Carla Cappetti, Black Orpheus Richard Wright's ''The Man Who Lived Underground'', MELUS, Vol. 26, No. 4, African American Literature, Winter 2001, Pp. 41-68.

Black Orpheus: Richard Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground"
Author(s): Carla Cappetti

Source: MELUS, Vol. 26, No. 4, African American Literature (Winter, 2001), pp. 41-68
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the
Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)
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Black Orpheus: Richard Wright's

"The Man Who Lived Underground"
Carla Cappetti
The City College of New York, CUNY
"Leaving, then, the white world, I stepped within the veil, raising it
thatyou may viewfaintly its deeper recesses."
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk 1903
"The Man Who Lived Underground"(1945) by RichardWright

tells the story of an epic journey that classical and modem, European and American writers have told numeroustimes.1 A fugitive
escapes to the undergroundsewer of an unnamedcity. In the footsteps of Orpheus and Odysseus, Virgil and Dante, Ishmael and
Queequeg, Huck and Jim, he begins to explore the underworld,the
world of darkness,nature,and death.2It is a moder version of the
fugitive slave narrative,a literaryform whose most famous representative, Frederick Douglass, is honored through the initials of
Fred Daniels, the novella's African American protagonist.3As he
escapes from corrupthistory and corruptingsociety into ostensibly
free and liberating nature, Fred Daniels is suddenly transformed
from privileged house servantto undergroundcriminal-discovererexplorer.
The discoveries that Fred Daniels makes in the course of his
undergroundjourney are significant and multiple. They concern
the racist society aboveground,his own status as an exile and an
invisible man, and the language available to moder art and to the
African American artist in that society. As s/he accompaniesFred
Daniels throughthe undergroundsewer, the readeralso undertakes
a journey to discover the view from "behindthe veil" that marks
the protagonist's experience as an African American servant and
artistin a racist and class society.4
In the tradition of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground (1864) and Joseph Conrad'sHeart of Darkness (1902), the
MELUS,Volume 26, Number4 (Winter2001)
42
CARLA CAPPETTI
novella also tells the story of a metaphoricaljourney into the aesthetic undergroundof moder art. In the course of this journey,
Fred Daniels revisits the romanticconflicts dramatizedby Ishmael
and Ahab, Huck and Tom, on the one hand, and the post-romantic
ones voiced by Dostoyevsky's narratorand Conrad'ssailor, on the
other. Like these literarypredecessors,Fred Daniels confrontsreason and unreason, rationality and sensuality, society and nature.
Unlike them, he encountersthese aesthetic dilemmas throughthe
specific perspectiveof the African Americanexperience in a world
where reason and rationalityhave become synonymous with racism.5
While familiarto and valued by RichardWrightspecialists, The
Man is not known as a classic of Americanmodernism,despite the
numerousscholars who have recognized the great artistic merit of
the novella.6 In the estimation of these scholars, "The Man Who
Lived Underground"is "Wright's most accomplished piece of
short fiction (Bryant378)," one "woven of the same exacting perfection as a poem" (Fabre,"RichardWright's"220).7
Recognition of "The Man" as a modernistclassic of American
literature has been hindered by obstacles that have restricted
Wright's recognition within the American and African American
modernist canons.8 First, Wright is frequently classified as a
Southernauthor,his significance limited to having witnessed and
survived the lynching, terror, and violent segregation of the premodern Jim Crow South.9 Secondly, literary critics have voiced
ambivalentpraise for Wright's work and for the modernrealist poetics he represents.10Thirdly, critics routinely ignore what they
classify as Wright's "European"writings, the larger part of
Wright's output.Lastly, "The Man,"which was written before but
published after Wrightwent into exile in 1947, tends to be read as
an expression of Wright's encounter with French existentialism
ratherthan his ongoing reflection on alienation and racism in the
United States.'
These misguided views notwithstanding, literary critics have
produced a substantialbody of scholarshipon "The Man." Critics
have especially examined its themes and motifs, its style and ideas,
its biblical, classical, and moder themes, and its poetic, aesthetic,
and philosophical concerns.12They have debated whether the novella expresses despair or hope; whetherrealism and naturalismor
WRIGHT'SBLACK ORPHEUS
43
fantasy and anti-realism characterize its style; and whether its

theme is race and racism or the human condition. More recently,
critics have focused on poetics and aesthetics in "The Man"and in
Wright's oeuvre, and have firmly dismissed the patronizing assumptionthat Wrightdid not have a philosophy of art.13
The present discussion shares Paul Gilroy's view of Richard
Wright as authorand intellectual of "modernity."In his important
The Black Atlantic: Modernityand Double Consciousness (1993),
Gilroy presents Wright as a chronically misunderstoodfigure of
"blackmodernity"whose work, especially "The Man,""presentsa
philosophically informed reflection on the character of western
civilization and the place of racism within it." Gilroy also denounces the essentialism of critics who treat Wright's exile and
engagement with "philosophicaltraditions supposedly outside his
narrowethnic compass... [as] a betrayalof his authenticity."14
In agreementwith several critics, the essay disputes the assertion that Wright only wrote 'from the gut' and from his personal
experience in the South; it argues that philosophy and aesthetics
were not beyond his reach;and it questions critics' predilectionfor
Wright as a southernratherthan a moder American author, and
for works in which he documentedthe violent racism and segregation of the pre-modem Jim Crow South ratherthan the less physical yet equally dehumanizingracism of the modem North.
This essay argues that "The Man Who Lived Underground"
wrestles with the importantphilosophical and aesthetic questions
of modernity,racism, and alienationthat preoccupiedWrightin all
of his fiction and non-fiction, pre- and post-exile.15"The Man" is
Wright's bold excavation throughthe buried archaeologicallayers
of American modernity, specifically "Black modernity."16Adopting Walter Benjamin's critique of progress and modernity, in his
"Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940), I argue that
Wright's powerful novella brings to light modernity's deep and
dark fear of history, and its even darkerfears of primitivism, aestheticism, and anti-modernity.7
"The Man," I argue, is at once an intensely self-conscious modernist work and a powerful critique of the alienating and racist
modern society that chases Fred Daniels underground.Instead of
choosing race or the human condition, the essay suggests that The
Man speaks of race and class and modem art and alienation in
44
CARLA CAPPETTI
modem society. Specifically, "The Man" expresses the alienation

and the double consciousness of the oppressed in a world where
race and class alienation are magnified and compounded by the
alienationof modernity.It is precisely by speakingof race that The
Man speaks of the alienationthat modem artand humanityshare.
I. Outcastsof Modernity
"Forknowledgeis onlytheraisingof a veil."
GeorgLukacs,TheTheoryof theNovel
The novella opens in an unidentified moder city presented
throughthe senses of a fugitive from the police. It is rainy, windy,
becoming dark,and the man is "crouchingin a darkcomer," in the
"vestibule" literally of a building, metaphorically of hell. The
sound of a police car siren comes and goes. The man waits and, after the "wailing"of the siren fades, he finds refuge in the undergroundsewer: "He went to the center of the street and stooped and
peered into the hole, but could see nothing. Water rustled in the
black depths"(28).This abovegroundcity, the readerrealizes, belongs to the twentieth century and to moder society. Strangely,
this moder world seems dominatedby primitive instincts and brutal violence, the chaos of natureratherthanthe orderof culture.
An even strangerview of that world opens up when the man descends into the undergroundsewer and begins a three-dayjourney
throughthe bowels of the earth.The journey begins with the man's
escape and descent into the underground;it stretches over the
course of his journey of explorationthroughsewers and basements,
and comes to a close with the protagonist's irrationalcompulsion
to returnaboveground.In the second and shorter leg of the journey, the protagonistbriefly returnsto the city aboveground;he attempts but fails to communicatewhat he has discovered in the underground;he is finally murderedby the police and consigned once
and for all to the world of the sewer and of the dead.18
Set firmly in space, the space of the city above and its underground sewer below, the journey also concerns time and the past,
memory and history, and the man's sudden fall outside history.
"The Man's" preoccupationwith history, the history of mankind
and of civilization and the historicalpaths that have broughtmodernityand racism together,underliesthe novella's complex renderThis content downloaded from 194.177.218.24 on Fri, 24 Jul 2015 14:21:12 UTC
45
ing of time, its protagonist'sloss of memory and language, and his

eventual inability to tell his story; it also impedes the reader's effort to understandthe story logically and chronologically, even as
the protagonistjourneys furtherand furtheraway from the world of
history.
Neither the circumstancesthat led to the chase nor the identity
of the man are conventionally introducedin the preparatorysection. The readermust reconstructthese circumstancesthroughscattered flashes of the protagonist'smemory. Out of these fragments
the reader recreates what Vladimir Propp might have called the
"initial situation."19The protagonist,a black house servant,was on
his way home to his family on Friday evening with his wages in
his pocket. Suddenly he was arrested;accused of the murder of
Mrs. Peabody, a neighbor of his employer; brought to the police
station; and beaten and tortured until he signed a confession.
Somehow he managedto escape.20
The fragmentsof the man's memory are presentedneither in a
linear nor a logical way. Out of the flashes of the man's fading
memory the readermust reconstructthe past in orderto understand
how he fell from Eden to Hell, from privileged house servant to
undergroundcriminal:
He had to leave this foul place, but leavingmeantfacingthose policemenwho had wronglyaccusedhim. No, he could not go back
aboveground.He rememberedthe beatingthey had given him and
how he had signedhis nameto a confession,a confessionwhichhe
had not even read.He had been too tiredwhen they had shoutedat
him, demandingthat he sign his name;he had signed it to end his
pain.(35)
In the effort to understandthe past, the reader finds herself engaged in a process that is the opposite of the process that engages
Fred Daniels. In his quest for truth, freedom, and humanity, the
man's escape from the world of history, racism, and alienation
plunges him into the world of nature,where memory, logic, coherence, and rationalitygraduallydisappear.By contrast, in order to
read the story at all, the readeris forced to move against the narrative current in the effort to grasp the fragments of the man's
dissolving memory.
46
CARLA CAPPETTI
Wright's novella expresses artisticallya preoccupationwith history that Walter Benjamin, in "Theses on the Philosophy of History," expresses philosophically and aphoristically(253-64). Benjamin reflects on the philosophy of history of traditionalJudaism
and of historical materialismin terms that illuminateWright's novella:
The truepictureof the past flits by. Thepastcanbe seizedonly as
an imagewhich flashesup at the instantwhen it can be recognized
and is never seen again. ... To articulatethe past historically...
meansto seize holdof a memoryas it flashesup at a momentof danger. Historicalmaterialismwishes to retainthat image of the past
which unexpectedlyappearsto man singledout by historyat a momentof danger.(255)
Benjamin's words capturethe predicamentof the reader of "The
Man"who, "singled out by history,"is engaged in a quest to recapture the past "as it flashes up at a moment of danger."Pointing to
Klee's famousAngelus Novus as the visual counterpartof the messianic philosophy of history of traditionalJudaism,Benjamin also
urges us to acknowledge the unpredictablepower of history and to
reclaim for the historicalclass its role as the messiah of society.
In his unpublished"Memoriesof My Grandmother,"Wrightreflects on the messianic vision of history of his Seventh-Day Adventist grandmother,and, more broadly, on the philosophy of history of black Christianity:
A man who worshipsin the Seventh-DayAdventistChurchlives,
psychologically,in a burningandcontinuousmomentthatneverends:
thepastis telescopedintothe now;thereis
thepresentis ever-lasting;
no futureand at any momentChristmay come againand then the
lived
anxioustensionof timewill be no more.... [Mygrandmother]
in
somewhere
off
with all of us, yet, psychologically,she hovered
space .... Alwaysshe seemedto be peepingout of Heaveninto the
worldwhile livingin the world.21
Within a journey that is characterizedby the protagonist'sfall into
a condition not unlike that of Wright's grandmother,the man's fall
out of history and time is punctuatedby flashes of memory evoked
at "moment[s] of danger."Only well into the journey do we be-
47
come aware of the racial identity of the man; it is even later when
are we told, and then only once, that his name is Fred Daniels
(55).22
"The Man Who Lived Underground,"like Walter Benjamin's

"Theses on the Philosophy of History,"asks how we will remember the past in the world of Nazism and Fascism, the Holocaust
and World War II, in a world that, like Fred Daniels, seemed to
have fallen out of history altogether. Richard Wright and Walter
Benjamin, writing in one of the darkestmoments of this century,
sought the answer in the philosophy of history and time, immanence and transcendence,the eternalpresent and the messianic future of the subalternclasses. Fred Daniels found that the answer
lies in the consciousness of the world of poor African Americans
who live permanentlyas outcasts of modernity,as exiles of modem historyand modem society.
II. The Belly of the Beast
"Halfthe timeI feel like I'm on the outsideof the worldpeeping in
througha knot-hole."
BiggerThomas,NativeSon
Fred Daniels's journey undergroundbegins in a watery darkness of a womb-like or primeval quality, a world that evokes the
beginning of time and the beginning of life. Dominated by death,
fear, and the instinct to survive, Fred Daniels falls not just undergroundbut into what feels like the deepest and farthestreaches of
space and time. This primevalworld is suggested by his encounter
with "a huge rat, wet with slime, blinking beady eyes and baring
tiny fangs" (30), which he fights and chases with a metal pole. It is
also the world of primitive Christianityand of a humanitydominated by guilt, as exemplified by the congregation of the poor
black church he observes through a crack. Finally, it is a watery
world that recalls the beginning and the end of life, of human life
in particular,as symbolized by a dead baby he sees floating in the
water.
Reversing Marlow's movement, in Conrad'sHeart of Darkness
(1902), from the heart of "moder" Europeto the heart of "primeval" Africa, Fred Daniels sets out in the prehistoricalbeginning of
time, both in the aboveground,where he is chased like a beast by
48
CARLA CAPPETTI
"hooting"sirens, and in the underground,where the primeval and

primitive ages of mankind are representedin several encounters.
Gradually,he reaches modem history, modem society, the modem
city, our time. The modem world is markedby Fred Daniels's acquisition of tools and food and cigarettes.He encountersthe modem world througha funeralhome and througha humanbody that,
laid upon a table, is in the process of being embalmed.He encounters it througha movie theaterand throughits shadow-staringaudience. Strangely,it is the modem world and yet it is still, and even
more, filled with shadows and death.
In a crescendoof death-in-lifescenes, the journeyreaches a new
stage in the history of civilization with the discovery of a jewelry
store, a radio store, and a butcherstore. Fred Daniels, who started
out as a passive, reactive, instinctive, less-than-humanfugitive, begins now to have ideas and to become creative.Takingon more actively and explicitly the role and function of the alienated modem
artist,he steals a radio and electric wires to use in his cave and realizes that he can steal the secret code of a safe.
His creativity coincides with the onset of a new estrangedperception of the world aboveground. This alienated perception,
which is theorizedin the aesthetic of Russian formalismand forms
the common denominatorof modem art, and the consequences of
this perception provide the unifying theme of the remainingportion of the jourey. In the process of exploring the basements surrounding the jewelry store, Fred Daniels emerges into the back
room of a butchershop at closing time. He is so emboldenedby his
cleverness that he steps into the store to observe the street and society outside:
He watcheda patchof sky turnred,thenpurple;nightfell andhe lit
anothercigarette,brooding.Somepartof himwas tryingto remember
the worldhe hadleft, andanotherpartof himdidnotwantto remember it. Sprawlingbeforehim in his mindwas his wife, Mrs.Wooten
forwhomhe worked,thethreepolicemenwho hadpickedhimup....
He possessedthemnow morecompletelythanhe hadeverpossessed
How this had come abouthe
themwhen he had lived aboveground.
couldnot say,buthe hadno desireto go backto them.(48)
Standing between the underworld and the upperworld, between
darkness and light, inside and outside, Fred Daniels feels so emThis content downloaded from 194.177.218.24 on Fri, 24 Jul 2015 14:21:12 UTC
49
powered by the distance that now separates him from the world
and by the special vision this distance has given him that he boldly
steps into the street. He is mistaken for an employee of the greengrocer by a white couple who, oblivious to the situation,hand him
a dime in exchange for some grapes. Exhilaratedby the mistake,
Fred Daniels throws the "dime to the pavement with a gesture of
contempt" (49), signaling with this gesture how removed he has
become from the social values of the world abovegroundthat are
epitomized in the coin. It is a magical moment, when terrorturnsto
laughterand contemptat the dime, a piece of metal that represents
the absurdvalues of the world aboveground.
This moment of intense alienationfrom the world aboveground
and from its absurdvalues is one among several of increasing intensity that signal the transformationof Fred Daniels, a once diligent servant, husband, citizen, and Christian, into a relativist, a
skeptic, and a nihilist. Just as suddenly, however, laughter turns
back into terroras he notices the headline of the evening newspaper: "HUNT NEGRO FOR MURDER" (49). This is another,just
as arbitrary,sign that expresses the values of the aboveground.His
distanced and alienated consciousness notwithstanding, Fred
Daniels is still, in the world aboveground,not a humanbeing. It is
also the first, not the last, time that the readeris invited to consider
whether modem art, and its alienated aesthetics, has the power to
defy the alienated and inhuman world that falsely accused Fred
Daniels of murder.
After stealing money, gems, and jewelry from the safe, and a
typewriter from an office, not for their value, which he has rejected, but as a way to express contempt for those values, Fred
Daniels himself begins explicitly to reflect on the relationshipbetween the world above and the world below:
He did not feel thathe was stealing,for the cleaver,the radio,the
money, and the typewriterwere all on the same level of value, all
meantthe samethingto him. Theywere the serioustoys of the men
who lived in the dead world of sunshineand rain he had left, the
worldthathadcondemnedhim,brandedhimguilty.(55)
Philosophically, Fred Daniels has fallen out of naive innocence.
Before the fall, he lived in a world that he assumed to be regulated
by reason and by God. He graduallydiscovers the essence of that
50
CARLA CAPPETTI
reason to be wealth, and the face of that God to be the white man's
face.
In one of several scenes that have explicit and intense aesthetic
underpinnings,Fred Daniels visually expresses his alienation by
covering the walls of his undergroundcave with the dead objects
of the city aboveground:
He tookthe towelwithwhichhe hadtiedthe sackandballedit intoa
swabanddippedit intothe canof glueanddabbedglueontothewall;
thenhe pastedone greenbill by the side of another.He steppedback
andcockedhis head.Jesus! That'sfunny..... He slappedhis thighs
and guffawed.He had triumphedover the worldaboveground!He
was free!... He hadnot stolenthe money;he hadsimplypickedit up,
just as a manwouldpick up firewoodin a forest.And thatwas how
now seemedto him, a wild forestfilled with
the worldaboveground
death.(62)
Having escaped from the alienatingobjectivityof the racist society
above into the irrational subjectivity of the world below, Fred
Daniels createsa new version of the Platonic cave of deceptionand
darkness.Earlier in the journey, Fred Daniels had expressed contempt for the congregationof the black churchand for the audience
of the movie theater, whom he despised for being enchained by
fears, guilt, and shadows, for being prisonersof a Platonic cave of
deception, the deception of religion and of mass culture. The collage expresses that contempt through the self-conscious artistic
languageof modernismand avant-gardeart.23
In the footsteps of the Romantic artists and of their postRomantic descendants, Fred Daniels comes to rely on his senses
ratherthan on his mind in order to reject the values of the aboveground. In a crescendo of sensations that quickly die and just as
quickly must be replaced by new and more intense sensations, he
soon reachesthe final destinationof his quest for freedom:
Maybeanything'sright,he mumbled.Yes, if the worldas men had
madeit was right,thenanythingelse was right,anyact a mantookto
satisfyhimself,murder,theft,torture.
with a start.Whatwas happeningto him?. .. He
He straightened
was goingto do something,butwhat?Yes, he was afraidof himself,
afraidof doingsomenamelessthing.(64)
51
As it turns out, the philosophical rejection and the aesthetic dissolution of the abovegroundproduces in Fred Daniels a mysterious
and intense fear of himself. He attempts to alleviate this fear by
turningon the radio, his last contact with the abovegroundhe has
rejected and with the human beings who inhabit that world. The
radio broadcastbrings to Fred Daniels and to the darkestrecesses
of his undergroundhideout yet another estranged vision of the
aboveground:
To controlhimself,he turnedon the radio.A melancholypiece of
musicrose.Broodingoverthe diamondson the floorwas like looking
up intoa sky full of restlessstars;thenthe illusionturnedinto its opposite:he was highup in the airlookingdownat the twinklinglights
of a sprawlingcity. The music ended and a man recitedthe news
events.In the sameattitudein whichhe hadcontemplated
the city, so
now, as he heardthe cultivatedtone, he lookeddownuponlandand
sea as menfought,as citieswererazed,as planesscattereddeathupon
open towns, as long lines of trencheswaveredandbroke.He heard
the namesof generalsandthe namesof mountainsandthe namesof
countriesandthe namesandnumbersof divisionsthatwere in action
on differentbattle fronts.He saw black smokebillowingfrom the
stacksof warshipas theynearedeachotheroverwastesof waterand
he heardtheirhugegunsthunderas red-hotshellsscreamedacrossthe
surfaceof nightseas. He saw hundredsof planeswheelinganddroning in the sky and heardthe clatterof machineguns as they fought
eachotherandhe saw planesfallingin plumesof smokeandblazeof
fire. He saw steel tanksrumblingacrossfields of ripewheatto meet
othertanksand therewas a loud clang of steel as numberlesstanks
collided.He saw troopswithfixedbayonetsandmengroanedas steel
ripped into their bodies and they went down to die .... The voice of
the radiofadedandhe was staringat the diamondson the floorat his

feet. (64-65)
Having denounced the arbitraryrationalityof racism through the
arbitraryirrationalityof aestheticism, Fred Daniels witnesses the
carnage of World War II, a concrete embodimentof the idea that
"nothingmeans anything."A Whitmanesquecatalogue filled with
futurist horrors, this powerful prose poem visualizes the aboveground as a world where technology and rationalityhave become
tools of violence and destructionon a world scale. Alone in the
52
CARLA CAPPETTI
scintillating cave, Fred Daniels and the reader are compelled to

witness the transformationof glittering stars and city lights into
blasts of war tearing the world apart.We are also left to consider
the possibly close relationshipthat links the sparklingdiamondson
the floor, the undergroundaesthetics on the wall, and the savage
war above.24
In the process of retracinghis steps backward,Fred Daniels has
three reencountersthat markhis change from alienatedcontemptto
sympathetic understanding.First, the black church congregation
wakes him from a short sleep with a sorrow song. Unlike the previous time, the song speaks of immanence ratherthan transcendence; it pleads "I got Jesus in my soul" ratherthan "Jesus, take
me to your home above" (67). Fred Daniels is still contemptuous
of the congregation.This time, however, he asks questions about
their guilt. He then observes a radio-shopboy who is being beaten
for the radio theft that Fred Daniels has committed. He responds
first with contempt:"it was so funny";then with compassion:"He
felt a sort of distant pity for the boy"; and finally understanding:
"perhapsthe beating would bring to the boy's attention, for the
first time in his life, the secret of his existence, the guilt that he
could never get rid of' (69).
The scene is repeated a third time when he reencountersthe
night watchmanof the jewelry store who is being accused and tortured by the three policemen for a theft that Fred Daniels has
committed. Once again he first responds with laughter and contempt. This time, Fred Daniels identifies with the watchman and
recognizes that what makes the watchman guilty is what made
Fred Daniels guilty: "The watchmanwas guilty; although he was
not guilty of the crime of which he had been accused, he was
guilty, had always been guilty"(70). He recognizes that the guilt of
the watchmanis the guilt of oppressedand powerless people, those
who are black, like Fred Daniels, and those who are poor, like the
white guard.
After he witnesses the suicide of the watchman, Fred Daniels
undergoesone final transformation:
He easeddowntherainpipe,crawledbackthroughtheholeshe had
made,andwent back into his cave. A feverburnedin his bones.He
hadto act,yet he was afraid.His eyes staredin the darknessas though
proppedopenby invisiblehands,as thoughtheyhadbecomelidless.
53
His muscleswere rigidandhe stoodfor whatseemedto him a thousandyears.(72)

The painful and startlingimages that close this first movement embody the flash of truth that Fred Daniels has just experienced. In
the effort to subvert the values of the aboveground, which had
chased him into the undergroundbecause of his race, Fred Daniels
gave up reason for unreason,rationalityfor irrationality,positivism
for nihilism. Having premised his freedom on the absolute rejection of the aboveground, Fred Daniels discovers his freedom in
solitude to be more terrifying,if possible, than the terrorof the fugitive.
Fred Daniels and the readerhave completed the modernistjourney from reason to unreason,reaching an inevitable and final destination. Fred Daniels here enters the last leg of his journey.
"When he moved again his actions were informedwith precision,
his muscular system reinforced from a reservoir of energy" (70).
Likewise moves the narrative,which proceeds from this point on
with relentless logic throughthe man's returnabovegroundto his
final murderby the police and consignment,once and for all, to the
undergroundsewer, the world of the dead.
Why and what Fred Daniels escapes by leaving the relative
safety of the undergroundand by returningto the mortallydangerous abovegroundare importantquestions.25We know that he escaped to the sewer in orderto escape death, and we know that if he
returnshe will be killed. The newspaperheadlines are unequivocal
in this regard. The only possible explanation for his returnis that
Fred Daniels reaches a new level of consciousness and claritywith
regard to the aboveground,and with regardto race and class oppression in the aboveground,that preclude his remaining underground and that result in his final murder. Retracing his steps
backward to the upper world, Fred Daniels "crawls," "drops,"
"sloshes," "falls," "grabs,"the rapid rhythmof the action verbs in
the active form marking the distance that Fred Daniels has travelled since the beginning of the journey as a terrified, passive,
reactive, less-than-humanbeing hauntedby evil forces.
His reemergence into the city and daylight causes Fred
Daniels's as well as the reader's senses, already disturbedby the
experiences of the journey, to be brutallyassaulted.
54
CARLA CAPPETTI
[He] put his shoulderto the coverandmovedit an inch. A crackof

soundcameto him as he lookedinto a hot glareof sunshinethrough
whichblurredshapesmoved ... Likea franticcatclutchinga rag,he
clang to the steel prongsand heavedhis shoulderagainstthe cover
andpushedit off halfway.Fora split secondhis eyes were drowned
in the terrorof yellow lightandhe was in a deeperdarknessthanhe
hadeverknownin theunderground.
(73)
We are back in the upperworld of rationalityand modernity,back
in the world of modem savagery, and of true darkness. To the
aboveground,we now realize, belong chaos, blindness, darkness,
untruth,fear, and terror.
In the aboveworld, Fred Daniels is led by the impulse "to tell,"
first by seeking the black church. The congregation is invoking
"the lamb,""the voice," "the story"(75-76). Ironically,they see in
FredDaniels neitherthe lamb nor the prophet,only a foul and foulsmelling man. Fred Daniels thereforedirects himself to the police,
the secularcounterpartof the churchand the institutionthat administers the laws of society:
He wouldgo thereandclearup everything,makea statement.What
statement?He did not know.He was the statement,andsince it was
all so clearto him,surelyhe wouldbe ableto makeit clearto others.
(77)
By seeing the man through the eyes of the police, in this case,
through the eyes of the society aboveground,the reader realizes
that an insurmountableabyss is separatingFred Daniels and the
rest of humanity:
"Whatdo you want,boy?"... His wholebeingwas full of whathe
wantedto sayto them,buthe couldnot say it....
"I'mlookingforthe men"....
"Whatmen?"...
"Theybroughtme here"....
"When?"....
"Itwas a longtimeago.... It was a longtime....
Theybeatme.. . I was scared ... I ranaway."(77-8)
At the police station, Fred Daniels has lost his memory, cannot reThis content downloaded from 194.177.218.24 on Fri, 24 Jul 2015 14:21:12 UTC
55
memberhis name, cannottell a story. We see him, as the police do,

as a "nut,"even though we know that his insanity is, like that of
King Lear,the insanityof the trulyand newly sane person.
Over and over he attemptsand fails to rememberand to put his
recollections and visions in some logical order, to tell his story so
that the police will believe him. This time the police know that
Fred Daniels did not commit the murderof Mrs. Peabody and they
tell him so in the hope that he will go away. Ironically,now that
the police proclaimhim innocent, Fred Daniels insists on declaring
himself guilty: "I'm guilty! . . . all the people I saw was guilty"
(80). The black church congregation chased the prophet Fred
Daniels because they did not understandhis message. The police,
on the other hand, eventually come to recognize in the midst of
Fred Daniels's incoherentbabble fragmentsof reality and of their
own brutal deeds. Fred Daniels is taken back to the manhole, he
thinks, to show the police the cave, the money, the jewels. It is
Sunday,the same rainy and windy and darkevening of the opening
scene, when he is shot and dumpedin the manhole:
"Whatdidyou shoothimfor,Lawson?"
"Ihadto."
"Why?"
"You'vegot to shoothis kind.They'dwreckthings."(91-92)
It is finally because the policemen come to understand Fred
Daniels only too well that they murderhim.
III. The Demon of Art
"Aloneman is nothing ... I wish I had some way to give the meaning
of my life to others.... To make a bridgefrom man to man.... We
mustfind some way of being good to ourselves.... Man is all we 've
got."
CrossDamonin TheOutsiderby RichardWright
From questioningthe values and truthsof the city aboveground,

which branded an innocent man guilty, to rejecting those values,
including language, to questioning whether reality exists at all, to
becoming himself "the word," "the statement,"Fred Daniels travelled a familiarpath in the footsteps of the post-Romanticartistsof
56
CARLA CAPPETTI
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.2 A recognizable

moder artist figure, Fred Daniels denounced the logic of the
abovegroundto the point that he had the greatesttruthto tell but no
language to tell it. Fred Daniels's journey had taken him too far
from humanity,and from the social values that are the precondition
of any kind of telling, art, or meaning. Whose responsibilityis it,
Wright seems to ask, when art travels so far from humanity,in its
conception of language, values, and conventions, that its truthbecomes unintelligible?
If the alienation of the modem artist is rooted in his or her inability to speak for and with society, the alienationof Fred Daniels
was specifically rooted in the discovery that the values of the society in which he had lived-being a faithful servant, a devoted father, a respectful citizen, an observing Christian,believing in the
work ethic, in thrift,respect for the law-were meaningless. Given
his color and his class, the secularlaw could strikehim at any time.
Fred Daniels thereforerejected the society that had arbitrarilyaccused him of murder.After renouncing its values as arbitrary,he
discovered that arbitraryvalues continue to control the destiny of
human beings, even of his own actions, removed as he might be
from those values. Even more terrifying,he discoveredthat the extreme nihilism he adoptedwas complicitous with that arbitrariness
because both are premised on and have as consequence contempt
for human beings. This contempt, on the part of the police and of
society, had pushed Fred Daniels into the underground,at first to
escape and finally to die. The same contempt had produced slavery, racism, and the Holocaust, and was now leading to the mass
destructionof World War II.
When he rejected the idea that "nothinghas any meaning" as
the source of the worst destructionof our age, Fred Daniels was
left with two options. He could choose the Christianlaw and accept the doctrine that to be human is to be guilty, or he could
choose the secular law of his society and its doctrine that to be
black and poor is to be guilty. Fred Daniels chose to give up his
dogmatic rejectionof black Christianity,his contemptfor the blind
masses of the churchand of the movie theater,and his nihilist notion that since God was dead he himself had become that God and
could thereforecreate any and all meaning. Fred Daniels chose to
come out of his undergroundexile to seek humanfellowship and to
57
encounterdeath. Like Dostoyevsky's undergroundman-who also

reached out of his narcissistic isolation and, if only briefly, made
contact with Liza, the prostitute-Fred Daniels reached out for the
black folk and the poor folk whose suffering he had seen from his
undergroundhideout. He failed, was killed, and returnedto the undergroundsewer. He failed because he had lost his reason, his language, his memory, and his identity, and also because society was
not ready for this modem Daniel.
Critics have interpreted"The Man Who Lived Underground"as
a dark and pessimistic assessment on the eve of RichardWright's
own journey of escape from the United States. Such a reading imposes upon the novella a pessimism that more truly belongs to Joseph Conrad'sHeart of Darkness (1902) than to Wright's brilliant
retelling of Marlow's famous journey. Marlow and Fred Daniels
have a great deal in common. They respectively escape spiritual
and physical death, to Africa and to the undergroundsewer, and
returnto Europe and to the aboveground.Early in their respective
journeys, Marlow and Fred Daniels discover that deception and
hypocrisy have their home in Europe and in the aboveground,in
the world of civilization and modernity, capitalism and racism.
Marlow's journey throughthe Congo and yearning to meet Kurtz
on the one hand, and Fred Daniels's aestheticistexplorationof the
undergroundsewer on the other, dramatizetheir desire once more
to find the truth and ideals that "civilized" Europe and moder
America betrayed.Both Marlow and Fred Daniels lose their sanity
in the course of their harrowingjourneys. Marlow is still articulate
enough to tell a long yam. However, judging by his seemingly ongoing and haunted effort to make out the meaning of his experience and of existence altogether,his tales are inconclusive, unintelligible even to himself, and offensive to his audience. Similarly,
Fred Daniels cannot tell the story of his journey, nor communicate
the truthhe had discovered or even rememberhis name. Both die,
one spiritually,the other literally, and it is left to an unnamednarratorto tell their stories.
And this is where significantsimilaritiesbecome significantdifferences. Marlow returnsto Europe to tell a 'big lie,' effectively
making peace with "civilized" Europe-with the Europeanlies of
idealism and rationalism he had escaped by going to Africa-as
the lesser of two evils. Marlow's lie is the reverse of Fred
58
CARLA CAPPETTI
Daniels's undergroundart. It is also the reverse of Conrad's aesthetics, which is embodiedin the programof aestheticism,the most
rarefied, civilized, idealized, and rationalized form of sensuality
and irrationalismavailableat the turnof the century.
Conrad's grandiloquentand old-fashioned first-personnarrator
tells a story whose meaning escapes him just as it escapes Marlow
and, by the author'spremeditatedchoice, it escapes Conrad'sreaders. Heart of Darkness expresses its author's position of distrust
that any meaningfulalternativeexists to eitherthe Europeanlies of
rationalismand the enlightenment,or the romanticprimitivismespoused by Kurtz and barely escaped by Marlow. Conrad's comment to his socialist friend R.B. CunninghamGraham, dated 8
February1899 and written as he was completingthe novella, is revealing: "Thereare two more installmentsin which the idea is so
wrappedup in secondarynotions that you-even you! may miss
it" (qtd. in Glenn, 238). Conrad's idea continues to elude critics.
Hidden behind the narrativescreen of two narrators,the anonymous narratorand Marlow, neither of whom represents the author's view of the world and especially of art, and both of whom
representnegative instances of those views, Conrad'sconservative
critique of modem primitivism and irrationalism"is so wrapped
up" that literarycritics-even literarycritics!-continue to miss it.
By contrast, Fred Daniels returns to tell the truth, a truth for
which he is killed. That Fred Daniels is killed for trying to tell the
truthand that the story is neverthelesslucidly told makes Wright's
act of narrationan act of hope in sharpcontrastto the cynicism of
Conrad's narrativechoices. Wright's radical critique of aestheticism also continues to elude literarycritics. His message, however,
was not intentionallyhidden. It is simply invisible to literarycritics
who are themselves, possibly, too "wrappedup" in the philosophy
of artthatWrighthere questions.
The difference between these two novellas is the difference between aestheticist despair and messianic hope. Fred Daniels's
physical death was finally a death full of hope in the future.27In
telling the story of his failure to communicatehis vision and truth,
the narratorexpressed a measure of hope in a better future. This
hopeful failure has more in common with Dostoyevsky's Notes
from Undergroundthan with Conrad's "deracinated"sailor.28The
failure of both Fred Daniels and Dostoyevsky's undergroundman
59
leaves to the novella, and specifically to the reader,the responsibility to tell that truth,and to communicatethe vision these two men
earnedat the price of death and in the darkestunderground.
"The Man Who Lived Underground"contains a powerful critique of the irrationalistic,subjectivistic solutions that moder art
and philosophy have embraced to escape our alienating society.
Like Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground,in Georg Lukacs'
memorablecharacterization,it is a novella that attacksboth rationalism and irrationalism.29
Formulatedfrom within the author'sown
modernist formation and allegiance, Wright's critique of aestheticism also reveals his profound commitment to and equally profound ambivalence towards moder art. Wrightwas committed to
the practice of modern realism and radical modernism.The fear
that this poetics would become untenableduringthe Cold War informs both "The Man Who Lived Underground"and Black Boy
(1945). In "The Man Who Lived Underground,"Fred Daniels is
chased away by the black church congregation.In Black Boy, the
narratoris chased away from the May-Firstparade by black and
white fellow party members. These are eloquent scenes. They express Richard Wright's fear, at the end of the 1930s and at the
dawn of the Cold War era, that his own art and moder art in general were destined, like FredDaniels, for the underground.
Notes
1. According to Fabre, "The Man" was written in the fall of 1941, shortly after
the staggering success of Native Son (1940). The idea for the story came to
Wright from reading a True Detective story entitled "The Crime Hollywood
Couldn't Believe." The story was about a series of mysteriousthefts all within
one neighborhoodand, as it was discovered, carriedout by the same person. The
burglarhad tunneled his way throughthe basements and had created a cave of
riches worthy of Ali Baba. Fabrenotes that "The short story is thereforesituated
in the heartof a culminatingperiod in Wright'sproduction,between the adaptation of Native Son and the composition of the unpublishedBlack Hope and
Twelve Million Black Voices on one hand, and the birth of Black Boy on the
other" ("RichardWright"210). Also see Fabre, The Unfinished Quest, 238 ff
and Bakish, 42 ff.
2. While critics have recognized, in passing or at length, the significance of
various Europeanwriters and philosophers as sources of inspirationfor the novella, no one to my knowledge has explored its debt to these classics of American literature.
60
CARLA CAPPETTI
3. The novella was famously rewrittenby Ralph Ellison as his well known Invisible Man (1952). Borrowingfrom "The Man"the metaphorof invisibility and
the literarydevice of the journey, Ellison was doing so, in the early fifties, in the
context of a radicallyalteredpolitical and social context. Ellison's Invisible Man
closes on a figure who, for the time being, intends to remain invisible and underground,the radio waves being the only link with humanityhe is willing to
trust.Comparedwith Ellison's Invisible Man, Wright'stragic novella seems like
a happy-endingfairy tale.
4. I am borrowingthe image of "the veil" from W.E.B. Du Bois' classic The
Souls of Black Folk (1903), a work that is, like "The Man,"the recordof a journey, literally to the deep South, figuratively to the invisible underworld of
Southernblack poverty. I am also borrowingthe image from Georg Lukacs' The
Theory of the Novel (1916), a philosophical essay on the conditions of consciousness and alienation in the modem novel that remains unsurpassed.The
theme of the journey to the underworldwithin African American literatureis
discussed by Thorton and by Dixon.
5. Classic and more recent discussions of modernism, aestheticism, and the
avant-gardeart movements of the early twentieth century can be found in Lukacs, Poggioli, Burger,Gaggi, and Larsen.
6. The novella is not widely known to literarycritics and scholars of American
and African Americanliterature;nor is it known to a wider public of American
and internationalreaders generally familiarwith Native Son (1940), Black Boy
(1945) and the earlier Uncle Tom's Children (1938). "The Man" is also not
available in a separatetext-book edition, and oddly it was left out of The Library
of Americaedition of RichardWright'smajorworks.
7. See Howe, "Eight Men;" Fabre, "RichardWright;"Dorothy Lee; Gilyard;
Bryant;Gilroy,Black Atlantic;and Weiss.
8. Overviews of the critical fortunes of RichardWright can be found in Fabre,
"RichardWright's Critical Reception;"Rampersad;Butler; Kinnamon,"Introduction;"Miller; Fabre, The World;Hakutani, Critical Essays; Gayle; Reilly,
Critical Reception; Fabre, The Unfinished Quest; Kinnamon, The Emergence;
and Bone.
9. This ignores the fact that much of Wright's work is set and addressesracism
and social injustice in the "modem"cities of the United States and in the postWorld-War-IIsocial order of first- and third-worldcountries. Wright's great
significance in the context of the thirdworld is discussed by Dissanayake;Folks;
Cobb;Reilly, "RichardWright'sDiscovery;"and Moore.
10. For specific interpretationsof the critical neglect that Richard Wright has
sufferedsee: Gilroy, TheBlack Atlantic, 146 ff.; Cappetti,182 ff.; Portelli "Everybody's; and DeCoste. Portelli suggests that as "salvific transcendence"and
"linguisticheroism"have become the favored conceptions of history among literarycritics, the inarticulatevictims of Wright'swork have become less and less
popular. While Portelli points to various forms of "post-modem idealisms" as
the cause of Wright's critical disfavor, DeCoste points to post-structuralismas a
new tool that expresses an old disfavor towards realism and referentiality.De-
61
Coste thus sees the declining critical fortune of RichardWright in conjunction

with the critical fortunesand misfortunesof literaryrealism in the United States.
11. Charles Johnson is a rare African American intellectual and artist who
praises ratherthan denigratesWright for his engagementwith "European"philosophy and who places Wright within a branchof African American literature
that has producedthe "finest work" in the traditionof metaphysicalphilosophy.
For Johnson, Wright is a "novelist of ideas," and his fiction a form of "concrete
philosophy."Wright's best work, "includingNative Son and his Dostoyevskian
parable 'The Man Who Lived Underground,"'expresses for Johnson "the most
interestingideas in continentalphilosophy duringthe thirties and forties."Johnson 36, 47-48. On Wright's exile in France, see Fabre, From Harlem 175 ff.;
and Weiss.
12. I am indebtedto many of these scholars in small and large ways for my reading. The myth of Orpheusand Plato's allegory of the cave are discussed by Soitos; Nash; McNallie; and Baker,"Reassessing."
Christianityand the Black Church,the Old and the New Testamentare examinedby Miller, 95 ff; Baker, "Reassessing,"and Caron.
Race, racism and racial identity are recognized as paramountto the novella
in Bryant;Miller, 95 ff.; Watkins;Soitos; Baker, "Reassessing";McNallie; and
Fabre,"RichardWright."
Existentialism, nihilism and phenomenology are considered by Peterson;
Fabre, "RichardWright";Baker, "Reassessing";Johnson;Watkins;Bryant;Hakutani,"RichardWright's";and Lynch.
Realism, naturalismand surrealismare analyzed in RobertA. Lee; DeCoste;
and Elmer.
13. The philosophy of art and language of modernism is touched upon by
Gilyard;Miller, 95 ff.; Mayberry;Gilroy, The Black Atlantic 146 ff.; McMahon;
and Weiss 5 ff.
Miller's is the most detailed analysis of poetics in "The Man."Miller argues
that "The Man" is about art and aesthetics and that references to art-for-art's
sake are salient. Gilyard claims that "The Man" is about language and specifically the language of art. Lee identifies two poetics in "The Man," one "outside," naturalism,and one "inside,"surrealism.Baker's "Reassessing"proposes
that for literarycritics "the uninscribedquestion is 'what is art?' and the answer
proposed by bourgeois aesthetics is a response that necessarily finds Wright
lacking" (131). DeCoste more broadlyclaims that Wright's realist poetics never
wavered in its commitment to "critique American class and race relations"
(130). This perspective, I would add, finds supportin James Baldwin's Nobody
Knows My Name where Baldwin recalls, as part of an ongoing dispute between
himself and Wright, both living in Paris at the time, the following words by his
mentor:"Whatdo you meanprotest!. .. All literatureis protest.You can't name
a single novel that isn't protest"(197). Poetics, in the form of a critical discourse
that demands "acceptance, reconciliation, transcendence and healing" (256),
preferably in the form of "psychological and linguistic mastery"(256), is the
focus of Portelli's inspiring"Everybody'sHealing Novel."
62
CARLA CAPPETTI
14. According to Gilroy, Wright's "anti-essentialistconception of racial identity

... has confoundedand perplexed many.... [proving]to be an embarrassment
for... those who have sought to position him at the head of the official pantheon
of twentieth-centuryAfrican-Americanletters." Gilroy also pointedly rejects
"the fortifications which critics have placed between the work [Wright] produced in America and the supposedly inferior products of his Europeanexile"
(BlackAtlantic 155).
15. Wright's philosophical, intellectual, and aesthetic preoccupationswere the
product of his experience of racism and alienation at home, not, as critics have
suggested, of his encounters with existentialism and phenomenology abroad.
C.L.R. James's recollection of a visit with Wrightliving in Franceillustratesthis
point: "One day I went to the country to spend a weekend with him. He had
gone to the countryto spend the summer.I came into the house and he showed
me twenty-five books on a shelf. He said, 'Look here, Nello, you see those
books there? They are by Kierkegaard.'I said, 'Yes, he's very popular these
days.' He says, 'I am not concerned about his popularity. I want to tell you
something.Everythingthat he writes in those books, I knew before I had them.'
I never spoke to him about it after.I knew what he meantto tell me.... Whathe
was telling me was that he was a black man in the United States" (196). As
James recognizes, the philosophical readings encounteredby Wright duringhis
French sojourn, not unlike the sociological readings of his earlier Chicago one
(discussed in Cappetti), gave him the language for articulatingthe experience.
The experience, however, did not come from books. He lived that experience,
encounteringit in differentforms in Mississippi, in Chicago, and in New York,
and carryingit with him to Europe,to Africa and even to Asia.
16. I am borrowingthe concept of "Black modernity"from Gilroy, Black Atlantic.
17. Within Wright's overall oeuvre, the novella stands out as the logical extension and intensificationof elements, both thematic and aesthetic, present in his
best-known fiction. Here, as in his other work, is the physical intensity of fear,
violence, and escape, and the alienationand estrangementof modem mankindas
epitomized by the African Americanworker in a racist and class society. Here,
as in his other work, is also the painful lyricism and the extremenihilism of the
social outcast.
18. In a parodicreversalof the Christianritualof Easter,the protagonistescapes
on Friday evening, returns abovegroundon Sunday morning, and is killed on
Sundayevening. Or, conversely, perhapsthe ritualis straightforwardbut the undergroundand the abovegroundare reversed,so that the final murderis actually
a resurrection.
19. Propp, 25 ff. No critic has explored the novella's possible significance as a
modernfolktale, yet a numberof elements suggest that this approachwould be a
fruitfulone.
20. According to several critics, the original and never published version of the
novella includedan additionaland long introductorysection. See note 1 above.
63
21. Wright, "Memories of My Grandmother"2; courtesy of Julia Wright.

Miller's is the only study that discusses Wright's importantcommentson art,the
black church and modernismin "Memoirs,"an importantmanuscriptthat does
for "TheMan"what "How 'Bigger' Was Born"does for Native Son.
22. The initials of the protagonist's name are those of Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
whose novella Notes from Underground(1864) inspired Wright. They are also
the initials of FrederickDouglass, whose name is synonymouswith the quest for
freedom of the fugitive-slave narrativetradition.Fred Daniels's name recalls as
well the biblical prophet Daniel, whose quest Wright's protagonistshares. And
by way of elision, Freddaniels' name, and especially his adventuresinto the aesthetic underground, invoke, ironically perhaps, the quest for freedom and
"autonomy"of moder art.
23. Plato's allegory of the cave is discussed by Fabre, who refers to Daniels as
an "aesthete"and to the scene of the cave an "epiphanyof artistic creation"
("RichardWright"218). It is also discussed by McNallie, who reads the Platonic
cave as both womb and tomb, as the space of a "primordialself," and the novella "as an inverted copy of Plato's parable, a nearly perfect mirrorimage or
negative of this most famous .... quest for ultimateknowledge"(77).
24. Passing remarksregardingthis importantprose poem can be found in Baker,
"Reassessing";McNallie; and Everette.
25. Whyand what he escapes by leaving the undergroundand returningto the
abovegroundhave been unclear to literarycritics and their tentative and contradictoryanswershighlightthe problem.See Baker"Reassessing,"and McNallie.
26. See Poggioli, Bongie, and Bell-Villeda.
27. According to Brignano,"TheMan WhoLived Undergroundmarksa low and
pessimistic point in the philosophical props beneath Wright's publications"and
Wright's "decision to live in France is a manifest outcome of this process"
(153). This is a perspectivethat I do not share.
28. I am borrowingthe term from Glenn (239) to whose perceptive reading of
Heart of Darkness I am indebted.
29. One might say of RichardWright what Lukacs says of Dostoyevsky at the
end of his The Theoryof the Novel: "Dostoyevskydid not write novels, and the
creative vision revealed in his works has nothing to do, either as affirmationor
as rejection, with EuropeanRomanticismor with the many, likewise Romantic,
reactionsagainstit" (152).
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Carla Cappetti, Black Orpheus Richard Wright's ''The Man Who Lived Underground'', MELUS, Vol. 26, No. 4, African American Literature, Winter 2001, Pp. 41-68.

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Black Orpheus: Richard Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground"

Author(s): Carla Cappetti

Black Orpheus: Richard Wright's

"The Man Who Lived Underground"(1945) by RichardWright

fantasy and anti-realism characterize its style; and whether its

modem society. Specifically, "The Man" expresses the alienation

ing of time, its protagonist'sloss of memory and language, and his

"The Man Who Lived Underground,"like Walter Benjamin's

"hooting"sirens, and in the underground,where the primeval and

the radiofadedandhe was staringat the diamondson the floorat his

scintillating cave, Fred Daniels and the reader are compelled to

His muscleswere rigidandhe stoodfor whatseemedto him a thousandyears.(72)

[He] put his shoulderto the coverandmovedit an inch. A crackof

memberhis name, cannottell a story. We see him, as the police do,

CrossDamonin TheOutsiderby RichardWright

From questioningthe values and truthsof the city aboveground,

the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.2 A recognizable

encounterdeath. Like Dostoyevsky's undergroundman-who also

Coste thus sees the declining critical fortune of RichardWright in conjunction

14. According to Gilroy, Wright's "anti-essentialistconception of racial identity

21. Wright, "Memories of My Grandmother"2; courtesy of Julia Wright.

. Notes of a Native Son. New York: Dial, 1963.

1980. Urbana:U of Illinois P, 1991.

. A Richard WrightBibliography:Fifty Yearsof Criticismand Commentary,

Horace Cayton,Ara Bontemps, SaundersRedding."Anger and Beyond:

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