Richard Wright's The Outsider: Existentialism and Black Dread

Introduction

Thirteen years after the publication of Native Son, Wright reexamined the problem of the ethical criminal in the role of Cross Damon, the protagonist of his novel The Outsider. Cross is in some respects an intellectualized Bigger; although he has read Heidegger, Jaspers, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Dostoevsky, his psychology is essentially Bigger's. Violence gives Cross a sense of meaning, a sense of freedom in a world that is otherwise hostile or chaotic. After committing two "senseless" murders, Cross experiences fulfillment: "The universe seemed to be rushing at him with all its totality. He was anchored once again in life, in the flow of things; the world glowed with an intensity so sharp it made his body ache" (Dickstein, 2004).

In this novel, Wright also refocuses his thoughts on the revolutionism of the Marxist Communist and that of the metaphysical rebel. Unlike Native Son, however, the differences between the two are not nearly so contradictory. Early in the novel, Cross finds himself in conflict with the Communist Party — not because he is so different from other Communists, but because he is so much like them. The Communists, he discovers, use idealism and ideology to mask their real intentions: their will, their desire for power. For Cross too, power is an end in itself; it is the basic ingredient of human nature, fundamentally a kind of libidinal assertion that often conceals itself in altruistic motives and the myths of humanitarian religion and ideology (Hricko, 2004).

The theme of The Outsider is Cross's search for freedom; but true freedom, he finds, is but another expression of the will to power. Hence Cross, the metaphysical rebel, opposes the Communists because his freedom — or will to power — must inevitably clash with the Communists' will to extend their power over him. Moreover, since Cross equates freedom with power, freedom actually means the successful subjugation of the will of others; thus the dream of universal freedom is a logical impossibility. In asserting that the Communist and the ethical criminal are motivated by the same principles, and that together they recognize an identical truth about the human condition, Wright avoids a number of the difficulties of Native Son, wherein he tried to reconcile Marxist determinism with existentialist freedom. But in summarily dismissing Marxist ideology as simply the intellectual superstructure of an innate will to power, Wright perhaps too glibly evades a number of crucial political, social, and moral issues. In other words, if in Native Son Wright allowed his Communists to talk too much, in The Outsider he scarcely allows them to defend themselves at all (Dickstein, 2004).

Literary Existentialism

Existentialist fiction is essentially a literature based upon a philosophy. At the heart of existentialist philosophy is the belief that man makes himself and that in this consists his fundamental freedom. Nothing is finished and final. In Christian as in atheistic existentialism there is a consistent emphasis on living rather than cognition. If the existentialists stress the doom that awaits man, it is in order to make clear the nature of the crucial choice that lies before him. Every moment — a point of intersection between two eternities — is a leap in the dark, emblematic of the paradox of all existence. In the theology of crisis, the polarity of consciousness leads to the abandonment of natural reason and the transcendence to the sphere of the miraculous. First comes the decisive act of choice and then faith crystallizes. Just when man despairs and is about to give up the struggle, that is his moment of spiritual victory (JanMohamed, 2005).

As Kierkegaard declares in Either/Or: "It is impossible to live artistically before one has made up one's mind to abandon hope; for hope precludes self-limitation." Trapped in anxiety, Kierkegaard writes: "I have the courage, I believe, to doubt everything. . . ." (Widmer, 2003). And what extraordinary dialectical variations he plays, in The Concept of Dread, on the term "nothing" on which the eye is hypnotically fixed.

Wright and Pessimism, Dread, and Fear

The modern existentialist writer, however, in portraying the disintegration of his sense of values and his inner demoralization, is expressing what is common to the men of his time. The hero in Sartre's Nausea makes the terrifying discovery that he can no longer do what he wills; he is atrophied and immobilized. There we have the existentialist thesis applied to fiction: that life is without meaning or purpose. The universe of matter is not interested in the fate of man, his aspirations or ideals, his sufferings and sacrifices and heroic dreams. Man is alone in the space-time continuum, and there is no one to whom he can turn for help. Man is his own God, dependent on his own volition. Sartre develops many of these ideas in What Is Literature? — particularly in the section concerned with the art of fiction as practiced in accordance with the existentialist philosophy (Winant, 2001).

It should be clear from the above that The Outsider is that rare thing in contemporary American fiction: the "novel of ideas." It is a novel that treats seriously the problems of dread, ethics, and morality, the dilemmas of politics and religion, and the paradox of racism in a democracy. Ultimately the novel is concerned with the meaning of being — the significance of life in a universe that makes no particular judgments about the value of man. In a sense, the novel represents a very important fragment of Wright's thinking in that the reader finds Wright (through Cross) attempting to reconcile his basically humanitarian and liberal beliefs with a profound feeling that man is fundamentally amoral and anarchistic (Winant, 2001). Cross, in the course of the novel, finds it impossible to reconcile freedom and order in his own personality and despairs, as the novel closes, that such a reconciliation can ever be effected in society as well. The Outsider, then, is Wright's most pessimistic novel in that he poses problems that he frankly states fail of solution; it is a novel in which the reader finds Wright endeavoring nonetheless to work these problems out, hoping that in the course of his exploration he would discover the form of his novel. But because his "ideas" fail him, the very structure of the novel fails him at the end — and The Outsider can at best be described as a very imperfect work of art.

Wright, of course, had always conceived of the novel as a means of working out his ideas. "Writing," he told William Gardner Smith in 1953, "would always be a way of thinking aloud over issues; posing the problems and the questions as to their solution — posing them only, not answering them" (Robison, 2003). The chief problem he poses in The Outsider is how to achieve individual freedom without impinging on the freedom or humanity of others. It is this central problem on which all the other problems of the novel hinge. They fail to resolve themselves because Wright attaches a set of conditions to his notions of freedom which make the attainment of freedom an impossibility. Freedom fails because man is so hedged in by predetermined psychological molds that he cannot act rationally or calculatedly (JanMohamed, 2005). He is instead a creature and prey of physical and emotional compulsions over which he has no control.

Every man, Cross discovers, is invested with a sense of dread and terror (perhaps connected with the birth trauma), with a sense of guilt (inherited from a civilization that tries to impose curbs on his violent, amoral nature, his lust for power, his desire to become a little god), with a sense of injustice (the world seems to promise so much and offers all too frequently only meaningless suffering and death), and with the sense, however remote and unacceptable, that the universe is purposeless, that God does not exist, and that human life is insignificant. Cross, in endeavoring to seek his freedom, finds himself capable of shedding all illusions regarding the true nature of "civilization," "morality," Christian "values," and human motivation; they are all, in the final analysis, man's inventions to conceal from himself the fierce libidinal impulses of his own nature and the senseless chaos of the world in which he exists (Widmer, 2003). But Cross is incapable of coping with his own physical needs, with his pride, with his self-love and self-hate, and his inborn sense of justice. In maintaining these attributes, Cross fails as god and remains human and, ironically, unfree.

Conclusion

Thus we are introduced to a criminal who, in rejecting moral and divine law, recognizes the insignificance of man. He has become the source of his own values, his own god. Whereas in the past primitive man projected his myths so as to reconstruct the world around him in the image of desire and thereby overcome his abysmal fears of the menacing darkness and the unknown, so even today twentieth-century man seeks to disguise the unbearable truth of reality and hide behind the consolatory myths of religion. Man, in short, craves the solace of the absolute lie. As Wright's protagonist points out: "We twentieth-century Westerners have outlived the faith of our fathers; our minds have grown so skeptical that we cannot accept the old schemes of moral precepts which once guided man's life" (Felgar, 2006). Here the irreconcilable conflict between reason and faith, atheism and the inextinguishable need for belief in God is brought into the open. The consequences of atheism must be realistically faced. Living their lives on the assumption that there is no God, the atheists discover that the implications of such a Weltanschauung are nothing less than catastrophic. "It means that God no longer really concerns us as a reality beyond life, but simply as something projected compulsively from men's minds in answer to their chronic need to be rid of fear, something to meet the obscure needs of daily lives lived amidst strange and threatening facts" (Brignano, 2002).