Literary critic and theorist Kenneth Burke memorably likened artworks to “meter readings.” They could be studied to “discern what forms ‘alienation’ takes as a factor in human experience, and what forms likewise arise in the attempt to combat alienation,” that is, in efforts “to ‘repossess’ one's world.”Footnote 1 Attentiveness to forms of alienation and strategies that would forestall its emergence or limit its impact was in Burke's view among the chief tasks of the literary critic. Primarily associated with key works of the mid-1930s and onward, such as Permanence and Change, Attitudes toward History and Philosophy of Literary Form, Burke's intellectual trajectory included Greenwich Village radicalism and its mix of socialist politics and modernist experimentation.Footnote 2 The different modernist schools of thought he encountered provided Burke with the terrain upon which he would devise his own path as a critic. When he arrived in Greenwich Village in 1918, the work of the Young American critics – a set of writers that included Van Wyck Brooks, Randolph Bourne and Waldo Frank, among others – represented an important locus of socialist intellectual life. Many elements gave the “Young American” ascription traction, including essay titles such as Brooks's “The Crisis and Young America,” Bourne's affirmation of youth culture in the early 1910s, and, more generally, a commitment to cultural and intellectual transformation that required departure from Victorian mores and long-standing aesthetic sensibilities deriving exclusively from Europe.Footnote 3 Although Burke's work would veer from that of the Young American critics, the little magazines and debates they generated provided the intellectual setting within which Burke began to craft his brand of criticism.
If Burke's Greenwich Village period recedes into the background in considerations of his critical output, another writer, Richard Wright, is even more thoroughly detached from histories of early twentieth-century socialist thought, despite connections evident in his writings. In most scholarly treatments, Wright's relation to socialist thought begins and ends with his relation to the Communist Party USA. To be sure, the debts that Wright incurred from Greenwich Village radicalism and its socialist milieu were less direct than those of Burke. It was only after he migrated to Chicago in the early 1930s that Wright discovered the interventions of the Young American critics and through them forged an affective and intellectual bond with socialist thought from before and after World War I. The writings of the Young American critics provided Wright with avenues into US literary culture and socialist thought alike. Lawd Today!, Wright's posthumously published modernist novel, written in the 1930s but only made available to readers in 1963, bears the imprint of Wright's intellectual immersion in the work of the Young American critics.Footnote 4 As Michael Denning has written, Wright's novel cannot be conflated with the modernist proclivity for “private languages of an isolated self.”Footnote 5 Instead Wright revived the modernism of the Young American critics, which ironized national ideologies and habits even as it proposed “Americanism” as a form of cultural transformation. Through epigraphs that accompany each of the novel's three parts (titled “Commonplace,” “Squirrel Cage” and “Rats' Alley”), Wright attempts to revitalize and augment the modern social criticism of the Young American moment and with Lawd Today! enlists social criticism more explicitly than in any subsequent work. Yet because Lawd Today! went unpublished for decades, the nexus of concerns he shared with critics of the 1910s and 1920s, and his debts to the work of the Young American critics, in particular, remain among the least remarked dimensions of his corpus.
Wright worked on the manuscript of Lawd Today! – originally called “Cesspool” – throughout the mid-1930s. Yet despite contact with several commercial publishers, Lawd Today! went unpublished during Wright's lifetime.Footnote 6 One publisher, Vanguard Press, called the novel “extremely promising” but finally passed on what they considered an “artificially blown up and drawn out story.”Footnote 7 In recent years, scholars such as Werner Sollors have emphasized the modernist experimentation that takes the form of a proliferation of interspersed and juxtaposed texts throughout Lawd Today!.Footnote 8 Arnold Rampersad has argued that the novel is a “young writer's book” that emerges as a compelling literary feat because the “pessimism with which Wright views the black community takes on a cosmic significance.”Footnote 9 Denning emphasizes the power of the long virtuosic scene set in Jake's post office workplace in which speakers remain unidentified, a mesmerizing sequence that combines the “call and response of a church service with the dozens of the street in a carefully constructed passage” that ranges over several subjects, communicating “common feelings” and “common knowledge.”Footnote 10 The essay that follows concentrates on Wright's use of epigraphs in order to demonstrate how central the navigation of modern US criticism is to the novel. Through his knowledge of, and facility with, modern cultural commentary, Wright composes a text that, among other things, brings the circumstances of black migrants in the early twentieth-century US within considerations of modernity itself.
Before turning to the epigraphs, it is crucial to note that the most ubiquitous set of interspersed texts that Wright includes in his novel have to do with the national commemoration taking place on the day on which the novel is set: 16 February 1936, or Abraham Lincoln's birthday. A transmitted radio broadcast emits a historical narrative involving Lincoln and his stewardship of the nation through the period of the Civil War. In the novel's different settings, the commemorative radio broadcast reenters the story, however briefly and intermittently, to remind Jake of the national holiday. Because the first words that appear in the novel are in fact those of a radio announcer introducing a historian who will narrate an account of Lincoln and the Civil War, Wright's novel is from the start bound up with the subject of the nation and its rituals of remembrance. The radio broadcast does not so much frame as it does haphazardly break through the contingency, idiosyncrasy and habitual patterns that mark the everyday life of Jake Jackson, a married black postal worker from the segregated South Side of Chicago.Footnote 11 The novel unfolds over one day, during which Jake spends much of his time as part of a quartet of friends, all fellow postal workers, who devote much of their free time to card playing and drinking, as well as banter and not infrequent rounds of the dozens. Beyond Jake's interactions with his band of fellow dislocated southern migrants, the novel presents scenes of the charged and violent relationship between Jake and his wife, Lil. The novel periodically returns to Jake's psychological state, which is marked by a powerful mix of restlessness, passion and uncertainty. Throughout the novel, Jake's mind is described as scattered. “Jake's mind fished about, trying to get hold of an idea to cover his feeling of uneasy emptiness” (89). Jake's pervasive “uneasy emptiness” resides beneath the different emotions that roil him.
The novel brings forth characters that travel within a world of “violence, quack medicine, numbers playing and dreambooks, roots and herbs, cheap movies, tuberculosis and venereal disease, hard liquor and sex and corrupt politics,” as George Kent wrote.Footnote 12 Kent's partial list gives some indication of the material out of which Wright formed a story in large measure about various trials and forms of alienation, and the moments when they are briefly transcended. As a narrative about black migrants and the new worlds they have found and created in the urban North of the early twentieth century, Lawd Today! disavows anything resembling a redemptive description of black urban life. Wright instead makes the miseries, occasional solaces and destructive patterns of black Chicago the stuff of his story. As Abdul JanMohamed has written, “while Wright is interested in mapping the process of subjection in general, his particular interest is in the manner in which the process of subjectification entails apparently voluntary cooperation.”Footnote 13 Wright brings the constraints and coercions that affect migrants, especially in the workplace, into his story, but also treats the failing of, and further suffering generated by, responses to conditions of subjection and segregated sociality. The actions, wordplay, banalities and musings of black migrants in a compromised social order provide Wright with the basis for a lively, if at times also disturbing, tale that dramatizes the personal and national dimensions of black migrant experience. As I argue in the last part of the essay, Lawd Today! also exhibits what I will describe, borrowing from theorist Ernesto Laclau, as Wright's “populism.”
The Epigraphs of Lawd Today!
Familiar with the writings of several critics by the time he worked on Lawd Today!, Wright selected three – Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank and T. S. Eliot – to pair epigraphically and respectively with the three parts of the novel. Taken together, the epigraphs represent a world of criticism in miniature that Wright curated for himself and to which he attached special relevance. Along with the avowedly national motif of Lincoln's birthday, the epigraphs direct attention to what can be called, following the Young American critics of the 1910s and 1920s, a concern with the content of “Americanism” that runs throughout Lawd Today! For the epigraphs disclose Wright's investment in criticism that treated the modern world and national belonging as complex and imbricated subjects. In his fictional and biographical writings Wright prioritizes the task of reading the contingent, divergent and heterogeneous patterns of black urban life into the text of the nation, thus rendering them features and “problems of American culture” and “Western civilization” writ large.Footnote 14 In Lawd Today!, Wright's “Americanism” and “populist” impulses continually return to national belonging as a necessary arena of literary-theoretical intervention.
In selecting a line from America's Coming-of-Age (1915), Brooks's book of literary and cultural commentary, Wright communicated that the Young American critic had become something of a touchstone in his thinking. Wright excerpts one of Brooks's key metaphors, repurposing it both as the epigraph and as the opening note of his own work: “a vast Sargasso Sea – a prodigious welter of unconscious life, swept by groundswells of halfconscious emotion.” According to Brooks, as America comes of age, it does so as a vast “Sargasso Sea,” a surface conglomeration of unconscious movement and waves of emotion, the lethargy and inertia of which resemble the sluggish seaweed of the actual Sargasso Sea. Wright's original title for his work – ”Cesspool” – adds coarseness to the sluggishness of Brooks's metaphor, but effectively works in relation to the “Sargasso Sea” concept, which helps to authorize Wright's literary exploration. Yet in making a claim upon Brooks's metaphor, Wright adds distinctive inflections, and in so doing suggests that the world of black 1930s Chicago provides an avenue for expanding Brooks's theorization of the early twentieth-century US. With Brooks's metaphor woven into his own text, Wright presents patterns of “unconscious life” and “halfconscious emotion” in segregated black Chicago as recent emblems of urban modernity, and as subjects by which both to elicit and to magnify the Young American critical idiom.
Several scenes in Lawd Today! are set in the interior workspace of a US postal building, where Jake and his friends sift and handle the mail that crisscrosses the city, nation and points beyond. Wright's story is thus already enmeshed within the “halfconscious emotion” that characterizes the nation. At the same time, Wright means for his main character to bring out substantive features of black migration to the urban North. In several reveries, Jake reveals a sense of displacement in relation to northern institutions. In one scene, Jake walks by a branch of the Chicago Public Library and thinks to himself: “Yeah, too much reading's bad. It addles your brains, and if you addle your brains you'll sure have bookworms in your brain” (69, original emphasis). Wright's narrator follows with a deadpan description of where Jake's ideas come from: “His poor old grandmother had told him that when he was a child, and he had never forgotten it, and had never had bookworms.” (Black Boy would go on to include a similar scene, directing attention toward the autobiographical resonances of Lawd Today!. Moreover, Wright worked as a postal clerk after moving to Chicago in 1927). For migrants, Wright suggests, southern histories interact with segregated sociality in the North, leading to a sense of personal and collective displacement that in turn adds to the stagnation besetting America. Thus does Wright argue for the continuing salience of Brooks's “Sargasso Sea” as a resource for cultural enquiry.
In Lawd Today!, Jake and his friends experience workplace exhaustion as they sort mail for hours, a situation that is only occasionally and temporarily lifted by the shared “common knowledge” that circulates among them as they converse. Yet Wright describes that “common knowledge” not as an entirely beneficial resource, but instead as made up of “clusters of emotion,” wherein “dim accretions of instinct and tradition rose to the surface of their consciousness like dead bodies floating swollen upon a dead sea” (158). Here commonality carries a sense of mutuality, but it also registers instinct and tradition that resemble “dead bodies” and a “dead” – or stagnant – “sea.” Thus does Wright attach dark connotations to Brooks's “Sargasso Sea.” If moments of solace are made possible by the “common knowledge” that provides the basis for interactions among Jake and his friends, Wright refrains from presenting such moments as sufficient for overcoming the forces arrayed against them, forces that have to do with segregation and racism, but that also extend beyond the strictures of black life to include modern work regimes and the hazards of urban dislocation. As Casey Blake has noted, Brooks was also wary of the ways “destructive commercialism” disturbed the human mind, such that American life remained what Brooks called an “unorganized vitality.”Footnote 15 In Lawd Today!, Jake and his friends find themselves deposited in a northern metropolis marked by commercial establishments to which they contribute their own vitality, but the “common knowledge” they circulate seems finally to further a sense of disorganization, to entrench them in stagnating patterns.
In America's Coming-of-Age, Brooks writes that “a people is like a ciphered parchment which has to be held up to the fire before its hidden significances come out.” For Brooks, the search for significances requires a “resisting background”; that is, willingness to throw the various elements of the social world into relief. For Brooks, sorting out those elements and finding significances could yield paths beyond “disorganized vitality,” indicating that “to create this resisting background must be the first work for our thinkers.”Footnote 16 Wright's “resisting background” brings within it all that he found important in the everyday life of Jake and his circle, and does not seal from view the internal fissures of the segregated community, nor even the domestic violence that enters the story early on. Wright's “resisting background” is all that falls within everyday practice and belief; all, that is, which is “Commonplace,” the title that he gives to the first part of the novel – the part that commences with Brooks's metaphor, which will remain relevant throughout the book.
The containment felt in the US postal service workplace comes across in the title that Wright gives to the second part of Lawd Today!: “Squirrel Cage.” The epigraph that accompanies this part of the novel is a fragment of a line from Waldo Frank's book of criticism and manifesto for artists, Our America (1919): “Now, when you study these long rows of desiccated men and women, you feel that you are in the presence of some form of life that has hardened but not grown, and over which the world has passed.” As one of Frank's desiccated men, Jake lives in a half-formed way, taking part in “some form of life,” but often feels disconnected from the world around him. The novel implicitly poses the question of what “forms of life” have arisen within the modern American city, and its segregated precincts in particular. If no once-and-for-all answer is given, Lawd Today! nevertheless remains throughout a picture of deprivation within an antagonistic and segregated social order. As Jake and his friends approach the Chicago Post Office, they prepare for “eight long black hours of work.” In the meantime, “white clerks got their hats and coats” and prepare to leave. We learn that the white clerks are often university students who look upon their post office jobs as temporary employment: “many of them carried books under their arms” (117). As he does throughout, Wright places Jake's observations in italics: “Jake scowled as he watched the [white clerks’] tense, eager faces. Them white boys always in a hurry to get somewhere. And soon's they get out of school they's going to be bigshots. But a nigger just stays a nigger.” In Wright's story, the “rows of desiccated men and women” in Frank's Our America surface as black workers seated in rows and attending to workplace duties under strict supervision by a “legion of catfooted spies and stoolpigeons who snoop eternally” (129).
Yet if desiccation characterizes the present for Jake and his friends, common experiences within the South form an essential part of Wright's overall picture. In Lawd Today! the “form of life that has hardened but not grown” has much to do with the cumulative impact of southern segregation and racism. Images in movies that recall the South – including “farms, chaingangs, lynchings, hunger” – are repugnant to Jake as they bring back injuries that he wishes to forget. “To see them again merely served to bring back the deep pain for which he knew no salve” (138). If Jake's life does not have a ready-made “salve,” fantasies fill the void and offer psychic respite. In an extraordinary episode during his time at work, and presumably one that recurs, Wright has Jake reflect on “something he could do to pay the white folks back for all they had ever done.” Jake's fantasizing begins with the workplace itself: “Lawd, if I had my way I'd tear this building down!” But soon his mind turns to larger scales of vengeance: “Yeah, some foreign country ought to whip this Gawddamn country! Some black country ought to do it!” That idea spurs Jake to fresh heights of imagination as he pictures himself standing on the deck of a “black battleship flying a black flag” when suddenly a “black shell screamed through black smoke and he saw the white head of the Statue of Liberty topple, explode, and tumble into the Atlantic Ocean … Gawddamn right!” (143–44). The stagnation and desiccation that the Young American critics diagnose in American life find any number of outlets, and in the case of black migrants leaving southern racism and encountering its northern variants those outlets involve fantasies of violent reprisal.Footnote 17 Jake's dream life is itself inspired in part by a parade of black soldiers he sees on his way to work, a reference to the regiments and regalia of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. Jake's fantasy compensates for the absence of what Wright calls a “salve.” Seen as a work in conversation with the Young American critics, Lawd Today! brings black migrant yearnings and aspirations within the scope of criticism. But far from a mere plea for inclusion, the novel converts the “deep pain” of migrants into a prime subject of “Americanism,” making the psychological dislocations and fantasies wrought by racism indispensable to the exploration of national meanings and patterns.
The “conviction that political domination penetrated deep into culture and the individual psyche” everywhere informed Frank's Our America, as did an “understanding of American culture as the product of unequal power relations,” Casey Blake has written.Footnote 18 Invoking Frank, Wright brought these views within his own work and rendered the world of black urban migrants as a yet-to-be explored “presence of some form of life,” an under-recognized part of national experience. For his part, Frank credited Brooks with creating a mode of critical inquiry that made his own work possible. “The focus of the eye of Brooks will not relent nor narrow down from the full American scene,” leading to “pioneering work.” Moreover, Brooks looks “back over the arid stretches of our Past and seeks to transvalue them,” Frank wrote.Footnote 19 In modeling his own criticism in part on Brooks, Frank explored myths, including the “myth that any workman can reach the employer's class.” Yet unlike Brooks, the critical idiom that Frank devised more often lent itself to declarative political judgments: “In a nation of vastly concentrated wealth, that Myth must go, however hardy myths may be among us.”Footnote 20 In Lawd Today!, the recurrent story of the Civil War told by radio brings to life well-known battles and historical figures, but as a whole also evokes a mythology of a “Past” that bears little relation to the present and certainly not to Jake's urban existence. As it surfaces in the novel, the Civil War becomes a digest of the past scripted in such a way as to preclude transvaluation. The radio broadcast commemorating Lincoln's birthday and recounting events of the Civil War scarcely impinges on the lives of Jake and his friends. Nor, as a rote act of remembrance, does it meaningfully affect the larger modern world they inhabit. Here, then, is Wright, in the tradition of Young American criticism, presenting mythologies that have grown inert and therefore incapable of contributing to social and cultural renewal.
Frank wrote in Our America that the time of Lincoln marked a shift wherein the “struggle for the assertion of life itself” became the “drama of American life.”Footnote 21 Lawd Today! treats the possibility for such assertion among black migrants in the urban North. For all the freedom bestowed by the Civil War and its symbolic reaffirmation in the story of Lincoln, few opportunities for what Frank called “assertion” seem on offer. Thus the Lincoln narrative that Wright strings across Jake's day takes on a sardonic quality. Wright does not reject it outright, but he does not make its efficacy and power self-evident given the deprivation and segregated sociality marking the lives of black migrants. Even as it follows him from the start of his day onward, the story of Lincoln and emancipation occupies a surreal space, sonically present but otherwise distinct from Jake's present. Moreover, a brief exchange among Jake's friends indicates that the radio commemoration touches on their everyday lives obliquely, casting doubt on its continuing relevance:
“What that?” asked Doc.
“What?”
“That on the radio? A speech or something?”
“Aw, naw. Just something about the Civil War,” said Jake, yawning.
“Civil War?”
“Yeah. This is old Abe Lincoln's Birthday, you know.”
“Oh.” (65)
A similar exchange transpires close to the end of the novel as the radio announcer declares, “AT ANTIETAM McCLELLAN AND LEE CLASHED IN A SANGUINARY STRUGGLE IN WHICH THE BLOOD OF TWENTY-TWO THOUSAND MEN STAINED THE SOIL” (199). Jake and his friends, gathered over food after their shift, follow up with “That's that Civil War,” “Slide the salt down this way,” and “Give me that cornbread.” If the exchanges are designed for humorous effect, they also impart the ways commemoration acquires an exceptionalist sheen that cannot but diverge from the quotidian. In the case of black urban migrants, that divergence is all the more stark and finally distressing given the contradictions of post-emancipation segregation and racism. The exchanges prove in that way both humorous and disquieting and give unmistakable evidence of the ways black migrants entered the urban metropolis but remained subservient within its prevailing patterns, constrained in their “struggle for assertion.”
When Lawd Today! reaches its third and last part, titled “Rat's Alley,” Wright turns for his final epigraph not to a Young American critic proper, but to T. S. Eliot, a contemporary of Brooks and Frank, whose vision allows Wright to tether modern fragmented subjectivities to his concerns with civilizational stagnation, and to give his story a closing symbolist mood. The image from Eliot that Wright chooses to append to the third and final part of Lawd Today! is the visage of a grinning skeleton: “But at my back in a cold blast I hear/The rattle of the bones, the chuckle spread from ear to ear.” Adding a macabre element to the novel, the lines predict a denouement that will not resolve, but indeed likely deepen, the ambiguities of an unsound social order. An emblem for modern urban life, the skeleton does not supply an easily identified villain but a palpable atmosphere that yokes dread and laughter, and even makes some combination thereof essential for navigating modern conditions. Thus, while it is certainly true, as Peter Nicholls has written, that the “fragmentary propositions of The Waste Land seem to float in timeless suspension,” offering up a present “paralyzed, left desolate and unredeemable by the contagion of the past,” Wright seems to want to activate Eliot's image as a resource within a widening Young American critical register.Footnote 22 For Wright, Eliot does not merely define modernity as paralysis and degradation; he also contends with that very modernity, laying it out for further scrutiny. In effectively gathering Brooks, Frank and Eliot as critics producing variations on the theme of the modern world itself, Wright clearly imagines Eliot in ways rather different from the response of many writers and readers in the 1920s, as famously recounted in Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return. For Cowley and others, the Eliot of The Waste Land “abused the present and robbed it of its vitality.” Thus while the poem's erudition and skill were lauded, Cowley recalls that “at heart – not intellectually, but in a purely emotional fashion – we didn't like it.”Footnote 23 Wright diverges markedly from that position. With Eliot, Wright can decisively frame his narrative and its treatments of black urban life in the US as modern fragmentation. If Wright associates Jake and the world of black migrants with the pervasive disillusion of The Waste Land, he also mobilizes Eliot's investment in bringing forth hard-fought truths. Indeed, the resonance of Eliot for Wright expands when we recall Eliot's description of the great poet as that figure who “out of intense and personal experience is able to express a general truth: retaining all of the particularity of his experience to make it a general symbol.”Footnote 24
The largest truth to emerge from Wright's novel may be that its scenes of domestic violence and workplace duties, like the banter among Jake's friends, do not add up to one undifferentiated collectivity, but rather to a congeries of communal bonds and social patterns, fragments and fantasies, all marked by the desolation that Eliot makes synonymous with modernity. That very desolation gives rejuvenation of some kind the status of an implicit demand within Wright's narrative, already evident in the beginning of the novel when Wright describes an “uneasy emptiness” for which Jake seeks a remedy. For that reason it is worth recalling what Elizabeth Drew has called the “necessity of regeneration” as a persistent feature of Eliot's work.Footnote 25 Alfred Kazin argued along similar lines when he wrote that for Eliot “one of the signal feats in The Waste Land was to present himself struggling with the age.” That struggle took the form of “his tale of a man blindly wandering the city with a fertility myth, carefully laid out in his notes, of desiccation and hope, of a dying land and rebirth by at least a thirst for faith.” In this reading, in The Waste Land Eliot is less invested in the return of the classicism central to his criticism than in developing his “instinct for making personal epic out of the city's ‘ensemble’ and ‘paradoxical unity.’”Footnote 26 The Eliot of The Waste Land furthers the critical imagination of the Young American moment, which Wright considered an urgent and productive resource for his own “struggling with the age.”
With the above renderings of Eliot's work in mind, one may recall that the final part of Lawd Today! not only suggests the need for regeneration, but indeed presents “dead men suddenly come to life” as Jake and his friends hear the “gong for quittingtime” (191). If that regeneration is short-lived, lasting at most until the start of the next scheduled shift, it nevertheless conveys a modicum of freedom. The rejuvenation that “quittingtime” affords brings about a sense of appreciable and “superb detachment” for Jake and his friends, even as it makes each aware “that something was lacking … lack [that] hungered over and above ordinary hunger” (191–92). As the novel reaches its finale, “superb detachment” begins to wane and Jake's misfortunes multiply as his money is stolen through an elaborate scheme that includes Blanche, a woman he meets in the dive bar that he and his friends go to after the end of their shift. He is beaten when he attempts to recover his money: “Something hit him in the base of his skull and the world went red, then grey … He felt himself pinching forward, felt his fingers clawing weakly at the ridges in the wooden floor, and the suddenly the world went black” (210). The conclusion of the novel finds Jake back at home, where his wife, Lil, who is introduced early on but is largely absent from the narrative, finds him in a bloodied and drunken state. But his state does not prevent him from resuming his menacing behavior. We know from early scenes in the novel that Jake forced Lil to have an abortion that has caused her ongoing medical problems. Later, Lil complains to Jake's employers about his unwillingness to pay for an operation she needs. In his drunkenness Jake confronts Lil: “You thought you was going to make me lose my job, didn't you. Well, you didn't. I still got it and I'm going to keep it, even if I have to split your head wide open!” A demur character throughout, Lil can no longer abide Jake's threats. In the novel's final scene, as she and Jake engage in a terrifying fight, Lil stabs him with a piece of glass, which finally subdues him. He falls into a “drunken sleep.” Healing her own wounds, Lil “pulled down the shade, wrapped herself in a coat and sank to the floor” (219). In the very last lines of the novel Wright turns away from the immediate details of the violent encounter to register despair and absurdity reminiscent of Eliot's grinning skeleton: “Outside an icy wind swept around the corner of the building, whining and moaning like an idiot in a deep black pit.” If Eliot writes of a sound “at my back,” Wright too presents a tragicomic and symbolist-like metaphor so as to bring his novel of the banal and the nightmarish, the high and the low, the “Commonplace” and the “Rats' Alley,” to a close.
Wright's “Americanism” as Populism
Lawd Today! does not merely demonstrate Wright's reading in cultural commentary and his determination to merge his prose with the critical idioms he found most compelling. Through the epigraphs, the novel affirms the potency that Wright found in the adversarial attitudes and diagnostic capabilities that Brooks, Frank and Eliot each in their own ways combined. Traversing “literary” and “critical” registers, Lawd Today! enlists and advances a “populism” of the kind theorized by Ernesto Laclau. For Laclau, populism is not a movement with content in itself, but instead a “dimension of political culture” that has more to do with “constituting the ‘people’ by finding the common identity of a set of social claims.” Perhaps most important, “populism presents itself both as subversive of the existing state of things and as the starting point for a more or less radical reconstruction of a new order whenever the previous one has been shaken.”Footnote 27 Lawd Today! has to do with Wright's desire to think through such a process of “reconstruction.” As with the Young American critics, Wright's populist motivations both produce an acerbic picture of the US as a modern civilization and strengthen powerful affective commitments to “Americanism” as a means of political thinking and acting. Drawing upon Brooks, Frank and Eliot, Wright locates himself within the terrain of “Americanism” and the problems of modern civilization, making them the starting point for a populism that, as with Brooks, sees that in the US “under the glassy, brassy surface of American jocosity and business there is a pulp and a quick, this acutely self-critical vitality, [that] is in our day in strange ferment.”Footnote 28 The possibility of another “Americanism,” the basis for what Laclau calls a “radical investment” – or the process of “making an object the embodiment of a mythic fullness” – pervades Wright's novel.Footnote 29 J. Hillis Miller has written that in Laclau, the subject “gives itself content by identifying itself, madly, without justification or reason, with the futurity of some social group, political party, or with some specific historical task.”Footnote 30 Wright's populist espousal of national belonging, his turbulent but necessary “Americanism,” becomes a site of durable investments and affects, and a platform from which to survey American life through its everyday and institutional forms and, not least, its official storytelling practices, as the significance of the Civil War radio broadcast in the novel attests.
Populist sentiments involve “constructing the political bond,” according to Laclau. Such sentiments emerge in Lawd Today!, a work that seeks to make black migrants, segregated and displaced, part of the “people” as such. The novel considers the intertwined questions of what kind of belongingness is available to Jake and what kind of belongingness he seeks. Before Jake is even introduced, Lawd Today! presents the voice of the radio station announcer, through whom Wright informs his readers that his story begins promptly at eight in the morning. But this is not any day, as the announcer soon makes clear: “MY DEAR FRIENDS, OUR FLAG IS FLYING HIGH TODAY IN HONOR OF ONE OF OUR GREATEST AMERICANS, A MAN WHO SAVED HIS COUNTRY AND BESTOWED THE BLESSINGS OF LIBERTY ON MILLIONS OF HIS FELLOWMEN” (4). From its opening page, the novel presents the national discourse around Lincoln as intrinsically related to Jake's fate as a post-emancipation, Depression-era migrant. But how much official national storytelling can tell us about Jake and the problems of black migrants making their way in the urban North is an open and far from settled question. Lawd Today! puts forth scenes relating to the post-emancipation era that national celebrations and their attendant narratives cannot accommodate and may even efface.
For Laclau, populism is not an inflexible concept that can only be assigned to “certain objects,” but instead a dynamic marked by the “establishment of an area of variations within which a plurality of phenomena could be inscribed.”Footnote 31 The work of formulating equivalences is of utmost importance within this redefinition since an “area of variations” can only be shown to be interrelated and cohesive if plausible and convincing correspondence among a “plurality of phenomena” can be demonstrated. It is because Laclau insists on the processes by which variations are made “intelligible” that his reconceptualization of populism becomes a resource for thinking through the literary-theoretical work of Lawd Today!, which is premised on the narrative intelligibility of black migrant subjectivities and situations.
If the “Sargasso Sea” communicated a sense of a nation that had grown inert and incapable of attending to its internal crises, it also implied that that inertia could be felt across a range of spaces. The return of Brooks's “Sargasso Sea” in Lawd Today! does not merely impart the continuing relevance of the metaphor for the 1930s. Wright's chosen epigraph recodes black Chicago as an instantiation of the “Sargasso Sea.” For all of its particularities, it forms part of the national continuum. The lack of resolve and of activity in any purposeful direction suggested by the “Sargasso Sea” defines black Chicago much as it does other places. We have, then, another “Sargasso Sea.” Wright thus implies that black migrant Chicago provides avenues for thinking about the national condition that the metaphor was meant to direct attention toward in the first place. Specificity is everywhere on display in Wright's novel, but the distinctive features of black migrant life in the urban North do not annul an equivalent link with the “Sargasso Sea” metaphor as such. The elasticity of the idea makes it amenable to the kind of transferability that Wright takes advantage of when he brings it within his own text. That transferability enacts equivalence and gives the “plurality of phenomena” that shows up in the book national meanings and repercussions.
The epigraph from Frank's Our America is significant for a number of reasons, not least the already mentioned equivalence between Jake and his fellow black migrant workers and the “long, rigid rows of desiccated men and women” that Frank puts forth as one figuration of the nation. Yet the possessive “our” of Frank's very title is arguably as important as the epigraph, for Wright both posits his own story as a part of that overall totality called “our America” and, of course, also forces the question of the relation of his narrative to national representation generally. Deftly bringing Frank's title into his own work, Wright further dramatizes a perspective that the Brooks epigraph had begun to impart: one that in principle yokes modern urban black migrant life to any and all representations of national collectivity. The “our” that Wright invokes by way of Frank recalls a key feature of Laclau's populism, namely an indispensable notion of totality. In his conceptualization, Laclau maintains that “difference, without ceasing to be a particular difference, assumes the representation of an incommensurable totality.” Thus a particularity takes up a “universal signification of which it is the bearer.”Footnote 32 If, then, “equivalential logic does not dissolve differences but inscribes them within itself,” the populist thinking of Lawd Today! avows the political salience of “our America” and nominates black migrant subjectivities and situations as elements within it and bearers of it.Footnote 33
Eliot's “rattle of the bones” and “chuckle spread from ear to ear” would seem to have little to do with the potential of “our America” as a form of political thinking. Yet in other ways, while they darken the criticality of Brooks and Frank, they insist on those intuitions that would explore the full range of modern particularities and differences, and, indeed, on the need to turn to those modern circumstances liable to be most unsettling. Here the “Americanism” of the Young American critics is contiguous with a critical dispensation that takes in the modern even in its most jarring forms, broaching the question of equivalences not as one that Wright can resolve, but as one to which he lends greater urgency through his narrative.
An investigatory space marked by populist sentiment, the “Americanism” of Wright's novel directs attention to the distance between official nationalism and the world of black Chicago. Laclau insists that insofar as populism constitutes a break, “one dimension of the break is that, at its root, there is an experience of lack, a gap which has emerged in the harmonious continuity of the social.”Footnote 34 In Lawd Today!, dislocation and discrimination produce conditions of lack. But at least as dramatic and portentous as material conditions of lack related to segregation is the feeling of lack that preys upon Jake's consciousness, described as that “old, lazy blue feeling,” and elsewhere as “vast emptiness” and an abiding sense of “missing something” (71, 131, 89). Existing “Americanism,” including the putatively inclusive work of commemorating emancipation, cannot make up for the gap in the social world that Wright seeks to bring into representation. It is in this sense that existing “Americanism” must be superseded by another “Americanism,” one that is characterized by a “mythic fullness,” as Laclau has it, that can fill existing gaps. The appeal of the Young American critics for Wright had to do with the harnessing of criticality and the renewability of “Americanism.” The distance of Jake and his friends from the national discourse around Lincoln and the Civil War – which Wright dramatizes with pointed humor – constitutes a gap. Yet there is no repudiation of “Americanism” as such. Lawd Today! gestures toward a sense of lack that makes another “Americanism” imperative. The titular expression, “Lawd today,” a vernacular variation on “Lord today” and a folk expression denoting people living “from day to day” and limited in the extent to which they can shape their everyday conditions, may be read as an exasperated acknowledgment of a shared sense of lack, of a gap in the political for which a resolution remains elusive yet urgent.Footnote 35
For Laclau, a “widening of horizons is a precondition for thinking forms of our political engagement.”Footnote 36 In making the world of Lawd Today! a means of reviving the question of “Americanism,” Wright registered his dedication to a critical “widening of horizons.” Here “widening” cannot be read as a plea for multiculturalist inclusion, or as a call for socioeconomic improvement for one group in relation to other groups. Widening in the sense that Laclau proposes and that Lawd Today! enacts instead denotes transformation in what can stand in for “the people” or the nation as a whole, and therefore transformation in what counts as the political. This once again underscores the significance of the commemoration of Lincoln and the Civil War within the novel. Wright seems to ask, how useful is this past, or how is this past being used?Footnote 37 Or, as Brooks might have put it, can this past become a “usable past”? In addition, Lawd Today! raises the question of what constitutes American peoplehood and what would happen to notions of American peoplehood if the circumstances and everyday experiences of Jake Jackson and his fellow migrants were to prompt the formation of another “Americanism.” By relocating critics of national culture within a narrative about urban segregation and displaced post-emancipation blacks, Wright presents another set of scenes and predicaments for national contemplation. To paraphrase Eliot, Wright gathers “all of the particularity of his experience to make it a general symbol.”
Wright's links to Young American criticism persisted into the 1940s, when he received wide acclaim for his work. But none of his writings from those years registered his reading in that body of criticism as revealingly and straightforwardly as did Lawd Today!, a work that Wright had set aside by that time and that readers would not know about until 1963, three years after his death. During the period of World War II, Wright composed an essay titled “Toward the Conquest of Ourselves,” in which he reflected on how black Americans could not only bring about an end to the entrenched discriminatory logic of racism, but also engender a related “frank and honest conquest of ourselves” that inevitably gave “something great to a great nation.”Footnote 38 Here again, Wright's “great nation” is, to speak with Laclau, a gesture that appeals to “mythic fullness” in order to present black Americans as an irreducible part of the nation. Such “mythic fullness” communicates “populist” strategy that urges upon blacks the role of subjects of communication, not an “object of information,” as in the radio broadcast.Footnote 39 Indeed, in contrast to the national rhetoric of the commemorative radio broadcast, Wright proposes “conquest of ourselves” that affords heightened “Americanism” among blacks. As in Laclau's conception of populism, Wright's novel serves as one setting for “bringing into the picture the power which has not met the demand,” and in particular it evokes the “unresponsive power” which the Young American critics, and Wright by extension, called “Americanism.”Footnote 40 Written in an idiom of populist possibility that Wright absorbed in part from the Young American critics, Lawd Today! shares with “The Conquest of Ourselves” a dedication to “conquest” not as destruction of the nation, as in Jake's fleeting fantasy, but rather as the purging of the varieties of alienation that have led to its condition of stagnation and depletion.
