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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
This essay examines Lawd Today!, Richard Wright's posthumously published novel, written in the 1930s but only made available to readers in 1963. Concentrating on the epigraphs that punctuate the novel, the essay demonstrates the significance of the social criticism of the 1910s and 1920s to Wright's formation as literary artist. In particular, Wright was drawn to the writings of the Young American critics, including Van Wyck Brooks and Waldo Frank, whose criticisms of national ideologies furthered a commitment to “Americanism” as a horizon of social and cultural renewal. Wright's intellectual immersion in early twentieth-century US social criticism gave Lawd Today! a Young American critical imprint. Drawing upon the work of Ernesto Laclau on “populism,” the essay reads Wright's novel as invested in an “Americanism” that seeks to describe common features of early twentieth-century black migrant experience in the urban North in terms of larger national and modern dynamics.
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2 See Selzer, Jack, Kenneth Burke and Greenwich Village: Conversing with the Moderns (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996)Google Scholar.
3 Blake, Casey, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 1–3Google Scholar.
4 Quoted in Rowley, Hazel, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 104Google Scholar. Wright's widow, Ellen Wright, considered the novel “taut and poetic … with a wry gallows humour about it,” and was certain that Wright would have wanted to make the book available to readers.
5 Denning, Michael, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996), 253Google Scholar.
6 Rampersad, Arnold, “Foreword,” in Wright, Richard, Lawd Today! (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991)Google Scholar, v–xi, v. See also Fabre, Michel, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993, second edition), 135–36Google Scholar.
7 Rowley, 103. Fabre, 135–36.
8 Sollors, Werner, Ethnic Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 158–59Google Scholar.
9 Rampersad, v, x.
10 Denning, 253.
11 Now defunct, Walker and Company published Wright's novel as Lawd Today in 1963, three years after the author's death. Among other changes, Walker and Company removed the exclamation point Wright had appended to the title. A new edition from the Library of America, published in 1991, restored the exclamation point and undid other changes, producing a text based on the final draft of Wright's novel available in the Richard Wright Papers in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. This essay makes use of the Northeastern University Press edition of Lawd Today!, cited above, which is the same as the unexpurgated Library of Congress edition. References to Wright's novel are included parenthetically within the essay.
12 Kent, George E., Blackness and the Adventure of the Western World (Chicago: Third World Press, 1972), 89–90Google Scholar.
13 JanMohamed, Abdul, The Death-Bound Subject: Richard Wright's Archeology of Death (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 119CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Richard Wright, “Towards the Conquest of Ourselves,” unpublished manuscript, Richard Wright Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
15 Blake, Beloved Community, 114; Brooks, Van Wyck, America's Coming-of-Age (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1915), 78Google Scholar.
16 Brooks, 179.
17 Here it is worth noting that at one point the intermittent radio broadcast commemorating Lincoln's birthday and narrating an account of the Civil War includes a reference to John Brown: “As [Jake] went through the door the radio sang … JOHN BROWN'S BODY LIES AMOULDERING IN THE GRAVE, HIS SOUL GOES MARCHING ON.” Wright, Lawd Today!, 67.
18 Blake, 172.
19 Frank, Waldo, Our America (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919), 195Google Scholar.
20 Ibid., 179.
21 Ibid., 8.
22 Nicholls, Peter, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 260, 258Google Scholar.
23 Malcolm, Cowley, Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (New York: Viking, 1975; first published 1934), 112–13Google Scholar.
24 Quoted in Drew, Elizabeth, T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1949), 66Google Scholar.
25 Ibid., original emphasis.
26 Kazin, Alfred, An American Procession: The Major American Writers from 1830 to 1930 (New York: Knopf, 1984) 315, 318Google Scholar, original emphasis.
27 Laclau, Ernesto, On Populist Reason (New York: Verso, 2005), 177Google Scholar. In his larger consideration of populism, Laclau notes how white supremacy and the politics of racial exclusion affected populist strategy in US history, making the basis for populism “an a priori homogeneous entity.” Contra the populism of multiple yet equivalent links, populism as it arose in much of US history involved “determining an identical substance” such that “the ‘people’ loses its internal differentiations, and is reduced to a substantial unity.” In likening the literary-theoretical work of Wright's novel to Laclau's redefinition of populism, I mean to emphasize the distance of Wright's thinking from the insistence upon “an a priori homogeneous entity” within the history of US populism. Indeed, the “Americanism” he borrows from the Young American critics may be seen as one of the intellectual levers with which Wright believed he could question the dominant and existing versions of populism he encountered. See On Populist Reason, 201–8.
28 Brooks, America's Coming-of-Age, 161.
29 Ibid., 115.
30 Miller, J. Hillis, “‘Taking up a Task’: Moments of Decision in Ernesto Laclau's Thought,” in Critchley, Simon and Marchart, Oliver, eds., Laclau: A Critical Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), 217–25, 224Google Scholar.
31 Laclau, 175.
32 Ibid., 70.
33 Ibid. 121.
34 Ibid., 85, original emphasis.
35 Kent, Blackness and the Adventure of the Western World, 88–9.
36 Laclau, 250.
37 Van Wyck Brooks coined the expression “usable past.” See Brooks, Van Wyck, “On Creating a Usable Past,” The Dial, 64 (1918), 337–41Google Scholar.
38 Wright, “Towards the Conquest of Ourselves.”
39 Willihnganz, Jonah, “The Voice of America in Richard Wright's Lawd Today!,” in Cohen, Debra Rae, Coyle, Michael, and Lewty, Jane, eds., Broadcasting Modernism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 124–41, 129CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
40 Laclau, 85–86.
