Go Long

Hello!

Here we are, so close to September. It is early morning. The sky out my window is clouds, gray lighted, sliding over. The oak trees are moving. The cars are going. I feel bleak.

I read Richard Wright's Native Son in one sitting yesterday, a day after staying up too late to finish Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, before reading James Baldwin's "Everybody's Protest Novel" and after listening to Kiese Laymon and Deeshaw Philyaw's Reckon True Stories podcast episode, "What's Happening with Men?" In the past week, I have also re-read Jean Toomer's Cane and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and read, for the first time, Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery. I wasn't trying to think or read only about men and violence or people writing or talking about men and violence but, effortlessly, a gift from grace, it happened. Like a fish consciousing water. Startling at first sure, but once the novelty wears off, a quick acclimation. It's been this all along!

What I can say about A Little Life, a novel that follows the lives of four college friends, one of whom has suffered extreme trauma and abuse, is that I love Andrea Long Chu. I read the whole entire giant book, yes, but that's because I am a sadistic little monster who enjoys a voyeur's thrill. Poor suffering, Jude! Burn him, slice him, smash him again! I won't say I hated A Little Life. I like the pleasure of horror and bad romance too much; I read all four Twilight books. But like eating a bag of potato chips in one sitting, it was indulgent, greasy, a net negative experience. Not profound, not even good.

Without spoiling too much, I'll say that reading about true horrors–in the case of A Little Life, child sex trafficking and abuse–can conjure a kind of perverse bravery in the reader: I'll face it, the worst the world has to offer, and I'll properly despise it and I'll properly sympathize (not empathize) with its victim. But a good novel should do more than press those brain receptors that are pleasured by suffering that is not yours, and virtue that is also not yours (and is also not virtue). It takes too much time to read, it is too intense and sustained an experience. Reading soaks your little brain cells so thoroughly in another world. It is more immersive than television or movies because you are doing at least half and probably more of the work. You are reaching across all of timespace to the inside of someone else's brain! That's what books are, by the way, the insides of brains. Reading is the closest you can get to seeing the fundamental realness of another human (the author, I mean, not the characters). That opportunity is wasted if you, reader, are met only with the lowest common denominator of fantasy and desire. The places anyone, not only the writer, can access. That is, pure types, ideals that have been hewed off in chunks from the great (white supremacist) collective imagination–sentimental saints, incoherently evil monsters. It is wasted because those chunks are surface level, baby. We can all think them, and pretty quickly, too. They are, usually, all we can think. They are the base average of every good or bad guy we have watched, read, heard, dreamed of. Start with them, sure. But don't finish with them. I didn't need Hanya Yanagihara to conjure Jude (beautiful, kind, silent) and his suffering and his tormentors (evil! big! senseless!) out of the bleak darkness for me. They were already there in my own unprocessed and unrefined imagination. This is why A Little Life feels like it was written from the brain-foyer, the anteroom. Not the really weird place that could only be accessed by Hanya Yanagihara by writing well and excavating deeply enough to show: beyond the surface, beyond the type, this is what I imagine Jude to be, to feel, to know.

The brain of Richard Wright on the other hand, is terrifying and sad. First of all, fuck you, I will say to him if we ever meet elsewhere. I do not believe that brilliance is its own justification–you can't write a novel like Native Son and not have to answer for its violence to women. Second of all, are you OKAY?

"The whole thing came to him in the form of a powerful and simple feeling; there was in everyone a great hunger to believe that made him blind, and if he could see while others were blind, then he could get what he wanted and never be caught at it. Now, who on earth would think that he, a black timid Negro boy, would murder and burn a rich white girl and would sit and wait for his breakfast like this? Elation filled him."

I do not believe that Richard Wright was okay, but I do believe he wrote a great novel. Not because Bigger Thomas is well-developed or realistically complex, but because Richard Wright was trying to develop a realistically complex sense of anger and hatred through Bigger, and through Bigger I can try to understand Richard Wright. I don't really mean his psychology or emotional state (okay I do mean that). But also what he thought was important to try to write about. Is that profound? This is why I don't get to write book reviews for anyone but my friends.

Capitalism and Slavery (Williams was the first to argue that slavery was primarily an economic, not racial, system and that the slave trade was abolished for economic, not humanistic, reasons) offers a long thread that leads us back to the beginning, and brings me back to Kiese Laymon's podcast:

"Most of my life, as a young black man slash boy, when I wasn't making money, my relationship to my grandmother and my mother and my aunties was much more intimate. When I started to make more money and I could quote unquote become my grandmother, like the person we looked to for some sort of stability, especially economic, one, I started to feel more like a man. Two, people actually called me, like, you a man now. But the relationships all atrophied. Because on one hand, I'm like, yall started to treat me like a ATM. But I also because I started to treat them like people who go to ATMs. We hadn't done the work."

Just like fish need great writers to help them see water more clearly, I need them to see men and violence, the world, the bleakness of the surface beneath which there is only what resists congealing into type. What is worth trying to find out about. Maybe horrifying and sad, but not deadening, not bleak. A Little Life stays on top, Native Son goes a little weirder, wields its violence to pierce the surface more effectively (is this what "masculinity" is??). A Little Life accepts without prodding at the fact that Jude is trafficked not just for evil's sake (or for nothing), but for money and a perverted dream of freedom. Bigger is penned into his hopeless life by racist structures that limit his access to money and opportunity. Kiese says, yeah, but once you do get access, if you don't understand what navigating those structures does to you, you're still lost to intimacy.

Which is what I want, to be so intimate that I am in the inside of your brain as you really try to understand things. How do we be together? How do we honestly hate each other? Why does violence feel so good to us?

Until next time, so long,

Endria