Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Wright Requires Baldwin


Just like Martin requires Malcolm.

The Wright-Baldwin pairing is an odd one, though, because it is fraught with the personal agon that erupted between the two men--or rather, the personal agon that Baldwin undertook with Wright, who had helped the younger and unknown writer see print only to find himself in Baldwin's polemical cross-hairs in Notes of a Native Son. It is all quite complicated but perhaps unavoidable--necessary even--when individuals find themselves in circumstances in which they cannot comfortably realize their own true characters but find they must thrash about like the mud-covered damned in Canto VII of Dante's Inferno: "...smiting each other not with hand only, but with head and chest and feet, and tearing each other piecemeal with their teeth" (Singleton translation, p. 77). The pressure-cooker of race in America demanded as much and so the two clashed. Yet oddly, to this day, the two complement each other as well. Hence we must learn to read one, then the other, then the first again, until understanding begins to dawn.

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