Phenomenology and Textual Power in Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Lived Underground”

In Richard Wright's novella "The Man Who Lived Underground," Fred Daniels's descent into an underground sewer to evade the police, who had tortured him into confessing to a murder he did not commit, brings to his consciousness the wretchedness an African American endures as the "other" in a repressive cultural context. His descent also affords him a fortuitous encounter with the wonder of blackness (of silence and darkness), a matrix that forms a lyrical and tactile field, luring him into experiencing finer acts of consciousness. Daniels learns anew to interpret local impressions in ways that negate the assumptions underlying his previous experiences, enabling him to suspend aboveground ideological premises so he can intuit and understand that he had always been victimized by his aboveground status. Such victimization was not based in the nature of things, as an unqualified existential exegesis would suggest. It was contrived by the insidious textual power of the aboveground to plant in him ideas that prevent any healthy cultural transformation. Edmund Husserl's phenomenological insight, and later developments of it in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is instructive in a reading of this text. It explains Wright's reliance on externals to convey the inward states of his protagonist (Johnson 13), and it explains the presentational function of these externals in the protagonist's various acts of consciousness. The insights of Robert Scholes's textual theory are also instructive, for they reveal how textual competency can subvert authoritarian discourse formations, the textual power of the aboveground. Though Daniels is cognizant of neither Husserl nor his methodology, his exploration of the underground (his Lebenswelt) is profoundly phenomenological; that is, he dissolves the meaning of conventional cultural and sensory images to reconstruct them on his own terms. Although Daniels clearly is not privy to (post)structuralist thought, his eventual desire to textualize his underground experiences by confronting and having dialogue with those who oppress him signifies his understanding that textual power is power that not only can maintain but also change the world. Most criticism of Wright's novella has adopted any one or an aggregate of naturalistic, existential, psychological, surrealistic, expressionistic, and structural approaches in addition to platonic, dynamic, and vernacular models in characterizing the underground as exemplary of the restricted world of the African American. Such methodologies, marked by allusions to disease, suffering, stagnation, guilt, the archetype, Gothic horror, madness, defeat, death, and the black (w)hole, "locate" the text either in Wright's symbolic delineation of the ghetto landscape, in his creative process or his philosophical speculation, or in the protagonist's response to his world and quest for understanding. (1) In general, the criticism of Wright's novella to date has framed the protagonist's actions from a disparaging or pejorative viewpoint. I propose a view that is less adversely critical of the protagonist's actions, one that recognizes his success, first through phenomenological reduction and then through textualization, at subduing the forces that restrict his private and public worlds. As a narrative strategy, Wright's use of Daniels's retreat underground is reminiscent of Bigger's flight in Book Two of Native Son (1940). Bigger dons deception and the "ignorant Negro" disguise to elude the authorities: "The thing to do was to act just like others acted, live like they lived, and while they were not looking, do what you wanted" (Native Son 102). Bigger's disguise is refined in an innocent victim like Daniels, whose descent into the underground becomes a significant motif in Wright's literary concerns. It anticipates Black Boy (1945), in which a nonfictional character is forced to mask his basic attitudes and hide in a personal domain of thoughts and reflections to endure: "I wanted to avoid trouble, for I feared that if I clashed with whites I would lose control of my emotions and spill out words that would be my sentence of death" (220). …