In a famous article on The Son of This World, published in 1949, entitled Everyone’s Protest Novel, author James Baldwin criticized the protagonist’s “virtuous anger” as defined by mere fear and hatred of the African-American Greater. When it came out in 1940, Wright’s bestseller was naturally the subject of controversy, and its provocative potential seems intact. It’s a bigger, raceless killer. And while it’s clear that Wright will spend nearly 600 pages showing that this violence is the result of systemic xenophobia by North American society, he doesn’t exactly choose the easiest way to do it.
Yes, This Son of the World is a thesis novel and is a Greater symbol, a symptom of a disease that continues to dream and create monsters. In order for this symbol to obey the laws of ideological semantics, Wright poses a few troubling questions. Should the reader be forced to identify with a criminal, even if his crimes are the result of terror and cowardice? Isn’t this fear of class and race conflict facing the portrait of new left-wing elites who confuse integration with disdain, perhaps not Manichaean? Isn’t it debatable that Bigger must be a communist avant la lettre, a white lawyer, now turned into a jury, explaining to readers what his actions mean?
The son of this earth raises these questions with no agenda other than preoccupation with a complex reality in which “twelve million people in reality form a separate nation, vestigial, dispossessed and imprisoned, deprived of political, social, economic life, and property”. rights.
Bigger’s defense attorney, Boris Max, is Jewish and communist, and as such, no matter how shaken by the boy’s actions, he cannot help empathizing with his tragedy. In his defense that covers the middle part of Fate, the third chapter of the novel, we hear Wright’s voice, who will later explain, in an explanatory supplement, Bigger’s birth. In Max, we see the Democratic tradition of the Roosevelt era embodied, the struggle for freedoms of an America suffering from the ravages of the Great Depression and now defending it with tooth and nail like in a Capra movie. literature with social connectedness. Max is the outside perspective that Son of This World needs to make the hero bearable, humanize him, and turn his anger into a force majeure cause, a cause that concerns us all. Clearly subject to the logic of bilateral justice, the speech of the Illinois attorney general’s office, which finds its equivalent in his speech, is also an impassioned manifesto against the death penalty and in favor of resettlement in a country where it is still in the judiciary. power in some states. Max builds a universal and timeless story that can continue in Spike Lee’s cinema, TV shows like The Wire, Colson Whitehead’s literature, and the #BlackLivesMatter protests. The way Wright described police violence in the 1930s is eerily the same as what we read in the papers in 2022. This Son of the World is unheard of.
Fear and Flight, the first two chapters of the novel, serve to draw the polyhedral profile of Greater Thomas. Wright admits that his existence was imposed as a necessary awareness, knowing how problematic this character was, who grew up in his mind from the aggressive, marginal, classless and rebellious models he had known since childhood.
Bigger, of course, is the son of centuries of slavery, but Wright, who was a member of the communist party at the time of his writing, also understands him as an incarnation of fascism—from Nazism to Stalinism—that devastated Europe. Obsessed with his irrational individualism and noticing his reasonless nihilism, the reader is filled with Bigger’s violence, like someone with an invisible stone in their shoe. One of the greatest virtues of the Son of this world is to prevent us from getting rid of him. No matter how harsh, nasty, and hostile the novel may be—and sometimes almost in a Dostoevsky sense, we draw on Bigger’s language, with no concessions other than to underline its message to the gallery. Revenge in his ruthless desperation, with almost no distance between what we think of him and the trouble of his conscience. Because Bigger Thomas was also “white, and there were literally millions of them everywhere.” There is something in this contemporary individual drugged by capitalism, in the swamp of collective ethics and the blindness of unique thought, something that resonates in the lives of a civilization as hectic as ours, in his heartbreaking cry.