did not Bigger himself know that it was the denial of his personality that allowed him to escape detection for so long? The one piece of incriminating evidence which would have solved the "murder mystery" was Bigger's humanity under their very eyes." If Wright's novel was protesting anything, it was white America's failure to see their own "Native Son" as a person. Gibson suggests that if we stop short and simply denounce stereotypes, we will misread the novel. I agree with Gibson.

The beauty of reading all of this - you are all right. Literature does that to us. Hopefully the readers comments were judged with the same nuanced stance as the critics's comments. Thank you all for sharing your many thoughts as I judge no persons feelings when it comes to interpretation as right or wrong.

I must say that I am shocked by Ayana Mathis's and Pankaj Mishra's interpretation of Richard Wright's seminal novel. Is Bigger Thomas really "a rapist and a murderer motivated only by fear, hate and a slew of animal impulses", "the black ape gone berserk that reigned supreme in the white racial imagination" (Ayana Mathis) ? I believe Bigger Thomas is a complex, fully human character motivated by complex and contradictory emotions. To take just one example, his attitude towards the white Mary Dalton - well-intentioned but condescending and even arrogant: clearly racist in her own way - is fascinatingly ambivalent. And he strangles Mary not because he is a murderer, or in order to "redeem his manhood", as Pankaj Mishra claims, but because he is terrified at the thought of being found in her room by her mother: his terror is fully understandable and human. And James Baldwin himself certainly did not portray Bigger as a "black ape" who wants to redeem his manhood through murder (one can read his essay here:http://www.uhu.es/antonia.dominguez/semnorteamericana/protest.pdf) ... Sadly, Ayana Mathis and Pankaj Mishra have misunderstood both Richard Wright's novel and Baldwin's marvellous essay.

I read Native Son when I was 21 years old. It stunned me and I have never forgotten it. And it changed me. Maybe it had it's day in a certain era but the wisdom embedded within it should be considered eternal. Then, I read Lawd Today. Another novel that predicted many of the future struggles of my own life. Thank you, Richard Wright.

What disturbs me is the relenting tendency of black writers to depict black characters in a mode satisfactory to the ingrained beliefs about black people held by whites. Money talks. Whites need characters like the two black females in " Gone with wind". Gregory Peck' s performance in "To kill a mocking bird" needed a black chactacter to feed white people,s image of the black male - always in font of white judge? The successful novel needs to satisfy the pathological view of black people cherished by many of whites. Dinesh D'Souza made millions dismissing the notion that racism exists ( and he is not even black.) Sidney Poiter's persona in "Guess who is coming to dinner was remarkable of almost impossible reume he had to have in order to be eligible for a white woman, whose only resume is that she was white!!!

"Certainly the racism that made Bigger Thomas still exists, but, thank God, Bigger Thomas himself does not — he never did."

I just read Native Son again, about a month ago, as an adult, not a teenager in high school. IT BLEW MY MIND. Oh, dear reader, Bigger Thomas exists. The poor, angry, young black male is present in our community. I knew EVERYONE of those characters, including the Dalton's. What was sad, was that this could have been written about present day Chicago.

Wow, this intellectual masturbation over a successful novel by a black writer reminds me that the artistic left is eaten up with highfalutin political correctness. As for James Baldwin's criticism of Native Son, it's a high-brow version of the crab-bucket theory. When one crab is about to escape over the top, the other crabs pull him back. Seems to me Native Son was a relatively accurate portrayal of the experience of many black Americans, certainly for the '40s. Did the author intend to give the story symbolic meaning beyond the tale and characters? Of course. As readers we can't come to various, even contradictory conclusions. The artist's job is done. Then the critic takes up his or her pen in hopes of a small payday and a big ego boost.

Having been re-enlightened by my rediscovery of Baldwin after an almost 35 year absence, I find myself resisting the urge to laugh about his laceration of "Native Son" as a protest novel. Baldwin, of all people, knew the landscape and the metes and bounds of protest poetry and prose -- fiction and non-fiction -- and forged new territory in that land. Hah! I fear he looked through green eyes at Bigger Thomas, whose contribution to the canon of American literature cannot be denied as America struggles with what oppression means and its effects. Bigger Thomas is written to frighten, to offend, and to horrify. He is wholly a creature of the forces of oppression. Isn't this the extreme of what Baldwin teaches as the likely consequences in "The Fire Next Time"? Isn't this type of alienation the result when the world has "no vocabulary for your existence"? Bigger Thomas lives; Bigger Thomas dies in our streets these days; Bigger Thomas must be read.

If Wright's aims in his, yes, classic novel, were to reveal to a white reading audience the plight of African Americans in our Northern cities and to create an empathy for those fellow Americans among that white readership, then he succeeded on both counts. As a college student in the '60's who had until then never really known a black American, reading "Native Son" was as powerful an eye-opener as watching and reacting to the violent injustices in the South then filling our black and white TV screens nearly every evening. It stands as a work belonging in the American Canon and deserving of the appropriate respect.

Native Son is an important piece of literature, and Wright's writing is often beautiful and lyrical. That said, it is not a book that I would recommend to someone with limited exposure to the African-American community. African-American literature is often underrepresented in mainstream and school-required reading. There are simply too many other books written by African-Americans that are just as worthy from a literary point of view that contain a more nuanced and realistic portrait of black America.

I'm a card-carrying AfrAmerican artist/writer/recovering adman. I'm working on my first novel, "Brand New Race" and so am new to these lofty literary musings.

But after surviving 67 BlackYears in the USA, I have the sinking feeling that these two critics have spent way too much time in writing schools and workshops and not enough time in life. By the time Richard Wright got to Chicago, he already had lived enough BlackYears in America to write "protest" novels until he died. Baldwin was an eloquent opportunist who thought he would somehow be an exception to white rule when, at 24, he attacked Wright.

By the time he died though, he was protesting at least as much as Wright.

Right?
Http://humanecom.com

The power of the book flows partly from the need to engage with it - whether you are black or white.
Baldwin was forced to - Mathis tries hard not to but in the end succumbs with her throw-away: "“Native Son” is limited by a circumscribed vision that fails to extend much beyond the novel’s moment in 1940." - Absolutely Wrong.
That is the power it still brings to bear today - you can't read it or re-read it without being forced to engage with it. That has always been - and always will be - great art.
Many of the noodler-graduates of the various Writers' Workshops could take a lesson - Hannah Horvath and present company take note.

My viewpoint probably reflects some of my racist upbringing in the 30's and 40's, when I was practically adopted by a few "colored" folk in the next block over. To see the lone "White boy" singing in an all African-American church would have made most of the regular congregation to wishing he would shut up. As I was loud loud loud. But, I read Native Son many years later when my interest in that community still lingered, moving away from a best friend will always do that to you. I did not find Native Son ugly or horrendous if you compare it to say The Man with the Golden Arm, and how the drug addicts dug their own holes in life. Again, James Baldwin was too tame for my tastes, after living the "real" thing as a kid.

"Native Son," at its core, is about how oppression naturally produces resistance to oppression. That to punish crime in an oppressive society is to simply continue the oppression. If Bigger were a more sympathetic, complex character, white readers could point to factors other than institutionalized racism and their complicity in it to explain his plight. Wright does not give them that option. I've been teaching the novel to black students for the past nine years and it resonates, provokes, and enlightens like no other text in my curriculum.

It's hard to argue that the incestuous black father of the child evangelist Julia Miller in Baldwin's "Just Above My Head" [1979] is not a literary descendant of Bigger Thomas, just like equivalent characters in "The Bluest Eye" [1970] and "The Color Purple" [1982].

I think the incestuous farmer Jim Trueblood in "Invisible Man" [1952] is a little different because there's a sense he's telling his story for money. He explains that white people have been rewarding him with money and gifts (like the trustee of the college who's shocked, but hands him a $100 bill) for confirming a negative stereotype.

"If Beale Street Could Talk" is the first James Baldwin novel I read. It's a nice novel but it's also protest novel. The pregnant teenage girl Tish seems at times like a vehicle for a James Baldwin essay.

I first read Native Son when I was in high school during the 60s. I was an avid reader, an English major from birth really, who, as a young black student in a largely white suburb, had to look around outside of the curriculum to find black writers to read. I picked up Native Son and, unfortunately, had to put it down once Bigger killed his girlfriend, Bessie and threw her body down the garbage chute. That was more terror and grimness that my sensitivies could take at such a young age.

But I've often felt that about a lot of the novels of the naturalist era--Zola in France, Dreiser in the US. Stories of powerless people who have no control over their fates used by powerful people who exploit them to their deaths. Clearly, Wright's book fit this genre more fully, though it could be sub-categorized as protest lit. I toy with with picking the book up again, but fear the depression that would result.

Mishra gets Baldwin right. The brilliant Baldwin ended his days in St. Paul-de-Vence, France, in physically pleasant, but emotionally sad exile. For Baldwin at his spoken best, watch him at the Oxford Union take on Wm F. Buckley, self-righteous rightwinger of unearned privilege … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFeoS41xe7w

James Baldwin never impressed me with his description of the life of Negores as African-Americans were referred to in most literature of those times.
"Native Son" on the other hand blew my mind when first reading it in my late teens. Had he lived longer and written other definitive words Richard Wright could have been our first African American writer to win a Nobel.