Richard Wright and the Police

Richard Wright always coincides with his object.

-Georges Charbonnier

Toward the end of his life, after a long exile in France accompanied by intermittent harassment by American internal security agencies, Richard Wright was asked whether he felt reluctant when he had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to renew his United States passport. Wright's reply was without anguish: "I don't think it has caused me too much hardship. I live quite comfortably. In any case the American Negro is the most vociferous defender of the Constitution. That's exactly what we want: enforcement of the Constitution." 1 Wright, whose reply was almost guaranteed to appear in his ever-growing FBI file, may not have had much latitude in expressing a public opinion toward the Pledge. 2 But clearly, Wright thought past the interviewer's question, and past the Pledge itself, which makes no mention of the United States Constitution. The deflection illustrates a familiar but fundamental aspect of postwar American culture: public controversy about questions of constitutionality and the role of the Supreme Court. In the postwar period the Supreme Court wrought major cultural changes long overdue in American jurisprudence, delivering such watershed decisions as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Miranda v. Arizona (1966). For Wright to have thought of constitutionality when reminded of the State Department's requirement that he recite the Pledge, suggests that the Court, in contrast to the executive or the legislature, represented what Wright thought of as the ideal version of American power, its friendliest, or its least autocratic, incarnation. For Wright, the America to which he could pledge allegiance was a judicial America, one engaged in the process of living up to its Constitution.

However, when Wright imagines encounters with American law in fiction, he does not think of the highest courts. Instead, his stories are consistently preoccupied with the most intensive and widely distributed form of state power, the police. For Wright's protagonists, the police are always the state that can be seen, and what his characters see are rampant transgressions of constitutional principle. Wright's characters were not alone in their fear of the police. Over the course of Wright's lifetime, progressive reforms increasingly sought to stem police lawlessness, and a major national program of review, the "Wickersham Commission," was appointed by President Hoover in 1929 to study the problem. The copious report established that the use of violent interrogation was widespread in police stations through the United States. 3 Public opinion recoiled from the thought of the rubber hose, the phone book to the head, and other forms of nonlethal torture, along with more insidious methods, including prolonged interrogation, isolation, and holding suspects without arraignment. As Yale Kamisar noted in the debate leading up to the Miranda decision:

In the "gatehouse" of American criminal procedure—through which most defendants journey and beyond which many never get—the enemy of the state is a depersonalized "subject"...Once he enters the "mansion" the enemy of the state is repersonalized, even dignified, the public invited, and a stirring ceremony in honor of individual freedom from law enforcement celebrated. 4

One way to think of Wright's fiction is as preoccupied with the scene in the "gatehouse." Rarely do Wright's characters find their way through to the "mansion" of the upper courts despite their continual encounters with law enforcement.

As procedure in the gatehouse began to come under increasing scrutiny, it became apparent that where white suspects might be detained incommunicado and intimidated, their treatment bore little resemblance to the much more intense methods of inquisition practiced upon black suspects. The result was that when the judiciary's inquiry into police procedure accelerated, the issue became racial as much as procedural, galvanizing support for due process standards as adjunct to, or even the focus of, the civil rights movement. Richard Wright's fiction, which rarely concludes without bringing his characters into contact with the law, reflects the sustained attention Americans paid to criminal justice procedure during Wright's career: Uncle Tom's Children, published in 1938, concerns mob violence and lynching, as do some of Wright's very earliest works, like the poem "I Have Seen Black Hands" (1934). By the time he wrote Native Son (1940), Wright's interest had shifted: the mob which sweeps the South Side of Chicago does not come near the point of extralegal, summary violence, despite the rough handling Bigger experiences during his arrest. In part, Wright's portrayal had to reflect that Bigger committed his crimes in the North, where procedure seems more successfully to have prevented—or masked—malfeasance. 5 Nonetheless, Wright's depiction of police in Native Son shows attention to the Court's invocation of due process when Bigger is threatened with mob violence during his interrogation by the Chicago district attorney. Wright's inclusion of the fleeting scene registers his attention to developments in police procedure: in February of 1940, a month before Native Son was published, the Supreme Court handed down a key decision in Chambers v. Florida, a case in which several black suspects had been held and threatened with mob violence, but not subjected to violent coercion. In a decisive step toward opening up the rights of the accused, the Court declared that the men's confessions were void due to "psychological coercion." 6 A month later, Native Son depicted precisely the elicitation of confession through the threat of mob violence. Bigger's interrogation was—by the time Native Son was published, if not at the moment Wright conceived the scene—newly unconstitutional.

As the district attorney points out in Native Son, there is plenty of physical evidence to convict Bigger; the case does not require his confession. But the D.A. wants the confession from him anyway. Bigger senses that "white men [wait] for his words," and has no will, any longer, to deny them anything. 7 In the rapt languor that descends on Bigger after he is apprehended, delivering those words seems to have no particular significance, to him or, perhaps, to Wright. Yet soon Wright's work became more and more preoccupied with the varieties of confession. Shortly after publishing Native Son, he wrote a novella, "The Man Who Lived Underground" (1941) which features police confession and interrogation in both its premise and its conclusion. Black Boy (1945) is a confession in the Augustinian or Rousseauian mode. The Outsider (1953) concludes with Cross Damon on his deathbed whispering his last words to the D.A.-cum-priest. And Wright's final published novel, The Long Dream (1959) is concerned for much of its final third with Fishbelly Tucker's ability to resist confessing under prolonged detention. All of these instances, and many more within Wright's shorter fiction, demonstrate his close scrutiny of modes of confessional speech, which played such a large role both in the due process revolution and the civil rights movement as a whole.

In what follows, I argue that the scene of confession binds together Wright's work after Native Son as an extended inquiry into the questions over which the Supreme Court puzzled in the forties, fifties and sixties: is there such a thing as a "voluntary confession"? What is the relationship between force and speech? How are the police related to the law? Looking at "The Man Who Lived Underground," I show how Wright revolts against the extraction of confessions, even as he evinces a desire for kinds of human connection that confessional communication creates. The subject of Black Boy is the frightening possibility that this connection depends on violence against the self. My account culminates by considering Wright's infrequently-read Savage Holiday (1954), in which Wright made his most complex inquiry into the possibilities of fiction construed as confession, taking into account not only the questions of voluntariness that preoccupied the debate around confession, but also the racial valences of the confessional scene.

Wright's vacillation between the promise and the danger of confession reproduces a pattern that Peter Brooks describes in Troubling Confessions: that, since the Romantic era, and arguably since the medieval establishment of the sacrament of confession, confession has presented two very different faces. 8 On the one hand, Brooks points out, the insult to human dignity involved in the confessant's "abjection" has been widely condemned, yet, at the same time, we regard the expression of truth to one's self and to others not only as the mark of authenticity but as the genesis of rehabilitation and expiation. Brooks rightly notes that the intersecting and diverse contexts in which confession is deployed—literary, religious, therapeutic, and legal, to state only the most obvious—mean that there is no question of stating flatly whether confession is to be lauded or not. For Richard Wright, though, confession discourse bound these realms together, articulating not only a relation between citizen and policeman, but also a relation between author and audience—and concluding, agonizingly, that for him, the two were the same relation. What Savage Holiday shows is that only the coercive confession would be available to the racialized subject.

Due Process, Voluntariness, and Black Boy

Black Boy is the most overtly confessional text Richard Wright produced. The book marks a definitive transition within his work from the naturalism of his early writing to the more philosophical mode of his middle period. To see what this shift meant to Wright, one has to look at the changing status of "confession" in the United States while Wright was working. The key development was the emergence of due process as the legal arena in which confessions law would be revised. The first major case, Brown v. Mississippi, was decided in 1936. Brown brought the concept of "coerced confessions" within the purview of the Supreme Court's due process doctrine. It would no longer be permissible to admit evidence obtained, as in this case, by whipping and hanging or other self-evidently violent techniques. As Justice Frankfurter would later summarize:

Is the confession the product of an essentially free and unconstrained choice by its maker? If it is, if he has willed to confess, it may be used against him. If it is not, if his will has been overborne and his capacity for self-determination critically impaired, the use of his confession offends due process. (Culombe v. Connecticut, 1961)

Brown meant that if a confession was obtained without due process, it would be voided, without the Court making any reference (as it had in the past) to such matters as the confession's perceived accuracy, usefulness to the prosecutor, or even its truth. If a statement was coerced, it would be excluded. Therefore, Brown became the first in a series of Supreme Court interventions that attempted to adjudicate exactly how a confession could and could not be "coerced"—that is, to determine what counts as "due process" in the elicitation of confessions.

In 1944, while Wright was working on Black Boy, the Court handed down Ashcraft v. Tennessee, in which Justice Hugo Black, writing for the majority, reached the conclusion toward which the court's confessions inquiries had been—vertiginously—tending: that contact with the police is "inherently coercive" and speeches given under custodial interrogation could never be purely voluntary. There never was and never would be untainted confession. The Ashcraft decision presented the possibility that the rabbit hole went on forever, that one would always find, in every confession, a way of showing that the words of the suspect had been in some wise extorted, therefore in violation of due process, and therefore inadmissible. Plainly, under due process jurisprudence, the Ashcraft ruling could never become substantial precedent; it represented the road down which confession law could never go. 9 Nonetheless, Black's conclusion was important, because it marked out the terminus of a philosophical problem that would increasingly concern Wright in his fiction.

In the period between Brown and Miranda, the Court generally attempted to review confessions based on what it called a "totality of circumstances" test, in which the police practices involved in obtaining a confession would be weighed against the perceived ability of suspects to resist those practices. Thus the question of the possibility of "voluntariness" in confessions was posed most forcefully in the context of legal interactions between black men and the police, focusing frequently on test cases involving the abuse of poor, uneducated black men from the South. Chambers v. Florida, the case connected directly with Native Son, was only the most prominent in a string of similar cases. For the Court it followed logically that previous criminal experience, legal knowledge, and the lack of disenfranchising identity markers resulted in a more complete ability to resist confessing, and so would merit more coercive police procedures, including such techniques as team interrogation and prolonged incommunicado detention. This complementary trend was crystallized in Lisenba v. California (1941), in which a habitually criminal, knowledgeable, white suspect endured a great deal of exhausting police interrogation before finally breaking down. The Supreme Court's failure to overturn his conviction signaled that the "totality of circumstances" test had perceived a limit—in large part a racial limit—in Lisenba.

The development of due process confessions jurisprudence, set in motion by Brown, was brought to a close in the Miranda revolution. In the 1960s, shortly after Wright's untimely death, the Supreme Court made its most adamant interventions in confession law. The last gasp of the trend begun in Brown was Felix Frankfurter's epic seventy-page decision in Culombe v. Connecticut (1961), which tried finally to plumb the depths of "involuntary" confession, developing the concept of the "overborne will" to make it possible to adjudicate confession admissibility. Yet the very intellectual intensity of Frankfurter's Culombe opinion signaled the incipient failure of the Court's long attempt at parsing the elusive notion of voluntariness. 10

The Court's new tack took inspiration from the 1943 ruling in McNabb v. United States. Instead of working through the mind-bending consequences of Ashcraft, the McNabb ruling suggested a more fruitful, less abstract direction. McNabb stipulated that prolonged pre-commitment detention was itself enough to render a confession inadmissible, regardless of the involvement or transgression of the confessant's will. 11 Thus the case moved toward an abandonment of the due process "voluntariness" criterion and the setting out of procedural safeguards that would themselves stand as a kind of simulation of the voluntary, so that confession could be rescued from the coercion intrinsic to the presence of the police. Finally abandoning the extremely vague conceptual apparatus that the "due process voluntariness" doctrine required, the Supreme Court, in 1957, in Mallory v. United States, formalized the "McNabb-Mallory rule" that made admissibility primarily a matter of procedure. In 1964, in Escobedo v. Illinois, and even more completely in 1966, in Miranda v. Arizona, the Court further developed explicit procedural safeguards against coerced confession, completing the thought begun in McNabb. Using its supervisory powers over the lower courts—no longer even making a Constitutional argument—the Supreme Court instituted a series of admissibility criteria for confessions that eventuated in the now-familiar "Miranda rights." No longer would the Court attempt to scrutinize confessional situations for ever-more-ephemeral traces of coercion. Instead, a suspect was held to be responding voluntarily if arraigned properly, granted legal counsel, and given the right to remain silent. What was said thereafter was admissible, whether "voluntary" or not.

This progression, beginning with a new emphasis on the relationship between force and speech, and ending with philosophical stalemate, is the progression of Richard Wright's increasingly confessional writing. The defense of suspects' rights must be lauded, and Wright's depictions of interrogations evince the same discomfort shown by the Court at the spectacle of language extracted by physical or psychological force. Yet as the Court revolved the issue over the course of thirty years, it came to the conclusion that this miserable process was actually not to be avoided—force was too insidious, and confession too necessary. Thus one can think of the trend that concluded in Miranda as both a victory for civil liberties and as a philosophical failure: it simply dispensed with the idea of a truly non-coercive interrogation, which the Court now held to be no more than an unapproachable—or more accurately, irrelevant—ideal.

As the Court moved forward in its inquiries about "coercion" and "voluntariness," Richard Wright began writing a text he called "Black Confession." Despite the fact that by 1944 he was calling the book "American Hunger," which then gave way to Black Boy, the work retains the imprint of its original, Augustinian concept. The book employs the Augustinian trope of telling a life-story which focuses on wrongdoing. As in Augustine's Confessions, Wright strove to convey a sense of completeness, papering over the life-story's missing interludes by exposing shameful actions, troping the comprehensiveness of the text's narrative through the abject quality of its revelations. The youthful Wright is an alcoholic, an arsonist, and a killer of animals; finally he becomes a danger to his family. Also like Augustine, Wright tells this story in order to set up a conversion narrative, in which the events of the confession's earlier portion become the justification or ground for the author to become someone else—to become the person who can author a confession. Black Boy is as close as Wright came in his career to conforming to the historically recognizable confessional mode. Yet Black Boy concludes with a powerful critique of confession that mirrors the Supreme Court's finally unsuccessful efforts to discover legitimate ground for identifying voluntary speech.

Wright's conversion narrative in Black Boy¸ climaxing in his entry into the Communist Party, to which he made "the first total emotional commitment of my life" departs from the Augustinian model in that it does not end in a joyful union of self and truth. 12 In fact, Wright's conclusion suggests the opposite, opening up the possibility that confessions, while uniquely capable of creating a relation between selfhood and truth, are also likely to go awry, becoming false and other—often in the name of establishing communal bonds. In the second half of Black Boy, entitled "The Horror and the Glory," Wright describes the confessional mode's twinned promise and demise. Already estranged from the Party because of its doctrinal character and hostility to his art, Wright witnesses the Communist "trial" of a member deemed incompletely doctrinaire. The party member, Ross, had been Wright's first subject in an intended series of "biographies" of black Communists. The Party became so suspicious of Wright's activity—thinking that he might be a spy—that it ordered him to stop seeing Ross entirely, deepening Wright's sense that the Party failed to appreciate the "inexpressibly human" property that Wright's biographies, presumably, would have attempted to capture (184).

Wright's focus on the scene of Ross' trial makes clear its importance to Black Boy as a whole: the book is a confessional text, which ends with a depiction of a scene of confession. The trial has no explicit procedure, only what Wright calls a form "as deep as the desire of men to live together" (70), in which the audience, as jury, designates Ross the focus and terminus of a narrative of world history. Working piecemeal, the Party members progressively tell a story about society, economics, nations, wars, and stages of production that implacably approaches, over the course of three hours, the man sitting before them. The function of the story is to "enthrone a new sense of reality in the hearts of those present," giving the trial the sense of an "absolute" against which Ross can be judged (371). Crucially, Wright says that despite the grueling nature of the experience, Ross did not want to leave; instead, he has reconciled himself to giving a complete confession. He had not been "prodded" or "tortured" (373). Ross remained because the narrative of the trial placed him exhilaratingly within a coherent process—it puts him in relation to the world. Despite the high costs to Ross' dignity, it is this relation that Wright refuses to malign, calling it the "glory" of the proceeding (374). At the trial's climax, Ross brokenly weeps that he is indeed "guilty" of all the farcical ideological crimes attributed to him, and despite the fact that he is personally destroyed, even prototypically abject, Wright adamantly denies that Ross has been "doped." Instead, he has been "awakened" (374). Wright asserts that the nearly orgiastic sense of understanding the trial developed among those present was real, not spurious or merely fleeting. But this "glory," comes at the cost of the "horror"—the destruction of Ross' "personality;" Wright finally adjudges it too high a price. Wright's admiration for the Party's powerful mechanism suggests that he was attempting to imagine a higher, unimpeachable tribunal—one more like the "mansion" of the Supreme Court than like the "gatehouse" of the police station. The show trials of the Party betrayed its totalitarian impulse, but also its desire for the validating confessions of its members. Wright, though ambivalent, finally turned away; the Party's neglect of the "inexpressibly human" revealed its fundamental depravity. Wright's confession in Black Boy concludes with a vision of confessional culture, in which the price of admission to human community is the "personality." Wright's finally repudiates the Party's dream of a social belonging that could be produced by such a confession. Given that Wright joined the Party because he glimpsed in it the possibility of a "unity" in the "search for the truth of the lives of the oppressed and the isolated" (317), the discovery that this unity was predicated on a confession that served not the truth of the self, but rather the self's dissolution into truth, posed a fundamental challenge to Wright's sense of confession's promise.

Commentators have concluded that Wright's experience with the Party was less shattering and melodramatic than was sometimes suggested during his lifetime. 13 Yet even if this is the case, the development of Wright's fiction after Native Son is indivisible from the account given in Black Boy (and prominently republished in 1949 in The God That Failed) of his betrayed conversion. The terms in which he described how "I Tried To Be A Communist" (the title under which "The Horror and the Glory" was first published) have less bearing on Wright's experiences with the Party than they do on his theory of writing, and in particular his theory of confession. Black Boy proposes two versions of confession, Wright's and Ross's, which collapse back toward each other as one examines them, and which suggest a polarity within Wright's oeuvre. Wright begins Black Boy with himself, with his birth, and proceeds through his childhood, his adolescence; it concludes with his majority, which he repeatedly emphasizes in the "The Horror and the Glory," insisting, for example, that he will not be gulled into anger, because he is a "man," who has "outgrown [his] childhood" (Black Boy, 381). Wright's manhood contrasts pointedly with the experience of Ross, whose "story" is told to show the degeneration or impossibility of his manhood—starting with the origin of oppression, the roles of the Soviet Union and the United States, the city of Chicago, the situation of the South Side, concluding finally with the terms of Ross' apostasy and his final admission of guilt. For Wright, Ross' acknowledgment of guilt is his extinction—precisely the opposite of being "a man."

In the story of Ross, Black Boy attempts to expel a possible reading of Wright's own story, one that would show it to be the product of vast forces ranged around him. Despite the narrative's clear suggestion that Wright's painful youth was largely the product of various aspects of American racism, Wright suggests that in at least one way the book is unlike Ross' confession: it was voluntary, and thus it individualizes and matures, rather than extinguishing, its subject. The contrast between Ross' confession and Wright's duplicates the shadowy distinction between coerced and voluntary confession that preoccupied the Supreme Court. Wright insists that the writer cannot be dictated to, cannot be "coerced," whether by the Party or by any other incursion upon the self. Writing, for Wright, demands the premise of an unalloyed voluntariness, figured in the conclusion of Black Boy as the concept of "manhood"—a figure who strongly resembles the unencumbered subject who might give rise to a "voluntary confession" despite the "totality of circumstances."

The looming possibility in Black Boy is that there is no real difference between Party or police coercion and that of the self, between such apparent opposites as externally and internal coercion. In worrying about that collapse, Wright's texts attempt to split the same hair that the Supreme Court did in the period of the "totality of circumstances" test, in which the strength of the suspect was tested against the coerciveness of his environment. In Black Boy, Wright shows us what it can mean when a subject, like Ross, "voluntarily" confesses his guilt, demonstrating how even the most explicitly "chosen" confession can become frighteningly external to the self. Wright turns away, even at the cost of abandoning moral clarity, human community, and a sense of meaningfulness. In this he repeats the mournful conclusion of the Court in the Ashcraft decision, discovering in his core beliefs about writing the taint of "involuntariness" that the Court, if only for a moment of its history, was willing to equate with violence.

Violence, The Police, and "The Man Who Lived Underground"

The plot of "The Man Who Lived Underground" is episodic, even schematic. Wright's protagonist is framed for murder and a confession is beaten out of him. Escaping underground through sewer tunnels and into cellars and basements, "the Man"—who is given no proper name—surveys aspects of life, from church and labor to banking and entertainment. Pointedly contrasted with the harmonious order of the aboveground world is the dank, primordial zone below. In a transvaluation typical of the tradition of Western thought to which Wright alludes, 14 Wright shows his Man darkly triumphant belowground, critiquing everything from God to gold, and finally springing prophetically back up into the light to usher in an era in which "everybody would be governed by the same impulse of pity." 15 He seeks out the very police from whom he fled. The officers, having already chalked up a conviction, have no interest in him any longer. In response to the Man's frantic confrontation, they find the confession he signed and burn it in front of him, telling him to get lost. The Man, however, refuses to depart, insisting that he can show them a vision of radical community outside of the existing social order. He tries, in effect, to force the police to take another confession from him, a total confession, one which shows that he has stepped entirely outside the social and political world aboveground. The police realize just enough of the Man's anarchic vision to see that he is dangerous, and summarily murder him, returning his body to the sewer. Far from being punished for his silence, as in the dark corners of American police stations, the Man is killed for too much speech.

In 1971, Wright's biographer Michel Fabre, in the course of arguing for the importance of "The Man Who Lived Underground" to the development of Wright's career, established that the bulk of the story had never been published (which remains the case). Of the manuscript Fabre reported that its first parts depict the incommunicado detention and torture of Fred Daniels (later only "the Man"). 16 Such a procedural, criminal-justice beginning was much in keeping both with contemporary debates and with the final chapters of Native Son. Yet the story took a turn in its final third, the portion that now stands alone. Denuded of its first parts, "The Man Who Lived Underground" becomes less topical and more philosophical, but the connection between the two parts is far from arbitrary; in fact, the theme of coercive interrogation gave rise to the increasingly existential and philosophical themes of Wright's middle period. Wright still sought to show how crime punctures the homogeneity of society, but also promised that somehow these crimes could become the basis for a new understanding, a claim prominent in its utter absence from the sober dénouement of Native Son.

As the Man moves from cellar to cellar, he steals a radio, then jewels and a large amount of money. Later, he witnesses the wrongful accusation and beating of a boy unjustly accused of the stealing the radio. Listening, the Man feels "a distant sort of pity" (the beginning of his new theory of society) but realizes that to return the radio and accept responsibility would be to deny the boy the chance to realize, in the situation of wrongful accusation, "the secret of his existence, the guilt that he could never get rid of." 17 As the boy is beaten, the Man turns away, "smiling," and returns to the basement which gave him access to the money and jewels. Here a police interrogation is in process; the bank's night watchman is accused of the Man's theft. Putting his eye to a peephole, the Man sees a repetition of the brutality that drove him underground in the first place—a man tied to a chair and beaten. Gleefully, the Man again reflects that the innocence of the watchman is irrelevant in light of the ways in which "he had always been guilty" (70). Given a moment's respite, the watchman grabs a gun and kills himself. Mysteriously altered, the Man suddenly knows that he must return to the surface, his actions newly "informed with precision" and his muscles "reinforced from a reservoir of strength" (72). Far from returning to put a stop to such practices, however, the Man seeks the surface in order to generalize them. Wrongful accusation—which nonetheless has its inner truth—has become a mode of communication between those who monopolize violence and those denied it. Strongly reminiscent of the way that Wright would frame the trial of Ross in Black Boy, the depiction in "The Man" of confession introduced its utopian promise, even in the inauspicious context of summary police violence. 18

James Baldwin, in his essay "Alas, Poor Richard," came close to identifying how Wright's confessionalism functions when he declared that Wright's work was marred by a violence to which it bore witness, but to which it was also party. 19 But Baldwin's implication that this violence is an unthought element within Wright's oeuvre misses the opposed possibility that each time Wright's protagonists become violent, they do the key thinking of Wright's work. Perspective on how to interpret Wright's violent imagery can come from Walter Benjamin's essay "Critique of Violence" (1921), in which Benjamin offers a structural critique of the role of violence in society. Wright's frequently murderous protagonists are versions of what Benjamin terms "the great criminal." 20 This figure arouses a strong public reaction, a compound of "admiration" and "horror," by threatening the modern state's monopoly on violence (239, 241). The very fascination with which the public regards the great criminal implies that the criminal's violence reveals to the public something it half understands: the general subtending of law by violence. Due to the close relationship between violence and the law, violence outside the law comes to have a "law-making character," fundamentally threatening the state by holding out the spectral possibility that anybody willing to use violence might also declare a new law. Just as Benjamin argues that capital punishment, in its "exercise of violence over life and death" (242), is the most revealing moment in the law's practice of its constituent violence, so in Wright a strong topical preference for murder suggests that Wright's work is intended to invoke the lawmaking character of violence. The crimes of Bigger Thomas and Cross Damon of The Outsider suggest how the kernel of some of Wright's work might be understood in Benjamin's terms: violence given to the criminal illuminates the violence of the state (for Thomas) and of institutions more generally (for Damon).

Yet if these men are manifestly violent, taking part in a violence that repeats, in order to reveal, that of the state, there is also a countertradition within Wright's oeuvre, one traceable from "The Man Who Lived Underground," through Black Boy, to Savage Holiday. These texts attempt to purge confessional speech of the taint of violence, seeking what we might think of as a greater confession, a confession, so to speak, in the mansion. Like Benjamin, Wright sought a place within the structure of society where law and violence, speech and force, could be uncoupled. To that end, "The Man Who Lived Underground," negotiated Wright's transition from naturalist fiction to confessional autobiography. The Man creates an anti-world, thriving through distinction from the world above; as he does so, he dooms himself to death upon his return to the light. From these facts, the Man would seem to be the great criminal extraordinaire, representing a threat to the canons of order. The police officer who shoots the Man on the story's final page claims as much: "You've got to shoot his kind. They'd wreck things." 21 And the name Wright gives to this cop, "Lawson," completes Wright's thought by articulating how the sons of the law must defend its unilateral violence. Yet in strong contrast to Native Son, the Man is never violent. He is innocent of the murder of which he is accused, distinguishing him from both Thomas and Damon. Moreover, the Man appears to have no malice of any kind toward the world around him, no "criminality" intrinsic to his character comparable to that which typifies Bigger Thomas. Violence enters "The Man Who Lived Underground" only at the hands of others.

"The Man" draws out of Wright's thought about law his most focused account of the nature of the police, and connects Wright's work to Benjamin's critique in a more fundamental way. For Benjamin, one of the scandals of legality is that it employs violence not merely as a means to achieve non-violent ends. Violence is not only the distasteful, but justifiable, implement of the law, but the inevitable complement through which law establishes itself. In the crux of his critique, Benjamin claims that the law has no non-violent ends that could serve as an imminent criterion for uses of violence; instead, law and violence are coextensive. In both its means and its ends, law is violence. The proof is the police, which for Benjamin represent the "ignominy" of an authority that possesses violence for legal ends, but which also possesses the simultaneous authority to decide upon those ends. 22 Far from being "merely" the armed element of a legal apparatus, Benjamin sees the police as an anomalous (and therefore revealing) structure which cannot be "justified" by appeal to the goals of a supervening legal authority. The police in the state resemble the violence in the law, in that they are "formless...nowhere-tangible, all-pervasive [and] ghostly" (243). In "The Man Who Lived Underground" there is no representation of the state outside of the police, and they appear to be able to do whatever they wish, without the slightest suggestion that their actions are dispensed to any ends but those internal to the police themselves—the maintenance, as they say, of "things." 23 Unlike Native Son, there seems to be no expectation that arrest will be followed by arraignment; instead, the state's violence is executed immediately and at whim. Decoupling the use of police force and the ostensible justifications for its use, descending from the Constitution high above, Wright maps a bleak terrain in which the voluntary acceptance of existential guilt is the only possible connection between accused and accuser.

For all the homology between Benjamin's theory and the frames of Wright's fiction, though, "The Man" offers more than the identification of a "scandalous" structure. As he peers through the peepholes into the submerged truths about the world above, the Man can originate a new stage in Wright's fiction. Surprisingly, though what the Man sees below is wrongful accusation and incessant confession, Wright perceives a model for political agency, discourse and writing generally. Thus the key transformation in the Man comes when the Man finds a way to reinvent himself as a writer. Along with the jewels and money (forms of signification the Man emphatically derides by strewing the jewels about and using the money for wallpaper), he stole a typewriter, but not before using it to type his name: "freddaniels." Yet in going beneath the surface of the earth, he forgets his name, and when he decides to use the typewriter again below, he cannot remember it. The passage from "fred" to "Man" becomes the universalizing gesture necessary to a new fictional mode. He can then begin a novel: "itwasalonghotday." He learns his way about the machine, and manages to type "It was a long hot day." Far from being merely another in a series of rejections of the aboveground world's conventions, the Man's appropriation of the writing machine makes clear the extent to which the Man was for Wright a prototype of the author.

Fabre refers to this episode as the creation of a novel en abyme in the center of the published version of "The Man." Fabre's discovery that "It was a long hot day" is also the first sentence of the unpublished full-length version of "The Man Who Lived Underground " considerably strengthens the impression that "The Man" is a commentary on the task of writing fiction. 24 Wright's use of such a gesture, completely uncharacteristic of his work as a whole, suggests how the topos of confession shifted Wright's understanding of writing. In the wake of Native Son, Wright's inquiry into confessions began to look into how fiction might find an auditor that does not share with the police the quality of "spectral" violence identified by Benjamin. Black Boy attempted to do just that. Unlike the confessions presented in Native Son or in the first parts of "The Man," Black Boy seized upon the mode of confession, presenting (in strong contrast to the place of confession in law) a zealous willingness to confess. But in conclusion Black Boy, like "The Man," was compelled to demonstrate how confession leads to destruction, calling into question its apparent promise of communication between the self and the state. In staging the ambivalent hope of the Man's confession, Wright posed a question not just for criminal law but for his own literary discourse. What is voluntariness in art? If the work is not unambiguously voluntary, is it marred by the pattern of agonized reiteration that Baldwin identified?

Finally, "The Man Who Lived Underground" shows how the confessional mode became linked in Wright's work to the problems of race in fiction. Of "The Man," Wright wrote in a letter that it was the "first time I've really tried to step beyond the straight black-white stuff." 25 Up until the early 1940s, Wright appears to have had no interest in doing something other than "straight" racial "stuff." The remark's enforced casualness papers over a crisis within Wright's thought about his work. The monumental perversity of race relations in Wright's America seems to have become his whole topic; encoding it as "straight," as though race had become too legible for words, required Wright to seek a new kind of derangement. Although "The Man" is certainly not a post-racial fiction, Wright's recourse to the scene of confession became an initial step in the use of some other "stuff" than that which he had previously used. Eventually Savage Holiday would fulfill Wright's intention, routing the relationship between race and writing through the confessional mode.

Race, Reception, and Savage Holiday

Of Savage Holiday, Wright wrote to a friend that it concerned "just folks; white folks" and claimed that the story would have made no sense as a narrative about a black man. 26 Wright's phrasing is rather extraordinary, because Savage Holiday seems almost to exist in order to bring its white protagonist before the police, to the place so pointedly occupied by the black man in "Underground" and other Wright texts. But even without thinking through Wright's oeuvre, the notion that "just folks" could not possibly be black folks startles, for it seems to indicate a major concession to the logic of race in America which Wright had been unwilling to make before. The statement implies Wright's resigned retreat to a concept of race that, far from postulating the human universalism he was wont to expound, instead admits the success of whiteness' masquerade as the unmarked member of a binary pairing. The remark is a clue that of all Wright's novels, perhaps Savage Holiday is the most anguished in its portrayal of American racism—despite the fact that race appears ancillary to its plot.

Savage Holiday concludes as its protagonist, Erskine Fowler, holds his head in his hands in a police station near his apartment. His last words to the police officer interviewing him are "I can't tell you anything," by which he means anything more than what he has already mentioned: that he has just killed a woman, in his kitchen, with a butcher knife, and that the police ought to go and see about it before Fowler's maid finds the body. Fowler confesses to the crime he has committed, confesses most willingly, but refuses to flesh out his story as the officer repeatedly requests. Fowler emphasizes that his refusal is not a matter of principle or a means of defying the law—he stipulates, three times, that he "can't" tell the rest of the story.

With that refusal, the novel ends, and we are left to speculate about Fowler's statement. Why "can't" he tell it? Fowler may simply be too overwrought, having killed Mabel Blake less than an hour before. He may be too overwrought because he has realized immediately after killing Blake that his hostility to her, particularly regarding her sexual promiscuity, stems from unresolved childhood resentment directed at his similarly promiscuous mother. During his abbreviated police interview, Fowler suddenly remembers that once as a child he drew a disturbing picture of a broken doll and was castigated by his mother. At this moment Fowler realizes why he always carries four colored pencils in the inner pocket of his suit jacket: they refer to the instruments with which he drew the picture, which drew down his mother's punishment. The gesture of reaching within his coat and touching the pencils—the novel's most dense piece of symbolism—is repeated a dozen times over the course of the book, whenever Fowler is distraught or confused. Perhaps we are to assume that the sudden revelation of the gesture's hidden coherence has shocked Fowler into silence. Or perhaps we are to assume that the multiple overdetermination of Fowler's crime is too miasmatic or inchoate to put into words at all. Wright has characterized Fowler as the archetypal Freudian subject: he is defined by the fact that he does not quite know what he knows. He may be incapable of confessing because he simply has no access to the content of his confession.

Yet in the context of Wright's investigation of confessional form, Fowler's inability to confess has everything to do with Wright's interest in the confessional subject as a post-racial one. The primordial scene of racial confession, the torment of black suspects by the police, was shown in "The Man" to have within it the surprising possibility of a relation between police and subject that Wright could not finally abandon, just as Ross before the inquisitors of the Party gave a confession Wright deemed reprehensible but still "glorious." In Savage Holiday, confession becomes something that a white man cannot do. The novel questions the very possibility of being white and encountering the police, because Fowler's characterization as "just folks"—that is, "white folks"—repeatedly, and deliberately, slips. Fowler is not really just folks; instead, Wright makes clear that in writing Fowler he is performing a kind of "whiteface." He is trying to avoid a certain type of reading.

Considerations of Wright's audience can show why Erskine Fowler must become Richard Wright's passing fantasy of representing "just folks; white folks." In a 1960 interview, Wright was asked for whom he wrote. His answer is surprisingly blunt. He writes for whites: "It is a white country in the imagination of my audience. This is natural because my audience is white, and I want to make them aware of the fact that there exists a black life with the same dimensions." 27 In Wright's figure, white life is superimposed upon a black life with the "same dimensions"—it's just that the latter "life" is not part of his audience. In a suggestive confusion, he states, "I'd like to hurl words in my novels in order to arouse whites to the fact that there is someone here with us, Negroes, a human presence" (224). The ambivalence of the statement in the text may not reflect Wright's manifest intentions; the sentence can be enunciated two ways. But as recorded it clarifies the fact that in the community of a Richard Wright text the "Negroes" may either be "us" or the "somebody who is here with us." And the surprising suggestion, implied strongly by the way that Wright construed his audience as white, is that he conceived his fictions, particularly Savage Holiday, as white entities to which blacks seek to gain entrance—even, presumably, in moments of realist depiction of blackness.

In What Is Literature? (1948), Jean-Paul Sartre gives a strongly contrasting analysis of Wright's work. He asserts somewhat dogmatically that Wright has two audiences, one white, one black, so that his writing reflects "a double simultaneous postulation" in which the demands and understandings of these two audiences both exert force on the text. 28 Sartre implies, but does not quite completely articulate, that these split forces may have something to do with Wright's greatness. Sartre's interest is in refuting the idea that one writes for the "universal reader," and Wright certainly seems to have agreed, although he also discerned that proposing two audiences, each with unambiguous racial encoding, may not have been an improvement on the "universal." Paradoxically, Wright's formulation of his own audience, as white, seems to be more flexible than Sartre's formulation. Wright's idea of his audience was actually intended to summon, by its very concept, the "human presence" of another life. Discarding the apparent givenness of any person's racial encoding, accepted by Sartre, Wright's decision to write to a white audience is actually the decision to argue that no such audience exists except insofar as it is also, in part, a black audience, a "life with the same dimensions." Wright's formulation emerges, even though apparently jaded and absolute, as more theoretically satisfying than Sartre's assertion.

In keeping with this logic, which makes awareness of "black life" dependent on the presence of whiteness, Savage Holiday presents a white protagonist who is incompletely white. A clue to the location of race in Savage Holiday might be glimpsed in the fact that Fowler is compared to Abraham Lincoln in the first pages of the book. Fowler is:

A six-foot, hulking, heavy, muscular man with a Lincoln-like, quiet, stolid face, deep-set brown eyes, a jutting lower lip, a shock of jet-black, bushy hair... 29

Wright emphasizes the comparison a few pages later, when, giving a speech, Fowler also invokes Lincoln:

We will continue to commune together through what that great savior of our country, Abraham Lincoln, called the 'better angels of our nature'! (16)

The statement turns out to be sardonic. Fowler, on the verge of being forcibly retired from the insurance company that employs him, has no communal tie with his coworkers. Yet the invocation of Lincoln points out an important element: Fowler not only represents whiteness, but represents whiteness not in the process of repressing its intrinsic relationship to blackness, but instead as it successfully transcends this relation, having become "the better angel," the figure who so frequently stands metonymically for an unoppressive whiteness. Lincoln, icon of the ideology of "just folks; white folks" stands for the universalizing urge that registers the "good intentions" of Fowler and others like him. Perhaps this is why it is possible to say, in direct juxtaposition to the epithet "Lincoln-like," that Erskine Fowler is a "hulking" man with "a jutting lower lip" and "jet-black bushy hair" beginning a pattern that will consistently describe Fowler with the code words of racist discourse (13).

Savage Holiday pointedly duplicates all the actions and events we expect from a Wright novel: abjection at the hands of society, scenes of violence, and the arrival of the police. Significantly, access to the final, complete confession is blocked, again, but this time, it is not blocked by police violence or the violence intrinsic to "guilty" human communities. Fowler himself is presented as in some way the only impediment to his own confession, which he appears to desire to give—yet he "can't," an assertion which, unexplained, leads one to suspect that Fowler's inability lies not within the vagaries of his psychology but instead within the structure of the representation of race that is Wright's subject in this novel. Like the American Supreme Court, Wright seems to have concluded that when one inquires into the complexity of confessional practice, it becomes clear that it is meaninglessness to connect confession and the will. When Fowler distinguishes between "can't" and "won't," he makes a distinction toward which the Court was tending, exempting himself (as will) from himself (as speechmaking subject).

One might construe Fowler's inability to confess as the result of the fact that when Fowler murdered Mabel Blake, his action made earlier parts of Fowler's weekend unrecoverable, no longer what they were when they happened, and therefore no longer capable of being narrated at all. In Savage Holiday the murder of Blake—the murder to which Fowler can confess—brings to a late dramatic climax a book actually more concerned with Fowler's role in Blake's son's death, presumably the primary element of what he "can't" confess. Young Tony Blake strongly reminds Fowler of himself, and they have a neighborly relationship within Fowler's apartment building. Tony's death is at Fowler's hands in a partial, carefully nuanced way that draws attention to the impossibility of divorcing the voluntary from the involuntary. One morning, Fowler goes out to get his newspaper from the hallway and his door swings shut behind him, locking him out of his apartment naked. After a panicked, comedic attempt to get down to the first floor and find the building manager, Fowler strikes upon the idea of going out onto a small balcony at the end of his floor's hall, wherefrom he can clamber up to his own open bathroom window. Hustling to avoid being seen, Fowler bursts onto the balcony, where Tony Blake is playing. Terrified at the naked man bearing down upon him—just as he imagines naked men approaching his mother—Tony springs to the balcony's railing. When Fowler's momentum throws him forward against the railing, it gives way and Tony falls.

For much of the remainder of the novel, Fowler adamantly denies to himself that he deserves blame in Tony's death. Manifestly "unintended," Fowler also recognizes that because Tony fears naked men, Fowler fits perfectly into an overdetermined situation in which Tony would be maximally terrified. To Fowler, the excruciating irony of Tony's death, coupled with Fowler's recognition that he identifies with Tony's plight as the son of a promiscuous mother, renders Fowler incapable either of going to the police or of finally absolving himself. Eventually Blake becomes suspicious of Fowler, who has in his hysteria proposed marriage to her, and her suspicion leads Fowler to kill her. From the point of view of the police, the inadvertent aspects of Tony's death have vanished, "killed" along with Mabel. Fowler's apoplectic butchery of Mabel, in which he kills both to protect himself and to destroy the reminder of his mother in her, determines in retrospect that Fowler is not just anybody at the moment he frightens Tony, but instead the singularly relevant and capable agent of Tony's death. When Fowler sits before the police with his head in his hands, his inability to confess more completely—his refusal to discuss Tony at all—suggests that the delicate balance struck by his role in Tony's death was tipped in his killing of Mabel. The act of bursting onto the balcony was no longer what it was, and so could not any longer be confessed appropriately. Wright has constructed the crime such that Fowler never committed the act of which he is nonetheless guilty.

Being incapable of speaking to the police, as in the case of Erskine Fowler, represents an unusual crux which draws to a close a major stage in the evolution of Wright's fiction; after Savage Holiday, Wright wrote a series of books of nonfiction essays, only returning to fiction to compose his last novel, The Long Dream (1959). Savage Holiday is important, despite its neglected status, for the way that it rereads Native Son. For just as Fowler kills Tony "unintentionally," so does Bigger Thomas kill Mary Dalton. Bigger's insistence that he has not "accidentally" killed Mary makes him a kind of existential hero, but at the cost of revealing the gap between his action and its reception—a reception that tends to show that Bigger cannot have "voluntarily" killed Mary, so closely does the story cleave to racist expectations of encounters between black boys and white girls. Bigger's agency, vanishing in the reading of Mary's death, is propped up by his second murder, of Bessie, which is premeditated, motivated, and self-interested. It renders Bigger truly criminal, "great" in his infamy, in a way that his killing of Mary could not have done. Savage Holiday is a curious reworking, as the killing of Mabel similarly makes Tony's death a murder, determining Fowler as the single right agent, much as Bigger's "murder" seems to contain an element of overdetermination and inevitability. In both novels, secondary, decisive acts of violence reconstruct the previous deaths as more intentional and deliberate than they ever were.

Comparing the two books also shows how Wright's "just folks" approach to Savage Holiday is designed to fail. Bigger's crime against Mary is entirely governed by the racial situation in Chicago—he can scarcely be seen behind the stereotypical role into which he has stepped. In a similar way, Erskine Fowler seems to represent, for Wright, something quintessential about whiteness. In interviews, Wright was candid about the way that Fowler represents the white psyche as such; and his job (insurance) and class (upper middle) seem designed, if anything, to render Fowler emphatically typical. If writing is personality bodied forth out of an overwhelming environment, as Wright frequently suggested, that environment is understood through its tendency to redescribe personality within expected forms of behavior. Nowhere was this more plain than in the expectation that Richard Wright, black boy himself, should stick to his topic. Savage Holiday emerges as Wright's definitive refusal to do so—and the only way in which he could emerge from behind his audience's expectations turned out to be by donning a mask.

Asked in 1956 how he came to write a novel largely lacking representations of black people, Wright explained that he "attempted to deal with what I consider as the most important problem white people have to face: their moral dilemma." 30 Wright tells his interviewer that the novel inquires into an excessive "freedom"— that Savage Holiday depicts a protagonist who, being forcibly retired at an early age, has everything he could want and absolutely no way to deal with the resulting "freedom." The "moral dilemma," it appears, has something to do with lacking restraint, constriction, or oppression: in effect, becoming a "personality" without an "environment." Similarly, Lâle Demirtűrk has argued that Savage Holiday depicts a familiar dynamic between "subject" and "other," in which Erskine Fowler's problem emerges as that of a subject suddenly deprived of the other that constituted and defined it. Demirtűrk rightly declines to join previous critiques that presume Savage Holiday to be simply non-racial. Wright's own remark that the novel is about whiteness refutes such an approach. Demirtűrk shows how Savage Holiday critiques the domineering logic of subject and other, and sees Wright as critical of the oppressive underpinnings of such a subjectivity. Demirtűrk concludes that this novel teaches the need to transgress the association between whiteness and domination. 31 One could not imagine Richard Wright disagreeing with that conclusion. Yet if Wright's novel "maps the terrain of whiteness," as Demirtűrk suggests, the result is a much more contorted topography than the one Demirtűrk imagines. Any account of Savage Holiday as a racial novel must give an account of the ways in which Fowler, is not allowed by Wright to remain white. 32

Fowler begins the novel by being forcefully expelled from the social order, placed on permanent "holiday." His retirement at the hands of his superiors, in order to make room for a younger employee, leaves Fowler wealthy but unbound, and when he confronts his former employer about the matter, Mr.Warren warns Fowler that "You're off balance, boy! Don't overestimate yourself!" 33 The use of the term "boy" for an employee apparently very valuable for over thirty years suggests the way that Fowler's ejection from employment hints at the theme of his conceptual "blackness." Structurally, Fowler's loss of his job is duplicated the next day—Sunday—by the initially diverting crisis of having been locked outside his apartment naked. When he first takes off his clothing, Wright emphasizes the bestial nature of Fowler's body:

He stripped off his pajamas and loomed naked, his chest covered with a matting of black hair, his genitals all but obscured by a dark forest, his legs rendered spiderlike by their hirsute coating. Tufts of black hair protruded even from under his arms. Nude, Erskine looked anything but pious or Christian. (40-1)

Fowler's body, densely hairy, is also a kind of body that "looms," exactly the motion which will terrify Tony Blake to his death. Going beyond a vague racialization, Wright describes Fowler here as an ape, a word that does not appear but which seems to have been deliberately avoided. A few sentences later, Fowler locks himself out of his apartment, making plain how Wright plotted Savage Holiday by rendering Fowler progressively further outside the frame of normal social life, abjecting him finally from whiteness. In the tense period during which Fowler hustles around his apartment building clutching a newspaper to his groin, Wright states no fewer than seven times that Fowler is naked , including the awkward "sprang nudely forward" (42). Outside his career, outside his home, and outside his clothes, Fowler is now denuded of all of the covers which made him seem like a white man: he is prototypically disenfranchised. In close connection with "The Man Who Lived Underground," Fowler's exile from the social order has a predictable effect on his racialization. Fowler's whiteness, is rendered less stable when he is standing "outside" (or "underground"), so that Fowler (like the Man) is ambivalently related to race, yet in the act of stepping beyond "the straight black-white stuff" that determined Sartre's understanding of Wright's work. Fowler, instead, is like a white man accompanied by a "black life of the same dimensions."

When Fowler emerges on the balcony and scares Tony to death, he appears as the apotheosis of Savage Holiday's racialized discourse. In a desperate attempt to reach the balcony before being seen naked in the hallway, he bursts out onto it, "his long, hairy arms flaying the air rapaciously, like the paws of a huge beast clutching for something to devour, to rend to pieces...He steadied himself partially by clawing at the brick wall" (52). This description, reminiscent of Bigger Thomas' clambering on the outside of the apartments of Chicago in the last moments of his flight, also may contain the faint echo of the strongly racialized paranoia of King Kong (1933), which like Native Son reworks the white myth of the sexually voracious black beast. 34 It is the "white face" of Tony that Fowler sees, in the hallucinatory moment before Tony falls down to the "black pavement" (52, 54). As though to confirm the parallel between Fowler's out-of-placeness and Wright's concept of race, Mabel Blake turns out to have seen Fowler's foot from her own window, just as he is pulling it into his window from the balcony. Yet her neighbors, who like Fowler suspect Blake's character to be deficient, imply that she might have been drunk, might have hallucinated "colored feet," and finally suggest that "it's a wonder she didn't say it was a nigger she saw" (109, 110). In one sense that is precisely what she saw. Fowler, once unemployed and once a criminal, is playing the role of Wright's prototypical protagonist: he is Bigger in whiteface.

Wright deploys the terminology of black stereotyping, until finally Fowler commits exactly the mythological rape/murder to which Bigger's murder of Mary inevitably referred. Fowler kills Mabel in a rage, deliberately, out of a compounded impulse of lust and hate, and he does so in a way that encodes both sexual attack and blind fury: by repeated stabbing in the gut with a large knife. Mabel's nudity accentuates the sexual nature of his assault, almost necessarily described as "brutal":

"No, no, no..." she was whispering, her breath issuing through her nostrils. As she opened her mouth to scream, he brought the knife down hard into her nude stomach and her scream turned into a long groan. (215)

Lying nude on the kitchen table, her abdomen pocked with "two-inch slits," Mabel now becomes, in the psychoanalytic framework of Savage Holiday¸ the mother who provokes Fowler's unresolved Oedipal tension (215). He moves into the bathroom, is surprised to see that "the face he saw was still his own" (216), and has a flashback to a moment in which his mother forced him, similarly, to look into a mirror. Is Fowler surprised to see that he is still a white man? That interpretation gives us a way to understand his "helpful suggestion" that the police get over to the apartment to prevent "the maid" from "seeing all that mess" (218). Erskine Fowler's maid, Minnie, is a "mammy" figure—credulous, servile, and without resentment, a character almost too flat for words. Is it possible that this cardboard stereotype, of all the characters in this "just folks" novel, might know how to read "the mess" in a way that the police would never see? In committing this murder Fowler repeats the maneuver from Native Son: Wright chooses precisely to depict (as though real!) the myth of black sexual predation. What Savage Holiday tries to reveal is that the body lies on the kitchen table of whiteness, regardless of who held the knife.

The racialization of Erskine Fowler suggests an explanation of why he "can't" rather than "won't" confess to the police. To read the inability of Fowler to confess is to reconsider the symbolism of the apparently all-too-well-explained pencils in Fowler's inner jacket pocket. Fowler's pencils refer less to Fowler's past than to the present work in which he finds himself. They represent within the book the act of writing, the moments of metadiscourse typical of the confessional countertrend in Wright's oeuvre, the corollary of the Man's "novel en abyme" or Wright's "biographies of Black Communists." These 'colored' pencils make sense as a constant assurance that Wright's writing can in fact go "beyond the straight black-white stuff." Each time Fowler touches the pencils, they represent a moment of contact between Wright and Fowler, a moment of revelation in which we see the protagonist as an outgrowth of the author. In "I can't," Wright refuses to occupy the scene of confession and its racial encodings. Savage Holiday, which juxtaposes the reception of a black man's writing to the interrogation of criminal suspects by the police, also angrily encodes its putatively white protagonist with the terrifyingly blunt racist discourse thus. Wright both masks and unmasks his only white protagonist. Sartre contemplates, only to dismiss out of hand, the possibility of a novel like Savage Holiday:

Can one imagine for a moment that [Wright] would agree to pass his life in the contemplation of the eternal True, Good, and Beautiful, when ninety percent of the Negroes in the South are deprived of the right to vote? ...Thus, if an American Negro finds that he has a vocation as a writer, he discovers his subject at the same time. 35

Denying Wright any possibility of "just folks," Sartre perfectly articulates the form of what might be called "reception violence" through which Wright experienced his audience: as the source of an unavoidable literary racism.

There is another clue, stray but leading, to the relation between Fowler and Wright: Fowler is forcibly retired from Longevity Life at age forty-three, and Wright himself was either forty-three or forty-four when he conceived of the novel. Even if there's only trivia value in the parallel, Savage Holiday stands aside from all of Wright's other fiction in that it is in no degree a bildungsroman: Fowler is full-fledged when he is committed to the page, even, as Wright puts it, "superbly alive, real, just there, with no hint in his attitude of apology for himself or his existence" (Holiday, 14). Fowler has the "inexpressibly human," the vivid quintessence that seems to be key to Wright's literary ideal; his existence is "glorious" in the way that Ross' confession was. Savage Holiday, and particularly its main character's complicated racial masquerade, is an elaborate attempt to claim the possibility of writing nonracial fiction, even as it anticipates the impossibility of doing so. Wright's discussion of the problem elaborates:

As I told you, [Savage Holiday] deals with just folks, white folks. I don't know how people will receive a story like this. Don't know if Harper will like my switching or not. But, as you can see, there was no sense in making this story a Negro story...Do read this and tell me what you think. I was of a mind to say try to publish this under another name. What I am worried about is that people will read this in a light of saying that this is a Negro writing about whites. Which is true. But they might read it with more a desire to try to find fault than just to be moved or interested in the story. 36

To read Savage Holiday in the context of race is not to "find fault" in the novel—it is to find confession. The logic of "just folks, white folks," exhibiting the fundamentally racist idea of a white normalcy and a black deviance, is embedded in Savage Holiday and its calculated expectations about its audience. This reading is confirmed by the truly painful idea that in order to publish such a book, Wright might have to change his name, which cannot but be interpreted as the kind of "extinguishing of personality," which Wright associated with the show trial of Ross and the Man's separation from his name.

Far from merely fearing a naïve response on the part of his audience, Wright anticipates that writing a book about a white man could be more revealing, more personal on his part, than even the disclosures of Black Boy were. The deeply racist discourse used to describe Erskine Fowler indicates Wright's anxiety about writing about a white protagonist—and thereby stepping forcefully out from behind the racial expectations of his audience. And this is what it means that Fowler "can't" confess. To confess would be to move backwards, to capitulate to the expectation of the interrogator and thus to return to the pattern of Wright's previous work, in which a deep desire for the community of confession resulted in unacceptable harm. Fowler, that is to say, "can't," because what Wright "can't" do is escape the violence implicit in the racialized reception of his novel. As Fowler's whiteness comes into question, we find a niche through which to glimpse Wright working within the racist expectations of his audience. Fowler's incomplete "whiteness" mimics the reception of Savage Holiday, in which a "just folks" book inexorably becomes a work not just about—but by—a black man.

---

In "The Man Who Lived Underground," the wrongfully accused finds in his situation the kernel of a social truth, the truth of a generalized guilt. The story holds out the promise that insofar as guilt is the condition of social belonging, a generalized confession might bind all together. Thus as early as 1941, Wright's work exhibited an ambivalent desire for confession. Attempting to grapple with that ambivalence, Wright chose a canonical mode of confession, giving an account of himself in Black Boy. Yet in concluding that work, which so forcefully laid claim to confession in its historically recognizable form, Wright seemed to retract the idea that confession could lead to a more perfect relationship to others: as Ross completes his confession, he is destroyed. Confession must be suspect, even as it remains ideal for forming human community. Savage Holiday, which also concludes in a partial confession mysteriously blocked, offers even less optimism. The novel theorizes Wright's conflicted relationship to his own status as the inevitable "protagonist" of all of his writing, his discovery that to be a black man writing was to become incapable of anything other than autobiography—to be doomed, one might say, to confession.

The Supreme Court found that the scene played by the police and the black suspect demonstrated the most disastrous traducing of a confession's integrity, but ultimately stopped trying to distinguish compromised confessions. Wright's fiction reproduces the Court's judgment that once in the hands of the police, a black man was almost always going to produce a confession, true or not. And like the Court, Wright takes one more step, ultimately fatal to the confessional trend in his work: he asks whether there is any other scene in which to speak or write. For Wright, the scene of police confession does not merely represent a topic of his fiction, but the model of the discursive forms available to him as a black author in a racist America. What Savage Holiday finally contemplates, at the end of a major development in Wright's work, is that Wright's audience and the police are much the same. There is no structure of address without a seam of coercion on the part of the interrogating audience.

The Court's response to finding itself in a conceptual cul-de-sac was to abandon psychology altogether, creating procedural safeguards intended to disincentivize the production of confessions through violence. The only available analogy to the Supreme Court's bureaucratic solution for Wright is Savage Holiday's racial masquerade. Disassembling the overdetermined scene of confession, construed as the agon of white cop and black suspect, Wright finally also discarded voluntariness, choosing "I can't" over the expected "I won't." In postwar America—and apparently in postwar France, where Wright wrote Savage Holiday—a fixation upon the concepts and forms of confession produced great promise but also great danger, vacillating ambivalently between the promise of a brighter, more individualizing future and the dread of total state power.

Jeff Clapp is at the University of California, Irvine, drawing his dissertation to a close. It is entitled Postwar U.S. Literature and the National Security State.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. Collected Essays. New York: Library of America, 1998.

Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings Volume 1: 1913-1926. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Brooks, Peter. Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Chafee, Zechariah, Walter Pollak, and Carl Stern. The Third Degree: Report to the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement. 1931. New York: Arno Press, 1969.

Demirtűrk, Lâle. "Mapping the Terrain of Whiteness: Richard Wright's Savage Holiday." MELUS 24:1 (Spring 1999). 129-140.

Fabre, Michel. "Richard Wright: The Man Who Lived Underground." Studies in the Novel 3:2 (Summer 1971). 165-179.

--. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Trans. Isabel Barzun. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Gayle, Addison. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1980.

Inbau, Fred et al. Criminal Interrogations and Confessions. Fourth Edition. Gaithersberg, MD: Aspen Publishers, Inc., 2001.

Kamisar, Yale. Police Interrogations and Confessions: Essays in Law and Policy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan University Press, 1980.

Leaville, Charles. "Brick Slayer Likened to Jungle Beast." Chicago Tribune. 5 June 1938. http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam358/wright.html. Web. 20 January 2011.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. What Is Literature? Trans. Bernard Frechtman, London: Methuen & Co, 1950.

Stephens, Otis. The Supreme Court and Confessions of Guilt. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973.

Strombeck, Andrew. "Investigative Savagery: Figuring Hoover in Richard Wright's Savage Holiday." Modernism on File: Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920-1950. Ed. Claire A. Culleton and Karen Leick. New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2008. 127-144.

Wadman, Robert and William Allison. To Protect and Serve: A History of Police in America. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004.

Wright, Richard, et al. 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States. New York: Viking, 1941.

Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

--. "The Man Who Lived Underground." In Eight Men. Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1961.

--. Native Son. New York: Harper Perennial, 1989.

--. Savage Holiday. Chatham, NJ: The Chatham Bookseller, 1975.

--. Conversations with Richard Wright. Ed. Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

Relevant Cases

Brown v. Mississippi (1936)

Chambers v. Florida (1940)

Lisenba v. California (1941)

McNabb v. United States (1943)

Ashcraft v. Tennessee (1944)

Mallory v. United States (1957)

Culombe v. Connecticut (1961)

Escobedo v. Illinois (1964)

Miranda v. Arizona (1966)

References