For me Black Boy succeeds more as an intellectual and political work then a work of art.
The book fails for me as a novel - though perhaps succeeds as journalism - because it does not make convey any real feelings of the narrator or of the other characters. I do not see how it could be otherwise as Wright says repeatedly that he has not formed any true connection to other people. He is clearly a keen and sensitive observer and the sections Professor Hungerford calls 'catalogs' are some of the more vivid parts of the book for me.
The fleshing out of the story after Wright leaves the south seems incredibly important to me. Without it is easy to dismiss racism as a southern problem not an American problem. With hindsight I cant help thinking of Martin Luther King also going to Chicago and all the trouble he had there. I find it unfortunate that Dorothy Fisher Canfield would only publish the first half of the novel. Considered with the letters Professor Hungerford choose she clearly wanted to shape this into an American story, not a black man's story, hence also the change of title from Black Boy to American Hunger.
I see the benefit of professional instruction when Professor Hungerford highlights the importance of Words and Writing in Wright's survival of a nearly inhuman childhood. The development of the parenthetical voice - even further removed from the action, from feeling, then his customary voice and later when he says "If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative. I strove to master words" shows me that Hungerford is correct in describing what Wright was trying to do and successful in doing it. The quote on the back of my edition is supportive too: "I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to crate a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human."
While with some prodding I can understand and admire the ladder of words he has built up and out of a desperate beginning, its still not really what I read literature for. Without much real lyricism or feeling I cant imaging wanting to re-read it.
posted by
shothotbot
09 March | 11:51