Chris Vials Realism for the Masses; Aesthetics, Popular Front Pluralism, and U.S. Culture, 1935 1947 (2009)

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.Langston Hughesobserved in 1950 that the book publishing market had opened up considerablyover the last twenty years and that black cultural producers had gained muchgreater access to mass magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post; but he alsonoted how Hollywood, professional theater, and radio were still quite restrictedfor Negro authors in comparison (306 9).In a telling sign of the times, Wright14 The Popular Front Boxing Narrativewas able to achieve such sales while still affiliated with the CPUSA.It should alsobe noted that, despite the negative representation of white communists MaryDalton and Jan Erlone in the novel, Wright did not break with the Party until1944.Native Son received high praise from most communist and leftist critics,and Wright was elected vice president of the Popular Front League of AmericanWriters soon after its publication (Mullen 33).Kegan Doyle has boldly argued that Native Son is a kind of boxing narrative,and that its antihero Bigger Thomas can be read as a nightmare alternative ofblack masculinity to Joe Louis.Wright, he notes, stated of his novel that Actionfollows action, as in a prize fight, and his character Bigger behaves as a boxer,always responding physically to an environment that traps and corners him bycompressing time.The narrative begins, furthermore, with a bell (127 29).Thepurpose of using boxing as a frame for rendering urban black male experience,Doyle argues, is to show the pitfall of revering the black masculinity of iconssuch as Joe Louis and to illustrate the danger of setting up famous athletes asrole models for the race (129).A number of critics have also noted that massculture leads Bigger to his destruction.Lacking any mooring in folk culture,Bigger uncritically patterns his life and values from the movies, magazines, andnewspapers.This causes him to evince a tough-guy masculinity that he has bor-rowed from detective and gangster pictures, to demonize communists and lookfavorably on fascists, and to find fulfillment only insofar as his life comes tomirror that of a melodramatic hero or villain (he spends his last two cents toread his story in the papers, for instance).10If Wright was trying to show his readers that it was impossible for anordinary black man to emulate media icons such as Joe Louis or Henry Arm-strong and, in particular, the implausibility of violently confronting whitesone could also add that Bigger s fights are tragic, unheroic parodies of theseprizefighters accomplishments.The novel begins not just with a bell, but witha fight not with Schmeling or Baer, but with a rat that leaps out at him froma corner.His other acts of violence are the antithesis of glamour he kills twowomen in their sleep, beats his friend Gus as a way to displace his own fear ofconfronting whites, and pistol-whips a white pursuer whose back is turned tohim.Unlike the Brown Bomber, his confrontations with whites must always bekept hidden, and visibility always works against him.As an ordinary black man,his representation in the white media always shames him, and Wright uses thephrase making sport of him a number of times to signal the emasculatingnature of his visibility (257, 259, 261).As an unfamous, working-class black man,he desires to rise above the obscure world of his mother and girlfriend Bessie,becoming extraordinary by emulating a kidnapping plot in a cheap story heThe Popular Front Boxing Narrative 15reads (167).But when he tries to exercise power over whites in the only way heknows how, he becomes, unlike Louis in the 1940s, a monster who ends badly.When he is discovered hiding on a rooftop, it is the white mobs, not adoringblack fans, who evince shouts of wild joy (247).Bigger serves as a case in pointfrom Wright s boxing reportage, where he wrote that Louis was respectfullyenshrined in the public s imagination in a way [ordinary blacks] knew theywould never be ( High Tide 18).While an uncritical distance to mass culture is in large part Bigger s tragicflaw, and Native Son can be seen as illustrating the impossibility for a working-class black man to replicate the heroic, public displays of male power likeblack boxers, the novel is not, as Doyle suggests, a rejection of the spectacleof prizefighting, Joe Louis, nor of mass communication altogether.Wright isnot necessarily rejecting mass communications per se in Native Son, but ratherthe dominant mass culture and the way in which his antihero reads it.Biggerwatches white-directed Hollywood films, reads detective magazines and (pre-sumably Hearst) newspapers, but nowhere in the novel does he pick up anAfrican American newspaper such as the Chicago Defender or the PittsburghCourier both of which had an elaborate national marketing network andextensive audience by 1940 not to mention the Daily Worker.Consequently,he does not revere black icons such as Louis or Armstrong at all; in fact, Wrightgives us no indication that Bigger ever noticed them.When he begins his jobat the Daltons, he enters the room set aside for him in their house, a roomthat had previously been inhabited by a servant named Green.Like Wright,Green had left the service industry to work for the government, a path Biggerwholeheartedly rejects, thinking instead that serving rich whites like those hesaw in the movie is a good job (32, 36).But Green left behind his pictures onthe wall pictures of Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Jack Dempsey, and Henry Arm-strong.As Wright instructs in his reportage, he had used them, applied theirlessons, then moved on.But Bigger looks at them once and never notices themagain: they evoke nothing for him one way or the other [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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