In the Vortex of Modernity: Writing Blackness, Blindness and Insight (original) (raw)

2011, Journal of Modern Literature

In this essay, we revisit one of the most radical literary expressions of American modernism, Richard Wright's Native Son, to address the critical relationship between (writing) Blackness and (in) racial America. We highlight Wright's use of the rhetoric of blindness and vorticity in Bigger's tortuous and deadly journey from racial immurement to selfredemption. This redemption, we contend, is achieved in the problematic Book Three through the will to self-authorship, the one antidote against the scripting of Bigger's life by the ravages of racialism in America. Keywords: rhetoric of blindness and insight / vortex / physis and psyche / race / modernity / communism / world as text N ative Son is a story about reading. Or, perhaps more accurately, about misreading. An obscure incident from Book Three might be taken to represent, by synecdoche, a narrative aesthetic founded upon what we term here the novel's rhetoric of blindness. Bigger Thomas, thoroughly captured, dominated by "silent men in blue," is dragged before a rabid mob at the coroner's inquest into Mary Dalton's death and thereby placed at the physical center of a maelstrom, a "solid sheet of white faces" that stretch to "the four walls of the room" (265). All is chaos, and then "a white man pounded with a hammer-like piece of wood upon a table" (265). As the crowd settles, we as readers are forced to realize that Bigger is entirely unable to determine the latent sense of this basic, symbolic act. Our moment of realization is an important insight not only into Bigger's inability to "read" the texts of his environment, to know somehow "naturally" that the "hammer-like piece of wood" is a gavel, and that these people mean business by it, but also into the raw-nerved poignancy of this very inability to read, the stifling marginality, the cultural illiteracy that continually defines Bigger's character. His failure is that of experience: anywhere beyond Black Belt Chicago, and especially at the point of impact of white man's law, the gavel crashing down upon the bench of judgment, Bigger is helpless, prisoner of a deterministic fate that is grounded and plotted by his inability to read, to interpret, in the novel's